Here are some general guidelines for you to read a research article:
Remember the structure of a psychological article, and how each section is different: Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References, Appendix.
Skim the article: Briefly skimming the materials can help you be familiar with the topic and information included in the article. With the anticipation of article structure and topic, you will read the article more efficiently and comprehend more later on.
Take notes as you read the article: Next, you should carefully read through each section and make notes. Write down any questions or criticisms so you do not forget them. Underline key points/definitions, mark down important data and results, go back to the start and look up the information that you missed, and discuss with your group. Such efforts can help you the first time you read an article.
Identify key information: Here are the key pieces of information to look for:
- What are the main hypotheses?
- What is/are independent variable(s)? What is/are dependent variable(s)?
- How did researchers recruit their participants? Identify participants’ demographic information and data collection procedure.
- What materials did researchers utilize to measure the hypotheses? Identify the apparatus and measurements.
- What are the key findings/results of the study?
- Do the findings justify authors’ conclusions?
Next semester, you will also have to: Note the other sources that the work cited in the introduction and discussion sections (you can skip this step for current discussion assignment): References section may be ignored but it is actually one of the most important parts in an article, especially when you are looking for references/sources for your own further studies. Spending some time to review it can help you find some research articles/topics in which you are interested. You will learn all about this in Methods II!
For this assignment, I have chosen a research article for you to read. Read the article posted below and answer the following questions.
1- What design did this study use? (Experimental or Correlational). Explain how you know (this should be fairly apparent from the title of the article, so please also explain why this is an experimental study).
2- What is/are independent variable(s)? (Specify the levels). Note: there may be more than one IV, or there may be just one. Try to spot them all!
3- What is/are dependent variable(s)? (List all dependent variables authors measured)
4- How many participants were in the study? What methods (e.g., survey, computer, equipment, etc.) did authors utilize to measure variables? How did they manipulate the IV? How did they measure the DVs?
5- What are the findings of the study?
6- Now you are going to write a one paragraph summary of the article you read where you describe the following elements:
a) the design the authors used for their project,
b) identify the independent and dependent variables,
c) talk about how the authors carried out their study (the methods; including the participants, how they manipulated the IV, how they measured the DV, and how they controlled for confounding variables in the study),
d) summarize the results.
But here's the catch: I want you to write a bad Yup, you read that right, I want you to write a bad work. I want you to write an example of what a work should NOT be.
You may be wondering, "what do you mean by a bad paragraph?" Well, here's where you can get creative. In your workyou should:
- Incorrectly describe two of the above-mentioned required aspects of the paragraph (items a through d)
- Include at least 4 grammatical errors.
You will be sharing this homework with your peers this week, so be prepared to swap work with one of your group members during the discussion assignment! The goal is to give your peers lots of elements to fix, so don't be afraid to be tricky!
a. Write no more than 10 sentences, the max word count is 250.
b. In-text citation and direct quotes are not needed (we will learn how to do that next week!).
c. You cannot directly copy and paste the sentences/phrases from the original article. You must use your own words (paraphrase) to summarize. Each student’s writing should and must be different.
d. Font: Times New Roman; Font size: 12.
Short Report
Manipulations of Emotional Context Shape Moral Judgment Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno
Northeastern University
Recent work in psychology and neuroscience has revealed that moral judgments are often mediated by two classes of brain
processes (Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt,
2001). One class, probably reflecting earlier evolutionary de- velopment, consists of processes that automatically alter he- donic states in response to specific types of socially relevant
stimuli. A second class consists of more domain-general, ef- fortful processes that underlie abilities for abstract reasoning,
simulation, and cognitive control. Often, these intuitive and deliberative processes work in unison to foster decisions in accord with the goals of both; goals that are socially adaptive are
often congruent with more abstract moral principles. Certain classes of ethical dilemmas, however, require decisions in which
the competition between these two systems becomes evident (Greene et al., 2001, 2004).
The structure of such dilemmas often requires endorsing a personal moral violation in order to uphold a utilitarian prin- ciple. The well-known footbridge dilemma is illustrative. In it,
the lives of five people can be saved through sacrificing another. However, the sacrifice involves pushing a rather large man off a
footbridge to stop a runaway trolley before it kills the other five. The vast majority of individuals believe it wrong to push him, even though not pushing him will result in a greater number of
deaths (Greene et al., 2004; Thomson, 1986). The reason for this seemingly illogical response stems from competition between
the emotionally intuitive and deliberative systems. Neuroim- aging has revealed that such dilemmas produce increased ac-
tivation in emotion-related brain centers, as well as in centers normally used for deliberative reasoning; considering personal moral violations, such as inflicting direct harm, elicits prepotent
negative reactions that appear designed to inhibit amoral acts (Greene et al., 2001). The infrequent selection of the logically
appropriate option in such dilemmas is associated with height- ened activation of deliberative centers aimed at cognitive con-
trol, suggesting that the automatic negative reaction must be
disregarded if a utilitarian judgment is to bemade (Greene et al., 2004).
Given these findings, one might expect that the ultimate ar- biter of ethical choice for such dilemmas would reside in indi-
viduals’ abilities and motivations to engage in controlled analysis. However, the proposed dual-process model of moral judgment suggests another unexamined route by which choice
might be influenced: contextual sensitivity of affect. Affective states stand as momentary informational signals regarding the
environment and are multiply determined (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). Consequently, environmental factors separate from any potential moral violations might influence affect at the time of
judgment. A close temporal contiguity of such affectively sto- chastic events and the stable negative emotion stemming from
a dilemmamight unhinge the direct relation between a dilemma- specific prepotent emotional response and choice. Simply put,
environment-induced feelings of positivity at the time of judg- ment might reduce the perceived negativity, or aversion ‘‘sig- nal,’’ of any potential moral violation and, thereby, increase
utilitarian responding.
METHOD
We examined this hypothesis using a paradigm in which 79
participants received a positive or neutral affect induction and immediately afterward were presented with the footbridge and trolley dilemmas embedded in a small set of nonmoral distrac-
tors.1 The trolley dilemma is logically equivalent to the foot- bridge dilemma, but does not require consideration of an
emotion-evoking personal violation to reach a utilitarian out- come; consequently, the vast majority of individuals select the
utilitarian option for this dilemma.2 We included the trolley dilemma for two reasons. First, it provided an opportunity to replicate previous work comparing canonical responses to the
two dilemmas and, thereby, to validate the current paradigm. Second, it provided an appropriate control condition; given the
Address correspondence to Piercarlo Valdesolo or David DeSteno, Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected].
1Given that repeated consideration of dilemmas describing moral violations would rapidly reduce positive mood, we utilized responses to the matched set of the footbridge and trolley dilemmas as the primary dependent variable.
2Precise wording of the dilemmas can be found in Thomson (1986) or obtained from the authors.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
476 Volume 17—Number 6Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science
lack of a negative prepotent emotional response in the trolley
dilemma, we expected that heightened positive affect would not influence responses to it.
To induce positive affect, we showed participants a 5-min comedy clip taken from ‘‘Saturday Night Live.’’ The neutral clip
consisted of a 5-min segment taken from a documentary on a small Spanish village. Positive affect was assessed as the mean response to a four-item feeling-descriptor measure consisting of
the following items rated on 7-point scales: happy, content, pleasant, good (Cronbach’s a5 .92). After the affect induction,
individual dilemmas were presented in random order on a computer monitor. Each dilemma was presented through a series of three screens, the first two explaining the dilemma and the last
asking the participant to indicate whether a described course of action would be ‘‘appropriate’’ or ‘‘inappropriate.’’ Each screen
was visible for a maximum of 15 s (cf. Greene et al., 2001).
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
As expected, participants who viewed the positive clip reported a more positive affective state (M 5 4.57) than did those who
viewed the neutral clip (M5 2.77), t(77)5 7.47, prep5 .99.More important, heightened positivity increased the odds of selecting
the appropriate (i.e., utilitarian) response to the footbridge di- lemmaby a factor of 3.8,w2(1,N5 79)5 3.90, prep5 .89, thereby confirming our central prediction (see Table 1). As expected,
affect did not influence responses to the trolley dilemma.3
Replicating previous findings, logistic regressions revealed that
longer decision times increased the odds of selecting the appro- priate response for the footbridge dilemma (Wald w2 5 7.50,
prep 5 .95), but not the trolley dilemma (cf. Greene et al., 2001). As predicted, affective state did not moderate the relation
between response time and choice in the footbridge dilemma, and including affective state in the analysis did not produce a relation between response time and choice in the trolley dilemma.
These findings demonstrate that the causal efficacy of emotion in guiding moral judgment does not reside solely in responses
evoked by the considered dilemma, but also resides in the af- fective characteristics of the environment. Whether such an
influence optimizes or biases the resulting decision depends on the relevance of the extraneous affective cues to the dilemma at hand. What is clear, however, is that a skilled manipulation of
individuals’ affective states can shape their moral judgments.
REFERENCES
Greene, J.D., Nystrom, L.E., Engell, A.D., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2004). The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, 44, 389–400.
Greene, J.D., Sommerville, R.B., Nystrom, L.E., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293, 2105–2108.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social in- tuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
Thomson, J.J. (1986). Rights, restitution, and risk: Essays in moral theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G.L. (1996). Feelings and phenomenal experi- ences. In E.T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 433–465). New York: Guilford.
(RECEIVED 11/1/05; REVISION ACCEPTED 12/5/05; FINAL MATERIALS RECEIVED 12/8/05)
TABLE 1
Frequencies of Appropriate and Inappropriate Responses to the Footbridge Dilemma as a Function of Affective State
Affective state
Response
Appropriate Inappropriate
Control 3 35 Positive 10 31
3As usual, large majorities selected the appropriate option (38 of 40 and 33 of 37 in the control and positive-affect conditions, respectively).
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Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno
