Bonus Article for Chapters 9,
10, and 12 of Research design explained
You may want to assign the following article:
Moskalenko, S., & Heine, S. J. (2003). Watching your troubles away: Television viewing as a stimulus for subjective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 76-85.
The authors use three studies to test whether watching television, by distracting people from unpleasant self-evaluations, can make people feel better. The first two studies are mixed designs (pretest-posttest X control/treatment), but they can be viewed as simple experiments (and, indeed, some of the analyses are identical to how a simple experiment would be analyzed). The third study is a multiple group experiment that you could use when discussing Chapter 10. In discussing Study 3, you may want to stress a point out an advantage of using three groups that was discussed on page 303 of Research design explained—if the researchers had used only two groups and found a difference between the success and failure groups, they wouldn’t know whether (a) success feedback decreases television watching, or (b) whether failure feedback increases television watching, or (c) success feedback decreases television watching and failure feedback increases television watching. You may also want to highlight a point made on page 314: Instead of analyzing the results of multiple-group experiments by using an ANOVA to determine whether any of the groups differ from each other, some researchers use planned comparisons to test specific predictions that they had about which groups differ from each other. The article is easy for your students to obtain (students who purchase the book can get the article by using the Infotrac® subscription that comes with Research design explained), and, if you give students Table 1, the article is relatively easy for students to read.
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Table 1 Helping Students Understand the Article |
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Section |
Tips, Comments, Rough Translations, and Problem Areas |
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Title |
Subjective self-awareness: one’s attention being focused on the environment or on the task
being performed so that the person is unaware of the self. |
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Abstract |
Actual-ideal discrepancies: gaps that a person notices between how that person should be and how
the person actually is. Self-discrepancies: same as actual-ideal discrepancies (defined above). Independent of mood: the participants’ moods did not cause the effect. Ecological validity: extent
to which the results apply to real world situations; could be considered an
aspect of external validity (external validity dealing with generalizing to
both most people as well as to real life situations, with ecological validity
dealing only with generalizing to real life situations); thought to be
boosted when the research setting is similar to a naturalistic settings Render: make |
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Introduction: Beginning |
Objective self-awareness: person is focusing on themselves and judging themselves; the opposite of subjective self-awareness (defined earlier [under “Title”]). |
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Introduction: Why Do People Seek Dramatic Experience? |
Genres: types
(e.g., comedy, drama, mystery) Attributed: credited to; thought to be created by Purges: gets rid
of an unpleasant thing or feeling Socialization: learning
how society expects you to act Alleviate: lessen Hedonic: focusing on pleasure Aversive: unpleasant States of gratification: happy; a pleasant or pleasurable state |
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Introduction: The Theory of Self-Awareness |
1st paragraph Mutually exclusive: when
one occurs, the other can’t Oscillate: go back
and forth 2nd paragraph state self-awareness: how aware one is of oneself at a particular moment; different from trait self-consciousness which is one’s general tendency toward self-awareness explicit measure: measure that involves directly asking participants about what you are trying to measure (e.g., “Are you now self-aware?”). An implicit measure, on the other hand, would be more indirect (e.g., assessing self-awareness by asking participants about their mood—using decreases in mood as an indirect indication of increases in self-awareness). Note that, to make the case that a variable has an effect, researchers like to be able to point to producing the effect using more than one manipulation of that variable. OSA: objective self awareness; being aware of oneself (defined in the “Introduction: Beginning section). 3rd paragraphAforementioned: previously stated Induce: cause SSA: subjective self-awareness Last sentence: much research has looked at effects of things that make one more self-aware, but little research has looked the effects of things that make one less self-aware. 4th paragraph “….bask in reflected glory”: An example of this would be if a person felt better because “my team won.” |
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Introduction: Past Research on Television Viewing and Positive Self-Feelings |
1st paragraph Ubiquitous: common; seeming to be everywhere Explanatory power: ability to make cause-effect statement 2nd paragraph Confound: make it difficult to determine the cause and effect relationship |
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Study 1 |
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Results and Discussion |
1st paragraph Cronbach’s a; Cronbach’s alpha: an index (that can range from 0 to 1) of the degree to which there is consistency between how participants answer one question on the measure with how the participant will answer other questions on the measure (see page 104). A high alpha (above .80) indicates that the subtest is internally consistent: people agreeing with one item on a subtest item tend to agree with other items on that same subtest. 2nd paragraph If a person had 10 mismatches and 0 matches, that person’s score would be 20 ([2*10] – 0 = 20]). If, on the other hand, a person had 5 mismatches and 10 mismatches, that person’s score would be 0 ([2*5] – 10 = 0]). 3rd paragraph The authors could have analyzed their study as a simple experiment because they had two groups and randomly assigned participants to condition. Indeed, the second analysis reported in this paragraph is the same analysis one would use with a simple experiment. The condition (TV or control) X measure (pretest or posttest) interaction is the result of an analysis typical of a mixed design. The hypothesis would have had stronger support had that interaction (which would indicate that the TV group changed more from pretest to posttest than the control group did) been statistically significant. 4th paragraph r=.05, ns: The correlation was very close to zero and thus not significant (ns) |
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Study 2 |
Ecologically valid setting: a situation that closely resembled a real life situation |
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Results and Discussion |
See Comments for Study 1 Results and Discussion |
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Study 3 |
Salient: obvious; easy to notice; hard to ignore OSA: objective self-awareness (defined earlier) SSA: subjective self-awareness (defined earlier) |
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Method |
Note that one (of several) problems of having a
no-treatment control condition is that is often difficult to keep
experimenters blind about such a control condition. For a more complete
understanding of the problems caused by no-treatment control conditions, see
pages 262-263 and 299-303 in Research
design explained. Bogus: fake Percentile ranking:
where one stands relative to 100 other people who took the same test; the
higher one’s percentile ranking, the better one scores relative to the
others who took the test. |
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Results and Discussion |
The researchers did not do a conventional, overall ANOVA. Instead, the researchers used planned comparisons. Their first planned comparison was to see whether total amount of television watching was a linear function of the favorableness of the feedback That is, the researchers wanted to know whether time spent watch television increased steadily as they went from giving unfavorable feedback to giving no feedback to giving favorable feedback (for more about how to actually do such an analysis, see page 543 of Research design explained).. The other planned comparisons are just t tests to compare one group against another group. |
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General Discussion |
Devoid of collectivist values: not valuing the group; not believing in the
importance of values such as respecting tradition, honoring parents, and
having loyalty to the group. |