Everyday Research Methods

Sports fans and self-esteem

Based on how many UD articles these students are wearing, can you predict whether their team won or lost last weekend? Christopher Ginn/University of Delaware

Here's a newspaper feature on how people's moods and self-esteem fluctuate with the performance of their favorite sports teams.  A variety of studies were covered by a journalist for the Washington Post, under the title, Self-esteem of sports fans is linked to their team, research shows.

The article introduces readers to the terms BIRGing and CORFing, which are defined as follows:

If their team wins, fans wear team colors the following day and brag about how “we” won the day, a behavior researchers have dubbed “basking in reflected glory,” or BIRGing. But if their team loses, fans cast off their team jerseys and talk about how “they” did not perform as well, thereby “cutting off reflected failure,” or CORFing.

Example 1:

BIRGing and CORFing have been studied using the apparel that students wear. Specifically, in one study, researchers... 

...surreptitiously monitored — with approval of the institutional review board — how many of over 200 students wore school-affiliated apparel during roll call for each class, throughout the college football season at seven universities.

The researchers found that if a student’s football team won a game, it more than doubled the odds of the student wearing the team’s apparel in the following class. Winning also more than tripled the likelihood of wearing more than two articles of team-branded clothing.

a) Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in this study:

Variable name (conceptual variable)	How was this variable operationalized?	What are this variable's levels?	Was this a manipulated or measured variable?	Was this an IV, a Quasi IV, or a DV?

b) Sketch a graph of the study's outcome--be sure to put the DV on the y-axis.  (by the way, the original empirical study is here)

c) How do these results support the BIRGing hypothesis?

d) Consider construct validity: Did the study directly measure self-esteem? Why or why not? 

Example 2:

The BIRGing hypothesis has also been tested by studying the language soccer fans use to talk about their teams. 

In one study, Billings and his colleagues used machine learning to analyze more than 7,000 geo-tagged tweets made during 2018 World Cup matches pitting England against Croatia and Colombia to analyze BIRGing and CORFing in real time.

They found that English fans tended to bask in reflected glory when England was leading or victorious, increasing the use of pronouns such as “we,” “us” and “our” [on Twitter] to show their affiliation with the soccer team when their team scored or saved a goal.

 

In contrast, the fans used pronouns such as “they,” “them” and “their” [on Twitter] when England trailed or lost.

d) Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in the second study:

Variable name (conceptual variable)	How was this variable operationalized?	What are this variable's levels?	Was this a manipulated or measured variable?	Was this an IV, a Quasi IV, or a DV?

 

e) Think about replicating the first, sports apparel study at your own college or university. How might you do it? Would football be the best sport to use, or some other sport? And do you think the results would replicated at your own school--why or why not? 

 

Personality correlates of liking spicy foods

Photo credit: marcoscastillo/Deposit photos

Here's another article from the content farm website, StudyFinds.  This one's on the personality correlates of liking spicy foods, and it includes a combination of frequency and association claims. The same poll was also covered by the NYPost and by Yahoo! News (with a video)

Below I will post a series of quotes and questions from the StudyFinds version of the story. 

Ninety-three percent of respondents prefer some level of heat in their food. However, nearly four in 10 (36%) say they go for medium heat, 33 percent go for mild, and just 24 percent like their spice level set to hot.

a) Based on this statement, there seem to be four levels of the "Liking Spicy Foods" variable. What are they? 

The methodology of the survey is not always clear from the press stories. Here is one example:

Spicy food eaters are more likely to enjoy trying new things (76%), consider themselves attractive (62%), and are more content with their lives (66%) than those with milder heat preferences.

b) In the quote above, what is your guess about who counts as a "spicy food eater"? That is, which answer would a person have to give to the "Liking Spicy Foods" variable you listed in a) in order to be counted as a "spicy food eater"?

In the quote above, another problem is they only report the percentages for the "spicy food eaters". We'd also need to know the corresponding percentages for "those with milder heat preferences."

c) What would these corresponding percentages be able to tell us about effect size? Propose some alternative outcomes for the variable "trying new things" that would show a large effect size vs. a small one. 

Here is a quote from later in the story:

Almost one-third (32%) of spicy food fanatics follow a certain diet like vegan or vegetarian— more than double than no spice fans (13%) and more than any other spice preference.

It's great that this quote at least tells us the percentage in each group that are vegan/vegetarian. However, it still does not tell us how they operationalized being a "spicy food fanatic" vs a "no spice fan."  

d) Here's another quote from the journalist's story. Based on what you answered so far (in previous questions), what is good and bad about the coverage in this quote? 

Of those who prefer hot foods, 21 percent consider themselves extroverted, compared to 15 percent of mild food eaters. Those who pack on the heat are also more likely to describe themselves as creative (54%), confident (51%), and adventurous (44%).

Another consideration here is the cultural background of the participants. One of my colleagues grew up in India, where children often learn to eat spicy foods from an early age.

e) How might culture moderate the relationships reported here, for example, how might it moderate the relationship between liking spicy food and being extroverted? 

f) This study was conducted by a commercial polling firm, and this particular study was commissioned by the brand Frank's RedHot. Do you think this commercial funding should affect our interpretation of the data? Why or why not? 

Selected Answers:

a) The variable "Liking Spicy Foods" has four levels: No heat, mild heat preference, medium heat preference, and hot heat preference.

b) It's not clear--but it's possible that they counted anybody who picked mild, medium, or hot (that is, 93% of the sample) as a "spicy food eater"?

c) Here's an example. What if 76% of spicy food eaters like trying new things but 70% of non-spicy food eaters like trying new things? That's not a very big effect size! But if 76% of spicy food eaters like trying new things but 20% of non-spicy food eaters like trying new things, that would be a very large effect size. 

d) This quote has the same problem of not defining what a spicy food eater is. But at least they give the percentages of extroverts for two different groups.

e) If a culture serves a lot of spicy foods and even children learn to enjoy them, then it's possible that "liking spicy food" will not be strongly correlated with personality (there's a ceiling effect on the spicy food variable). The personality correlations may exist only for cultures where spicy foods are more variable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When are doctors on a first-name basis?

Which doctors do you think will be more likely to be addressed by their first name: Doctors who are men or those who are women?
HPhoto credit: sbartsmediagmail.com/DepositPhotos

How do you address your physician? Do you refer to them as "Dr. X", or do you use their first name? 

Physicians may feel awkward when their patients refer to them with their first name only.  Sometimes they wonder if the patient is not showing adequate respect for their training and expertise. A recent study, covered by a journalist at the New York Times, sought to quantify when physicians were more likely to be addressed by their first names instead of by the "Doctor" honorific.

Here are some details about the study, from the journalist's coverage: 

It wasn’t easy to answer this question, but [the researchers] found a way — by studying tens of thousands of emails that patients sent to doctors at his institution. The results, published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open, appeared to illustrate a few themes about which doctors find themselves on a first-name basis with the people they care for.

Before reading on, make a prediction: Which doctors do you think will be more likely to be addressed by their first name: Doctors who are men or those who are women?

Here are the results:

Female doctors were more than twice as likely as male doctors to be addressed by their first names...

Now make another prediction: Which patients do you think will be more likely to address doctors by their first names: Men or women?

Men were more likely than women to address doctors by their first name.

And now here are some other results. Do you find any of these surprising?

Patients were more likely to address general practitioners by their first names than specialists.

The study found no difference based on age, whether of patient or physician. And the researchers did not examine the race or ethnicity of the patients or doctors.

Questions

a) Based on what you've read so far, what are some of the major variables in this study? The quoted text above includes at least five variables. 

Variable name. Hint: some variables were about doctors, and some were about patients. Be sure to specify that in your variable names	What are this variable's levels?	Is the variable measured or manipulated?
(add rows as needed)

b) Some might call this a correlational design.Why?

c) Some might call this a quasi-experiment. Why? Which quasi-experimental design is it? (Here are your options: Non-equivalent control group posttest-only design, Non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design, Interrupted time series design, or Non-equivalent control group interrupted time series design?)

The journalist says almost nothing about how the researchers measured doctor gender and patient gender in the study. If you're wondering about these details, that's a construct validity question! Here's what the study says (quoted from the empirical article): "After approval by the Mayo Clinic institutional review board with waiver of participant consent because of exempt status, a retrospective review was conducted of patient messaging to physicians through the Mayo Clinic electronic medical record from October 1, 2018, to September 30, 2021.....Available demographics of patients (age and gender) and physicians (age, gender, degree, training level, and specialty) were determined."

d) What do you think of the construct validity of this way of determining the patient and doctor variables?

e) Now you might reflect on the ethical implications of collecting the data in this way. Why do you think the Mayo Clinic waived informed consent? What ethical balance might have been considered here? 

The original empirical article is open-access here, in JAMA Network Open. 

Vegetarianism linked to depression

 

Can the study support a causal claim that a vegetarian diet leads to depression? Credit: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

A journalist for the foodie magazine Bon Appetit reported on an empirical article that found a correlation between type of diet and level of depression:

A new study found that people who excluded meat from their diets had twice as many depressive episodes as omnivores.

The journalist summarized the methodology this way:

To investigate the relationship between a meatless diet and depression among adults, a team of Brazil-based researchers gathered data from more than 14,000 people between the ages of 35 and 74 over a six-month period. They evaluated participants using the Clinical Interview Schedule-Revised instrument, a questionnaire that helps diagnose common mental disorders like depression and anxiety. “Depressive episodes are more prevalent in individuals who do not eat meat,” the authors concluded.

Here are some questions to answer about this study.

a) First, use this table to list and classify the study's variables, based on what you've read so far in the journalist's summary.

Conceptual variable name	How was this variable operationalized?	What seem to be this variable's levels?	Is the variable measured or manipulated?

b) Now sketch a small graph of the study's outcomes. Before you start, consider--would a bar graph or a scatterplot make more sense? 

c) Is this study correlational or experimental? How do you know?

Let's talk about whether this study can support a causal argument. Specifically, a reader might wonder, "Does being vegetarian cause people to become depressed?" 

The first criterion, covariance, is met by the results of the study. They reported that "people who excluded meat from their diets had twice as many depressive episodes as omnivores."

The second criterion, temporal precedence, is not met. It seems that this was a single survey, meaning that both variables (type of diet and depression level) were measured at the same time, so we can't be sure which comes first. Indeed, the journalist included a comment about this: "[a nutrition expert] also hypothesized that plant-based eating and mental health outcomes could be associated in reverse: People who are already depressed might try and change their diets to feel better."

The third criterion, internal validity, is also not met by a correlational study. There might be a third, "C" variable that goes with both A (vegetarian diet) and B (depression). The journalist addressed this issue too: "One user implied that vegans and vegetarians are probably more tuned in to the realities of our macabre meat industry and the impending environmental collapse, which could be more of a bummer than a lack of chicken nuggets." In other words, being tuned into the "macabre meat industry" could be separately linked to both vegetarianism and depression. 

d) Next let's evaluate the four big validities in this study. I'll put a quote on the left, and you can decide which of the four big validities it is addressing (hint: Some of the big validities appear more than once):

Quote from the article:	Which big validity is this quote about? (Construct, statistical, internal, or external?)
Mary Mosquera-Cochran, a registered dietitian at The Ohio State University, told Healthline that the 82 vegetarians (out of 14,000 total people surveyed) wasn’t a large enough sample group.
This isn’t the first study to explore a correlation between diet and mental health, though findings over the past couple of decades have been mixed. Australian research published in 2007 found that vegetarians had poorer mental health, with 21–22% reporting depression compared with 15% of meat eaters. A 2012 German study found that mental disorders tended to follow the onset of a vegetarian diet. But a French study published earlier this year found no relationship between a plant-based diet and mental health outcomes.
The researchers don’t yet know what’s causing the surprising relationship, but say they’ve ruled out some obvious suspects: nutritional deficiencies, socioeconomic conditions, and lifestyle factors like drinking, smoking, and differing levels of physical activity.(This quote is referring to regression, which controlled for several possible third variables)
They evaluated participants using the Clinical Interview Schedule-Revised instrument, a questionnaire that helps diagnose common mental disorders like depression and anxiety.

 

 

Has the pandemic changed people's personalities?

The study reported that average levels of extroversion, agreeableness,
and conscientiousness all went down from before the pandemic
when compared to a year after lockdowns. 
Credit: TheVisualsYouNeed/Deposit Photos

During the lockdowns of the pandemic, many researchers developed and tested interesting research questions. They collected data to test COVID-related hypotheses, and now many of those studies have completed the peer-review process and are coming out in publication. 

One such study was interested in whether the prolonged social isolation of the pandemic might have resulted in shifts in people's personality traits, on average. The study was covered by multiple media outlets, including the online magazine Fortune. The original empirical research is available open-acesss, in PLOS ONE. 

Researchers have long been interested in the question of how, and how much, people's personalities change. They've asked the extent to which people become more conscientious when they transition into a full-time job, or whether people become more agreeable as they get older. The study summarized by this journalist is in the same spirit. 

The Fortune journalist summarized the study this way: 

Past studies have found personalities are generally immune to environmental factors like hurricanes and earthquakes, but a group of researchers found that the global COVID-19 pandemic may be an exception. 

The researchers used data from the Understanding America Study of the University of Southern California to examine results from over 7,000 U.S. adults ages 18 to 109 before and during the pandemic. Personality was measured using a scale to assess five traits: neuroticism (is moody), openness (has an active imagination), conscientiousness (is a reliable worker), agreeableness (is generally trusting), and extraversion (is talkative).

The study echoed previous findings that neuroticism actually decreased from the period before the pandemic started to the early spring months of 2020, which may in part be because the beginning of the pandemic caused major outpourings of support with people rallying together and could have improved individual emotional stability, Sutin says. It may also be because people were able to point to a stressor as the reason for their overwhelm or anxiety versus blaming themselves, she speculates. 

However, as the pandemic wore on, personality traits changed more drastically. Measures of extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness all declined compared to participants’ pre-pandemic personalities. Experts say shifts like this usually take a decade.

Questions

a) This is a type of quasi-experiment. What is the quasi-experimental variable? What are the dependent variables? 

b) Which quasi-experimental design (from Chapter 13) best fits this study? Here are your options: Non-equivalent control group posttest-only design, Non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design, Interrupted time series design, or Non-equivalent control group interrupted time series design?

c) Pick the dependent variable of extroversion. Sketch a graph of the results described by the journalist. If you want to follow the style of the graphs in the textbook, you would put time on the x-axis and extroversion on the y-axis. 

d) Now you can look at how the empirical study presented the results by looking at Figure 1 of the empirical article. The published graph probably looks different from yours (in c, above) in several ways. First, they don't show absolute levels of extroversion; instead, they graphed changes in extroversion--in 2020 and 2021, compared to a pre-panedemic baseline. Specifically, you will see a bar graph in which rates of each trait were either higher (positive bars) or lower (negative bars) than they were before the pandemic. You'll also see that they graphed these changes separately for different age groups. Study the bar graphs in Figure 1 and identify the traits and subgroups that had the largest changes. 

e) Think about the external validity of this study. The sample came from the Understanding America Survey. Visit the survey's website and see if you can figure out if the sample used in the study was collected using probability sampling techniques or not (hint: use their "methodology" tab).

 

Stress and food: experimental and quasi-experimental evidence

In one study, department store workers ate more unhealthy foods
when they were working more demanding shifts. Is such a study likely to be
an experiment, a quasi-experiment, or a correlational study?
Credit: 22January/Shutterstock

A Washington Post journalist integrated several health psychology studies in an article about the relationships between stress and eating. For many people, stress and anxiety is associated with weight gain. The journalist summarized several examples of studies that support, and help explain, this link. Read them and think about whether they are  experimental or quasi-experimental. 

Here's the first study the journalist described (we'll call it Study A):

In laboratory studies, scientists have found that administering synthetic versions of cortisol to people causes them to eat substantially more calories than people who are given a placebo. That’s in part because cortisol reduces your brain’s sensitivity to leptin, also known as the satiety hormone, which regulates your appetite and makes you feel full.

a) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

b) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

Here's the next one, which we'll call Study B:

In one study of department store workers, people ate more sugar, saturated fat and overall calories when they had to work long, demanding shifts compared with when they worked less stressful shifts with lighter workloads.

c) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

d) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

Here's another, which we'll call Study C:

Even stress from activities we enjoy can lead to overeating. In one study, researchers followed ardent football fans in different cities. They found that fans whose NFL teams lost on Sunday consumed more calories and saturated fat the next day. Fans whose teams won ate less food and saturated fat the following day. The scientists found similar results when they looked at the dietary patterns of French soccer fans.

e) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

f) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

So far, the evidence suggests that stress in one's life might lead people to eat more of types of foods that are not good for us. Here's a final study that was designed to test a way to prevent stress from affacting our eating habits. We'll call it Study D:

In a study published last year, [researcher Janet] Tomiyama and her colleagues recruited 100 adults with elevated stress levels and split them into two groups. Everyone was trained to do a daily, six-minute stress reduction exercise called progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing and relaxing your muscles from toes to head. You can find an example of it here. This deep relaxation technique has been shown in studies to reduce stress and anxiety.

But members of one group were assigned to eat a serving of fresh fruit such as sliced pineapple, honeydew and pears, about five minutes into each of their daily progressive muscle relaxation sessions. After one week of this, the researchers found that eating just the fruit alone made the participants feel less stressed and put them in a better mood. By pairing the fruit with a relaxation exercise, their brains began to view the fruit as something that reduced their stress levels — essentially turning the fruit into comfort food.

g) There are two variables in this study. What are they? What are their levels? For each variable, decide if it is measured or manipulated. 

h) Do you think this was an experiment or a quasi-experiment? Explain your reasoning.

i) Bonus question: Study D included an element of classical conditioning, which you probably learned about in Introductory Psychology. Can you identify the conditioned stimulus and conditioned response in this example? 

j) Rank the four studies (A, B, C, and D, above) in terms of which ones you believe have the strongest evidence (based on their methodology).

Can a cuddly object or blanket reduce adult anxiety?

Does holding a comfort object actually reduce anxiety in adults? That's an empirical question!  Photo: NDanko/Shutterstock

Apparently, about half of American adults still have a childhood teddy bear, and 40% still sleep with it (we can look into the methodology of this survey in a later post!). Do such comfort objects provide anything beyond sentimental feelings?  What about the products marketed to help calm people or help them feel less lonely--products like weighted blankets, or the robotic, stuffed PARO seal, which was created to engage older adults with dementia? 

Time magazine journalist Jamie Friedlander Serrrano covered a variety of studies on these types of comfort objects. The story described several studies that have experimentally tested the effects of weighted blankets, teddy bears, and the PARO seal. One study featured by the journalist was published in the empirical journal, PLOS One. This study focused on a robotic cushion that was plush and soft, and which also mimicked breathing by inflating and deflating every few seconds.

The journalist explained that the researchers wanted to see if holding this object would help students feel less anxious before a stressful oral math exam. 

Students in the test group held the object—a plush, baby-blue cushion the size of a throw pillow that automatically inflates and deflates, mimicking inhaling and exhaling—for eight minutes before their exam. One control group did a guided breathing meditation instead, while another control group didn’t do anything special. Haynes and her team found that clutching the stuffed breathing cushion reduced anxiety as much as doing the guided meditation.

“This indicated that the cushion could be similarly effective as a breathing meditation for anxiety,” says [scientist] Haynes, who is now completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Saarland University in Germany. “We didn’t give the students in the experiment any guidance about using the cushion. We didn’t tell them to follow it with their breathing or anything—it was just purely the act of holding it as it slowly breathed that eased their anxiety. I think we thought it would help with anxiety, but we were pleasantly surprised that it was as effective as the breathing meditation.”

Lywood—who is currently working on commercializing the breathing cushion through her company Sooothe—believes the findings highlight our innate need for touch, even if the source isn’t human or alive, for that matter. “We take touch for granted,” she says. But because many people have been deprived of it during the pandemic, she points out, “we are sort of rediscovering how valuable it is.”

Questions

1. Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in this study (hint: One variable was manipulated and one was measured)

Variable name (conceptual variable)	How was this variable operationalized?	What are this variable's levels?	Was this a manipulated or measured variable?	Was this an IV or a DV?

2. Was the independent variable manipulated as independent groups or within-groups? 

3. Which of the four basic experimental designs was used: posttest only? pretest-posttest? repeated measures? concurrent measures?  Explain your answer. 

4. Sketch a little bar graph of the results of the anxiety result.

5. The journalist doesn't specify whether people were randomly assigned to the three conditions, and when you check the PLOS One article, it also doesn't mention that people were randomly assigned. I don't think we should assume that researchers did NOT take this step--sometimes they just forget to mention it. In any case, why would you need to randomly assign people to the three conditions? That is, what kinds of alternative explanations does random assignment help rule out?

6. One of the authors of the study also created, and hopes to market, the "breathing" cushion. Is this an ethical problem for the study? Is this a scientific problem for the study? 

"Fetuses smile for carrots but grimace over kale"

This fetus's facial expression would be judged as more of a cry or grimace. Photo courtesy of FETAP (Fetal Taste Preferences) Study, Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Durham University

This fetus's facial expression would be judged as smiling (or lip-pulling). Photo courtesy of FETAP (Fetal Taste Preferences) Study, Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Durham University

Even though kale is having a moment as a vegetable (and kale salad is certainly one of my favorites), most folks would agree that carrots taste better than kale.  A new study, covered by multiple news outlets, has demonstrated that even in utero, fetuses agree. They seem to be able to tell the difference between carrots and kale, and they like carrots better!

As you can imagine, this study was a media darling. Here are some excerpts of a report on this study as covered by journalists at CNN. 

The scientists used in-utero facial expressions to infer how babies felt about what their parent had eaten: 

Fetuses create more of a “laughter-face” in the womb when exposed to the flavor of carrots consumed by their mother and create more of a “cry-face” response when exposed to kale [...]

The study looked at the healthy fetuses of 100 women between the ages of 18 and 40 years who were between 32 and 36 weeks pregnant in northeast England.

From this, 35 women were [assigned at random] into an experimental group that consumed an organic kale capsule, 35 were put into a group that took a carrot capsule, and 30 were put into a control group that was not exposed to either flavor.

After a waiting period of 20 minutes post-consumption, the women underwent 4D ultrasound scans, which were compared to 2D images of the fetuses.

Lip corner pulling, suggestive of a smile or laughter, was significantly higher in the carrot group compared to the kale and control group. Whereas ... casting down of the lower lip...– suggestive of a crying face – [was] much more common in the kale group than the other groups.

Questions

1. Using the table below, classify the three main variables mentioned in this study (hint: One variable was manipulated and two were measured)

Variable name (conceptual variable)	How was this variable operationalized?	What are this variable's levels?	Was this a manipulated or measured variable?	Was this an IV or a DV?

2. Was the independent variable manipulated as independent groups or within-groups? 

3. Which of the four basic experimental designs was used: posttest only? pretest-posttest? repeated measures? concurrent measures?  Explain your answer. 

4. Sketch a little bar graph of the results of the "lip pulling" result.

5. Can this study support the causal claim that "eating a carrot pill causes fetuses to make a smiling face"? Apply the three causal criteria. 

6.  The CNN study mentioned the following in their reporting. Which of the four big validities is this addressing? 

Participants were asked not to consume any food or flavored drinks one hour before their scans. The mothers also did not eat or drink anything containing carrot or kale on the day of their scans to make sure it would not influence the results.

7. The 100 fetuses in this study were not a random sample of any population--they were a convenience sample. Why do you think these researchers did not prioritize external validity in this study? Do you think that's a major problem, or not? 

8. Use the Internet to find other media coverage of this study--note any similarities and differences in how the journalists discuss the findings. 

Here's a link to the original empirical article (paywalled). 

Time alone with your thoughts?

Credit: Ground Picture/Shutterstock

Imagine sitting alone with your thoughts for 20 minutes. You wouldn't be allowed to distract yourself with a book, phone, or even walking around. How much do you think you would you enjoy it?  

When this question was asked of participants in a series of studies, most reported that they'd not enjoy time alone very much.  But this study also tested how well their predictions matched their actual experience. The empirical research was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and  summarized in a trade magazine for the American Psychological Association. According to the journalist, 

...study lead author Aya Hatano, PhD, of Kyoto University in Japan[, said] “Our research suggests that individuals have difficulty appreciating just how engaging thinking can be. That could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy with devices and other distractions, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in daily life.”

The research team conducted six studies. Here is an overview of some of them: 

In a series of six experiments with a total of 259 participants, the researchers compared people’s predictions of how much they would enjoy simply sitting and thinking with their actual experience of doing so. In the first experiment, they asked people to predict how much they would enjoy sitting alone with their thoughts for 20 minutes, without being allowed to do anything distracting such as reading, walking around or looking at a smartphone. Afterward, participants reported how much they had enjoyed it.

The researchers found that people enjoyed spending time with their thoughts significantly more than they had predicted. This held true across variations of the experiment in which participants sat in a bare conference room or in a small, dark tented area with no visual stimulation; variations in which the thinking period lasted for three minutes or for 20 minutes; and one variation in which the researchers asked people to report on their enjoyment midway through the task instead of after it was over. In every case, participants enjoyed thinking more than they had expected to.

a) The researchers conducted six different studies. Do these sound like direct replications? Replication-plus-extensions? or Conceptual replications? (you can skip this question if you haven't done Chapter 14 yet)

b) The journalist identifies these as "experiments," so let's assume that each study contains a manipulated variable. Take this study, as described by the journalist:

The researchers found that people enjoyed spending time with their thoughts significantly more than they had predicted [in a variation of] the experiment in which participants sat in a bare conference room or in a small, dark tented area with no visual stimulation. 

In this study, one of the independent variables was "predicted vs. actual".  What is the other main independent variable, or IV? What is the dependent variable, or DV? 

c) Do the same for this study:

variations in which the thinking period lasted for three minutes or for 20 minutes;

In this study, one of the independent variables was "predicted vs. actual". What is the other IV? What is the DV?

d) And for this one: 

In another experiment, the researchers compared one group of participants’ predictions of how much they would enjoy thinking with another group’s predictions of how much they would enjoy checking the news on the internet. Again, the researchers found that people underestimated their enjoyment of thinking. The thinking group expected to enjoy the task significantly less than the news-checking group, but afterward, the two groups reported similar enjoyment levels.

In this study, one of the independent variables was "predicted vs. actual". What is the other IV? What is the DV?

e) Challenge question: For the study above (comparing time alone to looking at news on the internet)  and graph the result. You can compare your graph to Figure 6 in the empirical article (available next to the APA journalist's story, here).

Here's a final caveat about the results. I appreciated this statement because it puts the statistical outcome in concrete and realistic terms: 

It is important to note that participants did not rate thinking as an extremely enjoyable task, but simply as more enjoyable than they thought it would be, according to Murayama. On average, participants’ enjoyment level was around 3 to 4 on a 7-point scale. Future research should delve into which types of thinking are most enjoyable and motivating, according to Murayama. “Not all thinking is intrinsically rewarding, and in fact some people are prone to vicious cycles of negative thinking,” he said.

 

 

What your taste in music says about your personality

According to the study, which personality trait is associated with upbeat, danceable music? Credit: Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

This splashy heading from Inc.com reads:

Here's what your taste in music says about your personality, according to a huge new study. whether you like Mozart or metal really does reveal something about your personality, new research finds

 

This was a correlational study, and provides a good chance to practice concepts from Chapter 3 and 8. Here is how the journalist summarized the methods and results:

...researchers from University of Cambridge and Israel's Bar-Ilan University used an online quiz to extract information on the musical preferences and personalities of more than 285,000 study subjects from 53 countries (you can try the quiz yourself here). They also set up a website where 71,000 visitors from 34 countries rated music clips and took a personality quiz. 

The team used well-known, scientifically validated frameworks for categorizing both music and personality. The aptly named "Music" framework categorizes music using five dimensions: mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary. The familiar Big 5 personality framework categorizes people according to openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. 

Did the research team find any correlations between the type of music someone enjoyed and their personality type? Yup, reported the researchers recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

a) You could think of this study as having two big variables or ten smaller variables. What would be the two "big" variables? What would be the ten smaller variables? 

b) What makes this a correlational study? 

c) Here is a description of one of their results:

Extroverts the world over tend to like upbeat, danceable contemporary music. 

Sketch a well-labelled scatterplot of this correlation. 

d) Here is another result: 

The study found fans of the Nirvana classic "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and other intense music are higher in neuroticism on average.

Sketch a well-labelled scatterplot of this correlation. 

e) Here is a third result:

Those high in conscientiousness tended to avoid more intense music...

Sketch a well-labelled scatterplot of this correlation. 

f) And here's one more:

Looking for an agreeable type? Then put on some Marvin Gaye and see how they react. The researchers found a strong correlation between liking mellow music and being high in agreeableness.

 

g) Now, here are two quotes from the journalist's article. For each quote decide which of the four big validities this point is addressing.

 

1. The team used well-known, scientifically validated frameworks for categorizing both music and personality. 

2. They ... set up a website where 71,000 visitors from 34 countries rated music clips and took a personality quiz. 

 

h) What is a question you could ask about this study's statistical validity?

 

i) Inc.com is a business magazine, so they framed the study in terms of job hiring:

 

Despite its sometimes dubious scientific basis, the personality testing industry rakes in around $2 billion annually telling companies their new hire is an INFJ or revealing her Hexaco type. [This] study suggests your business might be able to save some money and just ask candidates about their taste in music instead. 

What do you think? Does the research study support the idea that we could use music preferences in job interviews to select certain personality traits? Why or why not?  (to read the Inc.com take on this question, read the full article).