Experimental Psychology

• Antecedent conditions

  All circumstances that occur or exist before the event or behavior to be explained.
• Commonsense psychology

  It is a practice of groups of people engage in the activity of describing, explaining and predicting human thought and action in terms of attitudes like belief, desire and intention.
• Explain

  When you ask yourself the question, “What is going on here?” you are conducting research for which goal of psychology?
• Good thinking

  An organized and rational thought, characterized by open-mindedness, objectivity, and parsimony; a principal tool of scientific method.
• Predict

  When you ask yourself the question, “Where will this behavior or event be exhibited”
• Pseudoscience 

  These are collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.
• Control

  Psychology strives to change, influence, or control behavior to make constructive and lasting changes in people's lives
• Random assignment of subjects

  It refers to how participants are randomly chosen to represent the larger population, random assignment refers to how those chosen participants are then assigned to experimental groups.
• Empirical data

  These data that are observable or experienced; capable of being verified or disproved through investigation.
• DeterminismThe belief that there are specifiable causes or the way people behave and that these causes can be discovered through research.
• APA. American Psychological AssociationIt provides ethical guidelines for psychological research. Acceptance of membership in the association commits the member to adherence to these principles. The principles are also intended for nonmembers, including students of psychology and others working for a psychologist.
• Informed ConsentParticipants are rarely misled as to the nature of the experiences they will have during the experiment. Furthermore, an experimenter usually states the purpose of the experimental procedure truthfully.
• PlagiarismTaking credit for someone else’s ideas, data, or words. Although it may be obvious to you that you should not use someone else’s data as your own, plagiarism may be much less obvious in other cases. If you are using someone else’s words, you are obliged to use quotation marks with an appropriate citation.
• FraudIt means to simply invent (fabricate) data, and disregard the fact that this violates fundamental and internationally accepted rules for good research practice.
• Privacy

  A persons may not want to be seen entering a place that might stigmatize them, such as a pregnancy counseling center clearly identified by signs on the front of the building, this is an example of:
• Protection form harm

  The subjects should have a way to contact the investigator following participation in the research.
• Freedom to withdraw

  Participants should be allowed to decline to participate or to withdraw at any time. Moreover, few people would deny that people who are unhappy about participating.
• Confidentiality

  It pertains to the treatment of information that an individual has disclosed in a relationship of trust and with the expectation that it will not be divulged to others without permission in ways that are inconsistent with the understanding of the original disclosure.
• Informed ConsentIts intent is that human participants can enter research freely (voluntarily) with full information about what it means for them to take part, and that they give consent before they enter the research
• Debriefing

   provides participants with a full explanation of the hypothesis being tested, procedures to deceive participants and the reason(s) why it was necessary to deceive them.
• Alternative hypothesisIt is a claim about the population that is contradictory to H0 and what we conclude when we reject Ho.
• Type 2 errorAlso known as a false negative and occurs when a researcher fails to reject a null hypothesis which is really false. Here a researcher concludes there is not a significant effect, when actually there really is.
• Significant levelThe statistical criterion for deciding whether to reject the null hypothesis or not, typically  p < .05
• Type 1 errorAlso known as a false positive and occurs when a researcher incorrectly rejects a true null hypothesis. This means that your report that your findings are significant when in fact they have occurred by chance.
• Non-directional hypothesis

  A statement that predicts a difference between treatment groups without predicting the exact pattern of results.
• Critical regionPortion in the tail (s) of the distribution of a test statistic extreme enough to satisfy the researcher’s criterion for rejecting the null hypothesis—for instance, the most extreme 5% of a distribution where p < .05 is the chosen significance.
• Null hypothesisA statement that the performance of treatment groups is so similar that the groups must belong to the same populations’ a way of saying that the experimental manipulation had no important effect.
• One tailed-testStatistical procedure used when a directional prediction has been made, the critical region of the distribution of the test statistic is measured in just one tail of the distribution.
• Two-tailed test

  A statistical procedure used when a non-directional prediction has been made, the critical region of the distribution of the test statistic is divided over both tails of the distribution.
• Measure of central tendency Summary statistics that describes what is typical of a distribution of scores; include mean, median and mode.
• Interval

  Example: “Our family income ranges from P20,000 – P40,000”
• Operational DefinitionIt is the statement of procedures the researcher is going to use in order to measure a specific variable.
• Hypothetical constructConcepts used to explain unseen processed, such as hunger, intelligence, or learning that the experimenter intentionally manipulates
• Independent VariableIt is a variable that stands alone and isn't changed by the other variables you are trying to measure.
• Nominal

  It is defined as a scale used for labeling variables into distinct classifications and doesn’t involve a quantitative value or order.
• Variable

  It is an object, event, idea, feeling, time period, or any other type of category you are trying to measure. There are two types of variables-independent and dependent.
• Control VariableIt is a potential independent variable that is held constant during an experiment because it is controlled by the experimenter.
• Dependent Variable

  It is something that depends on other factors. For example, a test score could be a dependent variable because it could change depending on several factors such as how much you studied, how much sleep you got the night before you took the test, or even how hungry you were when you took it.
• High test-retest reliabilityThe consistency of a measure across time: do you get the same results when you repeat the measurement.
• Not Reliable

  If the same result can be consistently achieved by using the same methods under the same circumstances, the measurement is considered reliable, but in the situation there were different diagnosis.