Psychology: Aims

• Hassett et al.

  Aim: 

  1. To test if differences in children’s toy preferences result from biological factors
  2. To investigate if male and female rhesus monkeys have similar toy preferences to human infants, despite no socialisation experience with human toys
• Dement & Kleitman

  Aim: to investigate the relationship between sleep and dreaming

  • Whether dream recall differs between REM and NREM
  • Is there a positive correlation between subjective estimates of dream duration and the length of REM period before waking
  • Are eye-movement patterns related to dream content
• Holzel et al.

  Aims: 

  1. To identify if regular participation in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) leads to measurable neurological changes, which might be associated with trait changes related to mindfulness practice.
  2. To identify brain structures which changed as a result of an eight-week MBSR programme.
• Andrade

  Aims:

  1. To investigate whether doodling improves our ability to pay attention to (or concentrate on) auditory information
  2. To investigate whether doodling affects later recall of auditory information
• Baron-Cohen et al

  Aims: 

  1. To investigate whether the improved ‘revised’ version of the Eyes test would show a clear impairment in a group of adults with ASD 
  2. To investigate whether there was an association between performance on the revised Eyes test and measures of traits of ASD
  3. To investigate whether there were sex differences in those without ASD on this task
• Pozzulo et al.

  Aims 

  1. To investigate whether children are less able to recognise human faces than adults
  2. To investigate whether children make more false positive identifications than adults when faced with: target-absent lineups versus target-present lineups 
  3. To investigate whether children make more false-positive identifications than adults when faced with: human faces and cartoon characters
• Fagen et al.

  Aims

  • To investigate whether free-contact, traditionally trained elephants can be trained to participate in a trunk wash by using positive reinforcement 
• Bandura et al.

  Aim:

  • To see whether children would reproduce aggressive behaviour when the model was no longer present
  • To look for gender differences in the learning of aggression
• Saavedra & Silverman

  Aims

  • Highlight the role of evaluative learning and disgust in the development and treatment of children’s phobias
  • Test the efficacy (effectiveness) of imagery exposure as part of an exposure-based cognitive-behavioural treatment for a specific phobia of buttons
• Migram

  Aim

  1. To investigate the level of obedience when an authority figure orders a person to administer a physical punishment to a stranger
• Perry et al.

  Aims

  • To investigate how oxytocin affects preferred interpersonal distance for those scoring high or low in empathy traits
• Piliavin.

  Aims

  • To investigate factors affecting helping behaviour on a New York subway train
  • To see how the following factors affected help offered to a passenger who collapsed in the carriage:
  • Type of victim
  • Race of victim
  • Modelled help provided by another passenger
  • Number of people in the carriage (group size)