--Original published at Site Title

Summary

After a longitudinal study, researchers have found the word “fat” holds a lot of power and negative consequences. This little word can do as much as increase the risk of young girls becoming obese later in life.

In this study, researchers followed 1213 girls that identified as black and 1166 girls that identified as white over the course of about a decade, starting at age 10 and ending at age 19. These girls were weighed at the start of the study (10) and then again at the end (19). Upon the start of the study, 58% of the participants were previously told they were “fat” by someone close to them such as a parent, sibling, friend, or teacher. The shocking results came after measuring the girls’ body mass indexes (BMI) at the end of the 10 years. The girls who were told they were “fat” before the study were found to be 1.66 times more likely to be obese at age 19 compared to those who were not told they were “fat”.

Although the parents/guardians of the participants shared information with the researchers about their income and educational background that could have contributed to the findings, the researchers found that the biggest contributor to obesity came from the girls being told they were “fat” by a family member versus and non-family member. These findings help back up a previous study done at Yale University in 2007 that found the stigmatization of overweight children can have negative consequences on both their physical and mental health. Even though there is no cause and effect between stigmatization and obesity, and at times it may not seem like it , young children do listen to what you say and will take it to heart.

http://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/calling-girls-fat-can-affect-their-weight

Hunger JM, Tomiyama AJ. Weight Labeling and ObesityA Longitudinal Study of Girls         Aged   10 to 19 Years. JAMA Pediatr. 2014;168(6):579–580. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2014.122

Reflection

The process of writing my own research summary was not too hard, but I think for the most part I just got lucky with the article that I chose. The news article and scholarly article are fairly short and lack a lot major detail therefore my summary could not be that extensive, however if the circumstances were flipped I think I might have struggled. Writing is not one of my strong suits and I have a lot of respect for journalists that do that for a living. Specifically I think it would be extra challenging to be a journalist who writes about research studies and experiments because they not only have to read those at times, lengthy scholarly articles, but they also have to understand what they are reading and interpret the results. That is a much more difficult task compared to us, where we were able to have access to a previously written news article in addition to the scholarly article Although my article was short I did leave out some information that I felt was rather irrelevant to the main idea of the research. Specifically, I left out the information about the states that the girls were from. I felt the need to leave this out because this was not mentioned in the scholarly article so that triggered me to believe it is either not important to the results of the research, or the writer of the news article did not have their facts straight. I also left out the little snippet from the original news article that states no data exists for adolescent boys on this topic, mostly because for me that only raised more questions and I think it is just better off if the reader is not introduced to excess information that could potentially distract from the main point. In addition, from my summary the five critical questions to look out for when reading research are not really addressed, but they were not fully answered in either of the original articles and made it difficult for myself to implement them in my writing.

--Original published at Caroline's Blog

Can swiping right on tinder lead to unhappiness rather than satisfaction? This might just be the case according to Shena S. Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark L. Lepper of Stanford University. These researchers gathered evidence from three different studies to decide whether or not a higher quantity of options leads to higher satisfaction.

All three studies build up to why having more options might not be as beneficial as having fewer options. First, the researchers visited a high-end grocery store and set up a display of jams to sample and potentially sell. Random people who were given six option to choose from versus people who were given thirty options to choose from were more likely to purchase the jam they sample. The next study was built off of this by looking at the quality in essays by college students who were given limited options versus a vast amount of options. The higher quality essays were from students given lesser options. Finally, the last study used results from the previous two studies. This one focused on decision making with greater or lesser varieties of options. Some of the people were given an extensive amount of Godiva chocolate whereas others had less to choose from. This study proved that it was harder to come to a decision when they had more options in front of them.

Tinder could be compared to an endless supply of Godiva chocolate- are you really making the best decision to swipe right on one individual while there are possibly millions of better options in front of you? Based on the previous research, Tinder may not be the key to your love-life issues. Getting to know a select few individuals, preferably in real life, may end up creating more satisfaction for you knowing that you those other one million individuals in your Tinder feed are not worth your time.

For my summary, I chose to include the general ideas of the studies so that someone reading this would not have to look back into the article to find the results of this study and have a hard time comprehending the advanced language in the research article. I did not mention how the variables were operationalized in depth, however I discussed how they were able to come to the results for each study. I also chose to leave out statistical information that would not have been helpful for the reader. The selection of participants (randomized) was discussed for the first study, and I mentioned who the participants were for the other two studies. The assignment of groups was not mentioned in my article nor in the original news article. The conclusions were generalized to the correct population in the first and last study that I mentioned. At the end, causal claims are able to be made because there is a clear independent variable and randomized groups for each of the studies.

In the original news article, the critical questions were not very evident, and my version did a better job at discussing them. The author did not define the independent or dependent variables, so they were not able to be operationalized, it does not discuss how the participants were chosen, if the participants were randomly selected and put into groups, they generalized the conclusion to the whole population, and it did not allow us to make causal claims. Overall, I tried to incorporate more factual information from the research article, although it was not statistical information, instead of providing personal anecdotes.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-illogical/201809/swiping-right-unhappy

https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf

Citations

Heiss, Rebecca S. “Swiping Right Into Unhappy.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 8 Sept. 2018, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-illogical/201809/swiping-right-unhappy.

Iyengar, Sheena & Lepper, Mark. (2001). When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?. Journal of personality and social psychology. 79. 995-1006. 10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995.

--Original published at HuntersCollegeBlog

Summary: 

When taking a picture with a phone, it is often seen as a simple task. Click a button, and you are done. Do those pictures save in our heads like they do on the phone? The term offloading refers to taking the picture, and rather than remembering it in our minds, we rely on our phone to do the remembering for us. This can cause the photo-taking-impairment effect, which means one cannot remember the object that they took a photo of, only objects they look at and see in real life. Each experiment conducted by Soares and Storm shows just how impairing it is to the memory to take a picture on a phone.

Coincidentally, people tend to take photos on their phones to later remember that snapshot, but according to the studies conducted in this research, the complete opposite can actually happen. Along with the offloading hypothesis is the attentional-disengagement hypothesis, which is where people may actually be more focused on taking the picture, rather than the object they’re photographing, thus making the ability to encode the memory even less. When asked, according to Mols, Broekhuijsen, van den Hoven, Markopoulos and Eggen (2015), people said that when they took pictures of their experiences rather than use something else to capture that experience, they felt more disconnected. When Henkel (2014) conducted a study that this current study is furthering, he found people who took photographs of the objects versus just looking at them remembered the photographed objects less when asked about them later. He suggested that this was possibly due to the offloading theory, which is further tested in the current study.

Within the two studies, both hypotheses were tested. Each person was able to take a picture of the photo on the computer screen, observe them, or take a picture and then delete it soon after. When testing the offloading hypothesis, it was thought the photo-taking impairment would be lessened if participants were not relying on the photos being saved for later. When testing the attentional-disengagement hypothesis, assuming the photos to be saved or not would cause a memory impairment after taking the picture.

In the first experiment, participants used Snapchat to avoid offloading, since the pictures would be sent somewhere instantly. As well as using Snapchat, some participants observed the photos on the screen, while others took a picture of the screen with a regular camera app. With this hypothesis of offloading, it was predicted that people using Snapchat would remember the photos better than those using the camera app. After the participants observed/took pictures of the photos on the screen, they were given a test to see how well they remembered the pictures on the screen, specifically the details. Each participant had fifteen seconds to observe the photo, and those who had to take pictures would take the picture (those using Snapchat would take the picture and then send it to the designated contact), and then use the remaining time left of those fifteen seconds to look at the photos on the computer screen. The test was then completed at the end of the experiment to see how well each trial could point out certain details in the photos on the computer. Participants who only observed the photos scored higher on the test than those who had to take pictures. Surprisingly, people who took pictures with the camera app answered more questions correctly than those who used Snapchat. The photo-taking impairment was present in both those who used the camera app and Snapchat, but it was larger with those who used Snapchat rather than the camera app.

In experiment two, the experimenters gave those taking pictures a full fifteen seconds after the photo was taken to ensure they had the same amount of time to encode the pictures as those who were only observing. A Delete condition was replaced with the Snapchat condition. Instead of using Snapchat, participants took a picture with the camera app and then deleted it immediately. This would show that memory was still suffering, even after having a full fifteen seconds to observe the photo on the screen once participants took a picture of it. Other than the changes mentioned above, the same procedure took place. After participants in the Camera group and Delete group took the photos on the camera, they were given an extra fifteen seconds to view the photos. The test was also taken at the end of the experiment. These results found that those who only observed the photos still answered more questions correctly than those who were taking pictures, but the photo-impairment was still high with those who deleted the photos from the phone. The Camera and Delete conditions were not significantly different, as each group did almost the same on the test.

The offloading hypothesis did not match with the results that were obtained, since every group had a kind of photo-taking impairment. Despite having the extra fifteen seconds, memory impairments were still seen, which could show that it is not distraction that is causing the photo-taking effect, but the entire experience failing to be encoded properly

Reflection: 

With this summary, I chose to put in more background information of the study, and why these researchers decided to do the study, because I felt that without knowing that prior knowledge, the study was hard to follow, and it could have become a bit confusing at times. I also chose to include the study that inspired this study, because in the article, it referred back to Henkel’s study, and what these researchers decided to do the same/differently from Henkel’s study. I chose not to include some information at the ending of the research article, because it went into a lot of information about why the study did not work, and the interpretations of the study, because the researchers went into a lot of detail on that, and it became confusing to interpret and understand. I also chose not to include whether it answered the five critical questions, because there were a few that were not present in the research article, and the study cannot be applied to specific populations. The researchers also pointed out a lot of flaws that led me to believe that this study was not completely perfected yet, so the five critical questions could not be justly answered. I feel that my summary covered the majority of the information given in the research article, whereas the news article missed a few important things. My summary was also a lot shorter than the news article, but I feel it still covered the necessary information. The news article was only able to cover a few of the five critical questions, while I chose not to include what critical questions the research article answered, in my summary. Based on each of the three assignments, I learned that it is sometimes difficult for journalists to write about psychology research, because of how in depth and difficult it is to interpret at some points.  For the popular article critique, it was hard for me to fully understand what the study was about, because not everything was discussed in full detail, but when I was writing the critique, it was hard for me to determine what should and what should not have gone into the critique. The same goes for the scholarly critique article-some of the information was hard to interpret, which made it harder for me to figure out how to write it and elaborate on it. The media project helped me to see how journalists pick and choose what information to put into their articles. It also showed me how to determine which information has to be included, and which can be left out.

Marczyk, Jesse. (2018, June 11).  “Getting Off Your Phone: Benefits? Psychology Today.

Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pop-psych/201806/getting-your-phone-benefits

Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2018). Forget in a flash: A further investigation of the photo-taking-impairment effect. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7, 154-160

Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117301687?via%3Dihub

--Original published at Sydney’s Side

A study conducted in England discovered being involved in sibling bullying could put a child two to three times more at risk to developing mental disorders. Almost 7,000 people were randomly selected to participate in the eighteen-year-long study. The researchers claim it is the first study of its kind.

Sibling bullying is more than just sibling rivalry, it is considered “repeated negative outcomes” between siblings. Children who participate in sibling bullying are three times as likely to develop psychological disorders. The study also found, children who were victims of sibling bullying as well as peer bullying were four times as likely to develop a disorder. The more frequent the bullying attacks, the higher the risk of a disorder.

At twelve years old, the participants went through a series of interviews to determine if they were a bully, victim, or neither. 364 of the participants were classified as a pure victim, 236 as a pure bully, and 384 were classified as a mixture of the two- called a bully-victim. At eighteen-years old, the participants took a test to determine if they showed any symptoms of a psychological disorder. Of the participants with a bullying status, 55 of them were found to have a psychological disorder. Less than 1% of the non-involved participants were found to develop a disorder.

It is not just the victims who are at risk. The study discovered perpetrators were just as likely as the victims to develop a psychotic disorder. The children who were victimized were also found to have additional negative consequences. They included lower IQ scores, trouble expressing their emotions, and were more likely to be bullied by peers than those who were not victims of sibling bullying. Previous studies have found a link between schizophrenia and social defeat, which many of the victims feel. Both victims and bullies are also more likely to develop negative schemas of the world around them.

It is important for parents to take initiative to prevent the negative side effects of sibling bullying, before it is too late. The study recommends parents should intervene and look to professionals to help prevent psychological harm. More research on this topic is necessary to make any definitive conclusions, but this study is a start.

Reflection:

It was somewhat difficult to summarize the research study in the 430 words used in the pop culture article. It was easy making the article below the word count because the word limitation was known as the summary was being written. While writing the article, there was not specific details of the information included. The difficulty came from deciding how much information to put into the summary. The original study was difficult to understand and to put it into a short article was challenging. There was a great deal of information left out such as the specific tests used, statistical analysis, strengths and limitations of the experiment, as well as any confounding variables. This information was left out because readers of an online news article would not be interested in this information. The information used in the summary included the location of the study and the categories of participants. Then it briefly explains how the data was collected and then the results were given. The five critical questions are briefly mentioned but not clearly stated. Often times they must be inferred because it was not necessary to put into the article.

Before writing the media production article, I believed journalists were too biased and left out too many details. Many of my original critiques of the pop culture article are due to the short length of it. For a journalist to accurately summarize an eighteen-year study within a short article, would be nearly impossible. Journalists often get backlash for not giving the entire story, but they have a limited word count in order to get the reader’s attention. It should be the job of the reader to find additional information to get the entire story because any article will have bias in it. The point of online articles is to have more people read them to get more money. If the article was long and described the study in full detail, not many people would want to read it.

The article does not clearly answer all five critical questions, because there is not enough space to explain all of them. The average reader would not recognize how the study operationalized their variables, but it is mentioned in the media production article. It defines how sibling bullying was defined, but does not go into further detail. Another critical question is how they selected their participants. The media production article states they were randomly selected, but they could choose not to participate. The next question asks how the study assigned their participants to groups, which can be inferred. It is unethical to assign participants to be a bully or a victim of bullying between sibling, therefore the study did not randomly assign their participants to groups. The fourth question wants to know if the experiment allows for causal claims. This is not stated in the article but can also be inferred. In order to have causal claims, the experiment must have random selection and randomly assign participants to groups, which it does not. Finally, the last critical questions asks if the study is generalized to the correct population. This is not mentioned in the media production article because the readers would not be interested in this information.

The pop culture article had many similarities and differences between the media production summary. They were similar in the way they both only provided the most basic information. The articles were both limited in the amount of words they could use, so they only provide a glimpse into the study. But they are different in the way they present the information. The pop culture article was written by a journalist getting paid to write an article to bring more readers in.  But the media production article was written only to summarize the information in the original study. They are also different because the pop culture article used the input of researchers involved in the study. The media production article did not have access to these individuals.

https://www.studyfinds.org/children-bullied-siblings-more-likely-devleop-psychotic-disorders/

file:///Users/sydneyleete/Downloads/For%20Sydney%20(1).pdf

--Original published at Rachelsblog

Researchers,Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg , Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut asked a very critical and controversial question that psychologists have been exploring: Does weather affect nostalgia? Nostalgia is a feeling of missing the past or a loved one that one receives from many different factors. Researchers wanted to know if weather affected moods and brought back feelings from past experiences. Therefore, multiple experiments were conducted.

Four experiments were done to help answer the question. In the first study, 75 participants were recruited, 51 women 24 men. The participants were assigned to listen to different recordings of weather. The recordings included, thunder, wind, rain, and a control group which was an empty parking lot with no type of bad weather. The recordings were 2-minutes and after listening to them, the participants were then asked to record their feelings of nostalgia. The results showed that after the participants listened to all 4 recordings, they had feelings of nostalgia after hearing the thunder, wind, and rain. The conclusions were generalized to all the participants, which is fair because there was a mix of genders. If just one gender was used and the results were generalized to all of society, this would be false because the other gender was not tested.

In the second study, 133 undergraduates from the University of Southampton were used. 117 women and 16 men were used. The participants were all assigned to keep an online diary for 10 days about how the weather affected their feelings of nostalgia and distress. The results of this show that rain and wind had a higher perceived affection of nostalgia and distress to the participants, thunder was not that big of a factor. Once again, the conclusions were generalized to the correct population because both genders were used, so there was no bias towards one gender compared to another.

In study 3, 323 participants were used. 186 women and 137 men were used. The participants were split into two groups randomly. One group was to listen to either the control or wind recording again. While they listened to the recording they were asked to think of a past experience that brought them feelings of nostalgia. The other group was to listen to the recordings and their task was to count backwards from 350 in intervals of 7. The results showed that those who focused on an event that caused them nostalgia had  more nostalgia after listening to the recording compared to prior to listening to them. The other group had less of an affect on their feelings of nostalgia because they were not focused on it. They were too busy trying to count backwards that they could not feel nostalgic and the weather did not affect them because they were not affected by it.

In the last study, 202 participants were used, 100 men and 100 women. The participants were randomly assigned to one of the four recordings in study 1 again. As they listened to them, they were asked questions about the recordings and social connectedness was then a factor that was included. The researchers asked what the feelings of nostalgia made them feel connected to, whether it be loved ones, friends, or a past time. Wind was perceived to give the most nostalgic feelings and social connectedness to the participants.  Thunder evoked more nostalgia than the rain.

In conclusion, it was confirmed that for most people, at least the participants used, that weather did evoke feelings of nostalgia. All the experiments were related to each other and supported each other. The data supports that weather does affect feelings of nostalgia.

Reflection:

After reading through the pop culture and scholarly research article, I learned that when it comes to reading psychology articles, it is important to pick one that is very detailed and is able to be fully understood. In my summary, I made sure to include as much detail as I could so the reader could see where I answered the five critical questions. The five critical questions are to be addressed because if they aren’t, there could be confusion on what is going on in the experiment. It is important for the article to be detailed, but not too much detail that it confuses the reader. The scholarly article also used big psychological words that were confusing to me as a reader, so in that case, I made sure to not include them or only include them if they were hard to leave out. I had to leave out some parts of the article that were not important, like the charts of data provided. It would have made my article longer than the page limit. The charts also were hard to understand as a reader, and personally, confused me when I was reading it. I am better at reading the data written out than in numerical values in a chart. The article also included an abstract all about nostalgia, which was helpful but a little unnecessary. I included the definition of nostalgia because I thought that was important for readers to understand, but the extra information in the scholarly article, I left out. I feel as if the scholarly article included a lot of helpful data but a little too much at times and I was lost reading it at times. The pop culture article was straight and to the point, but did not answer the five critical questions, which is essential to the article.

I found a middle point of both articles. I left out some of the extra details of the scholarly article that were not needed, but added to the pop culture article by answering all five questions. We critique journalists for leaving some things out, but after typing this, I can see why they do that sometimes. As learned in class, it is important to be able to understand the experiment to the fullest and be able to answer the five critical questions. I included a small summary of the materials used, procedure, and results of the experiment so the reader had enough detail to understand the article but was not overwhelmed and confused.

“Adverse Weather Evokes Nostalgia.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 14 Mar. 2018, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167218756030.

Haddock, Geoff. “Can Bad Weather Make Us Feel Nostalgic?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 7 Sept. 2018, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/attitude-check/201809/can-bad-weather-make-us-feel-nostalgic-0.

--Original published at Manami PSY105blog

Summary

A journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by the University of Michigan suggests that 5 to 10-year-old children have the same habits of saving/spending money called “tightwads” and “spendthrifts” as well as the adults do. Firstly, they predicted that children’s tendency of consuming can be measured based on their feeling whether they like to spend money or not. In addition, it was expected that children’s skill of decision making to shop can be educated and improved by understanding when and how children have stable consuming reactions.

In the study if children’s consuming behavior, 225 children at age of 5 through 10-year-old were assigned with almost equal number of boys and girls. Children under age 5 were assumed to lack the ability to explain their feelings accurately. One of participants’ parents also took a questionnaire about the spending/saving tendencies of their children.

There were five tasks for each child participant who assigned randomly. The first task called “ST-TW scales” showed a child two toy characters that said things “I feel mostly good when I spend money” and “I feel mostly bad when I spend money” twelve times. The child was told to choose the one that is more like his/her feelings. In addition, the researchers conducted two tasks to measure inhibitory control and financial understanding using their prior understanding of math. In “Sensitive to opportunity costs”, they asked children to pick from two options: did they want to save money for a new toy as the birthday gift or buy a candy? These four tasks were given participants in random order. Final tasks called “Observed money saving/spending behavior” was conducted to observe whether the child spent a given dollar for the bag of toys or take it home or not.

In the results, researchers found only 5-year-old children have tendencies of money-related behaviors based on their feelings as well as adults do. It was also clear that parents spending/saving habits relate to children’s habits according to ST-TW scales. Besides this, 51 percent of children who decided to spend a dollar for their toy bags had high score of ST-TW scale, which shows they are likely to be spendthrifts from their desire. The researchers also indicate that some children spend money without feeling of pain beyond desire what they want in their journal.

In addition, there were several limitations. For example, although first task’s pictures had emotional words such as happy and boring regarding spending habits, they should have focused on impulsive or careless consuming. Moreover, the research cannot be generalized because they have only 200 results whose participants were mostly white due to the location where the research conducted from the limitations in the journal.

In conclusion, people have spending/saving habits since they were only 5-year-olds. The result may help to design the financial education to children by focusing on how emotions influence on their consuming behaviors.

Citations:

Lisa, W. (2018, September 3). A Spendthrift 5-Year-Old? Researchers Say Yes. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-spendthrift-5-year-old-researchers-say-yes- 1536026460?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=9

Craig, E.S. Susan, A. G. Scotto, I. R. (2017, December 28). Spendthrifts and Tightwads in Childhood: Feelings about Spending Predict Children’s Financial Decision Making. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bdm.2071?mod=article_inline

Reflection

In this media production assignment, I focused on five critical questions to choose what is important contents. It was not difficult to figure out whether original research journal tells readers answers of questions accurately thanks to the previous assignment: scholar research critique. I suggested what the study found and how it is measured at first because the result that little kids have similar consuming responses to adults especially their parents have is beneficial to improve financial education. I empathized the associations between “ST-TW scale” and “Observation money spending/saving behavior” because it was the most useful result to support researcher’s prediction as well as the news article, “A Spendthrift 5-Year-Old? Researchers Say Yes,” by Lisa Ward.

I also did not include the detail information of other tasks because they did not have beneficial results and the correlation with the children spending/saving tendencies based on their emotions directly. I added information about participants and limitations of the experiment which news article does not mention by following to some critical questions: how do they selected and assigned participants and are the conclusions generalized to the right populations. It is important to explain why under 5-year-old children were not be assigned and there was no diversity of participants to be generalized. I learned people cannot know what research found in detail sometimes by just reading news articles, although they can catch the brief concept of the research and what was the result. In addition, it was not easy to answer all critical questions clearly and catch attention of readers. It was good to know that even original research journal has a lack of information to answer questions.

--Original published at jennacampanellipsych

Summary

Therapy has been the go-to solution for people with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, but if is as effective as you might think? In media, therapy can be seen as helpful toward people who are struggling, but researchers Ellen Driessen, Steven Hollon, Claudi Bockting, Pim Cuijpers, and Erick Turner looked more into how therapy is reflected in the media vs actual results and the answers were surprising. They studied past trials and found out that the effect of treatments such as therapy were 37% less effective then the media portrayed. Since they were studying past trials only, they cannot confirm that these trials were using the correct methods. Yet they are confirming that there are indications of publication bias in the media regarding therapy’s for effective for depression. All in all, they are saying they believe that therapy is not as effective as media may lead you to believe, but they are not stating these are facts. It is up to you to decide whether you believe it or not.

Reflection

While writing my summary, I found it difficult to put myself in someone’s shoes that has never been exposed to this information. From all the research I have done on this topic, it was tough for me to write about it brand newly for someone who has never researched these studies before. It must be hard for journalists to step out of their own minds and beliefs to write about topics for anyone to read and then make their own assumption unbiasedly.  I chose to include the basic top finding of the scholarly article, because it was what made the most sense to me and was clearest on the answer to my main question. My summary had more data than the pop-culture article, and I tried to not state that these findings were the 100% facts, because the researchers themselves said that these findings were just indicators. I felt that the author of the pop-culture article stated the findings as if they were the truth and you had to start believing that, but it is up to your own interpretation of the results. I learned from the pop-culture article journalists can really twist the information to sound however they want it to. Most likely, the regular person reading Cosmo would read this article and just believe it without extra research. This article just turns out to be true, but if it was false, false information could start spreading around. The journalists from the scholarly article have a hard job, having to go through every detail and explain it. They had to account and describe every mistake they could of made on the findings, and that cannot be easy. For me, the scholarly article was very, very hard to read and understand but I trust that it was well done.

Sources Cited

Narins, Elizabeth. “Therapy Probably Isn’t the Best Way to Treat Depression.”    Cosmopolitan, Cosmopolitan, 5 Oct. 2017, www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/ a47087/the-best-way-to-treat-depression-isnt-therapy/.

Driessen, Ellen, et al. “Does Publication Bias Inflate the Apparent Efficacy of Psychological Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of US National Institutes of Health-Funded Trials.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 30 Sept. 2015, journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0137864.

--Original published at RachelsCollegeBlog

Project

Diffuse intrinsic pontin glioma (DIPG), spreads through and around the brainstem. It is also the leading cause of cancer death for children. The reason it is so deadly is because of the difficulty of getting the needed medicine through the blood brain barrier, while not causing the medicine to go through the entire body causing toxicity in the body. A new technique, however, is being developed. This technique is a focused ultrasound combined with microbubble-mediated intranasal delivery (FUSIN). This technique utilizes nerve pathways in the nose, olfactory and trigeminal nerve, which allows for medicine to pass through the blood brain barrier as it also uses a focused ultrasound to better localize the medicine.

The technique is still in the testing stages as they are experimenting the technique on mice. The mice are distributed into five groups, each testing a different technique, and also looking at the consequences of each. The sample groups are researching the distribution of the solution after the administration of the medicines, comparing the localization abilities of intravenous, which is the techniques being used today which give the medicine through a vein in the arm, and intranasal techniques which is being utilized in FUSIN. They are also looking at the short-term effects of the techniques and how feasible it is to utilize the techniques.

The results of the experiments expressed that FUSIN did a better job with localizing the medicine than either intranasally by itself and intravenously. They also found that when using the technique of intranasally injecting medicine, that there was no vascular or tissue damage. This means that FUSIN did not cause any short-term consequences or safety concerns. They were able to determine the localization ability by measuring the radioactivity of the body using folds. They also injected fluorescence into the brain stem and nasal nerve pathways, this showed the effect that the medicine may have had on the brain and nerve pathways. The researchers measured the intensity of the fluorescence using arbitrary unit.

There are however, some limitations of this study. The study has not looked at the long-term effects of the research as they only have tested for the impacts just one hour after the study was conducted. The parameters that were used when testing FUSIN were from a previous experiment, so they could be a little off. They also have a lack of data evaluating the level of toxicity of the injection of the solutions. They are also, right now, only able to make these conclusions for mice because that is their sample population.

References

Washington University in St. Louis. (2018, September 4). Focused delivery for brain cancers:Imaging, aerosols and pediatric neuro oncology come together to fight tumors. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 25, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180904164645.htm

Dezhuang Ye, Xiaohui Zhang, Yimei Yue, Ramesh Raliya, Pratim Biswas, Sara Taylor,     Yuan-chuan,Tai, Joshua B. Rubin, Yongjian Liu, Hong Chen., (2018). Focused Ultrasound Combined with Microbubble-mediated Intranasal Delivery of Gold Nanoclusters to the Brain. Journal of Controlled Release, 286: 145

Links

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180904164645.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168365918304140

Reflection of Project

It was not very difficult to write my summary, and I did not have to leave out any information because my original article was long. I was able to answer some of the five critical questions, including the how they operationalized their variables, radioactivity and fluorescence. There population was randomly selected because they are mice from a breeder and they are randomly sent from a group of other mice. I also talked about the population generalization. Though, the scholarly article did not talk about random assignment, and there was not enough information because there is a lack of information on the method of assignment to groups.

Some similarities that are occurring between my article and the original article was summarizing the experiment as well as give a small background of the experiment. Both my article and the original article talks about the main reason for the experiment, cure DIPG. My article states, the limitations of the study while the original article did not. The pop culture article only answered one of the five critical questions and that was random selection. In my article, however, I included three of the critical questions. The original article included so quotes from the primary researcher and mine did not.

I learned that through this process that writing about psychology research can be a very difficult task. The pop culture article can depend on the scholarly article, when it comes to the amount of information used. My scholarly article was not written the best as it did not include all five of the critical questions, but it gave specific information. The pop culture article was given at least three of the critical questions, but the writer did not use them. Every piece of writing will include all of the scientific information but doesn’t not describe the experiment. My article was fairly easy to write because of all of the background information and the other two articles. This tells me that every piece of writing has its own difficultly and you may not be able to include all of the needed information.

--Original published at Makayla Hockenbrock

Can posting selfies cause the social media user harm? That is the question researchers set to find out with a study conducted by York University in Toronto, Canada.  Two hypotheses were proposed, one being by updating a personal social media profile with a selfie would cause a lower mood and amplified body concerns compared to a control group.  The second hypothesis was if the user could retouch their selfie, they would have a better mood and better body image compared to the ones who were not allowed to retouch their selfies.

Participants were selected by an online system, which allotted 113 undergraduate psychology students from York University. They had to have a live social media account on Facebook or Instagram, had to be female, and had to be between the ages of 16 and 29 years of age. The experiment session took about an hour. During the experiment, the participants used an iPad camera, an editing app, and the internet to access their social media account. Visual analogue scales were used to measure the mood and body image of the participants before the actual experiment was performed. This was also performed after the experiment, so the numbers could be compared to one another.

After being tested individually behind closed doors, the participants were randomly assigned to an experiment group. The groups consisted of an Untouched Selfie, a Retouched Selfie, and a Control group. In the Untouched Selfie group, the women were asked to use the iPad and take one selfie and post it to their social media platform. This group had five minutes to complete the task. The Retouched Selfie group was asked to take as many selfies as they wanted and were also allowed to use the editing app on the iPad to make any changes they wanted before posting their selfie. They had as much time as they needed to complete the task. The Control group also had an iPad but instead of taking a selfie, they were asked to read an article regarding social media and then answer questions about the article. The Control group was not allowed to get on Facebook or Instagram while on the iPad. Again, this group only had five minutes to complete the task. After everything was completed, the participants finished another scales test and were asked to complete the test based on how they felt at that moment in time. Once everything for the experiment was completed, the women were then debriefed.

The results found the participants who were not allowed to touch up their selfies felt more anxious than the participants who did not post a selfie. The women who could touch up their selfies were found to be more anxious than the ones in the control group and had the same amount of anxiousness as the women in the untouched group. Regarding attractiveness, the women who could retouch their selfies felt less attractive once they posted their selfie online. The women who could touch up their selfies felt more confident in themselves after they posted their selfie compared to the women who could not modify their picture. Those same women did not feel any more confident however, than the women who did not post a selfie at all. This study found changing and editing selfies does not improve the mood or self-image of the person in the picture. There was no evidence found to conclude posting a selfie which has been touched up made women feel better. In contrast, in some cases it made the women feel worse.

These findings are important for the social media users, specifically young women who post selfies. It is important for them to remember that posting a selfie, and seeing who comments, what they comment, and how many likes the selfie gets, does not determine how beautiful and unique that individual woman truly is.

References

“Selfie” harm: Effects on mood and body image in young women. (2018, August 24). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144517305326

The Unexpected Psychological Cost of Sharing Selfies. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beauty-sick/201809/selfie-posting-may-do-more-harm-good

Reflection

When writing this summary based off the original article, it was hard to not say exactly what the article said, as well as, the pop culture article, but still get the main points across. Putting myself in a journalist’s perspective was not easy for me and I now have a new respect for them and what they do every day. I tried to include all the important information from the article, however, it was very difficult to decide what information to leave out. I decided to leave out how the participants were broken down ethnically and their BMI’s because it was difficult for me to understand, so I assumed it would be hard for the public reading my paper to understand. I chose to answer all five of the critical questions whereas the pop culture article I found only addressed three out of the five.

When I critiqued the previous journalistic papers, I looked for the five critical questions and denoted the credibility of the article if all five were not present. I now know that an article can still be credible, even if all five are not discussed. I tried to keep all five questions in mind when writing my entry. Journalist seem to write with an engaging style that keeps the reader interested all the way to the end. I also can now understand why journalist choose to leave some information out and change some wording of the information provided, so that the reader does not think less of themselves because they do not understand what is being discussed.