--Original published at Jill Distler's Psychology Blog

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” Harriet Tubman. 

But where do our dreams really come from? There is actually a real science behind what goes on behind the scenes of the dreams that we create subconsciously while we are resting, and the physiological answer to this science is found within the Hippocampus of the brain.

The hippocampus is a neural center in the limbic system (neural center (including the amygdala, hypothalamus and hippocampus) located below the central hemisphere; associated with emotions and drives (Page 52 Myers & DeWall).) that helps to process explicit memories for storage. 

According to a group of scientists from Germany and Rhode Island, the process of moving memories to different storage centers during sleep, causes dreams to be produced from the experiences from the day that are being transferred to different storage locations. The hippocampus is essentially emptied every night while we sleep, to make room for more information coming the next day. It is believed that while the brain sorts through a day’s worth of experiences, that the brain is able to “steal” parts of these memories and fabricate them into some of our wildest/craziest dreams. 

Dreaming is also thought to be used as a purging method, since we can’t recall 90% of the dreams that our brains create overnight. This thought was also summarized by the famous Francis Crick, who in 1984 said, “We dream to forget,” in his development of his “garbage disposal theory”. 

Many people wonder what the crazy dreams they are having may mean, but there is no exact answer for why our minds create such specific and elusive visions to entertain us while we are in our most vulnerable state: sleep. Since we really don’t know how these images are created, we at least tried to understand how the brain is able to transfer memories to different areas of the brain. That ended up coming down to studying the electrical signals during sleep cycles, especially those signals being passed around in the structures within the limbic system, but mainly, the hippocampus and the neocortex. The neocortex being a section of the cerebral cortex (The most highly developed part of the brain that is associated with thinking, perceiving, producing, and understanding language.) that usually is known to be focused on sight and hearing, but while sleeping, helps to send memories to long-term storage.

While dreaming can be a confusing concept, they actually help the brain problem solve through endless possible experiences, both good and bad. The brain, while asleep, actually continues to work on its problems that it faced while awake. Creating dreams to allow us to “physically” work through the problems, but we only remember a few each night when we wake up the next day. The remembered dreams being the most extreme and bazaar solutions to these issues.

Although there is not a possible way to fully understand the complexity of the human mind, we can certainly try to find answers, and if we can’t, there is still many other things for scientists to discover along the way.

Sources:

https://www.pnas.org/content/104/12/5169

http://time.com/4921605/dreams-meaning/

--Original published at Phil's College Blog

Love is not easy. However, neither is telling someone that you do not love them anymore. This is a normal issue that many people deal with everyday, and there is something psychological that reveals why it can be problematic. A new study from psychologists from the University of Utah, Wayne State University, and the University or Toronto have found the explanation for this problem.
The issue is that the person who wants to break up is too concerned with how the other person will handle it. This will cause the individual who wants to break up to hold on to the relationship for the other person involved. These universities came to this conclusion by conducting two different studies to display their results to the public. The first study involved around 1400 participants and the second included an extra 500 from the previous 1400. Throughout the study, the participants were monitored by answering questions about their relationships. Then the participants were checked on over 10 weeks to see if they stayed with their partner. The second study was almost exactly the same however, it was used to see how many people thought of ending their relationship over the same time span. This allowed the researchers to have an in-depth look at both sides of the spectrum.
In both studies, the people that wanted the best for their ex-partner stayed longer than those who did not think about their ex-partner’s feelings. Furthermore, if the partner could see how much the other was putting into their relationship, they were inclined to stay in it longer because of the feelings for the other person.
In the end, people do break off relationships for different reasons, but it is true that partners do care about how their partner would feel if they left them. So next time you think your friend should break up with their partner, maybe you should give them time because maybe the process is already happening.

I found this article easy to summarize because it was about a topic I could understand because I had this happen to me. I was able to summarize the article easily because it did not have science specific definitions that would be hard to explain to the general public. However, I do feel that it was hard to fit in the reasons the scholarly article provides for why people could feel the way they did in the surveys and questions they answered. The answers such as the Prosocial Decision Making theory and Interdependence Theory could have been key bits of information that could have provided the reader with reasons why the participants felt the way they did. I believe that not having the space to put that type of information in hinders the piece’s affect. The reader was not able to see the complete side of the participants decision to break off their relationships because the reader could only see the results and not the explanation for them.

Furthermore, I decided to omit the same information as the original author as well because I would not have been able to conclude the article due to the space I was provided. The information that was left in my summary was just enough to get my point across. hat is all I wanted to put in my article because lay people do not want a long explanation with results, charts, and long definitions because that bores the reader. That is why I kept the information I did because it carried the story and kept the reader interested by not bogging them down with information that is not necessary.

Finally, my perspective on journalists have changed for the better because of this series. I never understood how hard it would be to keep an audience engaged and wanting to read without boring them with the unnecessary information. I never thought of how hard it would be to create a story with so much detail in the background but summarize the information into an article that makes sense in a defined length. Without doing this series, I never would have understood the editing of information required in order to release results to the public in a manner the public wants, while still keeping the integrity of the information by keeping the entire article credible with the information presented.

Links:
https://hellogiggles.com/news/why-people-stay-unhappy-relationships-study/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000139

--Original published at Bogo's Blog

            Doctor Elliot Ludvig from Warwick’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues at Princeton and Brown Universities, came up with an experiment that displays that forming good, or bad, habits depends on how often an action is performed rather than how much satisfaction the action ensues. The researchers created a computer simulation, where digital rodents were given a choice of two levers, one of which was associated with the chance of getting a reward. The lever with the reward was labelled the ‘correct’ lever, and the lever without the reward was labelled the ‘wrong’ lever. The reward was swapped between the two levers, and the simulated rodents were then trained to pick the ‘correct’ lever. Doctor Elliot Ludvig, Associate Professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s authors, commented, “Much of what we do is driven by habits, yet how habits are learned and formed is still somewhat mysterious. Our work sheds new light on this question by building a mathematical model of how simple repetition can lead to the types of habits we see in people and other creatures. “

            When the digital rodents were trained for a short period of time, they managed to pick the new, ‘correct’ lever when the lever with the reward changed. However, when they were trained extensively on just one lever, the digital rats stuck with the ‘wrong’ lever stubbornly, even when it had no chance of giving them a reward. Rather than having a chance of getting rewarded, the rodents stuck with the lever they were trained on. Dr Amitai Shenhav, Assistant Professor in Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences and one of the paper’s authors, commented, “Psychologists have been trying to understand what drives our habits for over a century, and one of the recurring questions is how much habits are a product of what we want versus what we do. Our model helps to answer that by suggesting that habits themselves are a product of our previous actions, but in certain situations those habits can be supplanted by our desire to get the best outcome.” This model could potentially be a small step towards understanding human habits more concisely.

Reflection

            When I was writing the summary for the article, I did not really think too much about the five questions because I felt like a summary should stay true to its source. Changing the summary so it fits all five categories would be changing the story and, hence skewing the truth. I did have some difficulty in keeping the summary concise enough to fit the length of the article. The most difficulty was deciding which details to cut out and which to keep, while keeping the reader in mind. I did not want to have the length required but end up writing a confusing summary. To make sure the limited number of words were enough, I used quotes from the people who ran the experiments. My summary was aimed at the general public, so I tried my best to keep it to basic terms to avoid confusion. The main mission was to make sure that the summary was understandable by everyone and easily interpreted, so anyone could pick it up and know what is going on.

            Doing this has given me some appreciation for journalists because it is very difficult to make a summary on an experiment and keep it interesting. If I had to pick between my summary and the article, I think it would be the article because going over both, mine is missing something. The article seems to appeal more to me, possibly because it was written by someone with more experience. The article also had an interesting title that made you want to read it more, granted the title was clickbait and overstated the extent of the experiment I still find it effective.

Citation:

University of Warwick. “Train the brain to form good habits through repetition.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 January 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190128105227.htm>.

--Original published at Jessica K's College Blog

As far as anyone knows, sleep is a very important aspect of life. While it helps people feel refreshed and energized in the morning, it also helps repair the body and sort out old and new memories for the next day. However, there are different stressors in life that may disrupt a person’s good night sleep, leading to a stressful night and stressful morning.

A study performed by the University of Surrey tests a group of lab mice for the connection between lasting stress and the subsequent change of sleep cycles. In a nine-week period, the mice were introduced to the scent of a predator on random intervals, increasing stress measuring the changes in rapid-eye movement sleep (REM) and non-REM sleep (nREM). During that time, mice exposed to the stressor decrease social activity with other mice, and increase in depressive behavior.

As for sleep cycles, mild stress increases REM activity in the mices’ brain, while nREM stays the same. With the increase in REM sleep, which is in between wakefulness and sleep, generally prevents the body to repair itself and reduce stress in of itself, leading to less energy in the morning.

With the information made, the increase of mild stressors in life may lead to a stressful waking experience, and if the effect continues, may cause symptoms of antisocial behavior and depression.

So while people encounter their own forms of stress on a near-daily basis, too much stress can be just as detrimental as any tragedy, big or small.

For more information on the topic, visit the summarized study below.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190128101104.htm

--Original published at WilliamsCollegeBlog

One of the big topics surrounding the generations today is the attention span of everyone in daily lives. A large issue comes with children diagnosed with the attention problem Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which affect about 1 in every 20 children. It is scary how easily our attention can flip from one serious matter to the latest email popping up on the screen. Cell phones and any other mobile device has become part of a person’s life and will not go anywhere without it. This idea of having multiple screens in front of a person became a study too good not to dive deeper into. A group of researchers from Cambridge University, led by Barbara Sahakian, decided to look into how we could use mobile devices to enhance one’s attention span and keep them on task.

The main method for looking at such a study was designing an application where players would have to remember certain patterns or look for sequences in a list of numbers. The game, Decoder, was invented by the research team and requires concentration in order to complete a level. As people grow, the part of the brain responsible for concentration and attention is meant to grow and help people be adults. Decoder is supposed to help sustain such attention and allow for motivation amongst players.

For the researchers to get accurate results, they went out and setup an experiment. Seventy-five young adults were recruited from the local Cambridge area based on what the researchers defined as healthy and young. They were considered healthy based on psychiatric and ADHD tests. The experiment was carried out by randomly assigning the participants to three different groups, allowing twenty-five people per group. One group was given the task of playing the Decoder game, another to play the game Bingo, and the last group played no game at all and carried their lives out normally. The last group was considered the control group and was used as a baseline for the results of the other two groups. Bingo was used because of its similar stimulus but does not give the same training for attention. The perimeters for the two groups playing a game was allotted to eight 1-hour sessions of gameplay over a 4-week span.

After each session of gameplay those two groups were asked to rate their experiences based on four levels of criteria. Those being alertness, enjoyment, motivation, and positive mood. At the end of the 4 weeks, all seventy-five participants were given a test to measure the outcomes. Over the eight sessions there was a significant difference between the Decoder and Bingo group in terms of all four groups. Two other tests, the CANTAB Rapid Visual Information Processing Test (RVP) and Trail Making Test (TMT), were given to assess sustained attention by completing a task requiring a certain level of awareness and concentration. The RVP test tested a participant’s ability to react to a certain sequence while the TMT looked at the response time and completion of test.

The experiment came out as a success, with the results concluding the original thought. While playing the game Decoder, attention and concentration showed improvement in comparison to the other two groups. The experiment used participants considered to be healthy, but now there is possibilities to achieve improvement for children and adults that suffer from ADHD. People who already have poor attention abilities and get easily distracted have shown improvement when using the game Decoder.

The future for these studies is endless. The success of the first experiment showed good improvement and the research behind ADHD patients shows promising results. People who suffer from concussions and traumatic brain injuries are also able to benefit from games like Decoder because they have impaired sustained attention. The cognitive training is huge and will be able to allow large advancements in this field.

Reflection:

One of the biggest challenges I found while writing this article was keeping the information concise and not adding too much detail to a subject when details were not necessary. Most of research article brought up terminology from neuroscience and the normal reader would not understand. Keeping this in mind, determining what I needed in the article itself was not difficult. I believe that the original article did a good job describing the experiment without using all the terminology and it helped keep me in line when writing. While writing, I knew I had to keep the 5 critical questions in the back of my mind and consider what the original did. The purpose is to make the paper make sense to whoever is reading, eve though would not be looking to make sure those questions are included.

In the original article, not all the 5 critical questions were addressed, and it made for a little bit of confusion on my part. The one they missed was talking about how they operationalized their variable. I would believe that is one of the most important questions to answer in the beginning. As I was referencing the original, I made sure to include the important details that they forgot to include. Writers are known for adding a bunch of extra words to make themselves sound better and it was obvious. There was a lot of generalization and assumptions about the research that should not happened. After reading the research, I made sure to make those distinct differences. Since the original article used many of the critical questions, it was rather simple finding a way to incorporate the same ones into my article. Questions involving the selection of participants and how they were assigned were straight forward and clear questions to answer in the article. The use of causal claims is important since it secures a sense of validity for the research itself. Keeping all those questions in the back of my mind, made for an easy time writing this article.

After finishing this project, there was a lot to learn about journalism. A main takeaway for me was how generalizing is a large part of making an article sound well written. Obviously not all readers are going to be as skilled as noticing when a piece of information is missing so generalizing is the key for most writers. Once we got the scholarly article that the pop culture article was written from, the level of writing had gone down. It is once again a key factor of generalizing. Journalism is great for creating a new story based on original concepts. Audiences do not want to read about statistics relating to a study; rather they want to hear the story behind it and why they should be reading anyways. If the audience is captivated by the information, writers know it is a good piece of work.

Citations

Avramova, Nina. “This brain training app may help you stay focused.” CNN. Cable News Network, 21 Jan. 2019. Web. Accessed on 28 Jan. 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/health/brain-training-app-focus-attention-study-intl/index.html

Savulich, George, et al. “Improvements in Attention Following Cognitive Training With the   Novel ‘Decoder’ Game on an iPad.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 13, no.   2, doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00002. file:///C:/Users/wscho/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/For%20Will%20S%20(3).pdf

--Original published at Ariana's Blog

Is using Facebook affecting how you see yourself? The short answer is yes. Many people today have a Facebook account and spend countless hours scrolling through their feed. Young teens and even adults now post many selfies either as a profile picture or just as a post. This raises the question if it affects how people view their body or face. To answer this question, we turn to the results of a recent study on this issue. 

Researchers Jasmine Fardouly, Phillippa Diedrichs, and Emma Halliwell hypothesized that Facebook increases body dissatisfaction, negative mood, and weight discrepancy. In their study they tested 2 different impacts—increased negative mood and body dissatisfaction. There had been correlational studies that found Facebook did increase body concerns; however, the researchers wanted to conduct their own experimental study. 112 voluntary participants were selected based on the criteria that they were female between seventeen and twenty-five years old. The researchers believed that this was an appropriate sample because they were testing the effect of Facebook on only women. They all completed a pre-exposure state measure of mood and body dissatisfaction. The participants were randomly assigned to 3 different groups. They either scrolled through Facebook, a fashion magazine website, or an appearance neutral website. All websites were checked to make sure each was equal in appeal and comparison opportunity.

Each participant was told to browse the feed of the assigned website for ten minutes a day for a week. After the week, the women were asked to rate their mood on a scale of 1-100 and to rate how different they would like their appearance to be on a scale of 1-5; one being a little different and five being extremely different. Responses were categorized into 3 groups: weight, body, or facial discrepancies. 

The results were unexpected. Women who browsed Facebook for a short time reported being in a more negative mood and had increased facial dissatisfaction. It turns out that women compare their facial features instead of body features. This could be due to the type of posts that are uploaded—up-close selfies! There needs to be further experimental research on this issue to determine whether Facebook is the cause of facial and body dissatisfaction as well as mood. 

Through this experiment the researchers hope to encourage women to follow positive, inspirational accounts to decrease body image concerns. They want to bring attention to the impact that Facebook may have on a person’s view of themselves. 

Reflection:

This project has made me realize that not everything we see on the news or in articles is accurate and further reading should be done in order to find the truth. To make sure that my readers knew the importance of the study, I explained the issue and gave a bit of background information on previous correlational studies. In this article, I chose to include important information so that the audience was able to answer each of the five critical questions. This is significant because it makes the article credible and reliable. I also chose to state that additional research is required to verify the article’s findings so that the audience is aware that there may be errors in the study. I chose to leave out information that I didn’t believe was necessary and was too scientifically based, such as the scientific terms for the specific scales used to operationalize their variables, so that the article was easy to read and understand.

The original article had a bit of important information that was also put in my article; however, it left out some critical information that it should have contained. The summary I wrote is more fact based and portrays the relevant points of the research instead of giving facts about Facebook to appeal to the audience. I recognize that the data may have made my summary less compelling to read, but I felt it was critical information that needed to be included. The original article failed to present the information needed to answer any of the five critical questions, such as how they selected participants and how they operationalized their variables etc., so I made sure to clearly state the information needed in my summary.

I understand that journalists writing pop culture articles have word limits, but I also noticed that they use that space to appeal to the audience instead of giving the facts that would make their article credible and important. It is important for journalists to answer the five critical questions of the scientific study, so the audience can determine its reliability. I also learned that being a journalist of a psychological study comes with the responsibility of interpreting the research so that the audience is able to understand the outcomes. It is difficult to write an article that appeals to a large group of people while simultaneously containing enough factual evidence, especially with the regulations placed upon journalists.

--Original published at AlexisPattersonBlog

When you get ready to go out to eat with someone, the first thing that pops into your head is the first impression you want to make on that person. You don’t want someone to judge you, or think that you talk too much, eat too fast, etc. Yet if you have a diet restriction, does that change the atmosphere? Would you feel more pressured if you were the one with the restriction? Lots of people would say they feel a certain way when having to present themselves as different in today’s society, especially when meeting someone new. This is even more stressful when people are going to eat with someone they just met for the first time. This pressure is best explained as consumption stereotypes. For example, this is where someone will judge someone else based off what they order or eat, depending on how picky they are, etc. A study was conducted by psychology students from Western Connecticut State University and University of Toledo who also wondered this. These students came together to present the question of whether people that a dietary restriction have such as gluten, would face conflict when it comes to dating or choosing a dating partner.

To conduct the study, students hung up flyers and sent out emails with incentives to obtain the test objectives. These students wanted the test to be random, to show the effects it could have on anyone, not one targeted group.  There were two rounds of this study done, both producing the same results. The first study was a series of open-ended questions about gluten free individuals and their thoughts about dating someone who would have a gluten free diet restriction. This study showed both positive and negative results. A part of the research showed that if you’re gluten-free, you’re more likely to be following a healthy diet, but unfortunately also to be picky, high-maintenance, difficult to please, demanding, concerned about your appearance, and entitled. Gluten-free individuals were perceived as complaining, critical and judgmental, and controlling and dominant

Think about this; if a boy and girl both had a dietary restriction, who do you think would be more likely to be a picky partner? Would this change your mind on your feelings towards them?  The second study was conducted to simulate it as if it was realistic dating. Students were then given certain scenarios, as if they were looking at a profile of someone with a dietary restriction. The reactions to those profiles were recorded and analyzed. Just like the first study, they were asked to reflect on the profile based off a list of traits to describe them. Regarding gender perceptions, gluten-free individuals were more feminine and less masculine than others (Whitbourne 2019). The results led to show that there is a balance between if people do think one would be considered picky or not, leaving room for further research.

Reflection

When writing my own scholarly article, determining what to include was one of the easier things to do. You wanted to include information that allowed the reader to understand what was going on in the study, so the more information the better off they are of being able to understand. Yet determining what was relevant was also crucial as you do not want to add information that is not needed. Starting the article was one of my struggles when writing as you want to hook the reader and give them more of a reason to want to read more. Another struggle was trying not to be repetitive from the first article. It is hard when you already have a summarized article that was published and already looked over. Everyone is human, so out of habit they will want to look at that one to help guide for this one. You want to find a balance of information that is relevant but concise.

When reading the research, I used the five questions as a base line for what should be included in my article. You want all aspects to be answered for the study to be reliable and easy to understand. Some similarities with my summary and the article are that they both started off situational, where the reader was put into a situation and asked their opinion on the information provided. Yet the pop culture article is more like a story and my article focuses more on questioning your own personal opinions. One difference I found present between the two articles that helped me when writing my summary was the lack of explanation of the effect of gender roles on the outcome of the study. It mentions gender roles in a sentence or two towards the end of the article, yet it is only mentioned briefly, assuming the reader would already know.

When writing each of the different pieces, I was able to observe the level of detail that goes into each. For a pop culture, you want to appeal more to an audience, stating factual information but keeping the tone of the writing easier to understand. The scholarly article is more study- based. It goes more into depth about the study, how it was performed, and the data that was obtained by it. The scholarly article reflected to be more of a scientific paper rather than an article to put in the media. The media production is similar to the pop culture as it is more summary based and not as detailed as the study. For example, the article was broad in the sense that it did not show statistical data that could support the findings. In the study, the open-ended response questions were analyzed, and percentages were given to explain the most common answers that were given.

sources

Aloni, Maya, Geers Andrew L., Coleman Mykelle, Milano Karissa. “Too picky for my taste? The effect of the gluten-free dietary restriction on impressions of romantic partners.” Appetite. Elsevier, 15 September 2018.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201901/is-picky-eater-also-picky-partner

https://www.elsevier.com/locate/appet

--Original published at Alex's Thoughts

In the recent tumult of national politics and partisan ideologies gaining traction in the United States, one must ask the question, why do people not bother to look at the other side’s viewpoints? Are they simply intellectually lazy, or do they attempt to rationalize their own partisan beliefs, even at the cost of the unabashed truth? Political scholars have been debating which one makes more sense in the context of modern society, especially after the 2016 election cycle. According to a recent study conducted by psychologists Dr. Gordon Pennycook and David Rand, the first theory is the most likely one.

The study in question relied on a convenience sample of Mechanical Turk workers. They were given a well-respected psychology test to determine political affiliation while avoiding the personal bias of the researchers. After being given the test, they were assigned tabloid and actual news headlines and asked to determine which ones were true and which ones were false. Generally speaking, neither side of the political spectrum was better or worse than the other at detecting false headlines. People who were more inclined towards critical thinking were more likely to detect false headlines, instead of attempting to rationalize them like the second theory would claim. This was true whether or not the headlines aligned with their own political views. After controlling for factors like level of education and political leaning, this was still found to be the case. Overall, the results of this study seem to coincide with the idea that people will not attempt to rationalize fake news for their own sense of entitlement, they simply do not care to research the topic in question.

While this study is merely a small sample and demographic relative to the United States population, it would seem to indicate that the question is still worth being researched. Increased samples with the same test administered would most likely corroborate with the findings of this study, adding more evidence to the idea that people will not rationalize false headlines, especially if they are adept at critical thinking.

This study and the topic as a whole are meant to address the question, what can be done about the proliferation of fake news? If the results of this study are found to be repeated a repeated pattern in further studies with much better samples and more diverse sampling options, then the answer would seem to be quite simple. Think before speaking, as thinking about the implications of the news versus the reality of the situation will give one a much better sense of what is occurring in the world. The American people do not need to be reminded about the partisanship in the nation, they need to be reminded about the innumerable benefits of being an informed, alert, and vocal citizen of the United States of America. Questioning news sources, reading literature and informing oneself about current events, and simply maintaining an open mind to the viewpoints of others would go a long way towards resolving both the ills of the media and the nation as a whole.

Original Article:

Bibliography

Pennycook, Gordon and David Rand. “Why Do People Fall for Fake News?” 19 January 2019. The New York Times. Website. 13 February 2019.

Original Research Article:
file:///C:/Users/koont/Downloads/For%20Alex%20K.pdf

Reflection:

I learned a lot about how the media chooses to portray psychological research in order to sell a particular viewpoint to the public in the hopes that “new research” buzzwords will cause them to immediately and unquestioningly believe whatever is espoused in the article. I understand that it is done to garner interest in the publication and ultimately sell ads, but the sensationalism that is originally innocent could prove poisonous if proper research is not cited to back up the claims of the article. For example, the original article goes into great depth about how the original variables in the study were operationalized, but skimmed over how their participants were selected and grouped. If they mentioned this up front, it would have confounded any conclusions they were trying to draw with the data, as the participants were not randomly selected or grouped at all. Additionally, they attempted to generalize the findings to the American population. However, the convenience sample of Mechanical Turk workers do not come anywhere close to allowing the results to be generalized to the population of the United States. To be fair, the authors of the original article attempt to assert that they have other studies in the works that corroborate the results further, but the studies have not been published or peer-reviewed as of yet. As such, I attempted to remedy the ills of the original authors in my reinterpretation.

I was up front about the sampling methods and stated that it was a convenience sample of Mechanical Turk workers. I praised the method of operationalizing variables, and went into detail about how the test was conducted. I later stated that while the sample and demographic were small when compared with the population of the United States, the question was still worth looking into. Larger samples with more diverse sampling options would do much to bolster the assertions of the original article and the findings of the researchers.

Overall, the quality of the assertions of the original article were quite poor, as no deductions can be drawn from data that is derived from such a lacking sample. The way I finished my article was all based under the assumption that if further studies with better sampling methods were conducted and found to have the same results as the one conducted by the authors, then perhaps something can be done about the widespread proliferation of fake news. Until then, nothing has been distinctly proven or disproven about the topic, and the American people will have to draw their own conclusions as thinking citizens.

--Original published at Zach Nawrocki's Blog

The age of technology has been taking over humans lives for decades now. One such branch of technology is photography. Have you ever gone on vacation and find an amazing view or monument and the first thing you do is take out a phone or camera and take a picture of it? An interesting new study in the journal, Psychological Science, suggests that taking a photo of an object may actually reduce how much you remember about the object later. Linda Henkel, author of the study and researcher in the Department of Psychology at Fairfield University states, “Taking a photograph is as easy as pointing and shooting, providing an external memory of one’s experiences.”

The first experiment in the study was comprised of a group of 27 undergraduates (6 men and 21 women) who were taken to a museum to observe objects. They were randomly split into two groups, with one set of students asked to read the name of an object, observe it for 20 seconds and then they were to take a picture of it. The second set of students was asked to read the name of the object and then to only observe it for 30 seconds.

 The next day the students where asked what they remembered from the previous day about the objects by participating in a free-recall test.  This test is a name-recognition test which consisted of the 30 objects including 10 names that were randomly intermixed among the objects and also a visual-recognition test with 10 pictures of objects that were not on the tour. From these tests the students were asked to recognize which objects where on the tour and other details about the objects, such as, “What did the warrior have in his hands?”. From the data it was found the recognition accuracy was lower for photographed objects than for observed objects and was higher when participants saw photos of the objects in the visual-recognition test.

               The second experiment conducted in the study was fairly similar to the first one with a few minor additions to make the experiment more accurate. In this experiment, a group of 46 undergraduates (10 men, 36 women) were taken to the museum and asked to observe 27 objects. This time however, they were given 25 seconds to observe the object, then an additional 5 seconds to either take a picture of the whole object or were asked to zoom in on a specific part of the object. They were also asked to only observe some objects without taking a picture of the object. Out of the 27 objects, each participate was asked to take a picture of a whole object 9 times, take a picture of a specific part of an object 9 times and to only observe an object 9 times for a total of 27 objects.

The next day the participates were asked to remember the various pieces of art (the 27 old objects and 10 objects randomly intermixed which were not on the tour). They were also asked to indicate whether they had taken a photo of the object or just observed the object. The participates were asked to rate their confidence about the details that they remembered from the objects that were observed. This experiment had some interesting results however. From the data obtained it shows that participants remembered fewer details about the objects when photos of the whole object were taken, however, participants remembered a similar amount of detail about objects when zoomed in on it compared to objects that were just observed with no photo taken. This data shows that if a person zooms in on an object, they not only remember more detail about the zoomed in part but also the object as a whole since a person has to focus more when zooming in on a picture.

This study shows several interesting facts that were concluded from the data. There is more to either taking a picture or not taking a picture that can affect your memory about an object. Thousands of photos are taken each day and many different factors go into photos including different angles, zooming in and how long you have to take a photo. All these factors can have an impact on how well a person will remember the object in the future. While this study seems professionally done it does not explain how the participants were selected so it cannot be generalized to a population. Nevertheless, remember when taking your next photo to always take another look at the view after you take a picture!

Reflection:

               Throughout the process I started to realize how difficult it can actually be to summarize a study with a limited about of space. Most studies (including mine) are pages long talking about how the study was performed and the results from the study. It proved difficult to pick out only the important information that can be used to explain the whole study with limited space. One item that I did leave out was the p-values that were obtained from the study. I decided to leave this out because since this is for the general population I feel as though it is not common knowledge to know what a p-value is or what they are used to show. I was still able to explain the results from the study however without the use of the p-values. Another piece that I left out except for a small part were the five critical questions of research. I decided to leave this out because the five critical questions are not common knowledge to know and some of the questions use words that not everyone might know what they mean. Nevertheless, I did include one critical question which was that since the study did not explain how they selected their participants it cannot be generalized to the population. When comparing my summary to the original news article there are several similarities and differences. Both my summary and the news article describe how the study was performed and how the data from the study was obtained and what the data meant. There are some differences as well. In my summary I go more into the detail of what tests were performed on the participants to obtain the concluding data. I also go into more detail about what that data means and the conclusions they got from the data. The news article never mentions anything about the five critical questions. Knowing that it can be difficult to include the questions into the summary, in my summary I still mentioned the one question which was that the study was not able to be generalized. Overall, while writing this summary I had to remember that it is for a general population to read which made my job of selecting what information to include and what not to include harder since some information that is used in the study is not common knowledge for most people.

While writing this summary I came to realize that we shouldn’t be so harsh on journalists because it is very difficult to include all the data that you want to include to make an article. A lot of information must be left out if you are to make the article understandable for the general public. I also realized that it is very difficult to make an article “attention grabbing”, when you read an article, journalist find ways to make even the most boring topic interesting. I find this very difficult to do being that you are talking about a study which a lot of people don’t want to read about. After writing my news article I have come to find a new appreciation for journalists and the struggles they have to go through to write an article for the public to be able to understand and find interesting.  

Links:

Original News Article – https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/health/memory-photos-psychology/index.html

Scholarly Article – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797613504438

--Original published at Emily's college blog

Many Americans believe their pets play a significant role by being part of their family, but perhaps large numbers of people do not realize their pets can also play a role in positively affecting their sleep quality and sleep routines. Researchers from the Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation at Canisius College conducted a survey to explore the impacts pets have on human sleep quality. They restricted their online survey to female participants who resided in the United States and sent the survey to previous participants who had volunteered for their other experiments while also posting the survey on their Facebook page.

The researchers collected data from 962 adult women who were living in the United States and found 55% of participants shared their bed with at least one dog, while 31% of participants shared their bed with at least one cat, and 57% of participants shared their bed with a human partner.

Through the survey questions, the researchers were able to measure the sleep components tied to sleep quality deficits, the components that show signs of sleep deprivation. If the participant’s score exceeded five of the twenty-one components, an indication of sleep quality deficits was noted. Measurements of the average wake times and bedtimes, as well as the levels of comfort, security, and disturbance from pets were also noted.

In the results, the researchers found women who shared their bed with dogs had fewer sleep disturbances, as well as stronger feelings of comfort throughout the night than women who did not share their bed with their dog. It was also found that having a dog bed partner strengthens circadian rhythms, the 24-hour sleep-wake cycle which influences important bodily functions. The researchers explained that this could be due to dogs getting up and going to bed at roughly the same time every day.

Although dogs were found to have positive effects on pet owners who allowed them to sleep in their bed, there was no correlation between cats and a good night’s sleep or stronger circadian rhythms. In fact, cats actually had negative results for being equivalent or even more disturbing than human partners during the night. Cats also do not go to bed or wake up at the same time each day, thus they have no effect on their owner’s circadian rhythms.

A few cautions should be warned when discussing the results of this survey. First, 58% of the people who participated in the survey resided in the state of New York (where the researchers had conducted the survey). Since over half of their participants resided where the researchers were doing their research, the experiment could potentially be seen as biased to outsiders, since the results are supposed to represent all the women in the United States. Secondly, the researchers for this survey announced that more research is needed in order to show a stronger relationship between the sleep quality of pet owners and their dogs.  Lastly, the researchers did not take into account the breeds of dogs that could be more likely to cause a better night’s sleep than another type of breed. For example, one breed could be known for snoring, kicking legs in their sleep, barking at noises in the middle of the night, etc.

Overall, this survey suggested an improved quality of sleep and comfort for women who shared their beds with their dogs, however, their findings did not support a strong enough relationship between dogs and sleep quality, so therefore more research is needed to better support the findings.

Reflection

In my summary, I made sure to include information that would be important for answering all five critical questions for reading research. I wanted to make the research summary straightforward and easy to comprehend. This way, a non-psychologist would be able to understand the results and findings that were discussed. I did not include any p-values or the specific types of studies and methods that would be needed in order to find a stronger relationship between pets and sleep quality of humans. I did not want the reader to be confused by p-values or the numbers they represent. I also did not want to go into too much detail about what the future studies and methods would entail since it would be off topic from the summary findings.

 The news article and my summary both discussed the percentages of participants in each group, the results from pet owners who slept with dogs versus those who slept with cats, the caution of not knowing which breeds would be a better sleep partner, and who conducted the survey. The news article, however, did not include information describing the selection of participants for the study, information describing the weak relationships in the results, or information describing the 58% of participants who resided where the research took place. They also excluded how the researchers measured the sleep and comfort quality of participants. I chose to include the information that was not in the pop culture article because I think excluding those points would establish assumptions and leave some unanswered questions about the research. Specifically, the information including how the researchers measured the women’s sleep quality, how they chose the participants, and how they assigned the participants into groups allows the reader to answer the five critical questions. From knowing those details of the experiment, the reader will know the participants were not randomly assigned to the experiment and were not randomly assigned into groups.

Writing about psychology research through these three assignments, has taught me that authors have the power to influence reader conclusions by choosing to exclude relevant information. By leaving out important information or being purposely biased towards an experiment, an author is able to potentially persuade a reader to his or her point of view. Also, in order to generate more readers, an author could also exaggerate the findings from an experiment or make generalized statements. I also learned about the difficulties associated with writing pop culture news articles. If a study is complex and requires some background knowledge in the field, it can be challenging for the author to write a short, engaging article for the reader to understand. Lastly, I learned to look for the critical questions in news articles discussing research experiments. If the article is missing adequate information to answer the questions, perhaps it is not a reliable source. Writing my own pop culture article demonstrated the power authors have in order to persuade viewpoints and generate readers, while also showing me the hard work in selecting information for the article as well as being aware of information a common reader will not understand.

Citations

Coren, Stanley. “Do Women Get Better Sleep Next to a Person or a Dog?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 24 Jan. 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201901/do-women-get-better-sleep-next-person-or-dog, 27 January 2019.

Hoffman, Christy L., Stutz, Kaylee, and Vasilopoulos, Terri. “An Examination of Adult Women’s Sleep Quality and Sleep Routines in Relation to Pet Ownership and Bedsharing.” Anthrozoös, Routledge, 13 November 2018, DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2018.1529354, 15 March 2019.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201901/do-women-get-better-sleep-next-person-or-dog

https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2018.1529354