PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Emotional Contagion, Operational Definition, Field Experiment

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 215
• Professor: Adam Etinson

Document Summary

Professor"s mood being influenced by other people"s facebook profiles and emotional tones; emotional tones influencing your own; day to day interactions. Emotional contagion = the tendency to converge emotionally with another; catch someone else"s emotion; can study with two people or in groups; lots of studies; provides an interesting question. Must see how other people are feeling; measure mood and emotions. Operational definition: definition of a variable in terms of a process used in your research. Researcher gets a number that represents your mood; seems arbitrary to us; self report measure is a decent method of measuring mood. Correlation calculates the degree of relationship between two things; correlation of 1. 00 represents perfect correlation; nothing is actually perfectly correlated; correlation of about 0. 6 represents strong correlation. Days absent from school & grade average will negatively correlate reasonably. Correlation does not equal causation; one of the crititical ideas in research; must understand this.