PSYC 2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Action Potential, Myelin, Random Assignment

• School: Auburn University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2010
• Professor: Daniels

Document Summary

Correlation coef cient: statistical measure of the relationship between two variables (r: positive and negative indicate the direction of the relationship, number indicates the strength of the relationship. Like other sciences, experimentation is the backbone of psychological research. Many factors in uence our behavior experiments manipulate factors that interest us, while other factors are kept under control. Effects generated by manipulated factors isolate cause and effect relationships. Double-blind procedure: patients and experimenter"s assistants should remain unaware of which patients had the real treatment and which patients had the placebo treatment (usually used in drug therapies) Random assignment: assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by random assignment minimizes pre-existing differences between the two groups (writing about trauma vs. writing about what they did before; did it rise/lower stress levels) Independent variable: factor manipulated by the experimenter; effect of the independent variable is the focus of the study.