The Scientific Method in Psychology and Validating New Knowledge

Today we looked at the first part of the research methods specification, linking this to a look-back over the anomalistic psychology topic.

You need to know the 'major features of science, including:

• replicability 
• objectivity 
• theory construction 
• hypothesis testing (falsifiability) 
• the use of empirical methods'

We defined these and wrote an example of 'good...' and 'bad...' from psychology / parapsychology.

We then looked at 'validating new knowledge and the role of peer review'.

Essentially, scientists make each other aware of their theoretical and experimental research through scientific journals. Most of these have a small circulation so are very expensive and are bought by university libraries. Journal articles on research studies typically have the following structure (which you may be tested on in your unit 4 exam):

• Abstract - a summary of the rest of the article, to allow researchers to quickly decide if it is relevant to them.
• Introduction including a literature review - the background to the study, including theories and previous research findings.
• Method - details of participants and how they were sampled, procedures including standardised instructions, materials used (e.g. questionnaires used) and ethical concerns. This should allow a full replication.
• Results - summary graphs and tables (full data usually available on request) and statements of the results of statistical tests.
• Discussion - of what the findings mean, of issues with the research and recommendations for future research.

Most journals operate a system for checking that research meets high standards of methodology (e.g. good control of variables) and has accurate statistical testing through a process called 'peer review'. The editors will select a panel of experts in the relevant research (the 'peers' of the researcher submitting the article) to make this decision.

Make sure you can answer these questions:

1. What does it mean to ‘validate new knowledge’? 
2. How does peer review work? 
3. Give an example of pseudoscientific research where new knowledge is not validated or subject to peer review. 
4. What are the drawbacks of peer review?

Near Death Experiences and Out Of Body Experiences

Around one in five people who are declared clinically dead (because their heart has stopped beating) but who are then revived (resuscitated) report some kind of 'Near Death Experience'. Often this involves the sensation of leaving their body, and these 'Out Of Body Experiences' can occur at other times. NDEs often involve a tunnel with a bright light at the end, a feeling of intense calm, reduced fear of death, increased belief in an afterlife, a 'life review' and meetings with dead loved-ones and religious figures.

Most psychologists explain these as interpretations of hallucinations created by changes in the brain as it is starved of oxygen. Your textbook gives quite a lot of detail on this - you don't need to know this much but a couple of examples would be useful. Believers in an 'immortal soul' - the idea that 'we' continue to exist once our body is dead - point to NDEs and OOBEs, especially when they involve people seeing and hearing things that they otherwise couldn't have - as strong evidence for these beliefs.

Make sure you can describe the case study of Maria's 'tennis shoe' OOBE and the criticism of this as a piece of evidence. Read about this in detail here.

Here is an article in the Daily Mail about a very recent piece of scientific research into NDEs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-89926/Scientists-discover-near-death-evidence.html
These researchers claim that the fact not all the patients who were clinically dead then revived which they studied had NDEs is evidence that the explanation was not physiological, and instead supports the idea of an immortal soul.

You should also be able to describe Ehrsson's research (in your textbook) into artificially induced OOBEs - the point here is that the sense that we are inside our own bodies is actually created by the brain. This research suggests that it isn't that surprising that people can have a vivid experience of leaving their bodies when their brain is undergoing big changes.

Psychic Mediumship

Here is a link to Derren Brown Investigates - The Man Who Talks To The Dead:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-investigates/episode-guide/series-12/episode-2
Well worth a watch, especially for Richard Wiseman's explanation of 'cold reading' - a rational explanation for the impressive feats of mediums.

Make sure you can:
- define mediumship
- explain how 'cold reading' can explain what mediums are capable of
- describe and evaluate controlled research in mediumship - Schwartz (2001)

The presentation is in an earlier post below.

Exceptional Experiences - Psychic Healing

Here is the presentation for the final 'exceptional experiences' section of Anomalistic Psychology.

The specification says:
Research into exceptional experience
-Psychological research into and explanations for psychic healing, near death and out of body experiences, and psychic mediumship
Today we looked at psychic healing, in particular three studies which appear to show evidence of psychic healing working in placebo-controlled (single-blind) trials, but with reason to doubt the findings of each one.

Read more about Sicher and Targ's study here.

Here is more detail on the 'miracle study' into prayer and infertility.

I set this exam question for next Wednesday:
“Discuss what research into exceptional experience has shown us about psychic healing” – 4 + 6 marks

Prepare it for as long as you like, then spend no more than 20 minutes writing it.

Unit 3 Exam Questions, and studies to learn for gender and relationships

Here are all the Unit 3 exam questions for Biological Rhythms & Sleep, Relationships and Gender. I have adjusted the AO1 marks for the older questions (there used to be 9 per section, now there are 8) and have noted where changes to the spec mean that a question wouldn't come up any more, or would be worded differently.

Here is my list of theories and studies for relationships in case you can't track it down - I plan to update this some more, but have added one study since I printed this and gave it to you a while ago. It's an interesting update to the Clark & Hatfield and Buss evidence which questions the claims of evolutionary theories. Alexander and Fisher (2003) had men and women answer surveys about how many sexual partners they had had and how many they wanted (amongst other things). They got typical responses suggesting that men were far keener on casual sex, but then repeated the experiment with participants connected to a fake lie-detector (known as a 'bogus pipeline'). When they thought that their lies would be detected, women and men answered in much the same way! This is a very nice bit of supporting evidence for a criticism we did briefly discuss - the idea that differences between men and women which arise in surveys may be due to differences in social desirability rather than real differences in what they actually do or want to do... Read more on this article or the actual journal article.

Here is my list of theories and studies for gender. Learning these, using active revision techniques like cue cards with key words or questions on one side and details on the other, would be a very good place to focus your revision over the holiday.