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Assignment Task
Task
Your major assignment in this unit is a called a research proposal. Actually what you are writing is the introduction to a research report. That’s what the introduction to a journal article is – a proposal for doing the study that is described in the paper. I don’t mean that every research proposal that you might ever write is the same as a journal article introduction, but the one that you will write in this unit is the same. Remember that when you write an introduction you use the future tense? That’s because you’re pretending that the research hasn’t happened yet. It’s a proposal for the study that is reported on starting in the method section.
The purpose of the introduction to a journal article is to:
Say why the area is worthy of investigation
Give reasons (based on the previous literature) for why the study needs to be done (aka a “Literature Review”)
Give reasons for why the study should be conducted in that particular way.
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To help you recognise where in a journal article the information is located, we have prepared a set of guided questions.
In talking to students it became clear that many of you are not fully aware of how authors achieve this in the articles that you read. The purpose of Part 1 of the research proposal is for you to identify where in the journal article the authors make their case for why the study needs to be done and why it needs to be done in that particular way. We’ve also included some questions about IVs and DVs because students we encounter in 4th year still have trouble with IVs and DVs!
This is not easy because sometimes the reasoning for certain elements is not stated explicitly.
Actually, the questions in Part 1 are really hard to answer. This sort of a task can be challenging even for seasoned researchers. I’m not saying that to make you feel scared about the task. I just want you to take is seriously, and treat it as an opportunity to learn. If you look at the marking criteria, you don’t have to give a perfect answer to get full marks. In this video I will walk you through a journal article, showing you where the information is located, and how I would answer the Part 1 questions for that journal article. After watching this video you should try answering the questions for another article, which is provided for you on vUWS. You will have opportunity for feedback on your answers to the questions in the first face-to-face tutorial. The more time you put aside for practising answering the questions on different journal articles, the more prepared you will be to write your own research proposal.
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Then in Part 2 you’ll write your own research proposal you will produce your own research proposal (think “Introduction”). Whereas the papers you read might not make all of these elements explicit, you are going to be asked to make your reasoning explicit for why the study needs to be done, and for the methodological choices that you make (participants, tasks, and stimuli).
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Article
The article that I will be going through with you is FITTING THE MIND TO THE WORLD: Face Adaptation and Attractiveness Aftereffects by Rhodes, Jeffery, our own Tamara Watson, Clifford, and Nakayama. It was published in 2003 in Psychological Science, which is one of the top journals in Psychology. You should read the article before watching the rest of the video if you want to get the most out of this.
There is a word limit for Research Articles in Psychological Science:
Research Article. Most of the articles published in Psychological Science are Research Articles. Research Articles may present new data, new theory, new methods, or any combination of these. They are limited to
2,000 words (includes all introductory and discussion material in the main text, any footnotes, acknowledgments, and appendices; does not include 150-word abstract, Method or Results sections (except footnotes), cover page, Author Contributions, or reference list)
40 references
The first thing I want you to note is that there are 2000 words for the intro AND discussion. The introduction for the paper we’re looking at in this video is around 1000 words, plus 300 or so for the mini-introductions to Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. You have 1250 words for your Part 2. That’s not an unreasonable thing to ask you to do. When you’re reading journal articles, try to take note of how they get across a lot of information using a small number of words. Scientific writing is clear, crisp, and precise. It is usually possible to cut down the number of words you use by looking carefully at the structure and content of your writing.
Having said that, a limit of 2000 words means that they might not have the space, in this format, to justify everything. Some of their reasoning is likely to be implicit. Journal articles will vary in this respect. Experienced researchers know that the implicit reasoning is. Part of the reason for doing this exercise is to help you learn to recognise the implicit reasoning behind the choices that the researchers made.
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1) According to the article, what is the interesting observation or question that motivates the investigation? (In a journal article this is usually found in the first or second paragraph. If it is not stated explicitly, what do you think it is? Give a non-technical explanation, like you were explaining it to a family member who does not study psychology.)
You won’t always find this mentioned explicitly in the journal article that you’re reading, but there is ALWAYS a question or real-world observation that motivates the research. We are doing research in psychology, here, so there must be some aspect about humans that motivates the research. This is a very broad “Why is this interesting” question. It is NOT about theories or prior studies. It is NOT because it will help people. That’s fine if it does, but that is secondary to understanding some mystery about humans that we don’t yet understand. Let me give you an example. If you were proposing a study on memory in people with autism you might be tempted to tell your Grandma that the reason for doing the study is to help people with autism. It might well do that, but basic research is worth doing even if we cannot imagine how it will directly help people in the short term. The reason for doing that study might be based on the observation that some people have autism and some people don’t and we don’t understand how autism develops or how cognition differs between people with and without autism.
GO TO PAPER
The first two paragraphs of the paper are much more focused on research findings than what we’re looking for in the answer to Question 1. The answer to the question, in this article, is actually in the third paragraph. What makes a face attractive? There could be absolute standards of attractiveness, e.g., “symmetry, youthfulness, and sexual dimorphism”. Or, maybe it’s based on your experience with different faces – averageness is attractive. In fact, the first sentence of the abstract summarises it well: “Average faces are attractive, but what is average depends on experience”.
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My answer to Question 1 is:
Why do certain faces look attractive and others look less attractive? Is it because certain facial configurations are intrinsically more appealing or are we constantly recalibrating our perception in response to the range of faces that we see every day?
Notice what’s missing from that statement. There is nothing about multidimensional face space, not even anything about how perceptual adaptation might provide a mechanism. It’s a broad real-world question that has nothing to do with specific theories or prior research.
This is one of the hardest things for students to get their heads around. We’ll provide you with opportunities to practice finding these reasons in other journal articles. You should use those opportunities.
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2) On the basis of the reviewed literature, what reasons do the authors give for why their study needs to be done? (This will usually come towards the end of the introduction. If it is not stated explicitly, what implicit reasoning have the authors provided?)
Now we’re interested in how the general question about the world that you outlined in Question 1 has been investigated in the scientific literature. Here is where you talk about the prior research and the theories.
GO TO PAPER
The answer to this can be found in the remainder of the introduction. It’s fairly straightforward in this paper, but you might have a more difficult time finding it in other papers.
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My answer:
What determines standards of beauty is a topic of debate. Averageness is suggested to be an important determinant, but this also suggests that there must be cognitive or perceptual mechanisms that keep track of what is average and what is extreme. We know that exposure to distorted faces produces an aftereffect such that normal faces look less normal than they did prior to exposure. If averageness is attractive, and people constantly recalibrate what average face is, according to what they see in their environment, then exposure to distorted faces should change the viewer’s judgement of what is average, and therefore what is attractive. It is also interesting to know whether adaptation occurs at a low level (e.g., orientation, spatial frequency, and contrast; Experiment 1), or a high level (size- and position-independent shape/configuration; Experiment 2).
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Justifying the method
I’m going to take a bit of a detour here from answering the questions and talk about the justification of the method. It’s a really important idea that I want you to try to understand.
The place where you justify your method, including any IVs and DVs, is in the introduction to the journal article. That doesn’t mean that every single aspect of the design of the study is reviewed and justified in the introduction. What is means is that if there is a debatable aspect of the design, the introduction is where that will be done – NOT (usually) in the method section.
So, to answer the Part 1 questions you might need to go to sections other than the introduction. But I want you to understand that the purpose of the Introduction is the justify the reason for doing the study AND the reason for doing it in that particular way (i.e., justifying the method).
In this paper, the authors make a case for the method in the final two paragraphs of the introduction, and in the single-paragraph introductions to each experiment. They do this by reviewing the empirical literature. That is, previous experiments. The conclusion of the second-last paragraph is that they should use the aftereffect paradigm to search for similar effects in normality (previous literature) and attractiveness. The last paragraph makes a case for how you would decide whether adaptation is due to low-level or high-level processes. The conclusion of that paragraph is you could use different face orientations for adapting and test faces to test whether high level
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