Measuring Psychological “Knowledge” by Means of Instructors' Test Manuals

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Furnham ◽  
Charlotte Thompson ◽  
Bahman Baluch

American social psychology textbooks often provide instructors' manuals that include Multiple Choice Quizzes (MCQ's) used by researchers examining the extent to which “lay people” could predict the outcomes of psychological research and theories. This study examined the extent to which students could choose a correct answer from social psychology instructors' manuals without having attended a related course. Three different manuals were used to look at tests of 57, 46, and 36 items, chosen to avoid technical jargon, real names, and experimental details, as well as to cover the broad range of social psychology. Subjects in Study 1 (n = 98 life sciences students) and Study 3 (n = 100 new students) got over 50% of the answers correct (53% and 52%, respectively), while in Study 2 (n = 139 student applicants) they got 48% correct. Scores were unrelated to gender and age, and there was no clear relationship between knowledge and particular areas of social psychology (i.e., social influone, prosocial behavior, attitude change). In the first study, prior knowledge of psychology did not relate to total score, while in the second sample, students who attended lectures did score higher than those who did not. In the third study, subjects who reported reading books, or who had how on social psychology courses, did score marginally higher. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Author(s):  
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the most promising contributions of psychological methods and insights for private law. It focuses on two related domains of psychological research: cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes, which one might shorthand as “thinking.” Social psychology asks about the role of other people—actual, implied, or imagined—on mental states and human behavior. The chapter is oriented around five core psychological insights: calculation, motivation, emotion, social influence, and moral values. Legal scholarship by turns tries to explain legal decision-making, tries to calibrate incentives, and tries to justify its values and its means. Psychology speaks to these descriptive, prescriptive, and normative models of decision-making. The chapter then argues that psychological analysis of legal decision-making challenges the work that the idea of choice and preference is doing in private law, especially in the wake of the law and economics movement.


1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Searing ◽  
Gerald Wright ◽  
George Rabinowitz

The ‘primacy principle’ comprises three assumptions about political orientations. The first is that they are learned during childhood. The second is that this childhood learning further shapes any subsequent modifications of them. The third is that the scale of any such subsequent modifications is small: fundamental political orientations tend to endure through life. We propose, using cohort analysis, to examine the extent to which three political orientations – party identification, political efficacy and political trust – do, as a matter of fact, endure through adulthood.


Author(s):  
Klaus Fiedler ◽  
Karolin Salmen

A synopsis of major theories of social psychology is provided with reference to three major domains of social-psychological inquiry: attitudes and attitude change, motivation regulation, and group behavior. Despite the heterogeneity of research topics, there is considerable overlap in the basic theoretical principles across all three domains. Typical theories that constitute the common ground of social psychology rely on rules of good Gestalt consistency, on psychodynamic principles, but also on behaviorist learning models and on semantic-representation and information-transition models borrowed from cognitive science. Prototypical examples that illustrate the structure and the spirit of theories in social psychology are dissonance theory, construal-level, regulatory focus, and social identity theory. A more elaborate taxonomy of pertinent theories is provided in the first table in this article.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-278
Author(s):  
Betty Ragnarsdottir ◽  
Dagmar Kr. Hannesdottir ◽  
Freyr Halldorsson ◽  
Urdur Njardvik

1981 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo A. Napoletano

Those 16 students who had completed the two psychology courses (a) tended to complete the practicum and (b) reported being more influenced by experiential rather than cognitive components of the practicum. In view of the previously reported findings of favorable attitude change following a psychiatric practicum for the students who had completed the two psychology courses, over-all results presented in both reports (a) confirm previous studies which suggest the effectiveness of a psychiatric practicum in changing nursing students' attitudes toward mental illness and (b) empirically support Rabkin's 1977 statement that academic instruction seems maximally effective in combination with factors such as personal experience with mental patients, etc. (as reported by the student nurses) in changing attitudes toward mental illness.


2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo de Castro Ribas Jr. ◽  
Maria Lucia Seidl de Moura ◽  
Isabela Dias Soares ◽  
Alessandra Aparecida do Nascimento Gomes ◽  
Marc H. Bornstein

This review has several objectives: To describe and discuss theoretical conceptions of the construct of socioeconomic status (SES) and to argue for its vital role in psychological research; to present and analyze procedures employed to measure SES and trends in their utilization; and to review and discuss the use of SES measures in Brazilian psychological literature. The relative position of individuals, families, and groups in a given hierarchy (frequently converted into a score produced by a scale) is what has usually been called SES. The main indicators and procedures used to measure SES are discussed in regard to its advantages and disadvantages. A review of the literature offers evidence of the importance of the SES in different psychological processes. A systematic evaluation of articles from the PsycARTICLES database was conducted and revealed that the percentage of articles published annually that employed socioeconomic status increased steadily and substantially from 1988 through 2000 and that SES has been consistently applied more in some research areas (e.g., developmental, clinical, social psychology). A content analysis of the use of SES in articles published from 1981 through 2001 in three prominent Brazilian psychology journals was conducted showing that reliable SES measures are not commonly used in the Brazilian psychological literature. The results of these reviews and analyses are discussed in terms of their implications for further progress of psychological literature, especially in Brazil, with regard SES.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 877-886
Author(s):  
İsa Kaya

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between children's prosocial behavior and self-regulation skills. To collect the data of the study, demographic information form developed by the researcher was used for the demographic information of children, the prosocial behavior sub-dimension of the social behavior scale was used for the prosocial behavior, and the self-regulation skills scale was used for the self-regulation skills of the children. The collected data were analyzed by independent sample t-test, Pearson’s product moment correlation analysis and simple linear regression analysis in a computer package software. As a result of the research, while the self-regulation and prosocial behaviors of children differed according to gender and age of children, the situation of the children whether they have siblings and duration of the pre-school education did not make any significant difference. According to these results, girls' self-regulation and prosocial behavior scores were higher than that of boys and 6 years of age children’s scores were higher than that of 5 years of age children. While there was a moderate positive significant relationship between self-regulation skills and prosocial behavior, it was concluded that the prosocial behavior of children predicted self-regulation skills at the level of 11%.   Keywords: Prosocial behavior, self-regulation skills, early childhood, preschool


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Aleksey Oparin ◽  
Givi Akhvlediani ◽  
Anatoliy Oparin ◽  
Sergei Pavlov

The aim of the study: To estimate the level of Galectin-3 with the parallel tracing of the content of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines Interleukin-6 (IL-6) and Interleukin-4 (IL-4) for patients with GERD and BA both in case of separate nosologies, and in case of their combined course during the period of exacerbation of the diseases. Methods. The study was conducted in three groups of patients, homogeneous by gender and age. The first group included 18 patients with GERD. The second group included 19 patients with intermittent or persistent-mild bronchial asthma. The third group included 22 patients suffering from GERD with concomitant BA intermittent or persistent-mild severity. Determination of the level of galectin-3 and interleukins (IL-4 and IL-6) in the blood serum was carried out by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results. Analyzing the results of the study, we found that the level of galectin - 3 was increased on average in both groups of patients with isolated GERD (and in patients with BA). In patients of the third group with comorbid pathology, the level of galectin-3 was statistically significantly higher than not only the norm, but also the average of patients with isolated BA and GERD. At the same time, we found the rise in the level of pro-inflammatory (IL-6) and anti-inflammatory (IL-4) cytokines. Moreover, in patients with GERD, the level of IL-6 was increased with a higher degree of reliability, and the level of IL-4 was increased with a lower degree of reliability. In patients with BA, on the contrary, the level of IL-4 was determined more often and higher, and the level of IL-6 was lower. Conclusions. Analyzing result of the study, a clear correlation and features of changes in the level of galectin-3, IL-4, IL-6 in patients with isolated GERD, BA, as well as with the comorbidity of these diseases, were revealed. In patients with BA, the level of galectin-3 increases with the same degree of certainty as in the group of patients with GERD. In the cytokine system, on the contrary, the level of anti-inflammatory (IL-4) cytokines increases with a greater degree of certainty than the level of pro-inflammatory (IL-6) cytokines. In patients with GERD with concomitant BA, the level of galectin-3 increases with a greater degree of certainty. It is observed also a higher rising of pro-inflammatory (IL-6) cytokines and a slightly pronounced increasing of the level of anti-inflammatory (IL-4) cytokines in comparison with the group of patients with isolated GERD.


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