Assessment Task: Psychology Research Report

Assessment Task: Psychology Research Report

Overview

This study aimed to examine how humans perceive elements and communicative differences across cultures, and how our own socio-cultural backgrounds play a role. Students (you) were tested on emotion processing.

The results and method from this experiment have been written up for you. What you need to do, is put together a complete research report on this experiment. As such, you will need to:

Include a title page

Write the abstract

Write the introduction

(Method already written for you)

(Results already written for you)

Write the discussion

Include the reference list

Methods and Results: I have attached a copy of the results in a separate word document.

The attached 'Method and Results' sections arecriticalfor your understanding of the research and its outcomes.Your research report needs to be written based on them.

You shouldNOTamend theMethod and Results sectionsin any way.You doNOTneed to includeMethod and Results sectionsin your research report submission.You can go from the Introduction section straight to the Discussion section and we strongly encourage you to do so. You will not get a penalty if you includeMethod and Results sections.

Method and Results sections doNOTcount in the 1700-word count (even if you include them in your report during submission).OnlyAbstract, Introduction and Discussion count in the1700-word count.Title list, Method and Results sections, Reference list doNOTcount in the 1700-word count.

References

APA 7 style referencing

You will need to explore the rest. You can do that via functions such asgoogle scholar, the reference list of existing articles, and so on.

We cannot tell you how many papers you need to cite in your report, but simply citing these two (I have also attached these article separately) is definitely insufficient. You must explore the topic and format further. 10 to 15 papers/ references.

Tip: Always think about this question when screening articles: Howrelevantis this article to (the research questions of) my research report?

Method

Participants

Five hundred and fifty-six participants participated in the study. Participants were first-year students from diverse ethnic-cultural backgrounds at Western Sydney University. Data from students with specific ethnic-cultural (Caucasian Australian, N = 241; East Asian (non-Australian), N = 35) backgrounds were used for analysis. The two groups differed in both ethnicity and culture. The study was approved by the Ethics Committees of Western Sydney University (H14705). Informed consent was obtained before the commencement of the experiment to ensure voluntary participation.

Stimuli

Mothers from two ethnic-cultural (Caucasian Australian, (East Asian) Japanese) backgrounds were invited for stimuli recording. To ensure unison and cohesion between stimuli recordings, all mothers wore the same shirt and removed all accessories such as necklaces, and sat on a chair one meter away facing the front of a camera against a white wall. Their infants were present during the recordings, sitting on a baby chair between the camera and chair, but 45 lower than the camera and mothers heads such that infants heads did not obstruct the stimuli recordings. Mothers were prompted to recall real-life scenarios which lead to three types of spontaneous emotions (anger, happiness, and surprise) directed to their infants, and their real-time emotions were recorded. Mothers unanimously expressed surprise to their infants as agreeable surprise emotions rather than disagreeable, unpleasant surprise as shown in Chong et al. (2003). As the human perception of spontaneous emotions was investigated, potential distracting facial features such as hair in the external portion of the face were kept to retain stimuli authenticity (Jack et al., 2012; Leitzke & Pollak, 2016). Illumination was kept constant across recordings. Static pictures showing anger, happiness, or surprise of each mother were obtained from the recordings (Figure 1).

Figure 1

An Example of a Picture Captured From the Stimuli Recording.

Note. Emotion: Happiness; Ethnic-cultural background: Caucasian Australian.

Procedure

An online program, Qualtrics, was used to create the experiment. After informed ethics and consent, participants filled in their demographic backgrounds and completed an image judgement task. The demographic questionnaire collected information about participants individual ethnic-cultural experiences. Afterwards, participants joined in an image judgement task, where they watched 18 still images of mothers emotions in random order on their devices and chose one of the six basic emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise) for each image. The choices were recorded and later transformed into accuracy. The choices that matched the emotions depicted in the images were deemed accurate.

Results

The data were submitted to linear mixed-effects modelling (LME) analyses using the lme4 (Bates et al., 2015) packages lmer function in R (R Core Team, 2018). Participants accuracy responses when identifying the emotions from the still pictures of mothers were set as the dependent variable. Their ethnic-cultural background (two-level, Caucasian Australian, East Asian) was set as the independent variable. Results showed that students with Caucasian Australian ethnic-cultural backgrounds exceeded those with East Asian experiences in identifying anger (estimate = 0.1599, SE = 0.0499, z = 3.205, p = 0.0013) expressed by Caucasian Australian mothers, whereas students with East Asian experiences outperformed their Caucasian Australian peers in identifying anger (estimate = -0.1111, SE = 0.0499, z = -2.227, p = 0.0260) expressed by Japanese mothers. No other significant differences between Caucasian and East Asian participants were observed in recognition accuracy for the rest of the stimuli (all ps > .05). Taken together, participants own ethnic-cultural experiences enhance their emotional recognition ability of anger expressed from their corresponding ethnic-cultural backgrounds.