Assignment3: Lab report for biological psychology subject

Assignment3: Lab report for biological psychology subject

Background to the Lab Report Topic

This lab report will investigate face emotion recognition in the broader autism phenotype.

Face Emotion Recognition

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterised by difficulties with social-communication, as well as restricted interests and repetitive behaviours. One important aspect of social-communication is the ability to understand the emotions and intentions of another person. Recognising the emotional expression from a face is thus a key skill for successful social interactions. Indeed, individuals with ASD have been shown to have a relative difficulty in accurately recognising face emotional expressions.

The 'broader autism phenotype'

ASD is considered a spectrum disorder with a range of severities. In fact, autistic-like traits (or characteristics) are normally distributed throughout the general population. Most people have an 'average' amount of autistic-like traits, while some have less than or more than the average (people with a diagnosed ASD would usually be placed at the further end of this spectrum).

The observation that autistic-like traits can be measured throughout the general population allows researchers to study this broader autism phenotype. Indeed many studies have demonstrated that individuals with high (but not clinical level) autism traits have similar subtle differences in social-communication, cognition, perception and attention, when compared with individuals with low autism traits.

Thus, studying the broader autism phenotype provides a 'model' of ASD, with studies commonly recruiting participants from the general population and comparing groups selected with higher or lower than average autistic-like traits.

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This report will be based on an experiment that Biological Psychology students will complete. Hence you will gain the experience of a participant in a cognitive neuroscience study.

However you must write this lab report from the perspective of the researcher, NOT from the perspective of the participant.

In this assignment (Part B) you will submit an Abstract, Methods, Results, Discussion and Reference sections.

The below sections will be added to throughout the semester, and after each lectorial.

Abstract

A 150-word abstract should concisely summarise the study aims, participants, procedures/tasks, findings and conclusions. This 150 words isNOTincluded in the word count.

Do NOT include an Introduction

Method

This section will be updated once you have completed the experiment.

A method section will have three subsections, with each describing the participants, the materials/tasks that were used, and the procedures of the experiment. The goal of the Method section is to allow the reader to full understand and be able to replicate the experiment if they so desired.

Results

This section will be updated once we collect some data!

A Results section should describe the findings of the experiment. It will involve reporting some statistics which we will go over in some detail in a lectorial later in semester and provide ample opportunity for you to grasp exactly what is required.

You should include a figure representing our data (to be provided). Make sure you refer to the figure in the narrative of your Results section. The figure will also need a figure caption.

Our results that you need to include are shown in the lectorial slides, which also shows how you write the statistics correctly.

Discussion

Your Discussion section will summarise the findings of the study in relation to the hypotheses. It will also discuss the findings of the study in relation to relevant previous literature you have already described in the Introduction. It should include some discussion of any limitations and implications of the findings.

Your discussion should include the following:

restate your study aims and hypotheses and link this to your findings (i.e., were they supported or not?)

Discuss your key findings and compare with literature reviewed in the introduction

what were the similarities and differences?

If there were differences, can you explain why thismightbe the case?

Are there any alternative explanations for your findings?

Describe any limitations of the study. This may lead to a discussion of directions for future research

what new direction might expand our understanding of the topic?

what changes to the methodology might help overcome limitations identified

Discuss study implications and conclusions

Here you should avoid simply restating your findings, but you should aim to refer to these findings and conclude with what has been contributed to the knowledge of the topic, and the broader implications of the research