It has been said that laughter is the best medicine, but can research be done to substantiate or discredit this assertion? Imagine that you have been hired to find out if laughter is an effective treatment for the common cold. As you describe your experimental design, address the following questions: What are your independent and dependent variables? How will you operationally define your variables? Who will participate in your research, and how will you select them?
What will be an ideal response?
In my research, laughter is the independent variable, and the dependent variable would be cold symptoms. The laughter would be operationally defined as auditory chuckles, and I would measure the duration of the chuckles as well as the frequency. Cold symptoms would be operationally defined as coughing and sneezing. I would measure the frequency of both. I would randomly select three doctors from the Midwest. During winter, I would randomly pick twenty-four patients from each doctor. A third would be assigned to the experimental group, a third to the placebo group, and a third to the control group. The experimental group would be shown humorous cartoons and sitcoms. The placebo group would be shown a film of two monkeys playing catch with a plastic carp. The control group would not be shown anything. The study would last two weeks, and participants would be monitored for the cold symptoms. If laughter were an effective medicine, we would expect to see a statistically significant decrease in the frequency of sneezing and coughing in the participants in the experimental group when compared to the participants in both the placebo and control groups.
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A. adaptology B. stagnation C. neuroplasticity D. reflex arc
Some researchers specialize in the study of death and dying; as a group, these scholars are known as __________.
A. morticians B. developmentalists C. thanatologists D. gerontologists
An individual's psychological test results are often compared with a distribution of test scores from a large normative population. In order to accomplish this, test administration, scoring, and interpretation must be consistent from one person to the next. What is this process called?
A. Validity B. Standardization C. Reliability D. T-score distribution
Talon drank one too many cans of "Jooky" last night. Talon spent the morning vomiting, and now even the smell of Jooky makes Talon nauseous. Talon is experiencing a __________, which can best be explained by __________ conditioning.
A. taste aversion; operant B. taste aversion; classical C. learned immune response; operant D. learned immune response; classical