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August 8th, 2017 
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Please read instructions carefully and follow these exactly! I will also upload articles that will help with writing the assessment piece.
In the past I have been disappointed with assessments completed by writers and only received very poor marks. I dont want a repeat of this again! So please follow instructions exactly as they are written.
PSY20006 Assignment 2You need to create an APA-formatted Title Page. The title page will include a title for your research report, and should give the reader an idea of what you are presenting. It should include something on the things we manipulated (e.g., type of judgement; emotional valence of stimuli), what sort of task we used (masked priming task) and it could mention the effect of individual differences (anxiety and happiness) on particular conditions.
You will also include your name, student ID and tutorial class time.
Abstract
Your abstract will be a single paragraph between 150 and 300 words in length. It should briefly describe the important characteristics of the sample, what task was performed, what we found, and what the implications might be. You do not need to include references in the abstract, nor do you include detailed statistics. You can often state the hypotheses as part of your findings to save words (e.g., The hypothesis that participants high on happiness would show increased priming effects for positive words was not supported in either condition. is an example of a sentence that combines hypotheses with data.). It is good to mention the type of task undertaken, the type of measure being used and the experimental manipulations. If you mention specific hypotheses, make sure that you identify the correct measures i.e., be clear whether your hypotheses relate to reaction times or priming effects. It is important to identify the constructs measured (e.g., anxiety or negatively valenced affect) but it is not important to identify and reference the specific measures we used (the Spielberg Anxiety Scale and the Oxford Happiness Scale).
Introduction
(note that APA format does not use a heading for the introduction you can put it in or leave it out and it wont affect your mark. You might receive a comment from the marker, but that will be for information only)One of the interesting things about human cognition is that even though we are not aware of many things in the environment, we often process them anyway (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963). Evidence for this comes from many different experimental paradigms (e.g., Merikle, Smilek, & Eastwood, 2001). and while the finding is important, it is even more important to know what specific types of stimuli are likely to get processed out of awareness and the extent to which they are processed compared with when attention is consciously directed at them. If, for example, unattended stimuli only ever had their early visual features processed, it would not be as interesting as if other aspects of the stimuli, such as their meaning, were also processed.
The extent that unconscious processing affects us has been the subject of a lot of debate, with most people suggesting that the amount of processing that occurs with unconscious stimuli is less than conscious stimuli. You need to find evidence for the idea that unconscious stimuli may not be processed to the same extent as conscious stimuli. More recently, there has been some debate about the extent that masked primes are processed. Masked primes are words that have been masked so that you are not aware of them. When masked semantic priming has been examined, the results have been mixed. Bodner and Masson (2003) have shown that task conditions may be at least in part responsible for this. You need find and understand what semantic priming is, as well as how this might differ from masked semantic priming.
Two main manipulations were run in our study. The first manipulation allowed us to examine the extent to which the type of stimuli might be responsible for masked semantic priming effects. We modulated the type of prime-word pairs, using pairs of negative, neutral and positive emotional valence. If different types of stimuli are processed differently, then perhaps some may be processed in our unconscious more easily than others. You need to find evidence for this, i.e., that words with different types of emotional valence might be processed differently.
The second manipulation allowed us to examine the effect that the type of task might have on our processing of unconscious types of stimuli. In one task, we asked participants to focus on the semantic/emotional characteristics of the stimuli (negative and positive valence, location). In the second task, we asked participants to do a lexical stress judgement on the word (i.e., which syllable is stress on). You need to find evidence that different types of task might cause stimuli that are presented in the same way to be processed differently. If possible, these should relate to the type of way we presented stimuli.
Finally, apart from stimulus and task type, it might be the case that some people are simply more affected by certain characteristics of stimuli than others. To explore this question, we used two scales, the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Index (SSTAI; Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) and the Oxford Happiness Questionaire (OHQ; Hillis & Argyle, 2002) and correlated them with performance data from the task (i.e., the size of the priming effect displayed by each individual). You need to find evidence for this, i.e., that individual differences might predict performance on a cognitive task like ours.
Remember when you are generating hypotheses that the hypotheses come from the literature that is, you are building an argument from the references you read. We might read literature suggesting that threatening stimuli capture our attention preferentially so we can respond to danger, so we might predict priming effects only for negative words. Or we find literature proposing that anxious people are more sensitive to threat and on this basis make a hypothesis about the effect of individual differences on priming. It is possible to have two competing hypotheses in the same assignment (e.g., According to Bloggs and Smith (2002), we would expect more priming for condition A, however according to Jones (2004) we would expect no priming for condition A but greater effects in condition B) and the data will then help distinguish which one is correct.
The main data analyses presented in the results section are of priming effects across word type analysed separately for the two conditions. If your interpretation of data requires consideration of actual reaction times rather than priming effects, you can describe differences across the two conditions, even though we did not perform a statistical analysis on these differences.
The material above is a guide for what you need to do in writing the introduction. You will replace this entire section with your own introduction. The method and results section below are written for you. You do not need to edit these sections. You will need to write your own discussion.
Method
Participants
One hundred and forty-four students from a medium sized university in Melbourne participated in the experiment. All claimed to be native speakers of English.
Materials
Words and Non-words. Ninety prime-target word triplets were used. The triplets were such that they included two primes and a target word. One of the primes (the control) was semantically unrelated to the target word (e.g., WALL-cat) and the other was semantically related (e.g., DOG-cat). Of the 90 triplets, one-third had positive emotional valence, one-third had neutral emotional valence, and one-third had negative emotional valence. The prime-target pairs in each group were balanced on psycholinguistic characteristics including word frequency, letter length, and association strength using the website of Landauer and Dumais (1997). In terms of word stress, within each group of 30, 16 of the targets used trochaic and 14 iambic stress. A further 36 prime-target pairs were used as practice words before the critical words began. These were broken into two groups of 18, with six stimuli in each of the positive, negative and neutral categories. Half of these stimuli were preceded by related primes and half were preceded by unrelated primes.
Individual differences measures. The trait items from the Spielberg State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (SSTAI; Spielberger et al., 1983) were used to provide a measure of anxiety. Raw scores were transformed into z-scores, where high values indicated higher anxiety and low values indicated lower anxiety than the mean. Items from the Oxford Happiness Scale (OHS; Argyle et al., 1995) was used to provide a measure of positive affect. Raw scores on the scale were transformed into z-scores, where high values indicated greater levels of happiness and low values indicated lower levels of happiness. Items are listed in Appendix A.
Procedure
Participants were run in groups of approximately 20 people. Participants were informed about the sequence of events in the task, and asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible. They were also told that the main experimental task was broken into two conditions, and that they should respond to the stimuli based on the information screen that would be presented at the start and at half way. Following this, they were told that after the main task had finished, that they would be presented with a list of questions, and that they should answer these based on their initial intuition without thinking too hard. The questions were from the two surveys, with the questions from the SSTAI (Spielberger et al., 1983) being presented first and the OHS second (Argyle et al., 1995). The experimental task and the two short surveys took about 15 minutes to complete.
Three groups were used in the study where only the task instructions were manipulated, and all of the groups performed a meaning judgement task as well as a stress judgement task. The instructions in the meaning judgement were designed to get participants to make a judgement about the words based on them being either of negative valence, positive valence, or a word that could represent somewhere or a place they could go to. Participants only performed one of the meaning judgement tasks. In the stress judgement task, participants had to judge whether the main stress of the word appeared on the first or second syllable. The order of the groups was counterbalanced such that half the participants in each of three meaning judgement groups made the stress judgements first and the other half made the meaning judgements. The groups were further counterbalanced such that in one group, half the targets used related pairs and half did not, and the other group used the other half of the stimuli. The two different tasks were preceded by 18 practice stimuli. Between the conditions, an information screen was presented that informed participants how they were to judge the words.
In terms of the stimulus presentation, the main stimuli always appeared in the centre of the screen. The timing was as follows: (a) a forward letter mask appeared for 500ms; (b) the prime was then presented for 48ms; (c) a backward mask appeared for 96 ms; and (e) the target remained on the screen until the participant responded.
Results
All data from the SSTAI and the OHS was initially processed by transforming the raw scores from all of the participants into z-scores. In the main task, all errors were discarded, as were responses in the meaning judgement task that were on stimuli that had a different meaning to the judgment (i.e., positive responses in a negative valence task). Reaction times (RTs) that were 3 or more SDs away from each participants mean were removed. The mean overall RTs appear in Figure 1.Figure 1. Mean reaction times of identical and unrelated prime-target pairs a function of word valence and judgement type. The error bars are +2SE.
It can be seen from Figure 1 that mean RTs for stress judgements were generally slower than for meaning judgements (note different time scales on mean reaction time axes for the two conditions). However the pattern of priming effects (difference in RT between the prime and control conditions) is similar across the two, with priming effects evident for negative words but not so clear for the other word types.
To examine these results statistically, a 3 (Word Type Positive/Negative/Neutral) 2 (Prime Relatedness Related/Different) Task Type (Meaning/Stress) ANOVA was conducted. The results showed there was a significant main effects of Task Type, F(2, 117) = 7.94, p < .001, confirming that participants were slower in the stress compared to meaning task. There was also a significant main effect of Prime Type, with related prime-target pairs being faster to process than unrelated ones, F(1, 117) = 4.66, p < .05, and there was a significant interaction between Prime Type and Stimuli type, with the negative stimuli appearing to show a bigger priming effect, F(2, 117) = 7.94, p < .005. To further examine the interaction, six t-tests were used to examine the size of the priming effect in the two tasks for each of the three stimuli types. The results showed that in the meaning judgement task, significant effects were found with the negative, t(39) = 4.73, p < .001, positive, t(29) = 2.65, p < .05, but not neutral words, t(39) = 1.58, p = .12. In the stress judgement task, there was a significant priming effect with only the negative words, t(39) = 2.13, p < .05. To further examine the data, we first calculated the size of the priming effect displayed by each subject. We then correlated the anxiety and happiness scores with this in the meaning tasks and the stress judgement task. The results showed that there was a marginally significant correlation between the size of the priming affect and the SSTAI with the negative words, r = .31, p = .051, and that no other correlations were significant. Discussion You will need to replace this section with your own discussion that provides: Summary of findings Relevance to the literature Limitations and Future Research Your discussion should begin with a summary of the findings in terms of your hypotheses, including any further aspects of the data you might want to discuss. This summary of findings discusses trends and significant results, but does not include actual data or statistics. You will then discuss the relevance of the findings back to the literature that you reviewed in your introduction. You will need to describe whether the data fit with previous models or require that previous models be rejected or refined in some way. In discussing limitations of the research, you need to identify how a methodological problem might actually have interfered with our ability to find the types of relationships we were looking for. Future research should target the issues that still have not been resolved, or ways to progress in understanding the topic of interest.References You will need to add your own references to the reference list. You should find at least 3 extra references. You will not gain extra marks for reading lots of extra references beyond three. You are expected to read all of the theoretical references listed in the reference list. You are NOT expected to read the Argyle et al. (1995) article and the Spielberger et al. (1983) manual. These two references are listed to identify what items were used in the experiment, and we are treating them as valid measures of anxiety (negatively-valenced affect) and happiness (a positively-valenced affect). The items used are listed in Appendix A.Bodner, G., & Mason, M. E. J. (2003). Beyond spreading activation: An influence of relatedness proportion on masked semantic priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(3), 645-652. Deutsch, J. A., & Deutsch, D. (1963). Attention: Some theoretical considerations. Psychological Review, 70, 80-90. Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford happiness questionnaire: A compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 1073-1082. Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Platos problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211-240. Merikle, P. M., Smilek, D., & Eastwood, J. D. (2001). Perception without awareness: perspectives from cognitive psychology. Cognition, 79, 115-134. Spielberger, C. D., Gorsuch, R. L., Lushene, R., Vagg, P. R., & Jacobs, G. A. (1983). Manual for the state-trait anxiety inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists press.SUBMISSION CHECKLIST AND MARKING GUIDE (Delete after you have satisfied these requirements) ? Title page [2% of marks] ? Abstract (150 300 words) [3% of marks] ? Introduction (approximately 750 1000 words) [40% of marks] o General introductory paragraph on conscious and unconscious attention o Introduction of semantic and masked semantic priming. o Introduction of the idea that different types of tasks might affect cognitive processing o Introduction of the notion of emotional valence and how that might affect unconscious processing of stimulus o Introduction of the notion of individual differences in personality traits relevant to emotional valence and how they might affect cognitive processes ? Hypotheses: your introduction will conclude with hypotheses that come from the literature you reviewed. There will be three hypotheses or research questions relating to the effect of judgement type, word type and to the relationship between individual traits and cognitive processing.The Method and Results have been written for you and do not need to be edited. You will not receive any extra marks for adjusting the material in these sections. Include these sections in your report for clarity, but they will not be assessed. Bear in mind that these sections will show up as unoriginal via Turnitin, but this will not indicate any issue with plagiarism.? Discussion (approximately 750 1000 words) [30% of marks] ? Your discussion will begin with a summary of the findings ? You will tie your findings back to the literature introduced in the introduction ? If necessary, you will include new information that might account for unexpected findings (whether you do this will depend on whether the findings supported your hypotheses ? You will discuss limitations of the study and future directions for research ? References [10% of marks] ? Your Reference list will be in APA format and will include at least 3 new references. ? Marks for referencing will be allocated on the basis of choice of appropriate references, appropriate in-text citations and appropriate APA formatting of both in-text and reference list citations. ? Structure, presentation, writing style [15% of marks] ? This section includes the overall structure of your research report, such as writing style, logical structure of arguments and the integration between different elements of the report (Does the title match the content? Does the abstract summarise your story? Does the discussion tie up all the issues raised in the introduction? Does your report tell a coherent story?) ? WORD COUNT: You are expected to write between 1500 and 2000 words yourself in the combined introduction and discussion. The method and results section already contain around 1600 words. Therefore the maximum word count for your completed report (from the beginning of the introduction to the end of the discussion) should be 3600 words.
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