Research Basis of Psychological Experiments

Author: Zhu Ying
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: Any psychological experiment must explicitly or implicitly address a series of issues, such as the definition of key concepts, samples of participants and experimental conditions, measurement, error control, design, and statistics. Based on a comprehensive collection of literature from various fields of psychology, this book analyzes these problems and provides some possible solutions. The purpose of this book is not to summarize research in each field, but to discuss how to conduct effective psychological experiments. Traditional significance testing methods have long been severely criticized, and this book gives them due attention while introducing the method of meta-analysis. Experimental research is increasingly applied in fields such as medicine, clinical practice, and business. However, since it is often impossible to precisely control relevant factors in these areas, the design methods of laboratory experiments cannot be directly adopted. This book includes a chapter on quasi-experimental designs to address such issues. The conclusions of experimental research inevitably involve causality, and measurement represents things numerically—these belong to the philosophical questions of science. The book dedicates two chapters to discussing these topics. Computers have been deeply and widely applied in psychological research, and the integration of psychology and neuroscience is a current trend in the development of psychology. Brain imaging techniques are increasingly used in human and animal participants. The book includes two chapters, "Computers and Psychological Research" and "Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging," to introduce these topics.