Research Basis of Psychological Experiments: Psychology Textbook

Author: edited by Zhu Ying
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: Every psychological experiment must explicitly or implicitly address a series of issues, such as the definition of key concepts, the sample 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 sufficient attention to them while introducing meta-analysis methods. Experimental research is increasingly applied in fields such as medicine, clinical practice, and business. However, due to the inability to precisely control relevant factors in these areas, laboratory design methods 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 of science, which is discussed in two chapters. Computers have been deeply and widely applied in psychological research. The integration of psychology and neuroscience is a current trend in psychological development, and brain imaging techniques are increasingly used in human and animal participants. This book includes two chapters, "Computers and Psychological Research" and "Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging," to introduce these topics.