An article critique is a written communication that conveys your understanding of a research article and how it relates to the conceptual issues of interest to this course. There are five elements emphasized in this critique: The title page (in APA format

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 An article critique is a written communication that conveys your understanding of a research article and how it relates to the conceptual issues of interest to this course. There are five elements emphasized in this critique: The title page (in APA formatting), summary of the article, critique of the article, brief (one paragraph) summary of the article, and appropriate referencing for the article.

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Absolut® Memory Distortions: Alcohol Placebos Influence the Misinformation Effect
Author(s): Seema L. Assefi and Maryanne Garry
Source: Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 77-80
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological Science
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ABSOLUT® MEMORY DISTORTIONS:
Alcohol Placebos Influence the

Misinformation Effect

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Research Report

Seema L. Assefi and Maryanne Garry

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract – Can the simple suggestion that you have consumed
alcohol affect your memory for an event? Alcohol placebos affect
social behaviors but not nonsocial ones, and have not previously been
shown to affect memory. We investigated the effect of alcohol placebos
using materials that revealed both the social and the nonsocial influ-
ences of memory. Subjects drank plain tonic water, but half were told
it was a vodka and tonic; then all subjects took part in an eyewitness
memory experiment. Subjects who were told they drank alcohol were
more swayed by misleading postevent information than were those
who were told they drank tonic water, and were also more confident
about the accuracy of their responses. Our results show that the mere sug-
gestion of alcohol consumption may make subjects more susceptible to

misleading information and inappropriately confident. These results
also provide additional confirmation that eyewitness memory is influ-
enced by both nonsocial and social factors.

Many people believe that drinking alcohol affects their ability to

remember events. In fact, some people who have committed violent
crimes while drunk claim to have no memory of the crimes (Swihart,
Yuille, & Porter, 1999). Although some of these offenders may be ly-

ing, Swihart et al. suggested that for others, memory lapses might be a

state-dependent memory effect: A man who assaults his partner while

drunk does not remember hitting her once he is sober. In the study we

report here, we investigated how people’s memories are affected when

they have not consumed alcohol, but simply are told that they have.

Research shows that the mere suggestion that one is drinking alcohol

can influence a wide range of dependent measures (Hull & Bond,

1986; Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). For example, when subjects receive an

alcohol placebo, they become more aggressive (Lang, Goeckner, Adesso,
& Marlatt, 1975), interested in violent and erotic material (Lansky &

Wilson, 1981; Wilson & Lawson, 1976), and sexually aroused (George &

Marlatt, 1986), even though their beverage contains nothing more than

plain tonic.
The pioneering procedure in this line of research is known as the bal-

anced placebo design (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). In this design, sub-

jects are told either that they are drinking alcoholic beverages or that

they are drinking nonalcoholic beverages, and what they are told is ei-

ther true or false. This 2X2 design separates the physiological and psy-

chological effects of alcohol on a dependent measure. Interestingly, Hull

and Bond’s (1986) meta-analysis showed that there is no interaction

between the physiological and psychological effects of alcohol on mem-

ory; they concluded that researchers can run only half of the design,

depending on their research question. As cognitive psychologists, we

were interested in only the effects of alcohol placebos on memory;

therefore, we ran the half of the balanced placebo design manipulating
expected drink content, but served all subjects a nonalcoholic beverage.

Although alcohol placebos have produced significant changes in
social behaviors, they have not produced similar changes in nonsocial
behaviors – those not thought of as being socially constrained, or in
the sphere of social influence, such as reaction time, memory for word
lists, and performance on general knowledge tests (Hull & Bond, 1986;
Maylor & Rabbitt, 1993; Nelson, McSpadden, Fromme, & Marlatt, 1986).

Why are only social behaviors affected by alcohol placebos? Re-
search suggests that alcohol provides an excuse for people to engage
in desired – but socially inhibited – behaviors, and then explain them

away (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). Of course, Hull and Bond (1986)
showed that these effects are not limited to “relatively deviant social
behaviors” (p. 347), but can extend to any behavior that people may
normally keep in check (e.g., outbursts of laughter; Vuchinich, Tucker,
& Sobell, 1979). Memory performance is not typically described as

something kept in check; perhaps unsurprisingly, then, there has been
no successful demonstration of alcohol-placebo effects on memory.

We believe that previous investigations of alcohol placebos and

memory have not used materials that would reveal the social influences
of alcohol on memory. However, the classic eyewitness memory para-
digm (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978) incorporates both nonsocial and
social factors, and is thus an ideal method by which to study the effects
of alcohol placebos on memory. In this procedure, subjects first view
slides depicting a simulated crime, then read a narrative of the event rid-
dled with misinformation, and finally are asked what they remember
about the original event. Hundreds of experiments have shown that it is

easy to distort people’s memory of an event (Frost, 2000; Lindsay, 1990;
Loftus et al., 1978). The question we asked was whether subjects who
are told that they are consuming alcohol are more prone to the misinfor-
mation effect (Belli, 1989) than subjects who are told that they are con-

suming a nonalcoholic drink. This question turns on the extent to which
the misinformation effect has a social component.

Certainly, the effect has a cognitive component, which involves

performance on control items: Subjects base their answers on what

they can remember from the slide sequence and report this informa-
tion on the memory test. On what do subjects base their test answers
for items about which they have been misled? Research suggests that
there are social factors affecting performance in the face of misleading
information. For example, the misinformation effect can vary depend-
ing on the status of the person who provides the misinformation. Dodd
and Bradshaw (1980) showed that the impact of misleading postevent
information (PEI) varied with the credibility of the “misinformation

messenger.” Subjects were more influenced by misleading PEI when it
was supposedly written by a neutral source than when it was written

by a defense lawyer. In another study, when subjects heard spoken
PEI, only those who rated the speaker high on a scale of power and at-
tractiveness tended to be misled; those who rated the same speaker
low on those dimensions were unaffected by PEI (Vornik, Sharman, &

Garry, in press). Finally, for the misinformation effect to occur, at
some point subjects must capitulate to the misleading information,

Address correspondence to Maryanne Garry, School of Psychology,
Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand;
e-mail: maryanne.garry@vuw.ac.nz.

VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2003 Copyright © 2003 American Psychological Society 77

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Alcohol Placebos and Misinformation

which is provided by another person. Thus, social factors do affect the
extent to which people are misled even when they do not receive the

suggestion that they are drinking alcohol.
In the current research, we combined two classic experimental par-

adigms: half the balanced placebo design (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980)
and an eyewitness testimony design (Loftus et al., 1978). Before sub-

jects took part in a misinformation experiment, we gave them a plain
tonic beverage and told them it was either a vodka and tonic or a plain
tonic drink. Because alcohol placebos affect behaviors in the sphere of
social influence but not outside it, we had two predictions: First, be-
cause the effect of misleading PEI is influenced by social factors, we

predicted that subjects told they drank alcohol (told-alcohol subjects)
would be more prone to misleading PEI than subjects told they drank

plain tonic (told-tonic subjects). Second, because memory for the slide

sequence (in the absence of misleading PEI) would not be influenced

by social factors, we predicted that subjects in the two groups would
be equally accurate on control items. This second prediction fit with
Yuille and Tollestrup’s (1990) finding that subjects given an alcohol

placebo and those who drank no beverage at all reported a staged
event equally accurately.

However, there were also reasons to predict that alcohol placebos
might cause other patterns of memory distortion. For example, told-
alcohol subjects might have poorer event memories for event slides
not because they were more suggestible, but because they simply did
not pay much attention to the slides. By the time they read the PEI,
they might believe they were starting to sober up, and read the mis-

leading narrative carefully. In this case, told-alcohol subjects would be
less likely than told-tonic subjects to report correct control details, but
more likely than told-tonic subjects to report incorrect details about
which they had been misled. Yet another outcome was also plausible:
Told-alcohol subjects might not pay attention to either the event or the
PEI, and therefore might perform at chance levels on the memory test.

In short, we were interested in whether subjects who were falsely
told they were consuming alcohol would be more susceptible to mis-
leading PEI than their counterparts who were correctly told they were
consuming plain tonic. Such a finding would have theoretical implica-
tions for how both the misinformation effect and the functions of

memory should be conceptualized.

METHOD

Subjects

One hundred forty-eight undergraduates participated in the ex-

periment.

Design and Procedure

Our study was a 2 X 2 mixed design. Drink condition (told alcohol
or told tonic) was a between-subjects factor. All subjects received both
control and misleading PEI. This information was counterbalanced so
that an item appeared equally often as a control item or as the target of
misinformation (misled item). Thus, PEI (control or misled) was a

within-subjects factor.
Subjects were told that the experiment was about alcohol’s influence

on preferred learning modes (visual and verbal). They sat in a room set up
as a bar, spacing themselves apart from one another. A volunteer in the

group chose an envelope that ostensibly assigned the group’s drink condi-
tion (tonic, vodka and tonic). The envelopes were rigged so that half the

time they said tonic, and half the time they said vodka and tonic. Regard-
less of what the envelope said, all subjects were served plain tonic.

To convince subjects that the drinks contained alcohol, we followed
successful procedures from past research using the balanced placebo
design (Rohsenow & Marlatt, 1981). For example, subjects were

weighed and told that the amount of alcohol they would receive was

proportional to their weight. “Alcoholic drinks” were poured from
Absolut® Vodka bottles and prepared in plain view of subjects. Drink

glasses were rimmed with vodka-soaked limes, and submerged in
vodka to smell like alcohol.

While they watched an action movie, subjects spaced their drinks
over 13 min, and then watched the movie for an additional 6 min. At the
end of the 19 min, subjects viewed a slide sequence of a man shoplifting
items in a bookstore (see Loftus, 1991). There were eight critical items:
a candle, notebook, stapler, textbook, sweatshirt, magazine, elevator,
and towel. We prepared two versions of the slide sequence that showed
the same critical items but with different characteristics (e.g., white can-
dle vs. yellow candle). Each slide was presented for 2.5 s.

After working on filler-task puzzles for 12 min, subjects read a
541 -word narrative, which contained misinformation about four of the
critical items and neutral information about the other four. There were
four narratives that differed in their descriptions of the critical items,
and slide and narrative combinations were counterbalanced across

subjects (e.g., a subject who saw a white candle read about either a

“yellow candle” or a “candle,” depending on the condition that subject
was in, and a subject who saw a yellow candle read about either a
“white candle” or a “candle”).

Finally, after working on puzzles for 3 min more, subjects took a
19-item forced-choice test in which they indicated the details they
remembered seeing in the slide sequence. For each item they chose
between the correct event detail and the suggested detail. Furthermore,
subjects were asked to rate their confidence that their answers were
correct, using a scale from 1 (not confident at all) to 5 (very confident).
The instructions minimized demand characteristics by emphasizing
the importance of basing answers on the event, not the narrative (Lind-
say, 1990). Afterward, subjects were fully debriefed.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Data were retained from 1 17 of the 148 subjects who took part in
the study. Because of an equipment failure, data from 24 subjects were
eliminated; 6 subjects did not complete the test, and 1 had seen the
slides before in a public talk. Our told-alcohol subjects expressed sur-

prise at the debriefing, indicating that they believed they had con-
sumed an alcoholic beverage, rather than plain tonic.

Misinformation Effect

Figure 1 shows the classic misinformation effect in both drink condi-
tions: Performance on control items exceeded performance on misled
items. However, the primary question in this study was whether told-
alcohol subjects would be more affected by misleading PEI than told-
tonic subjects. Figure 1 shows that they were, as does the significant
Drink Condition X PEI interaction, F(l, 1 15) = 4.20, p = .04; the ef-
fect size was small to medium,/ = 0.38 (Cohen, 1988). There was no
difference between groups in performance on control items, t(\ 15) =

0.56, p = .58. These results show that the mere suggestion to subjects
that they had consumed alcohol caused them to be more susceptible to

misleading postevent suggestion.

78 VOL. 14, NO. 1 , JANUARY 2003

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Seema L. Assefi and Maryanne Garry

Fig. 1. Performance on control and misled items by drink condition.
Error bars represent standard errors for the individual means.

Confidence Measures

Recall that when subjects took the test, they also rated their confi-
dence that each answer was correct. Research has demonstrated that
confidence for misled items tends to be higher than confidence for
control items (Loftus, Donders, Hoffman, & Schooler, 1989). We ob-
served this pattern as well. Although drink condition did not interact
with confidence on control or misled items, F < 1,/ = 0.08, subjects were more confident that their responses were correct when they were misled than when they were not misled, as demonstrated by the main effect for PEI, F(l, 1 14) = 15.25,p < .01,/= 0.37 (see Fig. 2).1 More

surprisingly, as Figure 2 suggests, told-alcohol subjects were more
confident of their responses overall than told-tonic subjects, as shown

by the main effect for drink condition, F(l, 114) = 11.33, p < .01. This effect size was medium to large,/ = 0.63. Thus, subjects' belief that they had drunk alcohol actually boosted their confidence regard- less of their accuracy.

Discussion

In summary, our results show that subjects who were told falsely that
their plain tonic beverage was a vodka and tonic were significantly more
misled on an eyewitness memory task than subjects who were told cor-

rectly that their beverage was plain tonic. Furthermore, told-alcohol

subjects were more confident about their answers than were told-tonic

subjects. Together, these results lead us to conclude that the suggestion
that one has consumed alcohol can affect not only memory for an event,
but also confidence about how accurate that memory is.

Why was memory affected by an alcohol placebo in our experi-
ment, when other research has not found such an effect? Recall that
Hull and Bond (1986) showed that alcohol placebos affect social be-
haviors, whereas nonsocial behaviors are not affected. In contrast to

previous research investigating memory and alcohol placebos, our ex-

periment relied on a paradigm that captured both nonsocial and social

components of memory.
Our finding that subjects’ memory for misled items, but not control

items, was affected by alcohol placebos also lends support to the idea

Fig. 2. Confidence scores for control and misled items by drink con-
dition. Higher scores indicate greater confidence. Error bars represent
standard errors for the individual means.

that memory can be affected by social factors, and is consistent with
other research showing that the misinformation effect itself comprises
both nonsocial and social components. Our pattern of results fits with
the idea that the alcohol placebo did not affect memory per se, but influ-
enced subjects’ tendency to capitulate to suggestions made by the ex-
perimenter.

These findings are important for two reasons. First, our experiment is
the only demonstration of alcohol-placebo effects on memory. Kvavil-
ashvili and Ellis (1999) showed that other types of placebos – ones with
no preconceived social suggestions – could affect memory. However,
they gave subjects a pill and told them explicitly that it would impair
memory. By contrast, we made no such claims, and even disguised the
fact that our study was about memory. More to the point, Kvavilashvili
and Ellis proposed that their subjects showed a decrease in memory per-
formance because their encoding processes were negatively affected. Most
researchers interested in alcohol and memory have proposed similar
encoding-disruption explanations (a point made by Read, Yuille, &
Tollestrup, 1992). However, in our experiment, poorer processing among
our told-alcohol subjects should have led to poorer performance on con-
trol items, relative to told-tonic subjects. Because we found no difference
between these two groups in performance on control items, we find
Kvavilashvili and Ellis’s conclusion to be untenable.

Second, our findings fit with the growing awareness that memory
is not purely a cognitive function devoid of a social component (see,
e.g., Gergen, 1994; Neisser & Hyman, 2000). Neisser has long argued
that memory has a social function (Neisser, 1980; Neisser & Harsch,
1993). In Neisser’s view, this social function often overshadows the
need for accuracy. Other researchers have put forth compatible views
(Conway, 1996; Pillemer, Goldsmith, Panter, & White, 1988).

Although in our experiment we manipulated alcohol suggestions
throughout the three-stage misinformation procedure, researchers
might wish to manipulate suggestions at different stages. For example,
debriefing subjects about the alcohol manipulation after they view the
slides but before they read the postevent narrative should eliminate the
difference in suggestibility between told-tonic and told-alcohol sub-
jects. Additionally, our combined paradigm could provide researchers
with a novel means by which to study the role of placebos in state-
dependent learning effects.

1 . One subject was removed for failing to rate confidence on a misled item,
so there were 1 14 degrees of freedom in the analyses of confidence.

VOL. 14, NO. 1 , JANUARY 2003 79

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Alcohol Placebos and Misinformation

Finally, with respect to the misinformation effect itself, there has been
much controversy over whether this effect is even a memory effect at all,
or merely the result of demand characteristics or other social influences

(see Belli, 1989; McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985). Our results suggest
that, like memory itself, the misinformation effect is the product of

cognitive and social factors.

Acknowledgments – We thank Dave Harper, Maree Hunt, and Todd Jones
for their help with this research, as well as the Cognitive Workshop, Beth
Loftus, Alan Marlatt, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on earlier
versions of this article. We are grateful to Alex Hudson, Kellie Fitzmaurice,
and Sonia Cunningham for their assistance with data collection.

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(Received 9/20/01; Revision accepted 2/24/02)

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• Article Contents

p. 77
p. 78
p. 79
p. 80

• Issue Table of Contents

Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. i-ii, 1-90
Front Matter
Psychology in Washington: The Nonuse of Psychological Research at Two Federal Agencies [pp. 1-6]
Research Articles
Emotional Facilitation of Sensory Processing in the Visual Cortex [pp. 7-13]
On Wildebeests and Humans: The Preferential Detection of Negative Stimuli [pp. 14-18]
Long-Term Inhibition of Return of Attention [pp. 19-25]
Time Course of Perceptual Grouping by Color [pp. 26-30]
Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition [pp. 31-38]
Spontaneous Attention to Word Content versus Emotional Tone: Differences among Three Cultures [pp. 39-46]
Electrophysiological Responses to Errors and Feedback in the Process of Action Regulation [pp. 47-53]
New Objects, Not New Features, Trigger the Attentional Blink [pp. 54-59]
The Secret Life of Pronouns: Flexibility in Writing Style and Physical Health [pp. 60-65]
Serial Expertise of Rhesus Macaques [pp. 66-73]
Research Reports
High-Fidelity Perceptual Long-Term Memory Revisited: And Confirmed [pp. 74-76]
Absolut® Memory Distortions: Alcohol Placebos Influence the Misinformation Effect [pp. 77-80]
“Blaming the Victim” under Memory Load [pp. 81-85]
Phonological Influences on Lexical (Mis)Selection [pp. 86-90]
Back Matter

Running head: ARTICLE CRITIQUE 1

ARTICLE CRITIQUE 5

Article Critique Instructions

April D. Schantz

Florida International University

Article Critique Instructions

Each student is required to write an article critique paper based on one of the research articles present on Canvas (only those articles listed on Canvas can be critiqued – if you critique a different article, it will not be graded). The article critique paper will account for 50 points. In addition to deepening your understanding of conceptual issues discussed in lectures, this article critique assignment is designed to improve critical thinking and writing skills. Please follow the instructions and guidelines below. If you are unclear about any of this information, please ask.

 

What is an article critique paper?

An article critique is a written communication that conveys your understanding of a research article and how it relates to the conceptual issues of interest to this course. There are five elements emphasized in this critique: The title page (in APA formatting), summary of the article, critique of the article, brief (one paragraph) summary of the article, and appropriate referencing for the article.

Psychological Purpose

This paper serves several purposes, the first of which is helping you gain insight into research papers in psychology. As this may be your first time reading and writing papers in psychology, one goal of this Article Critique is to give you insight into what goes into such papers. This article critique paper will help you learn about the various sections of an empirical research report by reading at least one peer-reviewed article (articles that have a Title Page, Abstract*, Literature Review, Methods Section, Results Section, and References Page—I have already selected some articles for you to critique, so make sure you only critique one in the folder provided on Canvas). This paper will also give you some insights into how the results sections are written in APA formatted research articles. Pay close attention to those sections, as throughout this course you’ll be writing up some results of your own!

In this relatively short paper, you will read one of the articles posted on Canvas and summarize what the authors did and what they found. The first part of the paper should focus on summarizing the design the authors used for their project. That is, you will identify the independent and dependent variables, talk about how the authors carried out their study, and then summarize the results (you don’t need to fully understand the statistics in the results, but try to get a sense of what the authors did in their analyses). In the second part of the paper, you will critique the article for its methodological strengths and weaknesses. Finally, in part three, you will provide your references for the Article Critique Paper in APA format.

APA Formatting Purpose

The second purpose of the Article Critique paper is to provide an opportunity to use American Psychological Association (APA) formatting. Below, I reference the APA Publication Manual sections in brackets (i.e., [7.02]) to indicate where in the manual you can find APA rules. There are a lot of very specific requirements in APA papers, so pay attention to the instructions below as well as referring to the APA6 Publication Manual. There is an example paper in the APA Publication Manual that starts on page 41 [Figure 2.1]

Writing Purpose

Finally, this paper is intended to help you grow as a writer. Few psychology classes give you the chance to write papers and receive feedback on your work. This class will! We will give you feedback on this paper in terms of content, flow, and mechanics (i.e., spelling and grammar).

Article Critique Paper (50 points possible)

This article critique paper will include 5 things:

 

1. Title page [2.01]: 1 page

· Use APA style to present the appropriate information:

· A Running head must be included and formatted APA style [8.03]

· The phrase “Running head” is at the top of the title page followed by a short title of your creation (no more than 50 characters) that is in ALL CAPS. This running head is left-justified (flush left on the page). Note that the “h” in head is all lower case! Look at the first page of these instructions, and you will see how to set up your Running head.

· There must be a page number on the title page that is right justified. It is included in the header and is also in Times New Roman font (size 12) [8.03].

· Your paper title appears on the title page. This is usually 12 words or less, in title case. It should be descriptive of the paper (For this paper, you should use the title of the article you are critiquing)

· Your name will appear on the title page

· Your institution will appear on the title page as well

2. Summary of the Article: 1 page minimum,

An article critique should briefly summarize, in your own words, the article research question and how it was addressed in the article. Below are some things to include in your summary.

· Note: the SHORT TITLE in ALL CAPS portion of your running head should also appear on the first page of your paper, but it will NOT include the phrase “Running head:”. Again, see the example paper in the APA6 Manual [Figure 2.1 on page 41]. There are numerous YouTube and Google resources to figure out how to have a different header on the title page (where “Running head:” is present) and other pages in the paper (where “Running head:” is NOT present).

· The same title used on your title page should be at the top of the page on the first actual line of the paper, centered [2.05, and Figure 2.1].

· For this paper, add the word “Summary” below the title as a Level 2 heading [3.03].

· Your summary itself will follow, including the following:

1. Type of study (Was it experimental or correlational? How do you know?)

2. Variables (What were the independent and dependent variables? Be specific with these. Define the terms independent and dependent variable and make sure to identify how they are operationally defined in the article)

3. Method (Was there a random sample of participants? Was there random assignment to groups? What did the participants do in the study?). How was data collected (online, in person, archival data, etc.)

4. Summary of findings (What were their findings?)

5. Note – if the article involved more than one experiment, you can either choose to focus on one of the studies specifically or summarize the general design for all of the studies.

3.

Critique of the study: 1 ½ pages minimum

1. This portion of the article critique assignment focuses on your own thoughts about the content of the article (i.e. your own ideas in your own words). For this section, place a Level 2 heading of, “Critique”.

1. This section is a bit harder, but there are a number of ways to demonstrate critical thinking in your writing. Address at least four of the following elements. You can address more than four, but four is the minimum.

1) In your opinion, how valid and reliable is the study? Why?

a) Make sure to define what reliable and valid mean, and apply these definitions to the study you are critiquing. Merely mentioning that it is valid and reliable is not enough – you have to apply those terms to the article.

2) Did the study authors correctly interpret their findings, or are there any alternative interpretations you can think of?

3) Did the authors of the study employ appropriate ethical safeguards?

4) Briefly describe a follow-up study you might design that builds on the findings of the study you read how the research presented in the article relates to research, articles or material covered in other sections of the course

5) Describe whether you feel the results presented in the article are weaker or stronger than the authors claim (and why); or discuss alternative interpretations of the results (i.e. something not mentioned by the authors) and/or what research might provide a test between the proposed and alternate interpretations

6) Mention additional implications of the findings not mentioned in the article (either theoretical or practical/applied)

7) Identify specific problems in the theory, discussion or empirical research presented in the article and how these problems could be corrected. If the problems you discuss are methodological in nature, then they must be issues that are substantial enough to affect the interpretations of the findings or arguments presented in the article. Furthermore, for methodological problems, you must justify not only why something is problematic but also how it could be resolved and why your proposed solution would be preferable.

8) Describe how/why the method used in the article is either better or worse for addressing a particular issue than other methods

4. Brief summary of the article: One or two paragraphs

· Begin with a Level 2 heading “Brief Summary”, and then begin the brief summary below this [3.03].

· In ONE or TWO paragraphs maximum, summarize the article again, but this time I want it to be very short. In other words, take all of the information that you talked about in the summary portion of this assignment and write it again, but this time in only a few sentences.

· The reason for this section is that I want to make sure you can understand the whole study but that you can also write about it in a shorter paragraph that still emphasizes the main points of the article. Pretend that you are writing your own literature review for a research study, and you need to get the gist of an article that you read that helps support your own research across to your reader. Make sure to cite the original study (the article you are critiquing).

5. References – 1 page

· Provide the reference for the critiqued article in proper APA format [6.25-6.30, and Section 7]

· If you cited other sources during either your critique or summary, reference them as well [Section 6, ‘Citing References in Text’]

6. Grammar and Writing Quality

· Few psychology courses are as writing intensive as Research Methods (especially Research Methods Two next semester!). As such, I want to make sure that you develop writing skills early. This is something that needs special attention; so make sure to proofread your papers carefully.

· Avoid run-on sentences, sentence fragments, spelling errors, and grammar errors. Writing quality will become more important in future papers, but this is where you should start to hone your writing skills.

· We will give you feedback on your papers, but I recommend seeking some help from the FIU writing center to make sure your paper is clear, precise, and covers all needed material. I also recommend asking a few of your group members to read over your paper and make suggestions. You can do the same for them!

The key point is that your critique should describe a “position” that you have taken with respect to the content of the article. Please note that you do not need to refer to any other sources other than the article on which you have chosen to write your paper. However, you are welcome to refer to additional sources if you choose (just be sure to reference what you cite!). Extra resources for tips on writing a Summary and/or Critique are in your Canvas Resources folder.