Applying Psychology – Magazine article
Part 1
Write a magazine article that reports the findings of a journal article in more accessible language to the public
Word Limit: 800
Task
Increasingly, psychologists (both in academic and non-academic contexts) are required to demonstrate their work has “impact” on the world and communicate their work to a wider audience. This contact with research may inspire various audiences to find out more or make changes to the way they do things. This wider communication typically takes a different form than what is common among scientists themselves.
Your task is to write a magazine article, reporting the main findings of a journal article, in a digestible form for a non-expert audience. You will be writing for the news section of sciencemag.org. N.B. There are also full journal articles published in this magazine, this is not what you are required to write. You can access this magazine online (although you will only be able to see a couple of news articles at a time before you hit a pay wall). However, some news articles are available online through the library and there are many hard copies of Science on floor 1 of the Templeton library. Read a few of these news items to get a feel for the style of these articles.
Choose one of the following journal articles (all available on Moodle):
Abbot-Smith, K., Nurmsoo, E., Croll, R., Ferguson, H., & Forrester, M. (2015). How 2;6-year-olds tailor verbal expressions to interlocutor informational needs. Journal of Child Language, 1-15.
Calogero, R. M. (2013). Objects don’t object: Evidence that self-objectification disrupts women’s social activism. Psychological Science, 24, 312-318.
Etchells, D., Brooks, J., & Johnston, R. (2016). Evidence for view-invariant Face Recognition Units in unfamiliar face learning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Greenaway, K., Cichocka, A., van Veelen, R., Likki, T., & Branscombe, N. (2014). Feeling hopeful inspires support for social equality. Political Psychology, 37, 89-107.
Vasquez, E. A., Pedersen, W. C., Bushman, B. J., Kelley, N. J., Demeestere, P., & Miller, N. (2013). Lashing out after stewing over public insults: The effect of public provocation and rumination on triggered displaced aggression. Aggressive Behaviour, 39, 13-29.
4. Applying Psychology – intervention proposal
Write an intervention proposal demonstrating you can apply psychological findings and theory to applied problems
Word Limit: 1,200 excluding title page and references (less is often appropriate)
Task
One of the goals of this module is to allow you to apply your acquired psychological skills and knowledge to real problems/situations you may encounter in your future career. Often, this will require you to make a proposal to others to convince them of your approach to solving the problem (in order to secure funding or your manager’s support).
In this component of the portfolio, your task is to choose one of the vignettes provided and propose a solution based on a sound theoretical rationale (with supporting literature). In order to measure the effects of your intervention, you should also come up with a testable method of demonstrating the effects.
Your proposed intervention should be feasible, achievable and strongly supported by background research.
This assignment should be presented in APA format and will resemble the proposal you wrote last year (SP529). However, you are not proposing an experiment, you are proposing an intervention to a problem based on already existing theory/findings. You should include a cover sheet, an abstract, an introduction (which ends in a prediction or a hypothesis), proposed methods, (a discussion if you feel this is applicable), and a reference section. A discussion section may be applicable if you have more than one approach. You could suggest the other as a follow-up option if the first is not found to be effective. This is not required in most cases. My main advice is to keep things simple. To gain high marks it is always better to write more about less. This means spending your words backing up one or two main points rather than skirting over several things in superficial detail. Don’t worry if the marker would approach the problem in a different way. Generally, there will be many ways to approach a problem. If you have made a strong case which is thoroughly supported by the literature, and you have used supporting evidence beyond what was presented in the lecture you will gain good marks.
No expected results section is required and no explicit discussion of statistics is expected. You need to state how you will test your intervention (i.e. which measures you would use) but you do not need to get into the statistics you will use. A statement such as “it is expected that the intervention will lead to significantly fewer instances of…” is sufficient, for example. However, if you feel you need to refer to specific statistics to make your point clear then feel free to do so.
No timetable or costs are required, however, do make sure your proposed intervention won’t cost an exorbitant amount of money and will be deliverable within a reasonable time frame (this links to the feasibility and achievability of the proposal mentioned previously). You are not expected to lay out a full plan of treatment (if your chosen vignette could be interpreted that way). Even if you were offering genuine therapy to a client, you would not have all the sessions planned out in advance. You’d have an idea of what might work and apply this to the situation that emerges over your work. This is exactly what is being asked of you here, which theories seem to apply and why do you think they would be helpful?
You are being asked to prepare a piece of work that you have not exactly done before. Since this is the case, the markers will not punish you for including something that is (in their opinion) in the wrong section or for small presentation errors that occur because this work is unusual. Write this as you would write a research proposal and don’t get too stressed out about the layout. The key for this part of the portfolio is that you identify useful findings for your chosen problem and use them to design a well thought-out intervention. Conflicting theory could help you include critical analysis of your intervention. Stick to APA if in doubt and concentrate on presenting your content as clearly as you can.
5. Social justice and morality – Essay
Question: “Why and how do people moralize everyday issues? Choose an example issue and discuss how various psychological processes contribute to the moralization of that issue. Reflect on some of the consequences of moralization for individuals, groups, and societies.”
