[Essay Help]: PSYC 3106EL Psychology 11

PSYC 3106EL Psychology 11.

This assignment is designed to train you how to read and analyze the information presented in a standard scientific journal article. As scientists, we gain most of our information through journal articles and NOT textbooks so summarizing and evaluating an article is an important skill to acquire. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me.

Some of the terms and ideas in the article you pick may be unfamiliar to you. To do this assignment you must research what these terms mean and how they fit into the study of evolutionary psychology. Some terms will become clearer as we progress in class, but the ones not covered in class are your responsibility to find out about.

You must find an article from a scientific journal in the area of evolutionary psychology (Journals like Animal Behavior; Evolutionary Psychology). The article cannot be a review and must be an experimental study (not correlational). It must not involve humans. It should be from the last thirty years (i.e. nothing earlier than 1980).

You must read the article and provide a summary of the contents within approximately 8 pages. There is a lot of information to put into 8 pages so you must be clear and precise and learn how to edit your thoughts so you can express them in the least amount of space possible. The various sections you should analyze are as follows:

1) HYPOTHESIS:

What is the authors’ hypothesis? What predictions were they making and why did they make them (how do they relate to evolutionary theory)? Why was this article written and what questions did it try to answer? Why should we care? More specifically – how does this research add to our understanding of evolutionary psychology? What aspect does it attempt to verify/expand on?

2) METHOD:

Outline the GENERAL methods the experimenter used to gather their data. Obviously they decided to investigate the question this way for a reason – Why did they choose to test their hypothesis in this way?

PSYC 3106EL Psychology 11