Table 1

Helping Students Understand the Article

Section

 Tips, Comments, Rough Translations,  and Problem Areas

Title

Subjective self-awareness: one’s attention being focused on the environment or on the task being performed so that the person is unaware of the self.

Abstract

Actual-ideal discrepancies: gaps that a person notices between how that person should be and how the person actually is.

Self-discrepancies: same as actual-ideal discrepancies (defined above).

Independent of mood: the participants’ moods did not cause the effect.

Ecological validity: extent to which the results apply to real world situations; could be considered an aspect of external validity (external validity dealing with generalizing to both most people as well as to real life situations, with ecological validity dealing only with generalizing to real life situations); thought to be boosted when the research setting is similar to a naturalistic settings

Render: make

Introduction: Beginning

Objective self-awareness: person is focusing on themselves and judging themselves; the opposite of subjective self-awareness (defined earlier [under “Title”]).

Introduction: Why Do People Seek Dramatic Experience?

Genres: types (e.g., comedy, drama, mystery)

Attributed: credited  to; thought to be created by

Purges: gets rid of an unpleasant thing or feeling

Socialization: learning how society expects you to act

Alleviate: lessen

Hedonic: focusing on pleasure

Aversive: unpleasant

States of gratification: happy; a pleasant or pleasurable state

Introduction: The Theory of Self-Awareness

1^st paragraph

Mutually exclusive: when one occurs, the other can’t

Oscillate: go back and forth

2^nd paragraph

state self-awareness: how aware one is of oneself at a particular moment; different from trait self-consciousness which is one’s general tendency toward self-awareness

explicit measure: measure that involves directly asking participants about what you are trying to measure (e.g., “Are you now self-aware?”). An implicit measure, on the other hand, would be more indirect (e.g., assessing self-awareness by asking participants about their mood—using decreases in mood as an indirect indication of increases in self-awareness).

Note that, to make the case that a variable has an effect, researchers like to be able to point to producing the effect using more than one manipulation of that variable.

OSA: objective self awareness; being aware of oneself (defined in the “Introduction: Beginning section).

3^rd  paragraph

Aforementioned: previously stated

Induce: cause

SSA: subjective self-awareness

Last sentence: much research has looked at effects of things that make one more self-aware, but little research has looked the effects of things that make one less self-aware.

4^th paragraph

“….bask in reflected glory”: An example of this would be if a person felt better because “my team won.”

Introduction: Past Research on Television Viewing and Positive Self-Feelings

1^st paragraph

Ubiquitous: common; seeming to be everywhere

Explanatory power: ability to make cause-effect statement

2^nd paragraph

Confound: make it difficult to determine the cause and effect relationship

Study 1

Results and Discussion

1^st paragraph

Cronbach’s a; Cronbach’s alpha: an index (that can range from 0 to 1) of the degree to which there is consistency between how participants answer one question on the measure with how the participant will answer other questions on the measure (see page 104). A high alpha (above .80) indicates that the subtest is internally consistent: people agreeing with one item on a subtest item tend to agree with other items on that same subtest.

2^nd paragraph

If a person had 10 mismatches and 0 matches, that person’s score would be 20 ([2*10] – 0 = 20]). If, on the other hand, a person had 5 mismatches and 10 mismatches, that person’s score would be 0 ([2*5] – 10 = 0]).

3^rd paragraph

The authors could have analyzed their study as a simple experiment because they had two groups and randomly assigned participants to condition. Indeed, the second analysis reported in this paragraph is the same analysis one would use with a simple experiment. The condition (TV or control) X measure (pretest or posttest) interaction is the result of an analysis typical of a mixed design. The hypothesis would have had stronger support had that interaction (which would indicate that the TV group changed more from pretest to posttest than the control group did) been statistically significant.

4^th paragraph

r=.05, ns: The correlation was very close to zero and thus not significant (ns)

Study 2

Ecologically valid setting: a situation that closely resembled a real life situation

Results and Discussion

See Comments for Study 1 Results and Discussion

Study 3

Salient: obvious; easy to notice; hard to ignore

OSA: objective self-awareness (defined earlier)

SSA: subjective self-awareness (defined earlier)

Method

Note that one (of several) problems of having a no-treatment control condition is that is often difficult to keep experimenters blind about such a control condition. For a more complete understanding of the problems caused by no-treatment control conditions, see pages 262-263 and 299-303 in Research design explained.

Bogus: fake

Percentile ranking: where one stands relative to 100 other people who took the same test; the higher one’s percentile ranking, the better one scores relative to the others who took the test.

Results and Discussion

The researchers did not do a conventional, overall ANOVA. Instead, the researchers used planned comparisons. Their first planned comparison was to see whether total amount of television watching was a linear function of the favorableness of the feedback  That is, the researchers wanted to know whether time spent watch television increased steadily as they went from giving unfavorable feedback to giving no feedback to giving favorable feedback (for more about how to actually do such an analysis, see page 543 of Research design explained). The other planned comparisons are just t tests to compare one group against another group.

General Discussion

Devoid of collectivist values: not valuing the group; not believing in the importance of values such as respecting tradition, honoring parents, and having loyalty to the group.