Table 1

Helping Students Understand the Article

Section

 Tips, Comments, and Problem Areas

Abstract

Excluded: left out

Decrements:  decreases

Impairment of attention regulation: failing to control attention, such as failing to pay attention to a message in one ear while ignoring a message presented in the other ear.

Dichotic listening procedure: participant wear headphones through which one message is sent to one ear and another message is sent to another ear. Participants are asked to pay attention to the message going into one ear (e.g., the left ear) and ignore the message going into the other ear.

Disinclined: unwilling

Introduction: Beginning

1^st paragraph

entail: involve

2^nd paragraph

ascribe: believe that they have; give credit for

3^rd paragraph

ostracized: excluded, rejected, banished.

pathology: disease, abnormality.

4^th paragraph

lethargic passivity: sluggish and tending to go along with others’ ideas rather than coming up with one’s own course of action

Introduction: page 590

1^st paragraph

The idea that social rejection à emotional distressà behavioral problems has not been supported because (a) many studies fail to find that social rejection à emotional distress

and

(b) even studies that show that social rejectionà emotional distress

do not find that

emotional distressà bad behavior.

2^nd paragraph

 cognitions: thoughts

4^th paragraph:

executive control: making conscious decisions

impairments: weaknesses,  limitations

deficits:  problems; less of something than there  should be

5^th paragraph

failing to delay gratification: not being able to wait for a reward

6^th paragraph

inimical: opposed to, inconsistent with, unfavorable to

decrements: decreases

7^th paragraph

implicit: unspoken, not stated

8^th paragraph

accommodating: adjusting, changing behavior to meet others’ needs

9^th paragraph

compensated: rewarded

The paragraph discusses two models:

(a)   rejection à unwilling to self-regulate à self-regulation failure

(b)   rejectionàunable  to self-regulate à self-regulation failure

Introduction: page 591

Might Rejection Facilitate Self-Regulation?

A priori: before the fact, ahead of time

Note  that the authors increase interest in findings by saying that there is reason to expect that rejection might hurt self-regulation, but there is also reason to expect the opposite result—that rejection helps self-regulation.

Note also that, because the authors can’t base their predictions on theory, the authors base their predictions on past research findings.

The Present Research

Impair: hurt, harm

Converging: from different methods but supporting the same conclusion

Bogus: false

Next to last paragraph

Experiments 5 and 6 tried to find out whether the self-regulation deficits following social rejection were due to people being (a) unable to self-regulate or (b) unwilling to self-regulate.

 Last paragraph

They wanted to test whether

Social rejection -à bad mood -à self-regulation failure

Experiment 1

trajectory: path, course

ostensibly: supposedly

Results supporting the view that mood causes self-regulation failure

Results supporting the view that social rejection, not mood, causes self-regulation failure

Modest financial inducement that was to be proportional to the amount drunk: in this case, 5 cents for every ounce consumed.

Extrinsic incentives: rewards such as money that come from outside the person

Method

 Short demographic questionnaire: a form asking questions about things such as the participant’s age, gender, and racial background. Note that the demographic questionnaire helped the authors get the data included in the Participants subsection.

Next to last paragraph

Ascertain: determine

Veridicality: truthfulness, accuracy,  reality

Results and Discussion.

Note that the planned comparisons were t tests. They were able to do t tests because they had predicted those differences in advance. However, many statisticians would still have preferred that the authors use post hoc tests.

Note that they reported a measure of effect size (Cohen’s d, which they abbreviated d). The ds are large. Note, however, that, in this case,  it might have been more effective to simply state that people were consuming more than 3 times as much in the future belonging condition than in the future alone condition. Note that, given that you know the t value and the df, you can compute the ds very easily by using the formula on page 275 of Research design explained.

Note also that, even though ANOVA assumes that the variances (and hence the standard deviations) in each group are the same, the ANOVA was still considered valid even though the standard deviation in the alone group was more than 2.4 times smaller than the SD in the other two groups (and the variance of the alone group was more than 7 times smaller than the variance  of the future belonging group). 

Mood mediation information (2^nd full paragraph of page 593)

One way to think about mediation is that you have three dominos: the experimental variable (belongingess), the possible mediator (mood), and the dependent variable (self-regulation). If mood is the mediator, knocking down the belongingness domino, should knock over the mood domino, which should then knock over the self-regulation domino. Furthermore, if mood is a mediator, there will be two other consequences. First, if we remove, lock in place, or otherwise control the mood domino, knocking over the belongingness domino will not coincide with the self-regulation domino moving. Second, if we remove, lock in place, or otherwise control the belongingness domino, knocking over the mood domino will still move the self-regulation domino. Below, we see how the authors tested these two consequences—and the results of those tests.

1. If the effect of belongingness on self-regulation is indirect (belongingness affects mood, which in turn, affects self-regulation), if we control for mood (thereby testing for a direct effect of belongingness), should have no relationship to self-regulation. However, when the authors controlled for mood, they found a relatively strong relationship between belongingness and self-regulation. Thus, mood does not mediate the belongingness-self-regulation relationship.
2.  If bad mood is what causes poor self-regulation, that relationship should exist, even when the authors controlled for experimental condition. However, when the authors controlled for experimental condition, there was no mood-self-regulation research.

Experiment 2

Converging: from different methods but supporting the same conclusion

Results and Discussion

1^st paragraph

The authors used an F test (analysis of variance) rather than a t test. For the two-group situation, the tests are essentially the same (Indeed, F = t²). Had they done a t test, the results would have been t (37) = 2.81, p < .01.

The d is a measure of effect size (see page 275 of Research design explained). Note that, given that you know the t value and the df, you can compute the ds by using the formula on page 275 of Research design explained (your d will be closer to .93 than to .98).

4^th paragraph

Note that they used a t test here, whereas in the first paragraph, they used an F test. Had they used an F test, they would have reported it as F(1,37) = 2.22, p <.15.

r(18)= .24, ns: The correlation (the Pearson r) between the two variables was .24 (positive but small) and not significant.

5^th paragraph

For more on mediation, see the notes on mediation for Experiment 1 (they are in the last section of our discussion of Experiment 1)

7^th paragraph

Note that the authors explain the value of expanding the simple experiment to include three groups (a topic discussed in Chapter 10 of Research design explained).