LAB ASSIGNMENT #1: Using PsychInfo & Reading Articles from Psychology Journals

Goal of Assignment: To give the student experience in locating articles using PsychInfo and to acquaint them with “primary sources” (i.e., journal articles) in the field of psychology. PsychInfo is the tool that psychologists use to find articles about the most recent research in the field. You can access PsychInfo by going to the Knox College Library Web Page and clicking on “FirstSearch.” This will give you a list of databases that you can use, and PsychInfo is one of them.

1. Successfully do an author search on PsychInfo.

Use PsychInfo to find out if there have been any articles published during the last 10 years by someone who has the same last name as you do. If possible, find an article by an author with the same first and last name as yours. Provide the complete reference information (Author name, year, title of article, name of journal, volume number, page numbers) from the article using the following format:

Knoxstudent, J. M. (1996). Why do people fantasize about killing their professors? Journal of General Psychology, 46, 88-97.

The format of this reference is according to the style of the publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA Format) and it will be the format for references used in every psychology paper that you write in every psychology course at Knox College.

After providing the reference information, summarize what the article is about in one or two sentences. You can get this information directly from the abstract of the article as it appears on the PsychInfo computer screen; you DO NOT need to actually track down a copy of this article. If you cannot find any articles by someone who shares your last name, give the reference information for someone whose name is as alphabetically close to yours as possible.

2. Successfully search for an article based on its subject matter or topic.

Use PsychInfo to locate an article on a topic that interests you, and make sure that it is an article that can be found in a journal that is in the Knox College Libraries.

Some sample topics might include gender differences in aggression, motivation of athletes, eating disorders, stress experienced by college students, divorce, dreams, or just about anything else you might imagine.

Provide reference information for this article using the same format listed above, and actually find the article in the Knox Library. Most psychology journals will be found in the SMC library, but some are located in the Seymour Library. Read the article as carefully as you can; this will be very difficult going for most of you, as these articles are written by psychologists for other psychologists to read and they are not easy to get through without a lot of practice. To the best of your ability, answer the following questions:

1. What problem is the article trying to solve? What questions does it hope to answer?

2. Is the article a theoretical/review article, an experiment, a correlational study, or something else?

3. If it was an experiment, what were the independent and dependent variables? If it was a correlational study, what types of variables were being studied?

4. What types of animals or people were being studied?

5. Were statistics used to analyze data in the study?

6. What were the major conclusions drawn at the end of the article?

Use your own words when answering these questions - do not copy directly from the journal, but summarize and paraphrase to condense a lot of information into a small space.