To learn more about the theory-data cycle, look in the textbooks from your other psychology courses for examples of theories. In your introductory psychology book, you might look up the James Lange theory or the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. You could look up Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision, or the stage theory of memory. How do the data presented in your textbook show support for the theory? Does the textbook present any data that do not support the theory? Go to an online news website and find a headline that is reporting the results of a recent study. Read the story, and ask: Has the research in the story been published yet? Does the journalist mention the name of a journal in which the results appeared? Or has the study only been presented at a research conference? Then, use the Internet to find examples of how other journalists have covered the same story. What variation do you notice in their stories? A few years ago, psychologist Stanley Coren wrote a Psychology Today blog post titled “The Data Says ‘Don’t Hug the Dog!’” This blog post was later covered by multiple press outlets, including National Public Radio. Why do you think this story proved so popular? Read Coren’s blog post and find out (Coren, 2016). Was the original study he reports on peer-reviewed? What do you think of the data he describes? Do any of the media outlets that picked up this story use the word prove in their headlines?
To learn more about the theory – data cycle, look in the textbooks from your other…
To learn more about the theory-data cycle, look in the textbooks from your other psychology courses for examples of theories. In your introductory psychology book, you might look...
