SONA Research Task PDF

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Sona Research Task Description - Psych1001
• explain why you believe the research was valuable and worth doing. (the field of psychology and society more broadly).
• real-world applications of the research– i.e. how it could help people and society....

Description

SONA Research Task  

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explain why you believe the research was valuable and worth doing. (the field of psychology and society more broadly). You may want to consider points such as the way in which the study adds to understanding in a particular field of psychology and the real-world applications of the research– i.e. how it could help people and society. Demonstrate a genuine attempt to address the question, by explaining the real-world applications of the study, and/or how it contributes to knowledge in a particular field of psychology

In the SONA computer-based experiment, participants explore how humans engage in inhibitory learning which is done by developing a relationship between cues and outcomes to provide a judgement on said cue. This research is valuable to our everyday lives as learning about inhibitory associations between events allows individuals to formulate predictions about the future, hence necessitating successful adaptive functioning. This study provides insight to social and developmental psychology by explaining how we understand negative relationships between events and how beliefs about casual relationships between events affect learning. An example of a real-world application is when strategies associated with the inhibitory learning model are used during exposure therapy for anxiety, creating nonthreat associations like reduced fear and limiting distractions. The experiment also deduced that humans adjust their decision-making and learning when inhibitory associations fail which can be seen when deciding if the combination of bread and carrots cause an allergic reaction, with previous findings indicating bread alone caused an allergic reaction. Experiments like these could help improve the efficacy of exposure-based anxiety treatments and aid patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which exemplifies the value of this study.

Real world implications of this research: In our daily lives, the ability to learn about inhibitory associations between events is necessary for successful functioning as it allows us to formulate predictions about the future. Accordingly, it is likewise important to be able to adjust this learning when it fails to serve us. For example, use of safety behaviours during exposure therapy for anxiety, where the safety behaviour is associated with reduced fear, permits a return of fear if they cannot be performed in the future. Increased insight regarding processes relating to inhibitory learning could thus aid in improving the efficacy of exposure-based anxiety treatments. What are the research questions? The study aims to explore how humans engage in a type of learning, known as inhibitory learning, where the presence of a cue predicts the absence of an outcome. While this learning is important for adaptive functioning, it remains unclear how we come to understand negative relationships between events. E.g., does learning about negative associations simply function in an opposite manner to learning about positive associations? The current study aims to investigate this issue as well as explore how one’s beliefs about causal relationships between events may affect learning....