Semantic Conditioning

Assignment: Semantic Conditioning Semantic conditioning is a form of respondent conditioning. The project consists of developing materials for a simple experiment in semantic conditioning and writing a relatively brief research report describing your results and conclusions. Follow these steps to do the project: 1. Read Chapter 3: Respondent (Classical, Pavlovian) Conditioning of Reflexive Behavior in the Martin and Pear (2015) textbook and the articles on attitudinal conditioning list below. This will give you an idea of what is involved in conditioning attitudes and can be used in the research report. a) Early, C. J. (1968). Attitude learning in children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 59(3), 176-180. b) Moore, L. P., Moore, J. W., & Hauck, W. E. (1982). Conditioning children’s attitudes toward alcohol, smoking and drugs. The Journal of Experimental Education, 50(3), 154-158. c) Stuart, E. W., Shimp, T. A., & Engle, R. W. (1990). Classical conditioning of negative attitudes. In NA—Advances in consumer research, 17, eds. M. E. Goldberg, G. Gorn, & R. W. Pollay, pp. 536-540. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. 2. Decide which attitude you would like to condition for which sets of words. You will be conditioning both negative and positive attitudes towards two types of word stimuli. For example, a student might choose to condition positive attitudes towards ancient Egyptian words (e.g., pharaoh, pyramid, Cleopatra, Nile) and negative attitudes toward furniture words (e.g., chair, sofa, table, lamp). You also need two other categories for control words. For the example here, you might choose house-style words (condo, two-story, split-level, and bungalow) and dairy-product words (e.g., milk, cheese, yogourt, and cream). Do not use any of the categories provided for this example; you must come up with your own categories and words. The words to be conditioned are called CS words because they are designed to function as conditioned stimuli. They will be paired with positive and negative US (unconditioned stimulus) words. Choose CS words and CS categories that do not have strong emotional responses already attached to them. For example, do not choose insects as a CS-word category, because many people have pre-existing negative attitudes toward insects. You must come up with 16 words in all, which will be divided into four different categories. The CS words in one of the categories will be paired with positive words (e.g., good) and the CS words in another category will be paired with negative words (e.g., bad). The words in a third category will be paired with neutral words (e.g., pencil), and the words in the fourth category will not be paired with any words but will appear on the pretest and post-test. Here is a sample of the words and word pairs a student might use: CS positive words CS negative words neutral words control words pharaoh chair condo nail pyramid sofa two-story screw Cleopatra table split-level staple Nile lamp bungalow paper clip 3. Make a pretest and a post-test. Order the words on both the pretest and the post-test in a random sequence, and use a different random sequence on the pretest and post-test. If you used the above words, your pretest and post-test word sequence might read like the one below. Remember, you may not use this sample as your pretest and post-test. You must generate your own word categories, words, and randomly-sequenced pretest and post-test. Pretest word order: Post-test word order: 1. pyramid 1. paper clip 2. bungalow 2. condo 3. paper clip 3. staple 4. table 4. nail 5. chair 5. lamp 6. Cleopatra 6. chair 7. pharaoh 7. Nile 8. staple 8. sofa 9. split-level 9. pharaoh 10. sofa 10. split-level 11. lamp 11. bungalow 12. nail 12. Cleopatra 13. screw 13. screw 14. condo 14. two-story 15. Nile 15. table 16. two-story 16. pyramid 4. After you have selected your word categories and words, you can select positive, negative, and neutral words to pair with your CS-words as well as control words. It is a good idea to select the words good and bad as US words because they are basic, widely agreed-upon positive and negative emotional words. In some cases you will want to select a US that goes with a particular CS word. For example, in the items below clever was selected to accompany Cleopatra, because this combination is more natural than Cleopatra – happy, for example. Here is a sample set of words paired with the positive and negative US words, good and bad. As you can see above, the positive US words here are good, wonderful, beautiful, and excellent, whereas the negative US words are bad, horrible, evil, and infection. In your own sample, you may use good and bad, but you may not use the other US words above. Positive CS-US pairs Negative CS-US pairs Neutral NS-NS pairs Control words pharaoh – good chair – bad condo – sidewalk nail pyramid – wonderful sofa – horrible two-story – paper screw Cleopatra – clever table – evil split-level – pen staple Nile – excellent lamp – infection bungalow – plate paper clip 5. Get twelve 3″ x 5″ or 4″ x 6″ index cards. Put one CS or NS word on one side and the associated US (or NS) word on the other side of each card. Include a check mark on the front side of each card to help you avoid confusion about which side is the front and which is the back. Your task will be easier if you write the word on the reverse side upside down relative to the front side so that when you turn the card over to show it to your participant, the word will appear right side up. So, in our sample set of words we have the following: Card # Front side Back side 1 pharaoh good 2 pyramid wonderful 3 Cleopatra clever 4 Nile excellent 5 chair bad 6 sofa horrible 7 table evil 8 lamp infection 9 condo sidewalk 10 two-story paper 11 split-level pen 12 bungalow plate 6. With all your materials prepared you are ready to go. Do the following: a. Find a participant who is willing to participate in your project. Do not discuss the nature and purpose of the experiment with your participant other than to inform him or her that that participation will involve an easy task in word association and remembering that should take approximately 45 minutes. b. Select a quiet setting for the experiment where you and the participant will not be disturbed. c. Give the participant the pretest, in which you have included your words in random order. After the participant has completed the pretest, look it over to make sure none of the 16 items on the pretest has been skipped. d. Shuffle your deck of index cards (12 words). Tell the participant: “I am going to read 12 word pairs to you. Your job is to remember the second word in the pair when given the first word. First, though, I will read all the word pairs to you three times so that you will begin to associate the words.” e. Read each of the word cards aloud to the participant, starting with the front side and then turning the card over and reading the word on the opposite side before moving on to the next card. When you have read all 12 cards (front and back), reshuffle the 12 cards and repeat the process two more times (three times total). f. Tell your participant: “Now I am going to show you a word, and your task is to say the word paired with it. If you cannot remember the word within three seconds, I will show you the word. When I show you the word, please read it out loud.” g. Reshuffle your deck of cards and go through it as you did in step f, with the modification indicated in step g. h. Repeat step g three times or until your participant correctly recalls all 12 word pairs. i. Give the participant the post-test. After the participant has completed the post-test, look it over to make sure none of the 16 items on the post-test has been skipped. 7. After you have collected the data, explain the nature and purpose of the research to the participant again. Verbally (briefly) describe the findings of previous work in conditioning attitudes to the participant. Ask the participant if he or she has any questions, and answer those questions, to enable the participant to learn about attitudinal conditioning. If the participant is concerned about what the data may reveal about himself or herself, reassure him or her that the purpose of the research is to assess the influence of word associations, which is a human characteristic but not a personal characteristic. 8. At this point you will have finished collecting data, and you can tabulate the results. Your main focus will be the change in the scores from the pretest to the post-test. For each of the 16 items on the pretest and the post-test, compute the change score by subtracting the pretest score from the posttest score. Then add the four individual change scores in each of the four categories (i.e., positive conditioning, negative conditioning, neutral stimulus control, and no-treatment control) and divide by four to get a mean change score value for each category. If the positive conditioning procedure was effective, the pretest-post-test change score should be negative. If the negative conditioning procedure was effective, the pretest-post-test change score should be positive. However, you also need to compare the change scores to the two control conditions. What if, for example, the no-treatment condition or the neutral-stimulus condition has a negative change score just like the positive conditioning condition? You will have to make some judgments about the experimental effects based on the relative change scores across the four conditions. 9. Note that this experiment is a simple one: it uses only one participant and applies no statistical analysis to the data. In interpreting the data and writing up your results, however, you should assume that positive and negative relative change scores are real experimental effects. This is not formally true, but this assumption will allow you experience handling data. 10. Write up an empirical research report, using APA Style. 11. A sample empirical research report is attached. The paper requires i) a title page, ii) an abstract, iii) an introduction, iv) a method section, a v) results and discussion section, a set of vi) references, and vii) at least one figure. 12. The introduction of the report requires at least 8 references to applicable scholarly literature. 1. 2. And 3 of the references used will be as noted in 1 a) b) and c). 4. The fourth reference should be Behaviour Modification What it is is and How to do it by Garry Martin and Joseph Pear, 10th Edition 5. 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th (remaining 4 references) need to be primary references. The articles must be research journal articles, not textbooks or other books, Web-page articles, Wikipedia, or other non-academic sources. The 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th references should come from the following sources ONLY: o Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis o Behavior and Social Issues o Perspectives on Behavior Science (formerly The Behavior Analyst) o Behavior Analysis in Practice o Journal of Organizational Behavior Management o Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice o Brazilian Journal of Behavior Analysis o EAHB Bulletin o European Journal of Behavior Analysis o Japanese Journal of Behavior Analysis o Journal of Behavioral Education o The Journal of Early and Intensive Behavior Intervention o Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior o The Psychological Record o The Analysis of Verbal Behavior o Mexican Journal of Behavior Analysis o Behavioral Interventions o Behavioural Processes o Behaviour Research and Therapy o Behavior Modification o Speech and Language Pathology and Applied Behavior Analysis DO NOT use any primary sources other than found in any of the above journals for the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th references 13. The report must be written in APA style. Deviations from APA style will result in deductions from your grade. 14. Your paper should be about 10 pages (double spaced) including the title page, abstract, references, and figure(s). Please include your pretest, post-test, and participant consent for as appendices to the report. These will not count towards as the 10 required pages, however. Reports shorter than 10 pages (2000-2500 words) will be not be graded. Evaluation Criteria Your report will be graded using the following criteria: o Proper use of references: 10% o Clarity of writing: 20% o APA Style: 30% o Grammar, spelling: 15% o Logic of assertions and conclusions: 25% Numbers 1-7 above has already been completed. The instructions is to start at #8 – the part of the empirical research report part.