Question

Suppose you are planning a research study in which you intend to manipulate the participants’ mood; that is, you plan to create a group of happy people and a group of sad people. For example, one group will spend the first 10 minutes of the experiment listening to upbeat, happy music, and the other group will listen to funeral dirges.

a. (LO 2) Do you consider the manipulation of people’s moods to be an ethical violation of the principle of no harm? Explain why or why not.

b. (LO 2) Would you tell your participants about the mood manipulation as part of the informed consent process before they begin the study? Explain why or why not.

C. (LO 2) Assuming that you decided to use deception and not tell your participants that their moods are being manipulated, how would you justify this procedure to an IRB? What could you do to minimize the negative effects of manipulating people’s moods (especially the negative mood group)?

Answer 1

Do you consider the manipulation of people’s moods to be an ethical violation of the principle of no harm? Explain why or why not.

Yes, consider it as ethical violation because I am a deceiving them by not telling the real reason. The participants should know about the research so they can give their best to research.

Would you tell your participants about the mood manipulation as part of the informed consent process before they begin the study? Explain why or why not.

Yes, I would tell them because in research deceiving participants is a violation of research ethics. So it would be good to tell them all so they can contribute their best in the research

Assuming that you decided to use deception and not tell your participants that their moods are being manipulated, how would you justify this procedure to an IRB? What could you do to minimize the negative effects of manipulating people’s moods (especially the negative mood group)?

This is what you can do to minimize or manipulate IRB

Explain what an experiment is and recognize examples of studies that are experiments and studies that are not experiments.

Explain what internal validity is and why experiments are considered to be high in internal validity.

Explain what external validity is and evaluate studies in terms of their external validity.

Distinguish between the manipulation of the independent variable and control of extraneous variables and explain the importance of each.

Recognize examples of confounding variables and explain how they affect the internal validity of a study.