Purpose of Paper I: Study One Literature Review
1). Psychological Purpose
This paper serves several purposes, the first of which is helping you gain insight into research papers in psychology. As this may be your first time reading and writing papers in psychology, one goal of Paper I is to give you insight into what goes into such papers. This study one-literature review paper will help you a). better understand the psychology topic chosen for the semester (Primacy Effect), b). learn about the various sections of an empirical research report by reading five peer-reviewed articles (that is, articles that have a Title Page, Abstract, Literature Review, Methods Section, Results Section, and References Page), and c). use information gathered from research articles in psychology to help support your hypotheses for your first study this semester (Primacy Effect). Of course, you will be doing a second literature review later in the semester (for study two), so think about Paper I as the first segment of your semester long paper. I highly recommend looking at the example paper to see what is expected.
In this current paper (Paper I), you will read five research articles, summarizing what the authors did and found, and using that information to help support your Primacy Effect study hypotheses. IMPORTANT: Yes you need five references, but note that you can spend a lot of time (a page or two!) summarizing one reference but only a sentence or two summarizing others. Thus spend more time on the more relevant articles!
For Paper I, start the paper broadly and then narrow your focus (think about the hourglass example provided in the lecture). My suggestion is to give a brief overview of your paper topic in your opening paragraph, hinting at the research variables that you plan to look at for study one. Your next paragraphs will review prior research (that is, the five references required for this paper). Make sure that you draw connections between these references rather than just listing them. Use smooth transitions between paragraphs, and build a case that supports your study predictions. Your final paragraphs will use the research you just summarized to support your research hypothesis. And yes, that means you MUST include your study one predictions in Paper I (which we provided in the researcher instructions and the debriefing statement. Use those predictions! They go at the end of your Paper I). A good hint is to look at the literature reviews on the articles that you are using as references as you write your own paper! See what those authors did in their literature reviews, and mimic their literature review style. Keep in mind that Paper I you will end with your hypothesis (and your references) rather than moving directly into your study methods. However, in Paper II, you will pick the topic up again and discuss your study methods, results, and discussion. Paper I thus merely leads up to your study one.
2). APA Formatting Purpose
The second purpose of Paper I: Study One Literature Review is to teach you proper American Psychological Association (APA) formatting. In the instructions below, I will tell you how to format your paper using APA style. There are a lot of very specific requirements in APA papers, so pay attention to the instructions below as well as your APA Formatting powerpoint presentation! Keep in mind that methods at FIU uses the 7th edition of the APA formatting manual.
3). Writing Purpose
Finally, Paper I is intended to help you grow as a writer. Few psychology classes give you the chance to write papers and receive feedback. This class will! We will give you extensive feedback on your first few papers in terms of content, spelling, and grammar. You will even be able to revise aspects of Paper I and include that content in future papers (notably Papers III). My hope is that you eventually craft a final paper that could be submitted to an empirical journal. Thus write your paper for readers who are familiar with APA style and methods, but note that they may not know much about your specific study topic. Your job is to educate them on the topic (Primacy Effect) and make sure they understand how your study design advances the field of psychology. In other words, your reader will be knowledgeable about research methodology, just not your specific topic. Teach them about your topic, not methods.
In fact, your papers in this class might be graded by another professor at FIU and not your instructor/ lab assistant. Thus write your Paper I for that “other” reader – a person who may know NOTHING about your topic and your specific study but is familiar with the mechanics of APA formatted papers and research methodology.
Note #1: The plagiarism limit for Paper I is 30%. This excludes any overlap your paper might have with regard to citations, references, and hypotheses. Make sure your paper falls under 30% (or 35% if including your predictions). Also note that when you upload your paper to Canvas, Canvas does a plagiarism check through turn-it-in.com. If you submit your paper early (before others submit), your score might be low. But if you happen to resubmit an updated version, your score might go up, sometimes dramatically. This is actually common. The later you submit, the more papers your submission is compared to, which might seem to inflate your plagiarism score. Don’t be alarmed, but feel free to reach out to your instructor if it concerns you.
Note #2: I am looking for 2.5 pages minimum for Paper I (around 850 words), including your study predictions (2 pages without predictions, or around 650 words), but that is the bare minimum. If it is only 2 pages, it better be really, really good (as I don’t think I could write Paper I in less than three pages and do the research topic justice, so aim for 3 to 4 pages).
Note #3: Because the study topic changes each semester, I revise these paper instructions each semester. You might see some text in blue. I do that because it is easier for me to make sure I update that specific information. Unless otherwise noted, just ignore the blue color itself.
Instructions for Paper I: Study One Literature Review Instructions (Worth 20 Points)
Students: Below are lengthy instructions on how to write your study one literature review. There is also a checklist document in Canvas, which I HIGHLY recommend you print out and “check off” before submitting your paper (Your graders are sticklers for APA format, so make sure it is correct! We mark off if you have a misplaced “&” or fail to italicize something that needs italics, so carefully review all of your work and use the checklist! It WILL help you get a good grade). Also look at the example paper in Canvas. It will show you what we expect. We use the 7th Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association for all paper formatting in this class (though note that we adhere to the professional APA paper formatting, not the separate student formatting version also present in the APA publication manual).
Yes, the information below is long, boring, and detailed. I know. I got bored writing them! While I am sorry for the length, you will appreciate the detail as you write your paper. Taking ten minutes to thoroughly read these instructions will save you lost points in the future, so it is well worth the effort.
1. Title Page: I expect the following format.
a. You must have a header and page number on each page of your paper. This header will be identical on all pages (though the page number will increase)
i. If you don’t know how to insert headers, ask your instructor or watch this very helpful video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZTCN6yOgSg
ii. The header goes at the top of the paper.
1. Use “Insert Headers” or click on the top of the page to open the header. Alternatively, click anywhere at the top of the page and it should open the headers.
2. Your header title is simply a shortened version of your original paper title. You can pull out a few words or a phrase from the title or create a new header title altogether. Just make sure it is in ALL CAPS. This short header should be no more than 50 characters including spaces and punctuation
a. Note: The phrase “Running head” is no longer used with the 7th edition of the APA publication manual. Do not put that phrase in the header
3. Insert a page number as well. The header is flush left, but the page number is flush right. The page number for the title page is … 1!
4. This same header will appear on every page of your document, including the title page.
iii. Want an example header? Look at the title page of these instructions! You can use any title you want depending on your own preferences (For example, imagine I use the title, “My First Impression Is She’s A Bad Apple: The Primacy Effect in Social Media” on my title page. I can use a short version of this for the header title: FIRST IMPRESSION).
b. Your Title itself should be three or four lines below the margin at the top of the page. Again, see my “Title” page on the first page of this current document as an example of the placement, but for your title you must come up with a title that helps describe your study one. Do NOT put “Paper One” or a variation of “Literature Review” for your title. Rather, think about the titles you saw in PsycInfo. Titles need to let the reader know what YOUR paper involves, so make your title descriptive.
i. Your title must also be in bold text. Make sure that every word with four or more letters starts with a capital letter. You can use lower-case letters for words like “and”, “with”, “the”, but in general start each title word with a capital letter.
c. Your name (First and Last) and the name of your institution (FIU) are beneath the title. For this class, your own name (and ONLY your name) will go on this paper.
i. You can also refer to the APA Format powerpoint for guidance, though I suggest looking at the example papers, too. There is one from a prior student in this course and one based on a document provided by the APA. Both have comments and notes to direct you toward correct formatting.
ii. Your name is placed two spaces below the title.
d. Your Title Page will be on page 1
e. Double space everything! This includes all title page information
2. Abstract?
a. You DO NOT need an abstract for Paper I. In fact, because your abstract needs to summarize your study results, you cannot write it until you run your studies. So omit the abstract until you get to Paper V.
3. Literature Review Section
a. First page of your literature review (Page 2)
i. Make sure you have the same information in the header that you have on the title page (short title and page number). Of course, page 2 should have the number 2 in the header for the page number. (You are currently reading page six of these instructions, so you can see the number 6 in the header, since it is the sixth page).
ii. The original title of your paper from the title page is repeated on the first line of page two, centered. It is IDENTICAL to the title on your title page, including the bold font type. Just copy and paste it from your title page!
iii. The beginning text for your paper follows on the very next line.
b. Citations for the literature review
i. Your paper must cite a minimum of five (5) empirical research articles that are based on studies conducted in psychology. That is, each of the five citations must have a literature review, a methods section, a results section, a conclusion/discussion, and references.
1. For Paper I, you MUST use at least three of the articles provided in the Canvas folder. You can actually use four if you like, but only three are required. For your fifth article, you must find a new one on your own (using PsycInfo). There are some other conditions for this fifth article that you must follow:
a. First, and to reiterate, remember that the fifth article cannot be any of those found in the Canvas folder.
b. Second, for your fifth article, it can be based on a wide variety of topics, including priming studies, studies on the primacy effect (with or without a social media angle), studies on social media (with or without a primacy effect emphasis), studies on impression formation, studies on order effects, traits, etc.
i. Trust me, there are TONS of topics that can use in your paper. Just make sure it is relevant to your study. It doesn’t even have to be about the primacy effect, so use your best judgment and get creative.
c. Finally, you can have more than five references if you want, but you must have a minimum of five references.
ii. Proper citations must be made in the paper – give credit where credit is due, and don’t make claims that cannot be validated. For citations (in-text referrals to other study authors), make sure you:
1. avoid using author first names, initials, or the title of the article the author(s) wrote
2. include the last name of the author followed by the date of publication. If there is one author, use that author’s name every time you cite. If there are two authors, use both author names every time you cite. If there are three or more authors, use the last name of the first author every time you cite followed by the phrase et al. to replace other authors.
a. One author example:
i. “According to Piper (2020) …”
ii. “The author found XYZ (Piper, 2020).”
b. Two authors example:
i. “According to Piper and Holmes (2020) …”
ii. “The authors found XYZ (Piper & Holmes, 2020).”
c. Three + authors example:
i. “According to Piper et al. (2020) …”
ii. “The authors found XYZ (Piper et al., 2020).”
d. An author you did not personally read, but was cited by an author that you did read example (note that below, you read Evans, not Piper, but you want to note what Piper found):
i. “Piper et al. (2020, as cited by Evans, 2021) found that …”
iii. If you use a direct quote, make sure to provide a page number for where you found that quote when citing the article, but do not directly quote too often. In fact, you cannot have more than two direct quotes for Paper I. If you do, you will lose “writing quality” points. Zero direct quotes would actually be better. I would like you to paraphrase when possible instead.
1. I prefer paraphrasing, but still cite even when you paraphrase.
2. If you need help with paraphrasing or writing, there are lots of resources available to you at FIU, including the writing center and the center for academic success. Visit their websites for more info:
a. Center for Academic Success: https://cfas.fiu.edu/
b. Center for Excellence in Writing: https://case.fiu.edu/writingcenter/
c. Requirements for the information in your literature review
i. Your study one literature review should use prior research as a starting point, narrowing down the main theme of your specific project – think about the hourglass example from the APA Formatting Lecture.
ii. The last part of your literature review should narrow down even further to focus onto your own study, eventually ending in your study hypotheses. However, DO NOT go into specific details about your methods. You will talk about your specific methods in Paper II in a few weeks.
1. Again, to be clear, at the end of your paper you MUST provide your specific predictions/hypotheses (See the last page of these instructions).
iii. The literature review must have a minimum of two (2) full pages of text NOT INCLUDING THE HYPOTHESES (2.5 pages if you include the hypotheses, or around 850 words). If your paper is only two pages, it better be really, really good. I don’t think I could do this paper topic justice in fewer than three pages, so if your paper isn’t at least three pages, I doubt it will get a good grade. The maximum for the literature review is five pages. Two to five pages gives you some flexibility. With the predictions, title page, and the reference page, I expect a minimum of 4.5 pages to a maximum of 7.5 pages, but good papers will be around 6 pages.
4. References
a. The References section starts on its own page, with the word References centered and in bold. Use proper APA format in this section (or lose points!)
b. All five references that you cited in the literature review must be in this section (if you cited more than five articles, then there should be more than five references, which is fine in this paper). Remember, at least three references must come from the Canvas article folder, one can come from either Canvas or library resources (PsycInfo), while the last one cannot come from Canvas. Only peer-reviewed articles are allowed (no books, journals, websites, or other secondary resources are allowed for paper one).
c. For references, make sure you:
i. use alphabetical ordering (start with the last name of the first author)
ii. use the authors’ last names but only the initials of their first/middle name
iii. give the date in parentheses – e.g. (2020).
iv. italicize the name of the journal article
v. give the volume number, also in italics
vi. give the page numbers (not italicized) for articles
vii. provide the doi (digital object identifier) if present (not italicized)
5. Writing Quality
a. This includes proper grammar and spelling. I recommend getting feedback on your paper from the Pearson Writer program prior uploading it on Canvas or going to the Writing Center at FIU for some proofreading help.
The above information is required for your paper, but I wanted to give you some hints/tips about writing your literature review. Students often struggle with this first paper, but hopefully this will give you some good directions:
· First, remember that you need 5 references, all of which MUST be peer-reviewed (three from the Canvas folder and one or two that you find on your own using PsycInfo). You can even check mark the “peer-reviewed” option in PsycInfo to guarantee you get peer-reviewed articles!
· Second, I don’t expect a lengthy discussion for each and every article that you cite. You might spend a page talking about Article A and a sentence or two on Article B. The amount of time you spend describing an article should be proportional to how important that article is in helping you defend your hypotheses. If a prior study looks a lot like your study, I would expect you to spend more time discussing it. If an article you read simply supports a general idea that ties into your study, you can easily mention it in a sentence or two without delving into a lot of detail. Tell a good story in your literature review, but only go into detail about plot elements that have a direct bearing on your study! Again, look at the literature review articles that you are citing. How did those authors set up their literature reviews, and how did they summarize the studies they read for their literature reviews? Want a valuable hint? Look at their in-text citations, too. Sometimes they cite four different studies in the same sentence. You can do the same, as long as the citations have the same general information. That is four citations taken care of all on a single sentence! One more to go!
· Third, this paper is all about supporting your hypotheses. Know what your hypotheses are BEFORE you write your paper, as it will help you determine how much time to spend on each article you are citing. My suggestion is to spend some time describing the nature of the primacy effect (Define it. Discuss the origins of the theory by Solomon Asch), and then talk about studies that looked at this area. Use those studies to help you defend your own study hypothesis. That is, “Since they found X in this prior study, that helps support the hypothesis in my study”. Hint: For your study, the dependent variables are important. I didn’t just make them up out of thin air. They actually replicate some of the DVs used in prior studies (and some of those studies are included in the Canvas articles you will cite). So, a good hint here is to discuss how prior studies used and measured the same DVs you are looking at!
o Do you remember your hypotheses? Okay, I’ll be really helpful here. BELOW are your study hypotheses. Use your literature review to support these hypotheses! Just remember that the rest of your paper needs to be at least two full pages NOT INCLUDING the hypotheses below.
In general, we predict that participants who read a list of traits describing a Facebook user that starts positively but ends negatively will rate the user more positively than participants who read a word list that starts negatively but ends positively, with those who read a mixed order falling between these extremes.
More specifically, participants in the positive-trait first condition will more strongly agree that a Facebook user is generous, happy, good-natured, humorous, sociable, talkative, imaginative, likeable, pleasant, agreeable, caring, and kind and more strongly agree that she is a good person and have a positive impression of her than participants in the negative-trait first condition, with those who read a mixed order word list falling between these extremes.
o For Paper I, I suggest keeping the full hypothesis as listed above. However, feel free to edit the predictions as you see fit. For example, the above hypothesis focuses on several different dependent variables, but you can shorten it to focus on dependent variables that you know YOU will analyze in your Paper II. That is, you could write the following as an alternative that only focuses on two specific dependent variables:
▪ More specifically, participants in the positive-trait first condition will more strongly agree that a Facebook user is good-natured and likeable than participants in the negative-trait first condition, with those who read a mixed order word list falling between these extremes.
· Fourth, make sure to proofread, proofread, proofread! I recommend using the Pearson Writer for help, but note that their suggestions are just that – suggestions. It is up to you to make sure the flow of your paper is easy to understand. You can download a free 90 day trial of the Pearson writer at https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/products-services-teaching/learning-engagement-tools/pearson-writer.html
· Fifth, look at the supporting documents for this paper. There is a checklist, a grade rubric, and an example paper. All will give you more information about what we are specifically looking for as well as a visual example of how to put your papers together.
· Finally, note that you have a lot of help available to you. You can go to the Research Methods Help Center (which is staffed by research methods instructors and teaching assistants). You can go to the Writing Center in the Green Library (at MMC) and get help with writing quality or get online Writing Center help. You can attend workshops from the Center for Academic success (CfAS) focusing on APA formatting, paraphrasing, and statistics. Your instructor might even be willing to give you extra credit for using these resources, so make sure to ask your instructor about it.
