Cabrillo College Library  

Psychology Dept. homepage

Assignment # 1

Find journal articles

Get a copy if it's not fulltext online

Cite your articles

The fun stuff

1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
2. Click on Internet Links
3. Select Psychology. Under Course-Related Materials, click on PSYCH 2
4. Make this page a Favorite. Towards the top of your screen, click on then on Add. Whenever you want to come back to this page during this class session, you can find it easily by clicking on (I may have already done this for you -- click on Favorites to see!)

Assignment #1: Folk Theory

Here are four pairs of conflicting folk theories

1. Absence makes the heart grow fonder    vs.    Out of sign, out of mind

2. Many hands make light work    vs.    Too many cooks spoil the broth

3. Birds of a feather flock together    vs.    Opposites attract

4. You're never too old to learn    vs.    You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Choose ONE of the conflicting theories and provide:

a. A description, in your own words, of what the folk theory means

b. Formulate a hypothesis that allows you to test some aspect of the theory

c. Based on your description and hypothesis, come up with some key terms that you can use to search for scientific articles that have explored the topic

d. Find one empirical article that is relevant to your hypothesis. Preferably, the article supports or refutes your prediction

f. Provide a reference in APA format for the article that you cite in your summary.

Open up a Word document so that you can begin writing a draft of this Assignment. Put your name on it.

Using your Word document, do steps a. through c.

When you formulate your hypothesis (Step b), think like a psychologist! Think how you might devise an experiment to test your hypothesis.

Once you have an hypothesis, generate a list of key terms -- words that you can use to search for that scientific article on your topic.

One of the examples your instructor gave you dealt with "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Here's what that student wrote:

The underlying theory addresses the issue of loss and subsequent desire; when an individual experiences the loss of a possession, he or she will acquire an increased longing for that particular possession simply because of its deficiency. With respect to this particular theory, I hypothesize that those individuals who are deprived of a desirable food will experience an increased craving for that food compared to those who have regular access.

What are some keywords that could be used from this to find a scientific article?

deprivation || loss || craving || desirable food (chocolate!) || food habits

When you get to step d. Find one empirical article... you will want to use periodicals databases. Here's how you do that:

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage 
   
2. Click on Full Text Articles  (second icon down on left)
   
3. The next screen has a list of the databases available to you. Academic Search Premier is listed under Social Sciences. Click to bring it up. [If you are coming in from off campus, you get access using your library card number.]  Academic Search Premier provides information about articles published in approximately 8,030 periodicals; for 4,500 of those periodicals, full text copies of the articles are available online.
   
4. Click to go to the Advanced Search mode, where you can enter more than one variable.

Type in search terms. You may have to try several different ways of expressing the same idea. Play around. You will also want to limit to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.

You will also want to click to limit the search to full text and scholarly journals:

Here are the results list from that search:

Click on the article title to get full information about it. You can click to print, email, even cite the article!

You can also print out the article for free in the classroom today-- we allow free printing while you are with your class doing research for up to 20 or so pages per student.

Other databases that might be useful

• Psychology and Behavioral Sciences -- Go to the Library homepage, click on Full Text Articles, and select it under Social Sciences. It works the same as Academic Search Premier.
  
  
• MEDLINE Go to Library homepage, click on Full Text Articles, and select it under Health & Medicine. Be sure to limit your search to full text. (MEDLINE is the world's largest database for Medicine. If you don't limit to full text, you'll retrieve a lot of articles that are not available to you full text.)

APA Style for Citing Articles (and other materials, including electronic resources)
Style guides are available on the Library's Internet Links page, e.g., Using APA Format, from Purdue University.

Here's a basic explanation of how to write an APA formatted citation for a journal article from an online periodicals database:

• Check to see if the journal is at UCSC.  If it is, you can go to UCSC and photocopy the article.
• It won't work for this assignment (there won't be enough time), but just so that you know -- You can request  that our library obtain a copy for you using Interlibrary Loan.  Read about Interlibrary Loan Services.  Place Interlibrary Loan requests at the Reference/Instruction Desk in the Library.

The Fun Stuff

These resources don't apply especially to PSYCH 2 -- but I think you'll probably want to know about them.

• Blinkx is a place for all kinds of good quality videos. Not YouTube quality. Good quality. See if you can find a video about the psychology of markets (certainly a hot topic these days!).
• MediaScrape  provides access to news from all over the world. Often in English. Really. Can you find news stories out of Kenya about conditions there today?
• Electronic books Cabrillo College library has about 18,000 electronic books now. Across all topics. Good academic titles. To get to them -- 1) Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage http://libwww.cabrillo.edu. 2) Click on Full Text Articles. 3) Under General (top left) click on Net Library E-Books. If you are coming in from off campus, just type in your library card number and you're there!
• GoogleBooks lets you search inside of books! Search for some specific topic, or use the name of someone somewhat famous, or just type in "research methods in psychology" to try it out. Not all the books are available cover to cover, but millions of them are! This is a growing, fabulous resource.
• For maps and satellite views, go to maps.google.com and type in an address. Choose Aerial view. Wow!
• Google Maps Type in your address. Go to satellite and/or hybrid view.
• Google Scholar When Google crawls the Web and thinks it has run across a journal article (there's an algorithm to detect that there is a volume number, page numbers, etc.), then it throws what it finds into Google Scholar. Millions of articles. Not all available full text, but a growing, wonderful resource.

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage    <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
2. Click on Internet Links
3. Click on Psychology, then on Course-Related Materials
4. Click on PSYCH 2

D. Douglass and T. N. Smalley  last rev. 9/09