It has been said that laughter is the best medicine, but can ...

[jace]

It has been said that laughter is the best medicine, but can research really substantiate or discredit this assertion? Imagine that you have been hired to find out if laughter is an effective treatment for the common cold. As you describe your experimental design, address the following questions: What are your independent and dependent variables? How will you operationally define your variables? Who will participate in your research, and how will you select them?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

A friend of yours claims that psychology isn't a science. Explain why your friend is wrong by relating the scientific goals of psychological research to the research methods that psychologists use.
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[dawsa925]

Answer to Question 1

ANSWER:
In a research study, laughter could be the independent variable, and the dependent variable would be cold symptoms. The laughter would be operationally defined as auditory chuckles, and we would measure the duration of the chuckles as well as the frequency. Cold symptoms would be operationally defined as coughing and sneezing. We would measure the frequency of both. We would randomly select three doctors from the Midwest. During winter, we would randomly pick twenty-four patients from each doctor. A third would be assigned to the experimental group, a third to the placebo group, and a third to the control group. The experimental group would be shown humorous cartoons and sitcoms. The placebo group would be shown a film of two monkeys playing catch with a plastic carp. The control group would not be shown anything. The study would last two weeks, and participants would be monitored for the cold symptoms. If laughter were an effective medicine, we would expect to see a statistically significant decrease in the frequency of sneezing and coughing in the participants in the experimental group when compared to the participants in both the placebo and control groups.

Answer to Question 2

ANSWER:
Psychology is a science in the sense that researchers in psychology strive to achieve four goals just like scientists in other fields, namely: (1) to describe phenomena, (2) to make predictions about phenomena, (3) to provide control over important variables associated with the phenomena, and thereby (4) to explain how and why the phenomena occur. To achieve these goals, psychologists, like scientists in other fields, employ a variety of research methods. To describe and predict aspects of the phenomena under investigation, psychologists employ (1) naturalistic observation, (2) case studies, and (3) surveys. To control and explain the phenomena, psychologists use (4) experiments, including quasi-experiments, to demonstrate cause-effect relationships among specific variables.