Stress, Health & Disease - IBP Year 2 - Workgroup notes

Workgroup 1: Stress & Health in the media: myths and science

- During this workgroup, we discussed assignment 1.

- Peer review refers to the assessment of a specific study by other researchers.

Peer review helps to improve the quality of your scientific article.

- The most important source of information that students should use is articles; which are peer reviewed.

- During this workgroup, we watched two web lectures, which you can re-view via BlackBoard.

- When we say ‘scientific’, we mean that the information was peer reviewed.   

- The database of psychological studies is complicated since different researchers may use different terminology to refer to the very same process/phenomenon. 

- The database is becoming bigger and bigger.

- Literature search is an important academic skill.

- A keyword profileis a composite literature search that can be used as a key to unlock a certain area of psychology: We can make use of many different terms in order to find studies onto a certain phenomenon in the database we are using.

- Keyword profiles should be published in all reviews and research reports. Others researchers can make use of these.

- Keyword profiles are indispensable in anarchistic databases such as that of psychology.

- How do we build a good key profile?

acne   

acne AND stress* (searches for both)

acne AND (stress* OR “negative emotion” OR “negative affect” OR anger OR angr*) (in this way you search for synonyms of ‘stress’ as well.)

- Useful trunctation:

“ = used to make the database search for the whole term as its mentioned; instead of every individual word.

* = used to make the database search for all similar words; When we search for anxi*; the database searches for anxi-ous, anxi-ety, et cetera.

- How do we find these synonyms/keywords? We can use thesaurus.com, synonym lists, or explore the literature.

- We should not use Google Scholar as an information source; it is not reliable enough. Instead, we should use Web of Science.

- We also should not use any research that was published more than 10 years ago.

- Mind that you should only use peer-reviewed articles.

Workgroup 2: Presentations and Different Types of Research

- During this workgroup, we did our presentations and got feedback on them.

- Different types of research:

--> Prospective research; measures a cohort of people for a longer period of time. It is difficult to get participants and it is expensive. It is however a reliable kind of study. There are few ethical considerations.

->- Retrospective research reports about what happened at some point back in time. However, people are often biased when talking about their past experiences: People often remember things differently or not at all; the latter leading to missing data. It is however a cheap and quick way of research. 

--> Cross-sectional research looks at one particular moment in time. It is not very reliable, since people tend to change.

--> Experimental designs look for a causal relationship and measure this by manipulating circumstances per group. However, groups generally do not differ on just one factor. It is important to add a control group.

--> Correlational research does not tell anything about a causal relationship; only about a connection. 

Workgroup 3: Group meetings

- During this week, each subgroup met up with the workgroup teacher to discuss their report and presentation.

Workgroup 4 & 5: Presentations

- In these workgroups, we held our updated and improved presentations about subject that have to deal with stress.

- We had to use our knowledge about the creation of a keyword profile in order to come up with good results in our literature search on Web of Science.

- In the presentations, we presented our keyword profile, the papers we picked out and concluded about our research questions.

Workgroup 6: Reviewing assignment 6

- During this workgroup, we reviewed assignment 6. For this assignment, we had to follow a mobile or online intervention program on a daily basis for at least a week. Afterwards, we reported about our experiences and whether we thought the intervention program led to a decrease in stress.

- In this workgroup, we discussed and shared our experiences with each other. We came up with personal opinions about the effectiveness of each of the programs.