Influence of Fragrances on Human Psychophysiological Activity: With Special Reference to Human Electroencephalographic Response

In
this paper, the authors must have conducted a study that included both
1) a behavioral dependent measure (and/or a cognitive or affective
dependent measure evaluating mental processes) and 2)
neurological dependent measure such as EEG, PET, or some type of
measuring of proteins or genes in a brain region. AND 3) the paper you
select must be different from any other paper you are presenting on in
this course, or any other course. Again, the concept of behavior
and/or cognition or affective functioning (e.g., mental processes)
should be defined by one of the dependent variables in your selected
research paper. For example, you will select a study where a drug or
some other manipulation is investigated to determine its effects on
behavior, thinking, and/or feeling. The article should also have some
direct measure in the brain (e.g., anatomy or functioning). Advice:
select an article that you understand or will be able to understand
after spending the time working through the research methods and
results. You want to challenge yourself and grow as a critical thinker,
but you do not want an article so complicated that it is too difficult
to summarize concisely. You need to demonstrate your understanding in
the summary. Similarly, do not choose an article that is overly
simplistic and lacking data figures (e.g., tables and graphs) for you to
interpret. 

Choose
an article where the researchers are directly collecting data from
humans or animals. Do not choose a review article, meta-analysis or a
systematic review. This will be difficult for you to summarize
appropriately for the purposes of this course and does not meet the
criteria of the assignment.

The remaining portion of this handout is the companion to the “Written Assignment ## Template to Fill in for Research Article Summary”
document posted in Bb. This handout explains what to include in the
summary; you will download the template from Bb and type your summary
directly into it. Your summary must be in your own words, do not copy and paste any information from anywhere. 

When
reading a research article, you will notice a specific format is used.
The Introduction begins with broad concepts and then narrows such that
it ends with purposes or hypotheses for the study about to be described.
The Method and Results are specific to the study described. The
Discussion begins with comments about the study that was conducted and
then broadens to put the study into a larger context. 

On
the accompanying assignment template, fill out the following
information in the space indicated (also be sure to refer to the grading
rubric for additional details, including specific information on the
minimum number of articles to cite in each section of the template and
the minimum number of experimental measures evaluated/reported in your
study):

2a. APA Style Reference of the selected article:
In APA style; the instructions for putting the source information into
APA style are in Bb. Be sure to provide the DOI link that goes directly
to the article.

Yes, I want the full reference for the article at the beginning of the summary so that I know what article you are summarizing. 

Information
from the reference is important to have at the start of the summary for
several reasons. First, in the behavioral sciences, we tend to refer to
sources by the authors rather than the specific title of the article.
Second, the year of publication puts the information into context. Note
that, unlike some disciplines, we do not give priority to the most
recent (at the expense of earlier) publications. Third, the title of the
article provides the key concepts and proposed relationship(s) between
concepts that will be addressed by the article. And, fourth, the journal
in which the article is published suggests the audience for which the
article is written as well as the quality and/or complexity of the
published work. These details may not seem relevant to you at first
since you are not familiar with authors, concepts, or journals; however,
they will take on relevance as the semester progresses and you start to
see the names of some authors appear again and again for some topics. 

Confirm
in Section 2b and 2c of the template that the article you selected is
an original research article and that it includes a behavioral measure.
Describe in point for how you know it is an original research article,
so that I know that you know. Similarly, write how you know that the
study includes either a behavioral, cognitive, or affective measure. As
an example, tell me the authors used the social interaction test to
measure how much time a rat spends with a novel rat as a measure of
behavior. Or write that the authors measured reaction time in a driving
test as a behavioral measure. Another example is if the authors measured
the number of items recalled in a memory task as a cognitive measure. 
If you are not sure which of the measures in the study is a behavior,
cognitive, or affective measure, select a different article. 

When you read your journal article at the very start you should find an abstract. The abstract should help guide you through the article but is NOT to be summarized or included in the summary.

3a. Introduction (may or may not be labeled as such in the article)

The
Introduction lays out the rationale for the study. In Expository
Writing terms, this is where the author(s) make their arguments for the
value of the study. 

• Provide
  a general background on the research topic. Why is this topic
  important? What are gaps in the literature that are important to
  understand. You will need to read other papers and cite other research
  articles and sources outside of your selected article to answer this. 
  This should lead into the next part, which is answering “What is the
  purpose of the article?” What are the issues/problems in the literature
  that the study attempts to address? Simply state, “The purpose of this article is to …”*
• What are the research questions or hypotheses the author(s) seek to address with the study? These should be listed.
• Refer
  to the grading rubric for guidance on how many outside primary research
  articles you should cite in the introduction section for full marks
  (these should be different from those cited in the Critique section).

* 
Note that my use of italics throughout this handout is to indicate how
you might say something. These do not indicate that I am quoting from an
article or that you should quote other. Indeed, you should summarize
information in your own words. 

3b. Method 

Note:
If an article describes multiple studies, organize the sections as they
are organized in the article. Typically, an article with multiple
studies presents the Method and Results for Study 1, then the Method and
Results for Study 2, and so on. If this is true of your article, create
a subheading for each study and group the Method with the Results for
each.

• How many participants/animals were included? What are the characteristics of the participants/animals? 
• What are the key variables that were manipulated/measured? How were they manipulated/measured (e.g., “Pain was manipulated by asking participants to put their feet in a bucket of ice water”; “Pain was measured by asking participants to rate their pain experience on a visual analogue pain scale”)
• What were the general procedures used? For example,

                                                                         “Participants completed a set of questionnaires. 

  
                                                                     
“Participants were then randomly assigned to the math challenge or
speech task  

        “Blood pressure was measured and saliva samples were taken to determine cortisol levels”

The
methods section is addressing the who/what, when, where, and how
questions of the study. Anyone should be able to read this section and
have a good idea of how the study was conducted, without needing to
refer to the original research article. 

3c. Results

The
Results section is typically the most difficult part to read and
understand for people who have not taken advanced statistics courses
and/or are new to this kind of reading. Although you are a novice, you
need to read this section.  

• Copy
  and paste the hypotheses/research questions you outlined in the
  Introduction section of the summary (the ones you wrote in your own
  words). After each, provide the corresponding result for each of the
  measures reported in your methods section. Use words to describe the
  results and conclusions, not statistical symbols and numbers. 

3d. Discussion

Most good authors restate the results in clear terms at the start of the Discussion section. Do not repeat the results in your summary of the Discussion section. What you need to include from this section are:

• Limitations
  to the study that were stated by the author(s) (Do not suggest your own
  ideas about limitations here; only state what is included in the
  Discussion section). 
• How the findings from the study contribute to what we know (as discussed by the author(s).
• Applications
  (how the results might be directly applied to the real world) or
  implications (what these results might mean in other situations)
  suggested by the author(s)).

3e. Critique

This
is where you get to discuss your thoughts about the article. This
should include what you believe are the strengths of the study and/or
contributions of the study as well as critical comments. Critical
comments might include, for example, ideas for how to improve the study,
suggestions for applications/implications of the findings, concerns
about the author’s(s’) interpretations of the results. Your positive
comments should not
indicate that you agree with the author(s) because the findings are
similar to your own (anecdotal) experiences, and your critical comments
should not focus on the style of writing (yes, these articles are
difficult to read; however, this is not an appropriate criticism of the
article).  Be sure to summarize how the results add to the knowledge
base of the research area, especially in the context of the questions
and hypotheses and how this research study does (or does not) fit into
the literature. This is the part of the summary where you need to
cite additional sources (using APA format) to show synthesis and
integration of the topic within the wider literature of your selected
article/topic. Refer to the grading rubric
for guidance on how many outside primary research articles you should
cite in the Critique section for full marks (these should be different
from those cited in the Introduction section).

Essentially, I want to see evidence that you are consulting outside sources
(cite additional research papers in your summary outside of your
selected article and provide the references in its own separate
Reference section using APA format) and thinking deeply about the research and this field.
Consider how the paper you are summarizing used a particular method,
how does that compare to how other scientists have used the same
method/test/questionnaire? Are there different (or even better) measures
or ways to test the questions that were done in the study? What are the
strengths weaknesses of the tests used? No test/experiment/technique is
perfect. You will need to read up on the methods/techniques used in
your selected paper so that you can provide an appropriate critique of
the paper. 

For
example, if you are summarizing an article that used surveys – are the
surveys valid and reliable? Would there be better ones to use? What are
the other options and the differences? If you summarize animal research
and the animals went through behavioral tests (and same for humans), are
those tests good? What do they measure? What do they not measure? For
example, in my lab we are using mouse touchscreens (like playing video
games) to evaluate cognition. The animals in the experimental group are
not performing well compared to control animals. I could simply say
these animals have a cognitive deficit….however, when they make a
correct choice in the experiment, they get a milkshake treat. Maybe
these mice are able to do the learning task…maybe they just don’t like
milkshake because there taste receptors are different…or maybe they
just don’t find rewards as rewarding as other animals because they are
anhedonic (depressive-like). Therefore, they are just not motivated to
do the task. Maybe there is something disrupted in their motor
abilities, and they can’t do the task due to a motor, rather than a
cognitive impairment. See what I mean? If I don’t test for those ideas,
these would be critiques that could be made about my study. These are
other ways to interpret the data. If I did include those controls,
someone could critique my study and say I included the experiments to
make sure those potential confounds were evaluated and why that is
important for the interpretation of my findings.

Some
of those questions about motivation and motor abilities I came up with
all on my own. But mostly, I read up on the touchscreen technique to
understand the limitations of the technique (and so in my summary I
would state these ideas and cite those papers in my critique).  

Related
to that, I mentioned controls – are the controls in the study you are
summarizing appropriate? Are there additional controls that could be
added to try to mitigate confounds in the study design?