Find the article from which the hypothesis was taken, and investigate how the researchers who did the experiment designed and executed the experi

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The Impact of Emotional vs. Cognitive Focus on Empathy and Altruistic Behavior

Empathy and altruism have been extensively studied in social psychology and neuroscience. Find out what motivates people to help others to make society more caring. This experiment seeks to determine if focusing on the poor affects our ability to help and understand others.

Hypotheses

– H1 (Alternative Hypothesis): Focusing on the feelings of a person in need will lead to greater empathy and more willingness to help compared to focusing on that person's thoughts.

– H0 (Null Hypothesis): There is no significant difference in empathy levels or willingness to help between focusing on a person's feelings versus their thoughts.

Previous research has revealed that empathy requires emotional contagion and comprehension of different perspectives, hence an alternative idea is proposed (Maciejewski, 2020). Participants are more empathic and motivated to help when they focus on feelings.

Experiment design.

This study uses a single-factor experimental design to separate the independent variable into two levels. This study is a single-factor design because it only modifies attentional focus in one condition (Siedlecki, 2020). We can directly compare the two focal cases using this method, which considers additional characteristics.

This structure has various advantages, including Changes to the focus variable affect the dependent variables, proving a cause-and-effect relationship. User-Friendliness: The simple style is easy to analyze and implement. This method eliminates confounding variables more easily than more intricate ones. However, Since the trial is so straightforward, tiny changes in how empathic people act may have been visible (Maciejewski, 2020). Additionally, we cannot study how other factors impact empathy and altruism when they interact with this design.

Independent Variable

This study focuses on two independent variable levels:

1. Focusing on the feelings of a person in need

2. Focusing on the thoughts of a person in need

Changing the independent variable: In the "feelings-focus" condition, participants envision how the main character feels. This task requires students to imagine themselves in the person's shoes and explain their sensations.

The first criterion, "thoughts-focus," requires individuals to envision what the character is thinking. They will visualize and describe the person's mood.

Participants must put themselves in the other person's shoes and draft a short essay about their sentiments or thoughts, depending on how they feel, to ensure the manipulation works.

Dependent Variables

This study will examine two dependent factors:

Empathy levels

Operational definition: Scores on a validated empathy scale, specifically the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) developed by Davis (1983) (Diotaiuti et al., 2021).

Quantification: Empathy scale, overall score (0–100)

Justification: The IRI measures empathy's logical and emotional aspects, making it a trustworthy and popular tool.

The 28-item IRI will be delivered to participants after attention manipulation during execution.

Willingness to help.

specifically, their time spent helping others. Measure available minutes: 0 to 60. Time commitment measures charitable giving more objectively than self-report metrics. Following the IRI, participants will aid the character for up to an hour.

Detailed Procedures

Participant Recruitment:

Recruit in the community and use university topic pools to acquire 200 volunteers, 100 per condition. For practical application, the group should include members of varied ages, genders, and nationalities. Ask whether persons have mental health issues like autism spectrum disorders or clinical depression that could influence their empathy so they can be considered.

Experimental setup

Create comfortable, private workstations in a quiet computer laboratory. Install the necessary applications for presenting stimulus and reaction. Third, make consent papers and debriefing sheets accessible.

Experimental procedure

Starting the project requires meeting with participants and receiving their permission.

Second, randomly divide them into two groups using a computer. One group should focus on thoughts and sentiments, the other on senses.

Provide broad research directions without detailed ideas.

Write and give each person the name of someone who needs help. We promise it will evoke strong emotions without being overdramatic. To demonstrate:

The company reduced back, and 28-year-old single mother Sarah lost her job. Her five-year-old daughter and rent are increasingly difficult to manage. Sarah applies for jobs daily but has not been interviewed. She fears losing her flat and living on the streets.

Deliver condition-specific instructions:

Imagine yourself in Sarah's shoes and feel her emotions. Be aware of her emotions.

Imagine you know what Sarah is thinking right now. This helps you focus on her thinking. Focus on her thoughts and ideas.

Ask the participants to write a 150–200-word paragraph summarizing Sarah's sentiments or thoughts, depending on their mood. This reinforces the focus trick and detects manipulation.

Use the IRI to assess empathy (Kodak & Halbur, 2021). Items should be positioned randomly to avoid order implications.

Ask volunteers to aid Sarah with her tasks. Please provide me a 0-to-60-minute scale with 5-minute steps.

Gather gender, age, and education data to account for confounding factors.

After the study is over, tell participants how essential it was and its true purpose. People emotionally affected by what happened should have several resources.

Thank them and give them course credit or money for your time.

Controlling Extraneous Variables

Multiple phases will account for irrelevant aspects to ensure the experiment's internal validity:

Standardization: Maintain consistency by using a standard script to ensure everyone follows the same steps. Make sure all experimenters are trained to provide consistent service.

Controlling the environment: Experiment in a lab to minimize outside influences. Maintain temperature, lighting, and noise throughout the session.

Randomization: Put people in random situations to spread out disparities. Randomize the empathy scale items to avoid order effects.

Blinding: Avoid researcher bias by using double-blind procedures. No one in the experiment should disclose participants their condition.

Timing: To account for the mood and empathy effects of time of day, all experimental events should occur at the same time (Spector, 2021).

Controlling the stimulus: All participants should employ the same scenario to avoid scenario-related reactions. Only this can prove manipulation is the reason.

Selecting the Right Participants: Ensure no participant has participated in similar psychology studies or has experience with the subject.

Demand Characteristics: – Use a cover story to hide the study's objective to prevent subjects from acting to please the experimenter.

Design Considerations

Although this study is largely between people, it could be interesting to change it to within-subjects or matched groups: concepts overall Making things visible:

Each subject would experience both feelings- and thoughts-focused settings in this investigation. This approach has many advantages: Individual uncertainty boosts statistical power. Fewer people are needed. Allows comparison of people's responses to different focus settings. This presents several challenges including.

Carryover Effects:

To address this, Change the order of occurrences such that half starts with feelings and half with thinking. Leaving a week between events is crucial. Maintain the emotional impact of the scenarios and utilize different ones for each event to reduce memory loss.

Fatigue:

To avoid this, keep each session under 30 minutes, giving subjects time to relax between conditions if they are evaluated in the same session, and consider separating the experiment into two halves.

Habituation:

To address this: Use alternative answer forms for the dependent variables in each scenario (e.g., numerical input vs readiness slider) to solve this problem. Using diverse scenarios for each occasion while maintaining emotional content.

Matched-group design:

A matched-group design pairs individuals by important attributes before placing them in conditions. We can maintain a between-subjects strategy simply while reducing individual disparities using this way (Lijuan, 2023).

Matching factors include Empathy and first impressions. Psychological qualities include neuroticism and agreeability. Gender, age, and education

The matching procedure includes these steps:

Testing key factors with pre-tests

Grouping persons with similar backgrounds using statistical matching methods like propensity score matching.

Third, randomly choosing one member from each couple for each situation.

Matching-group designs are easier to study because they only require one data-collecting session and do not cause tiredness and carryover effects like within-subjects designs.

This design requires more participants than a within-subjects design, which is problematic. — Finding compatible people may be difficult. If matching is poorly managed, bias may result.

Conclusion

This experiment examines how helping others, empathy, and attentiveness are linked. We aim to thoroughly control elements that could affect outcomes and investigate diverse research approaches to get trustworthy data that assist us in understanding empathy and altruism. If this study's findings are accurate, empathy and compassion treatments could improve classroom teaching and conflict resolution.

References

Diotaiuti, P., Valente, G., Mancone, S., Grambone, A., & Chirico, A. (2021). Metric goodness and measurement invariance of the Italian brief version of interpersonal reactivity index: A study with young adults.  Frontiers in Psychology,  12, 773363.

Kodak, T., & Halbur, M. (2021). A tutorial for the design and use of assessment-based instruction in practice.  Behavior analysis in practice,  14, 166-180.

Lijuan, W. (2023). Matched Group Design. In  The ECPH Encyclopedia of Psychology (pp. 1-2). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Maciejewski, M. L. (2020). Quasi-experimental design.  Biostatistics & Epidemiology,  4(1), 38-47.

Siedlecki, S. L. (2020). Understanding descriptive research designs and methods.  Clinical Nurse Specialist,  34(1), 8-12.

Spector, P. E. (2021). Mastering the use of control variables: The hierarchical iterative control (HIC) approach.  Journal of Business and Psychology,  36(5), 737-750.

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