Psychological Journal Article Summary and Analysis Research Paper

Psychological Journal Article Summary and Analysis - Research Paper Example Another explicit purpose of the study was to compare mere exposure (exposure without a reward) to a no-treatment control condition. The role that this control condition played in the experiment was to provide a baseline for the analysis of child responses when external rewards were presented. The authors were also interested several factors that contribute to the discrepancy between the tendency for rewards to increase acceptance in field studies on one hand, but the tendency of rewards to decrease liking in laboratory studies. Implicit in the design of their study, the researchers attempted to study the type of reward used, the initial liking, and the intended outcome of the study and whether those factors play a role. To accomplish these tasks, the researchers used a cluster-randomized experimental design that arranged over 400 children into four conditions: an exposure plus tangible non-food reward, an exposure plus social reward, an exposure alone, and a no-treatment control grou p. Over 12 days, the children were presented daily with the exposure to a vegetable that children find objectionable in taste. Then, the children from the respective conditions were either given an additional reward or, for those in the control condition, left alone. The results measured from these tests of taste were collected at a one-month and a three-month point after the 12 exposures in order to examine the effects of the exposures on acquisition and maintenance of the taste. This research design was intended to either accept or reject the hypothesis that external rewards have a significant effect on changing children’s tastes for vegetables. The children in the study fell in between the range of 4 and 6 years old and were randomly assigned to their conditions. To test each of the children individually, the researchers used a vegetable that the child rated in the middle of five other vegetables so that there was the potential of learning to enjoy the taste of that middle vegetable. During the intervention period, children were given praise as a reward (in the social reward condition), a sticker (in the tangible non-food condition), or minimal social interaction (in the no exposure condition). Through all of this testing, the researchers discovered that liking for the vegetable increased in the three intervention conditions as compared to the control condition, in which children were not exposed to the vegetable. Within these results, there was no significant difference in liking between each of the exposure conditions (that is, social rewards did not increase liking more than non-food tangible rewards). In terms of timing after the initial study, each of the interventions maintained their difference at a significant level for one month, during the acquisition phase. However, children who were rewarded with external rewards maintained their liking for three months or more during the maintenance phase. Likewise, during this maintenance phase, there w as no significant difference between the social reward and the non-food tangible reward condition in terms of who continued to like the vegetables more. Meanwhile, the effect of the no reward exposure because insignificant by that three month point. In other words, external rewards do not produce negative effects and may actually be useful to