Media Project – Nature Walks

This particular research study, titled “Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation”, discussed an experiment that was conducted to see if walking through nature was better for one’s overall mental health than walking through urban areas.  39 healthy participants were given a rumination self-report, or a Reflection Rumination Questionnaire (RRQ), in which they answered questions regarding their perceived level of rumination.  Rumination is a state of deep, often negative thought and can sometimes lead to anxiety and stress.  Participants also had a brain scan, in which activity in the brain, specifically in the sgPFC, is examined.  That area of the brain is known to show more activity during this type of negative, self-reflective thought and behavioral changes that occur during rumination.  After recording the participants’ rumination levels, they were each randomly assigned to either go on a 90-minute walk through nature or a 90-minute walk through a busy urban area.  Phones were given to each participant to make sure they stayed on the path and actually walked the whole 90 minutes.  Immediately after each participants’ walk they were given the Reflection Rumination Questionnaire again and went through the brain scan.  Results based on the Reflection Rumination Questionnaire showed that those who went on the nature walk showed a decrease in self-reported rumination.  For the sgPFC scan, participants who walked through nature showed a decrease in blood flow, a sign of relaxation and a sign of a decrease in sgPFC activity.  Those who walked in the urban areas did not have a decrease in blood flow.  These findings could possibly mean that living in urban areas could be a contributing factor to mental illnesses.  On the other hand, walking through and constantly seeing nature can be very beneficial for anxiety and other mental issues.  The lesson to be taken away from this experiment is that it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the house and go to your local park every now and then.  In fact, it would be very beneficial for your overall metal health.

 

Summarizing this article was not too challenging for me.  Although, it did require some thinking and problem-solving skills to make a decision of what information to leave out.  Throughout the article, I noticed that a lot of the results from the experiment were repeated and said in different ways.  I could have done the same thing, but I thought clearly stating the final results of the experiment once would be enough in order to process the outcome of the study.  I decided to add the process and the preparation  for the experiment to get a better idea of what the researchers were specifically looking for and testing for.  I also thought it was important, although a minor detail, to say that the participants were all relatively young and healthy.  This fact makes the results of the study even more impressive.  Despite the healthy state of the participants, the area in which you walk through affected them greatly.  Now that there’s scientific evidence supporting a more nature-centered lifestyle and that being around nature helps with mental health, hopefully more schools and parents will implement nature walks and time spent outside into their children’s lives.  Having to summarize this article into my own words has been slightly challenging at times, but overall, I think the summary represents the article very well.  This process also made me grateful for and impressed by the real professional journalists who summarize articles and research findings everyday into a form the public can understand and relate to.


Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 


Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694

 

 

 

Media Production Project

Does Sleep Deprivation Increase Susceptibility to False Memories?

Can one be more susceptible to false memory formation due to the lack of sleep?

Steven J. Frenda a psychological scientist, along with his colleagues, at the University of California, Irvine conducted a study on whether or not sleep deprivation increases susceptibility to false memory formation. Two experiments were conducted to reach their results and conclusions on this question.

In experiment one, one hundred and ninety-three undergraduate student’s self-logged the number of hours they slept per night, Frenda and colleagues posed that getting 5 hours of sleep or less was associated with forming false memories. In the beginning, students completed a questionnaire that described a plane crash and had been told that video footage of this crash was widely seen all over social media. The main question participants were asked was if they had seen “video footage of the plane crashing taken by one of the witnesses on the grown.” Experiment one’s misinformation task was that photos and audio of a crime scene were shown to participants and then asked questions about them.

The findings from experiment one needed further confirmation but broadly suggested that less sleep is related to memory suggestibility. Researchers wanted to further understand when during the formation of false memories did restricted sleep have an effect. Researchers were also curious about retrieval of memories and if restricted sleep was the one to blame for that. With these things in mind, they conducted experiment two. Here, the researchers had four main groups with their independent variable being sleep. Participants were either told to immediately sleep or stay awake then take the questionnaire in the morning or take the questionnaire then sleep or stay awake.

The researchers found that students that had read the narratives, viewed the photos and took the memory test after staying up all night were more likely to form false memories and report false details from the text narrative. On the other hand, students who saw the photos before staying up all night had almost very similar results for false memory formation.

“The researchers believe these findings have important legal applications: Recent studies are suggesting that people are getting fewer hours of sleep on average, and chronic sleep deprivation is on the rise,” says Frenda. “Our findings have implications for the reliability of eyewitnesses who may have experienced long periods of restricted or deprived sleep.”

Frenda closes by says that further research need to be conducted before enforcing specific law enforcement and says, “We are running new experiments now, in order to better understand the influence of sleep deprivation on processes related to false memory.”

Reflection:

After writing my own summary of the research article, I underestimated the amount of thought and summarizing that went into writing an inside view on today’s psychological studies. I definitely thought it would not be so difficult to compose my own thoughts and feelings to summarizing a study as well as keeping the readers entertained. It was difficult trying to condense the study’s experiments because I thought that everything was important and worth mentioning in the journal article for the reader to fully understand the material and the flow of the study. In the study there is a shift from experiment one to experiment two and it was difficult trying to create my own shift in the journal article because I had to be careful about plagiarism.

I think the journalist wrote the article in a way that the regular person could understand the article which was something that I struggled with when I first started to re-write the article. The journalist did talk about some parts of the study, but failed to mention other parts that I thought were important to mention and would make understanding the study easier. Adding those details about the study, that the original journalist missed, is something that I added to my re-write of the article that is different from the original creator.

I don’t think that the perspectives of the journalist were wrong, I just don’t think that there was enough detail to completely understand the study in its entirety, but, I did like how the journalist made reading the paper easy without the use of difficult words or phrases that the general audience might not understand.

 

 

References:

Link to the original article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/sleep-deprivation-may-increase-susceptibility-to-false-memories.html#.WRN-1FKZOfT

Link to the scholarly article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534694