Three Topic Questions
You should have (at least) three topics that you would be interested in pursuing. Your homework is to start turning them into good, answerable, psychological questions, and we’ll do that by making them more specific and more psychological. How we can do that is by fitting them into the framework for psychological thinking that I presented last week, with three levels (neuroscience, cognitive science, and social science) and three methods (development, abnormal, and individual differences) of psychological analysis.
Here are some examples of topics that have been fit into this framework. Please include the level and method in parentheses after the question, so I can be sure what you’re getting at. (**Note: this is exactly how your homework should look**)
1. How does drug use change the brain over time? (neuroscience, development)
2. Do better basketball players think differently than worse basketball players? (cognitive science, individual differences)
3. How does being transgender affect a person’s ability to make friends? (social science, abnormal)
Next, I’d like you to come up witha list of at least 5-10 keywords for each of your topics (meaning at least 15 total keywords–that’s words, not phrases). The more keywords you have, the more you’ll have to work with when we go to the library and start looking for articles, but 5 will be a good start for everyone.