Question

Dr. Kang, a cognitive psychologist, conducts an experiment examining the effect of emotion on memory. He provides lists of 15 words to two groups of participants at his university. He puts the names of all the participants in a hat. The first 20 names he assigns to Group A and the last 20 he assigns to Group B. Group A is given a list of words that are very emotional in content (e.g., passion, murder). Group B is given a list of words that are neutral in content (e.g., houseplant, desk). He then measures how many words each group is able to remember after being distracted for 5 minutes by watching a video about the history of the university. He finds that Group A remembers 15% more words than Group B.Which of the following is the independent variable in Dr. Kang's study?a) the length of the distraction taskb) the number of words rememberedc) the emotional or neutral word listd) the number of words on the list

Answer 1

Answer: Option B

Explanation:

The independent variable can be defined as the set of value or factor that is being changed ion the experiment.

Here, the experiment is to check the effect of emotion on memory. The list of words were different in the two sets of words that was given to two set of people.

One group was given emotional words and the other group was given neutral words. The conclusion was the group that were given emotional words remember more words as compared to the group given neutral words.

Hence, the independent variable is number of emotional or neutral word lists.