Select and read one peer-reviewed article. Ideally, this should be one on your topic that you may ultimately use in your final project. Highlight at least one threat to internal or external validity or reliability. Explore why this threat is problematic and how it could be remedied. Comment on the articles discussed by your classmates. Consider which validity threats are most common. Which are the most difficult to deal with?

LR

I found an article that was titled “Current mood influences biases for positive and negative stimuli.” One threat in the experiment that I noticed was their use of self-report. The participants self-reported their moods, and psychiatric disorders, and after completing a task they self-reported their mood on a depression inventory (Parker & Adleman, 2021). Self-report is great, especially for what the experiment was studying but it could also be a threat to internal validity. This is due to the idea that someone may lie or not know exactly how they were feeling, thus invalidating some results, or making possible outliers to results.

Some ways that I have come up with remedies for the self-report issues, especially because I was planning on using it myself for my experiment, is by making sure the questions are clear. By making sure the questions are straightforward, leaves less room for participants to be confused or unsure, thus their mood will change. Another remedy could be that the answers must be straightforward. Just like how in a “yes” or “no” question scenario, this is not maybe. There will be no “maybe” or in between options.

Reference:

Parker, A. J., & Adleman, N. E. (2023). Current mood influences biases for positive and negative stimuli.  Current Psychology,  42(5), 3769–3779. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1007/s12144-021-01686-8

DC

My peer reviewed article is one by Gregor Žvelc. It is titled “Between self and others: Relational Schemas as an integrating construct in psychotherapy.” (2009). The article proposes relational schema theory and suggests that this theory can be a handy umbrella for many psychological concepts. I intend on using this article as a jumping-off point for my definitions, though it clearly would not be my only definition.

I think that though this is a mostly theoretical article, it is still subject to different types of potential validity & reliability threats. One that I found to be the most evident would be that of external validity, which is how generalizable his theoretical conclusions are. I think if this theory were applied to a significantly different culture, then there may be an issue with how applicable it is. If this theory were to be applied to an Eastern culture, as opposed to a Western one, it may not hold up.

Reference:

Žvelc, G. (2009). Between self and others: Relational schemas as an integrating concept in psychotherapy.

Transactional Analysis Journal, 39(1), 22-38.