Handout: Closing Paragraphs from Published Articles
Psychology
Read each of these concluding paragraphs from real articles published in psychology journals. Do you believe each is a good or bad conclusion? If it is a bad conclusion, how would you re-write it?
Example 1
The results of this study reinforce the view that aggression and violence under certain conditions are learned and later adopted by people. If the violence and aggression viewed are appealing, and in carrying out that violence one feels in some sense morally justified, one’s inhibitions to violence are decreased. The portrayal of violence on TV and film does tend to lead people astray.
Example 2
Children's developing theories of mind are held together by rich causal knowledge, allowing them to reason backward and forward about links between mind, world, and behavior. The current study offers new insights by identifying basic developmental patterns in children’s reasoning about how internal states influence cognitive functioning: Young children understand impairment of thinking performance due to negative internal states earlier than they understand enhancement due to positive internal states, and their knowledge of emotional effects on cognition lags behind their awareness of other important internal (hunger, fatigue, interest, and effort) and external factors (environmental noise). Beyond contributing to theories of social cognition, these results have practical significance: Changes in emotional and physiological states are a regular part of children’s everyday experience in the school setting. Helping young students acquire knowledge and skills necessary to monitor and regulate them is critical for their success.
Example 3
Whatever the reasons for the children's failure to take into account the reasons for speaker inaccuracy in the typical naming game task, we have the clear demonstration in this research that children aged 3-4 years can show appropriate balance between risking believing an unreliable speaker whose short-term circumstances led to inaccuracy. This is confirmed in a further study (Doe & Doe, 2007) in which children were even prepared to abandon their well-founded expectation about the contents of a box, and to believe instead what they were told by a previously unreliable puppet, but only when the previous unreliability could be excused in terms of limited information access. Further research is needed to examine the limits of this well-balanced behavior.
Example 4
The current findings reflect a significant advance in understanding the effects of early-occurring maternal depression on the security of attachment and the emergence of negatively valenced representations of parents and of self in offspring of depressed mothers and suggest that intervention approaches that foster secure attachment may be promising avenues to pursue in order to prevent the emergence and consolidation of negative representational capacities in offspring of depressed mothers.
Example 5
Few previous studies have made an effort to examine the interplay between developmental changes in perceived stress and coping during adolescence. As one exception, our study showed that although the levels of perceived stress and coping varied between individuals, the situational impact was found to be a powerful determinant of stress perception and the relative use of active, internal and withdrawal coping strategies.
Example 6
However, it should be noted that the sample used in this study consisted only of students in private school. Continuing this research with children in other environments (e.g., public school, home-schooled) will be necessary to apply these results more broadly.
Michael J. Sheehan
Developed at Brandeis University through a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation