Psychology 1100

To register as a Participant in the system you will need to self-register. In order to self-register, click the REQUEST AN ACCOUNT link at your site's main page to request an account. Enter the information requested. Your email should be the one issued by OSU. You will also select the class that you are currently enrolled in upon registration in order to receive participation credits towards a particular class. You will be able to change the allocation of credits to courses throughout the semester. After pressing “Request Account”, an email will be sent to you with your username and a temporary password to login to the system. Once you have used that information to login to the Sona website, you should change the password to something unique that you will be able to remember. If you have lost (or don't know) your password, simply enter your email in the Retrieve Password field.

Your password will be sent to your email address.

First, go to the same web site as listed above and fill in your user name and password. After you login, click on the tab labeled "Study Sign Up." You will then see a list of all the available, as well as the number of credits they offer, for the date that appears in the upper right corner. You can search for available studies on any day that you choose. Find an experiment from the list that interests you and click on it. You will then see all the information associated with that experiment, as well as times that are available. If you wish to sign up for an experiment time simply click "sign up," located to the right of the experiment time. You will then see a confirmation screen. At this point, be sure to select the class to which you want credit assigned. Make sure you make a note of all the information that this screen provides, and click "confirm" to sign up or "cancel" if the time will not work for you. Note that the system will not allow you to sign up for the same experiment twice. The web will send you an email reminder about the experiment within 24 hours of the experiment.

In addition to the email reminder, you can review what experiments you are signed up for by clicking on the "My Schedule/Credits" tab. The experiments you are signed up for are listed under the heading "My Schedule/Credits." If you need to cancel an experiment before its start time, you may do so through this function. Simply click 'cancel,' located to the right of your experiment time. You will then be taken to a confirmation screen which will require you to confirm your cancellation. You may cancel an experiment up to one hour before your scheduled appointment in this way.

Please keep in mind that missing experiments causes difficulties for other students, research assistants, and the faculty. If you need to cancel an experiment, you may do so through the Sona web page. Please cancel as early as possible to avoid accumulating unexcused absences.

If you do not attend an experiment for which you signed up (and do not cancel before the experiment), you will accrue an "unexcused no show". There will not be any penalty for excused or unexcused no shows. However, if you accrue TWO "unexcused no shows", you may lose the privilege of participating in the human participant pool. If you are in PSYCH 1100, you may still submit papers for alternative credit.

Rather than participating in experiments, you have the option to write research papers. For each paper, you are required to select an article from the last two years in the journal Psychological Science and write a 2-3 page paper addressing the four (4) questions indicated below. You must also attach a copy of the front page of the article itself. These articles are available online from here.

Papers will be due as indicated in your course syllabus. To receive credit, your paper must be typed and have at least four (4) distinct, well-developed paragraphs that explain:

1. What the researcher did

2. What the researcher’s results indicated

3. Some personal interpretation of the article (such as how you might apply the findings to your own life, or what new directions future research should take)

4. How does this paper relate to what you are learning in your general psychology class?