Psychology Exercise Essay

A research question was proposed to a student asking why teenagers have more difficulty focusing their attention early in the morning when compared to that of younger children. After carefully considering the evidence in each choice option, the following were ranked in order the most convincing to the least convincing: 1. Thirty well-designed studies published in prestigious journals have discovered that melatonin; a hormone involved in sleep is secreted by the body of teenagers at a different point in the sleep-wake cycle than it is for young children and adults. 2. A nutrition expert, appearing on Good Morning America, stated that she believes teenagers have more difficulty focusing their attention than younger children because, as she learned in her interviews with students of all ages, the teenagers were more likely to skip breakfast. 3. After overhearing many teenagers talking about why they struggle with paying attention early in the morning, it provided a good understanding for the problem. 4. Twenty well-controlled experiments published in prestigious journals strongly suggest a cause for why teenagers have more difficulty focusing their attention early in the morning than do younger children. 5. Two well-controlled experiments published in a prestigious journal suggest a cause for why teenagers have more difficulty focusing their attention early in the morning than do younger children. 6. After a recent airing of a story on the news show Dateline on NBC about some people being morning people and others being night people, Channel 5 asked viewers to call in the reasons they have difficulty focusing attention in the morning. Two reasons were given most frequently, and those reasons were presented on that night’s local news. 7. A relative has a hunch. The decision to give the aforementioned reasons the rank in which they received was based fully on the evidence presented in each statement. Items 1-3 indicated a true correlation between the proposed question and the stated reason and personal understanding. Items 4 and 5 could have been credible sources, but they were absent the findings in the statement offered. Item 6 was not a source focused on the study of teenagers, but rather its research was done on a PSYCHOLOGY 3 broad level. Finally, item 7 did not come from someone with credibility nor did it possess any scientific verification to back up any reasoning. Also, it did not contain a valid reason pertaining to the question at hand. There were only two reasons suggested that contained factual evidence that were believable and credible (Shohov, 2004). Items 1 and 2 proposed that research in relation to the proposed question had been carefully and scientifically performed. Item 1 declared that thirty well-designed studies had been performed concluding that a specific hormone was believed to be the cause for a teenager’s inability to focus early in the morning. These studies had also been published in prestigious journals. Item 2 aired on a publically respected early morning news broadcast. The finder-of-fact was an expert nutritionist who had conducted many interviews on children of all ages. Her conclusions were drawn based on answers voluntarily given by the interviewed teenagers. Her findings concluded that teenagers skipping breakfast had more difficulty focusing early in the morning. Both of these suggested reasons offered a definitive answer to the proposed question, and they bore evidence to support their findings (Shohov, 2004). References Shohov, S. (2004). Advances in psychology research, volume 17. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.