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The Effect Of Taking An Abnormal Psychology Class On Students

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When I began looking for articles to summarize and talk about for this assignment, I did not really have any certain topic within abnormal psychology in mind. I thought the best approach was to start broad and look through articles and see if something stuck out to me as interesting or unique. By doing this method I located two very different articles on PSYCHinfo to examine. The first that I am going to be summarizing and talking about is an article that explained an experiment that was ran to test the effects of taking an abnormal psychology class on students. This experiment basically was ran to see if there was any connection between taking an abnormal psychology course and a student developing some sort of psychological disorder or …show more content…

They also wanted to see if different instructors teaching the abnormal psychology courses had this sort of effect on students as well. These researchers laid out a brief history of the previous research done on this topic in their introduction, but as they stated a lot of it was research done in the 1950’s and is not of any use or validity today. The reason that this research is no longer seen as credible is because of the changes that have been made to how mental health is evaluated, how mental disorders are now classified, and how they are diagnosed. The study conducted was a longitudinal study. The sample of this study was groups of undergraduate students (n=164 the second week and n=134 the final week of the course) who were either registered in abnormal psychology courses or business and social psychology courses (Curtin et al 2004, p. 52). The latter two were used as the control groups for the study. The students who participated were asked to complete a demographic and mental health questionnaire as well as the Symptom Check-List-90-Revised and the NEO-Five Factor inventory. They were given each of these questionnaires twice, the first time it was administered was during the second week of the semester and the second time was during the last and final week of the semester. The results of this study were quite mixed, some of the results matched up with more recent research done, but some of the results did not. I will further

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