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For Honours thesis and UROP students

Expectations:
Students who plan to pursue higher degrees in psychology are 'extremely' welcome, although the intention to pursue a research career is not a requirement for students at the HT stage.

You will work closely with the PI and senior lab members (postdoc/PhD students). Our lab already has some existing projects and research directions and your research topic should be relevant to what we do now or what we plan to do in the near future. We can explore potential research questions together.

Most of our studies involve using eprime and only a very few use paper and pencil testing only. We already have many eprime scripts ready and you can adapt them for your own use. There is also an opportunity to learn how to use basic Matlab scripts to organize behavioral data. 


1 How to choose topics:
Do a literature research before proposing your ideas.

• How to search: Locating the full text of an article in google scholar

• How to organize references: Rename files in Mendeley

Choose topics that are related with our ongoing projects:

• Decision making in older adults.

• Decision making under stress, e.g. choking under pressure.

• Social decision making：theory of mind/mentalizing/strategic thinking/game theory, conformity.

• Individual decision making: decision biases , consumer behaviour.

• Social cognition: prejudice, moral reasoning, culture difference, social rejection,

You may find out more about our research interests by attending our regular lab meeting and talking to lab members.
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2 Ethics application

DERC: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/psy/_research/ethics.htm
Note:

1. Please consolidate all the forms so that they are in a single document.

2. Please use your nus e-mail account.

3. There is a weekly deadline for all submissions – Fridays 9am. 

4. CO-PI signature is not required.

You do not have to apply for DERC if your research is covered by our existing IRB.
Our existing IRBs already cover tDCS, fMRI, EEG, stress manipulations, electric shocks to induce pain, and mood induction procedures.

3 Data collection
Subjects recruitment:
Apply for RP pool. We recruit paid subjects only when RP is not sufficient.
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Research funding:
There are $200 Student Research Funding (Thesis Support Fund) from the department.  

1. Make sure all participants understand the task before running formal testing.

2. Make sure participants understand that they should NOT talk (or think aloud) during the experiment. Specify which fingers they should use to press buttons.

3. Do not make changes to the protocol without discussing with your supervisor.

4 Data analysis
Data cleaning:
Dealing with outliers: see psychwiki

Plotting
Using excel, Sigmaplot, Matlab.

5 Writing