Preference And Familiarity For Male Forenames

1. Preference And Familiarity For Male Forenames Jonathan Stirk & Jasper Robinson E-mail: jas@psychology.nottingham.ac.uk jwr@psychology.nottingham.ac.uk

2. Introduction • Aims • To be introduced to the area of psychoaesthetics • To develop a greater understanding of partial correlation and linear regression • To learn more about design and control of experiments • Objectives • Over the next two sessions you will design and conduct a study in an attempt to predict participants’ preferences for certain male forenames over others

3. Introduction • Organisation of this session • What is psychoaesthetics • Previous research • How to finish the design of your own study • Run the experiment (between now and the next session) • Next session – how to analyse and write up the report (plus trouble shooting for those who still need to test subjects)

4. What Is Psychoaesthetics? • Psychoaesthetics is the experimental study of why people like certain things, and dislike others. - (Berlyne, 1971, 1974) • One theory suggests that familiarity is directly and positively related to liking… - (Zajonc 1968; Harrison, 1977) • …Despite contrary evidence that familiarity can breed contempt. - (Cantor & Kubose, 1969)

5. Familiarity And Liking • Children’s preferences for letters in a Roman alphabet rather than a Cyrillic alphabet waned with increasing age (despite increasing familiarity with the Roman alphabet). • This lead researchers to suggest that the relationship between familiarity and liking was akin to an inverted U. • (Slukin et al., 1973). • Other studies demonstrated that the relationship between familiarity and liking was diminished as age increased – further evidence for an inverted U. • (Colman et al., 1975).

6. Monotonic Or Non-monotonic? LIKING FAMILIARITY

7. Familiarity And Liking • One criticism of these studies is that the stimuli lacked ecological validity. How much can anyone like the word “CHAIR”? • In response to this criticism Colman, Slukin and Hargreaves (1981) decided to look at first names and surnames. • Very familiar surnames (e.g. Smith) and very unfamiliar surnames (e.g. Bodle) were not liked. Names of medium familiarity were like most – supporting the inverted U.

8. Inverted U Or Straight Line? • BUT first names displayed a positive monotonic relationship, reflecting Zajonc’s early theories. • Why do some studies suggest an inverted U whereas other studies (albeit fewer) suggest a straight line relationship? • You will test the less accepted of these two theories – that of the linear relationship. Is there another variable that may account for the relationship between familiarity and liking? Can we predict liking on the basis of familiarity or on the basis of some other variable?

9. The Experiment • Two E-prime programs – ‘BlockedNames.es’ and ‘RandomNames.es’ ask for familiarity and liking ratings on a 1-5 scale. • Choice of program depends on your choice of design. • Do you ask all the familiarity questions first and then the liking questions (BlockedNames), or do you mix the liking and familiarity questions in one big random block (RandomNames)? • Between groups or repeated measures? • If one person answers both questions to all the names will they guess the hypothesis? If the questions are asked to separate people, will individual differences in familiarity with names affect the results?

10. The Experiment • What names should you use? Where will you find these names? Will you choose them on a random basis? Or from a previous study? How many will you use (the programs are set up for 10 – you may need considerably more)? • Choose a third variable. What other factor do you think may influence familiarity. This third variable should be something that subjects can mark on the same 1 to 5 scale as familiarity and liking. • E.G. How familiar is the name MARK? How much do you like the name MARK? Do you know many people called MARK?

11. What You Need To Do This Week • Get into groups of three • Familiarise yourself with the two programs (but you cannot use your own data in your study!) • Write down your experimental design • Which subject does what, how many names, what should be random, (use the experimental checklist from last session) etc. • On the basis of your design modify the e-prime experiment appropriately (ask for help if you get stuck) – but save under a different name • Decide where to get your stimuli from, and then go get them

12. What You Need To Do Before The Next Session • Put all the names into your program • Pilot the experiment on friends (these pilot subjects can know already about the hypothesis, but cannot be used in the final analysis) • Modify the experiment if it did not run according to plan with your pilot subjects • Run the experiment on as many subjects as you stipulated in the design phase. All real subjects should be naïve, where ever possible, especially in a repeated measures design

13. In The Next Session • In the next session you will • Calculate mean ratings across items (rather than subjects) • Correlate familiarity, liking and your own variable to produce a correlation matrix • Perform partial correlations to find the strongest relationship with liking for male forenames • Calculate a simple linear regression to note whether liking can be predicted by the strongest related variable from the partial correlation