Analysis Of Promoting Positive Affect Through Smartphone Photography

I am summarizing, critiquing, and evaluating the scholarly article, Promoting Positive Affect through Smartphone Photography (Yu Chen, Gloria Mark & Sanna Ali, 2016), and the popular article, Science Says Selfies Can Make You Happier And More Confident (Lindsay Holmes, 2016). Researchers have realized that taking photos has become ubiquitous (Chen et al., 2016). They decided to research how photography captured with smartphones can be used to help people increase their mood. To carry out this research, they conducted a four week study that had forty-one participants. Each one person had to take one photo a day depending on which group they were in (a selfie photo smiling, a photo that makes you happy, and a photo that would make someone else …show more content…
The scholarly audience includes every detail you need to know. You learn about the background to the study, the study in actual depth, and the findings. The popular article only includes the highlights and the information that the average audience would find intriguing, even if it does not accurately represent the entire study. As I mentioned before, when research is translated into popular press, they use a title that is relatable to the average audience to draw them in. It does not include all of the relevant information in the article that you should know. A second problem is that you do not know all of the real results. The article gives you a one or two sentence summary of the findings. In a research article, you can see the instrumental value of the numbers in the findings, which can really help you understand the results of the study more. A third potential problem is that the author probably is not connected to the research in any way. They could be translating the research wrong, or not be providing us with the details that are truly important. All of these errors have the ability to shape our understanding of research in the wrong