PB2A- Scholarly Sources

Scholarly Sources: Makeup

The scholarly article I chose was a research paper for an experiment on the Influence of eye make-up on the perception of gaze direction. Just from reading the abstract one will find that the study was conducted to see if makeup has an alternative role besides from enhancing attractiveness.

Some of the conventions of a research paper include an abstract, synopsis, introduction, method, results, discussion, and references. What is interesting about the entire research paper is that is pretty much laid out exactly like the abstract. The abstract gives a preview of the paper itself by including the following things. The synopsis is at the beginning because it serves as a thesis statement; it is direct and tells the reader the purpose of the experiment. It would not make sense to have this type of information anywhere else in the abstract. The hypothesis follows the synopsis because it is the actual question that directed the experiment. After the hypothesis there are these statements that predict the outcome, the statements contradict each other. “Eye make-up might make an individual's gaze more recognizable by emphasizing the contrast of the eyes. Or make-up might make gaze less recognizable by transforming eyes to unnatural shapes.” While reading I thought the abstract showed credibility (ethos) in the experimenter because it did not come off as being biased towards any one outcome. After the theoretic part of the abstract ,there is the evidence and coding that was used. The rest of the research paper follows, going in depth for each of the sections of the paper.

The perception of different types of gazing is being operationalized in this study, but it does not give a definition of what gazing actually is. The only information about the type of gaze is “same direction” or “different direction”. Another concept that is being operationalized is recognition; there are different ways of recognizing something that needs to be narrowed down for the experiment to become more reliable. The amount of makeup defined as “light or heavy” is operationalized by having the faces wear “no eyeliner, thin eyeliner, or thick eyeliner”. The experimenters further operationalized this by giving the exact width and length of each category of eyeliner type. Although the paper mentions facial attractiveness as one of the roles of make-up it is not the main purpose of this experiment, but attractiveness would need to be operationalized.

In the discussion section of the paper, the main question that is addressed is “How might we explain the influence of eyeliner makeup on observers’ perception of gaze direction?” This question is different from the one mentioned in the abstract because it based off the result of the study. The researchers created this question because their result showed significance but having significance does not tell the research why there is such. I thought this was cool because they could have just ended with a conclusion of their results but they decided to question their own experiment, almost as if it was leading them into their next experiment. This relates to a reading I did in Writing 1 about how conclusions should be starting points for the next piece of writing, it is interesting to see this even in a research paper.

Overall, the abstract entirely is the most important part of a research paper, each section of the abstracts adds to its purpose. If you were to take out any part of the abstract it would not be an abstract, but the most valuable information in an abstract is probably the results of the study. Most people reading the abstract need the results for something else. The procedural part of the paper is important as well because it tells how the experiment was run. This is important because if the experiment was not conducted ethically or has multiple variables not addressed, the results could become unreliable or incorrect. If the results are suspicious one could review the procedure part and determine if the right criteria were met when performing the experiment.