Giving Presentations
in Psychology
K. H. Grobman, Ph. D.
DevPsy.org
Length of Presentation
How much time can you speak?
Subtract for distractions.
Allot about 25% of time for discussion.
Prepare your talk to fit the remaining time (75%).
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Preparation
Talks are milestones. Push yourself to your
limit in the days before your talk.
Practice your talk.
Practice by yourself for timing.
Practice with friends or lab for comfort.

Practicing even just once can dramatically
improve how smoothly you speak.

Don’t go overboard (Law of Diminished
Return)
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Your Presence - Your Body
Talk to your audience.
Do not read to your audience. Do not talk to your
computer or the projected slides.
Be happy to be able to tell your audience
about something so interesting. Smile.
Move around. Use gestures to convey
meaning and highlight slides.
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Your Presence - Your Words
Vary your voice to convey enthusiasm
and key points.
Enunciate clearly.
Speak at a normal conversational speed.
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Your Confidence
Be confident.
“How can I possibly be confident presenting
in front of all of these professors, who are so
critical, and who look for every possible
flaw? There are flaws and mistakes
everywhere in my study. It didn’t work out
how I planned. I wish I could start over.”
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
Your audience might know a lot.
Your advisor might know more
about the subject matter than you.
However, you know more about
your study than anybody else.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
There is something interesting about your
study, even if it did not work out. If it did
not work out, that means something
unexpected happened. That’s interesting!
Give the talk your data fits, not the one
you would have given before you began.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
You made mistakes and did not account
for everything. Do not be apologetic or
get bogged down in describing mistakes.
Acknowledge problems matter-of-factly.
Present your study positively. No study
finds out everything. Most shortcomings are just opportunities for future
research.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
Professors are very critical about
ideas, especially what they study.
Is being critical domain-specific?
My impression is that those who
are most focused on critically
examining ideas are least interested
in being critical of other people.
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Power Point Slides
Just
because
POWER
POINT
CAN
do
doesn’t
mean it
should.
Start out by making your slides plain.
Then only add elements (e.g., colors,
size, effects, comics) that add something
to your presentation.
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Power Point Slides
44pt
Use a large font.
40pt
36pt
Write as few words as possible.
People naturally read whatever you put on a slide. When you put bullet points on
your slides, you give your audience a structure to follow the substance you convey
with your voice. But if you write out long sentences in small font, your audience
will pay more attention to your slides than to you.
32pt
28pt
24pt
20pt
16pt
12pt
8pt
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Difficulty of Presentation
If you can be simple, do not be complex.
Avoid using jargon or acronyms whenever possible.
Aim for simplicity in every aspect of your talk, not
just language (e.g., data, literature review, graphs).
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Difficulty of Presentation
Know your audience and drop down the
sophistication one step.
Examples:
 Presenting to cognitive and developmental
professors and graduate students? Speak for
professors and graduate students in any area
of psychology.
 Presenting at a conference on memory?
Speak for researchers in any area of cognition.
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Difficulty of Presentation
Examples of “one step down” for an
audience of developmental and cognitive
psychology graduate students and professors:
Examples:
 It’s too many steps down to define “longitudinal
study”, “within-subject”, or ANOVA.
 Define advanced statistics and specialized concepts
in cognitive or developmental psychology (e.g.,
microgenetic method, logistic regression).
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Difficulty of Presentation
Explain complex ideas simply, but never too
simply. Do not add words just to tell us you
should not have to tell us something.
 “Logistic regression is a regression with
dichotomous data.”
 “A microgenetic approach measures something
repeatedly, far more often than it changes. It
makes our measurements like frames in a movie
so we can see development as it happens.”
 “As all of you know, a microgenetic …”
 This difference is significant, like I said in my
talk last year, …
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Parts of Presentation
Science has a conventional
format for presenting a study.
Follow convention unless there
is a convincing reason not to.
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion
Do not tell us that you are
going to follow convention.
Too simple; dropping more that one step.
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Parts of Presentation
Allocate your talking time where it matters. Use
3/4 of your time to tell us about your work.
17% Introduction
37% Method
37% Results
9% Discussion
Prepare the parts of your talk that matter most first.
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Goal for Presentation
What is your “take home message?”
Your point is a big idea, not a fact.
Everything you present should
convey your big idea.
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Introduction - Topic
Introduce your topic with over-arching
description and research question.
Define the key ideas.
Why is your subject important?
(Practically or Theoretically)
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Introduction - Literature Review

A study is related because of theoretical
constructs, not just operational definitions.

“Laundry List” of Results.

Remember your big idea. Give us just
enough to understand your study.
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Introduction - Hypotheses
Say hypotheses in everyday language
and theoretical constructs. Do not
use method or results language.

“We predicted 4-year-olds performance
on the day-night stroop task will be
positively correlated with performance
on the false-belief task.”

“We predicted 4-year-olds who can
inhibit well are more likely to
understand another person’s beliefs.”
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Method - Style
Describe the method from
a participant’s perspective.
Be concrete.
Give sample questions.
Show us stimuli.
Run a simplified version of
your computer program.
Example: for the
stroop task, ask us
to name the colors:
Bicycle
Flower
Blue
Student
Red
Green
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Method - Omissions
Psychologists and other scientists like to
debate the nitty-gritty. Even if you don’t
say details, put them on slides (e.g.,
participant demographics).
If you are not going to talk about every
task you administered, acknowledge you
did them, but do not give more detail.
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Results - Details
Psychologists like to debate the nitty-gritty.
Give us the results (e.g., p-values, F-ratio, N). Even if
you don’t say details aloud, put them on slides.
Graphs show the big picture; they are especially
engaging. Tables work too.
Present a result for each hypothesis in order.
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Results - Testing a Hypothesis
Steps for reporting a result:
(1)
Remind audience of hypothesis.
(2)
Describe analysis
(3)
State key idea behind result.
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Results - Testing a Hypothesis
Example of steps for reporting a result:
(1) Remind audience of hypothesis.
(2) Describe analysis
(3) State key idea behind result.
r = .54, p = .03, n = 36
“To test the hypothesis that 4year-olds who can inhibit well
are more likely to understand
another person’s beliefs, we
correlated the day-night stroop
task with the false-belief task.
The positive correlation
supports our hypothesis.”
Note. made-up results
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Discussion
Summarize your major results in everyday
language or theoretical constructs.
Describe limitation of your study.
Frame limitations as possible future studies.
Describe your long-term plans for this research.
End with a grand concluding remark
(e.g., hopes for future).
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Questions
Anticipate Questions.
Be able to justify your decisions (method, analyses).
How would someone who is skeptical of your “big
idea” counter your findings? How would you
respond?
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Questions
Make extra slides.
Histograms of data.
Analyses not presented.
Block quotations from famous papers.
Do not make extra slides to anticipate
questions you can answer in a sentence or two.
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Keep Your Perspective
Giving a talk is a skill; you learn through
practice.
Your compare your talk to the ideal in
your mind. Your audience compares your
talk to never attending it.
Just caring enough to try and give a better
talk is often enough to make a great talk.
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Thank You
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