Suppose that you are conducting an experiment to see whether receiving negative feedback from an authority figure will increase eating behavior. After writing an essay, half of your research participants are given negative feedback from a professor, and half are given encouraging feedback. All participants are then placed in a room with a large container of cookies and their eating behavior is

observed. In this study, an operational definition for the dependent variable might be ____.

a. whether participants received critical or encouraging feedback
b. the number of words in each participant's essay
c. the number of cookies each participant ate
d. how many minutes the professor spent giving each participant feedback

C