Do you really feel what you think you feel?
My lab partner, Hannah, and I created, conducted, and wrote about our experiment together, although our writing is a little different. You can visit her blog here.
When you feel an emotion, does your heart follow the pattern of that emotion, or is that just your mind rationalizing and saying what it is supposed to feel? You see a random picture and your heart jumps or twinges or maybe does not even react at all. Whichever the case, your heart’s reaction is the true emotion you are feeling because of the long-trained “fight or flight” thought process in the brain. If your heart rate increases or decreases matching the emotion stated for that certain picture, then the person stated what he or she actually felt. If not, he or she rationalized with him or herself and told you, the scientist, what he or she was supposed to have felt. Remember this is about how much the test-subject is true to his or her own feelings; it is not to measure the person’s personality. Our hypothesis was that there would only be a few big changes (ex: leap for fear and excitement, and, after research, drops for sadness).
Keep in mind that these are pictures, the test subject’s reaction are not entirely to the actual circumstance of the picture, instead they are to the picture (i.e. seeing a real-life tarantula versus just looking at a picture of one). We chose the ten pictures to try and encourage certain emotions. Afterwards, we showed the subject the pictures again, this time asking them to write down what emotion they felt for each picture. Then, we studied the graphs in relation to which picture the subject was seeing at that point in time, what emotion they felt, and tried to make connections. Below are the pictures we used.
Our basic procedure was to ask the subject to sit in front of the heart rate sensor, hold the hand held device displayed below. Here, a test subject, is holding the device and the object taped to the table is the sensor. To collect the data, we used Vernier Logger Pro and connected it to the laptop, recording the changes in hear trate as well as the heart beat in BPM, shown in the screenshot. We had them close their eyes for 25 seconds to allow the heart rate to register and then they looked at the pictures for 5 seconds each while recording their heart rate. Afterward, they wrote down what they thought they felt for each picture after having studied it for a minute. This is the key - it was not the first reaction that they wrote down. When analyzing the data, some discrepancies between actual heart rate and the heart rate the said emotion should have prompted made us look more closely at what might be happening in the subject's mind.
Below is the screenshot of data collection.
This picture shows the heart rate sensor and general setup.
Before we interpreted the data, we had to organize it. We averaged the results to make two graphs, one for the “average change” in heart rate for males, and the other for females. They are displayed below.
Basically, the after-reactions of the subjects had been filtered in many cases. The "fear" example is a particularly good illustration of the logical, analytical mind versus initial emotion. Not a single subject felt fear, although, after deliberation, they all said they did. This is not to say that they were lying - once they were allowed to study the picture, the brain may have connected the image with something they have seen in real life. Real spiders certainly cause fear in many people, so once the subjects connected these two things, they said they felt fear. It was almost an illusion in that way. However, there were no really big increases in heart rate generally, which leads to the tentative assumption that pictures don't really instill strong emotions in terms of "fight or flight" because it is not an "in the moment" experience - it simply makes the subject recall previous experiences, and most people do not have changes in heart rate over small, mostly insignificant memories.
d
Reading the graphs: boys that correlated (blue), boys that didn't correlate (red), girls that correlated (green), girls that didn't correlate (purple).
In the graphs above, more girls correlated for fear, while more boys correlated for sadness and excitement. Oddly enough, even though most individuals did not correlate for sadness, the averages most certainly did. However, the experiment overall proved our hypothesis (there were significant jumps, for the most part, for the pictures we specified) and showed something we never expected: people often deceive themselves into thinking that they felt a certain emotion when they actually felt something different. Does a picture of a spider scare you? Or does your brain remember the spider you saw on your ceiling and trick you into "feeling" scared?
URLs for the pictures we used:
In the graphs above, more girls correlated for fear, while more boys correlated for sadness and excitement. Oddly enough, even though most individuals did not correlate for sadness, the averages most certainly did. However, the experiment overall proved our hypothesis (there were significant jumps, for the most part, for the pictures we specified) and showed something we never expected: people often deceive themselves into thinking that they felt a certain emotion when they actually felt something different. Does a picture of a spider scare you? Or does your brain remember the spider you saw on your ceiling and trick you into "feeling" scared?
URLs for the pictures we used:
1) http://stormgrounds.com/media/Fluffy-Puppy.jpg
2) http://memory.loc.gov:8081/learn/collections/slavery/images/whip.gif
3) http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRqD1pimRTi6Jw61GfeQQWAhGWflue
JHGg__YlzLNSlXqFzyuKX&t=1
4) http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/tsunami_victims_sm.jpg
5) http://www.dreamstime.com/peaceful-waterfall-thumb2698604
6) http://www.presidiacreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/81.jpg
7) http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.papermashmusic.com/filess/Mar/dance-party-laser_0.jpg
8) http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://jasonschaeffer.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/polar-bear-on-a-peak-of-an-iceburg.gif
9) http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.beccabondphotography.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2010/07/playing-in-field-1024x614.jpg
10) Users/15hannahb/Desktop/crying-tears-of-joy-208913.jpg
