Pilot Testing

1. Define key variables.

1. Create an operational definition (i.e., a clear description of exactly what a researcher means by a concept) of stressful sound.
   1. For the purposes of this experiment, a stressful sound is any noise that creates a feeling of tension, immediacy, or anxiety within participants.
      1. This will be manipulated through three different sounds: static, ticking clock, and a crying baby.
2. Create an operational definition (i.e., a clear description of exactly what a researcher means by a concept) of acute stress.
   1. For purposes of this experiment, acute stress is defined as the stress or feeling of tension and strain resulting from recent demands or pressures.
      1. In order to measure this accurately, ask participants about their own stress levels using a straightforward question.

2. Conduct the study.

1. Meet the student/participant at the lab.
2. Provide participant with informed consent, a brief description of the research (concentration on a task), a sense of the procedure, an indication of potential risks/benefits, the right of withdrawal at any time, and a manner to get help if they experience discomfort.
3. Run the static condition.
   1. Tell the participant “I’m going to give you a series of math problems that should be easy to solve. Your job is to complete as many as possible in the 2-min time limit. Please try to concentrate and ignore any sounds you may hear.”
   2. Give the participant the math problem sheet (Figure 1), start the timer (set for 2 min), play the static sound, and say “you may start.”
      
      Figure 1: Math task. Examples of math problems given to participants
4.  Give the participant the dependent variable.
   1. Give the participant a measure that asks him/her to indicate how he/she currently feels (Figure 2). The item stressed appears embedded within several other distractor items (i.e., items not related to the present study but included to make the true purpose of the study less obvious). Feelings will be rated on a 1-7 scale, ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much.’
      
      Figure 2: Survey on feelings. Participants rates their feelings on a scale from 1-7 (not at all to very much)

3. Debrief the participant.

1.  Tell the participant the nature of the study.
   1. “Thank you for participating. In this study I was trying to determine what type of sound led participants to experience the most stress. There were three conditions. Everyone worked on the same math problems for two min, but each group did so while hearing static, a ticking clock, or a crying baby. We hypothesized that the group who listened to the crying baby would report the most acute stress.”
2. Explain explicitly why deception was necessary for the experiment.
   1. “We want to tell you about the deception we used in this study. We used deception by telling participants that the study was about concentration, which wasn’t true, but we didn’t want participants knowing that the study was actually about stress because it may have led to unnaturally increasing stress levels. We also indicated that the math problems were easy, when in fact they were not. We chose difficult problems to increase demands on participants, which generally creates a sense of stress. In both cases, deception was necessary because we wanted to get participants’ natural reactions. If participants were to know the true reasoning and hypothesis behind the study, they may perform in an unnatural way by trying to purposefully disprove the experimenter’s hypothesis. Because of the nature of the deception, it is quite natural for participants to not realize that they were being deceived.”

4. Run steps 2 & 3 above two additional times—once for ticking clock and once for crying baby.

1. Each condition has a unique participant with everything being exactly the same except for the sound played.