Methods of Mood Regulations - Essay Example

Research methods Affiliation Significance of the study Life is unpleasant sometimes, and life stressors are everywhere. Balancing well among daily work, studying, interacting with colleagues, and communicating with families can cause exhaustion and depressive moods. In order to keep being mentally healthy, copying and mood regulations is important. It is not a good idea for people to bear, and accumulate unhappy feelings then wait for an emotional explosion someday. Also, not everyone has enough time, to necessarily find a psychologist, a family counselor, or go to the hospital and get prescriptions for their depressive moods. Therefore, this study provides an easy and accessible way to cope with this feeling. Additionally, the subject will be tested to ascertain its workability. Innovation Many factors can cause a day to become “blue”. Furthermore, many blue days cause chronic depressive moods, which eventually turn into mental illnesses. Memory plays an important role in everyone’s life. This is because every experience turn into memories and the Memories contribute to particular mood states, especially when people are retrieving their memories. According to the article, Autobiographical Memory in Suicide Attempters, attempted suicide subjects were required to recover specific personal memories to positive and negative cue words. The subjects showed biased retrieval when their performance was compared with that of a control group. They had biases that made them have delayed the retrieval of positive memories (Mark and Broadbent, 1986). It is not a good idea to hold on to bad moods for an extended period to the extent that a psychotherapist will be needed to put one at ease some day. From our daily experiences, when someone has gone through a long, tough day, his/her friends usually suggest a funny movie to watch. The film is intended to cause laughter and ease of the bad mood feeling. Therefore, this study is entirely aimed at finding out whether there is any effective and easily accessible way (laughing) of helping people cope with their daily stressors; thus, keeping them in a relatively stable and a healthy mental state. If it is proven that laughing can make it easier for people to retrieve positive information, and harder to think about negative events, then it will be an easy way to cope with daily stress. Therefore, it would help reduce the probability of people being caught up by daily life stressors and hopefully, decrease the rate at which people get diagnosed with mental disorders due to stress. Approach The emotional cue-words test will be the base determiner of his study. It is designed to investigate whether laughing (caused by comedies or funny clips) can help people cope with traumatic “blue” days. Additionally, the comedies are aimed at improving people’s ability to retrieve happier memories while suppressing their negative memories (Berntsen, 2012). Data will be collected in relation to this approach and then recorded for later analysis. Resultant findings will be used to make substantial remarks and conclusions. Hypothesis i. There is a difference between baseline score and post-test score within the group that receives treatment. Specifically, laughing frequently can make it easier for people to retrieve a memory with positive information, such as happy, safe, and interested. ii. There is no difference between baseline test score and post-treatment test score in the control group. Method Test for hypothesis The Emotional cue words test will be used in this experiment for the purposes of data collection and analysis. In addition, the test will be effective in getting the null hypothesis (i) in this study. Therefore, if the study finds out that indeed laughter is a remedy to stress, then we will confirm the null hypothesis. Thus automatically disapproving the alternate hypothesis (ii). Design The pretest-posttest control group design. Data collection/Measurements Sixty students from a Teachers College were randomly selected, 30 male and 30 female. They were then randomly divided into two equal groups. The two groups were then put to test (Emotional Cue Words Test). Ten emotional cue words were used to cue memories in this study. Five pleasant words (happy, safe, interested, successful, and surprised) and five unpleasant words {sorry, angry, clumsy, hurt (emotional), and lonely} were used. Subjects in each case were asked to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to the word given. The test will be administered by researchers and alternating the two categories that are pleasant/unpleasant. Then the researchers would record the time that each subject needs to retrieve each memory. Also, researchers will record exactly how the subject describes the memory they talk. For example, some people who are recovering a happy memory may say, “I remember last Sunday I went to dinner with my boyfriend. We went to the restaurant called XXX at Soho and ate lobsters there”. While others may only say, “I remember I had a good time with my friend." Researchers will record both “how long they retrieve a particular memory” and “how specific the memory is described”. In the following week, that is seven days after the baseline test, one group (control group) will not be experimented on while the other group will receive 2-3 short funny clips, every day continuously for seven days. Every day, they will be asked to rate “how funny the clips were” after watching. The purposes for this will be to: i. Make sure they did watch those clips. ii. Prevent subjects from guessing what we want to study, and iii. Lastly, make sure they see the clips as funny and humorous. This will help the researcher to identify their liking and he/she will match clips according to their daily rating. After another one week (7 days), both groups need to attend the emotional cue words test again. Researchers will record time and how specific participants retrieve emotional memories. Finally, within-group comparison will be done in both groups. The purpose will be to investigate whether there is any difference between baseline test and post-treatment test. That is in terms of the amount of time the subjects spent in retrieving positive emotional memories after watching funny clips and laughing for a week. Also, the researcher will observe the control group to see what happens without treatment. Limitations and Scope of the Study Some potential confines can be time, age, and individual difference. It is possible that people will have different feelings when they watch the clips in the afternoon from when they watch those clips at night before going to bed. So researchers will send the clips to subjects every day at 7 p.m. and request a rating after watching and before sleeping. Young people may react differently to funny clips than older would. Therefore, the subjects need to be selected from a Teachers College. They must be 25 years old on average. An individual difference can also be a potential confine that can affect the result. Everyone has their standards of “being funny”, but all the funny clips will be selected from popular and general websites, which means the majority of the population will see the videos as funny. Since the study is based on random selection and grouping, individual differences should be addressed (Mark and Broadbent, 1986). References Berntsen, D. (2012). Understanding autobiographical memory: theories and approaches. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mark J. G. and Broadbent (1986). Autobiographical Memory in Suicide Attempters. Medical Research Council, Applied Psychology Unit, 144-149. Read More