Psychology - Experiment on Stress

I. Introduction In this experiment we are going to describe stress and prove how can a prolonged exposition to it have a negative impact on memory. The definition of stress used in this experiment is: difficulty one suffers that causes worry, emotional tension or loss of concentration. The reason why this topic has been chosen is because stress is a part of nowadays, hectic society and it has a very noticeable effect on people’s performance, in either work or daily life. The outcome of this experiment could be used in several fields, such as education; to help reduce the amount of stress students deal with, so their grades could be improved. The results could also be used to enhance and boost employer’s efficiency, in the workplace field. The hypothesis is to test how short-term stressful situations can lead to memory dysfunction. The null hypothesis, on the other hand, is that stress has no impact on memory whatsoever. The aim of this experiment is to prove how stress produces memory issues. II. Design The most efficient and easiest way to carry out this experiment would be using repeated measures, using the same sample of participants in both sets of conditions, deceiving participants to avoid any internal validity issue. Allowing a long time gap between conditions or changing the mentioned conditions would avoid participants from finding out the aim of the experiment, or biasing it. Single blind is the best method that can be used in this experiment, opposed to double-blind, which would be meaningless, because if participants are told the aim they might do better than they would do in a normal life situation, and the study would lose it’s reliability. Since it’s a short-term based experiment and the same sample of participants is used for both conditions, the experimental group would perform a series of memory-challenging activities, and later on, the control group