My internship/volunteering experience has concluded my training at the front desk today. The training involved a lot of interaction with all kinds of people in various states of distress. I often found myself becoming anxious or fearful when those I was suppose to help became worked up. Going forward with my project on anxiety vs. fear I will be using my experience at the hospital to design an experiment to attempt to measure a person's anxiety when confronted with various stimuli. As true fear is based on present danger the stimuli will try to simulate a perceived danger without any actual harm being done. An example of one of the trials is that I will have someone look for a cellphone in a messy room. The first time with no outside stimuli just with an instruction to look. The second with a timer, third with a timer and the phone ringing, and finally the last trail will include a person frantically looking for the same phone.
My hope is that will this kind of experiment I would be able to see the different stimuli in action to change a person into a hyper aware state. A heart rate test will be done before and after each trail to study change.
Your comments on the difference between fear and anxiety are intriguing. I think this could relate very well to your research. As you say, fear (or "good" anxiety) typically has kept us safe, but when we feel anxious without a threat this is not the case. Check out the article below that talks about it a bit. Relating this to the fight or flight response could be a good addition to your project.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.therapyinphiladelphia.com/tips/good-vs-bad-anxiety
I think that would be a cool experiment to observe! Would you use people of all ages or are you going to focus on a specific "category"?
ReplyDeleteI will attempt to keep my ages varied to maintain a statistically serviceable conclusion.
DeleteI love how you are incorporating self-designed experiments! Would this experiment be more to measure anxiety, rather than fear? I'm excited for your results!
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