Developing Methodology of Eliciting Emotions for Therapeutic, Preventative, and Corrective Measures

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to develop up to date reliable methods of eliciting emotions that could further be used by the scientific community. While breakthroughs have been made in almost every field of scientific research, the everyday methodologies utilized by Psychology researchers has failed to grow accordingly. We set out to bridge the gap between actual and idealized efficiency in psychological research through the use of recently developed technologies. The emotion elicitation method which we set out to refine was the use film clips since they are not easily influenced by other factors and have proven to be very effective in prior psychological research. Combining the utility of movie clips and modern methods, a resourceful and proficient methodology protocol was developed. To make this research possible we utilized a total of four film clips, which were divided into two categories consisting of amusement and fear with two films in each category. All the film clips used were discovered through a public domain film clip bank. Participants were selected through the Amazon Mechanical Turk subject pool. Two studies were created in order to control for between and within effects. The first study consisted of the participants self reporting their mood via the standard emotional inventory questionnaire the PANAS-X, watching one of the four clips embedded into the site, and self-reporting their mood through PANAS-X. The second studies only difference to the first was the PANAS-X was not given at the beginning. Emotions will be elicited more efficiently through our method and can further serve in creating positive emotions that develop a state of happiness in schools or workplaces.