In spring semester of 2021, I took the course PSYC 211W Research and Design Methods. This course was required for psychology majors and aimed to give students a taste of what it’s like to design and conduct psychological experiments, mostly through creating and distributing surveys and then analyzing the resulting data. One of the activities my class did in order to practice these skills was a group research project. Each group had to come up with a question they wanted to answer, and then design and conduct an experiment or a survey relating to that question.

 

My group came up with this question: how does music influence mood? We then went even deeper. We hypothesized that people’s mood would improve more after listening to a fast-paced song than a slow-paced one. Due to COVID, we decided an in-person experiment would be difficult, so we instead chose to create a survey in order to test people’s mood in relation to music. This project allowed me to gain more experience using tools for psychological experiments such as Qualtrics and SPSS software. This was particularly helpful for me, as I had very little experience with the statistics aspect of psychology. One of the most prominent aspects of this project was how difficult it was to arrange and plan a psychology experiment. Although most scientists try to maintain an unbiased attitude, psychologists are often biased without realizing it, and my group recognized that the nature of our study meant that it had severe limitations. For example, we chose to have participants listen to instrumental music. We feared that choosing popular music or music with lyrics would influence people’s mood not as a result of the tempo, but due to their inclination or hatred towards specific songs and artists. Because of this possibility, we ended up picking two pieces of classical music. However, we couldn’t conclusively say that the tempo is what affected participants’ mood when it could have been influenced by their overall opinion on classical music as a genre. Getting through this struggle served as good practice for setting concrete requirements, such as numerically stating what we as the researchers were defining as a “slow” or “fast” song, giving us a chance to practice the concept of operational definitions. It’s one thing to hear about the difficulties of scientific experimentation, but it’s another to experience it yourself.

 

Overall, this experiment gave me a basic idea of how psychology studies play out as well as the many obstacles that psychologists have to work around when doing research, including practical and ethical dilemmas. I believe this information will prove useful to me, perhaps in future situations where I may be conducting experiments with people face to face rather than through surveys. I found myself pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed being able to design and conduct my own experiment, and I think I’d like to try more research in this style. I’ve recently become very intrigued by language, language learning, and how people use language to influence others. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, as I just chose German as my minor. Due to this, I’d like to dive deeper into the psychology of language as a whole. I’m not sure yet what specific question I should try to answer, but as someone who is learning a language, I think it would be interesting to look at the mental processes that are a part of language learning. This could make for an excellent opportunity to connect my major with my minor.

 

Below is the link to a blog post I wrote regarding this project for Communicating Psychological Science, a website that Dr. Emily Stark and Dr. Karla Lassonde created in order to convey scientific research and information to the public.

 

https://www.communicatingpsychologicalscience.com/blog/student-research-report-music-and-mood