By the way, lest anyone be confused by my post, I am not a promoter of Therapeutic Touch or similar. It is entirely bogus in my view.
We were just surprised that the findings did not represent the detection rate of hands that would be expected due to normal sensing of the warmth of hands at a distance of about 4 to 6 inches (as was used in the original study by Rosa, et al). We would expect, with a better design (use of a constant source location sound or light to signal the hand is in position, placing a piece of cloth between the two hands [tt practitioners claim that clothing is no impediment to the human energy field]) that they would have had similar results, more than likely closer to a 50% hit rate. -- Paul Bernhardt Frostburg State University Frostburg, MD, USA On 1/13/09 4:52 PM, "Paul Bernhardt" <[email protected]> wrote: > I'll grant you that these examples appear quite reasonable to be one tailed > tests. And, I'll describe another that appears, also, to be reasonably one > tailed test and was published that way. > > Some of you may remember the study of Therapeutic Touch done by a 13 year > old (at the time) young girl and her parents as part of a science fair > project (initially). The study was published in the Journal of the American > Medical Association (Rosa, Rosa, Sarner & Barrett, 1998). Twenty-one > self-represented Therapeutic Touch practitioners had to state which of their > hands the child had positioned her hand (determined randomly, and obscured > by an opaque partition). If the TT practitioner was skilled at detecting the > purported Human Energy Field, they should get more than 50% correct. > Presumably, doing worse than chance would be meaningless. Out of the 280 > trials provided by the practitioners, they guessed correctly 123 times, 44%. > Obviously, this was a result in the opposite direction of the one tailed > test and is not meaningful. > > Or is it? > > Turns out that 123 hits out of 280 attempts just breaks below a .05 two > tailed test of significance by a binomial test. Hmmm.... > > Turns out I was two degrees of separation from the Rosa study, they were > known by a buddy of mine. We were skeptical. That one tailed test bothered > us. So, we started doing some studies of our own. > > Turns out without any interceding material (cloth, glass, etc) between the > hands, at the distance of separation used in Rosa, et al. we should have > expected better than 50% hits. People can sense the warmth of a hand even up > to 5 or 6 inches away. So, how come the below chance finding of Rosa, et al? > > We know they used verbal instructions and (certainly unintentionally) > directed their voice away from the target hand. We attempted that kind of > procedure and replicated their findings pretty closely, coming in at 39%. > Turns out a reasonable speculation is experimenter error, which should have > been detected, and a two tailed test would have done so. > > You can see our study in Long, Bernhardt & Evans, 2000, a chapter in > Therapeutic Touch, edited by Bela Scheiber & Carla Selby. Prometheus Books. --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
