Although the hypothesis being tested was different, this is what this reminded me of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2tfWBZ1A-M I had always thought that the experimenter saying, "you only have 75 more to go" was a great overexaggeration. Evidently not. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences John Brown University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 [email protected] ________________________________________ From: Mike Palij [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2011 4:09 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Mike Palij Subject: Re: [tips] Existential Psychology On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:30:27 -0700, Michael Sylvester wrote: >My favorite is "In walking,just walk-do not wobble". "Talking is easy. Being is hard." >Re Mindfulness,there is an interesting essay in the Asian Journal >of Thomas Merton. Can you be more specific? >Re your root canal experience,if you go along with the pain,maybe >it will go away, True Story #2: I don't want to give people the impression that I'm a masochist or pain junkie, but here's another pain story. When I was back in graduate school, a woman who was doing her doctoral dissertation on scaling responses to electrical stimuli asked me to volunteer to be a subject. Being a big tough New Yorker and willing to help a colleague out, I volunteered. She was looking at the pain responses using a 20-step rating scale versus a purely verbal rating scale of 20 adjectives and their relationship to the level of electrical shock (or so I remember; I guess I should take a look at her dissertation since its been so long). When we first started she used a forward staircase method to find the most severe pain I would be willing to tolerate. Once that was established, the top stimulus value used in the experiment was well below what I had identified as the highest level so I didn't have to worry about experiencing that again. For the next four hours I must have had a few hundred trials of shocks. At first, there was novelty/surprise of getting shocked and the pain. But as the trial went on, I was able to just focus on the nature and experience of the shock. It wasn't that they became less painful but I was having less of an emotional reaction to them. I could focus on the nature of the experience and even tried to understand why it felt painful (afterall it was a four hour experiment and even getting shocked gets kind of boring after a while). I must have been a good subject because she asked me back for a different set of responses to electric shocks which lasted another four hours. Moral: don't volunteer for experiments involving electric shocks unless you're really, really willing to be able to handle the shocks. I knew that if she had used the highest level of shock I would tolerate, I would have had real problems focusing and dealing with the shocks. I also realized that electric shocks above that point would have broken me in two. Perhaps with proper training I could handle stronger shocks but as that great Western philosopher Clint Eastwood once said: "A man's got to know his limitations." See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV5r8cs0 >however DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Good advice. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13039.37a56d458b5e856d05bcfb3322db5f8a&n=T&l=tips&o=9632 or send a blank email to leave-9632-13039.37a56d458b5e856d05bcfb3322db5...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=9633 or send a blank email to leave-9633-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
