AP Psych Students Flock to the Hallways to Prank Fellow Raptors

The immediate, worldwide Pixar success, Inside Out, which debuted on June 19, 2015 is an insightful and playful look into the mind of 11-year old girl, Riley Andersen. The movie was created to help viewers, specifically young minds, to understand how emotions help shape and change their perception and relationships with the world and others. In fact, infamous emotion psychologist, Paul Ekman, was an advisor on the scientific board that helped create Inside Out. But who is Paul Ekman, and why is he so important? Well, Paul Ekman is a psychologist known for his extensive and highly intellectual discoveries on emotions and facial expressions. In fact, Dr. Ekman himself coined the term ‘universal emotions’. Those 6 emotions being: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear. Any of those emotions sound familiar? wink wink But I digress, Paul Ekman is a very influential psychologist and his work has helped alter and grow the field of psychology forever. So yes, Paul Ekman is a pretty important figure, especially in the AP Psych classrooms at Magnet. Due to Dr. Ekman's research, Magnet students were tasked to run their own experiments testing 4 out of the 6 Universal Emotions. But here’s the catch, we didn’t have to tell our peers whether or not we were “experimenting” on them for our assignment. Which begs the question,  were you an unknowing test subject?

Interviews:

Victoria Carabus: 

• Emotion Tested: Happiness

• Discovered: Women tend to express happiness to a greater extent than men.

• Testing Method: I offered them a cookie.

• Funny Moment: Seeing someone have no reaction “being nonchalant” was hilarious.

Emelie Norton:

• Emotion Tested: Disgust

• Discovered: Males were more expressive to the smell and taste of gross things

• Testing Method: I gave each test subject a dixie cup of Omaha steak seasoning (without telling them what it was) and then I watched their reactions to the smell and taste.

• Funny Moment: Hoyt’s reaction was pretty minimal, and he claimed that it was due to that fact that his family actually seasons their food (felt like I got a side eye).

John Miles-Olsen:

• Emotion Tested: Anger

• Discovered: That the aggressiveness between male and female subjects were the same on average.

• Testing Method: I told them a close friend was talking badly about them.

Jason Wijaya:

• Emotion Tested: Fear

• Discovered: It concluded that women express more fear than men do when it comes to fear.

• Testing Method: Telling the person that something valuable is at risk like grades, phone, or car.

• Funny Moment: When I went to Waffle House with my friends, I told one of them that her car was just keyed outside and she started hyperventilating and running out with everyone chasing her and the employees thought we were dining and dashing and it was all very funny when I told her it was a prank.

Experiment Data:

All in all, the experiments were a success in both the mischievous and methodical approaches. And to all who were unknowingly tested for this AP Psych experiment, I hope you are not left too scarred from your experience. But at the same time, I think I can speak for all of us AP Psych students when I say, this experiment was very fun to execute because of the opportunity to prank and confuse our friends. Whether that be with a strange offering of taste-testing steak seasoning or telling a friend their car got keyed, this experiment was very entertaining and fun to conclude.

Works Cited: