It has been said that laughter is the best medicine, but can research really substantiate or discredit this assertion? Imagine that you have been hired to find out if laughter is an effective treatment for the common cold. As you describe your experimental design, address the following questions: What are your independent and dependent variables? How will you operationally define your variables?

Question

Who will participate in your research, and how will you select them??

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
In a research study, laughter could be the independent variable, and the dependent variable would be cold symptoms. The laughter would be operationally defined as auditory chuckles, and we would measure the duration of the chuckles as well as the frequency. Cold symptoms would be operationally defined as coughing and sneezing. We would measure the frequency of both. We would randomly select three doctors from the Midwest. During winter, we would randomly pick twenty-four patients from each doctor. A third would be assigned to the experimental group, a third to the placebo group, and a third to the control group. The experimental group would be shown humorous cartoons and sitcoms. The placebo group would be shown a film of two monkeys playing catch with a plastic carp. The control group would not be shown anything. The study would last two weeks, and participants would be monitored for the cold symptoms. If laughter were an effective medicine, we would expect to see a statistically significant decrease in the frequency of sneezing and coughing in the participants in the experimental group when compared to the participants in both the placebo and control groups.?