This year, I have been working with Dr. Rodman and her graduate student to design a study examining how one’s chronotype interacts with the ambient lighting environment (warm, dim light light versus cool, bright light) to affect how people perceive facial expressions of varying intensities.
Recall that chronotype refers to one’s natural inclination to sleep and wake at certain times in the 24 hour cycle. Morning-oriented individuals prefer to sleep earlier and wake up earlier, while evening-oriented individuals prefer to sleep later and wake up later. Blue light has been shown to increase alertness, and past studies have shown that evening-oriented individuals are at a greater risk for developing mood disorders such as depression. The lab hypothesizes that this may due to evening-oriented individuals’ greater exposure to bright (blue) light, as they may be perceiving negative (or neutral) facial expressions as more negative, due to increased alertness.
About two weeks ago, a graduate student and I started collecting data. Prior to bringing participants into the lab, though, we had to prepare the experiment room. The room is quite small, and we hung a curtain to partition it, so that when the experimenter opens the door the outside light does not enter the room and confound our results. Additionally, we set up two lamps with dim and bright settings and randomly assigned participants to each treatment group.
I am responsible for running six participants a week. After participants sign the form of consent, I give them a packet of questionnaires regarding chronotype, sleep habits, eating habits, creativity, etc. I then set a timer for 20 minutes, and they fill out the packet inside the experiment room. Participants must remain inside the room for 20 minutes in order to adjust to their prescribed lighting environment before they take the computer task. (If a participant finishes early, I am instructed to tell them to continue checking over their answers and stay inside the room until the 20 minutes has elapsed.) Then, subjects must complete a computer task, in which faces are flashed across the screen for short, varied amounts of time. The faces exhibit different emotions (happy, sad, fearful, surprised, angry) and are mixed with varying levels of the original neutral face. I instruct participants to rate what expression they think they see, and how confident they are in their rating, from a scale of 1-4. Lastly, I debrief subjects on the true purpose of the study, as we had originally told participants that we were researching how personal preferences affect our perception of emotions. For the rest of the semester, I will continue to run participants and collect data.
“Lastly, I debrief subjects on the true purpose of the study, as we had originally told participants that we were researching how personal preferences affect our perception of emotions. For the rest of the semester, I will continue to run participants and collect data.”
Do you all do any ethical training or have ethical discussions about this? We as graduate students are required to do 6+ hours of ethics training, which can vary department by department. If that is the case for graduate students in your lab I would recommend you spend some time going to those ethics journal clubs as well.
I don’t think that what you are doing is unethical but I know a lot of times with these sort of studies you can at least use them to probe ethical questions about things like informed consent.