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Testing the Mind, Biofeedback Lab Expands Undergraduate Research

Dr. Boyd Timothy, assistant professor of psychology at BYU–Hawaii, has created a psychophysical laboratory on campus, also known as a biofeedback lab, implementing new technology and resources. This new lab is designed to facilitate research opportunities for psychology undergraduates by increasing the number and improving the quality of experimental research projects.

“The psychophysiology laboratory will provide a way for undergraduate students at BYU–Hawaii to discover how mental and emotional processes influence the physical body, and the way the state of the physical body influences mental and emotional processes,” explains Timothy.

The new biofeedback lab gives students the opportunity to research and test topics they find interesting and report their findings. “The word ‘bio’ refers to the information coming from the body, which is being recorded, whereas the word ‘feedback’ refers to process of ‘translating’ those biological readings into information that can be seen, measured, and analyzed,” explains Kyle Madsen, a senior studying psychology from Gilbert, Arizona. “The machines, through sensors that are applied to the body, can measure heart rate, breathing, sweat level, and muscle tension - all useful information factors for our studies.”

Research groups can use the equipment in the lab to study physiological responses to emotional, cognitive, painful, and aversive stimuli with variations associated with personality, gender, and culture. Student researchers can also evaluate self-regulation interventions such as biofeedback, relaxation, and meditation, as well as examine the relationships between autonomic nervous system functions (such as heart rate or respiration) and subjective emotional states in interpersonal interactions (such as talking or texting). Such experiments in psychological research give students real-world practice that might not be experienced elsewhere.

Madsen conducted one particular experiment using the psychophysiology lab. He set out to study the way the human body interprets and understands fear. He took volunteer participants and had half of them play a horror-themed video game while the other half only watched a recording of the same game. “I'm using a horror-themed video game to elicit a fear response in subjects while I recorded their heart rate, skin conductance (body sweat), and breathing rate,” Madsen said when describing his study. “The reason I’m using biofeedback equipment is to compare general reactions in the two groups. I’m asking questions like ‘Will the heart rate of participants who play a horror video game be higher than those who merely watch?’”

"We have plans for the student-led projects to present at national and regional conferences, so they hopefully can be published within peer-reviewed journals of psychology," says Timothy. The BYU–Hawaii Psychology department hopes to see many more different types of projects as future students aim to explore the possibilities of the new laboratory, gaining critical understanding in the field of psychology from the data gathered through the new equipment. "The focus of this lab is on helping the students have the best educational experience possible.”

Discover more about the Psychology department at BYU–Hawaii at http://psychology.byuh.edu/

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