Couples Study

I came across a flier on campus 2 weeks ago; it was a recruitment flier for a psychology study couples. I'd certainly disregard it if not for the monetary award, it seems that for a 2-hr lab session & 21 days of 10-min daily survey, we'd be able to earn more than $200. So I brought home the flier and Tammy was really excited about it, so we ended up signing up for the study and went for the 2-hr lab session today.

The "examiner" brought us to an enclosed room which had been wired up with microphones and video cameras. We were made to sit in the room and talked about different topics such as "which part in the relationship causes most stress?" while the examiner watched over us in another "control room". I felt kind of awkward initially but Tammy seems to relish the opportunity to trash me about my lack of commitment in doing house chores..haha! Anyway, between the discussions, we have to provide our saliva samples, supposedly to test for hormones. I'm kind of suspicious about the real purpose of taking the saliva sample (since they won't tell us the actual purpose of the whole experiment until the very end of the whole study), but the process of collection of "saliva" is pretty interesting. The examiner gave us a vial and a tiny straw, with which we'd have to 'juice out' some saliva into the vial. It was kind of disgusting in the beginning and the vial is actually rather large. So by the end of the 3rd salvia collection, I'm already suffering from "dehydration". What's more frustrating is that the examiner tells me that I am offered an additional $3 if I drink back my own saliva! I immediately said no, but if the price is much higher, I thought I might give it a go. Anyway, the examiner threw away the 3rd sample, and that's when I thought that saliva isn't really collected for hormones-evaluation purpose.

Anyhow, the whole test proceeded with a concentration test where we'd have to read out a the color of the individual word printed on a piece of paper, except when the word is printed in black, in which case we'd have to read out the word itself instead. It gets really tricky when the words are the color word and yet printed in a different color. For instance, the word "purple" might be printed in yellow and we actually have to read out "yellow" instead of "purple". It does abit tricky especially when the test is timed.

The test ended with a rather boring "hit the spacebar when you see green circle on screen" test on a desktop. Anyhow, for all our 'hard work', we were rewarded with $60! Nice! hee...now we just need to finish the daily surveys and we'd receive the rest of the sum! It'd also be really interesting to see what is the real hypothesis this study is trying to investigate. Well, $200 for the advancement of science, we're definitely doing it!