Week 5: New Updates and Trends from Testing!

This past week, I continued expanding my experiment by adding new participants in the 20–30 age range, allowing me to begin comparing responses across a broader demographic. I maintained the same structured procedure for each trial. This still includes the pre-assessment surveys, controlled playlist exposure, continuous heart rate tracking, and post-assessment surveys along with cortisol sampling. Keeping the process consistent remains essential for ensuring that differences in results are due to participant response rather than experimental inconsistencies.

With this group, the results were noticeably less uniform than the initial 17–18 age group. For example, Participant 5 (age 23) showed almost no physiological change, with heart rate remaining around 76–75 bpm and cortisol levels staying relatively stable, yet they reported feeling slightly calmer and more focused after the mindfulness playlist.

In contrast, Participant 6 (age 27) exhibited a clearer physiological response, with heart rate dropping from 88 bpm to 78 bpm and a measurable decrease in cortisol, but their survey responses reflected only a minor perceived change in stress.

Participant 7 (age 30) responded in a different way not shown by our preexisting data. This participant showed a slight increase in heart rate during the expressive playlist (from 72 bpm to 77 bpm), possibly due to heightened emotional engagement, while still reporting an overall improvement in mood. 

Meanwhile, Participant 8 (age 21) demonstrated mixed results, with a small decrease in cortisol but little to no change in heart rate, and only a modest improvement in self-reported relaxation.

While earlier trials might have shown very stable relationships between participants’ physiological and psychological ratings or responses to auditory stimuli, it is now clear that responses to auditory stimuli do not always result in linear trends concerning physiological and psychological change in some participants (e.g., improvements in subjective experience without as much measurable physiological change). Relations between the individual differences among participants and types of audio could be expected to have an effect on the degree of physiological and psychological responses to auditory stimuli. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assess greater levels of variability between each participant’s physiological and psychological responses to auditory stimuli than previously thought.

In general, this week has demonstrated that measuring levels of psychological change is much more complex across different ages than initially believed. I intend to keep testing and consequently increase the sample size of participants in future sessions. A new trend to analyze is whether variations will be recognizable as broad patterns or if they remain highly variable from one individual to another. Each of these variables must be taken into account in order to draw more definitive conclusions about the influence of auditory stimuli on stress and emotional responses.