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We decided to test the effect of emotionally based images on one's heart rate. We chose three scenes from Youtube (sad, scary, and funny) to examine if this would increase or decrease one's heart rate per minute. We hypothesized that the sad images would decrease the initial resting heart rate, while the funny and scary images would increase the initial resting heart rate. We performed the tests twice on subjects Mariah and Anna.

Our data supported our story that some emotionally based images influence the heart rate of a person. From the experiences of Mariah and Anna, the sad images decreased their resting heart rates by about 4 BPM and 13 BPM respectively. However, the fear from scary images-which produced an adrenaline rush- increased Mariah's resting heart rate by about 2 BPM, while it decreased Anna's by about 7 BPM. Though Anna's data had the opposite of the presumed affect, this could have been because the "scary" test was done immediately after the "sad" test. When considering this, her heart rate did increase after this test. For the funny images, Mariah's heart rate increased about 18 BPM from her resting heart rate, while Anna's decreased about less than 1 BPM. Again, Anna's data contradicts our hypothesis, but if you consider that this test was performed following the scary test, and in this regard, her heart rate increased.

Thus, our data does not exactly support our story in some instances. We believe that this could be due to some of the limitations we experienced. Firstly, because we did not have access to headphones, we could not factor in the influence of the noise component in this experiment. The noise would have assuredly enhanced the raw emotion in the scenes. Also, the noise in class could have played a role in distracting our subjects from concentrating on the experiment. Furthermore, these scenes and the presumed emotions associated with them were subjective. For instance, Anna did not believe that our "scary" image was that scary, whereas Mariah believed differently.

JPierre (Jennifer Pierre), MCasias (Mariah Casias), Achiles (Anna Chiles)