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For this lab our group decided that we wanted to look at the way stress level affects heart rate. From personal experience we felt that when we are anxious about or scared about something in particular our heart begins to beat faster. We believe that this may occur because of the fight or flight instinct in humans which releases adrenaline during "dangerous" situations, therefore when the person is afraid the heart begins to beat faster. In order to test this we decided to watch clips from scary movies and measure our heart rates. Our first few experiments we each took turns on watching a clip or trailer from a scary movie and then our data seemed to show spikes in the amplitud of the heart beat. At first we thought that this supported our hypothesis but then we realized that the spike occured because we moved  or jumped when we were scared. Then we attempted to do a more controlled version of our previous experiment (literally...one person held down the experimentee hand while she was watching the clip). The data that we collected from this experiment did not differen greatly from the average resting heart rate measured in the beginning of class. Based on this evidence our hypothesis is incorrect, however there may have been flaws in the experiment or the technology that we used. 

Paoli, Claire, and Laura