“immedia Effects Of Chocolate On Experimentally Induced Mood States”
Beginning a Research Study
a) Research question: What is the relationship between the intake of chocolate and moods?
Directional hypothesis: People who eat chocolate will have improved positive mood.
b) The keyword search terms that I used in my PsycInfo search were chocolate and mood.
• Author(s) name(s): Michael Macht, Jochen Mueller
• Article title: “Immediate effects of chocolate on experimentally induced mood states”
• Appetite, 2007, V.49, Pages 667-674
c) The purpose of this study was to investigate if chocolate has the potential to improve negative mood and if this effect depends on the palatability or not. Previous studies show that stress and pain were effectively reduced by feeding human newborns sugar solutions. Similar studies have also shown that in human adults, pain tolerance can be increased by eating chocolate cookies just before they experience the painful stimuli. The authors of this study took the experiment one step further to see if there was a link between mood states and food palatability. Two hypotheses were tested in this study. The first hypotheses was that the negative mood will be effected only after eating chocolate and the second hypotheses was that this mood change will occur because of the palatability of chocolate.
Participants for both experiments were chosen by placing advertisements around the university. Experiment 1 consisted of 48 volunteers from which 21 were males and 27 were females between the ages of 19 and 48 years. They were all healthy individuals of normal weight with no food allergies or medical conditions such as diabetes. All participants liked chocolate but reported eating it only occasionally. Experiment 2 consisted of 113 participants from which 54 were males and 59 were females between the ages of 18 and 43 years. These individuals were very much like the participants in the first experiment with regards to...
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