Use of Humor to Improve Cognition and Memory

¶ … Manipulating Variables in an Experimental Study

A variable is a factor that can be changed and generally can be measured. A dependent variable is the factor that is being measured in an experiment and it is the variable that the investigators expect will be changed by the independent variables. The independent variables are those factors that are manipulated or introduced in a study in order to explore how they impact the dependent variable (Weiten, 2013). The independent variable is considered to be independent since the researcher is free to manipulate, introduce, or remove the independent variable over the course of an experiment (Weiten, 2013). Accordingly, the dependent variable is considered to be at least partly dependent on the changes that occur in the independent variable (Weiten, 2013).

Extraneous variables may have an impact on the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables. Two types of extraneous variables need to be considered during an experiment: 1) Extraneous variables that are related to the participants in a research study; and, 2) extraneous variables that are related to the circumstances of the study (Weiten, 2013). In many cases, the researcher is able to control the extraneous variables to some degree. However, confounding variables cannot be controlled and have the potential to change the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables (Weiten, 2013).

Operational definitions of independent and dependent variables describe the way the variables are measured in a research study and also how they are defined in the research. The factor that is being measured must be operationally described in a manner that adds clarity to the discussion and the experiment, and the instrumentation used to test the attributes of the dependent variable and the independent variable must be clearly, and operationally defined.

Schmidt (1994) conducted an experiment to explore the effects of humor on memory. Given the research question -- What are the effects of humor on memory? -- the dependent variable in this study is memory, and the independent variable in this research is humor. Schmidt could present the study participants with a list of words that they are to attempt to memorize. One third of the words could be part of a jingle, one third of the words could be part of a joke, and one third of the words could be presented only as a disjointed list of terms. The words would all be evaluated for commensurate difficulty, familiarity, and ease of pronunciation in order to ensure adequate construct validity and content validity. The measure of effect would be a frequency count of correctly recalled words under each of the three experimental conditions: jingle, joke, and nonsensical list. The independent variables are the presentation of the words in the form of a jingle, or a joke, or the list of words that served as a control.