Apparently, about half of American adults still have a childhood teddy bear, and 40% still sleep with it (we can look into the methodology of this survey in a later post!). Do such comfort objects provide anything beyond sentimental feelings? What about the products marketed to help calm people or help them feel less lonely--products like weighted blankets, or the robotic, stuffed PARO seal, which was created to engage older adults with dementia?
Time magazine journalist Jamie Friedlander Serrrano covered a variety of studies on these types of comfort objects. The story described several studies that have experimentally tested the effects of weighted blankets, teddy bears, and the PARO seal. One study featured by the journalist was published in the empirical journal, PLOS One. This study focused on a robotic cushion that was plush and soft, and which also mimicked breathing by inflating and deflating every few seconds.
The journalist explained that the researchers wanted to see if holding this object would help students feel less anxious before a stressful oral math exam.
Students in the test group held the object—a plush, baby-blue cushion the size of a throw pillow that automatically inflates and deflates, mimicking inhaling and exhaling—for eight minutes before their exam. One control group did a guided breathing meditation instead, while another control group didn’t do anything special. Haynes and her team found that clutching the stuffed breathing cushion reduced anxiety as much as doing the guided meditation.
“This indicated that the cushion could be similarly effective as a breathing meditation for anxiety,” says [scientist] Haynes, who is now completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Saarland University in Germany. “We didn’t give the students in the experiment any guidance about using the cushion. We didn’t tell them to follow it with their breathing or anything—it was just purely the act of holding it as it slowly breathed that eased their anxiety. I think we thought it would help with anxiety, but we were pleasantly surprised that it was as effective as the breathing meditation.”
Lywood—who is currently working on commercializing the breathing cushion through her company Sooothe—believes the findings highlight our innate need for touch, even if the source isn’t human or alive, for that matter. “We take touch for granted,” she says. But because many people have been deprived of it during the pandemic, she points out, “we are sort of rediscovering how valuable it is.”
Questions
1. Using the table below, classify the two main variables mentioned in this study (hint: One variable was manipulated and one was measured)
| Variable name (conceptual variable) | How was this variable operationalized? | What are this variable's levels? | Was this a manipulated or measured variable? | Was this an IV or a DV? |
2. Was the independent variable manipulated as independent groups or within-groups?
3. Which of the four basic experimental designs was used: posttest only? pretest-posttest? repeated measures? concurrent measures? Explain your answer.
4. Sketch a little bar graph of the results of the anxiety result.
5. The journalist doesn't specify whether people were randomly assigned to the three conditions, and when you check the PLOS One article, it also doesn't mention that people were randomly assigned. I don't think we should assume that researchers did NOT take this step--sometimes they just forget to mention it. In any case, why would you need to randomly assign people to the three conditions? That is, what kinds of alternative explanations does random assignment help rule out?
6. One of the authors of the study also created, and hopes to market, the "breathing" cushion. Is this an ethical problem for the study? Is this a scientific problem for the study?
