Music Exposure and Tangram Help-Hurt Task (THHT)
In order to ensure that participants did not become aware of the hypotheses being
tested, the study was described as investigating two different constructs: problem solving
skills and the relationship between music and information processing style. The state
aggression of the participant after being exposed to one of the songs was measured using
the THHT (Appendix A; Saleem, Anderson, & Barlett, 2015), which consists of two
parts. Participants first completed 11 tangram puzzles and they were told their
performance on these puzzles was being timed. Once they completed the puzzles,
participants were told they were then moving on to the second unrelated portion of the
study. This portion entailed privately listening to a song on the provided MP3 player
with headphones. After participants listened to the song to which they had been
randomly assigned, the experimenter told the participants that the experimenter had
forgotten to give them one of the forms from the first portion of the study, and asked
them to fill it out. This “forgotten” form instructed participants to pick 11 tangram
puzzles from a selection of 30 puzzles (10 easy, 10 of medium difficulty, and 10 hard)
that they were told another participant would have to attempt to complete in under 10
20
minutes to try to receive a prize. This particular puzzle-selection task is intended to
measure aggression through a scoring system that codes easy puzzles as +1, medium
puzzles as 0, and hard puzzles as -1 (Saleem, Anderson, & Barlett, 2015). The
participant’s score is then calculated by summing the 11 puzzles the participant chose for
the other participant to complete, which results in a score ranging from -10 to +10. The
lower the score, the more aggressive the participant was being by selecting more hard
puzzles for a future participant to work on. Using this measure allowed for the analysis lyricswoow of levels of state aggression in each of the experimental conditions. Saleem, Anderson,
and Barlett (2015) demonstrated that the THHT is a well-supported and validated as a
measure of aggression.
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