Valentine and Mesout (2009)

• generalisability?

  • good: balanced gender seen. actual age range in study 2 is 18-54 so quite wide range
  • bad: all people who may enjoy scary experiences and volunteers so won't apply to more anxious people. mean age in study 1 is 26.1, cannot represent to ages outside this.
• reliability?

  • good: controls seen, eample same scary actor used, same maze, same walking time and same tour, results can be replicable
• applications?

  catastrophe theory is supported, suggested it can be used in real life situations and try to find ways to potentially combat anxiety
• validity?

  • good: correlated heart rate with the STAI to accurately measure anxiety. accurate data is seen. controls for baselies with heart rate in study 1 seen
  • bad: subjective measures (self report, unsure what a 6/10 means to someone).

  field experiment in study 2? controlling all extraneous variables present? eg all interactions within the maze cannot be controlled