Glass and Singer

• Aim

  • Glass and singer wanted to investigate how noise can cause feelings of stress when doing simple cognitive tasks (e.g. memory tasks)
• Noise manipulation

  • Volume - played at 56 or 108 decibels
  • Predictability - the noise would play for 9 second bursts at regular intervals or unpredictable bursts of irregular lengths
  • Perceived control - some participants were shown a switch and told they could stop the noise by pressing it, others were not
• Procedure

  • Participants would be asked to complete these tasks while listening to specially prepared recordings that would last for 25 minutes
  • After hearing the noises for 25 minutes participants were given 2 tasks to do in scilence:

  1. Correct the spelling, punctuation and grammar for a passage (this design was called performance)
  2. Trace over the lines of a shape without tracing over the same line twice or lifting the pencil off the paper (some of the shapes were impossible to trace correctly - this was designed to test frustration)
• Results

  The strongest effect on participants performance (correcting the spelling task) came from:

  1. Noise being unpredictable
  2. Perceiving to the noise as something they couldn't control

  These factors could cause great stress