On April 23, Juliane Young, a senior at UNC Wilmington, presented her Honors psychology thesis to a panel of judges, explaining how she tested the placebo effect on 42 UNCW freshmen.

April 18 through April 26 marks UNCW’s eighth annual Showcase of Undergraduate Research, highlighting innovative research and activity that Honors students conduct over the course of the year. 

Though UNCW requires all psychology students to conduct research and complete a final project, only the Honors students have to do a formal presentation. 

“She did well,” said Karen Daniels, Young’s faculty advisor.  Daniels encouraged Young to do her presentation without note cards, and Young took her advice-she memorized her fifteen minute presentation, maintaining eye contact with her audience.

Despite the extra work, Young said that completing her Honors project has been a positive experience. 

“The survey I did was kind of a pilot study,” she said. “I’ve had to do small scale studies in classes.  This is the biggest thing I’ve been able to participate in.”

As part of the Showcase of Undergraduate Research, Honors students’ work is displayed in Randall Library.  Many students finishing up with classes and preparing for exams are able to stop and look at the work. 

The participants in Young’s study were students in introductory psychology courses that require students to participate in experiments conducted by upperclassmen.  The students needed six participation hours for the semester, and they were able to choose the experiments online.

In the first part of the study, each participant spent 20 minutes on an exercise bike while wearing a head device that supposedly measured cognitive activity. Then, Young showed each person a graph. She showed half the participants a positive graph, which showed that their cognitive functioning increased while they exercised. The other half were given a graph that suggested their cognitive functioning had decreased. 

To study the placebo effect, Young never turned on the participants’ head devices and used graphs she found online. 

“We wanted to see how those beliefs would affect them,” she said.

After exercising and viewing a graph, each participant was given a series of cognitive tasks that took 20 to 30 minutes. 

“We had some participants fly through it, and we had others who took their time and really studied it,” Young said.

One of the tasks required participants to read pairs of words on a screen, then rate how likely they were to remember them on a scale of 0-100. A few minutes later, more words appeared on the screen, and participants selected “R” if they recollected seeing the word, “F” if the word looked familiar or “N if they had no memory seeing the word.

Young found that participants who believed exercise limited their cognitive functioning completed the tests as well as the participants who believed exercise helped them. 

“There were no significant differences,” she said.

After presenting the data, Young described some of the limitations of her experiment. Naturally, the students had selected an experiment that sounded enjoyable to them.

“Our sample was very athletic,” Young said.  73 percent of the participants considered themselves to be athletic.

Julian Keith, a psychology professor at UNCW, suggested that maybe the results would have been different with non-athletic participants. 

“But of course you’d have to do another experiment to find out,” he said.

After graduation in May, Young looks forward to attending graduate school at Appalachian State University to study exercise physiology.