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Determining the Effect of Arousal on the Heart Rate and Blood Pressure of Adolescent Males

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Determining the Effect of Arousal on the Heart Rate and Blood Pressure of Adolescent Males
Wyatt Griffith and Michaela Rodriguez
Wood River High School
Hailey, ID 83333
ABSTRACT
When male adolescents were unknowingly placed in an isolated environment with an attractive woman, there wasn’t enough viable data to determine whether or not their blood pressure increased. Based on our limited and unreliable data there is no significant increase in the heart rate or blood pressure of male adolescents when placed in this situation.
INTRODUCTION
As blood flows through all parts of the body, it exerts a pressure on the walls of the arteries carrying it. Blood pressure reflects this force through two numbers, the systolic and the diastolic. …show more content…

However, this may not be due to a poor hypothesis, it seems more likely that it is at least partially due to inadequate data. Not only were there many errors in collecting data, but we also had an extremely small (N=3) sample size. We originally tried to test 6 students but due to various issues with the blood pressure measuring software, 3 subjects had various inconsistencies within the data. One test subject had a resting heart rate of 109 BPM that decreased to 28 BPM after having his blood pressure taken by Shaylyn. Both of these heart rates are out of the normal heart rate range for a human at rest. This is not where the mistakes end though. Upon summing up our data we came to the realization that our data was contaminated. Not only were the test subjects chosen in an arbitrary method, but one of the experimenters in the control group was a male and the other one was a female. Though we limited conversation and contact with the test subject, this made it even harder to gather any true meaning from our results because the variable (a senior female) was also present in the control test. Admittedly the female in the control test was much less involved and flirtatious than the one in the actual test and during the actual test the underclassman was alone with the senior female which could explain why there was any difference at all.
CONCLUSION
Overall this experiment was quite a failure; most of our data is unusable, the data that is usable is not

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