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The Happiness Experienced When Viewing An Image Of Abstract Art Essay

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For this experiment, a single subject rated the happiness experienced when viewing an image of abstract art. The subject used a rating scale which used a sliding scale to denote happiness evoked by the art, or a lack thereof. The score given by the rating ranged from 100, indicating very much happiness from viewing the art, all the way down to 0, indicating that the art did not evoke happiness in the least. Three different conditions were tested, including a normal condition, in which no special instructions were given to the subject; a pen between the subject’s teeth condition, which mimicked smiling; and a pen between the subject’s lips, which did not use the same muscles as the smiling/pen in teeth condition. The subject was instructed to perform each of condition a total of 11 times (for a total of 33 trials altogether), but was not told why until after the trials were finished. This was done so as not to bias the subject in regards to any of the conditions. The experiment was designed to investigate if putting the subject’s face into a simulated smiling state would influence the judgment about the amount of happiness generated when viewing abstract art (Sage, 2016). There were three levels of the factor for this experiment. The independent variable, or factor, is the pen (e.g. no-pen, pen/teeth, pen/lips) and the dependent variable is the happiness rating given to each image of abstract art. The prediction for this experiment is that the mean happiness rating will be

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