Priming-Induced Suggestibility and College Students’ Self-Reports of COVID-19 Symptoms
Elizabeth Tate- Emporia State University
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Cathy Grover
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on and remains a continuous media presence, researchers must investigate suggestive illnesses. I sought to determine if the reading of COVID symptoms might, via suggestion, increase participants’ self-reported sensations of such symptoms. Forty undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses read an article detailing the symptoms of COVID-19 (Menni et al., 2020) or an article about sports (Rothin et al., 2020). Participants then completed a survey about their current physical conditions. Contrary to my hypothesis, participants who read the sports article self-reported more
COVID-like symptoms than participants who read the COVID-19 article; more research should determine why.
Nice job presenting your work!
I think this topic is very important to investigate. It is extremely timely. I would like to know more about your procedure. For example, how exactly did you manipulate the independent variable of the article topic? Do you think it would make a difference if the COVID-19 article was an article about someone’s personal experience and symptoms when having COVID-19, or would it make a larger difference if participants read from a general COVID-19 article that had listed symptoms? Thanks, great job!!
I enjoyed learning about your research and I think the results are very interesting. Do you think it would have been useful to have a control group who did not read the COVID-19 or sports article, and directly answer the Present Conditions Survey?
I also think this is great research, and as other comments stated, very timely! I expect we will see a lot of research surrounding COVID-19 and psychology in the future!
However, I find it interesting that you chose to study the symptom aspect of the pandemic. I’m curious, do you think your number of participants was a limitation?
I also wonder, did you consider asking the participants questions to assess their overall knowledge of COVID-19 symptoms? It might be interesting to see if your sports article participants just happened to know more about COVID-19 than the other participants! While this is unlikely, it might be a useful consideration for future work!
Great work on this presentation! I thoroughly enjoyed it!