The Historical Past Behind Sitaxentan
A within-subjects manipulation was introduced and balanced in four blocks. Half of participants started the experiment with two blocks of the mental arithmetic task followed by two blocks of the backward counting task. The order of these tasks was reversed in another group of participants. After two blocks of the mental arithmetic task, PANAS was administered again to control for the effects of the experimental manipulation (i.e., stress induction procedure). During each block three blood pressure readings were taken, after which participants imagined consequences of eight or nine risky situations randomly selected from a total number of learn more 34 risky situations covering different risk domains (the unequal number of risky situations in each block was caused by the random selection mechanism, i.e., the need to divide 34 situations into 4 blocks). Each situation was followed by questions regarding stress (one question) and risk perception (two questions). The exact wording of these questions and descriptive statistics are shown in Table ?Table3.3. The whole procedure lasted ~30 min. Table 3 Descriptive statistics for measures used in Experiment 3. Results Data reduction Cardiovascular data were preprocessed in the following steps: (adapted from: Traczyk et al., 2015): (1) twenty measurements of systolic (SY) and diastolic (DY) blood pressure for each of the participants were transformed Forskolin datasheet into Mean Arterial Pressure (MAP = 2/3*DY + 1/3*SY); (2) the first three measurements from baseline (at the beginning of the study) were removed from further analysis; (3) the remaining 17 measurements were z-scored for each participant; (4) five measurements from baseline were averaged to control for pre-test baseline level of stress; (5) six averaged measurements from the mental arithmetic and six averaged measurements from the control task served as psychophysiological indicators of evoked stress. Manipulation check The transformed blood pressure data was entered into a repeated-measures ANOVA. The main effect of stress manipulation was significant and relatively strong, F(1, 60) = 34.095, p Sitaxentan p = 0.366 (Figure ?(Figure33). Figure 3 Mean blood pressure level (z-scored) as a function of experimental task (i.e., pre-test baseline readings, control backward counting task, and mental arithmetic task��stress). Error bars represent 95% bootstrapped CIs based on 1000 samples. To assess how stress manipulation influenced the positive and negative affect measured with PANAS, two t-tests were carried out. Results indicated that experimental manipulation with laboratory-induced stress led to an increase in negative affect, t(31) = ?3.215, p = 0.003.
