Research Proposal Outline
Introduction
Research topic: Exercise and mood in zombies
Do zombies experience an increase in positive mood after exercise?
Overview of previous research
Prior work in humans has suggested that exercise increases positive mood (Cheery and Sunny, 2018)
Researchers had a treatment group of humans who engaged in moderate cardiovascular activity for 30 minutes 3x a week, and a control group who did not exercise
The exercise group reported significantly higher mood compared to the control group
A review paper by Strongman et al. (2020) shows that regular exercise is known to improve mood in humans
Benefits can come from multiple different types of exercise, but heart rate must be elevated for at least 20 minutes per exercise session to obtain benefits for mood
Zombies show evidence of improved mood after chasing a meal (Brainless et al., 2021)
Zombies were observed during and after chasing a meal, and the researchers noted increased frequency of smiling, moaning, and napping after their meal was caught and brains were ingested
While previous research has primarily looked at the link between exercise and mood in humans, there’s a distinct lack of research on this relationship in zombies
Zombies are a challenging group to study because they have difficulties with self-report
Important to know how exercise affects mood for zombies
How do recommendations for cardiovascular activity apply for zombies, who don’t have a beating heart?
Happy zombies are probably less likely to eat you
The proposed study is a quasi-experimental factorial design collecting measures of mood in zombies and human controls before and after a period of exercise
Participants will complete a mood measure before engaging in 45 minutes of steady-state cardio
The mood measure will be repeated after engaging in 45 minutes of cardio
Prediction: Both humans and zombies will experience elevated mood after exercise, but the increase in mood will be larger for humans (who have a more expansive emotional experience relative to zombies)
Method
Participants: At least 25 zombies and 25 human controls who are roughly matched on age and gender.
Human participants will be recruited through advertisements on local news websites and social media sites, and will be paid $20 an hour for participating.
Zombie participants will be recruited through snowball sampling, and will be paid in brains for participating.
Design: quasi-experimental factorial design (2×2)
This study is a nonequivalent groups pretest posttest design
The variable that is manipulated (independent variable) is exercise
The other variable that is “manipulated” is whether the participant is a zombie or a human
The dependent variable that is measured is self-reported mood
Materials
Participants will be reporting their mood before and after exercise using a large mood tracker scale that has 9 images of a face that ranges from unhappy to happy, including a neutral midpoint face
This measure is used because it’s accessible for both humans and zombies to point to which face best describes their current mood
A treadmill will be used for the exercise portion of the study
Procedure
Participants will be brought into the lab and asked to make an assessment of their current mood with the mood tracker scale
Then, each participant will walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes. The speed of the treadmill will be determined per participant, depending on the speed at which breathing and/or vocalizations begin to sound labored
After completing the exercise portion, the participants will again assess their mood using the mood tracker scale
Participants will be fully debriefed and paid in money/brains at completion of the study
Data analysis: I would plan to use inferential statistics to analyze the mood measure. For my hypothesis to be supported, I would expect to see statistically significantly higher mood ratings after versus before exercise in both human and zombie groups, and that the pretest-posttest change in mood would be larger for humans compared to zombies. This would suggest that exercise benefits mood in both species, but humans experience larger benefits.
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