THE FEEEEEEEEEAR PROJECT

Curiosity-Surprise-Fear-Anticipation-Ignore

1. What is fear?
Fear to me is a reaction to something that is life threatening or something that reminds you of something that has scared you in the past.

2, Formulate an experiment.
What I did for this experiment is playing with a fear of my own. I have a weird deep seeded childhood fear of balloons. I've always been afraid of balloons since I was little. My brother liked to tease me about it and get really close to popping balloons in front of me. (Don't worry, I don't hold any grudges against him :) ). What I decided to do is try to get people to feel what it felt like to me when someone has a balloon. I feel okay when I hold a balloon, but when other people have one, I get scared that they will pop it. What I did is I bought some balloons and decided to pop it at random times. I wanted to first make the class curious as to why I was blowing up balloons, make the surprised when I popped it, and make them scared when I blew up another one.

3. Expected outcome.
Curiosity-Surprise-Fear-Anticipation-Ignore

4. Reaction
When I first started doing this experiment, I thought no one was reacting to it like I expected. Of course, the first time I popped the balloon, I startled some people. The next times after that, they kind of expected it and weren't as afraid (as anticipated).

5. Analysis
Like I said, I thought that it didn't have the expected outcome. But when we talked about my experiment, some people admitted to being afraid. One person had the exact outcome of what I was expecting (I think they had the same kind of fear of balloons I had). Most people, however, did not get to that state of fearing the balloons. But all the other steps happened like expected. They had curiosity of the balloon, they were surprised by the balloon, and then they anticipated what I was going to do and then they kind of ignored it.

6. Changes.
If I were to do this project again, I would work on timing. There were a lot of distractions going on in the class, and the experiment seemed to be diminished a little by all the other distractions going on. I think next time, I will try to perform the experiment with better timing.

The experiment I especially liked and had an effect on me was, I think his name was Kyle? He did the one where everyone had earplugs, looked into the lights and then closed their eyes. It was especially effective for me because I'm kind of weird about people touching my face and while this experiment was going on, I didn't know what was going to happen and I was really hoping not to be touched. I know that kind of sounds weird, but that's just what I was thinking. It impacted how I view my project in the simplicity of this experiment. Maybe you don't need to be especially over the top to get an effect.