4 of the Toughest Psychological Studies in History

Here are some challenging psychological studies that have led participants through hell; participants in these studies were subjected to all manner of embarrassment, pain, fear and boring experiments. Unlike other tests having few or no stress at all, with questionnaires and the likes.

Various research explained in this post were gathered from the popular British Psychological Society’s research digest; all in the name of science, we were made to know the emotional and physical pain the various volunteers went through in order give us better knowledge of human being.

Studying the brain circuits associated with fear.

In their quest to monitor brain activity associated with overcoming or being overpowered by fear, researchers made people with Ophidiophobia (fear of snake) to lie in a brain scanner with a live snake.

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While lying in a brain scanner, participants were asked to press a button that would bring in 1.5M long corn snake into the scanner and around their heads. Researchers marked ‘the sgACC’ as the major area with activity. ‘the sgACC’ is the part of the frontal cortex lying under the corpus callosum.

Studying Pain

In this strange research, participants were asked to swallow balloon so it could be inflated once it was in their oesophagus. In the study led by Peter Paine, researchers uncovered an apparent effect of personality as determined by each participant’s pain threshold.

As recorded, repetition of the pain increases parasympathetic nervous system activity in those high in neuroticism, but reduces in those with lower.