How stuffed animals can help your mental health
Human Health and Behavior
Camila Alcala
Belle Oviedo
- Grade:
- 5
- Teacher:
- Theresa Barry
Do stuffed animals help reduce stress and lower heart rate? To test this, we will watch a scary movie and monitor our heart rate with and without stuffed animals. Our hypothesis is that the stuffed animals will help lower anxiety levels in a scary situation.
This is a thoughtful and creative project exploring how comfort objects may affect stress levels. I liked how you developed a clear guiding question (page 3) and tested your hypothesis by measuring heart rate during a scary movie both with and without stuffed animals (pages 5-6). Using smart watches to collect heart rate data (page 9) shows good use of technology to gather measurable evidence, I especially appreciate your honesty in the conclusion (page 10). You clearly explained that the results were inconclusive and acknowledged that the data did not fully support your hypothesis. That shows strong scientific integrity which shows that It was also interesting that even though heart rates did not consistently decrease, both participants reported feeling less anxious. This opens the door to future research on emotional perception versus physiological response. For future studies, increasing the number of participants and using the same movie for both conditions might strengthen your results. Overall, this project shows creativity, thoughtful reflection, and willingness to analyze real data. Keep exploring topics related to mental health and stress you are developing important research skills!
This is a very creative project exploring how comfort objects like stuffed animals might affect stress. I liked that you measured heart rate using a smartwatch, which gives real biological data. In the future, you could improve the experiment by testing more participants and using the same movie for both conditions to keep the experiment consistent. Adding graphs to show the heart rate changes would also strengthen the analysis. Great effort exploring a psychology question!
This was a fun and ambitious project! I really appreciate your scientific honesty in stating that your results were inconclusive—that is a hallmark of a great scientist. You did a good job collecting quantitative data using smartwatches to track heart rates, which is a great use of modern technology in your research. For your next experiment, try to keep your ‘test’ environments as identical as possible. Because you watched two different movies, it is hard to tell if the stuffed animal helped, or if one movie was just scarier than the other! If you watched the same movie both times, you could be more certain about your results. Great start; keep investigating!