P.A.L stands for Productivity Application Lamp.The lamps name comes from its purpose to help the user apply a light color that assists in inspiring productivity, depending on the task. For example, based on research if someone needed to be stimulated more with creativity a blue light would be best, while if one were doing a tedious and repetitive task they would use a red light to peak arousal.
P.A.L
Background
Trisha has been researching the effects of color in educational and consumer settings since 2012. Trisha researched under Dr. Amy Copeland, a current professor, and researcher in LSU’s Clinical Psychology Department. During her junior year of undergraduate work, she became on of Louisiana State University Predoctoral Institute Scholars, where she followed a subcategory that related to her honors thesis, Mandala Coloring, and Test Anxiety. She independently researched the effects of the color red and test anxiety and presented her work under the title of, “The Effects of Red on Test Anxiety: Does the Color of a Proctor’s Shirt Affect Intellectual Performance” in a month. The paper was a proposal for a potential research study that Trisha plans to conduct later in her career.
Abstract
The following proposal addresses the relationship between test anxiety and the effects of red on low and high anxious individuals. Also, the study investigates if a test proctor wearing a red shirt affects anxiety levels and intellectual performance. The research of this topic can be beneficial in gathering basic and applied knowledge on color effects in environmental contexts, specifically in educational settings such as standardized testing. The first independent variable is color, manipulated by the test proctor’s shirt color—white, in the first IQ assessment and then a redshirt during the second assessment. The second independent variable is anxious type, low or high, and this is being assessed by using the Spielberger Test Anxiety Inventory. The dependent variables are anxiety experienced during the test and intellectual performance assessed with a German numeric IQ test. This proposal includes two hypotheses: (1) It is hypothesized that there will be a significant main effect for anxiety, such that those participants who are highly anxious will report higher levels of anxiety during the test; and (2) it is hypothesized that there will be a significant color by anxiety level interaction, whereby participants with high test anxiety exposed to the proctor wearing the red shirt will perform particularly poorly on the IQ test.
Keywords: Color, Red, Avoidance, Environmental Effects, Test anxiety, Worry
