Laugh Your Worries Away

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objectives were to find out if something easy, like laughing, would lower blood pressure, and if so, would the gender effect the amount of change in the blood pressure.Over all, I think the project objectives were all met and that from this experiment and I achieved to discover that laughter does lower blood pressure and gender does effect the results. Methods/Materials Materials: 1.Comedy tape, 2.Tape player, 3.Automatic blood pressure monitor. Methods: Step 1: Funny, clean comedy tape to use to test students. Step 2: Edit the tape down to about seven or eight minutes. Step 3: Take blood pressure of student before letting them listen to the tape. Step 4: Test one student at a time. Step 5: Play tape for the student. Step 6: Immediately after tape is over, again take the blood pressure of the student. Step 7: Compare the results of the blood pressure of the student before and after playing the tape. Results I tested twelve students in the eighth grade class between the ages of thirteen and fourteen years old. The average blood pressure for the female subjects before listening to the tape was 118/75. After, it was 110/70.The national average blood pressure for thirteen to fourteen year old girls is 109/62. For the males, the average blood pressure before listening to the tape was 102/65. After, it was 93/61. The national average blood pressure for thirteen to fourteen year old boys is 108/63.I also discovered that the systolic pressure,was lowered significantly more than the diastolic pressure in both the male and female subjects.I have found out that the female subjects have a higher blood pressure than the national averages, even after the tape was over. The male subjects, however, had a lower average blood pressure than the national averages, even before the tape was played. By this, I have proved that the section of my hypothesis that the female subjects will have a lower average blood pressure is incorrect. Conclusions/Discussion I have concluded that laughing does lower blood pressure and gender does affect the outcome of the results. I have also concluded that the male subjects, had a lower average blood pressure than the female subjects, which proves my hypothesis to be incorrect.Laughing only for about ten minutes substantially lowered blood pressure for both sexes, if people could sit down and laugh for a half hour every day, it could lead to a much lealthire life.

Competition history

• CSEF 2005 Social Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1725

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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