Circadian Rhythms

Essay by Louie1College, UndergraduateF, October 1996

download word file, 3 pages 3.0

Circadian Rhythms are the times of day that you get either hungry, tired, or energetic. This paper is to describe an experiment that I have thought up that will test to see if circadian rhythms differ from people who perceive themselves as night-time people and people who perceive themselves as morning people.

What is your hypothesis?

My hypothesis is that night-time people's circadian rhythms are extremely different than morning people's circadian rhythms.

What population are you going to study? How will you sample this population?

Participants for my experiment will be ninety-nine undergraduate female students from Iowa State University. Prior to the experiment all participants will have to fill out a questionnaire. This questionnaire will primarily determine if they feel themselves as being either morning or night types of people. Subjects for my experiment will be randomly chosen from these questionnaires. I will select three night-time people and three morning-time people.

I will then give each of them a journal. In this journal each subject will write in it the time that they become hungry, or the time that they became tired. They will do this for three days. At the end of the three days they will come back to my laboratory. They will then be put in an isolation booths. In one of the booths there will be a clock that doesn't have the right time on it. In another one there will be a window so that they can see where the sun is. In the third one there will be no windows and no clocks. All they would have is a light bulb in the ceiling. All the booths will have a bed and a bright red button on the far wall. The button will be for ringing. They will ring when they are tired, hungry,