Psychological Distance

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Psychological distance refers to how long ago a certain event may feel to a person as oppose to how long ago that actual event was. Psychological distance was first considered to examine ones self-esteem (Janssen, Hearne, Takarangi, 2015). People with high self-esteem generally remember events in which they are proud of with strong scene of emotion and feeling (Janssen, Hearne, Takarangi, 2015). The purpose of this study is to find out whether adults who have been diagnosed with major depression are more likely to develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because of negative events from the past. Physiological distance plays a huge role in finding out whether past events relate to ones depression, however one with high self-esteem is not …show more content…

Selecting the subject otherwise, i.e. through certain groups of people or even personal friend would make the experiment unethical. I will use random selection to select my participants; more specifically I will select 100 participants, being women, from a population of over 500 women living in a battered women’s shelter. The women chosen to be in the study must range from the age 22-44. I will then put 50 in a group and the other half in another based on a color selection from a box of 50 blue cards and 50 red cards. I will be sure to have all sorts of different ages in each group to maintain validity. Once I gather my first half of participants, I will take these participants and have them answer a questionnaire to begin the study. These women will answer questions based on nothing but what can be seen as positivity, asking only about positive events and specifics of those events. The only thing that may damage the outcome of the experiment would be the fact that some participants are older than others by a substantial amount, meaning that they have had more opportunity to experience positive to somehow look over negative event provoking depression, as oppose to the younger participants who potentially could have been going through things and haven’t had a chance to endure into positive

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