Scary experiments with electrical current

You may or may not have read my previous entry, in which I mention the research I'm currently working on. This time I elaborate on that more thoroughly, because I don't want you to be worried about me, innocent volunteers, bystanders or "the way science is practised these days". It's all quite harmless, really.
One of the possible explanations for physical symptoms with an insufficient medical explanation is sensitization. To learn more about this sensitization and how it can be measured, participants are undergoing several electrical shocks.
Yes, I am exposing volunteers to electrical current. It's only a mild stimulus and the participants decide how far they are willing to go. It's not some unethical thing, like Milgram's infamous experiments (1963) would be these days- those of you that know anything of psychology will know exactly what he did: he let volunteers supposedly administer electric shocks to other "volunteers" (which were in fact actors who did not recieve any electric shocks at all) in an adjacent room, every time they gave a wrong answer. The (actual) volunteers were told to increase the currency with each shock, despite the large "dangerous" labels on the machine, and the actors' screaming and sudden silence. Most volunteers went on for a long time, effectively showing that obedience to orders is a very powerful thing for many people.
However, that is not what I'm doing. For one thing, it would be unethical and the university would never approve of anything like this today. Experiments in the present day should refrain from causing physical or psychological injury to participants. To not immediately tell a volunteer what the experiment is about, is only possible under strict rules.
What I try to create is something called "sensitization":

Sensitization is an increase in response to a stimulus as a function of repeated presentations of that stimulus. It is the opposite in result of habituation - yet the conditions that produce them are, on the surface at least, the same: repetitions of exposure to the eliciting stimulus.
- Overmier, 2002

To this end I administer mild shocks to volunteers when they are watching a film. The shocks do not exceed the individual "somewhat unpleasant" limit that has been established before that. The time between these shocks is variable so they will come unexpectedly. Hopefully (for the sake of my experiment) the participants will have an increase in response afterwards, which is measured with three variables: detection threshold, "somewhat unpleasant" threshold, and sub-detection "guessing better than chance". Detection threshold means it's the intensity of the shock that people can barely feel, while the "somewhat unpleasant" threshold is used to measure exactly that: the stimulus intensity which people find "somewhat unpleasant" (it's forbidden to use the pain threshold). "Guessing better than chance" means that people are presented with shocks that are just below their detection threshold. Curiously, they tend to "guess" correctly whether or not they had received such a shock, more often than they would according to chance. It's believed to be some physical perception, without any cognitive interference, i.e. they have not consciously felt the shock, but physically. The aim is to decrease the scores on the first two measures, and to increase the scores on the last.
So you see, it's not all that bad. Participants are informed of the purpose and results of the research when all testing has been done. It's all quite ethical and clean. Trust me. Don't worry. Honestly.

DragonFang


Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioural study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.

Overmier, J. B. (2002). Sensitization, conditioning, and learning: Can they help us understand somatization and disability? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 43, 105-112.