Positive visual stimuli may not affect student's happiness

Abstract

While past research has proved the effects of visual stimuli on several aspects of a person, such as mood, memory and depression, few studies have been conducted on positive visual stimuli due to the limited research available on positive psychology, so this experiment was designed to investigate whether positive visual stimuli can have an effect on one's happiness level. Participants were asked to watch a video of positive or neutral visual stimuli and fill out a subjective happiness scale before and after the viewing respectively, through which we could know the average happiness scores of participants in different states. The research made a hypothesis that students' happiness levels would be increased if they were exposed to positive visual stimuli in our experiment, but our results did not support the hypothesis, implying that positive visual stimuli may not affect one's happiness level. However, the research does have limitations that may lead to our lack of significant results.