TITLE:
Control Groups: Not Truly Baseline
AUTHORS:
Tsee Leng Choy, John F. Connolly
KEYWORDS:
Event-Related Potentials, ERPs, Emotion, Music, Alexithymia, Depression, Sampling Bias
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of Neuroscience,
Vol.4 No.4,
July
23,
2014
ABSTRACT: Although routinely used, control group criteria vary considerably in
research. Drawing from aspects in our normative study on musical emotion
perception, we show how a group of participants who would normally be
considered a control group in most studies, display clear event-related potential
(ERP) differences when grouped by affective assessment scores that are rarely
administered to presumed “control” group candidates. This preliminary finding
demonstrates the importance of careful screening of control group membership.
Failure in this process can produce misleading observations, undermining the
validity of results.