Exposure Therapy

Introduction

A team of researchers wanted to test the effectivity for exposure therapy for college age students who have a fear of spiders. The researchers took 25 Counseling and Human Services students who wanted to overcome their fear of spiders. Before the few sessions of exposure therapy began, the students were exposed to a tarantula enclosed in a glass closed box. During this, the researchers took the heartrate of each of the 25 students. This allowed them to be able to analysis the data and ultimately determine the effectivity of the exposure therapy sessions for these 25 students. See Figure 1 in Appendix to see the findings from this research study.

Relevance to Major

How could math possibly relate to the counseling and human services field is a question that people may ask themselves. However, it is clear to researchers in the
This works for instances with outliners because it removes the off-balance of the values within the data set (Salkind, 2014). To find the median, researchers had to use the following formula:
Median = (n+1/2) th term
The researchers found the middle term to be the 13th one. Researchers found this by taking the total number of clients and adding 1 to that for a total of 26 and then dividing it by 2 to get the answer of 13. Then taking the 13th term from the data set, the researchers found that the median was 84. This is significant because the team knows that 50% of the heartrates from the clients were below 84 beats per minute and 50% of the heartrates from clients were above 84 bpm. Mode
The last measure of central tendency is mode. Mode is the most frequent occurring value in a data set. To find the mode in this data set, the researchers looked for the value that occurred the most. In this data set, the researchers found that the value 76 bpm was the mode since it occurred 5 times in the data set, more than any other value in the data set.
Measures of