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Physiological measures are increasingly used in developmental research because cognition, emotion, and behavior have physiological indicators. For example, when you are speaking in public, such as when you give a class presentation, do you feel your heart beat more rapidly or your palms grow sweaty? Increases in heart rate and perspiration are physiological measures of anxiety that might be measured by researchers. Other researchers might measure cortisol, a hormone triggered by the experience of stress (Simons, Cillessen, & de Weerth, 2017).

Some researchers measure eye movements or pupil dilation as indicators of attention and interest. For example, researchers in one study examined infants’ pupil dilation to determine whether they detect and attend to an unusual sound (Wetzel, Buttelmann, Schieler, & Widmann, 2016). Another study examined older children’s eye movements to determine their attention to healthy and unhealthy foods depicted in a cartoon (Spielvogel, Matthes, Naderer, & Karsay, 2018). The children paid more attention to unhealthy foods than healthy foods, especially when the characters were shown interacting with and eating the unhealthy food.

In recent decades, researchers have increasingly used physiological measures of brain activity to study human behavior. There are many ways of measuring brain activity, and each measure provides a different perspective, as noted in the Lives in Context feature. An advantage of physiological measures is that they do not rely on verbal reports and generally cannot be faked. A challenge to physiological measures is that, although physiological responses can be recorded, they may be difficult to interpret. For example, excitement and anger may both cause an increase in heart rate. Data collection methods are summarized in Table 1.4.

Table 1.4