Investigating Methodological Issues In Eda-Dmils: Results From A Pilot Study - Brief Article

ABSTRACT: This article addresses methodological issues in current EDA--DMILS research. The authors conducted an exploratory DMILS pilot study with 26 sessions and found a remote intention effect with an effect size of approximately ES = .35-.42 depending on the applied methods. The authors do not claim any significant psi finding as the experiment was not designed to find or investigate any. No psi hypothesis or significance testing was applied; instead, the variation of this effect as a function of different methodological approaches was studied.

The authors compared parameters drawn from different components of the EDA signal (tonic or phasic) and found effects similar in size. Furthermore, they contrasted the traditional parapsychological way to parameterize the phasic component with methods adapted from psychophysiological research. These new psychophysiological parameters (frequency of nonspecific responses and the sum of their amplitude) clearly outperformed the parameter used so far in DMILS/remote staring research.

Respiration is correlated with the electrodermal system. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that sudden irregular patterns in breathing cause responses in EDA. The authors investigated whether these EDA responses are also part of the remote influence effect and, therefore, discarded all electrodermal responses related to irregularities in respiration from the experimental data. The effect size dropped down to 30%-77% (depending on the parameter) of its original value. This indicates that the remote intention effect is very likely to also affect the pulmonary system.

Finally, the authors compared different statistical methods for the evaluation of EDA-DMILS data and show the traditional PIS method to not be appropriate and suitable. It lacks statistical power on some data (less than 50% than that of other methods) and invites misinterpretations by presenting an influence score that is not standardized. We present alternative methods, discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and compare their power using the data of our pilot study.

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