 As participants prepare for this speech their bodies exhibit increased sympathetic nervous system activation (sweaty palms, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure).After a minute or so of this heightened state of arousal, participants learn that they don’t have to give the speech after all and instead view a randomly assigned video clip that generates a positive or negative emotion, or a state of neutrality.Fredrickson and colleagues measured the amount of time it took each person to recover from the anxiety about the possible speech.