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Psychology

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Theses/Dissertations

Aging

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The Role Of Autobiographical Memory Recall In Reappraisal Efficacy And Effort Across Age, Irina Orlovsky Oct 2022

The Role Of Autobiographical Memory Recall In Reappraisal Efficacy And Effort Across Age, Irina Orlovsky

Masters Theses

Socioemotional theories posit that the experience of overcoming unique life challenges over a lifetime enhances self-efficacy and emotional resilience among older adults. Older adults demonstrate greater emotional well-being and motivation to regulate emotions than younger adults, but specific regulatory mechanisms supporting late-life emotional resilience remain unclear. Cognitive reappraisal is an effective but cognitively demanding emotion regulation strategy and shows mixed efficacy in later-life. While a growing repertoire of autobiographical memories may be a resource with age, the role of autobiographical recall in momentary reappraisal has never been tested empirically. In this online study, older and younger adults were trained to …


Emotional Response To Negative Mood Induction In Mild Cognitive Impairment And Cognitively-Intact Older Adults, Gennarina Diane Santorelli Oct 2019

Emotional Response To Negative Mood Induction In Mild Cognitive Impairment And Cognitively-Intact Older Adults, Gennarina Diane Santorelli

Doctoral Dissertations

Older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) report greater rates of psychiatric symptoms than cognitively-intact older persons. This may be associated with emotion dysregulation, which is prevalent in cognitively-impaired populations. No research to date has investigated responses to emotionally-provocative stimuli in persons with MCI. Aim 1 of this study determined differences in emotional reactivity to and recovery from negative mood induction in older persons with amnestic MCI (aMCI) and cognitively-healthy older adults. Moreover, emotion dysfunction in MCI may be linked to impairment in executive function (EF), a common feature of MCI. Theoretical models postulate that EF is essential to the …


Hearing And Seeing A Speaker: How Perceptual And Cognitive Factors Modulate The Dynamics Of Audiovisual Speech Perception, Elina Kaplan Oct 2018

Hearing And Seeing A Speaker: How Perceptual And Cognitive Factors Modulate The Dynamics Of Audiovisual Speech Perception, Elina Kaplan

Doctoral Dissertations

In face-to-face conversations, listeners process and combine speech information obtained from hearing and seeing the speaker talk. Audiovisual speech typically leads to more robust recognition of speech, as it provides more information for recognition but also as it helps listeners adjust to speaker idiosyncrasies. The goal of the current thesis was to examine how certain perceptual and cognitive factors modulate how listeners use visual speech to facilitate momentary speech perception and to adjust to a speaker’s idiosyncrasies. Results showed that (older) listeners’ sensitivity to cross-modal synchrony is related to the size of the audiovisual interactions during early perceptual processing. Furthermore, …


Age Group Differences In Affect Responses To A Stressor, Molly Mather Mar 2018

Age Group Differences In Affect Responses To A Stressor, Molly Mather

Masters Theses

Older adults may be better able to modulate their emotional experiences than younger adults, and thus may recover more quickly from negative stressors. Additionally, older adults may be more likely to experience co-occurrence of negative and positive emotions in the setting of negative stressors, which may facilitate emotion recovery. To date, few studies have investigated the nature of age group differences in spontaneous emotional responses to a standardized stressor. The current study utilizes a laboratory mood manipulation to determine age group differences in emotion recovery in negative and positive affects, as well as age group differences in the co-occurrence of …