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The Other Race Effect : The Role Of Experience And Social Attiudes On Face Recognition, Emily Wheat
The Other Race Effect : The Role Of Experience And Social Attiudes On Face Recognition, Emily Wheat
Master's Theses
The ORE is phenomenon whereby recognition for own race faces is better than recognition of other race faces. This study examines how non-perceptual factors—social context, attitudes, and experience—impact the ORE. Participants from three different racial groups (Caucasian, Black, Asian) completed a face recognition task screening faces for status-specific targets (baseline, perpetrator, victim), self-report measures of explicit bias and experience with members from other races and a measure of implicit bias. Results indicated that non-perceptual factors impact the ORE. Specifically, Caucasian participants revealed a reduced ORE for other race perpetrators in comparison to victims. Black participants revealed a reduced ORE for …
Shared Features And Similarity : Implications For Category Specificity And Normal Recognition, Daniel Kinka
Shared Features And Similarity : Implications For Category Specificity And Normal Recognition, Daniel Kinka
Master's Theses
Patients with category-specific visual agnosia (CSVA) often exhibit a disproportionate difficulty recognizing objects from biological categories due (in part) to the fact that exemplars from biological categories tend to be visually and conceptually more similar. Similarity is often conceived of as a pairwise property (i.e., in terms of distance in a psychological space matrix), but may be more accurately conceived of as a setwise property (i.e., in terms of shared features). The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of shared features on similarity in normal observers, while controlling for distance in structural space. Behavioral and electrophysiological results …
Do We Know What We Know? Self- Assessment Across The Lifespan, Courtney Clare Lee
Do We Know What We Know? Self- Assessment Across The Lifespan, Courtney Clare Lee
Master's Theses
Self-knowledge can play a critical role in navigating physical, cognitive, and social changes in late life. To protect and preserve one's sense of self against these changes, individuals may engage in self-enhancing and self-serving biases in areas important to self-esteem. The importance attached to these areas may change with age, and self-knowledge of these psychological processes may vary with age. We investigated self-enhancing biases and metacognitive awareness of abilities in adulthood. Participants ranging in age from 20 to 80 completed a series of tests assessing the better than average effect across a variety of age-relevant domains as well as objective …
Why Does This Always Happen To Us? An Examination Of Co-Rumination In The Same Sex Friendships Of Emerging Adults, Teresa Michelle Preddy
Why Does This Always Happen To Us? An Examination Of Co-Rumination In The Same Sex Friendships Of Emerging Adults, Teresa Michelle Preddy
Master's Theses
Co-rumination, which has been defined as a passive, repetitive form of problem discussion, has been linked to both benefits in terms of positive friendship quality and maladaptive outcomes such as internalizing distress. This study explored the trade-offs associated with co-rumination in emerging adult same-sex friendships both concurrently and longitudinally through the use of self-report questionnaires. Co-rumination was associated with concurrent positive friendship quality. Additionally, co-rumination partially mediated the link between gender and positive friendship quality, and was a marginal predictor of increases in positive friendship quality over time. Although co-rumination was associated with depression, co-rumination did not predict depressive symptoms …
Neural Replay : A Possible Mechanism For Differing Rehersal Strategies Across Parity, Cassie Brooke Jones
Neural Replay : A Possible Mechanism For Differing Rehersal Strategies Across Parity, Cassie Brooke Jones
Master's Theses
All mammalian females undergo behavioral and neurological changes during pregnancy and motherhood. Many of these changes lead to an enhanced ability to be an effective mother including: increased memory, foraging behaviors, and boldness. Here, we examined the differences in rehearsal strategies between mother and virgin rats. Stops made by rats when exploring their environment have been found to result in reverse replay activity in the hippocampus (Foster & Wilson, 2006). Reverse replay is sequential replay that occurs in the hippocampus immediately after a spatial experience; this replay/activation is in reversed order of the initial spatial episode (Foster & Wilson, 2006). …
Looking Into The Mind Of The Mother : Pup Exposure And Reactivation Of Maternal Circuits, Tricia Lauren Norkunas
Looking Into The Mind Of The Mother : Pup Exposure And Reactivation Of Maternal Circuits, Tricia Lauren Norkunas
Master's Theses
The female rat, among other species, undergoes a fundamental brain re-modeling as a consequence of experiencing the normal and natural events of pregnancy and offspring stimulation. Compelling data show that maternal experiences produce neurobiological modifications in the female leading to specific maternal behaviors, affective states, and the basic underlying female neurobiology necessary to raise viable offspring. This study aims to evaluate the number, quality and selective activation of neurons that develop during the maternal experience. The study showed a trend toward supporting the hypothesis that a “maternal-circuit” is formed through the proliferation of neurons during late-motherhood and lactation, and is …
The Role Of Phonological Similarity In Constructing A Developing Lexicon, Lin Li
The Role Of Phonological Similarity In Constructing A Developing Lexicon, Lin Li
Master's Theses
The implicational hierarchy of phonological feature development has proposed that children acquire native phonemic inventory in a systematic way, from the least articulatory-effort-required phonemes to most demanding ones. On the phonemic inventory level, the hierarchy suggests that perceptual features bearing by oral stops /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ would appear ahead of perceptual features bearing by fricatives, affricatives and liquids ... while nasals stops ... would emerge in the middle. With the help of age-of-acquisition index and a phonemic change schema, the distributions of 489 phonological neighbors have been examined against the data from MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory to …
Attentive Mothers Versus Minimally Invested/Neglectful Mothers : The Development Of New Neurons In The Hippocampus Specifically Activated By Foster Pup Exposure, Danielle Christina Worthington Stoneman
Attentive Mothers Versus Minimally Invested/Neglectful Mothers : The Development Of New Neurons In The Hippocampus Specifically Activated By Foster Pup Exposure, Danielle Christina Worthington Stoneman
Master's Theses
As pregnancy progresses, the female is transformed from an animal that actively avoids pup-related cues (Kinsley, 1994) to one highly motivated to build nests, and retrieve, group, groom, and crouch over a set of pups. In the vast majority of events, motherhood progresses normally; in a striking subset, however, it does not. This study seeks to evaluate neurological differences in the dentate gyrus between primiparous females that respond maternally and those that do not when exposed to foster pups. It was hypothesized that the attentive mothers which perform the expected maternal behaviors have a different number of triple labeled BrdU(measuring …
The Effects Of Target Age And Perceived Death Responsibility On Posthumous Impression Formations, Jenny Rebekah Heilborn
The Effects Of Target Age And Perceived Death Responsibility On Posthumous Impression Formations, Jenny Rebekah Heilborn
Master's Theses
Death positivity biases and posthumous evaluations are considered a universal normative social phenomenon which influences social judgments of the dead; we postulate that these individual biases are mediated by both sympathy and fear of mortality, or the belief in a just world. Study 1 postulated that sympathy mediates such positivity biases when target responsibility for cause of death is manipulated. We hypothesized the mediation of the just world violation on posthumous evaluatory measures when age at the time of death was manipulated in Study 2. Although results were inconclusive for both studies, alternate hypotheses and boundary conditions of death positivity …
Motherhood, Memory And Aging : Object Recognition Performance, Julia Margaret Friedenberg
Motherhood, Memory And Aging : Object Recognition Performance, Julia Margaret Friedenberg
Master's Theses
Reproductively experienced female rats have been shown to have attenuated stress responses, improved visual systems, and better memory and learning. This study sought to extend those findings by comparing aged reproductively experienced and aged virgin female rats on an object recognition task, as well as comparing levels of corticosterone and 17p-estradiol and neural activation. Multiparous (MP, 2 reproductive experiences) females performed better on the task and demonstrated quicker habituation to the task than nulliparous (NP, no reproductive experiences) females. No hormonal or neural activation differences were found. The present study contributes to the growing research areas of reproductive experience and …
Automatic Spatial Processing Of Threatening And Positive Information In Participants With High And Low Levels Of Trait Anxiety, Ryan W. Hansen
Automatic Spatial Processing Of Threatening And Positive Information In Participants With High And Low Levels Of Trait Anxiety, Ryan W. Hansen
Master's Theses
The study sought to investigate potential differences in automatic spatial processing of threatening and positive information in anxious and non-anxious individuals. Participants evaluated threatening and positive words and pictures in a memory task in which the stimuli's varying spatial position was incidental to the task. Participants demonstrated increased accuracy with threatening stimuli, and a decreased accuracy when the word location varied between initial presentation and test. The results did not provide evidence that threatening stimuli were associated with an increased degree of spatial processing, or that this relationship would be influenced by trait anxiety.
Intricacies Of Development : The Impact Of Maternal Experience And Isolation On The Social Development Of Juvenile Male Rats, Lillian Maria Christon
Intricacies Of Development : The Impact Of Maternal Experience And Isolation On The Social Development Of Juvenile Male Rats, Lillian Maria Christon
Master's Theses
Reproductive experience induces changes in females. Parity-related differences in maternal treatment of offspring can induce enduring changes in offspring. The relationships between maternal experience, early social isolation, and development were explored in rodents in this experiment. Male rats were weaned from multiparous (MP) and primiparous (PP) mothers and placed into isolation or social housing for four weeks. They were then observed in a social-interaction test. Social behavior and neural oxytocin and vasopressin were assessed post-testing, while corticosterone levels were measured across the four weeks. Weaning was extremely stressful for all offspring. PP- and MP-raised pups exhibited differences in social behavior, …
Early Vocabulary Development In English, Mandarin, And Cantonese : A Cross-Linguistic Study Based On Childes, Shuxia Liu
Early Vocabulary Development In English, Mandarin, And Cantonese : A Cross-Linguistic Study Based On Childes, Shuxia Liu
Master's Theses
Early language development is an exciting topic in the field of child language acquisition. Only a limited amount of cross-linguistic studies has attempted to investigate the similarities and differences in child language development across different languages. In this thesis, I present a study based on English, Mandarin and Cantonese corpora extracted from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 2000). I investigated the lexical compositions of certain lexical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in children and their caregivers’ vocabularies across eight different children age groups ranging from 13 to 60 months. ANOVA, frequency analysis, and cluster analysis were used …
A Role For Vasopressin And Oxytocin In Parental Behavior Of The Male Sprague-Dawley Rat, Ekaterina V. Karelina
A Role For Vasopressin And Oxytocin In Parental Behavior Of The Male Sprague-Dawley Rat, Ekaterina V. Karelina
Master's Theses
Paternal behavior, though infrequent in many mammalian species, can be induced under laboratory conditions through manipulation of either hormonal or environmental states. Rodent studies of parental behavior have implicated similarities for males and females in not only the actual behavioral repertoire, but also the brain mechanisms governing the set of behaviors in both sexes. The current project investigated changes in oxytocin and vasopressin in the hypothalamus of paternal male rats. We found that paternal behavior, which was readily induced through sensitization (chronic pup exposure), was significantly correlated with increasing oxytocin and vasopressin immunoreactivity within the paraventricular nucleus. Further, corticosterone levels …
Learned Fear And Reaction To Novel Stimuli: Behavioral And Hormonal Stress Responses In The Maternal Rat, Brandi Nicole Rima
Learned Fear And Reaction To Novel Stimuli: Behavioral And Hormonal Stress Responses In The Maternal Rat, Brandi Nicole Rima
Master's Theses
The present thesis examines the relationship between reproductive experience and the behavioral, neural, and hormonal processes of learned fear in the female rat. Multiple research models indicate that reproductive experience functions to decrease the female's stress response in potentially harmful environments, thus providing her with numerous survival benefits, including decreased fearfulness, increased aggression, and refined hunting skills. Based on existing understandings of maternal experience and unconditioned fear, this study was designed to determine how nulliparous (no reproductive experience, NP), primiparous (one reproductive experience, PP) and multiparous (more than one reproductive experience, MP) rats comparatively respond to a Pavlovian paradigm of …
Conditional Love : A Study Of Situational Differences In Rooting For An Underdog, Sheila Margaret Hindle
Conditional Love : A Study Of Situational Differences In Rooting For An Underdog, Sheila Margaret Hindle
Master's Theses
While people tend to root unabashedly for underdogs in the domain of athletics, underdogs do not generally receive the same tremendous support in matters of business. This may occur for a variety of reasons, but of particular interest is the fact that an individual's perception of a situation as both self-relevant and of high consequences may prove detrimental to his or her willingness to support an underdog. Two studies were conducted to explore these hypotheses. Study 1 (N=48) required participants to read a brief scenario depicting a situation of varied self-relevance and consequences, and then select a company to complete …
Predictors Of Breast And Cervical Cancer Screening Among Vietnamese Immigrant Women, Anh B. Nguyen
Predictors Of Breast And Cervical Cancer Screening Among Vietnamese Immigrant Women, Anh B. Nguyen
Master's Theses
Predictors of breast and cervical cancer screening among Vietnamese immigrant women. Anh B. Nguyen, Master of Arts in Psychology, University of Richmond, 2006. Thesis director: Barbara K. Sholley, Ph.D Although practicing preventative healthcare is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, some high-risk populations do not engage in preventative screenings for cancer. Vietnamese American women constitute a high-risk group in gynecological cancers, and it was hypothesized that tenure, acculturation, health insurance, a regular source of care, education, employment status, and marital status would affect rates of cancer screening. It was also hypothesized that the Vietnamese population would have different trends …
Self-Esteem And The Underdog : Why Stability Of Self-Esteem Matters In Social Situations, Kelly Dyjak
Self-Esteem And The Underdog : Why Stability Of Self-Esteem Matters In Social Situations, Kelly Dyjak
Master's Theses
Differences related to self-esteem and their possible influences on perceptions of underdogs were investigated. Global self-esteem and stability of self-esteem were evaluated using The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Participants' self-esteem was threatened by using the false feedback technique. Finally, perceptions of a competition between an underdog and a top dog were evaluated. The results demonstrated that although participants with stable and unstable self-esteem favor the underdog, participants with unstable self-esteem favor the underdog even more than the participants with stable self-esteem. The findings reinforce the robustness of the underdog effect and highlight a consequence of having unstable self-esteem.
A Cognitive Intervention To Increase The Salience Of Intrinsic Thoughts Associated With Exercise, Katie S. Moran
A Cognitive Intervention To Increase The Salience Of Intrinsic Thoughts Associated With Exercise, Katie S. Moran
Master's Theses
A four-week cognitive intervention was created to increase the salience of intrinsic thoughts associated with exercise in moderately extrinsic exercisers. Participants were assigned to either an intervention or control condition. Those in the intervention condition were asked to respond to questions concerning the pleasure, enjoyment and/or satisfaction experienced during or after their exercise regimen each week. Results showed a marginally significant two-way interaction (p = .059) between the control and intervention condition over time. Those in the intervention condition showed a greater increase in intrinsic motivation than those in the control condition. These results. while only marginally significant, were in …
Sentence Recognition In Native And Foreign Languages : Comprehension Of Form And Meaning, Sara Elizabeth Sepanski
Sentence Recognition In Native And Foreign Languages : Comprehension Of Form And Meaning, Sara Elizabeth Sepanski
Master's Theses
The goal of language comprehension is to retrieve and retain the meaning of speech or text. Research with monolinguals has shown that participants' ability to detect structural changes in sentences decreases with time, while their ability to detect meaning changes remains accurate (Sachs, I967). In this study I examined whether this monolingual pattern holds for bilingual speakers in a second language. English-Spanish bilinguals at three different proficiency levels participated in a reading task in which native (LI) and non-native (L2) language sentences were presented. Participants read both LI and L2 sentences and were then tested for their recognition of the …
Affective Benefits Of Capitalizing On Personal Positive Events, Daniel B. Goldman
Affective Benefits Of Capitalizing On Personal Positive Events, Daniel B. Goldman
Master's Theses
The present study examined how disclosing personal positive events influenced ensuing positive affect (PA). Forty undergraduate students reported personal positive events either privately or to a friend. All participants made written and vocal disclosures, counterbalanced to control for order effects. We hypothesized that participants who vocally reported positive experiences to a friend would have the highest PA scores subsequent to disclosure. Results from a two-way mixed ANOV A failed to support the hypothesis. Trait optimism was significantly related to positive affect, but its inclusion as a covariate in the ANOV A did not influence the pattern of results. These results …
The Life-Long Diminution Of Anxiety Response As A Consequence Of Reproductive Experience, Ilan M. Mcnamara
The Life-Long Diminution Of Anxiety Response As A Consequence Of Reproductive Experience, Ilan M. Mcnamara
Master's Theses
Reproductive experience (RE), associated with hormonal fluctuations and enriching environmental stimuli, enhances spatial memory and blunts responses to stress/anxiety. Whereas stress reductions occur during lactation, the persistence of the RE-anxiolytic effects is unclear; and little research has focused on the HP A axis, amygdala, and other anxietyrelated areas. Using an elevated plus maze (EPM), we examined anxiety in nulliparous (NP), primiparous (PP), and multiparous (MP) females (zero, one, or two litters, respectively) at 6, 10, 14, 18, and 22 months of age. Brains were subsequently analyzed for neurodegeneration in dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN). RE significantly dampened anxiety (defined by time …
The Relationship Between Age And Depression : A Self-Efficacy Model, Brandyn M. Street
The Relationship Between Age And Depression : A Self-Efficacy Model, Brandyn M. Street
Master's Theses
From an applied perspective, it is useful for clinicians and researchers to know what variables are more likely to be related to depressive symptoms for some groups than for others. From the social-cognitive perspective, symptoms of depression are linked to people's beliefs that they are unable to regulate or control their own functioning. The purpose of the present study was to test social cognitive theory and its claims about self efficacy by examining whether age and sex differences in depression are a function of emotion regulation, emotional self-efficacy and response styles to depression. The results indicated that females had a …
"Paper Sack Brown" : Effects Of Age, Skin Tone, And Stereotype Threat On Cognitive Performance And Self-Efficacy Among African Americans, Breonte Stephan Guy
"Paper Sack Brown" : Effects Of Age, Skin Tone, And Stereotype Threat On Cognitive Performance And Self-Efficacy Among African Americans, Breonte Stephan Guy
Master's Theses
Divergent African American skin tones have led to negative stereotypes and outcomes regarding darker-skinned African Americans in many domains, including educational and occupational (Hill, 2002). This study assessed the effects of skin tone and stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995; Steele, 1997) on cognition in younger and older African Americans. A 2(Skin Tone: light, dark) X 2(Age: young, old) X 2(Stereotype Threat: Threat, Non-Threat) between subjects design was used. Seventy-four African American adults ranging in age from 18 to 86 years completed a battery of cognitive measures. Darker-skinned adults performed more poorly on three tests of intelligence, a paired-associates memory …
The Presence Of Pups After Birth : Effects On Spatial Memory And The Pre-Synaptic Protein Synaptophysin, Abbe Hoffman Macbeth
The Presence Of Pups After Birth : Effects On Spatial Memory And The Pre-Synaptic Protein Synaptophysin, Abbe Hoffman Macbeth
Master's Theses
A newly maternal rat goes through many changes when she gives birth, mostly due to prolonged elevation of hormones, particularly estrogen. Estrogen has been shown to increase memory capabilities by increasing synaptic activity in the CA1 hippocampus, but exactly how is still unknown. The current project uses reproductive experience to determine whether high hormone levels experienced during pregnancy and lactation affect spatial memory and synaptophysin, a pre-synaptic protein that controls vesicle exocytosis and thus may be responsible for enhanced synaptic connectivity. We found that reproduction itself does not affect memory of a spatial task, but the presence of pups has …
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor And Maternal Behavior : Neuronal Alterations In The Medial Preoptic Area And Suppression Of Pup Attacks, Lillian Flores Stevens
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor And Maternal Behavior : Neuronal Alterations In The Medial Preoptic Area And Suppression Of Pup Attacks, Lillian Flores Stevens
Master's Theses
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), by virtue of its relationship to various neurotransmitter systems, hormones, and to estrogen in particular, may play a role in maternal behavior. To explore this possible role, female virgin Sprague Dawley rats received continuous intracerebroventricular infusions ofBDNF sense oligonucleotide and were exposed to pups for maternal behavior testing. Behaviorally, BDNF sense had no effect on maternal behavior but did significantly suppress pup attacks during the first 24 hours of exposure. BDNF had a significant effect on neuronal morphology in the medial preoptic area (mPOA) as well, such that neurons in this region exposed to BDNF had …
Reproductive Experience And Aging : Possible Neuroprotective Effects Of Motherhood, Jessica Dawn Gatewood
Reproductive Experience And Aging : Possible Neuroprotective Effects Of Motherhood, Jessica Dawn Gatewood
Master's Theses
Hormonal fluctuations associated with pregnancy and post partum periods create significant changes in the brain and behavior in female rats. Animals were tested in a land version of the Morris Water maze for three days at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. At the ages of 12, 18, and 24 months animals were also tested in the same maze using a reversal task. At the conclusion of the study brains were analyzed for Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) to determine the amount of neurodegeneration among the groups. Multiparous animals showed significantly superior performance , followed by primiparous animals, and nulliparous animals …
The Effects Of Childhood Social Competence On Young Adults Interpersonal Competence In Dyadic And Family Relations: An Exploratory Analysis, Gwen Renae Pursell
The Effects Of Childhood Social Competence On Young Adults Interpersonal Competence In Dyadic And Family Relations: An Exploratory Analysis, Gwen Renae Pursell
Master's Theses
The majority of peer relations research focuses on the short and long term effects of childhood peer rejection and aggression for development. The importance of social competence and more specifically, its long term effects on development have not been as thoroughly examined within the peer research. In this 20 year follow-up investigation, preadolescent social competence, peer rejection, and aggression scores were used to predict adult measures of dyadic adjustment, family environment, and family expressiveness. In addition, both preadolescent peer relation scores and concurrent adult dyadic and family scores were used to predict offspring emotion regulation abilities, internalizing and externalizing symptomatology, …
Context Effects And Lexical Ambiguity Processing: An Activation-Based Account, Frazier Orgain
Context Effects And Lexical Ambiguity Processing: An Activation-Based Account, Frazier Orgain
Master's Theses
Many studies have been conducted to test the effects of ambiguous words in sentence processing. There are two views: the modularity hypothesis and the interactive hypothesis that dominate this field of study. The effect of ambiguity has been tested in many ways, including gating, cross-modal priming, naming, and self-paced reading. This utilizes the methods of self paced reading with lexical decision and naming tasks to examine the hypotheses as they relate to the access period of lexical differentiation. Results indicate that context has an immediate effect, after which participants look to other factors to discern meaning of a sentence. Details …
Working Memory In Schizophrenics And Older Adults : A Mediator For Episodic Memory Deficits?, Matthew W. Webster
Working Memory In Schizophrenics And Older Adults : A Mediator For Episodic Memory Deficits?, Matthew W. Webster
Master's Theses
The purpose of this study was to determine the role of working memory on episodic memory in older adults and adults with schizophrenia. This study included 15 adults with schizophrenia, 20 young adults without psychopathology, and 21 older adults without psychopathology. Storage working memory scores were greater than processing working memory scores in all groups. Young adults had the fewest problems with episodic and working memory, compared to older adults and adults with schizophrenia, who had similar deficits in both memory types. Speed of processing was found to be the greatest predictor of working memory capacity.