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Psychology

Theses/Dissertations

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Aging

Publication Year

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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, …