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The Effect Of Sleep And Emotion On Pattern Separation, Alanna N. Osmanski

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Prior work on the relationship between sleep and memory suggests that the sleep state is an optimal time for memory consolidation to occur. During slow wave sleep, newly encoded information in the hippocampus is repeatedly activated, driven by slow oscillations that originate in the neocortex. This process that occurs during slow wave sleep facilitates the long-term storage of memories. A widely accepted view of emotion and sleep is that emotional memories are preferentially consolidated during sleep so that they are easily accessible for retrieval, whereas neutral memories tend to be less accessible. However, recent meta-analyses of sleep, emotion, and memory …

Thinking About Thinking: Children’S Awareness And Development Of Metacognitive Emotion Regulation, Reilly Rowland

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Metacognitive emotion regulation is a complex system of our underlying thinking that contributes to the emotions that we endure. By gaining an understanding of this concept, young children can learn various strategies, e.g. cognitive reappraisal, problem solving, and delayed gratification, to help alter their thoughts and/or goals to alleviate negative emotion. Thus, they are able to increase their confidence in their own metacognitive emotion regulation abilities and awareness. This study explored the awareness of young children and their metacognitive emotion regulation abilities, the strategies that young children take part in to try and control negative emotion, and the learning strategies …

Visual Attention And Emotion Regulation In Schizophrenia, Bern Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Emotion regulation and emotion processing deficits cut across the varying symptom presentations of schizophrenia. Emotion processing deficits are inadequately treated by pharmacologic interventions and are related to real-world functional impact and disability. This study investigated behavioral and psychophysiological responses to a series of emotion regulation tasks while concurrently collecting eye tracking data as an index of visual attention. A brief neurocognitive assessment was also completed in order to examine potential cognitive determinants of emotion. Participants completed tasks designed to assess cognitive change and directed attention strategies for down-regulation of unpleasant and pleasant emotion. For each of our two unpleasant emotion …

Integration Of Audio-~Visual Emotional Information In Schizophrneia, Bern Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a debilitating illness characterized by a number of perceptual and

cognitive deficits. Deficits in emotional judgment and perception are consistently identified, although less is known about the integration of emotional information from separate sensory modalities. This study investigates the integration of auditory and visual emotional information in schizophrenia and healthy controls through application of an emotion judgment task modeled after the McGurk effect. The emotional judgments of 54 participants (40 SZ and 14 control participants from the community) for auditory, visual, and bimodal phonemic stimuli conveying no lexical information were analyzed. Visual and auditory stimuli conveying joy …

Auditory Processing Deficits In Bipolar Disorder With And Without A History Of Psychotic Features, Ryanna Verbiest

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Auditory perception deficits have been identified in schizophrenia and linked to dysfunction in primary auditory cortex. There is also evidence that primary auditory cortex abnormalities are associated with positive symptoms, particularly auditory hallucinations. Given the evidence that individuals with bipolar disorder frequently experience auditory hallucinations, it may be that individuals with bipolar disorder who also exhibit psychotic symptoms demonstrate similar impairment in auditory perception tasks. Additionally, these deficits may contribute to impaired social interactions, as they are likely to interfere with accurate perception of emotion from spoken words. The current study examined this matter by comparing performance of 50 individuals …

Incidental Music: Enhancing The Emotional Experience Of The Audience, Daniel Edward Nelson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Environmental psychologists, like Robert Gifford who study transactions between individuals and their physical settings, maintain that as an individual's environment is changed, the environment also changes his/her behavior and experience. (Gifford, 2002) Like other segments of a theatrical setting, manipulation of the environment can enhance or constrain a broad range of audience actions from traditional theatre audiences to shoppers in a mall or guests at a wedding. Physical elements, as well as other ambient factors such as lighting, color, and quality of materials, set design, music, fragrance, and room temperature are a sample of the dramatic elements used to orchestrate …