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Examining A Normative Model Of Stress Using Choice Under Risk, Zarmina Khan Apr 2017

Examining A Normative Model Of Stress Using Choice Under Risk, Zarmina Khan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Novel research in the domain of decisional control (DC), the process whereby individuals in multifaceted stressing situations make probabilistic judgments in order to reduce the occurrence of adverse events, has recently tested a mathematically specified normative model of coping with stress. This model used choice under uncertainty to understand the cognitive underpinnings of choice and linked threat. Findings from this undertaking have supported the notion that individualized subjective expected utilities (SEU) provide the best fit over group-averaged SEU and objective utility models in a sample of undergraduate students. The present research examined whether this finding holds true for choice under …


Individual Differences In Stress And Coping: Testing A Model Of Decisional Control, Bryan D. Grant Nov 2016

Individual Differences In Stress And Coping: Testing A Model Of Decisional Control, Bryan D. Grant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Quantifying the processes of coping is one way to make the concept both descriptive and testable. Decisional Control (DC) is a formal, mathematically-specified, normative model which prescribes that an individual faced with a variety of alternatives in a stressing situation will attempt to minimize objective and perceived threat of an adverse event inherent within their choices. In this study, a game-theoretic probability mixture model created for DC was evaluated using established indexes of model fit to empirical decision and choice data. Sources of empirical departure from the fully normative model predictions, notably individual and group cognitive mapping of choice linked …


Mathematical Modeling Of Stress Management Via Decisional Control, Matthew J. Shanahan Dec 2015

Mathematical Modeling Of Stress Management Via Decisional Control, Matthew J. Shanahan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Engaging the environment through reason, humankind evaluates information, compares it to a standard of desirability, and selects the best option available. Stress is theorized to arise from the perception of survival-related demands on an organism. Cognitive efforts are no mere intellectual exercise when ontologically backed by survival-relevant reward or punishment. This dissertation examines the stressful impact, and countervailing peaceful impact, of environmental demands on cognitive efforts and of successful cognitive efforts on a person’s day-to-day environment, through mathematical modeling of ‘decisional control’. A modeling approach to clinical considerations is introduced in the first paper, “Clinical Mathematical Psychology”. A general exposition …