Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Affect Identification And Interpersonal Skills: An In-Depth Evaluation Of Social Cognition In Schizophrenia, Griffin Pollock Sutton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The presence of deficits in various sub-domains of social cognition has been investigated to a degree in individuals with schizophrenia. Some of the most commonly researched and documented deficits have included impairments in the identification of affect portrayed in faces. Research has indicated that the performance of individuals with schizophrenia on such tasks is generally impaired as compared to normal controls. However, some have questioned the generalizability of such findings to real-world situations, as day-to-day interactions generally necessitate a constant, fluid assessment of the thoughts and feelings of others and are rarely, if ever, limited to still images of others. …

Construct And Criterion Validity Of The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test-Spanish Version In Adults With Traumatic Brain Injury, Cristobal Neblina

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) is among the most commonly used English-language neuropsychological tests of verbal learning and memory. Previous research supports the validity and clinical utility of adaptations of the RAVLT into many diverse languages. In the United States, Hispanics represent the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority group. As the Hispanic populace continues to grow, so does the need for empirically validated Spanish-language neuropsychological measures. In 2002, a Spanish adaptation of the RAVLT was developed in Puerto Rico (Acevedo-Vargas, 2002). However, validation studies have not been undertaken with clinical samples, and little is known regarding its psychometric …

Neurological Soft Signs In Persons With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment And The Relationships To Neuropsychological Functions, Hui-Jie Li, Peng-Yun Wang, Yang Jiang, Raymond C.K. Chan, Hua-Li Wang, Juan Li

Behavioral Science Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Neurological abnormalities have been reported in people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). The current study aimed to examine the prevalence of neurological soft signs (NSS) in this clinical group and to examine the relationship of NSS to other neuropsychological performances.

METHODS: Twenty-nine people with aMCI and 28 cognitively healthy elderly people were recruited for the present study. The NSS subscales (motor coordination, sensory integration, and disinhibition) of the Cambridge Neurological Inventory and a set of neuropsychological tests were administered to all the participants.

RESULTS: People with aMCI exhibited significantly more motor coordination signs, disinhibition signs, and total NSS …

The Extent To Which “Death And Disgust” Thoughts Influence Recall In Survival Processing Scenarios, Melanie Kramer

Honors Theses

Recently, researchers have found that survival processing enhances retention. This led the authors to speculate that our memory systems have been fine tuned to remember survival relevant information. One question that might be asked is what is it about thinking about one’s survival that aids memory? As an extension of my previous research, this project examines the extent to which death and disgust influence recall in survival processing scenarios, determining whether or not death and disgust play a role in the memory enhancement associated with survival processing scenarios. There are four conditions in this study differing in the amount of …

Linguistic Devices, Emotionality, And Memorability Of Computer Mediated Communication, Angela M. Mion

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

I examined whether college students use shortcuts, pragmatics, and errors in text messages differently depending on their gender and the emotionality of the message. Results indicate that the prevalence of particular shortcuts differed across happy, sad, and angry messages, but gender did not influence use of linguistic devices. In a second study, I examined the emotionality and memorability of text messages versus voicemails. Results indicate that texts may be remembered better than voicemails, and happy, sad, and angry messages may be remembered differently by men and women.

Nicotine Enhances Acquisition Of A T-Maze Visual Discrimination: Assessment Of Individual Differences, J. Besheer, Rick A. Bevins

Rick A. Bevins

In the present report, rats' performance was assessed in five tasks designed to measure behavioral response to different novel stimuli under different experimental situations. Daily nicotine treatment (0, 0.3 or l.0 mg/kg) began after the conclusion of the behavioral tasks and continued throughout the experiment. Training of a T-maze visual discrimination task commenced after 11 days of nicotine pretreatment. As a group, rats treated with the higher dose of nicotine (l.0 mg/kg) made fewer errors to acquire the initial T-maze discrimination than saline-treated controls. Activity induced by an inescapable novel environment (i.e. first behavioral screen) was positively correlated with the …

Interaction Of Long- And Short-Term Memory On Selective Attention During Timbre Discrimination, Eva Garcia

Dissertations and Theses

The present study investigated the effects of short- and long-term memory on processes of selective attention during timbre discrimination. Pitch served as the distractor dimension, held constant on standard trials and deviating from the standard frequency on distractor trials. Short-term memory was operationalized as levels of covariate context: Within a block of trials, pitch deviants (p=.28) were either absent (baseline condition), varied orthogonally (filtering condition) or systematically (positive and perfect conditions) with timbre values. Long-term memory was operationalized as levels of psychophysical context: Within a block of trials, the range of pitch change was psychophysically equated with timbre change in …

Improved Self-Control Associated With Using Relatively Large Amounts Of Glucose: Learning Self-Control Is Metabolically Expensive, Matthew T. Gailliot

Faculty Publications

The current study examined whether changes in glucose during a self-control task would predict changes in self-control performance later on. Participants attended two experimental sessions, spaced two weeks apart. During each session, they had their glucose measured, completed the Stroop task as a measure of self-control, and then had their glucose measured again. Larger decreases in glucose (from before to after the Stroop task) during the first session predicted larger increases in improvement on the Stroop task during the second session, in the form of increased speed. Learning self-control might benefit from using larger amounts of glucose. Learning self-control is …

The Role Of Sleep In The Enhancement And Impedance Of Episodic Emotional Memories, Rafael De Jesus

Dissertations and Theses

"The current study examined whether sleep enhances the retention of emotionally arousing memories, and whether an emotional memory can be blocked with a single night of sleep deprivation. Using a modified version of a slide show varying in emotionality with respect to the narrative (participants' acting as either a mother or father experiencing the tragic death of their imagined child), 100 (healthy young adult student volunteer) subjects following the experience were randomly assigned to either a normal night of sleep or were variously sleep deprived (in laboratory). After having experienced the emotional event followed immediately by a night of sleep …

The Effects Of Circadian Rhythm-Related Mood On Recognition And Recall Memory For Emotional Images, Priya Puliyampet

Dissertations and Theses

"Studies have proposed that sleep following the presentation of emotional information aids in the consolidation of memory for the emotional elements of the stimuli. Some of these studies have used a paradigm that may have been affected by the confounding influence of circadian factors. Mood may follow a circadian rhythm and research suggests that mood at the time of recall can influence the content of the memory recalled. This study was meant to determine whether the enhanced memory for emotional stimuli in the morning following a night of sleep is a function of the circadian rhythm of mood. Better recall …