Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

P300 Event-Related Potential Responses To Self-Relevant Stimuli, Jordan Razzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous literature has suggested an apparent P300 sensitivity to self-relevant stimuli. To further explore this relationship, we asked participants to submit 10 photos, each of a particular category (e.g. footwear, plants), to be used as either targets or distractors in a given condition of an oddball task. Furthermore, we attempted to see whether the effect of self-relevance on the P300 could be induced in a participant by allowing them to study a set of unique photos which would then be used as targets. Our analysis suggested that P300 amplitude elicited in response to self-relevant stimuli used as targets was statistically …

Multidisciplinary Literary Review: The Relationship Between Social Media And Empathy, Mayra E. Salgado

Honors Theses

This literary review examines the different psychological perspectives on the relationship between social media usage and empathy. Specifically, it discusses the association by expanding on the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, clinical psychology, and some evolutionary psychology. I define empathy and discuss its developmental journey, its cognitive functions, its neurobiological processes, its possible damage caused by social media usage, and its effects on physical and mental health. Lastly, I argue that research focusing on high levels of social media usage and its relationship with levels of empathy should focus on creating an elaborate longitudinal study to gain more information on …

Decoding Affective Information From Neuronal Populations In The Human Hippocampus, Alexander N. Lawriw

LSU Master's Theses

The hippocampus is understood to play a key role in the formation of episodic memories. Prominent theories suggest this is made possible through use of sparse encoding schemes, in which a small number of neurons encode each episodic event using a distinct pattern of neuronal activity. However, more recent computational models suggest that the hippocampus may also be capable of representing semantic structure, a notion previously thought to be exclusive to the neocortex. In our previous line of work, we trained multivariate classifiers to predict the semantic content, specifically affect, of computer-generated faces given spiking data taken from individual neurons …

Buffering Effects Of Negative Intergroup Contact Through Complex Social Identities, Liora Morhayim

Masters Theses

Although negative intergroup contact occurs less frequently than positive contact, negative contact can more strongly influence outgroup attitudes and behaviors due to the effect of category salience in the generalization process. The present study (N =306) tests whether being aware of an outgroup member’s complex social identity will serve as a buffer against the adverse impact of a negative intergroup contact experience on outgroup attitudes. In a 3X2 between-subjects design, social identity complexity (SIC) of an outgroup confederate (high versus low versus control) and the valence of contact (neutral versus negative) were manipulated. Participants interacted with an outgroup confederate …

A Comprehensive Study Of Neural Entrainment In Developmental Language Disorder And Reading Disability, Christine Moreau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Prior research has suggested that reading disability (RD, dyslexia) and developmental language disorder (DLD) stem from deficits in rhythmic auditory processing, specifically in synchronizing neural oscillations (Cumming et al., 2015; Goswami, 2011). Speech relies on rhythmic patterns for signaling linguistic information at multiple timescales (e.g., phonemes, syllables; Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). The disruption of regular neural entrainment is hypothesized to lead to difficulties in processing fast acoustic changes in speech, negatively affecting phonological processing, and speech segmentation. In this dissertation, I studied neural entrainment to uncover possible areas of impairment related to speech tracking, which could help inform interventions. In …

A Phenomenological Study Of School Psychologists: The Influence Of Implicit Bias On The Disproportionate Identification Rates Of African American Students Evaluated For Emotional Disturbance, Sonya Coe-Milo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As advocates, school psychologists remain ethically responsible and uniquely positioned to identify social injustices and promote nondiscriminatory practices in prekindergarten through grade 12 public education institutions. Implicit bias and its influence on African American students is one such practice. In public education, implicit bias contributes to discipline disproportionality, differentiated teacher support, pedagogical practices, and adult perceptions and expectations of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. These factors directly correlate to the disproportionate identification rates of African American students for special education and related services. Therefore, this phenomenological qualitative study examined the personal, lived experiences and perceptions of school psychologists regarding implicit bias …

Psilocybin With Acceptance And Commitment Therapy (Act) For The Treatment Of Social Anxiety Disorder (Sad), Aspen E. Allred

University Honors Theses

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a debilitating mental health condition characterized by an overwhelming fear and anxiety of social rejection that can lead to chronic patterns of social behavioral avoidance. Despite the existence of traditional efficacious treatments, a significant number of individuals either do not respond to treatment or experience a recurrence of symptoms over extended periods, spanning 10-12 years. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a form of acceptance-based behavioral therapy considered part of the "third wave" of cognitive behavioral therapies, has shown promising results in early studies, comparable to those of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that is considered the …

Learning From One’S Own Errors Vs From Observing Other People's Errors: Ego Engagement Vs Ego Threat, Viktoriya Andreevskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Do people learn better from their own errors or from observing other people’s errors? A sense of ego-threat may impede learning from negative corrective feedback directed to self. A series of two experiments manipulated the degree of ego-threat between subjects. In the neutral ego-threat condition, results showed better learning from self-generated errors.

Individual Concepts And Personal Identity Judgement, Molly M. Ye

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research into personal identity judgments has yielded conflicting outcomes. This paper introduces an alternative argument, proposing that the concept PERSON and HUMAN BEING provide different ways of thinking about the identity of people. Two experiments in this study provide evidence for this claim.

The Non-Standardization Of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: A Call To Action, Gabriel L.S Gomez

Psychology Doctoral Specialization Projects

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most diagnosed disorders in adults and children, yet there is no standardized method to assess for ADHD. The similarity of symptoms shared across other disorders (comorbidity) makes the assessment of ADHD a very delicate process. This is not aided by the fact that the assessment of ADHD is not standardized. This allows individuals able to assess for ADHD to give a test or a combination of tests that they find fitting. This in turn brings into question the quality of testing and disagreement in diagnosing across fields. Lastly, ADHD-focused measures typically …

The 1-Back Matching/Mismatching Paradigm With Pigeons (Columba Livia): Evidence For Explicit Learning?, Daniel Peng

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

With humans, a distinction can be made between explicit and implicit learning. language can be used to describe rule-based learning commonly seen in explicit, but not implicit learning. Unfortunately, we cannot do so with animals. Therefore, a non-verbal paradigm is needed to differentiate the types of learning. One method to make such a distinction is by training animals under a conditional discrimination task such as matching-to-sample with reinforcement delayed until a choice is made on the next trial: otherwise known as a 1-back procedure. In this experiment an alternating matching/mismatching to sample task under a 1-back schedule of reinforcement was …

Towards Algorithmic Justice: Human Centered Approaches To Artificial Intelligence Design To Support Fairness And Mitigate Bias In The Financial Services Sector, Jihyun Kim

CMC Senior Theses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has positively transformed the Financial services sector but also introduced AI biases against protected groups, amplifying existing prejudices against marginalized communities. The financial decisions made by biased algorithms could cause life-changing ramifications in applications such as lending and credit scoring. Human Centered AI (HCAI) is an emerging concept where AI systems seek to augment, not replace human abilities while preserving human control to ensure transparency, equity and privacy. The evolving field of HCAI shares a common ground with and can be enhanced by the Human Centered Design principles in that they both put humans, the user, at …

An Examination Of The Relation Between Memory Self-Efficacy And Working Memory Within The Cognitive Reserve Framework, Genna Marie Mashinchi Ma

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Dementia has been found to negatively affect multiple aspects of cognitive functioning. Despite an increasing prevalence of cognitive decline, many aging adults do not experience reduced cognitive functioning. The reason as to why some experience cognitive decline and others do not is still unclear. One leading theory thought to explain this phenomenon is the cognitive reserve theory (CR), which proposes that certain lifestyle factors (e.g., educational attainment, occupational attainment, and leisure activity participation) prolong one’s cognitive functioning and reduce the risk of cognitive decline. Memory self-efficacy (MSE), defined as one’s beliefs in their memory ability, was found to be positively …

Correlates Of Celebrity Worship And Materialism, Caitlin T. Davis

Honors College Theses

The proposed study will further examine the relationship between celebrity admiration and narcissism. The proposed study will also examine the relationship of the variables to materialism. Finally, this study will examine how the extent to which one perceives themselves to be similar in some respect to their favorite celebrity correlates with the aforementioned variables. We expect that there will be positive relationships among the variables such that greater celebrity worship is associated with higher narcissism, materialism, and perceived similarity with one’s favorite celebrity.

Your Anonymous Words Matter: The Harms Of Internet Anonymity And Its Inhibiting Effects On Producing Knowledge, Sena Selby

CMC Senior Theses

In this paper, I will argue against Karen Frost-Arnold’s claim that internet anonymity has more epistemic benefit than epistemic harm for online communities. I will first outline her arguments that anonymity poses epistemic benefits for speakers of marginalized communities, who often rely on anonymity to share their experience and testimony without fear of repercussions, such as testimonial injustice, backlash, and even physical harm. I will then consider objections to Frost-Arnold’s account made by others, including the idea that anonymous testimony is not reliable. I will show how this objection alone is insufficient against Frost-Arnold’s claim. Then, I will offer my …

Designing A Personalization Intervention To Reduce Churn In Exercise Mobile Apps: A Research Proposal, Chris Li

CMC Senior Theses

Sports and fitness mHealth app development has rapidly increased since the COVID-19 pandemic due to changes in living situations that increased the demand for exercising remotely. App developers struggle to understand the various strategies in reducing the amount of users that churn as time progresses. This research proposal will primarily focus on the effect that personalization has on churn, seeing the increased development of mobile health apps, strong desire for curated experiences, and the recent relevance of AI. To fully understand the relationship between personalization and churn, moderator effects of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and user engagement will …

Fantasia On A Theme Of Purpose: Using A Music-Guided Scribble Technique To Support Meaning-Making In Older Adult Retiree Musicians, Sophia R. Smith

Art Therapy | Master's Theses

Within the population of older adults, overall well-being corresponds with the ability to self-actualize and seek meaning, but age-related changes combined with ageism and isolation can negatively impact this capacity to maintain a sense of purpose, especially following retirement. It may be that retired musicians are especially vulnerable to this experience later in life due to a loss of the primary method of creative engagement and community that is facilitated by musical performance in a group setting. Integrating phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, this study utilized a qualitative design to understand how music-guided art-making incorporating the scribble technique could support a …

Grammatical Aspect, Temporal Adverbs, And Situation Models, Valerie Hemeon

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Grammatical aspect and temporal cues have been shown to impact discourse processing. To explore this further, we contrasted temporal adverbs that move narrative timelines forward or backward. Although previous research has examined timelines independently, it was yet to be explored how timeline adverbs impact discourse processing when grammatical aspect and temporal cues are also manipulated. The experiment involved a sentence-completion task which allowed us to measure availability of target discourse concepts in situation models. Results showed main effects for grammatical aspect, temporal shifts, and narrative timeline directions. Three two-way interactions were found. The results demonstrated support for the iconicity assumption …

The Influence Of Visual Perspective On The Cognitive Effort Required For Mental Representation, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors.

The current research consists of four experiments, designed …

Music Density: A Novel Measurement Of Music Perception, Tyler Ussery

All Master's Theses

Empirical research in fields such as music perception, cognition, and therapy has developed considerably in recent decades. While many studies implement musical stimuli, there are few expeditious metrics for identifying the objective characteristics of music itself. The current study proposed and developed a tool for measuring perception of the theoretical concept of music density. Music density can be defined as the compactness of auditory information that comprises a piece of music. For this study, five musical factors were explored (tempo, texture, timbre, dynamics, and predictability) via a 5-point Likert scale. It is well established that personality is an important …

Grasping Type Affects Configural Encoding In Visual Working Memory, Shinhae Ahn

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has shown that different grasping actions selectively influence the processing of simple visual features based on their relevance to the specific action. However, it remains uncertain if this interaction extends to abstract and higher-order information, such as global configuration extracted from an array of visual objects. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of different grasping types on the processing of configural shape information in visual working memory (VWM). In Experiment 1, participants engaged in a VWM change detection task while adopting either power- or precision-grasping postures. The availability of configural shape information was manipulated through the …

Exploring The Use Of Time Delay As A Pragmatic Cue In Text Messaging, Nicklas Phillips

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Text messaging is often used as a stand-in for face to face communication. While texting mimics the rapid back and forth, turn taking nature of oral conversation, it lacks many of the pragmatic cues conversationalists ordinarily rely on to establish common ground and inform their understanding of sometimes nonliteral meaning conveyed to them. To get around this hurdle, texters have developed sets of textisms. These are specific cues that can be used to make up for the lack of pragmatic information in the texting environment. Examples include emoji, emoticons, and punctuation. This is an experimental study exploring whether time can …

Spontaneous Simulation Of Future And Past Events, Mackenzie Bain

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Spontaneous future and past events come to mind unintentionally. Previous research supports that environmental cues prompt spontaneous simulation, although the role of specific cues remains unaddressed. Previous work has found that involuntary autobiographical memories are generated in chained-event sequences, which refers to multiple, related events being generated consecutively. We addressed how event and location cues influence spontaneous future and past events, and whether future events occur in chains. In a boring vigilance task, 132 participants located a left-facing arrow amongst right-facing arrows. On 49 of 350 trials, participants encountered event or location cues. Ten times, participants audio-recorded off-task thoughts they …

Mrs. Dalloway As A Window For Understanding Life, Kristen Venegas

English (MA) Theses

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway may be dismissed as fiction, and fiction consequently is dismissed as fantasy. However, the novel enables readers to practice an intellectual exercise of meta-awareness that extends beyond the pages and onto real world phenomena. Under a cognitive neuroscience perspective, Mrs. Dalloway is a literary masterpiece due to its hyper- realistic execution of the intimacies of life. Through the narrative style of free-indirect discourse, Woolf illustrates what occurs in the minds of characters as they develop their own perceptions of reality and identity, exposes the fear and inadequacies of mankind’s distress in times of chaos and disorder …

The Relationship Between Auditory Working Memory And Statistical Learning In Infancy, Mckenzie Mullins Sheets

Masters Theses

Although previous research indicates that there is a strong relationship between auditory working memory and language skills in children and adults, no studies have explored this relationship in infancy. Working memory develops shortly before the onset of many language abilities in infancy, including the ability to use statistical information to segment words from speech. To track frequent syllable co-occurrences within a speech stream to locate word boundaries, infants must hold auditory information in their mind as one syllable quickly displaces another. Thus, it seems likely that auditory working memory plays a role in statistical learning. In the current study, I …

Biomarkers Of Objective Criteria For Subtle Cognitive Decline In Parkinson’S Disease, Mary Ellen Garcia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease (PD-MCI) is the continuum from normal cognitive function to dementia. Recent studies suggest that objectively defined subtle cognitive decline (Obj-SCD), which uses non-traditional “process” neuropsychological scores, may be a better pathway to earlier detection of cognitive impairment. Obj-SCD has been defined as the stage where cognition is not impaired, but biomarkers are present or cognitive impairment is minimal but not sufficient to meet MCI or dementia criteria. We examined the longitudinal trajectories of neurodegenerative markers among individuals who are classified as cognitive normal (CN), Obj-SCD, and PD-MCI. Past literature has been inconsistent about the …

Formalizing The Faustian Bargain Within The Healthcare Domain: An End-Of-Life Approach., Rachel Appel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Faustian Bargain refers to an individual making a “deal with the devil,” exchanging something moral or sacred for an unattainable earthly good. The Faustian Bargain has been used to describe a ubiquitous social dilemma inherent to human civilization: exchanging individual liberty for public goods (e.g., security) provided by societal leaders and governments (Ostrom, 1980). Research on Faustian Bargains often examines tradeoffs between outcome utility (i.e., value derived from the outcomes of a decision) and procedural utility (i.e., value derived from being involved in the decision process (e.g., Frey et al., 2004). Much of the research on Faustian Bargains has …

Diminishing Creative Returns: Predicting Optimal Creative Performance Via Individual Differences In Executive Functioning, Kent F. Hubert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A robust finding in creativity research is that during idea generation, later (vs. earlier) responses on a divergent thinking task tend to be more creative, while the number of responses start off quickly, and then slow down over time, termed the serial order effect. Divergent thinking and time may follow a diminishing returns curve, where there is an optimal amount of time that should be spent while generating ideas. Executive functions (inhibition, updating, and shifting) have been associated with divergent thinking, specifically with the idea generation phase, but the effect of individual differences on the temporal dynamics of divergent thinking …

Examining Task-Related Differences In The Error-Related Negativity (Ern) As A Function Of Cognitive Control Strategy And Trait Anxiety, Russell Mach

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety disorders pose a significant challenge to daily living, workplace productivity, and healthcare systems. Extant research supports empirical links between anxiety and brain-level error monitoring. The ERN – or error-related negativity – is one widely studied correlate of anxious symptomatology. Relatively stable individual differences in the ERN are inferred from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings time-locked to the commission of mistakes. However, the assumed interchangeability of ERNs elicited under different experimental conditions has not been thoroughly evaluated. Canonical tasks for measuring the ERN may cue specific strategies for cognitive control, possibly producing divergent findings across studies. In a sample of 108 undergraduate …

Discounting Of Delayed And Probabilistic Outcomes Across The Adult Lifespan, Haoran Wan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intertemporal and risky decision-making predicts many problem behaviors that also decline with age, raising the question: Do intertemporal and risky decisions change with age? Despite the theoretical and empirical importance, the literature under both rubrics reveals inconsistent findings. Some studies suggest that these inconsistencies may be due to the presence of unassessed demographic differences. The present study examined age differences, evaluating the role of demographic variables in intertemporal and risky choice of gains and losses using the discounting framework. Four experiments were conducted, each with one of the four types of discounting: discounting of delayed gains, discounting of delayed losses, …