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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

The Feeling Mind, Maria Doulatova May 2021

The Feeling Mind, Maria Doulatova

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to standard conceptions of agency, our reasons and intentions guide our actions. That is, goal-directed intentions play a key role in practical deliberation, planning, and execution of action. Furthermore, purposeful, goal-directed behavior warrants attributions of responsibility or “reactive attitudes” like resentment, anger, gratitude and forgiveness. However, recent developments of the dual-process theory of mind cast doubt on the empirical adequacy of this picture. While people take themselves to be responding to relevant reasons, they are often bypassed by irrelevant affective or automatic reactions. In this work I go beyond the dual-process theory of mind to offer a mechanistic account …


Psychological Construct Validity, Caroline Marie Stone May 2021

Psychological Construct Validity, Caroline Marie Stone

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A primary concern for any psychological research project is determining how to measure unobservable mental entities, such as "implicit memory", or "intelligence". Psychologists say that a measure has construct validity when they believe that a measurement method measures the construct they intend it to measure, where a construct is any theoretical term that refers to a mental entity. Construct validity, then, is the process of justifying one's belief that a measure has construct validity. My dissertation seeks to answer three related questions, 1. What is construct validity?, 2. What is the best epistemic theory of justification for construct validation?, and …


Modeling Semantic Structure And Spreading Activation In Retrieval Tasks, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar May 2021

Modeling Semantic Structure And Spreading Activation In Retrieval Tasks, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Considerable work in the past decade has focused on representational accounts of how semantic information is acquired and organized, leading to the advent of modern Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn word meanings by extracting statistical information from large text corpora. However, mechanistic accounts for how meaning-related information is accessed and retrieved from semantic representations to ultimately produce responses within semantic tasks remain relatively understudied, especially for production-based tasks that require the selection of a single response amongst several activated competitors, such as in free association and sentence completion tasks. This dissertation evaluated the extent to which state-of-the-art DSMs combined …


Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier May 2019

Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between morality and mental illness. Mental illness is often thought to impair moral functioning but careful examination reveals that mental illness offers its own insight into moral functioning. While we learn a great deal about moral responsibility and exempting conditions (psychopathy and addiction), we also discover that there a multiple ways to be moral and that many individuals act morally despite ongoing conditions (high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and recovered borderline personality disorder). I conclude that these insights ought to shape our ethical theories.


The Role Of Personality In The Development Of Health Disparities During Late-Mid Life, Juliette Mcclendon Iacovino Aug 2018

The Role Of Personality In The Development Of Health Disparities During Late-Mid Life, Juliette Mcclendon Iacovino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The current study examined race/gender disparities in initial levels and trajectories of self-reported physical and mental health, and health care utilization, as well as the impact of personality and stressful life events on race/gender disparities. We hypothesized that health disparities would remain stable or decrease over time; that at-risk personality traits (e.g., high neuroticism) would have a more robust negative impact on health for black participants; that trust would mediate racial disparities in health; and that personality traits would moderate the association between stressful life events and health trajectories differentially across race/gender. Methods: Analyses utilized the first six waves …


Parsing The Blues: What Depression Reveals About The Life Well-Lived, Ian Tully May 2018

Parsing The Blues: What Depression Reveals About The Life Well-Lived, Ian Tully

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the way depression illuminates –and is illuminated by – certain aspects of moral philosophy. I begin by defending, in chapter one, a cognitive theory of one important subtype of depression. The subsequent chapters then investigate what depression can teach us about the nature of well- (and ill-) being, and about the nature of moral virtue. In chapter two I ask ‘what makes depression bad for us?’ and go on to argue that reflection upon this question shows that desire-based theories of welfare are false. Then, in the next chapter, I provide a (partial) answer to that question, …


Stories In Mind – The Relationship Between The Narratological Categories Of Order And Time And The Reader’S Cognitive Structures As Exemplified In Büchner’S Play Woyzeck, Marc Breetzke May 2015

Stories In Mind – The Relationship Between The Narratological Categories Of Order And Time And The Reader’S Cognitive Structures As Exemplified In Büchner’S Play Woyzeck, Marc Breetzke

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.