Psychology Commons^™

The Life Of An Unknown Assassin: Leon Czolgosz And The Death Of William Mckinley, Cary Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The purpose of this essay is to examine the discourses that surrounded the life of Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley. The gaps in Czolgosz’s life, his peculiar silences, his poor health and the ambiguity and thinness of his confession, rather than taken as instances of mental and physical distress, have, instead, been understood as signs of a revolutionary anarchistic assassin. Czolgosz is an expression of a cultural tradition in somatic form. I argue that the discursive construction of criminality, already present in the late nineteenth century within the medical and human sciences, is what shaped Czolgosz’s life …

Effect Of Social Status On Behavioral And Neural Response To Stress, Daniel W. Curry, Kathleen E. Morrison, Matthew A. Cooper

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Mental Blocks: The Behavioural Effects And Neural Encoding Of Obstacles When Reaching And Grasping, Craig S. Chapman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ability to adeptly interact with a cluttered and dynamic world requires that the brain simultaneously encode multiple objects. Theoretical frameworks of selective visuomotor attention provide evidence for parallel encoding (Baldauf & Deubel, 2010; Cisek & Kalaska, 2010; Duncan, 2006) where concurrent object processing results in neural competition. Since the end goal of object representation is usually action, these frameworks argue that the competitive activity is best characterized as the development of visuomotor biases. While some behavioural and neural evidence has been accumulated in favour of this explanation, one of the most striking, yet deceptively common, demonstrations of this capacity …

Coaching Efficacy With Academic Leaders: A Phenomenological Investigation, Deanna Lee Vansickel-Peterson

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this psychological phenomenological research was to understand the efficacy of life coaching from the perspective of academic leaders. To date, not one investigation or attempt has been made towards the above stated purpose. This study includes a theoretical overview and a review of the coaching literature from Socrates (469-399 BC) to current day Humanistic theory presented in part by Roger (1902-1987).

This process included data collection from five academic leaders who have been coached for at least two years. Levels of analysis of 365 statements, quote and/or comments produced finding of efficacy in life coaching with academic …

When Bad Stress Goes Good: Increased Threat Reactivity Predicts Improved Category Learning Performance, Shawn W. Ell, Brandon Cosley, Shannon L. Mccoy

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

The way in which we respond to everyday stressors can have a profound impact on cognitive functioning. Maladaptive stress responses in particular are generally associated with impaired cognitive performance. We argue, however, that the cognitive system mediating task performance is also a critical determinant of the stress-cognition relationship. Consistent with this prediction, we observed that stress reactivity consistent with a maladaptive, threat response differentially predicted performance on two categorization tasks. Increased threat reactivity predicted enhanced performance on an information-integration task (i.e., learning is thought to depend upon a procedural-based memory system), and a (nonsignificant) trend for impaired performance on a …

Vocal Learning In Grey Parrots: A Brief Review Of Perception, Production, And Cross-Species Comparisons, Irene M. Pepperberg

Sentience Collection

This chapter briefly reviews what is known—and what remains to be understood—about Grey parrot vocal learning. I review Greys’ physical capacities—issues of auditory perception and production—then discuss how these capacities are used in vocal learning and can be recruited for referential communication with humans. I discuss cross-species comparisons where applicable and conclude with a description of recent research that integrates issues of reference, production and perception.

Wilderness Beauty: A Means To Resolve Volitional Doubt, Brian T. Scalise

Eleutheria: John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal

Doubt is often part of Christian spiritual life. Matured doubt will influence the will (the volition) so as to keep the Christian doubter from acting like a Christian or even desiring the Christian life. This essay seeks to construct a theory designed to engage and help resolve volitional doubt by use of wilderness beauty. This theory incorporates three areas of study—Land and Leisure Management, Abraham Maslow’s metamotivation theory, and Jonathan Edwards' aesthetic theology—to demonstrate the uniqueness and usefulness of wilderness beauty for resolving volitional doubt. Subsequent to the construction of the theory, practical suggestions for its application are given.

Effect Of Social Status On Behavioral And Neural Response To Stress, Daniel W. Curry, Kathleen E. Morrison, Matthew A. Cooper

Senior Thesis Projects, 2009

Individuals respond differently to traumatic stress. Social status, which plays a key role in how animals experience and interact with their social environment, may influence how individuals respond to stressors. In this study, we used a conditioned defeat model to investigate whether social status alters susceptibility to the behavioral and neural consequences of traumatic stress. Conditioned defeat is a model in Syrian hamsters in which an acute social defeat encounter results in a long term increase in submissive behavior and a loss of normal territorial aggression. To establish social status, we weight matched and paired Syrian hamsters in daily aggressive …

Alternation Rate In Perceptual Bistability Is Maximal At And Symmetric Around Equi-Dominance, Rubén Moreno-Bote, Asya Shpiro, John Rinzel, Nava Rubin

Publications and Research

When an ambiguous stimulus is viewed for a prolonged time, perception alternates between the different possible interpretations of the stimulus. The alternations seem haphazard, but closer inspection of their dynamics reveals systematic properties in many bistable phenomena. Parametric manipulations result in gradual changes in the fraction of time a given interpretation dominates perception, often over the entire possible range of zero to one. The mean dominance durations of the competing interpretations can also vary over wide ranges (from less than a second to dozens of seconds or more), but finding systematic relations in how they vary has proven difficult. Following …

Convergent Validity Of Self Reported Physical Activity With A Seven Day Recall, Benjamin J. Silber

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Accurate assessment of physical activity is important to studies interested in the relationship between physical activity and other variables. Questionnaires are the only feasible means for large-scale sampling but such self-report measures require validation due to their inherent subjectivity. The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) survey includes exercise items that were validated in the present investigation. A calibration study examined self-reports of exercise with two phone calls to 1,000 participants in which an interview-assisted 7-day physical activity recall was completed by a random sample of AHS-2 participants. Inter-index correlations both within the survey and between the survey and the 7-day physical …

Are Unfamiliar Neighbours Considered To Be Dear-Enemies?, Elodie Briefer, Fanny Rybak, Thierry Aubin

Sentience Collection

Background: Discriminating threatening individuals from non-threatening ones allow territory owners to modulate their territorial responses according to the threat posed by each intruder. This ability reduces costs associated with territorial defence. Reduced aggression towards familiar adjacent neighbours, termed the dear-enemy effect, has been shown in numerous species. An important question that has never been investigated is whether territory owners perceive distant neighbours established in the same group as strangers because of their unfamiliarity, or as dear-enemies because of their group membership.

Methodology/Principal Findings: To investigate this question, we played back to male skylarks (Alauda arvensis) songs of adjacent neighbours, distant …

Capuchins (Cebus Apella) Can Solve A Means-End Problem, Anna M. Yocom, Sarah T. Boysen

Sentience Collection

Three capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were tested on a 2-choice discrimination task designed to examine their knowledge of support, modeled after Hauser, Kralik, and Botto-Mahan’s (1999) experiments with tamarins. This task involved a choice between 2 pieces of cloth, including 1 with a food reward placed on its surface, and a second cloth with the food reward next to its surface. After reliably solving the basic problem, the capuchins were tested with various alternations of the original food reward and cloth. The capuchins were able to solve the initial task quickly, and generalize their knowledge to additional functional and nonfunctional …

Neural Reuse As A Source Of Developmental Homology, David S. Moore, Chris Moore

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Neural reuse theories should interest developmental psychologists because these theories can potentially illuminate the developmental relations among psychological characteristics observed across the lifespan. Characteristics that develop by exploiting pre-existing neural circuits can be thought of as developmental homologues. And, understood in this way, the homology concept that has proven valuable for evolutionary biologists can be used productively to study psychological/behavioral development.

Information Acquisition And Sociality Among Migratory Birds, Zoltán Németh

Dissertations

Information use is a key feature of adaptive behavior: the better informed an individual, the better it is able to adjust its behavior to meet the demands of a variable world. Therefore, most animals attempt to reduce environmental uncertainty by gathering information when it is available. However, tracking unpredictable ecological factors may carry costs as individuals invest valuable time and energy in the process of information acquisition. Social learning (i.e., use of social information inadvertently produced by other individuals) enables the individual to gain rapid and more complete assessment of its novel environment. This process may be particularly important for …

Neuropsychological And Emotion Processing Abnormalities In Bipolar Disorder I And Ii, Carol Randall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bipolar disorder illness is marked by emotional lability and mood disturbance, as well as various neuropsychological deficits, and the neuroanatomical correlates of many of these deficits are beginning to be identified. Numerous studies have implicated specific cortical and sub-cortical abnormalities in areas associated with executive function, memory, motor function, and the processing of emotion. Although a large body of research has been devoted to the investigation of cognitive and emotion-processing deficits in bipolar disorder, relatively few studies have been devoted to the investigation of how these deficits differ among bipolar disorder subtypes. This is surprising in light of known symptomatological …

The Effect Of Self-Efficacy Manipulation On The Efficiency, Rate Of Perceived Exertion, And Affective State Of Runners, Isabelle Stoate

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Objectives: To determine the effect of self-efficacy manipulation on the movement efficiency, rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and affective state of runners while running on the treadmill at a constant submaximal pace.

Methods: 20 trained male and female runners were randomly assigned to experimental (self-efficacy manipulation) and control groups. Participants first filled out a pre self-efficacy questionnaire and the positive affect negative affect schedule (PANAS), and then completed a 20 minute run on the treadmill running at 75% of their peak treadmill running speed. After 10 minutes, their oxygen consumption (VO2), heart rate (HR), and RPE was recorded. Participants (n=10) …

A Combined Fmri And Dti Examination Of Functional Language Lateralization And Arcuate Fasciculus Structure: Effects Of Degree Versus Direction Of Hand Preference Author Links Open Overlay Panel, Ruth E. Propper, Lauren J. O'Donnell, Stephen Whalen, Yanmei Tie, Isaiah Norton, Ralph O. Suarez, Lilla Zollei, Alireza Radmanesh, Alexandra Golby

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The present study examined the relationship between hand preference degree and direction, functional language lateralization in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, and structural measures of the arcuate fasciculus. Results revealed an effect of degree of hand preference on arcuate fasciculus structure, such that consistently-handed individuals, regardless of the direction of hand preference, demonstrated the most asymmetric arcuate fasciculus, with larger left versus right arcuate, as measured by DTI. Functional language lateralization in Wernicke’s area, measured via fMRI, was related to arcuate fasciculus volume in consistent-left-handers only, and only in people who were not right hemisphere lateralized for language; given the …

Food Handling Practices, Knowledge And Beliefs Of Families With Young Children Based On The Health Belief Model, Adeline Lum

Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Objective: To determine current food handling practices, knowledge and beliefs of primary food handlers with children 10 years old and the relationship between these components.

Design: Surveys were developed based on FightBac!™ concepts and the Health Belief Model (HBM) construct.

Participants: The majority of participants (n= 503) were females (67%), Caucasians (80%), aged between 30 to 49 years old (83%), had one or two children (83%), prepared meals all or most of the time (76%) and consumed meals away from home three times or less per week (66%).

Analysis: Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (rho) …

Mother Earth "Speaks": Change Yourself, Change The World, Use The Archetypal Energy "Harmony" As A Guide, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

In relation to the Cosmos, we all, as human beings, live on this tiny planet we call Earth, a planet that supports and sustains life, as we know it. There are many different kinds of people, plants, and animals functioning in harmony with soil, air, and water--all linked to one another in a complex web of life to form one Earth community. Unfortunately, we often take this miracle and ecosystem of life for granted. When, however, we take the ecosystem of life too much for granted, Mother Earth "speaks," reflecting imbalances and dis-harmonies. When Mother Earth "speaks," her message is …

Rule-Based Categorization Deficits In Focal Basal Ganglia Lesion And Parkinson’S Disease Patients, Shawn W. Ell, Andrea Weinstein, Richard Ivry

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Patients with basal ganglia (BG) pathology are consistently found to be impaired on rule-based category learning tasks in which learning is thought to depend upon the use of an explicit, hypothesis-guided strategy. The factors that influence this impairment remain unclear. Moreover, it remains unknown if the impairments observed in patients with degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) are also observed in those with focal BG lesions. In the present study, we tested patients with either focal BG lesions or PD on two categorization tasks that varied in terms of their demands on selective attention and working memory. Individuals with …

The Use Of Horticulture And Gardening As A Special Education Tool At The High School Level, Krysta Marie Johnson

Horticulture and Crop Science

THIS REPORT CONTAINS PLANNING METHODS AND INSTALLATION PROCEDURE FOR A RAISED VEGETABLE GARDEN FOR WILSONVILLE HIGH SCHOOL, IN WILSONVILLE, OREGON. THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THE GARDEN WAS TO USE IT AS A LEARNING TOOL FOR THE SPECIAL EDUCATION DEPARTMENT AT WILSONVILLE HIGH SCHOOL. UPON DOING MORE RESEARCH IT BECAME EVIDENT THAT THE GARDEN CAN ALSO BE USED AS A HEALING TOOL FOR STUDENTS WHO SUFFER FROM ATTENTION DISORDERS AND WHO HAVE EMOTIONAL AND LEARNING DISABILITIES. THE STUDENTS HAVE BECOME INVESTED IN THE GARDEN PROJECT AND LOOK FORWARD TO DOING MORE PROJECTS WITH THEIR CLASS.

Assessing Sleep Quality In Young Adult College Students, Aged 18 - 24 In Relation To Quality Of Life And Anthropometrics, Douglas Mathews

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the impact of sleep on quality of life and anthropometrics in young adults. College students (n=218) were recruited through a variety of methods for a study on weight management for obesity prevention and randomized into control (n=108) or treatment (n=110) groups. Of those, 152 (71%) completed pre- and post-tests, including the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), scored 0-4 =normal and 5-21=disordered, (a=0.80), the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ), scored from 0-14=good quality of life to 15-36=poor quality of life, (ct=0.87), and anthropometrics. Statistical analyses included linear regression, one way ANOVA, chi-square analysis, and Pearson's Product-Moment Correlation. Significance …

Enhanced Food Marketing To Children On The Internet: A Content Analysis, Sarah A. Ochsner

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In light of the continuing epidemic of childhood obesity, aggressive food marketing strategies have come under increased scrutiny as a possible contributing factor. It has been acknowledged in numerous studies, that poor nutrient quality of food and beverages dominate children's programming. The growth in child-specific media envoys has further increased favorable opportunities to market food and beverages to children, notably less regulated and parentally unsupervised. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 65% of children aged 6-11 have home access to the Internet; and today, the majority of food manufacturers operate websites appealing to children. The Institute of Medicine issued a …

A Longitudinal Study Of Neurocognitive Deficits And Functional Outcome In Bipolar Disorder, Brian D. Leany

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bipolar disorder is an affective disorder that, in addition to being characterized by depressive and expansive mood symptoms, often presents with neuropsychological deficits. Bipolar disorder not only impairs an individual’s cognitive abilities, but these cognitive impairments may also impact day-to-day activities causing functional impairment. In other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, it has been shown that the neuropsychological deficits are predictive of poor, long term treatment outcome and functioning. However, while bipolar disorder affects nearly 1 - 2% of the U.S. population (Keck, McElroy, & Arnold, 2001), little is known about the extent that neurocognitive deficits may play in the …

Archetypal Energies, "Psychic Politics", And The Transformative Potential Of The Health Care Debate, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

In a previous message, I spoke of “Archetypal Energies, The Emergence of Obama As A Practical Idealist, and Global Transformation” (February/March 2009). I suggested that at issue is what I called “psychic politics for global transformation, nurtured by practical idealism and the Archetypal Energies.” To reiterate, I have described Archetypal Energies as Higher Vibrational Energies, operating deep within our individual and collective psyches, which have their own transcendent value, purpose, quality, and “voice” unique to the individual. We experience them as “creative urges” to move us toward our Highest Good or Optimal Realities. I use easily recognized terms to evoke …

Volume 03, Cheryl Peck, Charles Hoever, Longwood Theater Department, Brittany Anderson, J. Ervin Sheldon, Richard Hayden, Yuri Calustro, Candice Fleming, Rebecca Franklin, Ashley Yocum, Danielle M. Jagoda, Cristina M. Valdivieso, Jameka Jones, Amy Ellis, Ashley Maser, Erikk Shupp, Jamie Yurasits, Joshua Davis, Alexander Leonhart, Kenny Wolfe, Sally Meadows, J. Haley, Amy Jackson, Morgan Howard, Adrienne Heinbaugh, Melissa Dorton, Ciarra Stalker

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction from Dean Dr. Charles Ross

Little Shop of Horrors by Longwood Theater Department

Who Has the Hottest Hotsauce in Farmville: A Quantitative Comparison of Sauces from Local Restaurants by Cheryl Peck and Charles Hoever

Precipitation Effects on the Growth of White Oaks and Virginia Pines on the Mt. Vernon Plantation by Brittany Anderson

Design and Synthesis of Novel Ion Binding Molecules for Self-Assembly and Sensing Applications by J. Ervin Sheldon

A Statistical Analysis of Algorithms for Playing SameGame by Richard Hayden

Intersecting Cylinders at Arbitrary Angles by Yuri Calustro

Putting a Foot in the Revolving Door: Strategies for Reducing …

The Effects Of Handedness And Bilateral Saccadic Eye Movements On False Alarms In Recognition Memory, Lisa Weinberg

Psychology Honors Projects

Handedness can be used as a marker for interhemispheric interaction, which can produce memory benefits. Bilateral saccadic eye movements can be used to manipulate levels of interhemispheric interaction. This study measured the effects of handedness and bilateral saccadic eye movement on memory using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. This study predicted a memory advantage for left-handers and mixed-handers without eye movements and an advantage for right-handers with the eye movements. The results do not support these predictions but do suggest that handedness is a factor in episodic memory performance. The analyses for this study were run using A’ to compare false alarm …

Group Ii Metabolic Glutamate Receptors In The Basal Amygdala Regulate Sleep And Fear-Induced Alterations In Sleep, Enheng Dong

Theses and Dissertations in Biomedical Sciences

Glutamate is a major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain and it has been recognized as playing an essential role in activating and maintaining arousal. Group II metabotropic glutamate (mGlu II) receptors are expressed in the amygdala, a brain structure important in the regulation of stress and anxiety as well as in the regulation of sleep and arousal. Our lab has found that the central nucleus of the amygdala (CNA) is involved in the emotional modulation of sleep. The basal amygdala (BA), which has direct connections with the CNA, is involved in conditioned fear and fear extinction. However, the potential role …

Locus Of Control And The Age Difference In Free Recall From Episodic Memory, Paul Amrhein, Judith K. Bond, Derek Hamilton

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The authors investigated the relation of locus of control (LOC) to age differences in free-recall memory performance. Older and younger participants completed P. C. Duttweiler's (1984) Internal Control Index (ICI) and subsequently performed free-recall memory tasks. Compared with the younger participants, the older participants exhibited poorer recall with more intrusions and uncorrected repetition errors as well as reduced categorical clustering. For the older participants with less internal LOC, recall proportion and item-pair associative recall clustering were lower than for the older participants with more internal LOC. By contrast, the younger participants did not exhibit any LOC effects in their recall …

Seasonal Hippocampal Plasticity In Food-Storing Birds., David F Sherry, Jennifer S Hoshooley

Psychology Publications

Both food-storing behaviour and the hippocampus change annually in food-storing birds. Food storing increases substantially in autumn and winter in chickadees and tits, jays and nutcrackers and nuthatches. The total size of the chickadee hippocampus increases in autumn and winter as does the rate of hippocampal neurogenesis. The hippocampus is necessary for accurate cache retrieval in food-storing birds and is much larger in food-storing birds than in non-storing passerines. It therefore seems probable that seasonal change in caching and seasonal change in the hippocampus are causally related. The peak in recruitment of new neurons into the hippocampus occurs before birds …