Psychology Commons^™

A Functional Neuroimaging Study Of Self-Regulatory Control In Adults With Gambling And Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Nidhi Parashar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: Recent findings suggest phenomenological similarities across gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The key similarity between the disorders is the failure to inhibit or control a repetitive behavior (or urges to engage in a behavior) and intrusive thoughts. Our current understanding of the neural pathophysiological mechanisms linking gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders is limited. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine the functioning of frontostriatal brain regions that support self-regulatory control in adults with gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Methods: The study compared functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen level dependent response in 19 adults with pathological gambling (PG), …

Threat-Related Attentional Bias In Relation To Anxiety And Depressive Symptoms In The General Population: The Potential Role Of Sex Effects, Beril Yaffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heightened sensitivity to relevant environmental stimuli (attentional bias) has been observed in relation to clinical and non-clinical anxiety and depression symptoms. While depression symptoms are associated with sensitivity to disorder and self-relevant words, hypervigilance to threatening stimuli is observed in relation to anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, attentional bias has been shown to play an important role in the development and maintenance of depressive and anxiety disorders. Accordingly, a large body of literature has examined threat-related attentional bias in relation to symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, several methodological inconsistencies exist across studies, including variability in definitions of threat, lack of consideration …

Manipulating Goal States And Brain States: Using Eeg And Hd-Tdcs To Investigate Mechanisms Underlying The Influence Of Achievement Goals On Declarative Memory, Yuliya Ochakovskaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When it comes to learning factual information, students may benefit from having opportunities where they can learn from their mistakes as opposed to only being asked to study that information. However, the achievement goals that instructors set for their students may influence how students engage with these learning opportunities. Although some instructors may focus students on learning (i.e. mastery goals), others may seek to motivate students by focusing them on doing better than others (i.e. performance goals), which is thought promote greater sensitivity to errors and impair learning. Across two studies, the present dissertation examined the roles of dorsolateral frontal …

The Relationship Between Cognitive And Neural Bases Of Metamemory Judgments, Alexandra M. Gaynor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metamemory monitoring, the process of making subjective assessments of the status of one’s own memory, is crucial to guiding behavior and effective learning. Past cognitive research has shown that subjective confidence judgments are inferential in nature, and based on cues available at the time of the judgment. When confidence is based on cues that are related to objective memory performance, metamemory accuracy is high. However, past studies have shown that metamemory monitoring tends to be inaccurate because individuals base their confidence on information that is not predictive of memory success, such as the fluency with which items were encoded during …

Rumination And Rebound From Failure: Investigating How Trait And State Forms Of Ruminative Thought Influence Attention To Errors And The Ability To Correct Them In A Challenging Academic Environment, Ronald C. Whiteman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rumination is a recurrent and repetitive manner of thinking that can be triggered by blockage of personally-relevant goals, creating a temporary state of abstract and evaluative self-focus that can also become a chronic trait-like style of responding to personal challenges. Despite claims that rumination helps down-regulate unwanted emotion, cope with problems, and lead to goal attainment, it often increases negative affect, interferes with problem solving, and exacerbates goal-state discrepancies, particularly for women. Given the pervasiveness of rumination and its potential impact on cognitive processes and emotional states, one important yet untested question is how it might impact individuals’ ability to …

The Effect Of An Extinction Procedure On Level Of Responding To Visual Stimuli In An Evaluative Conditioning Procedure, Allison Hirsch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Evaluative conditioning is a type of learning that results in the acquisition of likes and dislikes in humans. The procedure that produces evaluative learning is similar to that of Pavlovian conditioning. A consistent observation is that evaluative conditioned responses are less sensitive to extinction procedures than would be expected given the Pavlovian-type conditioning procedure used for acquisition. The present study sought to determine what the effect of an extinction condition was on the level of responding to visual conditioned stimuli in a visual-gustatory evaluative conditioning paradigm. Two dependent measures were used: an explicit measure, and a choice-based preference measure. The …

Neural Hypervigilance In Trauma-Exposed Women, Seungyeon A. Yoon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trauma-exposed people often experience hypervigilance, which is a tonic condition of elevated alertness and excessive scanning for potential threat. A cardinal feature of hypervigilance is that no actual threat is needed to evoke or maintain the over-alertness and heightened affective response. However, most neuroimaging research in trauma to date has only focused on reactivity to an actual threat. Thus, the overarching aim of this dissertation was to investigate neural signatures and salivary markers of post-trauma hypervigilance in the absence of threat that can cause impairment in daily functioning and contribute to developing other trauma-related symptoms such as heightened threat reactivity. …

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or …