Psychology Commons^™

Employees Communicating Within Transportation And Logistics Organizations: What Studying Stress And Acts Of Incivility In The Workplace Reveals About The Industry, Elizabeth Munyak Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project investigates the relationship of workplace stress and workplace incivility in the context of transportation and logistics organizations. Informal, one-on-one interviews with transportation and logistics operations office employees are conducted to answer this study’s research questions that examine the commonality, perceived norms, and perceived emotional and physical effects of workplace incivility in response to stress within the transportation and logistics workplace. Using grounded theory analysis, it is revealed that acts of incivility amongst transportation and logistics operations office employees communicate the conflict occurring at the industry, organization, and workplace levels of the transportation and logistics industry. The ultimate …

Exploring Problematic Online Gaming: A Qualitative Approach, Joseph M. Waters

Open Access Dissertations

Online gaming, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), has become a very popular pastime and often is the subject of scrutiny in the literature regarding problematic play. This study aimed to develop a better understanding of problematic online gaming by recruiting and interviewing MMORPG players who potentially played at problematic levels. Ten participants (9 males, 1 female) from a Mid-Western university were screened and interviewed regarding their online gaming experiences. Consensual qualitative research was used to analyze the data. Eleven domains emerged from the data analysis: (a) antecedents to involvement in online gaming, (b) gaming activity, (c) character creation, …

Improving Online Food Safety Communication: The Role Of Media, Jing Ma

Open Access Dissertations

Food safety is important as foodborne illness outbreaks cause great economic and societal losses. Efforts to protect public health and reduce foodborne illness outbreaks will not be fully effective unless the resulting information is communicated to consumers.

However, food safety communications have not been particularly satisfactory (Worsfold, 2006). If food safety information were more accessible, consumers would be more likely to use it (Worsfold, 2006). In this regard, the Internet presents great possibilities for communicating food safety information to the public. But media’s role has been largely overlooked in existing literature. When the lack of research is combined with consumers’ …

How Musical Oddballs Warp Psychological Time, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oddballs—low-probability, attention-capturing expectancy violations—are judged as longer than non-oddballs, but are temporal intervals that contain oddballs judged as longer than those that do not? In 2 experiments, we tested competing model predictions using a novel and covert measure of subjective duration—musical imagery reproduction. Participants verbally estimated and reproduced with musical imagery repeated, coherent, or incoherent familiar or unfamiliar chord sequences (3.5 s, 7 s, or 12 s) that either did or did not contain dynamic auditory oddballs. Participants verbally estimated repeated chord sequences that contained oddballs as shorter than those that did not, but reproduced with musical imagery incoherent chord …

Enhancing Travel Experience With The Combination Of Information Visualization, Situation Awareness, And Distributed Cognition, Weiran Lei

Open Access Theses

With the new forms of travel introduced by new technologies of transportation and communication, a satisfied travel experience could be affected by various factors before and during a trip. Especially for road trips, traveling by car provides freedom on time control while leading to more possibilities of rescheduling initial plans made under time constraints. When overwhelmed with the need for changed travel context to avoid unexpected events that will require a serious change of initial plans, travelers need to find and access helpful contextual information quickly. This is a context-related decision making process that requires amplifying human situation awareness and …

Is Maternal Touch Used Referentially?, Rana Abu-Zhaya

Open Access Theses

Early social interactions are highly multimodal and include a wealth of cues (e.g., speech, facial expressions, motion, gestures and touch). Infant-directed speech (IDS) by itself may aid in language development. Touch by itself has been also shown to play an important role in dyadic interactions affecting both the infant and the caregiver. However, little is known about the impact of the combination of these two modes of communication on infant language development. In this thesis, I hypothesize that caregiver touch is provided in synchrony with speech, providing the language-learning infant with cues that may not only help her to find …

An Evaluation Of Alternative Methods For Online Survey Recruitment: The Equivalency Of Data Collected Through Amazon Mechanical Turk And Second Life To Traditional Undergraduate Student Samples, Elizabeth M. Briones

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

A major proportion of psychological research uses subjects from undergraduate populations. Increasingly, researchers are exploiting the Internet to reach beyond the traditional undergraduate sample. The current study sought to compare data obtained from a conventional undergraduate student sample to data collected via two online survey recruitment platforms: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing site and the virtual environment of Second Life (SL). Data obtained via these online recruitment platforms was statistically equivalent to the data obtained from the college sample, based on standardized measures of psychological stress and sleep quality. Additionally, correlations between the sleep and stress measures were not statistically …

Perceptions And Expectations About The Use Of Social Media To Raise Situational Awareness In Emergency Events, Israa Bukhari

Open Access Theses

Social media transformed the process of crisis communication. This technology enables the user to communicate with emergency officials as well as the whole virtual world in a click of a button. The emergence of social media in emergency management and its role in raising situational awareness is growing tremendously, making it important for emergency officials to better understand the users' needs and perceptions.

This study's goal is to gain a better understanding of the expectations and perceptions that Purdue associates have regarding the use of social media as it relates to emergencies. The set of interviews conducted in this study …

The Effect Of Color On Emotions In Animated Films, Andrew Kennedy

Open Access Theses

Lighting color in animated films is usually chosen very carefully in order to portray a specific mood or emotion. Artists follow conventional techniques with color choices with the intention to create a greater emotional response in the viewer. This study examined the relationship between color variations in videos and emotional arousal as indicated by physiological response. Subjects wore a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor and watched two different videos: one portraying love and one portraying sadness. The videos were watched multiple times, each with variations in the lighting color. No significant effects on emotion for either hue or saturation were …

Don’T Worry, I Am Fine: A Qualitative Analysis Of Family Communication And Depression In Chinese International Students In The Us, Lan Jin

Open Access Theses

Depression and associated mental health problems are increasingly a critical health issue for Chinese international students in the U.S. (Lyubomirsky, Kasri, & Zehm, 2003; Cheung, 2011; Liu, 2009). Recent studies in different U.S. universities found a 32% to 47% rate for depression symptoms among Chinese international students (Cheung, 2011; Wei et al., 2007). The statistics suggest that Chinese students face a high prevalence of depression problems (Han et al., 2013). To address the depression problems, family communication provides substantial support for Chinese students (Liu, 2009). However, little is known about family communicative practices of this population (Wei et al., 2010). …

Congruent And Incongruent Effects Of Ethnic Music On Ethnic Menu Item Selection, Ryan David Muniz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated what impact ethnic music had on ethnic menu item selection. College students were randomly divided into three groups and listened to one randomly assigned sound treatment in sensory booths. Three hundred and five participants completed the questionnaire with measures of expected price value and willingness to pay value. One of the groups listened to an Italian folk music, the second group listened to a Thai folk music, and the third group listened to a restaurant background noise in order to examine if the music will impact each participant menu items selection and perceived price values. The result …

Attachment And Delayed Gratification In The Technological Age, Susan G. Pomerantz

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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More Than Memories? Schema Transference From Media Characters To Real People, Hilary Ray

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study focused on whether personality traits and evaluations of television personalities are used to make inferences about new Social interaction partners. It tested the hypothesis that priming schemas of television personalities will bias inferences made about a stranger. The results were mixed. Participants in the experimental condition made more biased inferences about a stranger than did participants in the control condition. This transference was not influenced by participants' parasociability, and methodological limitations prevented conclusive study of the influence of affective evaluations in this effect. Future studies should attempt to increase methodological control and introduce a diverse set of measures …

Application Of Protection Motivation Theory To Study The Factors That Influence Disaster Recovery Planning: An Empirical Investigation, Shalini Wunnava

Doctoral Dissertations

In today's information intensive and networked world, Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is a critical and significant activity. However, DRP does not always receive the attention it deserves. Therefore, it is critical to examine the factors that influence the undertaking of disaster recovery planning. A model on disaster recovery planning was developed using the theoretical lens of Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). Drawing from PMT literature and using the information technology disaster recovery planning (ITDRP) construct developed by Shropshire and Kadlec (2009), a research model was developed in which perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards, fear, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and …

Sociocultural Attitudes And Expectations As A Result Of Media Internalization: An Exploration Of Potential Cultural Resiliency Factors Among Mexican-American College Women, Natalie Marie Perez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study involved a final sample of 153 Mexican-American college women who viewed photos of models who exemplify the thin ideal and models who are considered average and overweight according to society’s standards of beauty. The order of the photos was manipulated to determine if subjection to the thin ideal would negatively affect body satisfaction and or affect how the participants judged the models who did not meet the thin ideal. Manipulation did not negatively affect how participants judged the average and overweight models. In addition, upon manipulation, both groups rated themselves as heavier despite group assignment. Finally, acculturation level …

Reel Talk: Deconstructing Communication Disorders In A Sampling Of Modern Films, Lisa M. Beccera

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This study focused on films that depicted characters that had a communication disorder or characters that have a disability which resulted in a communication disorder. This study examined types of communication disorders depicted in films and the accuracy to which communication disorders are portrayed in films. Thirty films were used in this study and 32 characters were found to have communication disorders. The author used qualitative methods and quantitative methods to examine and deconstruct the depiction of communication disorders in modern films. This paper also illustrates the effective and efficient manner films can be used to educate society and college …

Cinematherapy As A Clinical Intervention: Theoretical Rationale And Empirical Credibility, Michael Powell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two problems must be addressed before cinematherapy can advance as a credible therapeutic intervention: (a) a solid theoretical rationale must exist supporting its use in mental health counseling, and (b) quantifiable data must exist promoting its treatment efficacy, and these data need to extend to various clinical populations representing a range of mental health conditions. This study intends to address both problems by critiquing the theoretical and experimental literature on cinematherapy and measuring the relative effectiveness of a structured, nondirective cinematherapy intervention at improving the hope and optimism of an adult diagnosed with Major Depression. One person (JV= 1) was …

The Cowboy Way: A Study Of Leadership As Portrayed In Western Film, Ralph L. Turner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to examine leadership through the medium of film, specifically the genre of the western. The western is iconographic; representative of the American ethos, the western embodied the "frontier myth." The purposes of this study were to examine how leadership was portrayed in a selected sample of western films dating from 1945 to 1995, and to categorize and characterize the leadership methods exhibited in each film. Qualitative in design, the study was concerned with broad description and discovery. Using observation as the data collection technique and content analysis as the research method, the study examined a sample of …