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Cognitive Psychology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns Apr 2022

Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns

Neuroscience Honors Papers

Classical conditioning has been a fundamental concept and practice throughout the history of psychology. While classical conditioning traditionally seeks to elicit target behaviors in correlation to specific stimuli, we sought to do the same with cognitive states in place of behaviors. Specifically, we wanted to determine the effectiveness of conditioning states of cognitive arousal in human participants in conjunction with cues presented in a designed learning task. We designed a cognitive task specifically for this research, referred to as “the Tone Pitching Task”, which utilized a combination of working memory and mental processing in order to elicit cognitive arousal and …


Components Of Mindfulness Training: Impacts On Attention And Affect, Maximilian Fey Dec 2019

Components Of Mindfulness Training: Impacts On Attention And Affect, Maximilian Fey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The literature on mindfulness supports a distinction between two components of non-judgmental acceptance and directed attention. The present research analyzed whether there are distinct differences in attentional capabilities or affect between mindfulness inductions which differed in either including only directed attention or directed attention and non-judgmental acceptance. I hypothesized that the acceptance component of mindfulness would increase participants sustained attentional capabilities relative to a control condition; furthermore, I hypothesized that the non-judgmental acceptance component of mindfulness would lead to significant increases in positive affect and decreases in negative affect relative to control. Lastly, I hypothesized that an individual difference measure …


The Effects Anxiety Has On Attentional Bias And Working Memory, Breana Mcswain Jan 2018

The Effects Anxiety Has On Attentional Bias And Working Memory, Breana Mcswain

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Research has shown that anxiety impairs attention and working memory, especially when it comes to completing a mentally demanding cognitive task such as the emotional Stroop paradigm or the n-back task. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether state anxiety affects behavioral performance on executive function tasks. State anxiety was induced using negatively valenced images from the International Affective Picture System, while neutral images served as the control. We compared behavioral performance between individuals in the negative mood induction against those in the neutral mood induction. Trait anxiety was used as a covariate for both groups. This allowed …