Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Neuroanatomy In Mild Cognitive Impairment: Relationship To Functional Skills, Treatment Expectancy, And Comorbid Depression, Sara Rushia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a neurocognitive disorder defined by cognitive decline in older adults. Although MCI has been studied for decades, there remain important areas to be explored in order to adequately characterize aspects of this disorder that provide information valuable for possible interventions and disease progression to dementia, including a better understanding of the neuroanatomical variables relevant to this disorder. Such neuroanatomical variables include cortical thickness, hippocampal volume, and white matter hyperintensities (WMHs). This dissertation consists of three separate studies aimed at addressing gaps in the literature on MCI in relation to brain morphometrics and under-studied characteristics involved …

Psychology In The Modern World, Kutay Agardici

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is created for the two courses I will be teaching at City College in the psychology dept. Topics include cognition, language, learning, memory, nature vs. nurture, abnormal psychology, social psychology, etc.

Testing An Overtraining Protocol For Fear Learning In Humans, Gordon M. Haskell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Successful regulation of fear memories is a fundamental tenet to the exposure-based therapies often employed by mental health professionals for individuals with PTSD, phobias, and other anxiety disorders. Consequently, the efficacy of these treatment methodologies is largely dependent on the strength of the fear memory, as stronger memories are often characterized by an increased resistance to extinction and heightened fear recovery. However, there is little consensus within the scientific community regarding how to effectively maximize fear memory strength in human studies, and the literature exploring the impact of variability in acquisition parameters on memory strength is sparse. Here, we tested …

Evaluating Brain Performance Enhancing Drugs, Kristina Toropova

Open Educational Resources

Students read about drugs which enhance student academic performance.They will connect the found information to prior course material, addressing neuroanatomy and neurophysiology as well as connect to the attention course chapter. Students will also delve into the ethical components of the use of brain enchasing drugs and compare them to sports performance-enhancing drugs.

Do Psychopathic Traits Influence Distractibility By Empathy-Eliciting Pictures?, Priya M. Reji

Student Theses

Empathy is a crucial component in forming interpersonal connections, and reflects the ability to share and understand the feelings of others. Psychopathy is often associated with a reduced ability to feel and display empathetic concern towards other people. The Response Modulation Hypothesis argues that such individuals have an attentional deficit, which makes it difficult for them to shift focus between stimuli, thus individuals who have high scores on the interpersonal-affective factor of psychopathy have an increased ability to ignore emotional stimuli that are goal-irrelevant. The current study investigated whether psychopathic traits would influence distractibility on an emotional Stroop (eStroop) task. …

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), …

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 …

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. …

Understanding The Role Of The Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex In Emotional Memory Using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation And Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, R. Rachel Weintraub-Brevda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emotional stimuli can have both beneficial and detrimental effects on memory, such that emotional stimuli can be distracting from current neutral working memory goals, while also leading to enhanced episodic memory for the distracting emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has multiple roles in the enhancing effects of emotion on memory through top-down/controlled processes, including 1) coping with negative distraction and 2) elaborative encoding of negative information. Additionally, previous research has alluded to hemispheric differences in the VLPFC (Chapter 1). However, previous research has been correlational, with no strong laterality tests of the VLPFC. Two …

Observational Assessment Of Empathy In Parent-Child Verbal Exchanges And Their Influence On Child Behavior, Patty Carambot

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Empathy, the ability to both experientially share in and understand others’ thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, is vital for human adaptation. Deficits in empathy development have implications across the lifespan for the development of prosocial behavior, social functioning, mental health disorders, and risk for antisocial behavior (e.g., Guajardo, Snyder, & Petersen, 2009; Moreno, Klute & Robinson, 2008). In light of these societal and individual burdens, it is imperative to foster and strengthen the development of this ability early in life to prevent or ameliorate such negative outcomes. This type of prevention can take a variety of forms, but parent and child …

An Analysis Of Canine Processing Of Stimulus Compounds Varying In Light And Sound Intensity, Katherine O. Compitus

Theses and Dissertations

A dog was trained to respond deferentially to two light-sound compounds. The dog was then tested with combinations of additional light and sound intensities. The dog appeared to use the information provided by both stimulus dimensions. This research is relevant to the understanding of information processing, specifically categorization and generalization.

Stress And Suicidal Behavior: A Cognitive, Behavioral, And Biological Integrative Approach, Jorge Valderrama

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in young adults in the United States. Previous research has established distal and proximal life stress as a strong risk factor for suicidal behavior. However, how stress impacts suicidal behavior via interactive cognitive and biological mechanisms has not been thoroughly examined. The present research sought to better understand the relationship between stress and suicidal behavior via altered neurobiological functioning, maladaptive cognitions, and deficits in executive functioning. The first study found a relationship between the brooding subtype of rumination and trait impulsivity in the forms of negative urgency, lack of premeditation, and …