Digital Commons Network^™

Freud And Critical Legal Studies: Contours Of A Radical Socio-Legal Psychoanalysis, David S. Caudill

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Syntactic Language Computer Analysis Of Depressed Versus Non-Depressed Females., Daniel Merton Christy

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study sought to examine the interrelationship of cognition and language in the clinical syndrome of depression. It was proposed that the types of cognitive differences in depression proposed by Beck and other cognitive theorists would be reflected in language usage, and especially in syntax. Using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), subjects were classified as either depressed (BDI $\geq$ 16) or non-depressed (BDI $\leq$ 4). Subjects were asked to speak into a tape recorder for 3-5 minutes on each of three stimuli, a positive event, a negative event, and a neutral opinion stimulus. The language samples were then analyzed using …

Subliminal Perception And The First Amendment: Yelling Fire In A Crowded Mind?, Scot Silverglate

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Components Of Naming In Children: Effects Of Referential Uncertainty And Stimulus Realism, Carla J. Johnson

Digitized Theses

The purpose of this research was to identify stimulus characteristics that influence the ease of picture naming in children. Naming is a basic aspect of language behavior that includes such components as object identification, selection of an appropriate name, and generation of the naming response. Little is known about factors that influence the proficiency with which these components are executed. This research attempted to isolate the effects on naming efficiency of: (a) the number of available correct names for a picture (referential uncertainty) and (b) the degree to which a picture realistically represents the depicted object (stimulus realism).;Results from three …

Metaphor, Theory, And Practice In The History Of Psychology, David E. Leary

Psychology Faculty Publications

In these chapters we have seen that neuropsychological discourse has been advanced by the use of metaphors from telecommunications, control systems engineering, computer science, holography, and other developments in parallel distributed processing (Pribram, Chapter 2); that theoretical discussions of the emotions have revolved around metaphors of inner feelings, physiological responses, vestiges of animal nature, diseases of the mind, driving forces, and social roles (Averill, Chapter 3); that treatments of motivation have portrayed the human person as a pawn, an agent, a natural entity, an organism, or a machine (McReynolds, Chapter 4); that a vast array of cognitive metaphors have been …

The Effect Of Severity Of Closed Head Injury On Memory Functioning., Linda Marie Brown

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study was undertaken to examine the relationship between neuroanatomy of memory, the structural mechanics of closed head injury and the resulting effects on memory functioning. The experimental groups were composed of 30 closed head injured individuals equally divided by severity of injury based on posttraumatic amnesia (PTA). The first group included 15 mild head injured patients whose PTA was defined as less than 60 minutes. Group two was composed of 15 severely head injured patients whose PTA was greater than 24 hours. The comparison group consisted of 15 non-head injured volunteers matched to the experimental group by age, gender, …

The Effects Of Prosocial Skills Training On Anger Management Of Aggressive Adult Inmates, Marcus Read Forbes

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The effectiveness of prosocial skills training groups, which focused on helping aggressive, male, adult inmates manage anger, was investigated. Forty-eight inmates, defined as aggressive, participated in treatment. A random sample, pretest-posttest-follow-up, treatment control group design was utilized. The eight-week treatment focused on variables of social skill development, anger perceptions, and anger behaviors. Participants' responses to the Social Skills Inventory (Riggio, 1989) and the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory (Spielberger, 1988) were analyzed, along with case counselor responses to the Correctional Adjustment Checklist (Quay, 1984). Results indicated that prosocial skills training had no significant differential effect upon participants when compared to …

Parenting Style And Family Environment Of Caucasian-American Versus Malaysian Families, James Eric Davison

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to determine whether functional Malaysian families differed from functional Caucasian-American families in family environment, parenting style, and marital adjustment, in terms of behavior-rating measures of family problem-solving and self-report measures of family environment and marital adjustment. Variables for the sample of 38 families were assessed using the Family Problem-Solving Behavior Coding System, the Problem-Solving Efficiency Scale, the Beavers-Timberlawn Family Evaluation Scale, the Family Environment Scale, and the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test. Significance was determined by comparing ratings between Malaysian and American families. Malaysian and Caucasian-American families were not significantly different regarding parenting style and family environment variables. …

Cerebral Dominance, Language, And Emotion: A Divided Visual Field Study Of Lateral Asymmetries In The Processing Of Verbal Stimuli., Margaret Helene Launius

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Thirty male and thirty female undergraduate students participated in a divided visual field study designed to examine the effects of emotional content on cerebral lateral asymmetries in the processing of verbal stimuli. The study utilized a randomized block design with a three-factor factorial arrangement of treatments. Each of the three within-subjects factors has two levels, resulting in a Task (lexical, affect-salient) x Word Type (happy, sad) x Visual Field (left, right) design. A bilateral presentation/manual response paradigm was utilized. In the lexical task, emotional words were paired with nonsense words and subjects were asked to respond to the "real English …

Semantic Encoding In Alzheimer's Disease And Multi-Infarct Dementia., Bryan Alan Bernard

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Episodic and semantic memory tasks were administered to patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and patients with multi-infarct dementia (MID). The MID group had multi-focal lesions predominantly in the subcortical regions. Episodic memory is recall of events in a particular temporal-spatial context, whereas semantic memory is "knowledge" memory regarding words and their associations. The AD and MID groups were comparable in terms of level of dementia. A control group of healthy elderly subjects was comparable to the dementia groups in regard to age and years of education. The experimental measure of semantic encoding involved presentation of six 14-word lists composed of …

Circumplex-Balance Model Of Personal Adaptation And Psychopathology, Scott Cramton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Making The Most Of Volunteer Help: A Handbook For Parents And Teachers, Janet Lynn Bond

Graduate Theses

This project is concerned with the importance of parental involvement in children learning to read. Research shows children who view reading as an important and valuable process develop a more positive attitude toward learning to read. Children involved in reading activities at home learn to read earlier and have improved comprehension over children who have no experiences reading in the home. Parent involvement can take place in the home or at school as classroom volunteers. This project contains a volunteer handbook for parents and teachers. Included are characteristics of a volunteer, tips for teachers, suggested activities for the classroom and …

Three Blind Mice, See How They Run: A Critique Of Behavioral Research With Animals, Michael A. Giannelli

Experimentation Collection

Animal research has been a traditionally accepted and respected part of modern psychology from its earliest days. The prevalent view of animals in contemporary psychology has origins far more basic than the scientific method. Its roots are deeply imbedded in Judaeo-Christian culture, a tradition which postulates a wide gulf between humankind and the animal world. The Darwinian revolution and the ethological outlook it fostered, while of immense biological significance, has for the most part been neglected by modern American comparative psychologists in favor of a positivistic-behaviorist orientation with a heavy reliance upon laboratory experimentation.

In recent years, opposition to animal …

The Cult Of Empiricism In Psychology, And Beyond, Stephen Toulmin, David E. Leary

Psychology Faculty Publications

At some stage in it's development, any field of intellectual discussion or scientific speculation may reach a point at which it begins to generate large numbers of "empirical" questions, that is, questions whose answers must refer to carefully documented observations, or even to controlled experiments. In physics, this happened most strikingly in the course of the seventeenth century; in biology, the comparable stage was not reached until around 1770, rising to its peak in the course of the nineteenth century (Toulmin, 1972; Toulmin & Goodfield, 1962); whereas in psychology, it has become customary-though a trifle arbitrary-to argue that this happened …

The Effects Of Word Length, Word Frequency And Word Repetition In Auditory Memory (Lexicon, Verbal Ability, Psycholinguistics), Judith Lutzhoff Scharff

Doctoral Dissertations

Four auditory lexical decision experiments were run to assess the effects of word frequency, word length, and word repetition. Experiment I examined the effects of word length, word frequency, and stimulus repetition on RT. The results demonstrated a significant main effect for length and frequency and a significant length by frequency interaction. Long words showed the greatest frequency effect. There was no significant repetition effect. In this experiment the repeated stimuli were separated by at least seven minutes. Experiment II examined the effect of stimulus repetition with the repeated stimuli separated by 0-15 stimuli. This experiment demonstrated a significant repetition …

The Impact Of Sompa Elp Scores On Special Education Evaluation And Placement., Alan Lesley Taylor

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The impact of the use of SOMPA Estimated Learning Potential (ELP) scores as a substitute for traditional IQ scores was examined as it affected students evaluated for special education in a large metropolitan school system. SOMPA is the System of Multicultural Pluralistic Assessment, an evaluation package developed by Jane Mercer (1979) to address concerns about bias in assessment of minority students and particularly to remove "unfair" labels of mental retardation. ELP scores represent IQ scores adjusted for the effects of sociocultural background and compared only to ethnic peer norms, with the general effect being to raise estimates of intellectual potential …

Concept Formation And Development In The Congenitally Blind Child, Kimberly J. Franco

Honors Theses

T.D. Cutsforth once stated that "no single mental activity of the congenitally blind child is not distorted by the absence of sight." Blindness permeates the intellectual functioning of language, thought, comprehension and conceptualization. Ultimately, the child lacking vision will both understand and respond to the world in a manner unlike that of a sighted child. This incongruous interaction breeds frustration since the blind are a minority in a world which concentrates on the characteristics, needs, behaviors, and accomplishments of sighted individuals. Lacking the visual modality, the blind rely on the information about the objective world which they receive from people …

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb: An Ethnography Of Speaking Of A Millenarian Movement, Karl W. Schmiedeskamp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Metaphorical Interpretations Of The Neurotic Paradox, Mark J. Weaver

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a theoretical/philosophical paper which is intended to bring to the reader's attention an emerging literature and discussion which holds potentially productive consequences for the understanding of man. This thesis does not offer completed formulations or empirical groundings. The purpose is to create a basis for dialogue.

This paper will initially specify a current conflict in psychology around the different metaphors used to define the image of man. A theoretical/philosophical basis for viewing the process of generating models of man and his behavior as essentially "metaphorical" is then presented. A specific category of human behavior known as the neurotic …

The Development Of Picture-Generated Stories, Dina Lee Anselmi

Doctoral Dissertations

Recently, certain aspects of story production, comprehension, and recall have stirred up much interest within psychology. Most of this research has focused on these story processes in adults; less work has been done on the development of story knowledge in young children. This dissertation explored the similarities and differences among nursery school, first and second grade children, and adults. Each individual was asked to produce an oral story after having viewed a set of story-book pictures.

The stories were evaluated on several different dimensions which included: the thoughts, intentions and emotions of the characters, how single elements from the pictures …

Effects Of Stimulus Complexity, Subject Age, And Stimulus Coding On Selective Stimulus Control, Ronald Louis Michaud

Doctoral Dissertations

Selective stimulus control refers to the functional relationships that are developed between the various stimulus elements of a discriminative stimulus and the subject's response. A multi-element conditional discrimination problem is an effective means of studying these relationships. In the first experiment, preschool and adult subjects were presented with a series of conditional discrimination problems. They were required to respond differentially to two multi-element stimulus cards by touching one of two response circles, one red and one blue. Each problem set contained either two, four, six, or eight elements per stimulus card. The discrimination was established using an errorless training procedure …

A Validity Study Of The Construct "Most Highly Valued Representational System" In Human Auditory And Visual Perceptions., David E. Lange

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Bandler and Grinder (1975) proposed the construct "most highly valued representational systems" to describe auditory, visual, and kinesthetic perceptual orientations among individuals. They set forth a predicate method for determining an individual's primary representational system. Contrary to Bandler and Grinder's construct, experimental evidence consistently supports the principle of visual dominance among humans. In order to test the effectiveness of Bandler and Grinder's constructs, 221 volunteers were screened by an alternate predicate method. 22 subjects were selected as "highly auditory" and 19 subjects were selected as "highly visual." These 41 subjects were asked to give their first impressions to 75 simultaneous, …

Child Behavior In Venezuela And The U.S.: A Cross-Cultural Comparison., John Michael Fitch

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purposes of this study were (a) to carry out a factor analysis of the Spanish translation of the Children's Behavioral Classification Project questionnaire on data obtained from Venezuela, and (b) to compare the result with that of parallel data obtained in the United States with the original English version of the same questionnaire. The Children's Behavioral Classification Project questionnaire is an instrument designed to be administered to parents of children 6-13 years old for the purpose of contributing information about the child's outward behavior useful in understanding the psychological, physical, or conduct problems which the child might display. The …

Sex Typed Language., Margaret Estes Johnson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychological sex typing and patterns of language usage. Seventy-nine Louisiana State University undergraduate students were categorized according to the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence, Helmreich and Stapp, 1975). Sex type groups included: psychologically androgynous (High Masculine/High Feminine); masculine (High Masculine/Low Feminine); feminine (Low Masculine/High Feminine); and undifferentiated (Low Masculine/Low Feminine), for both male (n = 40) and female (n = 39). Three written language samples were gathered for each subject. Subjects were asked to spend ten minutes writing in response to each of the three verbal stimuli. Two of the …

An Empirical Analysis Of Brain Damage And Minimal Brain Dysfunction In School Age Children., Gregory Blaine Sisk

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Minimal brain dysfunction (MBD) in children is described in terms of diagnosis, symptomatology, etiology, prevalence, and prognosis. The MBD area is reviewed with reference to brain damage (BD), non-BD, and empirical models of classfication. A rationale is developed for empirically derived categories of MBD using (a) a comprehensive assessment battery, (b) the administration of this battery to BD, MBD, and normal children, (c) a factor analysis of the children's scores on the test variables, and (d) a cluster analysis of all the children based on the similarity of their factor score profiles. In addition, a canonical correlation between early life-history …

Sex, Status, And Solidarity: Attributions For Interpersonal Touching, Gayle Frances Scroggs

Doctoral Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Reaction To Social Pressure From Adults Versus Peers Among Mexican, Mexican-American, And Anglo-American Rural Children, Ana Maria C. Donini

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project was to investigate whether there was a significant difference in the adherence to conventional morality and the reaction to social pressure from adults versus peers among Mexican, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American children. The instrument used was the Moral Dilemmas Test (MDT) developed by Bronfenbrenner, Devereux, Suci, and Rodgers, which measures the reported readiness of children to engage in morally disapproved behavior and their reaction to social pressure exerted by adults and peers. The subjects were asked to respond to a series of conflict situations under three experimental conditions of confidentiality, scrutiny by parents, and scrutiny by …

Nonverbal Communication: Its Importance In Salesmanship, Kenneth Paul De Meuse

Student Work

It has been "common knowledge" for decades that verbal skills are necessary in selling. Many authors stress the importance of verbal skills a successful salesperson must possess (Feldman, 1974; Jones & Healey, 1973; Perry, 1975; Townsend, 1966). In this study, however, we are concerned with the nonverbal skills a salesperson must possess. How vital are nonverbal skills to a salesperson's performance? More specifically, are nonverbal skills even more important in sales success than verbal skills?

Lateral Eye Movement As An Indicator Of Cognitive Ability And Style, William Joseph Owens

Doctoral Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Recognition Latencies, Psycholinguistic Reality And Statistical Generality: A Probe Study Of Adverbial Clauses With Language Materials Analyzed As A Random Factor, Janet Marie Lang

Doctoral Dissertations

No abstract provided.