Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Interpersonal Emotions As Emergent Phenomena: Social Neuroscience Beyond Western Cultural Constructions, Kaitlyn Penchina

Scripps Senior Theses

Because science as it exists today is a cultural construction of the West, studies of neuroscience have often been limited by Western perspectives. In particular, the Western proclivity towards individualism has led to a field of neuroscience which has historically focused on studying single individuals, as opposed to social or collective neuroscience. For the most part, it has just been assumed that collective phenomena such as interpersonal emotions must be able to be reduced in terms of individual phenomena such as individual emotions. However, closer review reveals that interpersonal emotions have emergent properties that individual emotions alone do not account …

Polyrhythmic Pathways: Using Bimanual Coordination Research To Develop A New Framework For Practice, Performance, And Pedagogy, Christian Swafford

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This study reviews and compares percussion literature pertaining to polyrhythms and scientific literature pertaining to bimanual coordination. There exists a gap in the pedagogical approach to polyrhythms, and there is much disagreement between common instructional methods, especially when considered against the findings of several bimanual coordination studies. The purpose of this study is to reveal insight to the percussion community that the learning of polyrhythms is facilitated by the brain in novel ways, and the uniqueness of this learning process requires a rethinking of the current pedagogical approach. Percussion articles, method books, popular literature, and music scores are surveyed alongside …

Perceived Factors Of Intimate Partner Violence On Women Diagnosed With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Angela M. Halcovich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent diagnosis, and many human and social services professionals strive to understand its components, to ensure that they serve the population properly. However, little is known about how PTSD may influence women’s vulnerabilities to and future experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Emphasizing relationship coaching, which provides tools to foster healthy relationships, within the therapeutic curricula on rehabilitation for women with PTSD may result in reduced chances to experience IPV as women integrate back into their everyday life after being diagnosed and treated for PTSD. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to …

Defining And Exploring Animal Sentience, Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva Mrs, Ian J.H. Duncan, Nicholas Palmer

Animal Sentience

One of the commentaries on the target article notes that "animal sentience" is difficult to define operationally. This response to the commentaries develops a working, usable definition of animal sentience and examines the relationships between animal emotions and sentience.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words: Factors Influencing Disability Accommodations, Alicia E. Martin

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Because not all disabilities look the same it is difficult to label a person with disabilities just by looking at them. Given that our knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions impact how we interpret our world and our willingness to act, people, including professors, may be biased toward providing accommodations for those with easily recognizable disabilities and biased against those with non-recognizable disabilities, and this may impact the disabled person’s ability to learn. This thesis aims to address whether professors’ disability-related attitudes, perceptions of accommodation reasonableness, and willingness to provide accommodations differ when the disability is recognizable (student is pictured in a …

Perceived Factors Of Intimate Partner Violence On Women Diagnosed With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Angela M. Halcovich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent diagnosis, and many human and social services professionals strive to understand its components, to ensure that they serve the population properly. However, little is known about how PTSD may influence women’s vulnerabilities to and future experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Emphasizing relationship coaching, which provides tools to foster healthy relationships, within the therapeutic curricula on rehabilitation for women with PTSD may result in reduced chances to experience IPV as women integrate back into their everyday life after being diagnosed and treated for PTSD. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to …

Plant Sentience? Between Romanticism And Denial: Science, Miguel Segundo-Ortin, Paco Calvo

Animal Sentience

A growing number of non-human animal species are being seriously considered as candidates for sentience, but plants are either forgotten or explicitly excluded from these debates. In our view, this is based on the belief that plant behavior is hardwired and inflexible and on an underestimation of the role of plant electrophysiology. We weigh such assumptions against the evidence to suggest that it is time to take seriously the hypothesis that plants, too, might be sentient. We hope this target article will serve as an invitation to investigate sentience in plants with the same rigor as in non-human animals.

Plant Sentience Revisited: Sifting Through The Thicket Of Perspectives, Paco Calvo, Miguel Segundo-Ortin

Animal Sentience

In our target article (Segundo-Ortin & Calvo 2023), we proposed the intriguing possibility of plant sentience, drawing parallels with non-human animal studies. This response aims to sift through the rich thicket of perspectives offered by our commentators. To do so, we assess the risks of employing double standards, as well as the tendencies of anthropomorphizing and zoomorphizing in plant studies. We also emphasize the need for clarity in linguistic and conceptual terms, examine the neurophysiological evidence for plant sentience, and discuss the ethical implications of such recognition.

Making Emotions Trustworthy, Xiaoyu Ke

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I investigate ways by which agents can make their emotions more trustworthy from a perspective that’s informed by recent psychological research on the nature of emotion regulation. This dissertation is a collection of three articles, each addressing one type of cases of untrustworthy emotions in a particular context. Chapter one (Developing Appropriate Emotions) concerns emotions that are untrustworthy because they are irrelevant to the moral or epistemic judgements at hand. By situating the problem in the context of a situationist challenge to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, I argue that we can address this problem by developing ameliorative abilities such as emotion …

Musicality, Misophonia Sensitivity, And Responsiveness To Misophonia Videos, Alexis Rice, Jennifer Hsu, Kaela Omengan, Sivan Barashy

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Misophonia sensitivity as measured by the A-MISO-S predicts emotional responses to misophonia trigger videos, but musical sophistication (Gold MSI scores) did not. A measure of real-time responses to videos can capture a meaningful aspect of misophonic experience in the general population. Future research should investigate whether more direct measures of musicality such as perceptual tasks will show a relationship between musicality and misophonic reactions.

The Stability Of The Speech-To-Song Illusion, Jennifer Hsu, Brooke Booth, Jordyn Karns, Rodica R. Constantine

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

The Speech-to-Song (STS) illusion: when a listener is presented with multiple repetitions of a spoken phrase and begins to hear it as increasingly song-like. In the present study, we aim to verify anecdotal evidence that suggests the STS illusion is temporally stable and replicate existing evidence that excerpts transform to song by the third or fourth repetition and perhaps faster upon future encounters.

Multilingualism And Memory: Investigating Possible Differences In The Abilities Of Monolingual And Multilingual College Students, Clara E. Barned

Honors Projects

This study investigated whether there is a difference in the memories of monolingual and multilingual undergraduate students using simple memorization tasks. There were 46 participants, 30 of which were monolingual (only knew one language) and 16 of which were multilingual (knew two or more languages). There was found to be no significant difference between the performance of the two groups, with the data generating a p-value of 0.557. This study further suggests related avenues of research and ways in which the study could be improved in the future.

Psychophysiological Effects Of Increasing Awareness Of Nondual Consciousness In Young Adults With Depression And Anxiety, Milena Braticevic

CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century

Young adults increasingly suffer from anxiety and depression during the time of transition into adulthood. This research study examined the effects of increasing awareness of nondual consciousness in young adults who were experiencing various levels of anxiety and depression. The methodology was mixed-method and included four 1-hour group-based sessions over 4 weeks. Increasing awareness of nondual consciousness through educational, experiential, and behavioural components resulted in reduction in the average depression score from 19.4 (borderline clinical depression) to 10 (normal), and reduction in the average anxiety score from 12.7 (moderate anxiety) to 6.9 (mild). Participants reported increased mental, emotional, physical, and …

Belonging Amidst Bias: Embracing Difference On The Path To Common Humanity, Alyssia Sheikh

Mindfulness Studies Theses

The mindfulness community prioritizes self-awareness and common humanity, but is often entrapped by the idea that oneness is equivalent to sameness. This inclination for objectivity is rooted in the same neural propensities that facilitate bias; the brain is a subjective organ, however, and so neurologically speaking, bias is inevitable. This paper asks: Is striving for sameness separating us from interconnectedness? A human experience is a subjective, diverse, and variable one. The path to shared humanity and social justice co-occurs with increasing cultural humility through mindful awareness and acknowledging our subjective nature. Exploring our neurological tendency to make assumptions, we …

The Biological Influence Of Stories & The Importance Of Reading Fiction, Elise N. Good, Katharine Schaab

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fictional narratives and stories have persisted throughout human history. However, perhaps due to a bias that stories offered nothing more than entertainment for the reader or perhaps that they are not useful outside of the realm of academia, the research within science academia has been lacking in literature on why these narratives have endured. Unfortunately, due to the lack of conversation across disciplines, particularly those of science and literature, this subject has not been thoroughly investigated through an interdisciplinary lens. Within this paper, the goal is to analyze the benefits of fictional narratives through biological, evolutionary, and neuropsychological perspectives. Research …

Hiding Behind The Title: Bridging The Gap Between Identity And Leadership Through Neuroscience, Emotional Intelligence And Ethical Management, Alicia S. Huddleston

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

Leadership is the key determinant in the success of any organization, and leaders have an immeasurable impact on the lives and performances of those they have been entrusted to develop, support and lead. School principals are an integral part of the leadership tapestry within society and many people have been impacted by a school principal. Often enough, there are individuals who lead with or behind their title versus understanding first who they are intrinsically, and then working through those dynamics to effectively lead their own lives. When leaders are able to do this, then and only then are they equipped …

Danaher's "Jesus And The Bicameral Brain: Knowing And Being" (Book Review), Joseph Baumstarck Jr.

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

An Abductive Argument From Depression And Anxiety To Christian Personal Holiness, Kelly Douglas Burchett

Masters Theses

The science on pathological depression and anxiety (D&A) describes religion and spirituality's (R/S) insulating and immunizing effects in roughly 72 to 85 percent of all relevant articles. But the descriptivism of science cannot assign any normative value to a theological worldview. Deductive logic favors theism via Leibnizian contingency, Kalām cosmology, objective morality, fine-tuning of the universe, and abstract conceptualism. The information in DNA, the irreducible complexity of intracellular machinery, the improbability of folded proteins, and the support for common modular design over common ancestry establish a design inference for all of life. Unguided naturalistic simulations fail to surmount the complexity …

Pain Sentience Criteria And Their Grading, Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg

Animal Sentience

On the basis of the target article by Crump and colleagues, we suggest a more parsimonious scheme for evaluating the evidence for sentience. Since some of the criteria used by Crump et al. are not independent and some are uninformative we exclude some criteria and amalgamate others. We propose that evidence of flexible learning and prioritization, in conjunction with relevant data on brain organization, is sufficient for assigning pain-sentience to an animal and we suggest a scoring scheme based on four criteria.

Truly Minimal Criteria For Animal Sentience, Mark Solms

Animal Sentience

The criteria for determining animal sentience proposed in the target article are sensible but they lack an explicit functional justification for the focus on pain. This commentary provides an abbreviated account of the most basic functional principles that underpin animal sentience and articulates some minimal criteria for determining its presence.

No Need For Certainty In Animal Sentience, Yew Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

This commentary supports Crump et al.’s (2022) point that where risks to welfare are severe, strong evidence of sentience is sufficient to warrant protecting welfare. Crump et al.’s eight criteria for sentience are also useful. Flexible decision-making (5) and flexible behaviour (6) are consistent with Ng (1995). The concession that the “no-need-for-sentience” proposition is unnecessary also strengthens the importance of the target article’s conclusions.

Fine-Tuning The Criteria For Inferring Sentience, Culum Brown

Animal Sentience

“Sentience” means the capacity to feel, and feelings are private affairs. Sentience is hence extremely difficult to quantify in nonhuman animals. We have no direct means of determining whether an animal is sentient. Thus we rely on a series of indirect measures or criteria which collectively provide some level of confidence about the probability that an animal is sentient. Crump et al. propose a modified framework based on 8 criteria for estimating the likelihood of sentience in a target taxon. Whereas I very much like their proposed framework, I would suggest a couple of amendments that may improve it further: …

Generalizing Frameworks For Sentience Beyond Natural Species, Michael Levin

Animal Sentience

Crump et al. (2022) offer a well-argued example of an essential development: a rigorous framework for assessing sentience from the perspective of moral concern over an agent’s welfare. Current and forthcoming developments in bioengineering, synthetic morphology, artificial intelligence, biorobotics, and exobiology necessitate an expansion and generalization of this effort. Verbal reports (the Turing Test) and homology to human brains are utterly inadequate criteria for assessing the status of novel, unconventional agents that offer no familiar touchstone of phylogeny or anatomy. We must develop principled approaches to evaluating the sentience of (and thus, our responsibility to) beings of unfamiliar provenance and …

Sentience In Decapods: An Open Question, Mark Briffa

Animal Sentience

Crump et al.’s framework is a powerful tool designed to assist decisions on the ethical treatment of decapod crustaceans. However, the question of whether decapods are sentient (i.e., whether they feel), remains open, perhaps indefinitely. More optimistically, we might design experiments that distinguish among different levels of awareness, sometimes viewed as components of sentience. We should strike a balance between assuming that all organisms are sentient and making unnecessary anatomical assumptions about sentience. Refining current experiments may provide concrete insights about awareness in Decapoda and other taxa.

Does The Sentience Framework Imply All Animals Are Sentient?, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

The eight criteria proposed in Crump et al.’s framework for evaluating pain sentience in decapod crustaceans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to markers that could increase confidence in an animal’s sentience more generally. Some of the commentaries have already pointed out that pain is only one kind of sentience (Souza Valente). It has also already been pointed out that there are other criteria for pain that could be usefully added to the framework’s eight (Burrell). This expansive thinking about criteria that can be used to increase confidence in sentience raisess the question: in an expansive …

Distinguishing Epistemic And Moral Grounds For Legal Protection, Carlos Montemayor

Animal Sentience

The criteria proposed by Crump et al. are based on various cognitive roles associated with sentience. A subset of them may be sufficient for certain kinds of welfare, but the presence of all of them should be considered as clearly sufficient for substantial kinds of legal protection based on their relation to capacities that we consider essential for moral standing in human beings.

Unconscious Humans, Autonomous Machines And The Difficulty Of Knowing Which Animals Are Sentient, Marian Stamp Dawkins

Animal Sentience

The framework proposed by Crump et al. still leaves much doubt about whether invertebrates such as crabs are sentient. For example, many complex behaviours - even in humans - occur without sentience. Also, simple machines could easily meet all of Crump et al.’s eight proposed criteria for sentience. Acknowledging the limitations of what we currently know about sentience is important both for formulating legislation correctly and for advancing scientific understanding of this most puzzling of biological phenomena.

Decapod Sentience: Broadening The Framework, Cecilia De Souza Valente

Animal Sentience

A framework for studying sentience in decapods is of great value, but how high a cost (in suffering) to each individual decapod (or any animal) is warranted for collecting scientific evidence of sentience? The lack of evidence for some of the target article’s proposed criteria surely results from the fact that research is focused mainly on biomedical studies, ecotoxicology, and commercial production, with decapod sentience and welfare seen as only a secondary research topic. I draw attention also to the possibility of a wider framework that includes all felt experiences, from suffering to pleasure.

Independence, Weight And Priority Of Evidence For Sentience, Elizabeth Irvine

Animal Sentience

This commentary maps out relationships of dependency between the criteria proposed in the target article (Crump et al. 2022), identifying the criteria that carry most of the weight of the evidence, and suggesting which criteria should have priority in research on sentience.