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Can The Survival Processing Effect Be Replicated In Non-Ancestral Survival Scenarios?, Ciro Griffiths

Honors Theses

When primed to think about one’s survival, participants experience an increase in recall for a set of words. This result called the ‘survival processing effect’ was initially found for participants primed to think about their survival in an ancestral environment. The present study was designed to access whether the effect could be replicated in non-ancestral scenarios. Analyses showed that the effect could be replicated and that non-ancestral scenarios even led to a slightly higher level of recall than the traditional ancestral scenario. Various characteristics of the modern scenarios are believed to have been responsible for this finding including an increase …