Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …

The Effects Of Message Matching In Climate Change Persuasion, Matthew R. Penner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Public opinions of climate change are not consistent with the reality that climate change is occurring. Effective persuasive messages must be created to ensure that irreparable damage to the environment is prevented. This study investigated the cognitive processes that occur when an individual is exposed to a persuasive message regarding environmental concerns that is matched to an individual’s personality characteristics like right wing authoritarianism and purity.

Messages on two environmental topics (solar panels and the Environmental Protection Agency) were created. Each topic was framed in multiple ways to test hypotheses about personality-based message matching. Participants completed a thought listing task …

Aging And Visual Spatial Integration, Alexia J. Higginbotham

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The current study evaluated the ability of 20 younger and 20 older adults to discriminate shapes depicted by Glass patterns. On any given trial, observers identified a particular pattern as either possessing a radial or concentric organization. Detecting a shape defined by a Glass pattern requires the successful detection of the orientations of its constituent local dipoles. In addition, long-range processes are needed to integrate the spatially separated dipoles into perceivable contours that have a particular (e.g., radial or concentric) organization. In the current experiment, the shapes were defined by either 40 or 200 oriented dipoles spread over an area …