Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluation Of A Cue Associated With Alternative Reinforcement To Mitigate Resurgence, Hayley Brown

Masters Theses

Treatment relapse due to the extinction of a previously reinforced alternative behavior is known as resurgence. Understanding the conditions under which resurgence is mitigated may be important for improving the maintenance of the effects of interventions. One method that has been found to effectively mitigate resurgence is pairing a cue or stimulus with alternative reinforcement and then continuing to present that cue when alternative reinforcement is terminated. Animal studies have found that cues must be paired with alternative reinforcement and target extinction to be effective. However, this finding has not yet been replicated with humans. Demonstration of a similar effect …

Contextualizing The Neural Vulnerabilities Model Of Obesity, Timothy D. Nelson, Eric Stice

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

In recent years, investigators have focused on neural vulnerability factors that increase the risk of unhealthy weight gain, which has provided a useful organizing structure for obesity neuroscience research. However, this framework, and much of the research it has informed, has given limited attention to contextual factors that may interact with key vulnerabilities to impact eating behaviors and weight gain. To fill this gap, we propose a Contextualized Neural Vulnerabilities Model of Obesity, extending the existing theory to more intentionally incorporate contextual factors that are hypothesized to interact with neural vulnerabilities in shaping eating behaviors and weight trajectories. We …

Editorial: Appraisal Processes In Moral Judgment: Resolving Moral Issues Through Cognition And Emotion., Justin F. Landy, Tom R. Kupfer

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Divided Attention In Free Recall: Affecting Trace Accumulation By Dividing Attention, Anne Olsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How environmental information stores in memory directly affects our ability to retrieve the information. This thesis investigates the effects that dividing attention during study has on the storage of contextual information. Through several experiments, participants were asked to study and later recall word lists using a mixed-pure design with strengtheners varying as either repetition or study time. Experiment 1 investigates the effects of divided attention on the formation of inter-item associations and Experiments 2-6 manipulate strengthening item and context information in a memory trace when cognitive load is strained at various levels. Experimental results indicated that dividing attention during study …

The Role Of Dentate Gyrus Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase Activating Polypeptide (Pacap) In Contextual Fear Discrimination, Samantha Kelly Moriarty

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

When dysregulated, neural systems important for fear behaviors can contribute to mental health disorders such as anxiety, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD, a myriad of symptoms is possible, but a hallmark feature of the disorder is generalizing fear. This occurs when fear is experienced inappropriately in relation to the environment or circumstances. To study this behavior in rodent models, contextual fear conditioning is used. Contextual fear conditioning is a learning theory preparation where rodents are conditioned with an aversive stimulus such as foot-shock in one distinct context (A), while concurrently being exposed to a safe context (B). …

Evaluation Of Renewal During Differential Reinforcement With Asymmetrical Choices And A Context Fading Mitigation Technique, Kacey R. Finch

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Successful clinical behavior analytic treatment often results in decreases in challenging behavior and increases in appropriate behavior. These reductions in challenging behavior are often achieved by implementing differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA; Petscher et al., 2009). One variation of DRA to decrease challenging behavior is differential reinforcement with asymmetrical choices, which are two or more concurrently available response options associated with differential outcomes (Fisher & Mazur, 1997; Kestner et al., 2023). However, responding that was previously reduced sometimes reemerges. Specifically, renewal is the reemergence of a previously reduced response following a context change. The first two experiments evaluated renewal …

Belonging In Context: An Exploration Of Sense Of Belonging Among College Students, Ladonna L. Gleason

Theses and Dissertations

Feeling a sense of belonging is essential to human health and functioning and has been well documented in the literature. However, questions of context remain. Research in belonging has focused on social aspects of belonging, leaving broader contextual frames unexplored. There has been little work in identifying and differentiating the contexts in which belonging is experienced or in developing an understanding of how the experience of belonging differs across contexts. Current belonging theory lacks this important contextual perspective that could inform the ways in which belonging is constructed and reconstructed through disruption. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, new …

The Infuence Of Context Representations On Cognitive Control States, Reem Alzihabi, Erika Hussey, Nathan Ward

Liberal Arts Publications

Cognitive control operates via two distinct mechanisms, proactive and reactive control. These control states are engaged differentially, depending on a number of within-subject factors, but also between-group variables. While research has begun to explore if shifts in control can be experimentally modulated, little is known about whether context impacts which control state is utilized. Thus, we test if contextual factors temporarily bias the use of a particular control state long enough to impact performance on a subsequent task. Our methodology involves two parts: first participants are exposed to a context manipulation designed to promote proactive or reactive processing through amount …

Culture And Context's Influence On Hispanic Undergraduates' Perceptions Of Their Persistence Toward Stem Degree Attainment, Elsa I. Bravo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influences of context and culture on Hispanic undergraduate’s in the STEM pipeline. Study one utilized systematic review methods to assess the effectiveness of STEM intervention programs on Hispanic undergraduates. A total of 45 STEM related databases were searched from March-September 2020 with no limitations. Although a total of 259 studies were identified, only one study was actually found to specifically focus on Hispanic populations and include empirically based evaluations. The one remaining study did not find a statistically significant intervention effect for four- year graduation rates. The lack of evidence highlights a gap in research or …

Pedagogy Of Tarot: Simultaneity Of Past, Present, And Future, Ashley S. Hill

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

A three card tarot spread can represent the past, present, and future. As a reflective practice, tarot does not divine the future; rather it invites the practitioner to consider context and imagine multiple futures. Simultaneously experiencing the past, present, and future of education is valuable and is possible through a pedagogy of tarot. A pedagogy of tarot connects fxminist and democratic approaches to education through non-hierarchical relationships that honor lived experiences - calling teachers and learners to remain conscious and awake to one another. By acknowledging the possibility of multiple truths within current sociopoliticial and hxstorical contexts, we can make …

Considering Culture And Context: A Mixed-Methods Approach To Examining Adolescent Engagement And Parent Satisfaction In Urban Out-Of-School-Time Programs, Jacqueline Oluwakemi Moses

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adolescents of color living in poverty are at elevated risk for mental health problems with limited access to quality care, and 21% of youth in poverty are diagnosed with mental health disorders that, left untreated, lead to significant long-term consequences. Positive future orientation – optimistic expectations for graduation, gainful employment, and healthy relationships – among vulnerable adolescents has been identified as a unique protective factor associated with positive mental health trajectories. Out-of-school-time (OST) programs in neighborhood settings can promote positive future orientation and maximize benefits for adolescents, but we know little about cultural and contextual influences on youth enrollment and …

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., …

Contextually Modulated Avoidance Behavior In Rats Post-Pavlovian Extinction, Lauren Branigan

Theses and Dissertations

The following study sought to examine the psychological substrates of renewal (e.g.., context dependent extinction processes) for conditioned avoidance behaviors in rats. Using signaled active avoidance conditioning, rats acquired two-way shuttle responding, to two different auditory stimuli. These behaviors were then extinguished through exposure to the auditory stimuli where shuttling behavior was now without consequence. Subjects were then tested for renewal of avoidance in three distinct renewal sequences (e.g., ABA vs ABB, AAB vs AAA, and ABC vs ABB) in three separate groups of rats. It was found that subjects showed more responding to a stimulus presented outside of its …

Advancing Creativity Theory And Research: A Socio-Cultural Manifesto, Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Michael Hanchett Hanson, John Baer, Baptiste Barbot, Edward Pl Clapp, Giovanni Emanuele Corazza, Beth Hennessey, James C. Kaufman, Izabela Lebuda, Todd Lubart, Alfonso Montuori, Ingunn J. Ness, Jonathan Plucker, Roni Reiter-Palmon, Zayda Sierra, Dean Keith Simonton, Monica Souza Neves-Pereira, Robert J. Sternberg

Psychology Faculty Publications

This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio-cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the transition from the Information Society to the Post-Information Society. Through the propositions outlined here, we aim to build common ground and invite the community of creativity researchers and practitioners to reflect up, study, and …

Contextual Control Of Instrumental Actions And Habits Following Retroactive Interference, Michael Steinfeld

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

It is commonly accepted that instrumental responses that have been extinguished can return. For example, in a phenomenon known as the renewal effect, extinguished behaviors return upon removal from the extinction context. Another well-accepted notion is that instrumental behaviors can be thought of as goal-directed actions, which form over the course of moderate amounts of practice or training, and habits, which form after extended practice. Despite years of research on both topics, what happens to actions and habits following extinction is poorly understood. The present experiments examined the renewal of actions and habits following retroactive interference paradigms such as extinction …

The Context Of African American Emotion Expression: College Campus Influences, Deon Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical frameworks suggest that African Americans express emotion in context-specific ways that are unique to their familial socialization experience (Boykin, 1986; Dunbar, Leerkes, Coard, Supple, & Calkins, 2017). However, less is known about how African Americans express emotion across familial and public contexts. The current study was interested in exploring the contextual differences in emotion expression among 188 African American/Black college students from 3 different types of college campuses: predominantly White (i.e., PWI), historically Black (i.e., HBCU), and racially diverse. Data were collected via an online survey in which students reported the school they attend, their emotion expression in the …

The Neurobiological Basis Of Memory Specificity: The Influence Of Context And Re-Encoding, Dr. Brock Kirwan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

At a general level, we know that the information that is successfully encoded in and retrieved from long-term memory is influenced by the context during encoding and retrieval. However, we do not yet know how context affects mnemonic discrimination of similar or overlapping items or events. Further, we do not yet know what the effect is of retrieving the wrong information (or false recognition) on the original memory representation. Here, I propose to lead a group of students in an investigation using functional MRI (fMRI) on the effects of context on a neural process called pattern separation that is thought …

Effects Of Context And Individual Differences On Memory For Prior Remembering., Marcus L. Leppanen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though people often remember experiences from their lives, they are also able to remember whether a memory has previously been retrieved, which is known as memory for prior remembering. Frequent failures of memory for prior remembering can have negative consequences on how people perceive their own cognitive health. The recurrence of traumatic memory retrieval can be interpreted as a consequence of intrusive memory for prior remembering. This dissertation was conducted to improve our understanding of the factors that influence the efficacy of memory for prior remembering. The two factors that were investigated were context change and individual differences. Participants ( …

Socialization Trajectories Of Civic Development: Examining Variation Among Children In Black Immigrant And African American Families, Juliana Karras-Jean Gilles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Little is known about how developmental experiences spanning early childhood through adolescence prepare children and youth to engage with society (Astuto & Ruck, 2017), and even less so for ethnically diverse Black children and youth (Jagers, Lozada, Rivas-Drake, & Guillame, 2017). Building from work linking positive youth development (PYD) to civic engagement (Lerner et al., 2006), this study examined how socialization trajectories from early childhood through adolescence in concert with early childhood experiences and contexts related to adolescent civic development. Civic development was measured by the PYD outcomes of competence, confidence, connection to school and peers, caring, and character; these …

Age-Related Differences In Context-Specificity Benefits Ambiguous Predictive Learning, Catherine Luna

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The present study investigated age differences in the context-specificity effect in learning. Ambiguity was manipulated in two conditions in a predictive learning paradigm (Callejas-Aguilera & Rosas, 2010) to encourage participants to attend to context. In the ambiguous condition, foods led to the presence of the illness equally as often as its absence. In the non-ambiguous condition, foods consistently led to the presence of the illness or consistently lead to its absence. Participants were instructed to make predictive judgments for foods leading to the presence of an illness in one of two restaurant contexts. During the test, participants made predictive judgments …

Healthcare Vs. Hawkishness: The Divergent Effects Of Affect On Context-Driven Shifts In Attitudes, Fade Rimon Eadeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a tradition of research in affective science suggesting different affective states (e.g., anger vs. anxiety) are associated with relatively unique goals and motives (Frijda, 1986; 1988; Schwarz & Clore, 2007, Lerner & Keltner, 2000; 2001). Although this approach has received considerable empirical support, this work has yet to fully resolve an important issue. For any given type of emotion (say, anger), such feelings can be activated in a variety of different "triggering" contexts. If so, to what extent does the triggering context matter when examining the consequences of that emotion for attitudes? Some findings suggest that context does …

You'll Spoil Your Dinner: Attenuating Hedonic Contrast In Meals Through Cuisine Mismatch, Jacob Lahne, Richard Pepino, Debra Zellner

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Previous research (Lahne & Zellner, 2015) has shown that hedonic contrast occurs in a multi-coursed meal such that good appetizers reduce the hedonic evaluation of an entrée. This paper extends that finding by examining whether hedonic contrast between courses served in a real restaurant meal can be attenuated or eliminated through a categorical mismatch of cuisine (Italian vs Thai). Subjects (N = 143) ate a meal in a University teaching restaurant in which the cuisine of the appetizer (soup) was manipulated so that it either matched (Italian minestrone) or did not match (Thai tom kha) the main course (Italian pasta …

The Effects Of Changing Attention And Context In An Awake Offline Processing Period On Visual Long-Term Memory, Timothy M. Ellmore, Anna Feng, Kenneth Ng, Luthfunnahar Dewan, James C. Root

Publications and Research

There is accumulating evidence that sleep as well as awake offline processing is important for the transformation of new experiences into long-term memory (LTM). Yet much remains to be understood about how various cognitive factors influence the efficiency of awake offline processing. In the present study we investigated how changes in attention and context in the immediate period after exposure to new visual information influences LTM consolidation. After presentation of multiple naturalistic scenes within a working memory paradigm, recognition was assessed 30 min and 24 h later in three groups of subjects. One group of subjects engaged in a focused …

Harnessing The Placebo Effect: A New Model For Mind-Body Healing Mechanisms, Gabriel Crane

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The placebo effect is a phenomenon that has confounded Western medicine and research for over sixty years. While the field has historically and continues to be rife with misconceptions and confusion, recent research aims to reignite the art of medicine by turning the effect's underlying mechanisms to therapeutic benefit. However, researchers may not have the appropriate theoretical framework to do so. While significant progress has been made in identifying a number of the placebo effect's underlying mechanisms, conceptual deficiencies hinder application of advances in the field. In part, this is because the placebo effect unearths a number of problematic philosophical …

Health Inequality: What Counselors Need To Know To Act, D. Jones, M. Tang

David E. Jones

How Luck And Fortune Shape Risk-Taking Behaviors, Andrea Yvonne Ranieri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study uses a lottery-based paradigm to examine how risk taking is affected by two specific types of good and bad experiences, luck and fortune. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, we suggest that they refer to two separate aspects of risk. Fortune refers to the overall positivity or negativity of the overall context, whereas luck refers to the probability of a better or worse outcome. To make the lottery context fortunate or unfortunate, a set of mixed-valence control lotteries were surrounded by all gain (good fortune) or all loss lotteries (bad fortune). To make the lotteries lucky …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Sources Of Interference In Recognition Testing, Jeffrey Annis, Kenneth J. Malmberg, Amy Criss, Richard M. Shiffrin

Psychology Faculty Publications

Recognition memory accuracy is harmed by prior testing (a.k.a., output interference [OI]; Tulving & Arbuckle, 1966). In several experiments, we interpolated various tasks between recognition test trials. The stimuli and the tasks were more similar (lexical decision [LD] of words and nonwords) or less similar (gender identification of male and female faces) to the stimuli and task used in recognition testing. Not only did the similarity between the interpolated and recognition tasks not affect recognition accuracy but performance of the interpolated task caused no interference in subsequent recognition testing. Only the addition of recognition trials caused OI. When we presented …

Musical Mood And Musical Arousal Affects Different Stages Of Learning And Memory Performance, Tram Nguyen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examined whether the effect of music on memory is attributable to musical mood, musical arousal, context, or some combination of these factors. In Experiment 1, participants performed a face-name paired-association task while music was played in the background. In Experiment 2, the perceptual context (Experiment 2A) and emotional context (Experiment 2B) of music was examined more thoroughly. Experiment 3 examined whether the context effect of musical mood and musical arousal occurs in a recall task (Experiment 3A), a recognition task (Experiment 3B), and an association task (Experiment 3C). The results showed that low arousal music enhanced memory while …

Effects Of Method And Context Of Note-Taking On Memory: Handwriting Versus Typing In Lecture And Textbook-Reading Contexts, Ian Schoen

Pitzer Senior Theses

Both electronic note-taking (typing) and traditional note-taking (handwriting) are being utilized by college students to retain information. The effects of the method of note-taking and note-taking context were examined to determine if handwriting or typing notes and whether a lecture context or a textbook-reading context influenced retention. Pitzer College and Scripps College students were assigned to either handwrite or type notes on a piece of academic material presented in either a lecture or textbook context and were given a test to assess their retention. The results demonstrated that there was a significant main effect for typing notes such that typing …