Psychology Commons^™

The Telling Line: The Relationship Between Cognitive Style And Fashion Design Sketching, Mary K. Culpepper

Creative Studies Graduate Student Master's Theses

This mixed-methods exploratory study addresses a gap in the literature by testing for links between cognitive style and the gestalt of sketches produced by college-level fashion design students. Students’ cognitive styles were appraised with the FourSight assessment, a measure of problem-solving preference gaining use in design schools. Then participants sketched fashion designs to complete a design brief. Panels of raters trained in FourSight reviewed the sketches to assess the cognitive styles of the sketchers. Quantitative analysis revealed a significant degree of interrater reliability, while qualitative analysis indicated emergent themes of selection, attitude, and innovation that aligned with FourSight types. The …

Are All Voices Created Equal?: Conditional Indirect Effects Of Directness Of One's Voice On Perceived Uncertainty And Performance, Dennis Lawrence Poepsel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current investigations was to examine the effects of the amount of voice one is given during decision-making on group behaviors. In particular, across two studies, participants were members of groups that needed to make a decision. In these situations, participants were provided varying degrees of voice during a decision-making process. Depending on the study, participants were either given a direct voice (Personal Voice), an indirect voice (Group Voice), a direct voice and an indirect voice (Composite Voice), or were not allowed a voice (No Voice). The results of Study 1 found that having Personal Voice or …

Interactive Video Gaming: Do We Feel Like We Are Exercising?, Antonio Santo, Shaelee Allen, Janet Dufek, Paul Hafen, Michael Jarrett, Krystina Moschella, Robert Rietjens, James Navalta, Richard Tandy, Jacob E. Barkley

Interdisciplinary Research Scholarship Day

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and hedonics (liking or enjoyment) changed during 30 contiguous minutes of playing select, interactive video games on the Nintendo Wii system. A secondary purpose was to determine if RPE and liking differed among games.These data suggest that individuals do perceive difference in the amount of work they are performing during extended play of the same game or among sedentary and physically interactive games. Additionally, liking was similar during extended game play and among games suggesting that the physical interaction with the game may be …

Death And Politics: The Role Of Demographic Characteristics And Testimony Type In Death Penalty Cases Involving Future Dangerousness Testimony, Amy Magnus, Miliaikeala Heen, Joel D. Lieberman

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

Past research examining expert future dangerousness prediction testimony in death penalty cases and civil confinement hearings for sex offenders has found that jurors tend to be more persuaded by less scientific “clinical” testimony and less influenced by “actuarial” based testimony. Jurors demonstrate greater receptivity for clinical testimony despite the fact that actuarial testimony has been shown to be a better predictor of future dangerousness. Research in this area has focused on identifying cognitive factors that can potentially be manipulated during a trial to increase the effectiveness of actuarial testimony on jurors. A mock jury study was conducted to extend these …

Infant Perceptions Of Mixed-Race Faces: An Exploration Of The Hypodescent Rule In 8.5 Month-Old Infants, Sophie Beiers

Pitzer Senior Theses

Studies have shown that adults often categorize mixed-race individuals of White and non-White descent as members of the non-White racial group, an effect said to be reminiscent of the “hypodescent” or “one-drop rule.” This effect has not yet been thoroughly studied in infants, although 9-month-old infants have been shown to be able to categorize mono-racial faces into different racial groups. In the present study, the perception of mixed-race White and Asian/Asian American faces was studied in sixteen 8.5-month-old infants. The infants were randomly assigned to two stimulus groups. The stimuli were the photographed faces of female college students who had …

Infants’ Responses To Affect In Music And Speech, Daniel K. Feinberg

Pitzer Senior Theses

Existing literature demonstrates that infants can discriminate between categories of infant-directed (ID) speech based on the speaker’s intended message – that is, infants recognize the difference between comforting and approving ID speech, and treat different utterances from within these two categories similarly. Furthermore, the literature also demonstrates that infants understand many aspects of music and can discriminate between happy and sad music. Building on these findings, the present study investigated whether exposure to happy or sad piano music would systematically affect infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech. Five- to nine-month-old infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech …

Generalization Of Expert Face Processing Takes Time, Karen Duan

Honors Theses

Same race faces are recognized better than other race faces, and this other-race effect (ORE) can be explained by reduced holistic processing of other-race faces. Holistic processing is defined as a tendency to process all parts of a stimulus interactively as a whole. Previous studies found that experience can mediate ORE in holistic processing. The present study investigated whether quality or quantity of experience with the other-race better predicts holistic processing of other-race faces between Caucasian and Asian individuals. Contrary to what we expected, we did not find any correlation between experience with the other-race and the ORE in holistic …

Positive Affect Improves Working Memory: Implications For Controlled Cognitive Processing, Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang, Alice M. Isen

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study examined the effects of positive affect on working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM). Given that WM involves both storage and controlled processing and that STM primarily involves storage processing, we hypothesised that if positive affect facilitates controlled processing, it should improve WM more than STM. The results demonstrated that positive affect, compared with neutral affect, significantly enhanced WM, as measured by the operation span task. The influence of positive affect on STM, however, was weaker. These results suggest that positive affect enhances WM, a task that involves controlled processing, not just storage processing. Additional analyses of recall …

Balconies, Joe Guimera

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Recent developments in theoretical physics suggest the possibility of parallel universes. What if we could see two or more universes at the same time? In effect, superimpose a scene from one universe; say a street corner, over the image of the same scene from a second universe? The photograph “Balconies” imagines the possibilities.

Aspects Of Facial Contrast Decrease With Age And Are Cues For Age Perception, Aurelie Porcheron, Emmanuelle Mauger, Richard Russell

Psychology Faculty Publications

Age is a primary social dimension. We behave differently toward people as a function of how old we perceive them to be. Age perception relies on cues that are correlated with age, such as wrinkles. Here we report that aspects of facial contrast–the contrast between facial features and the surrounding skin–decreased with age in a large sample of adult Caucasian females. These same aspects of facial contrast were also significantly correlated with the perceived age of the faces. Individual faces were perceived as younger when these aspects of facial contrast were artificially increased, but older when these aspects of facial …

Eurasian Jays Predict The Food Preferences Of Their Mates, Alan C. Kamil

Avian Cognition Papers

The cognitive abilities of animals continue to fascinate both scientists and nonscientists. Although the abilities of the primates, our closest living relatives, generally attract most interest, several different lines of research have demonstrated high levels of intellectual capacity in birds, particularly corvids. The members of this family are known for their large brains and have performed well in many cognitive tasks using different paradigms (1–3). This finding has led to substantial revision of thinking about avian intelligence, including the suggestion of convergence in the evolution of cognitive abilities between corvids and primates (4). In PNAS, Ostojić et al. (5) add …

Lateralized Difference In Tympanic Membrane Temperature: Emotion And Hemispheric Activity, Ruth E. Propper, Tad T. Brunyé

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We review literature examining relationships between tympanic membrane temperature (TMT), affective/motivational orientation, and hemispheric activity. Lateralized differences in TMT might enable real-time monitoring of hemispheric activity in real-world conditions, and could serve as a corroborating marker of mental illnesses associated with specific affective dysregulation. We support the proposal that TMT holds potential for broadly indexing lateralized brain physiology during tasks demanding the processing and representation of emotional and/or motivational states, and for predicting trait-related affective/motivational orientations. The precise nature of the relationship between TMT and brain physiology, however, remains elusive. Indeed the limited extant research has sampled different participant populations …

Unconscious Processing Of Unattended Features In Human Visual Cortex, Tatiana Aloi Emmanouil, Philip Burton, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Unconscious processing has been convincingly demonstrated for task-relevant feature dimensions. However, it is possible that the visual system is capable of more complex unconscious operations, extracting visual features even when they are unattended and task irrelevant. In the current study, we addressed this question by measuring unconscious priming using a task in which human participants attended to a target object's shape while ignoring its color. We measured both behavioral priming effects and priming-related fMRI activations from primes that were unconsciously presented using metacontrast masking. The results showed faster RTs and decreases in fMRI activation only when the primes were identical …

Examining The Effects Of Variation In Emotional Tone Of Voice On Spoken Word Recognition, Maura L. Krestar, Conor T. Mclennan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Emotional tone of voice (ETV) is essential for optimal verbal communication. Research has found that the impact of variation in nonlinguistic features of speech on spoken word recognition differs according to a time course. In the current study, we investigated whether intratalker variation in ETV follows the same time course in two long-term repetition priming experiments. We found that intratalker variability in ETVs affected reaction times to spoken words only when processing was relatively slow and difficult, not when processing was relatively fast and easy. These results provide evidence for the use of both abstract and episodic lexical representations for …

Self-Defining Memories, Scripts, And The Life Story: Narrative Identity In Personality And Psychotherapy, Jefferson A. Singer, Pavel Blagov, Meredith Berry, Kathryn M. Oost

Psychology Faculty Publications

An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long-term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life-story memories, which in turn become self-defining memories when linked to an individual's enduring concerns. Self-defining memories that share repetitive emotion-outcome sequences yield narrative scripts, abstracted templates that filter cognitive-affective processing. The life story is the individual's overarching narrative that provides unity and purpose over the life course. Healthy narrative identity combines memory specificity with adaptive meaning-making to achieve insight and well-being, as …

Effects Of Texture Component Orientation On Orientation Flow Visibility For 3-D Shape Perception, Michelle L. Fowler, Andrea Li

Publications and Research

In images of textured 3-D surfaces, orientation flows created by the texture components parallel to the surface slant play a critical role in conveying the surface slant and shape. This study examines the visibility of these orientation flows in complex patterns. Specifically, we examine the effect of orientation of neighboring texture components on orientation flow visibility. Complex plaids consisting of gratings equally spaced in orientation were mapped onto planar and curved surfaces. The visibility of the component that creates the orientation flows was quantified by measuring its contrast threshold (CT) while varying the combination of neighboring components present in the …

Music And Movement Share A Dynamic Structure That Supports Universal Expressions Of Emotion, Beau Sievers, Larry Polansky, Michael Casey, Thalia Wheatley

Dartmouth Scholarship

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in …

College Students' Alcohol Consumption Habits, Perceptions, Readiness To Change And Exposure To A Brief Information Based Intervention, Matthew Boudreau

Psychology Honors Papers

The current study sought to compare the effectiveness of two brief information based interventions. The first exposed to participants information regarding accurate social norms college student alcohol consumption and a second which focused on information regarding the effects of alcohol on the brain and body. The effectiveness of the interventions was investigated by comparing initial scores on the Readiness to Change scale (RTC; Rollnick et al. 1992) to scores on the same scale after a two week follow up. It was hypothesized that the groups who received the intervention would both show significant increases in scores on the contemplative and …

Cardiovascular Fitness Associated With Cognitive Performance In Heart Failure Patients Enrolled In Cardiac Rehabilitation, Sarah Garcia, Michael L. Alosco, Mary Beth Spitznagel, Ronald Cohen, Naftali Raz, Lawrence Sweet, Richard Josephson, Joel Hughes, Jim Rosneck, Morgan L. Oberle, John Gunstad

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

Reduced cognitive function is common in persons with heart failure (HF). Cardiovascular fitness is a known contributor to cognitive function in many patient populations, but has only been linked to cognition based on estimates of fitness in HF. The current study examined the relationship between fitness as measured by metabolic equivalents (METs) from a standardized stress test and cognition in persons with HF, as well as the validity of office-based predictors of fitness in this population.

Methods

Forty-one HF patients enrolled in cardiac rehabilitation completed a standardized exercise stress test protocol, a brief neuropsychological battery, the 2-minute step …

Word Of Mouth And The Forecasting Of Consumption Enjoyment, Stephen He, Samuel Bond

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The digital era has permitted rapid transfer of peer knowledge regarding products and services. In the present research, we explore the value of specific types of word-of-mouth information (numeric ratings and text commentary) for improving forecasts of consumption enjoyment. We present an anchoring-and-adjustment model in which the relative forecasting error associated with ratings and commentary depends on the extent to which consumer and reviewer have similar product-level preferences. To test our model, we present four experiments using a range of hedonic stimuli. Implications for the provision of consumer WOM are discussed.

Analyzing The Determinants Of Group Identity Among Alevis In Turkey: A National Survey Study, Cigdem Sirin

Selected Works Temporary Series

This study systematically explores the factors that affect collective identity associations within the Alevi community in Turkey by employing the social identity approach and examining survey data collected through fieldwork. The results show that Kurdish Alevis express lower levels of attachment to their religious identity as compared to Turkish Alevis. The results also indicate that personal experiences of discrimination tend to increase one's prioritization of Alevi identity. Last, no significant differences are observed regarding group identity between Alevis who reside in urban areas and those who live in rural areas.

Building Coalitions, Making Policy: The Politics Of The Clinton, Bush, And Obama Presidencies, By Martin A. Levin, Daniel Disalvo, And Martin M. Shapiro, Eds., José Villalobos

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Building Coalitions, Making Policy: The Politics Of The Clinton, Bush, And Obama Presidencies, By Martin A. Levin, Daniel Disalvo, And Martin M. Shapiro, Eds., José Villalobos

Departmental Papers (PS)

No abstract provided.

Concepts Of Law, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Visual Wulst Lesions And Trigeminal Nerve Sectioning On The Discrimination Of Magnetic Inclination In The Homing Pigeon (Columba Livia), Merissa Acerbi

Honors Projects

The ability of homing pigeons to return to their loft from unknown places has fascinated scientists for centuries. It is well established that homing pigeons, like migratory birds, posses an innate magnetic inclination compass to determine direction by measuring the angle between the magnetic field vector and the Earth's surface. Recent work has indicated that the avian magnetic compass is light mediated and appears to mediate magnetic information to the brain. This occurs via a visual pathway with processing in the visual Wulst area of the forebrain. There is, however, also evidence from other avian species that magnetic direction may …

Memory, Cognition, And The Effect Of A Music Intervention On Healthy Older Adults, Shannon L. Bowles

Theses and Dissertations--Gerontology

Music is a powerful modality that can bring about changes in individuals of all ages. This research employed both an experimental and quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of music as it influenced psychological well-being, memory, and cognition among older adults. Specifically, it addressed three aims: (a) To determine to what extent learning to play a music instrument later in life influenced psychological well-being and cognitive function of non-institutionalized healthy seniors, (b) To determine the effects of the amount of music involvement on psychological well-being and cognitive function (c) To determine the benefit of music for those with limited/no music …

Emotion, Community Development, And The Physical Environment: An Experimental Investigation Of Measurements, George E. Boone

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

A wide range of research fields have studied how emotions and behavior are affected by the physical environment. This gestalt theorist approach of experimental research as well seeks to measure emotion (using the valence-arousal scale) and micro-scale community development interactions when weighted physical environment factors are adjusted. Community development (CD) interactions at the micro-scale have received but slight attention from scholars in the CD research field and this study aims partially to investigate developing objective measures from social observations. CD interactions from recordings along with self-reported emotion through surveys in four quasi-experimental groups (where the environments were constructed based on …

Alterations In Visual Processing And Its Impact On Upright Postural Stability In Athletes Following Sport-Related Concussion, Andrea E. Cripps

Theses and Dissertations--Rehabilitation Sciences

Athletes are at risk of sustaining a concussion in all sports and at all competitive levels which may lead to balance impairments. Balance results from the integration of visual, vestibular, and somatosensory information. The underlying pathophysiology for balance impairments is not well understood and visuo-motor processing impairments and how these impairments contribute to balance in concussed athletes has not been reported. Objectives: (1) to investigate the influence of visual perturbation on upright postural stability and balance in athletes who have recently suffered a sports-related concussion, (2) to establish the test-retest reliability of a simple visuo-motor processing task. Design: A longitudinal, …

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …

The Interaction Between The Physical Environment And Metaphysical States: The Role Of Social Anxiety And Stress In Informing Spatial Perception, Emily Koelmel

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.