Psychology Commons^™

The Measurement Of Product Typicality In Design Research. A Basic And Applied Approach, Travis Kent

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

The objective of this study was to examine the use of the cognitive construct of “typicality” to guide design decisions in the development of consumer products. Increasing products that will appeal to consumers, designers strive to balance novelty and familiarity. A potential way to thread this needle is to understand how “typical” a design is of its particular product category. The construct of typicality has been used by psychologists to understand how people create and represent categories. Objects that are more typical of a category are often associated with positive responses from observes (e.g., greater visual appeal, faster recognition). In …

A Comparative Test Of Creative Thinking In Preschool Children And Dolphins, Dawn Melzer, Deirdre Yeater, Madison Bradley, Heather M. Hill, Gonzalo Guerra, Kimberly Salazar, Teresa Bolton, Kathleen M. Dudzinski

Psychology Faculty Publications

Creativity is considered one aspect of intelligence. Including creativity allows for more room for expression (e.g., participants can respond with movement instead of written or verbal responses) than in standard intelligence assessments. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance, 1974) are the leading method of assessing creative abilities in school-aged humans and above. To assess creativity in young humans and nonhuman animals, modifications must be made to facilitate nonverbal responses. In the current study, a cross-species comparison was conducted between preschoolers and bottlenose dolphins to examine responses to a modified creativity task in which both species were trained to …

Eye Movement And Pupil Measures: A Review, Bhanuka Mahanama, Yasith Jayawardana, Sundararaman Rengarajan, Gavindya Jayawardena, Leanne Chukoskie, Joseph Snider, Sampath Jayarathna

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our subjective visual experiences involve complex interaction between our eyes, our brain, and the surrounding world. It gives us the sense of sight, color, stereopsis, distance, pattern recognition, motor coordination, and more. The increasing ubiquity of gaze-aware technology brings with it the ability to track gaze and pupil measures with varying degrees of fidelity. With this in mind, a review that considers the various gaze measures becomes increasingly relevant, especially considering our ability to make sense of these signals given different spatio-temporal sampling capacities. In this paper, we selectively review prior work on eye movements and pupil measures. We first …

Visual Looming Cues Increases The Auditory Looming Bias, Maggie K. Mccracken

Senior Independent Study Theses

Looming objects have been environmentally relevant cues throughout human evolution due to potential danger. Observers integrate both auditory and visual signals emitted by moving objects. While visual arrival time estimates are relatively more accurate, auditory estimates are anticipatory as observers perceive a moving sound source as arriving before it actually does. In the present study, participants made loudness change judgments of sounds presented unimodally or with visual motion. The sounds consisted of two intensity ranges and conditions included both looming and receding motion. The results showed that listeners perceived looming sounds as changing more in loudness than equivalent receding sounds. …

Noise Pollution, Patrick Barry

Reviews

The authors of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment are a trio of intellectual heavy hitters: Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, constitutional law scholar Cass Sunstein, and former McKinsey consultant (and current management professor) Olivier Sibony. As prolific as they are prominent, the three of them have collectively produced over fifty books and hundreds of articles, including some of the most cited research in social science. If academic publishing ever becomes an Olympic sport, they’ll be prime medal contenders, particularly if they get to compete as a team or on a relay. Their combined coverage of law, economics, psychology, medicine, education, …

Sentience And Sentient Minds, John Anthony Webster

Animal Sentience

My commentary builds on Rowan et al.’s (2022) comprehensive review to address the question ‘what do we mean by sentience?’ It suggests how we might recognise degrees of sentience within the animal kingdom, ranging from primitive sensations such as hunger and pain to more complex emotions that determine quality of life.

Defending Human Difference By Raising The Bar, Joe Gough

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (C&H) offer a theory of why we humans want to believe that we are different: to justify our cruelty to animals. This commentary offers further supporting evidence of this and examines more closely what the claim that humans are ‘different’ amounts to. It also considers some methodological issues in animal psychology closely related to C&H ‘s theory. These problems result from a common strategy for defending hypotheses about human difference.

Dataset: Knowledge And Attitude Retention Following An Implicit Bias Classroom Workshop, Yuanyuan Zhou, Joel Purkiss, Malvika Juneja, Jocelyn Greely, Anitra Beasley, Anne Gill

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Baylor College of Medicine provides a classroom-based implicit bias workshop to all third-year medical students to increase students’ awareness of their unconscious bias and develop strategies for reducing health care disparities. The workshop meets our immediate goals and objectives. However, we are unsure if the benefit would be long-term or diminish over time.

Methods: To examine the concept retention from the implicit bias classroom workshop, we administered a self-developed seven-item seven-point Likert-scale survey to our medical students at pre-, post-, and one-year post-workshop attendance.

Results: The data set was comprised of survey results from two cohorts of our third …

Care To Walk In My Shoes? Repairing Trust After Violations Of Benevolence, Luke Aaron Langlinais

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation examines how perceived perspective taking relates to trust repair, specifically in the context of a benevolence-based violation. I draw on perspective taking theory, attribution theory, and the integrative model of organizational trust to explore a model of interpersonal trust repair. The extant literature on trust repair primarily focuses on violations of ability and integrity, leaving the third dimension of trustworthiness, benevolence, largely unexplored. Yet, research suggests as many as 96% of workplace employees have been victims of benevolence-based offenses, such as disrespect, condescension, or degradation. The present research expands the theoretical bounds of the extant trust repair literature …

Agents At Work: Modeling How Space Can Influence People In The Workplace, Jovan Poposki

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

People interact with space in ways that are important to consider when designing an office. Not considering this relationship has led to the dissatisfaction of employees post-occupancy. In this thesis, I present an agent-based model that incorporates several characteristics of agents, such as work ethic and sociability, and explores their behaviours and social interactions in the workplace. The model is first tested on a commercial workspace, varying agent parameters to see how they change the behaviour of the model. I find that agents with extreme personalities are happiest, and show a bimodality in the distribution of time spent in various …

Pushing It To The Limit: Determining Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) Olfactory Sensitivity And Discrimination Through A Behavioral Choice Task, Matthew S. Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations

Elephants have shown remarkable olfactory capabilities. Their sense of smell impacts their foraging choices, behavior, and ultimately, survival. Being able to detect a target odor can allow elephants to locate specific resources, identify threats, and find receptive conspecifics. Previous studies have shown that elephants can consistently detect target odors, but have not identified the limits of this detection. Thus, to investigate the extent of elephants’ odor detection capabilities, we tested Asian elephants in a two-step odor discrimination task. First, we investigated whether elephants could detect odors at varying levels of dilution after a training procedure, and then whether they could …

Filled/Non-Filled Pairs: An Empirical Challenge To The Integrated Information Theory Of Consciousness, Amber R. Hopkins, Kelvin J. Mcqueen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one’s visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image pairs are important to the experimental testing of theories of consciousness. We review recent experimental research and conclude that filling-in involves brain activity with relatively high integrated information (Φ) compared to veridical visual perceptions. We then present filled/non-filled pairs as …

Prudence, Ethics And Anticipation In Visionary Leaders, Yanick Farmer

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

In ethics, prudence is an essential skill in making informed decisions. Although several studies in various fields have dealt with the notion, few empirical studies have addressed one of its inextricable aspects: anticipation. To gain a better understanding of the notion, this study questioned fifteen leaders whose peers consider to be “visionary” in their respective fields. The results of this qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews describe the fundamental aspects of anticipation according to three categories: reasoning and trend analysis, implementation and strategy, and personality and values.

Refugee Children In Malaysia: Perceptions Of Family And Coping Mechanisms, Jin Kuan Kok, Khengkia Khor, Kai Yee Hon, Gertina J. Van Schalkwyk

The Qualitative Report

The percentage of refugee children in Malaysia has been growing in recent years with a rise of more than 9000 in less than 3 years. More than 51,000 of the 164,620 documented refugees in 2019 are below the age of 18 years. Refugee children are often marginalized in society making them vulnerable and requiring special assistance in meeting their educational needs, mental health care and socio-emotional wellbeing. The purpose of this study was to discover the perceptions of refugee children regarding family life and their emotional and coping mechanisms. Employing the Collage Life-Story Elicitation Technique (CLET) and a discovery-oriented narrative …

Growth In Confidence And Search For Belonging: A Case Study Of Muslim Student Experience At An American College, Amir Duric

Muslim Student Life

The broader perception of Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the wider society is not always positive. It is often viewed as a conservative organization where all members need to be a specific type of Muslim to fit in or a political space influenced by a foreign group or ideology. Because of this I studied the group, and my findings challenge this view drawing from the semester-long fieldwork, participant observations, and four in-depth interviews with MSA members at Salt City University (SCU). Data collected shows how the group and its members and the broader Muslim community on campus made Muslim students …

The Understanding Of Digital And Multimedia Evidence (Dme) By Attorneys And Digital Forensic Examiners (Dfe) Within The United States Criminal Justice System, Joseph Levi White

Dissertations

One goal of this research was to determine potential themes that may influence the understanding of Digital and Multimedia Evidence (DME) by attorneys and Digital Forensic Examiners (DFE) within the United States Criminal Justice System. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather information from experienced criminal attorneys and DFEs regarding potential influences on their understanding of DME. The results of these interviews were transcribed, and the data coded to allow for qualitative analysis. Five themes were developed from this data and are thought to play a role in understanding of DME by attorneys and DFEs: motivation for involvement in the …

Facial Expressions And Emotion Labels Are Separate Initiators Of Trait Inferences From The Face, Anthony Stahelski, Amber Anderson, Nicholas Browitt, Mary Radeke

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Facial inferencing research began with an inadvertent confound. The initial work by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen identified the six now-classic facial expressions by the emotion labels chosen by most participants: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. These labels have been used by most of the published facial inference research studies over the last 50 years. However, not all participants in these studies labeled the expressions with the same emotions. For example, that some participants labeled scowling faces as disgusted rather than angry was seen in very early research by Silvan Tomkins and Robert McCarty. Given that the same …

Primacy And Recency Effects On Position Error In Short-Term Memory Recall, Weerachet Sinlapanuntakul, Kelly Harris, Brittany S. Wesley

Beyond: Undergraduate Research Journal

Position error is the most common error in serial recall of short-term memory, especially when environment, language, or similarity factors are presented. Previous studies demonstrate some support for the serial recall resulting in less error-prone for the first and last positions than the middle positions. This study investigates the accuracy of recalling letters and their positions when given a random sequence with minimal to no external factors. The significant predictors influencing position error were the primacy and recency effects. Participants completed a 20-trial experiment on the CogLab Experimental Control Software, which presented a series of letters one at a time …

Using The Behaviour Change Wheel Program Planning Model To Design Games For Health: Development Study, Michael C Robertson, Tom Baranowski, Debbe Thompson, Karen M Basen-Engquist, Maria Chang Swartz, Elizabeth J Lyons

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND: Games for health are a promising approach to health promotion. Their success depends on achieving both experiential (game) and instrumental (health) objectives. There is little to guide game for health (G4H) designers in integrating the science of behavior change with the art of game design.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to extend the Behaviour Change Wheel program planning model to develop Challenges for Healthy Aging: Leveraging Limits for Engaging Networked Game-Based Exercise (CHALLENGE), a G4H centered on increasing physical activity in insufficiently active older women.

METHODS: We present and apply the G4H Mechanics, Experiences, and Change (MECHA) …

The Relationship Between Cognitive Functioning And Internalizing/Externalizing Behaviors In Children And Adolescents With Down Syndrome, Jessalin R. Good

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Introduction: Down syndrome (DS) is a developmental disorder caused by a complete extra copy of chromosome 21. This genetic error results in a variety of other symptoms related to a range of medical and cognitive challenges. Although it has been reported that a significant relationship exists between cognitive functioning and both internalizing and externalizing behaviors in typically developing (TD) individuals, the literature is severely limited in investigating this relationship in those with DS.

Rationale: Internalizing and externalizing behaviors have been shown to have a negative relationship with cognitive functioning in TD children and adolescents (Shankman et al., 2010; Wood et …

Future Possibilities For Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Nicolas Leonardi

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Autism Spectrum Disorder’s nature of presenting socially awkward behaviors creates barriers for those with ASD in the job interview process. This problem raises questions on how the interview process can be redefined to be more inclusive. Dillenburger et al. conducted a study on interventions provided for individuals with ASD. The study concluded that most jobs do not provide an appropriate job interview process for those with ASD. Solomon et al. and Maras et al. both conducted studies that highlighted the social behaviors presented by individuals with ASD that prevented them from being hired during the job interview process. Both of …

Perceptions Of The Appropriate Response To Norm Violation In 57 Societies, Kimmo Erikkson, Pontus Strimling, Et Al., Andree Hartanto, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, …

Variations In Medical Students' Educational Preferences, Attitudes And Volunteerism During The Covid-19 Global Pandemic, Nital P Appelbaum, Sanghamitra M Misra, Jennifer Welch, M Harrison Humphries, Sunthosh Sivam, Nadia Ismail

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Public health crises require individuals, often volunteers, to help minimize disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic required such activation of individuals, but little is known about medical students’ preferences of such engagement. We investigated potential variations in medical students’ educational preferences, attitudes, and volunteerism during the COVID-19 pandemic based on socio-demographics to better prepare for future activation scenarios. A web-based, anonymous survey of U.S. medical students at a single institution was conducted in May 2020. Across four training year, 518 (68% response rate) students completed the survey. During the pandemic, 42.3% (n = 215) wanted to discontinue in-person clinical experiences, 32.3% (n …

Boosting Brain Waves Improves Memory, Richard J. Addante, Mairy Yousif, Rosemarie Valencia, Constance Greenwood, Raechel Marino

Psychology Student Publications

Have you ever wanted to improve your memory? Or have you struggled to remember what you studied? Memory uses special patterns of activity in the brain. This experiment tested a new way to create brain wave patterns that help with memory. We wanted to see if we could improve memory by using lights and sounds that teach the brain waves to be in sync. People wore special goggles that made flashes of light and headphones that made beeping noises. This trained the brain through a process called entrainment. The entrainment put the brain in sync at a specific brain wave …

Population-Based Approaches For Monitoring The Nurturing Care Environment For Early Childhood Development: A Scoping Review, Jéssica Pedroso, Stefanie Eugênia Dos Anjos Coelho Kubo, Priscila Olin Silva, Gabriel Ferreira De Castro, Juliana Lopes Pimentel, Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Muriel Bauermann Gubert, Gabriela Buccini

Social and Behavioral Health Faculty Research

Selecting indicators to monitor nurturing care (NC) environments that support decision-making and guide the implementation of integrated early childhood development (ECD) programmes has become a priority globally. Several population-based approaches have been attempted to create a set of indicators or a composite index methodology to measure the NC environment using existing secondary data. However, they have not been systematized. Our scoping review aimed to analyse the population-based approaches for monitoring the domains of the NC (e.g. good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, security and safety, and opportunities for early learning). ECD experts, peer-reviewed, and grey literature were systematically searched with …

Code-Switching Patterns Differentially Shape Cognitive Control: Testing The Predictions Of The Adaptive Control Hypothesis, Giliaine Ng, Hwajin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Bilinguals engage in qualitatively different code-switching patterns (alternation, insertion, and congruent lexicalization) to different degrees, according to their engagement in different types of interactional contexts (single-language context, dual-language context, and dense code-switching context). Drawing on the adaptive control hypothesis, we examined whether bilinguals’ code-switching patterns would differentially shape multiple aspects of cognitive control (interference control, salient cue detection, and opportunistic planning). We found that a dense code-switching context, which predominantly involves insertion and congruent lexicalization, was positively associated with verbal opportunistic planning but negatively associated with interference control and salient cue detection. In contrast, a dual-language context, which predominantly involves …

Looking For A More Effective Online Learning Experience: Personality And Attention Ability As Moderators, Caroline Smith, Courtney Keim

River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference

Historically, organizations have used in-person training, while sometimes relying on technology (e.g., pre-recorded tapes), to train employees. However, online instruction has become the preferred method of educational and organizational learning experiences, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic (Use, 2020). Sometimes online learning produces greater knowledge gain and similar satisfaction to in-person instruction, and other times the learning is equal (cf. Sitzmann, et al., 2006). Despite the assumption that online training is cheaper and easier to deliver, it should be implemented so that the technology allows for effective learning (Salas et al., 2012, emphasis added) and in ways that accommodate disabilities (Use, …

Resetting Of Auditory And Visual Segregation Occurs After Transient Stimuli Of The Same Modality, Nathan C. Higgins, Ambar G. Monjaras, Breanne D. Yerkes, David F. Little, Jessica E. Nave-Blodgett, Mounya Elhilali, Joel S. Snyder

Psychology Faculty Research

In the presence of a continually changing sensory environment, maintaining stable but flexible awareness is paramount, and requires continual organization of information. Determining which stimulus features belong together, and which are separate is therefore one of the primary tasks of the sensory systems. Unknown is whether there is a global or sensory-specific mechanism that regulates the final perceptual outcome of this streaming process. To test the extent of modality independence in perceptual control, an auditory streaming experiment, and a visual moving-plaid experiment were performed. Both were designed to evoke alternating perception of an integrated or segregated percept. In both experiments, …

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance To Healthy Facial Features, Mitch Brown, Ryan E. Tracy, Steven G. Young, Donald F. Sacco

Publications and Research

Objective: Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals’ infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research.

Methods: In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them.

Results: Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced …

The Motion Aftereffect: Mechanisms And Variants, Erica E. Hassoun

The Cardinal Edge

The motion aftereffect causes a visual stimulus to undergo apparent motion. An adapting stimulus, which moves in a specific direction, adapts motion-responsive neurons in the middle temporal area (V5) to that direction of motion. Viewing a second stimulus, a test stimulus, produces apparent motion in the direction opposite that of the initial stimulus. Neural networks involved in attention and working memory are also implicated in the motion aftereffect. There is still little known regarding the mechanisms of the motion aftereffect, despite extensive documentation in the literature. This review discusses established knowledge of the motion aftereffect, focusing primarily on the middle …