Psychology Commons^™

Third Culture Kids - Playing To Heal, Amna Sana

Theses and Dissertations

With increased globalization and a large expat population, Qatar is home to increasing numbers of Third Culture Kids (TCKs). TCKs are children who live in a country where their parents are non-native, children who grow up between cultures. Young TCKs, especially children between the ages of three and seven, do not possess the skills to adequately vocalize their feelings, but fortunately, play therapy allows them to articulate problems and feelings on their own terms. This thesis addresses the emotional hurdles facing TCKs, using concepts derived from play therapy and offering a series of interactive objects designed to reflect emotional expression …

Investigating How The Modularity Of Visuospatial Attention Shapes Conscious Perception Using Type I And Type Ii Signal Detection Theory, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Attention abilities rest on the coordinated interplay of multiple components. One consequence to this multifaceted account is that selection processes likely intersect with perception at various junctures. Drawing from this overarching view, the current research examines how different forms of visuospatial attention influence various aspects of conscious perception, including signal detection, signal discrimination, visual awareness, and metacognition. In this effort, we combined a double spatial cueing approach, where stimulus- and goal-driven orienting were concurrently engaged via separate cues, with Type I and Type II signal detection theoretic frameworks through five experiments. Consistent with the modular view of visuospatial attention, our …

From Music To Animacy: Causal Reasoning Links Animate Agents With Musical Sounds, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We ask whether high-level causal reasoning about how music was generated can lead people to link musical sounds with animate agents. To test this, we asked whether people (N=60) make flexible inferences about whether an agent caused musical sounds, integrating information from the sounds’ timing and from the visual context in which it was produced. Using a 2x2 within-subject design, we found evidence of causal reasoning: In a context where producing a musical sequence would require self-propelled movement, people inferred that an agent had been present causing the sounds. …

Memory Strategy Instruction With Goal-Setting And Positive Feedback: Impact On Memory, Strategy Use, And Task Commitment, Mercedes E. Ball

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Strategy instruction can improve memory performance, but some training programs are more effective than others. Some scholars propose that a key element to boosting the benefits from training programs is enhancing or emphasizing self-regulatory factors, such as knowledge about memory, beliefs about ability, or motivational factors. Research supporting this claim evidence adds that programs that enhance trainees’ confidence in their abilities improve memory performance and that multifactorial programs are more effective than strategy-training-only programs. Setting performance goals and receiving feedback are two self-regulatory factors known to relate to memory performance that may sometimes be included in some training programs. However, …

Influence Of Increased Options On Performance Generalization Across Two Variations Of The Monty Hall Dilemma, Robert A. Southern

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a probability puzzle at which humans consistently fail to adopt the optimal winning strategy. The participant chooses between three identical doors, behind one of which is a valuable prize. After the participant makes their initial decision, the host reveals that there is nothing behind one of the two remaining doors, then asks the participant if they would like to stay with their originally selected door or switch to the remaining unopened door. The optimal choice is to switch to the previously unchosen door, which increases the probability of winning from 33% to 67%. Despite …

How Interesting Is This To You: Rating The Interestingness Of Auditory Clips, Hanna Zakharenko, James R. Unverricht, Yusuke Yamani

Psychology Faculty Publications

Modern technological environments integrate multiple devices, competing for limited attentional resources of users. This study aimed to validate the auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) with a college student population and examine the psychological structure of task engagement. Thirty-nine students listened to thirty-nine auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) for their level of engagement. Participants rated how interesting they found the material on a slider from -7 (boring) to 7 (interesting) while listening to each clip. Participants also rated levels of difficulty, entertainment, and likelihood to attend to each clip. Participants who rated high on difficulty, …

Now You See Me — Now You Don’T: An Investigation Of Hair Alterations Effects On Face Identification In Own- And Other-Race Faces, Maresa A. Tate

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Investigating The Inhibition Of The Return Of Attention In The Tactile Domain, Robert Plax

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Purpose: The time-course needed to elicit tactile inhibition of return (IOR) has not been well-defined due to the paucity of research in this area especially studies investigating spatial discrimination. Reportedly tactile IOR uses higher-order mental representations to orient attention spatially yet the properties of low-level dermatomal maps may better account for how IOR orients tactile attention in space although its contribution is unclear. The present study sought to establish a time-course that evokes IOR in a unimodal tactile spatial discrimination task and decouples the contribution of the dermatome from higher-order representations. Methods: Two conditions containing distinct tactile cue-target paradigms designed …

Visual Perception And Action In Reaching During Upper Limb Obstacle Avoidance, Nondon Chakraborty

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During everyday activities, people reach to specific objects with their hands and avoid obstacles. For people to move successfully through an obstacle gap, it is necessary to be able to accurately perceive the actions that the surroundings afford and adjust hand movements accordingly. Reaching behaviours, including planning (perception) and execution (action), depend on visual information. This study aimed to understand and detect the differences between perceptual judgment and actual performance of both hands during a reaching task at the time of obstacle avoidance by using a hand-scaled approach. Participants were young adults (male (n=7) and female (n=10) aged 18 to …

How To Improve Dynamic Decision Making: Evaluation Of A Brief Training Program On Human Error, Yoannis Hermida

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current work environments require leaders to make effective and sound decisions in unpredictable situations. How can leaders improve their dynamic decision-making (DDM) skills? The current studies explored the effects of a training program on improving DDM in two computer-simulated tasks with different task characteristics. This study was comprised of two experiments. The first experiment included 83 undergraduate students who independently managed a computer simulated chocolate factory (ChocoFine). The second experiment included 111 students who played the role of a fire rescue chief overseeing a forest fire (WinFire). Half of the participants in each simulation group received a brief training on …

Predictors Of Academic Performance: The Roles Of Self-Compassion, Coping, Mental Toughness, Grit, And Self-Reported Stressors On Physics Final Exam Performance, Darnishia L. Morris

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The intersection of stress, persistence and success in college-aged students is progressively gaining attention in research. Analyzing how students succeed and what factors contribute to their success, failure, and ultimately the completion of their degree, is vitally important for educators and administrators in higher education to understand. Historically utilized factors such as grade point average (GPA), standardized test scores (college admissions and Advance Placement (AP) exams), and previous academic achievement (pre-requisite courses) are not the only predictors of academic performance. This study aimed to quantify contributions and inter-relationships of student perceptions, coping style, stress, mental toughness (MT), and other potential …

And The Stars Look Very Different Today, Amy Rogin

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

A personal reflection about synesthesia

The Influence Of Information Power Upon The Great Game In Cyberspace: U.S. Wins Over Russian Meddling In The 2018 Elections, Joseph H. Schafer

Military Cyber Affairs

The 2018 U.S. pivot in information and cyberspace degraded Russian operations in the 2018 election. Following pervasive Russian information power operations during the U.S. 2016 elections, the United States progressed from a policy of preparations and defense in information and cyberspace to a policy of forward engagement. U.S recognition of renewed great power competition coupled with Russia’s inability to compete diplomatically, militarily (conventionally), or economically, inspires Russia to continues to concentrate on information power operations. This great game in cyberspace was virtually uncontested by the U.S. prior to 2017. Widespread awareness of Russian aggression in 2016 served as a catalyst …

Failure To Protect?: Applying The Drri-2 Scales To Rwanda And Srebrenica, Elizabeth Mason

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article critically reanalyses the action, or lack of action, taken by UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990's. The lack of action of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Bosnia has long been criticised as a conscious decision made by peacekeepers to not act in defence of those being targeted but instead to act as bystanders of genocide when they had the ability to prevent acts of genocide taking place. This article re-examines the actions of the UN command under Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda and Thom Karremans in Srebrenica, Bosnia in terms of the stress-related factors which influenced …

The Insanity Spectrum, Nicholas Gallagher

Capstones

Schizophrenia, which includes a combination of persistent and overwhelming hallucinations and delusions, emerges in men between the ages of 18 and 25. After I experienced a string of strange auditory hallucinations as a 19-year-old, I begged to fast-forward past the threshold of early adulthood to learn my fate: whether I was among the one-time voice-hearers, the people with a long-term mental illness or the conspiracy-peddling catastrophizers. I came to understand that those distinctions are blurrier than we’d like to admit. We are all connected through a shared pathology, falling in some liminal space between sanity and madness.

http://theinsanityspectrum.tilda.ws/

Factors Impacting Students’ Perceptions Of Mathematics, Amber Souza

Honors Program Theses and Projects

I want to be able to present math in a positive light to all of my future students, regardless of race, gender, and math background. However, for teachers as a whole to be able to take this important step, they must first develop a deeper understanding of why math is a sore spot for many students.

Outdoor Air Pollution Exposure And Inter-Relation Of Global Cognitive Performance And Emotional Distress In Older Women, Andrew J. Petkus, Xinhui Wang, Daniel P. Beavers, Helena C. Chui, Mark A. Espeland, Margaret Gatz, Tara Gruenewald, Joel D. Kaufman, Joann E. Manson, Susan M. Resnick, James D. Stewart, Gregory A. Wellenius, Eric A. Whitsel, Keith Widaman, Diana Younan, Jiu-Chiuan Chen

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The interrelationships among long-term ambient air pollution exposure, emotional distress and cognitive decline in older adulthood remain unclear. Long-term exposure may impact cognitive performance and subsequently impact emotional health. Conversely, exposure may initially be associated with emotional distress followed by declines in cognitive performance. Here we tested the inter-relationship between global cognitive ability, emotional distress, and exposure to PM2.5 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter 2 (nitrogen dioxide) in 6118 older women (aged 70.6 ± 3.8 years) from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study. Annual exposure to PM_2.5 (interquartile range [IQR] = 3.37 μg/m³) and NO₂ (IQR …

Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Suggestions can cause some individuals to miss or disregard existing visual stimuli, but can they infuse sensory input with nonexistent information? Although several prominent theories of hypnotic suggestion propose that mental imagery can change our perceptual experience, data to support this stance remain sparse. The present study addressed this lacuna, showing how suggesting the presence of physically absent, yet critical, visual information transforms an otherwise difficult task into an easy one. Here, we show how adult participants who are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion successfully hallucinated visual occluders on top of moving objects. Our findings support the idea that, at …

Impact Of The Covid-19 On Religious Practices Of Muslim Students In Higher Education, Amir Duric

Muslim Student Life

Implications of religious practices in Islam go far beyond religiosity, and this paper analyzed the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and religious practices of Muslim students in higher education. The analyzed data is from the survey of the Muslim Student Life at Syracuse University and the Center for Islam in Contemporary World at Shenandoah University. The survey was conducted through a non-random convenience sampling from March 30th through April 10th of 2020 and had 498 responders. For this study, I analyzed 272 who provided their demographic information. The paper hypothesized and confirmed an overall increase in the engagement with the …

Influence Of Convenience, Time-Savings, Price, And Product Variety On Amazon Prime Members And Non-Prime Shoppers’ Online Apparel Purchase Intention, Md Rashaduzzaman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The number of internet users and online shoppers in the United States has grown at an incredible rate over the past few decades. Greater convenience and availability of a wide assortment of apparel products at a cheaper price made online shopping very enticing to consumers. Amazon.com (Amazon) gained unprecedented popularity among consumers with its Amazon Prime program. Amazon’s retail revolutions changed consumer’s way of shopping and expectations. Both online and physical store retailers are facing tremendous pressure to fulfill that level of expectation. Thus, it is essential for retailers clearly understand the shopping expectations and preferences of Amazon Prime members …

Attentional Control In Young Drivers: Does Training Help Or Hinder Bottom-Up Processing In A Dynamic Driving Environment?, Sarah Elizabeth Yahoodik

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Anticipating hidden hazards on the road is a critical skill for safe driving, one that many young and novice drivers lack. Training programs are shown to improve hazard anticipation performance in young drivers, but whether these training effects persist in the presence of salient and potentially distracting stimuli remains relatively less explored. In this study, we examined whether the effectiveness of an existing driving training program, Risk Awareness Perception Training (RAPT), on increasing latent hazard anticipation on the road persisted with extraneous bottom-up stimuli in the road environment. Forty-one young drivers, aged 18-21, completed a series of driving scenarios with …

Dual Mechanisms Of Cognitive Control: An Eye Tracking Study, Kyle Mobly

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to attempt to provide an ocular signature for the dual mechanisms of cognitive control (proactivity and reactivity) by utilizing an eye tracker to record gaze patterns while participants were administered a modified version of the AX-CPT 40. Additionally, we sought to clarify whether context updating or maintenance was responsible for the higher Total Visit Duration (TVD) on the cue location during the ISI that was found in previous studies by providing both a short (1.5 seconds) and long (3 seconds) ISI length. This allowed us to disentangle context updating from maintenance by removing …

Knowledge-Intelligence Integrative Taxonomy, Ammar Yakan

Al Jinan الجنان

Knowledge and Intelligence constitute the base for human cognition processes. Knowledge and Intelligence are also reciprocal since intelligent behavior requires good knowledge and good knowledge about a problem implies an intelligent behavior to solve it. Educational psychologists have thoroughly studied knowledge and intelligence concepts while discussing the teaching and learning paradigms. Knowledge was defined to be information in action or the set of skills, competencies, beliefs, and insights owned by an individual and exerted during problem solving process. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the process conditions affecting the problem solution, such as time, place, shape, suitability, appropriateness, reliability, and …

Response To Commentaries On ‘Hard Criteria For Empirical Theories Of Consciousness’, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

In consciousness research, we have a very large number of theories, which exceeds by far the number of theories in other fields. We recently presented a set of criteria for evaluating and comparing theories of consciousness, and then applied the criteria to a number of different theories. Our publication sparked strong responses as evident by the many comments published in Cognitive Neuroscience (this issue). Overall, there seems to be consensus that a theory of consciousness (ToC) needs to have an unconscious alternative, but other criteria sparked controversy. The hottest debate is to what extent consciousness needs to work with purely …

Psychological Contract Perception And Contractual Employee Performance, Robin Roberts, Stephanie Douglas Ph.D.

Publications

Contractual, short‐term employees are increasingly utilized to support organizational performance. The employee's perception of the psychological contract were explored in this qualitative study through semi‐structured interviews of 22 contractual workers. Psychological contract was fulfilled through transactional job tasks and psychological contract breaches were found in relationships with leadership and the organization. An exploratory examination from the contractual worker lens helped to influence the psychological contract on the employee performance and its use in leveraging this workforce to improve organizational performance.

Historical Trauma Response Scores As A Function Of Unresolved Grief And Substance Use Disorder In American Indian Populations, Andrew R. Saunders

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Abstract

Researchers are interested in the outcomes of interventions, specifically, measuring historical trauma (HT) among American Indian/Alaska Native communities and the long-term distress and substance abuse as a result of historical trauma response (HTR). Previous literature has implicated limitations in the clinical conceptualization of the relationship between intergenerational transfer of HTR and substance abuse. The aim of the current study is to examine treatment efficacy of 50 homosexual, American Indian males randomized to a culturally-adapted juxtaposition of (1) Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), (2) Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and (3) Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention (HTUG), or (4) waitlisted on …

Wicked Problems: Depression, Sebastian Wendolowski

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Depression is a disorder that can affect anybody and is the leading cause of disability and disorders in the United States. This year, due to COVID-19, it has hit an all time high, affecting many more people. Suicide rates have been steadily growing across all ages, and this year is at a record high too, showing correlation with depression. There are two types of depression, major depressive disorder and chronic depressive disorder. Diagnosis of depression is typically done physically or through a questionnaire, which is compared into a DSM-5. There are many risk factors for depression and other common mental …

A Whiteheadian Innervation Of The Soma: A New Vision For The Peripheral Nervous System, David Milliern

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This essay draws attention to two problems in neuroscience’s set of assumptions. These self-defeating assumptions include: 1) the assumption that what the nervous system, especially the brain, does is synthesize experience, while also assuming philosophical realism, and 2) the problem of biological signal transduction. In the latter, neuroscientists and philosophers of biology have left unaddressed the issue that the signal differences between the inside and outside of the organismic boundary are of distinct ontological types; and yet no concern has been expressed regarding how it is possible that an organism’s inner states could reflect the experiential content flowing from outside …

Centaur Mind: A Glimpse Into An Integrative Structure Of Consciousness, Azin Izadifar

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Jean Gebser’s theory of consciousness suggests that we are experiencing a new era in the history of consciousness. Human consciousness moves like a pendulum. The current Integral Structure of Consciousness is not unprecedented, yet we are experiencing it in a multi-layered, deeper, and vaster way. Centaurs are imaginal creatures that first appeared within the Mythical Structure of Consciousness, making a bridge between the unity of the Magical and the duality of Mental structures. In this paper, I view the centaurs through the lenses of mythology and archetypal depth psychology and discuss the critical role of this mythic figure in the …

The Journey Back To Wholeness That Already Is, Jenna Dishy Wes

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Sunrise’s father had had lost his own, rather impactfully at the tender age of seven, just as he was transitioning into what Piaget called the Concrete Operations Period. “With this change, he (began) to behave in many ways much like an adult and, indeed, in terms of lines for the self and moral reasoning, many adults never grow past this stage” (Combs, 2009). And so would be the case for Sunrise’s father. Having never been given the tools or guidance to heal from such trauma, he resorted to substances that subdued what it was he could not face. Sunrise …