Psychology Commons^™

Dark Humor And Suicide: Exploring Viewer Suicidality In "The Long Way", Sarah M. Rosen

Scripps Senior Theses

Death, dying, and the actual loss of life are some of the broadest sweeping concepts that typically evoke a wide array of emotions from sadness and anger to fear and despondence. It is unlikely that the first words associated with death are comedy, humor, or laughter. However, that is precisely what creators and comedians of dark, death, and gallows humor seek to achieve. For my senior capstone project, I have created a short fictional narrative film encompassing the traits of a dark comedy. However, noticing that few dark comedies delve into topics surrounding suicide, I wondered if it was possible …

Music Performance Anxiety And Interventions In Conservatory And Liberal Arts Institution Music Students, Francesca M. Jimenez

Scripps Senior Theses

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is reported in musicians of all experience, levels, and genre. However, solo classical musicians report MPA more often and at higher levels than performers in other genres because of its formal culture and traditional structure. Within solo classical musicians, collegiate training greatly differs between conservatories that award a Bachelor of Music (B.M.) and liberal arts institutions that award a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). In 2 studies, the proposed research examines the differences in general anxiety, MPA, and private lesson content between these two groups. Participants will be from the two groups of types of collegiate music …

The Power Of Perks: Equity Theory And Job Satisfaction In Silicon Valley, Kristi Sun

Scripps Senior Theses

Silicon Valley is known for its amazing workspace and perks. Due to Equity Theory and Two-factor Theory, employees should be content and stay longer. However, studies have found that there's a higher rate of job-hopping, which seems like a contradiction (Fallick et al, 2006). Participants were 135 engineers, ages 18 to 35 years old, who completed an online survey looking at job satisfaction, job expectations, perk usage, employee perception of perks, personal equity sensitivity, and comparison others. Recruitment was done through personal connections in the Bay Area and various social media sites that are targeted towards engineers. Results did not …

Love In The Golden Years: A Narrative Examination Of Romantic Relationships In Older Adulthood As Compared To Young Adulthood, Ariana Turner

Scripps Senior Theses

Life-stories offer an approach to understanding personality processes within a larger, developmental context. This study examines the role that one area of a person’s larger context (namely romantic relationships) plays in that person’s life-story. Specifically, the study examines whether this role changes over the lifespan. Nineteen students from a consortium of colleges in southern California, and an equal number of older adults living in a nearby retirement community, were interviewed about their romantic relationship history. The interview was semi-structured and asked participants about past and current relationships, and their most meaningful relationship overall. The interviews were coded for the themes …

Dreaming Big: Understanding The Current Context Of Academic And Career Decision-Making For Undocumented Students, Neeta Kantamneni, Kavitha Dharmalingam, Jessica Tate, Beth Perlman, Chaitasi R. Majmudar, Nichole Shada

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Undocumented student immigrants in the United States face substantial challenges in higher education including systemic, institutional, and cultural barriers that often impede access to and success in higher education. These barriers directly influence academic and work opportunities. The purpose of this article is to discuss the myriad of factors that affect the academic, career, and work development of undocumented college students. The three main objectives of this article are to (1) examine legislation that directly impacts access to higher education, (2) explore common barriers and systemic challenges undocumented college students face, and (3) review culturally sensitive interventions and resources for …

Review Of Ordinary Magic: Resilience In Development By Ann S. Masten, Eric S. Buhs, Kathleen Moritz Rudasill

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

The notion of risk has been a mainstay of research in child development for decades. Studying and understanding risk have led to important discoveries that have informed policy and practice, particularly for children living in situations where risk is abundant. More recently, there has been attention to cumulative risk, or the idea that single indicators of risk – for example, poverty, hunger, and home insecurity – tend to co-occur. Individuals and families facing higher levels of cumulative risk are thought to have compounded problems, regardless of the risks themselves, because these multiple stressors together wear down a family’s resources and …

Toward A Human Rights Agenda: Social Issues That Have Shaped Psychology In The United States, Dena Abbott, Noelany Pelc, Debra Mollen

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

The history of psychology is comparably brief relative to many other fields of study. Within this brief history, beginning in the late 19th century, there have been tremendous, impactful shifts and the coalescence of multiple events that have shaped the development of psychology, which has likewise impacted society. Rapid social, political, cultural, and technological changes have dramatically altered the experience of each successive generation, and the science of psychology has adapted to each change to remain relevant, effective, and innovative. The impact of these widespread changes has affected the ways in which psychologists study human behavior and practice psychotherapy. In …

Practical Implications Of Learning From Unsuccessful Retrieval Attempts, Ann C. Rossmiller, James R. Houston

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Recent findings suggest that retesting oneself facilitates better learning than studying alone. Building off previous experiments where correcting participants has significantly increased correctness, the current study furthers our understanding about learning from unsuccessful retrieval attempts by manipulating the frequency of correction. Using a set of 42 associated word pairings, each participant was exposed to two blocks where they would memorize the word pairs. This was followed by two quizzing blocks and a final exam block where participants were asked to write down the associate to the stimulus presented on screen. Frequency of correction was manipulated during the quizzing blocks where …

Aggressive And Depressed: Long-Term Outcomes Of Childhood Maltreatment, Elizabeth Dotson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Prior research has established a relationship between childhood maltreatment and resulting maladaptive outcomes, specifically, aggressive behaviors and depressive symptomology. The present research sought to extend the current body of literature by determining whether distinctive forms and functions of aggression are related to severity of childhood maltreatment, and whether gender plays a moderating role in this relationship, and if depression is uniquely associated with maltreatment and aggression type within an undergraduate population. Results were analyzed through a 2 x 2 between­ group factorial analysis of variance. Findings from the current study suggest that physical and psychological abuse are the strongest predictors …

Sexual Risk Taking Among Young Lgbt Individuals: Examining The Interplay Between Shame Memories And Fears Of Compassion, Elijah N. Johnson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Though there is a growing body of research concerning the impact that shame experiences can have on an individual, there is a paucity of research about what variables may mediate the relationship between central, shameful memories and resulting self-harming behavior. The purpose of this study was to explore fears of compassion as a possible mediator between shame memories and individuals' tendency to engage in risky sexual behavior, with an emphasis upon LGBT individuals, who on average are more likely to experience shaming experiences than non LGBT individuals. I predicted that fears of compassion would significantly strengthen the correlation between central …

Financial Decision-Making And The Normalization Of Deviance, Dilata Ranadive

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Two perspectives have dominated the discourse on the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. The first attributes the financial crisis to intentionally malevolent behaviors, whereas the second attributes it to the natural market fluctuations. However, there is still a third, possible perspective. While the first two perspectives focus on the intention of the actors, the third perspective focuses on the response of the observers. This is what Vaughan (1996) refers to as "normalization of deviance". In normalization of deviance actions or decisions that are initially regarded as aberrant or atypical are re-conceptualized and adopted as the new criterion. The …

Cross-Language Conceptual Activation And Development Through Text Passages, Karly Meillyn Schleicher

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The present study begins to bridge the gap between bilingual education practices and cognitive frameworks of bilingual conceptual access. A reading comprehension task was used to investigate how bilingual undergraduate students activate and develop academic information across their two languages when reading expository text. Using scientific texts, participants (N = 128) read two distinct passages pertaining to prior knowledge, as well as new, related conceptual information. At test, the participants were asked to complete true-false questions and elaborate on the reasons for their responses. A counterbalanced, mixed factorial design was used to infer how language dominance influences encoding and retrieval …

Development Of A Measure Of Positive And Negative Aspects Of Dog Owners' Attachment To Their Pets, Paola Nayeli Balcazar Soto

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis describes the development of the Assessment of Dog Owners' Behaviors and Experiences, Version I (ADOBE-I), a multi-scale measure of positive and negative aspects of dog ownership. In Study 1 a pool of 265 items was administered online to 352 participants on Mechanical Turk (M-Turk). Exploratory Factor Analysis of responses was used to construct the ADOBE-I, which includes 58 items and five scales, Dog-Owner Bond, Legal Problems, Hostile Dog, Obedient Dog, and Care for Dog's Health, and one supplemental scale, Dog as Child. In Study 2 the psychometric properties of the ADOBE-I scales were examined in a sample of …

Defining Moral Attitudes : An Examination Of The Structure And Consequences Of Moral Attitudes, Ciara Katelyn Kidder

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The goals of this Dissertation were to contribute to the literature on the structure of moral attitudes and explore the consequences of moral attitudes on person perception. The goal of study 1 was to replicate and extend previous research examining the automatic nature of moral objectivity and moral universalism. In Study 1, there was no support for the relationship between morality and objectivity and morality and universality. Instead, the study demonstrated that sequential priming may be an ineffective methodology for measuring these relationships. The goal of study 2 was to examine the relationship between the similarity of participant attitude to …

Is Torture Ever Justified? The Influence Of Group Membership, Interrogation Approach, And Success On Attributions Of Interrogator Behavior And Perceived Acceptability Of Torture, Julia Labianca

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of these three experiments was to determine what factors affect Americans' attitudes toward torture and the interrogators who engage in torture. Using theories of intergroup bias, fundamental attribution error, and cognitive dissonance, the three experiments investigated how people make behavioral attributions for an interrogator, as well as how people perceive the acceptability, ethicalness, effectiveness, and procedural justice of the technique used. Four variables were manipulated: group membership of the interrogator and detainee, outcome of the interrogation, and type of interrogation tactic used. It was expected that people would make attributional and attitudinal judgments in a manner that preserved …

Deception Detection In Dyads, Lorae Marquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The aim of the present study was to determine whether it is possible to detect deception during the interview of a dyad by observing the nonverbal "partner monitoring" behavior of one dyad partner while the other partner is telling a lie. This study also aimed to assess whether individual differences in the Big Five personality traits, Absorption, and Imaginative Suggestibility are correlated with partner monitoring when one's partner is telling a lie. Undergraduate psychology students (N=94) were grouped in dyads and asked to play a game that involved one member of the dyad lying and the other member telling the …

Examining The Spanish Maysi-2 Translation Among Mexican Americans, Yolanda Denise Ochoa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Due to the increasing Latino population in the U.S., Spanish translations of mental health screening tools are needed to better serve Latinos, particularly those in juvenile justice settings. Screening tools are measures that flag mental health symptoms and indicate if further evaluation is needed. The most widely screening tool used in juvenile justice settings that has been translated into Spanish is the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Version 2 (MAYSI-2). To date, research has focused only on the English version of the MAYSI-2. The present study examined the equivalence of the Spanish translation of the MAYSI-2 to its English version in 18- …

Examining The Role Of Threat Processing In Memory Consolidation And Prejudice Formation, Stephanie Marie Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Memory is a flexible system that integrates new incoming information into existing memory representations (Stickgold & Walker, 2007). Through sleep and over time, memories become stable via consolidation processes (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg & Kensinger, 2008). Prejudice formation can occur through the consolidation of stereotype schemas. In a previous study Latino participants learned positive and negative trait information about in-group and out-group members (Enge, Lupo & Zárate, 2015). At test, participants responded more quickly to out-group targets paired with negative traits than in-group pairings with these traits. Findings indicate that participants also responded more quickly to in-group targets paired with positive …

Development Of Efficient Simultaneous Confidence Bounds For Linear Mixed Models With Applications In Alcohol Research, Emmanuel Joseph Sequeira

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Multiplicity corrections are necessary to ensure the accuracy of conclusions made in studies that carry out multiple inferences simultaneously. This Thesis uses the methodology derived by Hunter and Worsley to obtain improved simultaneous confidence bounds (SCBs) that are less conservative than the highly used Bonferroni SCBs, for studies using linear mixed modeling. Empirical coverage rates were obtained for data that was generated using simulations, to compare the accuracy of the Hunter-Worsley SCBs with that of the Bonferroni SCBs. The bounds were also applied to data in the field of alcohol research, where comparisons were made to determine the moderating effect …

Religious Priming And Moral Reasoning As A Manipulation For Supporting Violence, Brandt A. Smith

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The present research tests the effects of religious priming and cued moral reasoning on support for violence against others. Further, the present research examined the effects of two individual difference measures, Social Vigilantism and the degree to which people accept religion as a social force research demonstrates that religious priming elicits greater compliance by acting as a cognitive distraction. The data show that lower levels of moral reasoning and religious priming lead to higher activism, radicalism, and extremism scores as well as higher agreement with a recorded message. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The Impact Of Stress On Risk Perceptions And Risk Behaviors, Gabriel Andrew Frietze

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As the national conversation regarding the legalization of marijuana in the United States continues to emerge as a pressing issue, the rates of simultaneous marijuana and alcohol consumption prior to driving are likely to rise. Research suggests that alcohol and marijuana consumed independently at low levels results in minimal impairment on driving performance. Conversely, driving performance is dramatically impaired when small amounts of marijuana and alcohol are simultaneously consumed. The current study investigated the impact of social stress on the perceived risk of Driving Under the Influence of Small Amounts of Marijuana and Alcohol (DUI-SAMA). In addition, the current study …

Does The Pain Of Rejection Promote The Pleasure Of Revenge? A Neural Investigation Of Cingulo-Striatal Contributions To Violence, David Chester

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Aggression is a dynamic and costly feature of human behavior. One reliable cause of aggression is social rejection, though the underlying mechanisms of this effect remain to be fully understood. Previous research has identified two psychological processes that are independently linked to aggressive retaliation: pain and pleasure. Given recent findings that pain magnifies the experience of pleasure, I predicted that the pain of rejection would promote the pleasure of aggression and thus, aggression itself. I also expected that this indirect effect of aggressive pleasure would only be observed among individuals with weaker self-regulatory abilities that are necessary to cope with …

Body Part Structure Knowledge In Infancy, Rachel Jubran

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Human faces, bodies, and hands convey critical social information (e.g., emotions, goals, and desires). Infants, like adults, are sensitive to such social information. Unlike infants’ knowledge of the structure of the human face and body, not much is known about infants’ knowledge of hands and feet. The current study tested infants for their preference between intact hand images and ones in which the same hands were distorted (i.e., location of at least one finger was altered to distort the typical structure of the hand). Infants at 3.5 months of age had a preference for the reorganized hand image, demonstrating that …

Exploring The Conceptual Overlap Of The Cognitive And Affective Theories Of Suicide, Leo D. Debroeck

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"To be able to help those contemplating suicide, the first step is to understand why people die by suicide. The cognitive theory of depression and the affective theory of psychache answer that question differently. Specifically, although they may have different parts in their theoretical systems, many of those parts overlap conceptually. The purpose of this study was to find if the two theories could be combined to create a more holistic theory between them. The application of each theory's aspects, in the form of standardized scales administered online to 427 college students, accounts for the nearly the same amount of …

Stress And Health Interview For Primary Care Patients With Medically Unexplained Symptoms: A Randomized Trial, Maisa Ziadni

Wayne State University Dissertations

Trauma, stress, and inhibited emotions contribute to pain and physical symptoms. People may disclose stressors and express emotions when encouraged, which may improve their symptoms. We developed an intensive interview aimed at: 1) raising patient awareness about the links between their stress and health; 2) engaging patients in emotional experiencing and expression processes. We tested its effects on patient attributions of their symptoms, in addition to physical and psychological outcomes in primary care patients with Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS).

In this study, 75 patients (87% women; 79% White; mean age = 39 years) with MUS (e.g., localized chronic pain, fibromyalgia, …

Effects Of Foreperiod Regularity And Muscle Size On Fractionated Reaction Time, Ronald Joseph Benedict Ii

Wayne State University Dissertations

Fractionating reaction time (FRT) chronometrically separates central (PMT) from peripheral (MT) processing, allowing for analysis of the variables that may have a timing effect on either. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of foreperiod regularity and muscle size on the components of FRT. Forty-four male (n = 21) and female (n = 23) healthy Wayne State University students responded to a visual stimulus in a simple reaction time task, either by alternating foreperiod by block (Exp1) or by alternating muscle size by block (Exp2). All participants completed six blocks of eight trials using their right-side, with …

Anticipatory Grief, Tara Fox Hall

Animal Sentience

This commentary reviews Barbara King’s How Animals Grieve, delving into the controversial topic of the status of animals in our society, as well as the key difference between human and non-human grief: the ability to anticipate death.

Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner

Animal Sentience

King discusses many examples where two animals, as they bond, behave in ways we interpret as expressing love for one another. If one of the bonded animals then dies, signs of loving are replaced by signs we interpret as expressing grief by the animal who remains. I propose a pathway for emotional communication between an animal and an observer that can have a central role in these and other observations by King and in our overall ability to interpret observed behavior in relation to emotion. This pathway provides evidence of emotion in an observed animal by communicating evidence of emotion’s …

Sentience And Animal Welfare: Affirming The Science And Addressing The Skepticism, Nancy Clarke

Animal Sentience

Broom’s (2014) book is a well-researched and thoroughly written exploration and evaluation of the journey from the origins of animal welfare science to what we can say we now know and need to consider in relation to animal sentience and welfare. This book will help to counter any skepticism among academics and policy makers.

Nigerian Educators' Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Knowledge And Classroom Behavior Management Practices, Arthur N. Ojionuka

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This correlational study assessed Nigerian educators' knowledge about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and inclusive classroom management practices when serving students with ADHD. Specifically, the study examined the predictive correlation between teachers' demographic characteristics, including years of teaching experience, level of education, and knowledge about ADHD, as well as how their knowledge informed their choice of behavior management interventions. Teachers are accountable for pedagogical responsibilities including maintenance and management of a learning environment that promotes learning and inclusion. Further, they play a significant role in identifying and supporting students with learning impairments including ADHD. Thus, it is critical for teachers to …