Psychology Commons^™

Is Psychological Science Committing “Suicide” By Linguistic Muddling?, Roger K. Thomas

Animal Sentience

Beginning mainly with the “cognitive revolution” in psychology in the latter half of the 20^th century, psychological science has been committing “suicide” slowly via linguistic muddling. Peña-Guzmán’s target article is but one of thousands of cuts contributing to this death by “suicide.” Having said that, given the current state of affairs in animal cognition research, there is much to commend in Peña-Guzmán’s article. I leave that to others, however. This commentary explains how the suicide by muddling of psychological science is happening in general, with the understanding that it applies also to Peña-Guzmán’s target article.

On Assisted Suicide, Clark Glymour

Animal Sentience

What would be the moral implications of the capacity for suicide in nonhuman animals? Humans can be helped to end their lives if they no longer find them bearable. Should captive animals not be given the same possibility?

The Potential Of Epigenetics Research To Transform Conceptions Of Phenotype Development, David S. Moore

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Epigenetics remains an exciting subdiscipline of biology, generating discoveries and insights about development. Because epigenetic phenomena can draw attention to the dynamic, interactional, and probabilistic nature of phenotype development, epigenetics research could hasten the demise of both nature-nurture debates and reductionist, genetically determinist perspectives on phenotype development. However, new data alone will not inevitably transform conceptualizations of phenotype origins, because it remains possible to assimilate epigenetic phenomena into traditional conceptual frameworks; epigenetic discoveries could even strengthen biologically determinist conclusions if traditional conceptualizations are retained. Although epigenetics will not force conceptual transformation, epigenetics research encourages the dismissal of the nature-nurture dichotomy …

Executive Control Goes To School: Implications Of Preschool Executive Performance For Observed Elementary Classroom Learning Engagement, Timothy D. Nelson, Jennifer Mize Nelson, Tiffany D. James, Caron A.C. Clark, Katherine M. Kidwell, Kimberly Andrews Espy

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The transition to elementary school is accompanied by increasing demands for children to regulate their attention and behavior within the classroom setting. Executive control (EC) may be critical for meeting these demands; however, few studies have rigorously examined the association between EC and observed classroom behavior. This study examined EC in preschool (age 5 years, 3 months) as a predictor of classroom learning engagement behaviors in first grade, using a battery of performance-based EC tasks and live classroom observations in a longitudinal sample of 313 children. Multilevel modeling results indicated that stronger EC predicted more focused engagement and fewer task …

Human Classifier: Observers Can Deduce Task Solely From Eye Movements, Brett Bahle, Mark Mills, Michael Dodd

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Computer classifiers have been successful at classifying various tasks using eye movement statistics. However, the question of human classification of task from eye movements has rarely been studied. Across two experiments, we examined whether humans could classify task based solely on the eye movements of other individuals. In Experiment 1, human classifiers were shown one of three sets of eye movements: Fixations, which were displayed as blue circles, with larger circles meaning longer fixation durations; Scanpaths, which were displayed as yellow arrows; and Videos, in which a neon green dot moved around the screen. There was an additional Scene manipulation …

Sibling Relationship Quality And Mexican-Origin Adolescents' And Young Adults' Familism Values And Adjustment, Sarah E. Killoren, Sue A. Rodriguez De Jesus, Kimberly A. Updegraff, Lorey A. Wheeler

Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families, and Schools: Faculty Publications

We examined profiles of sibling relationship qualities in 246 Mexican-origin families living in the United States using latent profile analyses. Three profiles were identified: Positive, Negative and Affect-Intense. Links between profiles and youths’ familism values and adjustment were assessed using longitudinal data. Siblings in the Positive profile reported the highest familism values, followed by siblings in the Affect-Intense profile and, finally, siblings in the Negative profile. Older siblings in the Positive and Affect-Intense profiles reported fewer depressive symptoms than siblings in the Negative profile. Further, in the Positive and Negative profiles, older siblings reported less involvement in risky behaviors …

Parent-Child Differences In Psychological Distress Following Childhood Cancer Treatment, Shelby A. Wilson

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

While the prognosis for pediatric cancer is improving, survivorship is accompanied by a number of potential long-term consequences. While not all childhood cancer survivors (CCS) and their parents experience psychological distress during survivorship, research does indicate that at least some do experience significant problems that warrant intervention. The current study was a retrospective analysis of an existing cross-sectional dataset that examined associations between psychological distress and other late effects in CCS and their parents. Neurocognitive late effects (NCLE) and parent/child distress were found to predict both parent and child psychological distress. Time since diagnosis was found to be related to …

A Correlational Study Of Emotional Intelligence And Language Style Matching, Deprise M. Depass

Honors Undergraduate Theses

ABSTRACT

Individuals subconsciously convey emotions through language. The present study investigates the relationship between emotional intelligence (EQ) and language style matching (LSM). Emotional intelligence involves the ability to regulate, maintain, and express one’s emotions and to perceive the emotion of others. LSM involves the phenomenon that when individuals talk they tend to mimic each other’s word usage (Neiderhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002). The hypothesis of the present study is that individuals who are emotionally intelligent subconsciously match their language to their communication partner. Ten participants from the University of Central Florida’s Psychology Department were given an emotional intelligence test. The participants …

Reliability And Validity Of The Hd-Pro-Triadtm, A Health-Related Quality Of Life Measure Designed To Assess The Symptom Triad Of Huntington's Disease., Nicholas R Boileau, Julie C Stout, Janes S Paulsen, David Cella, Michael K Mccormack, Martha A Nance, Samuel Frank, Jin-Shei Lai, Noelle E Carlozzi

Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine Departmental Research

BACKGROUND: Huntington's disease (HD), is a neurodegenerative disorder that is associated with cognitive, behavioral, and motor impairments that diminish health related quality of life (HRQOL). The HD-PRO-TRIADTM is a quality of life measure that assesses health concerns specific to individuals with HD. Preliminary psychometric characterization was limited to a convenience sample of HD participants who completed measures at home so clinician-ratings were unavailable.

OBJECTIVES: The current study evaluates the reliability and validity of the HD-PRO-TRIADTM in a well-characterized sample of individuals with HD.

METHODS: Four-hundred and eighty-two individuals with HD (n = 192 prodromal, n = 193 early, and n …

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Increases Amygdala Connectivity With The Cognitive Control Network In Both Mdd And Ptsd, Haochang Shou, Zhen Yang, Theodore Satterthwaite, Philip Cook, Steven Bruce, Russell Shinohara, Benjamin Rosenberg, Yvette Sheline

Psychology Faculty Works

BackgroundBoth major depressive disorder (MDD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterized by alterations in intrinsic functional connectivity. Here we investigated changes in intrinsic functional connectivity across these disorders as a function of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), an effective treatment in both disorders.Methods53 unmedicated right-handed participants were included in a longitudinal study. Patients were diagnosed with PTSD (n = 18) and MDD (n = 17) with a structured diagnostic interview and treated with 12 sessions of manualized CBT over a 12-week period. Patients received an MRI scan (Siemens 3 T Trio) before and after treatment. Longitudinal functional principal components analysis …

Pretrial Attitudes And Their Influence On Interpretation Of Case Evidence And Mock Juror Decision-Making In Insanity Defense Cases, Justine M.L. Gonzales

Honors Papers

Pretrial attitudes (attitudes held preceding any case-specific information) towards the insanity defense are known to influence jurors’ decision-making about a case. However, the impact of pre-trial attitude on decisions across different types of evidence was an open question that the present study addressed. Through Amazon Mechanical Turk, participants indicated their pretrial support for the insanity defense. Participants served as mock jurors and rated the likelihood of giving the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) as well as perceived responsibility for the defendant’s actions, they gave these ratings after introducing seven different pieces of evidence (baseline case vignette, mother …

Burdens Of The Body Weigh More Than We Know: How Weight Impacts Judgments Of A Simulated Vehicular Pursuit, Holly Lonergan

Undergraduate Review

The purpose of this project was to replicate research on embodied cognition and extend it to the judgments related to law enforcement, specifically decisions associated with the use of force. Excessive use of force by police officers is often characterized as an act driven by racism and ethnic and social biases. However, decisions are far more complex and are shaped by many psychological and environmental factors. The current study examined how one of these factors, the perception of physical or metaphorical weight, may influence judgments about suspect dangerousness and incident severity. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions …

Objective Measurement Of Sleep By Smartphone Application: Comparison With Actigraphy And Relation To Cognition, Mood, And Self-Reported Sleep, Taylor Maynard

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Honing In On Hormone-Sensitive Neural Targets For Therapeutic Intervention: Mission Impossible?, Mary Holschbach, Amanda P. Borrow, Robert J. Handa

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Developmental Manganese Neurotoxicity In Rats: Cognitive Deficits In Allocentric And Egocentric Learning And Memory, Nina Atanasova, Robyn M. Amos-Kroohs, Laurie L. Davenport, Zuhair I. Abdulla, Matthew R. Skelton, Charles V. Vorhees, Michael T. Williams

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Exploration Of Cleveland After School And Summer Programs, Alissa Mullen, Ashley Wilson

Undergraduate Research Posters 2017

Increasing rates of homicide and crimes in Cleveland in recent years among young adults suggests a need to improve efforts for early prevention and intervention. After school programming may provide one such opportunity. The first goal of this study was to compile information on community after-school programs available to Cleveland youth, particularly those with an aim to reduce risk behavior related to juvenile delinquency. The second goal was to document which programs focus on the four factors shown to most reduce juvenile delinquency: building positive peer relationships, emphasis on drug use reduction, development of social skills, and character development. First, …

P3: Does Lexicality Affect Classification Performance Of Two-Letter Strings?, Nicole Russo, Lea Araya

Undergraduate Research Posters 2017

Some models of word identification hypotheses units responsive to bigrams—letter pairs—that may not be adjacent in a letter-string stimulus. Grainger, Mathot, and Vitu (2014) and Palinski (2016) found, for words, responding was more efficient when flanking bigrams contained target-string letters than when they did not. They also found that responding was more efficient when flanking bigrams contained letters ordered as in the target than switched but whether flanking bigrams were ordered as in the target did not affect performance. Palinski (2016) replicated the results of Grainger et al. (2014) and conducted a second experiment that included four additional conditions in …

P1: Can't Shake The Blues: Do Worry And Attention Flexibility Enervate Cognitive Emotion Regulation Outcomes, Evan Basting

Undergraduate Research Posters 2017

Depression is a mood disorder that is characterized by enduring feelings of sadness that are often accompanied by psychovegetative symptoms and attentional deficits that result in functional impairment. Depression is often hallmarked by biased attention towards negative information that once activated, remains in depressed persons conscious awareness. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often co-occurs with depression, and is also characterized by enduring negative information processing in the form of worry that consumes a significant amount of an individual's thought processes. Both disorders are marked by emotion regulation deficits in the form of responses that usually reduce distress, but that fail to …

Meta-Analyses Of The Relationship Between Depression And Nine Dimensions Of Perfectionism, Gabriel Lynn Hottinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Perfectionism has been shown to be related to depression, but perfectionism is multidimensional. Some dimensions are related to positive psychological characteristics and outcomes and other dimensions are related to negative psychological characteristics and outcomes. This study reports results of nine meta-analyses performed to investigate the association between each of nine subscales of perfectionism and depression to determine which dimensions of perfectionism are most strongly associated with depression. The two subscales that were used from the Hewitt and Flett (1991b) Multidimensional Perfectionism scale were Self-Oriented Perfectionism (SOP) and Socially-Prescribed Perfectionism (SPP). The five subscales that were used from the Frost et …

Effects Of Childhood Experiences On Adult Desire To Parent, Sarah Bailey

Student Research Posters

Many believe the primary role in life is to settle down and have children. The present study focuses on understanding what can influence a person’s choice to have children. With a wide variety of childhood experiences that exist, as well as the influences of an optimism/pessimism attitude about life, this study will focus on how these characteristics can combine to influence one’s decision to have children.

According to McDonnell (2012), many of those who experienced an unstable or undesirable childhood grow up wanting no children as a way to not repeat the cycle. Meanwhile, some who experienced adversity in childhood …

Relationship Of The Openness Personality Trait And Development Of Belief In God, Anne Njenga

Student Research Posters

The development of an individual’s beliefs about God is significantly influenced by teachings of parents. However, not all children have the exact same beliefs as their parents. The present study will examine what may be the characteristics of individual who have similar or differing beliefs than those to which they were exposed as a child.

Although not identical to a “belief in God”, much of the past research evaluating belief systems has focused primarily of “religiosity”. Caldwell-Harris (2012) noted that openness to experience was the personality characteristic that differed most between the religious and non-religious respondents. Even controlling for education, …

How Are Non-Numerical Prognostic Statements Interpreted And Are They Subject To Positive Bias?, Anne Moyer, Samantha Siess, Sumeet Bhinder

Department of Psychology Faculty Publications

Objectives: Frank, clear, communication with family members of terminally-ill or incapacitated patients has important implications for well being, satisfaction with care, and sound decision making. However, numerical prognostic statements, particularly more negative ones, have been found to be interpreted in a positively-biased manner. Less precise non-numerical statements, preferred by physicians, and particularly statements using threatening terms (“dying” vs. “surviving”) may be even more subject to such biases. Methods: Participants (N = 200) read non-numerical prognostic statements framed in terms of dying or surviving and indicated their interpretation of likelihood of survival. Results: Even the most extreme statements were not interpreted …

Racial Segregation In The Rise And Fall Of 22nd Street South: The Unfolding Story Of The Historic Black Business Recreational District In St. Petersburg, Florida, Marvin L. Simner

Psychology Publications

A clause entitled “Segregation of Races” was inserted in the St. Petersburg City Charter in 1931. It wasn’t until 1936, however, that the clause gave rise to the first segregated housing zone within the city. In this report we provide evidence to suggest that it was the Federal Government and not the St. Petersburg city council, as has been claimed, that was responsible for the implementation of this clause and the segregated commercial district that developed along 22^nd Street South. We then document the rise of this commercial district and present further evidence that city council showed little interest …

A Model Of Event Knowledge, Jeffrey L. Elman, Ken Mcrae

Psychology Publications

We present a connectionist model of event knowledge that is trained on examples of sequences of activities that are not explicitly labeled as events. The model learns co-occurrence patterns among the components of activities as they occur in the moment (entities, actions, and contexts), and also learns to predict sequential patterns of activities. In so doing, the model displays behaviors that in humans have been characterized as exemplifying inferencing of unmentioned event components, the prediction of upcoming components (which may or may not ever happen or be mentioned), reconstructive memory, and the ability to flexibly accommodate novel variations from previously …

Origins Of Thalamic And Cortical Projections To The Posterior Auditory Field In Congenitally Deaf Cats., Blake E Butler, Nicole Chabot, Andrej Kral, Stephen G Lomber

Psychology Publications

Crossmodal plasticity takes place following sensory loss, such that areas that normally process the missing modality are reorganized to provide compensatory function in the remaining sensory systems. For example, congenitally deaf cats outperform normal hearing animals on localization of visual stimuli presented in the periphery, and this advantage has been shown to be mediated by the posterior auditory field (PAF). In order to determine the nature of the anatomical differences that underlie this phenomenon, we injected a retrograde tracer into PAF of congenitally deaf animals and quantified the thalamic and cortical projections to this field. The pattern of projections from …

Hippocampal Neurogenesis And Volume In Migrating And Wintering Semipalmated Sandpipers (Calidris Pusilla)., Nara Gyzely De Morais Magalhães, Cristovam Guerreiro Diniz, Daniel Guerreiro Diniz, Ediely Pereira Henrique, Patrick Douglas Corrêa Pereira, Isis Ananda Matos Moraes, Mauro André Damasceno De Melo, David Francis Sherry, Cristovam Wanderley Picanço Diniz

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Long distance migratory birds find their way by sensing and integrating information from a large number of cues in their environment. These cues are essential to navigate over thousands of kilometers and reach the same breeding, stopover, and wintering sites every year. The semipalmated sandpiper (Calidris pusilla) is a long-distance migrant that breeds in the arctic tundra of Canada and Alaska and winters on the northeast coast of South America. Its fall migration includes a 5,300-kilometer nonstop flight over the Atlantic Ocean. The avian hippocampus has been proposed to play a central role in the integration of multisensory spatial information …

Are There Place Cells In The Avian Hippocampus?, David F Sherry, Stephanie L Grella, Mélanie F Guigueno, David J White, Diano F Marrone

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Birds possess a hippocampus that serves many of the same spatial and mnemonic functions as the mammalian hippocampus but achieves these outcomes with a dramatically different neuroanatomical organization. The properties of spatially responsive neurons in birds and mammals are also different. Much of the contemporary interest in the role of the mammalian hippocampus in spatial representation dates to the discovery of place cells in the rat hippocampus. Since that time, cells that respond to head direction and cells that encode a grid-like representation of space have been described in the rat brain. Research with homing pigeons has discovered hippocampal cells, …

Hippocampal Astrocytes In Migrating And Wintering Semipalmated Sandpiper, Dario Carvalho-Paulo, Nara G De Morais Magalhães, Diego De Almeida Miranda, Daniel G Diniz, Ediely P Henrique, Isis A M Moraes, Patrick D C Pereira, Mauro A D De Melo, Camila M De Lima, Marcus A De Oliveira, Cristovam Guerreiro-Diniz, David F Sherry, Cristovam W P Diniz

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Seasonal migratory birds return to the same breeding and wintering grounds year after year, and migratory long-distance shorebirds are good examples of this. These tasks require learning and long-term spatial memory abilities that are integrated into a navigational system for repeatedly locating breeding, wintering, and stopover sites. Previous investigations focused on the neurobiological basis of hippocampal plasticity and numerical estimates of hippocampal neurogenesis in birds but only a few studies investigated potential contributions of glial cells to hippocampal-dependent tasks related to migration. Here we hypothesized that the astrocytes of migrating and wintering birds may exhibit significant morphological and numerical differences …

Of Bayes And Bullets: An Embodied, Situated, Targeting-Based Account Of Predictive Processing, M.L. Anderson

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

No abstract provided.

Two Years Of Relationship-Focused Mentoring For First Nations, Métis, And Inuit Adolescents: Promoting Positive Mental Health, Claire Crooks, Deinera Exner-Cortens, Sarah Burm, Alicia Lapointe, Deb Chiodo

Education Publications

First Nations, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) youth are disproportionately affected by a range of negative health outcomes including poor emotional and psychosocial well-being. At the same time, there is increasing awareness of culturally-specific protective factors for these youth, such as cultural connectedness and identity. This article reports the findings of a mixed-methods, exploratory longitudinal study on the effects of a culturally-relevant school-based mentoring program for FNMI youth that focuses on promoting mental well-being and the development of cultural identity. Participants included a cohort of FNMI adolescents whom we tracked across the transition from elementary to secondary school. We utilized data …