Psychology Commons^™

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.

A Novel Use Of The Deese-Roediger-Mcdermott Paradigm: Distinguishing Between Differential Memory Mechanisms In Emotional Literature, Alan John Yablonski Jr.

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

To current knowledge, the emotional literature has not included the proposal to conceptualize experimental designs in terms of item vs. hippocampal-dependent relational memory representations. Through utilizing the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm the current study targets two memory mechanisms: item-specific memory (i.e., font color) and relational memory. In addition, relational-binding memory was also assessed. The current study consists of three hypotheses: (a) negatively-valenced critical lures will be correctly recalled by participants more than neutrally-valenced critical lures (increased relational memory for negatively-valenced words), (b) participants will more accurately recall studied negatively-valenced words with the correct color compared to neutrally-valenced studied words (increased item-specific …

Anger And Sadness Rumination And Their Impact On Momentary Changes In Impulsivity And Pain Tolerance: Implications For The Development Of Suicide Risk, Keyne Catherine Law

Master's Theses

Recent research in suicide has called for an increased focus on factors that facilitate an individual’s transition from suicidal ideation to action (Klonsky & May, 2014). Rumination, the repetitive fixation on negative emotional material, has been associated with not only increased suicidal ideation but also a history of self-injury and suicide attempts (Morrison & O’Connor, 2008), suggesting that it may contribute to the ability to inflict lethal and non-lethal self-harm. Given that past research has found physiological differences between low (ex. sadness) and high (ex. anger) arousal negative affective states, the present thesis project sought to examine the effects of …

Interdependent Mechanisms For Processing Gender And Emotion: The Special Status Of Angry Male Faces, Daniel Harris, Vivian Ciaramitaro

Honors College Theses

While some models of how various attributes of a face are processed have posited that face features, invariant physical cues such as gender or ethnicity as well as variant social cues such as emotion, may be processed independently (e.g., Bruce & Young, 1986), other models suggest a more distributed representation and interdependent processing (e.g., Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). Here we use a contingent adaptation paradigm to investigate if mechanisms for processing the gender and emotion of a face are interdependent and symmetric across the happy-angry emotional continuum and regardless of the gender of the face. We simultaneously adapted participants …

The Regret Elements Scale: Distinguishing The Emotional And Cognitive Components Of Regret, Joshua Buchanan, Amy Summerville, Jennifer Lehmann, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES’s relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES’s ability to differentiate regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale …

The Regret Elements Scale: Distinguishing The Emotional And Cognitive Components Of Regret, J. Buchanan, A. Summerville, J. Lehmann, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three\302\240studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective\302\240component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with\302\240functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES's relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals\302\240of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES's ability to differentiate\302\240regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale provides both a new theoretical …

The Influence Of Emotional And Situated Social Cognition Factors On Consents To Search, Sarah A. Moody

UCARE: Research Products

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution holds that the government cannot conduct an unreasonable search or seizure without probable cause or consent. A surprising majority of people acquiesce to search requests and research is lacking in determining what factors play a role in these decisions. Findings from the current research on the roles of emotions and situated social cognition in consents to search may help police officers and other legal authority figures ensure against coercive or unfair consents. Based upon regression models constructed from the data, authority figures can alter their search requests to help prevent coercion. The current …

“My Logic Is Undeniable”: Replicating The Brain For Ideal Artificial Intelligence, Samuel C. Adams

Senior Honors Theses

Alan Turing asked if machines can think, but intelligence is more than logic and reason. I ask if a machine can feel pain or joy, have visions and dreams, or paint a masterpiece. The human brain sets the bar high, and despite our progress, artificial intelligence has a long way to go. Studying neurology from a software engineer’s perspective reveals numerous uncanny similarities between the functionality of the brain and that of a computer. If the brain is a biological computer, then it is the embodiment of artificial intelligence beyond anything we have yet achieved, and its architecture is advanced …

Is The Divide A Chasm?: Bridging Affective Science With Clinical Practice, Lauren M. Bylsma, Iris B. Mauss, Johnathan Rottenberg

Psychology Faculty Publications

This special section endeavors to facilitate the integration of biologically-based assessments of emotion into the clinical setting. This goal is consistent with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative, which aims to identify transdiagnostic biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie mental disorders. We focus on four challenges to applying biologically-informed research on emotion and emotion regulation to clinical contexts: (1) How do we assess emotion in an RDoC framework? (2) How do we integrate measures of emotion with other systems in a wider context? (3) What do physiological indices of emotion tell us about clinical phenomena? and (4) How do we integrate physiological …

Rumination And Rebound From Failure As A Function Of Gender And Time On Task, Ronald C. Whiteman, Jennifer A. Mangels

Publications and Research

Rumination is a trait response to blocked goals that can have positive or negative outcomes for goal resolution depending on where attention is focused. Whereas “moody brooding” on affective states may be maladaptive, especially for females, “reflective pondering” on concrete strategies for problem solving may be more adaptive. In the context of a challenging general knowledge test, we examined how Brooding and Reflection rumination styles predicted students’ subjective and event-related responses (ERPs) to negative feedback, as well as use of this feedback to rebound from failure on a later surprise retest. For females only, Brooding predicted unpleasant feelings after failure …

Defining A Role For Affect In Decision-Making, Pareezad Cyrus Zarolia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent theories of decision-making have hinted that affect might be useful during some decision-making processes. I propose a model, the affective evaluation model, which defines the role of affect in decision-making as helpful when affect is decision-relevant and unhelpful when it is not. In three studies, I manipulate the decision-relevance of affect to test this central component of the affective evaluation model. Study 1 demonstrates that emphasizing decision-relevant affective signals facilitates optimal decision-making as compared to emphasizing purely cognitive evaluations. Study 2 tests the hypothesis that creating the expectation that affect is useful can facilitate decision-making. Finally, Study 3 tests …

Political Conservatism Predicts Asymmetries In Emotional Scene Memory, Mark S. Mills, Frank J. Gonzalez, Karl Giuseffi, Benjamin Sievert, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Hibbing, Michael D. Dodd

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Variation in political ideology has been linked to differences in attention to and processing of emotional stimuli, with stronger responses to negative versus positive stimuli (negativity bias) the more politically conservative one is. As memory is enhanced by attention, such findings predict that memory for negative versus positive stimuli should similarly be enhanced the more conservative one is. The present study tests this prediction by having participants study 120 positive, negative, and neutral scenes in preparation for a subsequent memory test. On the memory test, the same 120 scenes were presented along with 120 new scenes and participants were to …

Pathways Linking Sleep Timing To Obesity In Midlife Women, Dana R. Schreiber

Theses and Dissertations

Midlife women are vulnerable to developing obesity. Both sleep timing and negative emotion are risk factors, yet limited research has explored their role on weight outcomes in this population. The current investigation explored the association of sleep timing (i.e., mean sleep time, sleep time variability) and obesity (i.e., BMI, waist circumference) in midlife women, considering emotional pathways (i.e., depressive symptoms, anger) that might mediate this association. PROCESS parallel mediation models assessed direct and indirect pathways. In follow-up analyses, sleep duration was explored as an indirect pathway linking sleep timing to obesity. Results demonstrated that sleep timing does not directly predict …

Secondhand Exposure To Problematic Drinking: The Lingering Effects Of Family Behaviors On Emotion, Lillie M. Holcomb

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Previous research regarding alcohol-related visual cues has focused on the effects of imagery on those affected by personal alcohol use and abuse. The viewing of such imagery among these individuals provokes a number of both emotional and physiological responses and provides important information about the multiple components of addiction. This area of research is important because alcohol use and abuse is a widespread problem. Personal users, however, are not the only people to experience the consequences of alcohol. Problematic drinking behaviors pose risk to both the users and those exposed to the users. More specifically, family members exposed to drinkers’ …

Contemplating Mindfulness At Work: An Integrative Review, Darren J. Good, Christopher Lyddy, Theresa M. Glomb, Joyce E. Bono, Kirk W. Brown, Michelle K. Duffy, Ruth A. Baer, Judson A. Brewer, Sara W. Lazar

School of Business Faculty Publications

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important …

Emotional Factors Affecting Face-Name Memory : The Role Of Valence And Arousal During Encoding, Stephanie Ann Kazanas

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The emotion literature has maintained that emotional stimuli are prioritized over neutral stimuli: Emotional words and images are detected faster, processed more automatically, and remembered better. However, the benefit from processing emotional stimuli can also be affected by valence, wherein some emotion advantages are driven by positive emotion and others by negative emotion. This is particularly evident in the face memory literature, in which researchers have investigated the role of expressed emotion in learning new faces. For example, some have found that happy faces are more memorable than angry and neutral faces. However, when comparing memory for happy faces with …

Schadenfreude, The Dark Triad, And The Effect Of Music On Emotion, Robin Lane

Honors College Theses

Schadenfreude is a humorous response at the misfortune of others and has been suggested to be an empathic defense mechanism. Previous research indicates that individuals who tend to exhibit the Dark Triad personality traits narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, experience higher levels of Schadenfreude. Additional studies suggest that music modulates neural activity associated with experiencing humor. In the present study we ask, do music and dark personality traits influence Schadenfreude? Participants viewed a series of brief, randomly intermixed physical misfortune and neutral videos (e.g., a person falling off a treadmill or running on a treadmill, respectively), with either an upbeat or …

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 …

The Influence Of Emotion On Memory For A Crime, Taylor Langley

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Researchers have reported errors in recall or recognition of witnessed events, accounting for the most common cause of false convictions of innocent people. Tiwari (2010) indicated that 25% of suspects who were identified in a line-up were actually innocent. Jurors are strongly influenced by eyewitness testimony and this can lead to false convictions. The validity of eyewitness identification is critical in cases in which it is used as evidence. In the current study we examined specific emotion states by inducing fear, surprise, and neutral moods. We hypothesized that participants in the Fear group would be least susceptible to the effects …

Examining The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence And Interpersonal Forgiveness Among Internet Users, Noelle Lowry

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Emotional Intelligence (EI) and forgiveness both involve interpreting emotional content. Empirical study of a relationship between these two constructs is lacking. This is a problem as many psychological studies infer a relationship between these two constructs. The purposes of this study were to explore whether EI and forgiveness are correlated and to identify whether predictor variables (empathy, life satisfaction, emotional management, and emotional understanding) contribute to the probability of forgiveness within an interpersonal relationship. A quantitative, nonexperimental research design, based on the theory of mind, was used to answer two research questions: Does a correlational relationship exist between the two …

Animal Mourning: Précis Of How Animals Grieve (King 2013), Barbara J. King

Animal Sentience

Abstract: When an animal dies, that individual’s mate, relatives, or friends may express grief. Changes in the survivor’s patterns of social behavior, eating, sleeping, and/or of expression of affect are the key criteria for defining grief. Based on this understanding of grief, it is not only big-brained mammals like elephants, apes, and cetaceans who can be said to mourn, but also a wide variety of other animals, including domestic companions like cats, dogs, and rabbits; horses and farm animals; and some birds. With keen attention placed on seeking where grief is found to occur and where it is absent …

Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters

Animal Sentience

Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious event, possibly only to the fact that injury has occurred, ignoring information that is much less important for survival, such as the location of the injury. Some of the neural properties proposed to be critical for conscious pain in mammals …

Thinking Positively: Optimism And Emotion Regulation Predict Interpretation Of Ambiguous Information, Nakia S. Gordon, Samantha A. Chesney, Katherine Reiter

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

The way individuals interpret their worlds is influenced by emotion and its regulation. Indeed, negative affect typically increases negative interpretations of ambiguous stimuli and may have a role in dysfunctional psychosocial function. Yet, it is not currently known whether explicit and implicit emotion regulation can counteract this effect. To address this question, undergraduates (N = 103) used cognitive reappraisal under angry and control mood states to disambiguate sentences by selecting either a neutral, positive, or negative word. While explicit cognitive reappraisal decreased negative affect, it had no effect on interpretation of ambiguity. Still, reported use of reappraisal predicted decreased …

Emotional And Autonomic Responding To Auditory Stimuli, Jeremy C. Peres

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Much of the research examining emotion induction, regulation, and suppression considers solely the visual modality (e.g., pictures of faces) for emotion elicitation. In reality, emotions are cued, expressed, and interpreted through multiple modalities by employing the extensive use of auditory stimuli in addition to visual stimuli. There have been some recent efforts to offset this imbalance in modality preference by using emotional auditory stimuli alone or in addition to visual stimuli. This project aims to further investigate emotional and autonomic responding to auditory stimuli with the added component of examining differential responding across social (nonlinguistic vocal expression) and non-social auditory …

Understanding Emotion In Relation To Drinking Motivation, Melissa C. Hinely

Honors College Theses

Recent research has uncovered the interactions between implicit alcohol motivations and drinking behaviors after emotion inductions (Ostafin & Brooks, 2011). However, little research has supplemented such findings. This longitudinal two-part study examined the impact of a personalized emotion induction on implicit alcohol-related associations in a college sample enrolled at southern university. 215 participants were randomly assigned to one of three emotion-induction conditions (negative, neutral, or positive). During phase I, participants completed a baseline Implicit Association Tests (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) to assess implicit alcohol-related cognitions related to valence and motivation. Based on condition, participants were also asked to describe …

Color Me, Please: How Color-Emotion Pairs Affect Our Perceptions, Russell T. Rogers

Honors College Theses

Color-emotion pairings are part of everyday experience, and they develop in early childhood. Emotional experiences are typically much stronger when emotional stimuli (e.g., pictures or videos) are paired with sensory stimuli (e.g., sights or sounds). Since the presence of these sensory stimuli seems to heighten the emotional experience of emotion-evoking visual stimuli, it should be the case that such pairings will allow the manipulation of color-emotion pairings through the presence of a color (a visual stimulus) during an emotional situation (such as watching a video). In this study (N = 44), we paired both a positive and negative video …

Integration Of Audio-~Visual Emotional Information In Schizophrneia, Bern Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a debilitating illness characterized by a number of perceptual and

cognitive deficits. Deficits in emotional judgment and perception are consistently identified, although less is known about the integration of emotional information from separate sensory modalities. This study investigates the integration of auditory and visual emotional information in schizophrenia and healthy controls through application of an emotion judgment task modeled after the McGurk effect. The emotional judgments of 54 participants (40 SZ and 14 control participants from the community) for auditory, visual, and bimodal phonemic stimuli conveying no lexical information were analyzed. Visual and auditory stimuli conveying joy …

The Abcs Of Stress Responding: Examining The Time Course Of Affective, Biological, And Cognitive Responses To Induced Stress As Prospective Predictors Of Depressive Symptoms, Marissa Erin Rudolph

Clinical Psychology Dissertations

Vulnerability-stress models of depression posit risk for depression is characterized by the presence of underlying affective, biological, and cognitive vulnerabilities that become activated during life stress exposure. Extant research has shown heightened reactivity to stress across these vulnerability domains predicts depression; however, little is known whether the persistence of and failure to down-regulate these maladaptive stress responses conveys greater risk of depression than initial reactivity alone. The current study examined associations between the time course of responses to a laboratory stress induction and depressive symptoms. I hypothesized that prolonged maladaptive responses to the stressor across affective (state negative affect; NA), …

Distinct Effects Of Contrast And Color On Subjective Rating Of Fearfulness, Zhengang Lu, Bingbing Guo, Anne Boguslavsky, Marcus Cappiello, Weiwei Zhang, Ming Meng

Dartmouth Scholarship

Natural scenes provide important affective cues for observers to avoid danger. From an adaptationist perspective, such cues affect the behavior of the observer and shape the evolution of the observer’s response. It is evolutionarily significant for individuals to extract affective information from the environment as quickly and as efficiently as possible. However, the nearly endless variations in physical appearance of natural scenes present a fundamental challenge for perceiving significant visual information. How image-level properties, such as contrast and color, influence the extraction of affective information leading to subjective emotional perception is unclear. On the one hand, studies have shown that …

Can Non-Haptic Manipulation Of Temperature Influence The Same Emotions As Ostracism?, Rebecca Ann Oglesby

Theses and Dissertations

I explored the possibility that temperature can alter the same variables affected by ostracism (i.e., being ignored and excluded): belonging, control, meaningful existence, and self-esteem need satisfaction, feelings of ostracism, mood, and loneliness. According to the theory of embodied cognition, individuals can associate physical warmth with social intimacy, as well as cold temperatures with social isolation (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008; IJzerman et al., 2012). Bargh and Shalev (2012) found that participants holding a cold pack reported higher loneliness than participants holding a neutral or warm pack. My study expands upon Bargh and Shalevâ??s (2012) findings by examining more emotions frequently …