Psychology Commons^™

Editorial: Appraisal Processes In Moral Judgment: Resolving Moral Issues Through Cognition And Emotion., Justin F. Landy, Tom R. Kupfer

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Professional Shame As Experienced By Pre-Professional Accountants, Grant R. Countess

Honors Theses

While the role of shame in professions is an emerging area of research, it has not been thoroughly studied in accounting’s professional or educational settings. Shame has been explored in engineering and nursing education with powerful implications regarding well-being and learning. This study is primarily driven by the research question, “How do pre-professional accountants experience professional shame?” Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), I interviewed three pre-professional accountants to further understand the lived experiences of shame as accounting interns. I demonstrate the insights from the analysis of these transcripts, which characterize the experience of locating identity as pre-professionals, navigating expectations, experiencing …

Art Therapy And Chronic Pain: Exploring Pain Tolerance, Body Sensations And Emotions, India Brown

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Over four weeks, topics of emotion, physical and body sensation, and chronic pain using art therapy were explored. The therapy provided a foundation for practicing mindfulness, increasing awareness, and expressing various symptoms such as somatic discomfort and emotional dysregulation. I co-facilitated a group consisting of individuals between the ages of 23 and 70 identifying as male or female, with a mix of white and black clients from the middle-class bracket. The group participated in art therapy and mindful meditation sessions in an outpatient program. Through this experience, I discovered that many individuals dissociate from their pain and emotional well-being. While …

The Dynamics Of Emotion-Related Impulsivity: An Analysis Of Emotional Control And Daily Emotion-Driven Urges And Actions Via Ecological Momentary Assessment, Jeremy B. Clift

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emotion-related impulsivity, or the engagement in impulsive reactions specifically in response to emotions, has been identified as a crucial transdiagnostic factor. Mixed evidence from ecological momentary assessments (EMA) underscores a potential discrepancy between the existing measurements of emotion-related impulsivity at trait and state levels. Unlike previous EMA studies examining emotion-related impulsivity through measures of urgency, the current study tested Carver and colleagues’ (2008) reflexive responding to emotion framework by investigating the relationship between emotional control and emotion-related impulsivity. Participants (N = 197) with varying levels of emotional control completed one week of EMA to investigate two central questions. First, we …

The Effect Of Sleep And Emotion On Pattern Separation, Alanna N. Osmanski

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Prior work on the relationship between sleep and memory suggests that the sleep state is an optimal time for memory consolidation to occur. During slow wave sleep, newly encoded information in the hippocampus is repeatedly activated, driven by slow oscillations that originate in the neocortex. This process that occurs during slow wave sleep facilitates the long-term storage of memories. A widely accepted view of emotion and sleep is that emotional memories are preferentially consolidated during sleep so that they are easily accessible for retrieval, whereas neutral memories tend to be less accessible. However, recent meta-analyses of sleep, emotion, and memory …

Plant Sentience: "Feeling" Or Biological Automatism?, Andrea Mastinu

Animal Sentience

Sentience refers to the ability of an organism to have subjective experiences such as sensations, emotions and awareness. Whereas some animals, including humans, are widely recognized as sentient, the question of whether plants are sentient is still debated among scientists, philosophers, and ethicists. Over the past 20 years, many scientists such as Trewavas, Baluška, Mancuso, Gagliano, and Calvo have reported interesting discussions about memory, behavior, communication, and intelligence in plants. However, the reported conclusions have not convinced the entire scientific community. In this commentary, I would like to focus on two critical aspects related to sentience: cognition and emotion

Pupil Dilation Is Not Associated With Memory For Prior Remembering, Sana Aftab

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This experiment was conducted to assess the relationship between pupil dilation and memory for prior remembering. Prior remembering is the judgment of whether a memory was previously remembered. Previous studies have suggested that pupil dilation can change in response to emotional stimuli as well as “old” versus “new” stimuli in recognition memory tests. The present experiment had participants view emotional and neutral context image-word pairs before they completed two separate cued-recall tests. Critically, some image-word pairs changed between tests. During the second cued-recall test, participants were also asked to make a judgment about whether they previously retrieved a given word …

The Role Of Negative Affects As Mediators In The Relationship Between Stress And Mental Health In Ecuadorian Adolescents, Rodrigo Moreta-Herrera, Doris Zumba-Tello, Jaisalmer De Frutos-Lucas, Stefanía Llerena-Freire, Alexandra Salinas-Palma, Almudena Trucharte-Martínez

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background: Stress and negative emotions have adverse consequences for the mental health of adolescents, an area that deserves further examination. These attributes are associated with each other and regularly interact in different ways. The way they exert an influence can be both direct and indirect, so the general objective is to elucidate the potential mediating effect of negative affects in the relationship between stress and mental health in Ecuadorian adolescents. Participants and procedure: An explanatory and mediation design based on structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied with 1154 high school students from Ecuador (67.7% women) aged 14 to 19 years …

Gender, Generations, And Guilt: Defendant Gender And Age Affect Jurors’ Decisions And Perceptions In An Intimate Partner Homicide Trial, Christine L. Ruva, Kendall D. Smith, Elizabeth C. Sykes

Psychology Sarasota Manatee Campus Faculty Publications

Using the context of an intimate partner homicide trial, the study explored the effects of defendant gender and age on mock-jurors’ verdicts, sentences, and culpability ratings—and whether defendant credibility and juror anger mediate these effects. The study used a 2 (Defendant Gender: male vs. female) × 3 (Defendant Age: 25, 45, or 65 years) between-subjects design. Participants (N = 513 community members) completed the experiment online. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the six Defendant Gender × Age Conditions. Participants read the trial transcripts that included the age and gender manipulations, provided verdicts and sentences, and completed the …

Wooing “Willing Dupes”: The Bush Administration’S Use Of Emotional Language In The Drive Toward War With Iraq, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

The publicly available texts of the George W. Bush administration from September 11, 2001, to March 19, 2003, as presented in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, were analyzed for word frequency and the words themselves analyzed for emotional weight using the NRC Emotion Intensity Lexicon. Transcripts of six television news agencies (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, and PBS) were also analyzed for word frequency to determine the extent to which these agencies may have repeated and consequently amplified the rhetoric of the administration. Public opinion polling for this same period was examined in an …

Examining The Effects Of Noise And Task Dependent Performance In Prosody Perception In Autistic Individuals, Zehranur Sasal

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

ABSTRACT

Objective: It is known that autistic individuals have enhanced abilities in pitch discrimination and tend to excel in low-level tasks requiring lower cognitive processing. On the other hand, noise is a distracting factor in many areas of life, including prosody perception. The studies presented in this thesis aimed to understand prosody perception through different levels of cognitive tasks and under the influence of speech background noise.

Methods: In total, 256 non-autistic and 39 high-functioning autistic adults participated in these studies. In the first study, participants were asked to listen to brief utterances conveying one of six universally accepted emotions …

A Close Look At The Connections Between Mental-State Talk, Theory Of Mind, And Source Monitoring During Parent-Child Reminiscing Of Emotional Events, Mallory Earnshaw

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Autobiographical memories play a critical role in shaping personal identity, regulating emotions, and guiding future behaviour. Reminiscing about these memories can be particularly beneficial for coping with negative experiences. This study investigated the connections between mental-state talk, theory of mind, and source monitoring in parent-child reminiscing, and how it can be influenced by remembering enjoyable versus frustrating events. This study involved children ages 3-8 (N = 50) and consisted of two sessions. In the first session, the child reminisced with their parent about an enjoyable and frustrating event and completed two source-monitoring tasks. In the second session, the child …

Mind Wandering In Daily Life: A National Experience Sampling Study Of Intentional And Unintentional Mind Wandering Episodes Reported By Working Adults Ages 25 – 50, Paula C. Lowe

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Numerous researchers have investigated thinking that drifts away from what the individual was doing, thinking that is known as mind wandering. Their inquiries were often conducted in university lab settings with student participants. To learn about mind wandering in the daily life of working adults, this experience sampling study investigated intentional and unintentional mind wandering episodes as reported by working adults, ages 25–50, living across the United States. In this age frame, work and family responsibilities have increased in complexity and overlap. Using a smartphone app, participants were randomly notified to answer experience sampling surveys six times a day for …

The Influence Of Beliefs About Emotion On Avoidance Behaviors, Elise Warner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The beliefs individuals hold about emotions have been shown to influence their tendencies to avoid distressing situations. While much of the work to-date has been on beliefs about whether emotions can be changed (i.e., malleability beliefs), there is research suggesting that the belief that emotions last for long periods of time (i.e., longevity beliefs) have important implications for emotion regulation (Veilleux et al., 2020). Thus, our aim was to examine the relationship between longevity beliefs and experiential avoidance. We predicted that greater longevity beliefs would be associated with greater avoidance tendencies, and that stronger beliefs in the moment would also …

Assessing Subjective Well-Being: A Review Of Common Measures, William Tov, Jun Sheng Keh, Yan Qiang Tan, Qin Ying Joanne Tan, Indra Alam Syah Bin Aziz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Subjective well-being (SWB) consists of affective components (frequent positive feelings, infrequent negative feelings) and cognitive components (evaluations of life and judgments of satisfaction). We review four commonly used measures of SWB: the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Cantril’s ladder, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences (SPANE). We conducted a meta-analysis of the reliability and validity of each measure based on studies published from 1999 to 2019. The SWLS, PANAS, and SPANE generally exhibit acceptable levels of reliability (alphas > .80) across most samples, time frame instructions, and age groups. All measures were …

The Effects Of False Heartbeat Feedback On Moral Judgment, Scott Koenig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on human morality is at a crossroads, with one side claiming that moral judgment is the result of rational inference and the other side claiming that it is the result of emotion-laden intuition. This study investigated whether emotion drives moral judgment by manipulating a core component of the experience of emotion: physiological arousal. The sample consisted of 77 undergraduate students at Brooklyn College (57% women, 43% men; mean age = 20.1). One group of participants was led to believe their heart was beating quickly, and another group slowly, while they read and evaluated a series of text vignettes depicting …

Case Study: Exploring College Students’ Transformative Learning Experience Through Co-Creation Of A Pilot Compassionate Parenting Module In A Humanities Class, Maria Silvia Casabianca

Theses and Dissertations

A case study was conducted with 14 students who took a 16-week college humanities course at a regional university in the state of Florida. The core subjects of the course were kindness, compassion, and empathy. The instructor’s approach to teaching included methods akin to those of transformational learning. Data were collected from 14 weeks of reflective journals, semi-structured interviews, and compassionate parenting modules written by the participants as final assignments. Findings indicated that transformative learning practices supported participants’ reflection and identification of acquired beliefs and new learning about kindness, empathy, and compassion. Participants also described perceived benefits of kindness for …

Examining The Impact Of Attachment And Parent Socialization Of Emotion In Childhood On Emotion Regulation In Maltreated Adults, Nikki Major

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Objectives: The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between child maltreatment and adult emotion regulation by examining parenting processes of emotion socialization and attachment security as possible mechanisms accounting for this relationship. It was hypothesized that maltreated adults would retrospectively report more unsupportive responses from parents/caregivers, greater attachment insecurity, more difficulty with emotion regulation, and using expressive suppression more than cognitive reappraisal. It was also hypothesized that unsupportive responses to emotions and attachment security would both indirectly effect the relationship between child maltreatment and adult emotion dysregulation.

Method: A sample of 226 participants from Amazon Mechanical …

Representing The Good And Bad: Fmri Signatures During The Encoding Of Multisensory Positive, Negative, And Neutral Events, Preston P. Thakral, Ryan Bottary, Elizabeth A. Kensinger

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Few studies have examined how multisensory emotional experiences are processed and encoded into memory. Here, we aimed to determine whether, at encoding, activity within functionally-defined visual- and auditory-processing brain regions discriminated the emotional category (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral) of the multisensory (audio-visual) events. Participants incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral multisensory stimuli during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Following a 3-h post-encoding delay, their memory for studied stimuli was tested, allowing us to identify emotion-category-specific subsequent-memory effects focusing on medial temporal lobe regions (i.e., amygdala, hippocampus) and visual- and auditory-processing regions. We used a combination of univariate and …

Linking Creativity To Psychological Well-Being: Theoretical Insights From Instrumental Emotion Regulation, Angela K. Y. Leung, Brandon Koh, Riyang Phang, Sean T. H. Lee, Tengjiao Huang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research has recognized that people regulate their emotions not only for seeking pleasurable experiences but also for receiving instrumental gains. We draw on the theoretical framework of instrumental emotion regulation (IER; Tamir, 2005, 2009) to shed new light on the relationships among creativity, emotion, and psychological well-being. We outline propositions that explain why there are concurrent creative and well-being benefits when people experience emotional states that are consistent with their personality trait (e.g., worrisome emotions being consistent with trait neuroticism) even if such trait-consistent emotions are negative. The IER perspective offers new interpretations of the creativity—well-being relationship through motivating a …

Sorrow, Healing, And Hope: A Braided Narrative, Abigail Maggi

Honors Projects

This project is a creative nonfiction essay about sadness. In the form of a braided essay, I weave personal narrative with insight and guidance from therapists, psychologists, and friends. In this essay, I share my experience of sadness and how I have processed my emotions during challenging times. The essay is split into three sections – sadness, feeling a little better, and hope – to share my story, the skills I learned that helped me move through sadness, and my decision to choose hope despite and amidst the struggles.

Examining The Impact Of Political Identification And Morality On Compliance With Covid-19 Public Health Measures, Jessica Stump

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to study the influence of individual and group differences on beliefs and behavior. In the present work, we examine COVID beliefs and behavior as a function of morality, ideology, and emotion. Data were collected in the spring of 2021 and the fall of 2021, allowing for distinct snapshots of an undergraduate sample at two periods of the pandemic. Of primary interest was the relationship between political ideology, moral foundation endorsement, and COVID-19 behaviors and beliefs. The results reveal that ideology drives COVID-19-related beliefs and behaviors. The results from Study 2 suggest that political liberals were …

Moderating Effects Of Parental Feeding Practices And Emotional Eating On Dietary Intake Among Overweight African American Adolescents, Mary Quattlebaum

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of parental feeding practices and adolescent emotional eating (EE) on dietary outcomes among overweight African American adolescents. Based on Family Systems Theory, it was hypothesized that parental feeding practices, such as parental monitoring and responsibility, would buffer the effects of EE on poor dietary quality, whereas practices such as concern about a child’s weight, restriction, and pressure-to-eat would exacerbate this relationship. Adolescents (N = 127; Mage = 12.83 ۫.74; MBMI % = 96.61 ± 4.14) provided baseline data from the Families Improving Together (FIT) for a Weight Loss trial and an ancillary study. Dietary outcomes …

Psychophysiological Predictors Of Change In Emotion Dysregulation 6 Months After Traumatic Injury, Jacklynn M. Fitzgerald, Sydney Clare Timmer-Murillo, Claire Sheeran, Hailey Begg, Morgan Christoph, Terri A Deroon-Cassini, Christine L. Larson

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Emotional dysregulation that occurs after trauma conveys risk for multiple disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Psychophysiological data (e.g., skin conductance level [SCL]) may be a useful biomarker for quantifying emotion dysregulation given that autonomic nervous system (ANS)-mediated arousal may underlie this feature. In this longitudinal study, we tested whether SCL collected following a single-incident traumatic injury could predict changes in emotion dysregulation over 6 months. Sixty-six adults were recruited from the emergency department; SCL was quantified during an active trauma narrative, in which participants re-told their traumatic event to a research staff member, as well as a …

Ethics Of Interaction: Levinas And Enactivism On Affectivity, Responsibility, And Signification, Edward A. Lenzo

Middle Voices

In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to connect enactivism with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. This essay is such an attempt. Its major theme is the relationship between affectivity and ethics. My touchstones in enactivist thought are Giovanna Colombetti and Steve Torrances’ “Emotion and Ethics: an (inter-)enactive account” (2009) and the influential concept of participatory sense-making developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). With respect to Levinas, I deploy major insights from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I first show that enactivist thought (thus represented) and Levinas roughly agree on …

Mental Construal And Alterations In Emotional Memory, Olivia D. Beers

Dissertations

Psychological distancing refers to a shift from a psychologically immersed perspective that involves thinking about the details of an event (concretely) or stepping back from it and watching the event from an outside point of view (abstractly)––this can help individuals change how they feel about the experience. Investigating how construal levels affect emotional memories may provide more insight into how individuals may potentially alter the recall of their memories. The current study reflects a new examination of the effect of primed high and low construal levels on the recall of positive and negative arousing stimuli. This study included a pilot …

Plea To Professors: A Passionate Approach To Controversy In The Classroom, Adrianna Meredith

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Scholars have warned of a student-driven movement to turn campuses into comfort zones free from any material that may be seen as controversial (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Despite this movement, the notion that professors ought to shelter their students as opposed to exposing them to challenging ideas is anti-intellectual and counterproductive to the development of critical thinking (American Association of University Professors, 2014). If the goal of education is indeed to foster critical thinking, it is crucial for professors to be willing to discuss controversial subjects (Schneider, 2013). Such openness in the classroom requires students to analyze the origin and …

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …

Interrupting Holistic Processing May Improve The Detection Of Deceptive Emotional Facial Expressions, Christopher A. Gunderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although a growing body of evidence suggests that genuine and deceptive facial expressions differ, previous work is mixed as to whether observers can discern between them. One explanation is that cues to deception on the face are subtle and not readily perceived by observers. I argue that the way people process faces may obscure these cues, making them ‘unseen’ by observers. In the current work, I pit two hypotheses against each other to test whether interrupting holistic processing improves or impairs the ability to identify deceptive emotional expressions. Since people process faces holistically, one region of the face may interfere …