Psychology Commons^™

Integrating Acceptance And Commitment Therapy Processes With Information-Processing Theory In Anxious Early Adolescents, Gilly Kahn

Theses and Dissertations

The social information-processing (I-P) model states that cognition assumes several cognitive steps (encoding, interpretation, response access, and selection). It has been shown that anxious youth display deficits or distortions at various stages of the social I-P model. In response to ambiguous situations, they show threat perception and interpretation biases, choose maladaptive responses, and engage in greater levels of avoidance than do non-anxious youth. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an empirically-supported treatment for anxious youth. It aims to increase mindfulness, acceptance, and cognitive defusion, and to decrease experiential avoidance. The mechanisms explaining the effectiveness of ACT processes suggest that they …

Ptsd And Immunological Correlations Of Attention And Working Memory In Gulf War Illness, Mary Jeffrey

Theses and Dissertations

Gulf War Illness (GWI) impacts 25 to 32 percent of those deployed in the 1991 Gulf War (White et al., 2016) and includes symptoms related to fatigue and mood/neurological disturbances. Therefore, it is difficult to ascertain the influence of trauma exposure and chemical exposure when investigating neuropsychological symptoms. This cross-sectional study utilized a group of veterans with and without GWI (n=61) to investigate: 1) the unique impact that GWI has on a survey measure of attention and memory or the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT). We also investigated how PTSD symptoms, followed by fatigue levels, improved the GWI model …

Examining The Role Of Trust In Peer-Assisted Learning, Peter Crowe

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Team and peer-assisted learning methodologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in both academia and industry. Learning with others is used with the assumption that individuals learn better in groups. The studies in this paper examine aspects of Peer-Assisted Learning in order to understand whether the claims of improved individual learning are substantiated, and if so, how that improved learning occurs. The cognitive mechanism examined in the studies below is the development of trust between peers on a learning task. Participants were selected from Wright State University and were predominantly undergraduate Psychology 101 students. Results indicated that Peer-Assisted Learning conditions did not …

Counterterrorism Investigator Perceptions: Homegrown Violent Extremists With Mental Illness, Jeffery Brandon Perez

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Terrorism endures throughout the world. Some individuals who engage in it may suffer from a cognitive disorder. For those who investigate terrorism, preconceptions exist both toward extremists and toward people with mental illness (MI). A review of the literature has shown how counterterrorism (CT) investigators perceive terrorists’ motivations, and how law enforcement perceives people with MI. In filling a gap between the two, this study aimed to research whether based on their lived experiences, do the understandings, perceptions, and attitudes of CT agents inform their biases and influence their decision-making and ultimately investigations of homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) with MI. …

Poor And Unpopular: How Verbal Ability And Theory Of Mind Predict Peer Rejection In A Socioeconomically Diverse Environment, Ellen Rispoli

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This study compares associations between Peer Rejection (PR) and Verbal Ability (VA) and PR and Theory of Mind (ToM) within a socioeconomically diverse context. At the time the study was stopped, five participants, ages 6-9, were recruited from the Boys and Girls Club. Participating families completed socioeconomic status (SES) questionnaires written in either English or Spanish prior to an hour-long session with a team of Butler University undergraduate students. The undergraduates administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT) to assess VA; the Mind of the Eyes task, a series of three Faux Pas (FP) tasks, …

Anxiety-Inducing Effects Of Alcohol And Caffeine In C57bl/6j Mice, Melissa Evans

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Caffeine and alcohol are two of the most popular and legal drugs around the world. In America, both drugs are easily accessible, which has contributed to frequent use of the drugs in tandem. Previous studies have revealed much about the mechanisms of each drug, but the effects of co-consumption are not yet fully understood. One concern is that caffeine could reduce how intoxicated a person feels, leading to an increase in alcohol consumption or other risky behaviors. Withdrawal is also a concern as it helps maintain the cycle of substance abuse. This study was designed to examine consumption patterns of …

The Effects Of Ingroup Threat On The Anchoring And Adjustment Heuristic, Mattie V. Hedgebeth

Theses and Dissertations

Since its introduction in 1974, the anchoring and adjustment heuristic has been a topic of interest within the field of decision making. Although much work has examined factors that affect the process of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic, very little has been studied about the self-processes that may influence how individuals anchor. More specifically, self and ingroup motivations have yet to be explored. This research sought to identify whether an individual’s magnitude of adjustment from an anchor can be affected by either an enhancement or threat of the individual’s ingroup. I hypothesized that ingroup enhancing information would induce a smaller …

The Effect Of Threatened Masculinity On Men's Perceptions Of Women's Refusals And Their Willingness To Continue An Unwanted Sexual Advance, Mollie Colleen Mcdaniel

Wayne State University Theses

Men’s sexual aggression against women is distressingly common. Some men use sexual aggression as a way to reassert their masculinity when they have been rejected by a woman (Malamuth, 1995). Some men who perpetrate aggression may not intentionally overlook women’s refusals to unwanted sexual advances, rather they might not perceive a refusal as resistance at all. Social perception research has shown that people’s perceptions are influenced by their motivations, allowing them to only perceive what they wish to see. Masculinity threat may be one such motivation. A sample of 106 men completed an experimental survey with a 2 (threatened masculinity …

Maximization In Moderation : Finding The Optimal Level Of Maximizing Tendency, Shannon Pierce

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Maximizing tendency is a decision making style in which an individual keeps a high standard for decisions. Research has shown conflicting results regarding the nature of maximizing tendency and various subjective outcomes. Extant research has shown maximizing tendency to be linearly related, both negatively and positively, to depression, optimism, life satisfaction and decision regret. Although measurement issues have been routinely blamed for the inconsistencies in these findings, this study posits that maximizing tendency is curvilinearly related to the subjective outcomes of decision regret, optimism, and life satisfaction, based on the Too Much of a Good Thing effect. It was hypothesized …

Imaginary Friends: The Effect Of Imagined Social Support On Subjective And Physiological Indicators Of Stress, Breana Bryant

UNF Undergraduate Capstone Projects and Honors Theses

Social support is known to help buffer the effects of stress (Uchino et al., 1996). However, in many situations social support is unavailable, and imagining social support may help to reduce the impact of stress. Although imagined physical touch has been shown to be an effective stress buffer, little research has compared it to other types of imagined support (Feldman et al., 2010). Additionally, women tend to seek emotional support, whereas men tend to seek tangible support, but it is unknown if imagining those types of support will reduce stress (Reevy & Maslach, 2001). To gain greater insight into these …

Book Review: Was Yosef On The Spectrum By Samuel J. Levine, Ian Hale, Ph.D.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Dissociation And Appropriation: Evaluating The Politics Of U.S. Psychology Via Hermeneutic Interpretation Of Culturally Embedded Presentations Of Yoga, Genelle N. Benker

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Psychology in the United States (U.S.) is partially constituted by a cultural history of intellectual imperialism that undermines its altruistic intent and prevents disciplinary reflexivity. The scholarship and clinical application of Yoga exemplifies the way U.S. psychology continues to give lived authority to imperialism as part of the neoliberal agenda. Through a hermeneutic literature analysis of two source Yogic texts and peer-reviewed articles that exemplify the dominant discourse on Yoga in U.S. psychology, this dissertation identified themes that describe culturally embedded presentations of Yoga and their sociopolitical implications. Through interpretation, Yoga was conceptualized as: (a) a 5,000 year-old tradition that …

College Of Psychology Doctoral Program Practicum Brochure 2020-2021, Nova Southeastern University

College of Psychological Services / College of Psychology Postgraduate Student and Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Core Concepts In Heroism Science, Volume Two, Scott T. Allison

Bookshelf

What lies at the core of heroism?

This book attempts to answer this daunting question. To understand the core of heroism – the forces underlying it – let’s first examine what heroism is at its surface. On the outside, heroism is a behavior, or set of behaviors. These actions are directed toward helping others, and they go beyond expectation and are considered by most people to be extraordinary (Franco, Blau, & Zimbardo, 2011). In addition, heroism involves taking great risks and making exceptional sacrifices (Allison, Goethals, & Kramer, 2017). We observe these extreme helping behaviors and we admire them -- …

Information Security Ambassadors’ Perceptions Of Peer-Led Motivation In Phishing Detection, Kingkane Malmquist

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Phishing rates are increasing yearly and continue to compromise data integrity. The need to guard business information is vital for organizations to meet their business objectives and legal obligations. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore security ambassadors’ perceptions of motivating their peers to adopt safe internet behaviors in a large medical campus in Minnesota. Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristic motivation theory was used to frame the study. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 20 security ambassadors. Data coding and analysis yielded 7 themes: rewarding, value, personal interest, limited information security knowledge, increased interest, communication, and topics …

A Psychological Perspective On Elephant Rewilding, Janet Vt Pauketat

Animal Sentience

Baker & Winkler describe the complexities of captive elephant conservation efforts in Thailand through multiple lenses. They advocate rewilding captive elephants within mixed elephant-human communities based on the benefits to captive elephants as well as to Karen mahout communities, given the entrenched economic and social systems in Thailand. From a psychological perspective, this advocacy is grounded in considerations of culture, cognition, speciesism, the differential valuing of others in social hierarchies, and the potential for positive interaction to build positive emotions and trust that enable successful rewilding in a world of elephants and humans.

Assessing Implicit Leadership And Followership Theories, Daniel Bashore

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Implicit Leadership and Followership Theories (ILTs and IFTs, respectively) are individuals’ schemas composed of attributes that characterize leaders and followers. ILTs and IFTs are commonly measured through direct measures, however, researchers have questioned the validity of popular direct measures. With better and more parallel measures, we can examine the extent to which individuals think about leaders and followers as similar or dissimilar. Also, although substantial research has examined predictors of explicit leadership and leaders’ behavior, little research has attempted to examine antecedents of implicit leadership or followership. Using a sample of working adults (N = 243), the current study created …

"It's All In Your Head": Diagnostic Overshadowing And Mental Illness, Katya Monarski

Capstone Showcase

Diagnostic overshadowing in mentally ill patients is the misattribution of physical illness to a preexisting mental health condition. This phenomenon contributes to the fact that patients with mental illness to receive diagnoses later, receive less treatment, and live with untreated chronic conditions. The societal attitudes on mental illness associate sufferers with negativity, danger, fear, and strangeness. This stigma could affect the formation of a realistic schema for mentally ill patients, even in a medical context. Doctors who view mental illness with the misinformed stereotypes may only see the patient for that stereotype and not as a whole. A detriment to …

Perceived Threat And Left-Wing Authoritarianism: The Effect Of Framing On Persuasive Messages, James Donald Mcfarland

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Past research reveals a strong connection between feeling threatened and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). This relationship is considered to be an integral part of authoritarianism and the nature of its presence in the left-leaning populace is still being fully explored. This study examined the relationship between perceived threat and Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) through the framing of persuasive messages. Participants (n = 256) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and given a list of reward- or threat-framed statements concerning the possible ramifications of voting in future elections and then asked to rate the quality and persuasiveness of the respective statements. …

Could A Robot Be Your Psychotherapist?, Benjamin Huston

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

As technology has advanced over the years, it has been integrated into psychotherapy and changed the way that people receive mental health care (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). Many of these advances, such as telehealth practices, were seen as unsustainable until the public Internet offered broader access to technology-based care in the 1990s (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). These technology-based practices have since grown in popularity and with a recent increase in telehealth practices, text-based therapies, and applications to aid in mental health practices, modern therapy looks very different than it did even ten years ago (Fiske, Henningsen, & Buyx, …

Attitude Strength And Situational Strength As Moderators Of The Job Satisfaction – Job Performance Relationship, Joseph William Dagosta

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Workers who are satisfied with their jobs are better performers, but prior research has found a plethora of moderating variables between job satisfaction and job performance (Ostroff, 1992, Schleicher, Watt, & Greguras, 2004; Spector, 1997). Prior research has suggested that job attitude strength can strengthen the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance and that the relationships between personality variables and extra-role job performance are stronger in weak rather than strong workplace situations (Meyer et al., 2014; Shleicher et al., 2015). In the current study, I investigated the interaction between job satisfaction, job attitude strength, and situational strength on job …

Extraversion And Emotional Expressiveness: Moderators Of The Relationship Between Curmudgeon Personality And The Quality Of Social Relationships, Md Rashedul Islam

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Curmudgeon personality, the extent to which a person dislikes most things, has recently received increased attention from researchers. Existing research has focused on either the relationships between curmudgeon personality and Big Five personality factors (e.g., extraversion, agreeableness) or curmudgeon personality and various workplace outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention). The current research examined whether curmudgeon personality and other personality traits (i.e., extraversion and emotional expressiveness) interact with each other to influence the quality of individuals’ social relationships at work. Analyses using an MTurk dataset (N = 529) showed some evidence of these interaction effects though some directions …

Music On The Brain, Skyler Bortz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Music surrounds us in our daily lives through the radio, social media, and our own personal playlists. Taste in music varies across individuals and cultures, but it is a singular, uniting aspect of society. Music creates connections and meaning that would be lost if the first string of an instrument had not been heard. Creativity is sparked with music which adds to the artistry of cultures and other forms of art.

As music develops artistry, so does dance. Music led movement to begin as dance developed through the centuries. While movement can occur in silence, it becomes more impactful when …

Play's Role In The Development Of Antisocial Behavior, Cheyenne Vazquez

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper is a literature review which examines the relationship between play and prosocial behavior. More specifically, it examines its inverse, questioning whether a lack of play in early childhood may be correlated to the development of antisocial behavior later in life. Comparing research from an abundance of psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists, this paper answers various questions pertaining to play and prosocial behavior: What happens if play is inhibited in childhood? Would different reasons for play to be inhibited result in different results (i.e. abusive childhoods, desperate situations such as homelessness and poverty, chronic illness, etc.)? Is a lack of …

What Are You Looking At? Using Eye-Tracking To Provide Insight Into Careless Responding, Cheyna Katherine Brower

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Careless responding (CR), also called insufficient effort responding (IER), occurs when survey participants respond to items without regard to item content. The presence of careless responding threatens the validity of inferences made from self-report data (Huang et al., 2012; Huang et al., 2015), thus careless responding must be identified and removed to trust inferences made based on self-report survey data. Using a sample of 59 undergraduate students, this study uses eye-tracking data to assess the validity of existing careless responding indices and to provide insight into the nature of careless responding. Although influenced by measurement error in the eye-tracking indices, …

Comparing Dichotomous And Polytomous Items Using Item Response Trees, Daniel Jenkins

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Research on the optimal number of response options on graphic rating scales has yielded mixed results such as that more scale points are better; there is an optimal range; or that it does not matter. The present study compared the psychometric properties of dichotomous and polytomous personality items using several methods of scoring including summed scores, item response theory (IRT), and item response trees. It was found that regression models based on dichotomous items explained similar amounts of variance in careless responding as models based on polytomous items. In addition, scores from dichotomous models were more closely related to the …

Induction And Transferral Of Flow In The Game Tetris, Kevin John O'Neill

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We looked at the facilitation and transfer of a flow state in a cognitive context. Subjects played a manipulated version of the game Tetris, and we gathered data on their gameplay performance on pre- and post-tasks, as well as a set of questionnaires which measure flow and perceived task effort. The altered version of Tetris includes an artificial intelligence agent that continually assesses the participant’s skill and adapts the challenge level of the game to match the participant’s skill. An adaptive condition characterized by challenge-skill balance was hypothesized to induce flow, reduce perception of effort, and improve performance. We found …

Professional Self-Care Practices, Emotional Work And Burnout In Australian Psychology Academics, Claudia Yael Hoenig

Theses : Honours

This study examined whether professional self-care practices (PSCP) had a moderating effect on the relationship between emotional work (EW) performed and burnout symptoms experienced among Australian academics teaching psychology. Seventy-seven Australian psychology academics ranging from 27 to 64 years, with an average of 13.34 years of academic experience, and representing the full range of academic levels from Associate Lecturer to Professor, and predominantly females, participated in the study. Participants completed an online survey comprising three questionnaires: the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), Intensive Emotion Work Inventory (IEW) and Professional Self-Care Scale (PSCS), addressing levels of PSCP, EW performed and frequency and …

The Descendants Of Hurao: An Exploratory Study Of Chamoru Rights Groups, Alan T. Butler

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The psychological literature conducted in Guam on indigenous practices of resistance to colonialism is nonexistent. This dissertation responds to this absence in the literature by conducting an exploratory hermeneutic study on the lived experience of members of Chamoru rights groups in Guam. Data for this study were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight members of Chamoru rights groups. Results indicated that engagement in a Chamoru rights group can be a deeply meaningful experience that involves education, activism, and being part of a supportive community. This community was felt to be healing, allowing for active engagement with community issues and against …

Uncovering The Complex Genetics Of Human Personality: Response From Authors On The Pgmra Model, Igor Zwir, Pashupati Mishra, Coral Del-Val, C. Charles Gu, Gabriel A. De Erausquin, Terho Lehtimäki, C. Robert Cloninger

School of Medicine Publications

Following publication of our two articles [1, 2], a critique of the methodology of Phenotype-Genotype Many-to-Many Relations Analysis (PGMRA) [1, 3, 4] questioned the validity of our results from the perspective of polygenic risk scores (PRS) [5]. We appreciate the importance of these questions, and here provide a concise discussion of the assumptions and mathematical constraints of both approaches. We thank this commentator and others who have discussed our articles with us for their thoughtful questions and critiques