Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Self-Conscious Emotions And The Right Fronto-Temporal And Right Temporal Parietal Junction, Adriana Lavarco, Nathira Ahmad, Qiana Archer, Matthew Pardillo, Ray Nunez Castaneda, Anthony Minervini, Julian Keenan

Department of Biology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

For more than two decades, research focusing on both clinical and non-clinical populations has suggested a key role for specific regions in the regulation of self-conscious emotions. It is speculated that both the expression and the interpretation of self-conscious emotions are critical in humans for action planning and response, communication, learning, parenting, and most social encounters. Empathy, Guilt, Jealousy, Shame, and Pride are all categorized as self-conscious emotions, all of which are crucial components to one’s sense of self. There has been an abundance of evidence pointing to the right Fronto-Temporal involvement in the integration of cognitive processes underlying the …

Biomechanics Of Trail Running Performance: Quantification Of Spatio-Temporal Parameters By Using Low Cost Sensors In Ecological Conditions, Noé Perrotin, Nicolas Gardan, Arnaud Lesprillier, Clément Le Goff, Jean-Marc Seigneur, Ellie Abdi, Borja Sanudo, Redha Taiar

Publications

The recent popularity of trail running and the use of portable sensors capable of measuring many performance results have led to the growth of new fields in sports science experimentation. Trail running is a challenging sport; it usually involves running uphill, which is physically demanding and therefore requires adaptation to the running style. The main objectives of this study were initially to use three “low-cost” sensors. These low-cost sensors can be acquired by most sports practitioners or trainers. In the second step, measurements were taken in ecological conditions orderly to expose the runners to a real trail course. Furthermore, to …

Historical Trauma Response Scores As A Function Of Unresolved Grief And Substance Use Disorder In American Indian Populations, Andrew R. Saunders

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Abstract

Researchers are interested in the outcomes of interventions, specifically, measuring historical trauma (HT) among American Indian/Alaska Native communities and the long-term distress and substance abuse as a result of historical trauma response (HTR). Previous literature has implicated limitations in the clinical conceptualization of the relationship between intergenerational transfer of HTR and substance abuse. The aim of the current study is to examine treatment efficacy of 50 homosexual, American Indian males randomized to a culturally-adapted juxtaposition of (1) Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), (2) Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and (3) Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention (HTUG), or (4) waitlisted on …

The Ush2a Gene: An Analysis Of Ultrasonic Vocalizations In A Mouse Model Of Usher Syndrome Type 2, Kiana R. Akhundzadeh

Honors Scholar Theses

Usher syndrome type 2 is a complex autosomal recessive genetic disorder that is characterized by moderate to severe congenital sensorineural hearing loss, the onset of retinitis pigmentosa in the second decade of life, and in some cases, vestibular dysfunction. Mutations in the USH2A gene account for 85% of cases of type 2. The USH2A gene is responsible for encoding the protein usherin, which has an important role in the development and function of inner ear hair cells and retinal photoreceptors. Until recently, it has been believed that carriers of the USH2A mutation were phenotype free. However, recent data has suggested …

A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani

Summer Research

The “uncanny valley” is the effect of being ‘creeped out’ by things that are very close, but not quite, human (e.g., a ventriloquist dummy). Over the past two summers, I found that intranasal administrations of oxytocin, a hormone which affects attention to external social information, decreased participants’ reaction times when assessing uncanny valley stimuli, but did not affect their ratings of eeriness. Furthermore, oxytocin affected participants’ reaction times the most for stimuli rated to be intermediately eerie but altered their visual attention the most during the perception of stimuli rated to be either not eerie or very eerie. From these …

Eeg Study Of The Featural And Configural Components Of Face Perception, Heather Rose Stegman

Summer Research

Prior research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests that facial features (i.e. eyes, nose, and mouth) and their configuration (i.e. T-shaped arrangement of features) are processed in different face-specific brain regions. However, precise response time of featural and configural face processing is unknown. Featural processing may occur before configural processing, or configural processing may occur before featural processing; conversely, they may occur simultaneously. Here, using the electroencephalography (EEG), we will examine the face-specific event related potential (ERP), the N170, to analyze temporal differences between featural and configural face processing.

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Getting A Grip On Memory: Unilateral Hand Clenching Alters Episodic Recall, Ruth E. Propper, Sean E. Mcgraw, Tad T. Brunyé

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Unilateral hand clenching increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe of the contralateral hemisphere. Such hand clenching is also associated with increased experiencing a given hemisphere’s “mode of processing.” Together, these findings suggest that unilateral hand clenching can be used to test hypotheses concerning the specializations of the cerebral hemispheres during memory encoding and retrieval. We investigated this possibility by testing the effects of a unilateral hand clenching on episodic memory. The hemispheric Encoding/Retrieval Asymmetry (HERA) model proposes left prefrontal regions are associated with encoding, and right prefrontal regions with retrieval, of episodic memories. It was hypothesized that right-hand clenching …

The Neuroscientific Study Of The Self: Methodological And Theoretical Challenges, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Samuel E. Winer

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Neuroscientific research methods, such as brain imaging techniques, have increasingly been applied to social cognitive research efforts and, in particular, to the study of the self. In this essay we discuss the ability of such research to shed light on the emergent, dynamic psychological phenomenon of self. Although neuroscientific tools can be useful for gaining general knowledge about associated underlying structures, a careful consideration of the methodological and theoretical issues discussed herein is necessary to avoid simplifying or reifying the self.

Cross-Modal Interaction Between Vision And Hearing: A Speed—Accuracy Analysis, Yoav Arieh, Lawrence E. Marks

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Cross-modal facilitation of response time (RT) is said to occur in a selective attention task when the introduction of an irrelevant sound increases the speed at which visual stimuli are detected and identified. To investigate the source of the facilitation in RT, we asked participants to rapidly identify the color of lights in the quiet and when accompanied by a pulse of noise. The resulting measures of accuracy and RT were used to derive speed-accuracy trade-off functions (SATFs) separately for the noise and the no-noise conditions. The two resulting SATFs have similar slopes and intercepts and, thus, can be treated …

Processing Picture–Word Stimuli: The Contingent Nature Of Picture And Of Word Superiority, Yoav Arieh, Daniel Algom

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

P participants named (Experiments 1–2) or categorized (Experiments 3–4) the picture or the word of the picture–word compounds that varied in the relative saliency of the 2 components and in the correlation between them over the experimental trials. Picture-word interference (PWI) was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects. PWI was found to be malleable; its magnitude and very presence depending lawfully on the contextual variations introduced. The contingent nature of PWI is a fact to be reckoned with by theorists of the picture–word processing.