Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

The Development Of The Creative Synergy Scale, Amy E. Climer

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study developed a scale for teams to assess their behaviors related to creative synergy. Creative synergy is the interactions among team members where the collective creative results are greater than the sum of their individual efforts. When a team achieves creative synergy they have the potential to solve difficult problems with innovative solutions leading to positive impacts on our communities, societies, and even our world. This study looked at the internal-process variables of teams to determine what factors impact creative synergy. The research process involved two phases.In Phase 1, a survey was taken by 830 adults who were members …

Examining The Role Of Threat Processing In Memory Consolidation And Prejudice Formation, Stephanie Marie Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Memory is a flexible system that integrates new incoming information into existing memory representations (Stickgold & Walker, 2007). Through sleep and over time, memories become stable via consolidation processes (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg & Kensinger, 2008). Prejudice formation can occur through the consolidation of stereotype schemas. In a previous study Latino participants learned positive and negative trait information about in-group and out-group members (Enge, Lupo & Zárate, 2015). At test, participants responded more quickly to out-group targets paired with negative traits than in-group pairings with these traits. Findings indicate that participants also responded more quickly to in-group targets paired with positive …

Experiences Of Neurotypical Siblings Of Children With An Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Qualitative Exploration, Stacie R. Keirsey

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

In recent years, the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been on the rise, prompting a simultaneous increase in scientific study regarding cause, impact, and intervention (Hughes, 2009; Ravindran & Myers, 2012). Research has proposed advances in the treatment of the individuals diagnosed and focused efforts on scholastic, parental, and professional intervention and supports. However, the siblings of ASD children have largely been neglected in this scientific investigation. The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore neurotypical siblings’ experiences in living with a child diagnosed with ASD. Seven adolescents were selected using criterion, convenience, and snowball sampling. …

The Effects Of Alcohol On The Interpretation Of Social And Emotional Cues: A Field Study Of College Student Drinking, Emotion Recognition, And Perceptions Of A Hypothetical Sexual Assault, Alexander James Melkonian

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alcohol use and abuse among emerging adults is highly correlated with increased risk for sexual victimization. Alcohol myopia theory has been used to explain impairments in Social information processing resulting in decreased attention to environmental Social cues including risk factors for sexual assault as well as facial emotional recognition. Those with deficits in Social information processing may be at particular risk for the misperception of salient risk factors for sexual assault by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders when intoxicated. In this naturalistic field study, participants who had been consuming alcohol were recruited to engage in tasks of facial emotion recognition and …

Examining The Effect Of Education Type On Common Misconceptions Of Traumatic Brain Injury, Monica De Iorio

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

It has been widely shown that misconceptions related to traumatic brain injury (TBI) are held among both family members of people with TBI and the general public. These misconceptions have the potential to increase the distress of people with TBI and negatively impact rehabilitation processes. Although increased education has often been suggested to reduce misconceptions, few studies have examined which methods are most effective in providing information to the public. In the current study, I investigated the effects of existing education materials – either a TBI factsheet or personal stories of people with TBI. These materials are currently easily accessible …

Can Motivated Cognition Exacerbate A Bias?, Luis O. Camacho, Saera R. Khan

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

This study examined the relationship between the need for cognition and impression formation, particularly with common biases. Upon listening to a speaker with either a heavy Japanese or Los Angeles accent, participants rated the speaker on how well-informed they believed she appeared to be on the subject she spoke about and on intelligence. Despite the need for cognition, speakers with a Los Angeles accent were rated less favorably on intelligence, compared to Japanese accented speakers. However, the high need for cognition participants utilized a stereotype in impression formation, as their ratings for both speakers resonated with the speaker’s respective stereotype. …

The Relationship Between Emotional Contagion And Mood State, Kayleigh-Farrell Crow

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

Emotions can often be transferred from one person to another. It has been assumed that the strength and impact of contagious emotions can depend largely on the susceptibility of the individual. This concept has led to the idea of emotional contagion, or “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person, and consequently, to converge emotionally”, as defined by Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson (1992). The present study will examine the influence of certain emotions and the increased probability for contagion to occur. Specifically, this study will explore the emotional strengths of …

Seeing People, Seeing Things: Individual Differences In Selective Attention, Miranda May Mcintyre

Open Access Theses

Individuals differ in the extent to which they attend to their physical and social environments, but little empirical work has measured these differences at a cognitive level. To address this gap, two studies explored the association between attentional processes and Person and Thing Orientations. The first study measured visual selective attention toward person- and thing-related image components. In the second study, participants provided written responses about a set of images; linguistic analyses were conducted to assess attentional bias toward interest-congruent content. The results from both studies support motivated attention as a process through which interests in physical and social environments …

Why Is The Crowd Divided? Attribution For Dispersion In Online Word Of Mouth, Stephen He, Samuel Bond

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The widespread availability of online word of mouth (WOM) enables modern consumers to assess not only the opinions of others about products and services, but also the extent to which those opinions are consistent or dispersive. Despite longstanding calls for greater understanding of mixed opinions, existing evidence is inconclusive regarding effects of WOM dispersion, and theoretical accounts have relied primarily on the notion of reference dependence. Extending prior work, this research proposes an attribution-based account, in which consumer interpretation of WOM dispersion depends on the extent to which tastes in a product domain are perceived to be dissimilar, so that …

An Analysis Of Cognitive Factors In School-Aged Children With Emotional Disturbance And Adhd Using The Wisc-Iv, Maria Fragnito Maddalo

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

Children with Emotional Disturbance and ADHD demonstrate social, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that present many challenges for School Psychologists because of differences between each student’s individual needs. A high level of comorbidity exists for these children with internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Little is known about neurocognitive factors as they relate to ED versus ADHD. The current study examined the cognitive profiles of a total of 58 children with ED versus ADHD, using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition (WISC-IV). Index scores that were examined included Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. The groups were compared …

A Historical Review And Resource Guide To The Scholarship Of Teaching And Training In Psychology And Law And Forensic Psychology, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Bette L. Bottoms, Margaret C. Stevenson, Jennifer C. Veilleux

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

The field of psychology and law, including forensic psychology, is an exciting concentration of research activity and student training and has grown rapidly, but to what extent have teaching and training efforts in the field been systematically catalogued and evaluated? We conducted a historical review and content analysis of the American and Canadian literature on the scholarship of teaching and training in the field. This review catalogs (a) information related to the development of training and teaching, (b) descriptions of programs and courses at various levels, and (c) articles on teaching resources or techniques in this field. We hope it …

The Ripple Effects Of Stranger Harassment On Objectification Of Self And Others, Meghan Davidson, Sarah Gervais, Lindsey W. Sherd

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Despite the frequency and negative consequences of stranger harassment, only a scant number of studies have explicitly examined stranger harassment and its consequences through the lens of objectification theory. The current study introduced and tested a mediation model in which women’s experiences of stranger harassment may lead to self-objectification, which in turn may lead to objectification of other people. To examine this model, undergraduate women (N = 501) completed measures of stranger harassment (including the verbal harassment and sexual pressure subscales of the Stranger Harassment Index), body surveillance, and objectification of other women and men. Consistent with hypotheses, significant positive …

A Dream Best Forgotten: The Phenomenology Of Karen Refugees’ Pre-Resettlement Stressors, Theodore T. Bartholomew, Brittany E. Gundel, Neeta Kantamneni

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Refugees are often forced into states of imposed vulnerability in which loss is common and migration is normative. Karen refugees from Myanmar have endured a long civil war with the Burmese government, followed by their forced relocation to refugee camps and subsequent global resettlement. This phenomenological study aimed to understand the meanings ascribed to pre-resettlement stress among resettled Karen refugees. We interviewed six participants who were identified through purposeful sampling in a Karen refugee community. Using phenomenological analysis, we identified and interpreted 286 meaning units. The meaning units were then grouped into four themes: (a) Loss From Oppression, (b) Resignation …

Connecting To Others: Studying The Relationship Between Social Exclusion And Imitation, Sarah K. Blyth

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Automatic imitation (AI) refers to the subconscious tendency we have to imitate an observed action, even when that action is irrelevant to or interferes with an action we are attempting to execute (Heyes, 2011; Brass et al., 2000). Human beings display a fundamental need to stay meaningfully connected to others, also known as the need to belong. Previous research shows that an experience of rejection can reduce one’s feelings of connectedness to others (Legate et al., 2013), and that behaviours such as non-conscious mimicry (NCM) increase after being excluded as a possible means of re-affiliation (Lakin et al., 2008). It …

A Narrative Study Of Emotions Associated With Negative Childhood Experiences Reported In The Adult Attachment Interview, Lynne Hartman

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Attachment patterns, which tend to be stable over time, are passed from one generation to the next. Secure attachment has been linked to adaptive social functioning and has been identified as a protective factor against mental illness. The parents’ state of mind with regard to attachment—as measured with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2002)—predicts the attachment classification for the infant in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Earned-secure individuals have overcome negative childhood experiences to achieve a secure state of mind in adulthood. Earned security, like continuous security, strongly predicts infant security …

Cultural Psychological Theory, Kimin Eom, Heejung S. Kim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cultural psychology has revived the original intention of the cognitive revolution in which psychologists aimed to bring meaning to the study of the mind (Bruner, 1990). In contrast to much of psychological research that has been devoted to discovering “pure” context-free psychological mechanisms, the basic assumption of cultural psychology is that the human psyche cannot exist independently of its sociocultural contexts, and therefore, the study of human actions must consider the contexts in which these actions take place (Shweder, 1995). From the beginning, cultural psychology has aimed to understand the mutual influence between psyche and cultural contexts. According to the …

Influence Of Seductive Details, Belief-Congruence, And Repeated Testing On Memory For Controversial Information, Daniel Adam Nuccio

Theses and Dissertations

People often encounter conflicting information on a wide array of topics. How they evaluate this information in relation to their current beliefs, and the effects of other influences, such as the weight given to superficial aspects of the information (e.g. pictures, anecdotes, or jargon that are at most minimally related to an author's argument), has been of interest to researchers for many years. One component of their processing

and evaluation of this information is their memory for the information. This study set out to examine the following questions: (1) Is belief-congruent in

formation remembered better or worse than belief incongruent …

Effects Of Race Of Attractiveness Ratings And Individuals Physical Attractiveness Stereotypes, Aaron Karst

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The purpose of this research project was to investigate the “physical attractiveness stereotype”. Previous research suggests that the physical attractiveness plays an important role in how we ascribe certain personality traits. Weiten (2002) for example, noted the stereotype as people’s tendency “to ascribe socially desirable personality traits to individuals who are considered to be more attractive, seeing them as more sociable, poised, and well adjusted than those who are less attractive”. However, very little research has been conducted to explore the role race may have on the concept. The current study was conducted to explore the validity of the physical …

Sales Performance And Intuition – The Role Of Gut Feelings, David Locander

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation extends the dual theory of salesperson information processing by examining the relationship between salespersons' emotional intelligence (EI) and their preference for and use of decision-making styles (intuition and/or deliberation) in the selling process. This dissertation contains two studies, Study 1 employs a descriptive research design and Study 2 uses experimental manipulations to investigate the role that intuition and deliberation play within the sales process. Data for both studies come from a sample derived from a national online panel of business to business salespeople.

Study 1, using a survey approach, assesses two competing models and one post hoc model …

May I Help You? How Stereotypes And Innuendoes Influence Service Encounters, Lauren Michelle Brewer

Doctoral Dissertations

"You only get one chance to make a good first impression." The dissertation focuses on marketing agents; among the most visible is the "service provider." Previous research establishes the important role of cognitive social schemata in determining the way consumers react to different types of marketing agents, including service providers. In the literature review, a classification schema is developed for service provider stereotypes derived from theory using social stereotypes. The development of the Service Provider Perception Framework (SPPF) creates a classification for the individual service provider along two main dimensions: competence and affect.

In services design (particularly situations involving a …

Incarceration And Reintegration: How It Impacts Mental Health, April M. Marier, Alex Alfredo Reyes

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Background: Previous criminal justice policies have been non-effective leading to overpopulated prisons and unsuccessful reintegration. There is a lack of effective supportive and/or rehabilitative services resulting in high rates of recidivism and mental health implications. Objective: This study investigated the perceived impact that incarceration and reintegration with little to no supportive and/or rehabilitative services has on the mental health status of an individual. The emphasis was on participant perception and not on professional reports because of underreporting and lack of attention to mental health in the criminal justice system. Methods: Focus groups in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley …

Implicit Prejudice And Its Implications For How Communities Should Respond To Racial Injustices, Harry Kainen

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

In the spring of 2013, a racially controversial incident occurred on the Washington University Campus. The incident raised questions about the racial tolerance of the university community as well as exactly who should be held responsible for the injustice. Most importantly, the community’s response to the incident exemplified how a community with the potential for substantial collective action can fail to mobilize and improve when they are called upon to do so. This paper examines recent psychological research that studies the existence of subconscious racial prejudices in order to examine its implications in community responses to racial injustices. Results show …

The Benefits Of Exposure To Animals For Persons With Dementia: A Literature Review, Stephanie Bennett

Undergraduate Research Symposium

This literature review was performed to assess the current standing of the use of animals as a therapeutic agent for individuals suffering from dementia. This area of study is currently broad; therefore the intent of reviewing the current literature was to establish what has been studied at this point in time and to recommend future research directions in the field. The literature search was performed on three academic search sites (PsycINFO, PubMed, and AgeLine) using four search terms (“Pet therapy Alzheimer’s,” “Pet therapy dementia,” “Animal therapy Alzheimer’s,” “Animal therapy dementia”); search results were verified by having a second researcher independently …

The Effects Of Serial Position, Evaluation Format, And Behavioral Isolate On Verbal And Nonverbal Clinical Cue Recognition And Performance Ratings, Timothy Robert Turner Jr.

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Standardized patients are individuals trained to realistically portray specific physical and psychological symptoms and evaluate healthcare trainees on their patient interaction skills. Prior research suggests that individual differences among standardized patients often result in assessment variance. This study examined the effects of cue serial position and evaluation format on individuals' perceptual awareness and recognition accuracy of verbal and nonverbal clinical cues. It was predicted that implementing periodic evaluations would reduce participant working memory load and permit better awareness and recognition of relevant clinical cues than the traditional post-scenario evaluation format. The concurrent evaluation benefit was also expected to mitigate the …

Conformist Opinion Shift As An Accommodation-Motivated Cognitive Experience In Strong And Weak Situations, Angela K. Y. Leung, Evelyn Wing-Mun Au, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The authors introduce accommodation motivation as an individual difference construct that predicts personal preference to display conformist opinion shift, or the tendency to align opinion of the self with that of the group. The authors hypothesize that the relationship between accommodation motivation and conformist opinion shift will be stronger when the situational press for conformity is weak. Having clarified the conceptual meaning of accommodation motivation, the authors present evidence from two experiments that accommodation-motivated individuals readily display conformist opinion shift in anticipation of discussing with disagreeing others when conformity demand is weak (vs. strong). The second experiment offers initial support …

What You See Is What You Forget : Alcohol Cue Exposure, Affect, And The Misinformation Effect, Camille Crocken Barnes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Previous research has suggested that both alcohol cues and positive affect increase the tendency to incorporate false information into memory. This series of studies sought to determine if affect mediates the influence of alcohol cues on incorporation of false information into memory. Initially, a pilot study was completed to determine the individual differences that predict which individuals experience a heightening of positive affect following visualization exercises involving alcoholic beverages. Next, a study was conducted to determine if this affect increase from exposure to alcohol cues leads to increased acceptance of misinformation into memory. Participants' memories were tested while they were …

We’Ll Meet Again: Revealing Distributional And Temporal Patterns Of Social Contact, Thorsten Pachur, Lael J. Schooler, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

What are the dynamics and regularities underlying social contact, and how can contact with the people in one’s social network be predicted? In order to characterize distributional and temporal patterns underlying contact probability, we asked 40 participants to keep a diary of their social contacts for 100 consecutive days. Using a memory framework previously used to study environmental regularities, we predicted that the probability of future contact would follow in systematic ways from the frequency, recency, and spacing of previous contact. The distribution of contact probability across the members of a person’s social network was highly skewed, following an exponential …

When Thoughts Clash: Self-Compassion And Self-Monitoring As Moderators Of Cognitive Dissonance, Jessica Lyn Sastre

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cognitive dissonance occurs when someone engages in a counter-attitudinal behavior that has negative consequences. In the present study whether moderators such as self-monitoring and self-compassion impact the experience of dissonance. Specifically, high self-monitors should experience less dissonance than low self-monitors because of their propensity to alter their opinions based on the social cues around them and not be as attached to their opinions as low self-monitors. Self-compassion may also moderate the dissonance effect in that more self-compassionate individuals may handle the experience of dissonance with more self-kindness and subsequently experience less dissonance than participants with low self-compassion. Participants (N …

Priming The Data: Examining Self-Potentiation In A Word Fragment Completion Task, Michael P. Mcdonald

All Master's Theses

The studies presented assessed the presence and severity of self-potentiation effects in a word fragment completion task commonly used to evaluate priming effects. Priming effects have suffered a plethora of replication issues, and the field is currently under intense scrutiny. By analyzing and refining the methodology used, we will be able to more effectively evaluate the significance and strength of these effects in future research, and increase the reliability of results under replication. In these experiments, outcomes on a word fragment completion task were examined under a variety of conditions. In the first study, responses were collected in a free-response …

Feminist Stereotypes: Communal Vs. Agentic, Emily R. Lindburg

Scripps Senior Theses

This study examined relationships between facial appearance, gender-linked traits, and feminist stereotypes. Naïve college students rated traits based on facial appearance of female CEO's whose companies appeared in the Forbes 1000 list. The photos of each female CEO (n=35) were randomly combined with two descriptive identifiers; an occupation (n=9) and an interest area (n=9), including 'feminist'. Participants then rated the head shots of the CEO's on a 7 point Likert scale of communal (expected feminine) traits like attractiveness, warmth, compassion and cooperativeness, and on agentic (expected masculine) traits like ambition, leadership ability and intelligence. If college students hold negative stereotypes …