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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Social Media Usage And Motives In Socially Anxious Individuals, Emma Eddy May 2026

Social Media Usage And Motives In Socially Anxious Individuals, Emma Eddy

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Social media use (SMU) has grown rapidly in recent years, alongside the rate of social anxiety. Plenty of research has been previously conducted exploring the relationship between SMU and social anxiety, as well as potential motivations for using social media which may explain the recent incline in usage. However, this study combines the two relationships together to test the association between social anxiety and problematic SMU as well as to investigate motives of SMU as potential mediators of problematic SMU. Problematic social media usage, social anxiety, passive vs active SMU, and four different motives of SMU were all looked at. …


How Schema Knowledge Affects Memory, Sarah Waller May 2026

How Schema Knowledge Affects Memory, Sarah Waller

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Schemas are a type of semantic knowledge that are formed from generalizations about the world. Schemas are essentially expectations about how we expect the world to be, and they are helpful for understanding and categorizing information we encounter. Prediction errors, which occur when our predictions are violated, are caused by events that are inconsistent with our schemas. Current findings on prediction error’s effects on memory are contradictory, with some studies stating that the presence of a prediction error enhances memory for a context, while other research disagrees. A popular theory proposes that prediction error causes a boost in memory for …


Negation And The Backfire Effect, Caden Fowler May 2026

Negation And The Backfire Effect, Caden Fowler

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Quick! Do not think of a polar bear. Did you think of a white bear? As Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his 1863 essay “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” “[when tasked to not think of a polar bear] you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” The consequence of negation without context (i.e., unlicensed negation; Levine & Hagaman, 2008) is what has come to be referred to as the “backfire effect,” a phenomenon where correcting misinformation strengthens belief in that information rather diminishing it (Ecker, et al., 2020). Fake news and misinformation in …


A Vicious Cycle: The Interplay Between Anxiety, Perfectionism, And Indecision, Kaelyn G. Moran May 2026

A Vicious Cycle: The Interplay Between Anxiety, Perfectionism, And Indecision, Kaelyn G. Moran

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Chronic indecisiveness is a pervasive issue that can negatively impact academic, occupational, and psychological functioning. Although prior research has identified anxiety and perfectionism as relevant correlates of indecisiveness, less is known about how these factors uniquely and jointly contribute to decision-making difficulties. The present study examined the relationships between trait anxiety, multidimensional perfectionism, and indecisiveness in a sample of 199 undergraduate students at the University of Arkansas. Participants completed self-report measures assessing anxiety (STICSA), perfectionism (Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale), and indecisiveness (Revised Indecisiveness Scale). Zero-order correlations and multiple regression analyses were conducted to evaluate both overall and dimension-specific effects. Results …


Detection Of Changes In Short Narratives, Presley Priddy May 2026

Detection Of Changes In Short Narratives, Presley Priddy

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Narrativity and object association have been extensively researched in the past to determine how changes in a text impact reader interpretation. In this research, we attempted to establish a relationship between the relation of an object to a character situated in a particular narrative context and the detection of inconsistencies presented in the given story. Participants read texts that either associated or dissociated an object with a character, within a high or low-narrative context. Reading times were measured on critical sentences that were inconsistent with the placement of previously dissociated objects. When presented with object inconsistencies in highly narrative stories, …


The Role Of Executive Functions In Creativity, Gavin R. Kyer May 2026

The Role Of Executive Functions In Creativity, Gavin R. Kyer

Biological Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

The present study investigates the relationship between executive functions and creativity, measured through divergent thinking. Literature review determines that there should be a positive correlation between executive functioning and creative idea generation, however, findings are mixed. This study tested the level of correlation/predictability between executive functions, specifically, updating, shifting, and inhibition, and creativity. Participants (N=112) completed tasks assessing updating (letter memory), shifting (number letter) and inhibition (Stroop). They also completed the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) that measures divergent thinking. Pearson’s correlations and multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine any individual or combined relationship between executive functions and creativity. Results …


The Role Of Cognitive Inhibition In Creative Problem Solving, James Schnoes May 2026

The Role Of Cognitive Inhibition In Creative Problem Solving, James Schnoes

Biological Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

Creativity is a defining characteristic of human cognition and plays a central role in shaping our daily lives. In the literature, creativity is commonly conceptualized through two cognitive processes: divergent thinking, which involves generating multiple novel ideas, and convergent thinking, which involves arriving at a single correct solution by integrating all information available. (Cropley, 2006; Guilford, 1959; Runco & Jaeger, 2012). The present study examined how cognitive control, measured via the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), relates to convergent creative problem solving as assessed by the Compound Remote Associates (CRA) task. Additionally, trends in alpha and theta power spectra during the …


Surviving Their Stripes: Quality Of Life And Coping For Individuals With Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Julianna L. Breazeale May 2025

Surviving Their Stripes: Quality Of Life And Coping For Individuals With Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Julianna L. Breazeale

Health, Human Performance and Recreation Undergraduate Honors Theses

Hypermobile type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) is a subtype of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disorder with complexities involving joint hypermobility, tissue fragility and severe pain. Patients with hEDS often experience misdiagnosis, medical dismissal and years of waiting for a diagnosis. This study aims to evaluate the quality of life and diagnostic journey for patients living with hEDS. Qualitative, cross-sectional and semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study using a descriptive, phenomenological methodological approach. The specific phenomenon is the experience of the hEDS diagnosis and how that diagnosis further impacts patient life. The two primary research questions that we aimed …


Do Readers Keep Track Of Protagonist Identity In Narratives?, Sophia Skrivanos May 2025

Do Readers Keep Track Of Protagonist Identity In Narratives?, Sophia Skrivanos

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this research was to further investigate conflicting findings in the literature regarding the processes readers use to maintain and update their mental representation of contextual information in text. Previous research suggests that the relevance of information to a protagonist’s goals in a story influences whether that information will later be validated (Levine & Kim, 2019; Levine & Klin, 2001; Lutz & Radvansky, 1997). Studies showing that readers overlook inconsistencies in contextual information (Albrecht & Myers, 1995; Smith et al., 2020; Smith & O’Brien, 2012) often involve materials where the inconsistent details are irrelevant to the protagonist’s goals. …


Penny For Your Thoughts: Exploring Mechanisms Linking Socioeconomic Status And Cognition, Colton Hunter May 2025

Penny For Your Thoughts: Exploring Mechanisms Linking Socioeconomic Status And Cognition, Colton Hunter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Socioeconomic status is a complex psychological construct linked to a number of professional and personal barriers, including cognitive deficits. Throughout this dissertation, I seek to examine the mechanisms that link socioeconomic status and cognition. First, I explore potential mediators in the link between adolescent family income and cognition in adulthood, identifying education, stressful life events, inflammation, and family education expectations as significant mediators. Next, I examine the effects of writing-based stress manipulations on long-term memory and working memory, as these effects may mimic stress from financial worry. In doing so, I identify potential effects on working memory parameters. Finally, in …


Influence Of Smartphone Notifications On Behavior And Eye Movement Parameters Of Emotional Attention, Joshua Daniel Upshaw May 2025

Influence Of Smartphone Notifications On Behavior And Eye Movement Parameters Of Emotional Attention, Joshua Daniel Upshaw

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how smartphone notifications interact with emotional facial expressions to influence behavioral and physiological eye movement parameters of attentional orientation. Using a dot-probe paradigm, participants viewed mixed emotional face pairs (angry, happy, or neutral) following an auditory stimulus (smartphone notifications, control tones, or silence). Angry faces elicited greater behavioral accuracy and delayed initial fixations, consistent with heightened threat-related attentional engagement. Notifications disrupted attentional stability, reflected in increased fixations and pupil size variability. The combined effect of smartphone notifications preceding angry faces intensified attentional modulation—evidenced by slower responses, increased blinking, greater pupil constriction, less pupil variability, and faster initial …


Help-Seeking For Problematic Alcohol Use: Stigma, Shame, & Guilt, Olivia G. Chapell Jan 2025

Help-Seeking For Problematic Alcohol Use: Stigma, Shame, & Guilt, Olivia G. Chapell

2025 Honors Symposium

Stigmatization is a prevalent barrier to help-seeking behaviors in problematic alcohol users, especially among college-aged students. By using a cross-sectional electronic survey method, the relationship between personal or immediate family experience with substance-related treatment and perceptions of stigmatization was assessed.


Enhancing Memory Through Literary Features, Sarah Naylor Dec 2024

Enhancing Memory Through Literary Features, Sarah Naylor

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary devices used by a writer can influence and impact the manner in which readers respond and interact with a text. Both the perspectives readers are expected to take while reading and the amount of foregrounding in a text cognitively and affectively influence a reader’s experience. However, little research has explored what effects these factors have on verbatim memory. For this research, participants were instructed to read a short literary story either by identifying with the protagonist or as a spectator. After reading and completing a range of other tasks, participants were asked to select sentences they saw in the …


Strategies For Misinformation Correction: Evidence For The Power Of Negation, Angel Houts Aug 2024

Strategies For Misinformation Correction: Evidence For The Power Of Negation, Angel Houts

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study investigated the effectiveness of different correction strategies for misinformation using a 2 (Source: no source, credible source) x 2 (Structure: negation, affirmation) within-subjects design with an additional control condition that had no corrections. Participants read 40 Twitter-like statements, which included 25 pieces of misinformation and 15 truthful statements, and rated their emotional responses on a Likert scale. After completing a distractor task, participants read additional Twitter-like statements across five different conditions. The first four conditions aimed to correct misinformation: negation with a credible source, negation without source, affirmation with a credible source, affirmation without source. The fifth …


The Cognitive Implications Of Literary Devices And Perspective-Taking On Reading Time, Amelia Ward May 2024

The Cognitive Implications Of Literary Devices And Perspective-Taking On Reading Time, Amelia Ward

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The study of literary devices in the context of published fiction is unusual in psychology; however, some research has suggested that reading time may be influenced by cognitive challenges that come with the extra work that may be necessary to understand the meaning behind an author’s usage of literary devices (Miall & Kuiken, 1994; Egen et al., 2019). Jumping off of this suggestion, this present study aimed to answer the question of whether reading time is influenced by factors such as narrative perspective, the usage of literary devices, a person’s print exposure, and a person’s need for cognition, as well …


Investigating The Relation Between Family Income And Barriers For Black Caregivers Of Autistic Children, Leah Gelfand May 2024

Investigating The Relation Between Family Income And Barriers For Black Caregivers Of Autistic Children, Leah Gelfand

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Black caregivers and families of autistic youth experience racial barriers (e.g., racial microaggressions, stigma;) and practical barriers (e.g., cost of treatment, long waitlists), when seeking treatment and diagnostic services (Lovelace et al., 2018). The current study aimed to ascertain whether family income influenced the racial and practical barriers experienced by a sample of Black caregivers of autistic youth (N = 101). Overall and item-level analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between racial and practical barriers experienced across Lower (below 39,693; n=32), Lower-Middle ($39,693-$59,540; n=28), Middle-Upper ($59,540 to $119,080; n=21), and Upper income groups ($119,080 and …


The Interplay Of Chronic Alcohol Misuse And Facial Recognition Abilities, Morgan Wilson May 2024

The Interplay Of Chronic Alcohol Misuse And Facial Recognition Abilities, Morgan Wilson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both perpetrators and eyewitnesses of a crime have often been found to be under the influence of alcohol. While research has been conducted on the short-term effect of alcohol on eyewitness memory and lineup performance, little research has investigated the long-term effects of chronic alcohol misuse on facial recognition abilities. The current study investigated the effect of alcohol misuse on facial recognition and whether duration of misuse contributed to this effect. Participants (n = 370) completed an online survey which consisted of a well-tested facial recognition paradigm plus several surveys pertaining to individual differences of interest. We found race match …


Winners And Losers: Emotional Shifts Across Elections Are Conveyed By A Politician’S Smile, Carl Senior, Patrick A. Stewart, Erik Bucy, Nick Lee Apr 2024

Winners And Losers: Emotional Shifts Across Elections Are Conveyed By A Politician’S Smile, Carl Senior, Patrick A. Stewart, Erik Bucy, Nick Lee

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The human smile can convey both rewarding and affiliative social intent and thus has significant utility in politics, where the ability to bond with and reassure voters is vital to electoral success. We examine experimental evidence from the 2019 UK general election to investigate the influence of a politician’s reward or affiliative smile on voter emotions. It was hypothesised that the winner’s affiliative smile would engender positive affect across all partisan groups compared to the winner’s reward smile display. Participants from a nationally representative sample were shown campaign footage containing both types of smiles from the leaders of the main …


Examining The Effects Of Mental Health Barriers On Black Undergraduate Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions, Patrice N. Storey Dec 2023

Examining The Effects Of Mental Health Barriers On Black Undergraduate Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions, Patrice N. Storey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Black college students are experiencing mental health issues at an alarming rate. There is, however, a reluctance among Black college students to seek assistance. There is a stigma surrounding mental health. An individual with a mental illness is often stereotyped as weak, uncontrollable, or paralyzed by demons. Historical incidents such as slavery, the Tuskegee Experiment, Jim Crow, and the forced sterilization of Black women have led the Black community to distrust the medical system. The stigma embedded in the Black community is passed down from generation to generation. This literature review examines existing research on Black students and their perception …


Diminishing Creative Returns: Predicting Optimal Creative Performance Via Individual Differences In Executive Functioning, Kent F. Hubert Dec 2023

Diminishing Creative Returns: Predicting Optimal Creative Performance Via Individual Differences In Executive Functioning, Kent F. Hubert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A robust finding in creativity research is that during idea generation, later (vs. earlier) responses on a divergent thinking task tend to be more creative, while the number of responses start off quickly, and then slow down over time, termed the serial order effect. Divergent thinking and time may follow a diminishing returns curve, where there is an optimal amount of time that should be spent while generating ideas. Executive functions (inhibition, updating, and shifting) have been associated with divergent thinking, specifically with the idea generation phase, but the effect of individual differences on the temporal dynamics of divergent thinking …


Examining Task-Related Differences In The Error-Related Negativity (Ern) As A Function Of Cognitive Control Strategy And Trait Anxiety, Russell Mach Dec 2023

Examining Task-Related Differences In The Error-Related Negativity (Ern) As A Function Of Cognitive Control Strategy And Trait Anxiety, Russell Mach

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety disorders pose a significant challenge to daily living, workplace productivity, and healthcare systems. Extant research supports empirical links between anxiety and brain-level error monitoring. The ERN – or error-related negativity – is one widely studied correlate of anxious symptomatology. Relatively stable individual differences in the ERN are inferred from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings time-locked to the commission of mistakes. However, the assumed interchangeability of ERNs elicited under different experimental conditions has not been thoroughly evaluated. Canonical tasks for measuring the ERN may cue specific strategies for cognitive control, possibly producing divergent findings across studies. In a sample of 108 undergraduate …


(A Lack Of) Effects Of Acute Social Stress On Attentional Bias To Threat, Colton L. Hunter, Grant Shields Aug 2023

(A Lack Of) Effects Of Acute Social Stress On Attentional Bias To Threat, Colton L. Hunter, Grant Shields

Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Attentional biases toward or away from emotionally evocative stimuli have been well documented and are known to be clinically relevant, making it important to understand how various factors contribute to them. Some work has suggested that acute stress modulates attentional biases, but this work has produced inconsistent results. For example, many studies have found that stress enhances attentional bias, others that stress decreases attentional bias, and others still that there is no effect of stress at all. Methodological differences may explain these inconsistencies. For example, discrepancies exist between studies in participant sex (e.g., mixed sample vs. all men) and in …


How Systematically Increasing Estimator Variables Affects The Confidence-Accuracy Relationship, Amber M. Giacona Aug 2023

How Systematically Increasing Estimator Variables Affects The Confidence-Accuracy Relationship, Amber M. Giacona

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have used signal-detection theory-based approach to show that when police use proper practices with eyewitnesses, highly confident witnesses will be highly accurate even when viewing conditions may be suboptimal (Wixted & Wells, 2017). This is referred to as the pristine conditions hypothesis. There have been multiple, and often contradictory, studies that have investigated the relationship between viewing conditions and memory degradation (Giacona et al., 2021; Grabman et al., 2019; Lockamyeir et al, 2020; Semmler et al., 2018). In the current study, I systematically manipulated five estimator variables (lighting, distance, retention interval, exposure duration, and race) as either suboptimal or …


Updating Of Protagonist Information In Narratives, Luke Mcclanahan May 2023

Updating Of Protagonist Information In Narratives, Luke Mcclanahan

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of the present research was to further examine contested findings in the research literature surrounding the processes readers use to maintain and update their mental representation of contextual information in a text. Research indicates that whether information is directly relevant to the goal of a story’s protagonist influences whether it will be used as a basis for later validation (Levine & Kim, 2019; Levine & Klin, 2001; Lutz & Radvansky, 1997). Some prior research that indicates that participants fail to validate inconsistent contextual information (Albrecht & Myers, 1995; Smith et al., 2020; Smith & O’Brien, 2012) relies on …


Rigid And Non-Rigid Images: Effects On Prospective Person Memory In Missing Persons Cases, Lauren Terry May 2023

Rigid And Non-Rigid Images: Effects On Prospective Person Memory In Missing Persons Cases, Lauren Terry

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every day in the United States, people are reported missing with the hopes that a recovery will be made using missing person alerts and the help of the public. This paradigm for finding missing persons hinges on the prospective memory of the individuals that see the missing person alert. Prospective person memory (PPM) is a form of event-based prospective memory wherein the “event” is a sighting of the missing person, and the associated action is reporting the sighting to authorities (Lampinen et al., 2009). PPM may be improved through increased facial recognition abilities. Previous research has indicated an increase in …


Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson May 2023

Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Certain literary features of text (metaphor, idiom, etc.) are said to be foregrounded, or stand out from the surrounding text. Prior research (Miall & Kuiken, 1994) demonstrates that foregrounded text slows readers down, which is consistent with attention being grabbed. Do features of literary text, more specifically metaphors, improve memory as a result of being foregrounded? The present study investigated the effect of reading metaphoric phrases on reading time, memory accuracy, and decision times. We predicted that when a textual phrase was read as a metaphor, verbatim memory would be better retained than when that same phrase was read as …


The Association Between Mobile Phone Use And Suicidal Ideation, Brendan Wolf May 2023

The Association Between Mobile Phone Use And Suicidal Ideation, Brendan Wolf

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Research suggests that suicidal ideation can increase among people who feel that they do not belong (i.e. thwarted belongingness) and who perceive themselves to be a burden on others (i.e. perceived burdensomeness). However, it is not known whether these risk factors for suicidal ideation are moderated by smartphone use and social media use. I hypothesized that the association of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness would be stronger at higher levels of mobile phone use and social media use. Undergraduate student participants (N = 81) were incentivized via class credit to participate in a two-week longitudinal study. They completed questionnaires about …


Lineups, Showups, And Simultaneous Showups: A Replication And Extension Of The Red Box Study, Lana Dranow May 2023

Lineups, Showups, And Simultaneous Showups: A Replication And Extension Of The Red Box Study, Lana Dranow

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The reliability of eyewitness identification procedures and the following testimony in a court of law has been highly contested in recent decades. There are two main types of identification procedures most commonly used by law enforcement officers in the United States: lineups and showups. Prior research has indicated that lineups consistently yield the most accurate identifications due to the presence of fillers (plausible alternatives to a suspect) alongside the suspect when compared to showups. This is commonly attributed to two main theories- filler siphoning theory and diagnostic feature detection theory. In a study conducted by Colloff and Wixted (2020), researchers …


What Cognitive Processes Drive Attentional Bias, And How Does Stress Affect Them?, Colton L. Hunter May 2023

What Cognitive Processes Drive Attentional Bias, And How Does Stress Affect Them?, Colton L. Hunter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Attentional biases toward or away from emotionally evocative stimuli have been well documented and related to clinical outcomes such as social anxiety. Some work has suggested that stress modulates attentional biases, but there are a number of inconsistencies in this literature regarding the direction of that modulation, highlighting a need to examine moderators of that effect. Sex differences in stress effects could potentially explain this inconsistency, as acute stress can affect males and females differently. It is also possible that stress differentially influences multiple component processes underpinning attentional bias, but these processes have not been well character, and to date …


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 May 2023

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 …