Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

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 …

Humor Improves Women’S But Impairs Men’S Iowa Gambling Task Performance, Jorge Flores‑Torres, Lydia Gómez‑Pérez, Kateri Mcrae, Vladimir López, Ivan Rubio, Eugenio Rodriguez

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study, we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model (EVM) were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean …

Technical Report 2019-01: Pupil Labs Eye Tracking User Guide, Joan D. Gannon, Augustine Ubah, Chris Dancy

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Hypervigilance In A Normative Population, Karly Weinreb

Theses and Dissertations

Hypervigilance is conceptualized as a symptom of trauma-related disorders, however it can also occur in a normative population. To distinguish normative hypervigilance from trauma-related hypervigilance, 372 participants (123 trauma-exposed and 249 non-trauma-exposed) completed a questionnaire assessing hypervigilance in contexts. Trauma-exposed participants reported greater levels of hypervigilance in 3 contexts.

Better With Science: Strengthening Patron Learning, Heather Simmons, Alyson Drake, Joseph Lawson

Presentations

A baseline understanding of cognitive theory and educational psychology concepts is critical to successful student learning. With librarians in all settings providing more teaching and training than ever, designing educational experiences with these concepts in mind will result in greater retention and understanding for their patrons. This program will discuss five important ideas from cognitive learning science and give examples of how librarians and other information professionals can incorporate those theories into their instructional offerings. Participants will then work in groups to brainstorm ways various theories can be applied as they design or restructure their own instructional programs.

Takeaways:

1) …

Decisions, Decisions: Review Of Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking By Richard E. Nisbett, Anne Kelly

Numeracy

Richard Nisbett. 2015. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). 336 pp. ISBN: 9780374536244.

Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett provides help in identifying and overcoming faulty cognitive strategies and replacing them with more accurate heuristics. To do so, Nisbett draws from statistics, correlation, experiments, differences in Western and Eastern thought, and, especially, social influence.

“A” For Effort: Rewarding Effortful Retrieval Attempts Improves Learning From General Knowledge Errors In Women, Damon Abraham, Kateri Mcrae, Jennifer A. Mangels

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Previous research has shown that the prospect of attaining a reward can promote task-engagement, up-regulate attention toward reward-relevant information, and facilitate enhanced encoding of new information into declarative memory. However, past research on reward-based enhancement of declarative memory has focused primarily on paradigms in which rewards are contingent upon accurate responses. Yet, findings from test-enhanced learning show that making errors can also be useful for learning if those errors represent effortful retrieval attempts and are followed by corrective feedback. Here, we used a challenging general knowledge task to examine the effects of explicitly rewarding retrieval effort, defined as a semantically …

"A Bias Steam-Ironed Into Women's Lives": A Conversation With Author Phyllis Chesler About Women And Madness, 47 Years After Publication, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A conversation with Phyllis Chesler about Women and Madness, 47 years after publication, conducted by Jody Raphael. Chesler discusses her motive for writing Women and Madness and its early reception. She reflects on changes and lack of changes in views and treatment of women by society and the mental health system in the years since its publication. Her feminist analysis now includes Islamic fundamentalism, prostitution, and surrogacy, which are not always politically correct views among feminists today.

It Is In The Cards: An Analysis Of Greeting Card Selection Through Identity And Personality, Emily Topilow

Honors Projects

In this exploratory study, personal and social identity were analyzed for their effect on how consumers choose greeting cards. Factors, including personality, relationships, and identity will be qualitatively analyzed to understand people’s buying habits. Certain factors, including gender, personality, relationships, type of card, and frequency of receiving and giving cards, will be qualitatively analyzed for frequency. The two theories analyzed were the Social Identity Theory (SIT) and the Identity Theory (IT).

525 college-aged students were surveyed to examine their purchasing habits of greeting cards. The results showed that the identity of the card giver and the identity of the card …

Measuring Neural Time Series Data In A Sensory Deprivation Tank, Jackson Gregory, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz, Amir Raz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

We are interested in studying the neurological and physiological effects of the float pod, also known as REST therapy, or sensory deprivation tank. Float pods rely on the concept of depriving most senses (from sound and light to temperature and proprioception) in a pool filled with buoyant salt water at body temperature. While float pods are most commonly used in spa environments, we intend to look at the potential benefits of floating under the empirical lens. In this study, we aim to measure neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). We intend to look at the different levels of relaxation and the …

The Limits Of Sociality, Johnna B. Mcgovern

Theses

There is a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy of emphasizing the capacity for reflection in theories about humans’ characteristic nature. In Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, John Doris attempts to shift the focus to an emphasis on human sociality. Particularly, Doris argues that sociality, both implicitly and in the form of collaborative reasoning, is what makes humans best equipped for moral improvement. This collaborativism possesses a defining role in his account of agency and responsibility. This thesis attempts to gain an understanding of how sociality affects moral behavior and to argue that it is not conducive to agency …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

Turning Down The Heat: Neural Mechanisms Of Cognitive Control For Inhibiting Task-Irrelevant Emotional Information During Adolescence, Marie T. Banich, Harry R. Smolker, Hannah R. Snyder, Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock, Detre A. Godinez, Tor D. Wager, Benjamin L. Hankin

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

One major question in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control is whether prefrontal regions contribute to control by upregulating the processing of task-relevant material or by downregulating the processing of task-irrelevant material. Here we take a unique approach to addressing this question by using multi-voxel pattern analysis, which allowed us to determine the degree to which each of the task-relevant and task-irrelevant dimensions of a stimulus are being processed in posterior cortex on a trial-by-trial basis. In our study, adolescent participants performed an emotion word – emotional face Stroop task requiring them to determine the emotional valence (positive, negative) of …

Genome-Wide Association Scan Identifies New Variants Associated With A Cognitive Predictor Of Dyslexia, Alessandro Gialluisi, Till F. M. Andlauer, Nazanin Mirza-Schreiber, Kristina Moll, Jessica Becker, Per Hoffmann, Kerstin U. Ludwig, Darina Czamara, Beate St Pourcain, William Brandler, Ferenc Honbolygó, Dénes Tóth, Valéria Csépe, Guillaume Huguet, Andrew P. Morris, Jacqueline Hulslander, Erik G. Willcutt, John C. Defries, Richard K. Olson, Shelley D. Smith, Bruce F. Pennington, Anniek Vaessen, Urs Maurer, Heikki Lyytinen, Myriam Peyrard-Janvid, Paavo H. T. Leppänen, Daniel Brandeis, Milene Bonte, John F. Stein, Joel B. Talcott, Fabien Fauchereau, Arndt Wilcke, Clyde Francks, Thomas Bourgeron, Anthony P. Monaco, Franck Ramus, Karin Landerl, Juha Kere, Thomas S. Scerri, Silvia Paracchini, Simon E. Fisher, Johannes Schumacher, Markus M. Nöthen, Bertram Müller-Myhsok, Gerd Schulte-Körne

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapid naming, and phonology. To investigate the genetic basis of DD, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of these skills within one of the largest studies available, including nine cohorts of reading-impaired and typically developing children of European ancestry (N = 2562–3468). We observed a genome-wide significant effect (p < 1 × 10−8) on rapid automatized naming of letters (RANlet) for variants on 18q12.2, within MIR924HG (micro-RNA …

Six Of One, Une Demi-Douzaine De L’Autre: Detecting Cross-Language Code-Switching In A Continuous Narrative, Melissa Kadish

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study examined how cross-language code-switching is processed and perceived. The following experiment compared how long English-French bilinguals, English monolinguals, and English-speaking French-language-learners took to detect instances of French/English code-switching in a semantically-rich narrative. Bilinguals displayed shorter change-detection response latencies than language learners and monolinguals, but the latter two groups did not significantly differ. These results provide insight into how the observed cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may develop, and offer support for the multi-language lexical processing theory of language interference. This study also addresses potential sociocultural origins of the observed language-level differences in code-switching perception by examining …

A Phenomenological Study Of High-Performance Teachers' Happiness At School And Home, Sarah Abuaqel

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This research study is focused on understanding the phenomenology of happiness of High Performing Teachers (HPT) working in an elementary school located in a Midwest City. The purpose of the study was to understand positive and negative emotions of HPT, through their experiences at work and home. Qualitative methodology through in-depth interviews was employed for this study. Tomkins' affect theory of happiness (ATH), was used to assess and explore positive and negative emotions of participants of the study. In this study a purposeful sample of 11 participants that work in elementary school located in a Midwest City, participated in in-depth, …

Exploring Locus Of Control In Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha Lightning, Danielle Polage

All Master's Theses

Working with four Washington State county jails to administer surveys to currently incarcerated inmates, we investigated locus of control and beliefs in the likelihood of continued legal involvement as possible antecedents to criminal recidivism. The surveys examined whether there was any connection between legal involvement frequency and the externalization of locus of control. We investigated external locus of control with specific respect to involvement with the law, the prospect of future incarceration, and feelings concerning the overall cause of original and/or sustained legal involvement utilizing the Revised Causal Dimension Scale (McAuley, Duncan, & Russell, 1992). We identified statistically significant interactions …

Cross-Language Activation And Integration Of Concepts In Text Passages, Karly Meillyn Schleicher

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Learning from text requires the ability to efficiently activate and retrieve relevant concepts from long-term memory and connect these with new information that is being presented in the text. It is assumed that memory representations built from text can be influenced by both surface level information (i.e., word forms), or deeper, conceptual level information. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of surface level features (i.e., language) influence memory representations developed from text. By recruiting Spanish-English bilinguals, the present study investigated how surface level features from a reader's two lexicons influences the activation and integration of …

Anxiety Rates In Cal Poly Students: Short Documentary And Literature Review On Prevalence, Causes And Treatment, Anabelle M. Carpenter

Journalism

Anxiety is a leading mental health disorder at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Over 50% of students who visit the counseling reported feeling anxiety, and 14.8% of students met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety disorder during the 2016-2017 school year. Nationally, anxiety rates among college students have increased almost 16% from 2007- 2017 (LeViness, Bershad & Gorman, 2017). This project is comprised of two parts: a short, documentary style video on anxiety at Cal Poly, as well as a literature review. The video is a series of interviews from Cal Poly students who suffer from anxiety, and a …

Young Authoritarians? Trends And Individual Differences In Preschoolers' Perceptions Of Adult Authority, Ava Alexander

Honors Projects

Although traditional stage theories (e.g., Piaget, 1965) postulate that preschool age children are guided entirely by punishment avoidance and absolute deference to authority, more recent research suggests that their concepts of adult authority are complex and vary based on social cognitive domain and the content of the commands (e.g., Tisak, 1986). Also, although past studies have shown that the majority of children will reject adult authority in certain contexts, much individual variation between children has been observed (e.g., Laupa, 1994). The current study expanded upon past research by exposing children to multiple typical and atypical commands across domains, while also …

Motivational Valence Alters Memory Formation Without Altering Exploration Of A Real-Life Spatial Environment, Kimberly S. Chiew, Jordan Hashemi, Lee K. Gans, Laura Lerebours, Nathaniel J. Clement, Mai-Anh T. Vu, Guillermo Sapiro, Nicole E. Heller, R. Alison Adcock

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Volitional exploration and learning are key to adaptive behavior, yet their characterization remains a complex problem for cognitive science. Exploration has been posited as a mechanism by which motivation promotes memory, but this relationship is not well-understood, in part because novel stimuli that motivate exploration also reliably elicit changes in neuromodulatory brain systems that directly alter memory formation, via effects on neural plasticity. To deconfound interrelationships between motivation, exploration, and memory formation we manipulated motivational state prior to entering a spatial context, measured exploratory responses to the context and novel stimuli within it, and then examined motivation and exploration as …

Vmpfc Activation During A Stressor Predicts Positive Emotions During Stress Recovery, Xi Yang, Katelyn M. Garcia, Youngkyoo Jung, Christopher T. Whitlow, Kateri Mcrae, Christian E. Waugh

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Despite accruing evidence showing that positive emotions facilitate stress recovery, the neural basis for this effect remains unclear. To identify the underlying mechanism, we compared stress recovery for people reflecting on a stressor while in a positive emotional context with that for people in a neutral context. While blood–oxygen-level dependent data were being collected, participants (N = 43) performed a stressful anagram task, which was followed by a recovery period during which they reflected on the stressor while watching a positive or neutral video. Participants also reported positive and negative emotions throughout the task as well as retrospective thoughts …

Memory Of Words: A Categorization Task, Paulina Maxim

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Through the years, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm has demonstrated to be a useful method of observing false memories from semantically related word lists. The present study was conducted fully online and measured memory performance dependent on categorization of words by using groups, as well as dragging words across the page as a form of interaction. In a 2 (Categorized, Non-Categorized) x 2 (Interactive, Non-Interactive) between-subject factorial experiment, 56 undergraduate students were shown 18 different lists of 15 associative words to be studied, one list at a time. Participants were given a free recall test immediately after studying each individual list. Participants …

Is Viewing A Painting Really Like Reading? An Investigation Of Trans-Symbolic Comprehension Processes, Christian C. Steciuch

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Humans form mental models of the world around them. A large body of research has outlined these mental processes for comprehending texts, yet less work has been conducted in the world of comprehending artworks. The recent Trans-Symbolic Comprehension (TSC) Framework has posited that there are shared comprehension processes between the domains of text and artwork. The current study tested this claim by having individuals think-aloud while viewing paintings and reading texts. Think-aloud protocols were then parsed and coded for six distinct mental processes that the TSC framework claims are required for comprehension across symbol systems. It was hypothesized that individuals …

Individual Ability To Learn A Parallel Processing Technique And Musical Aptitude., Daniel Warren Emmett

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Correlations between music training and psychosocial skills, sensory abilities, and aspects of intelligence, are sorted into primary or secondary effects. Correlations between these areas of human development and music training lack support pertaining to the underlying cognitive networks that these processes rely on. Thus, this study was based on the work of Baddeley and Hitch's model of working memory, and implemented a test of parallel processing (Articulatory Suppression Task, AST), which measures proficiency of working memory systems. Individual differences therein, were compared with music aptitude. Participants were gathered throughout urban and rural regions of the state of Oregon. Half the …

An Analysis Of The Ego-Depletion Effects Of Emotion Versus Attention Draining Tasks: Even Emotionally Arousing Depletion Tasks Do Not Show An Ego-Depletion Effect, Savannah Binion

Senior Independent Study Theses

The theory of ego-depletion has come under intense scrutiny within the past few years. Beginning around 2010, researchers conducted meta-analyses and large replication studies that have investigated this topic, and found a wide range of evidence for and against the existence of an ego-depletion effect. Although the goal has been to determine whether this effect exists or not, the research has proved that the answer may be more complicated than that. The purpose of the current research was to examine the different theories about self-control, and to test two specific depleting tasks against a control group. The depleting tasks were …

Psychological Ways Of Expressing Appreciations, Experiences, Thanks And Blessings In The Society, Iwasan D. Kejawa Ed.D

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

ABSTRACT: Research has shown that one of the avenues to make aware of once experiences, appreciations and blessings is through writing a gratitude journal or memoir. By journalizing our thought by hands or electronically, it may help us focus them, according to psychologist Robert Emmons, who says that he does this routinely to remind himself; it makes apple of time to understand the meaning and importance of people and events. It has been found that one should go for a depth in writing rather than breadth, because this will help one to enjoy what one appreciates, and what to keep …

Enrichment Of Putatively Damaging Rare Variants In The Dyx2 Locus And The Reading-Related Genes Ccdc136 And Flnc, Andrew K. Adams, Shelley D. Smith, Dongnhu T. Truong, Erik G. Willcutt, Richard K. Olson, John C. Defries, Bruce F. Pennington, Jeffrey R. Gruen

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Eleven loci with prior evidence for association with reading and language phenotypes were sequenced in 96 unrelated subjects with significant impairment in reading performance drawn from the Colorado Learning Disability Research Center collection. Out of 148 total individual missense variants identified, the chromosome 7 genes CCDC136 and FLNC contained 19. In addition, a region corresponding to the well-known DYX2 locus for RD contained 74 missense variants. Both allele sets were filtered for a minor allele frequency ≤0.01 and high Polyphen-2 scores. To determine if observations of these alleles are occurring more frequently in our cases than expected by chance in …

General And Emotion-Specific Alterations To Cognitive Control In Women With A History Of Childhood Abuse, Kristen L. Mackiewicz Seghete, Roselinde H. Kaiser, Anne P. Deprince, Marie T. Banich

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Background

Although limited, the literature suggests alterations in activation of cognitive control regions in adults and adolescents with a history of childhood abuse. The current study examined whether such alterations are increased in the face of emotionally-distracting as compared to emotionally neutral information, and whether such alterations occur in brain regions that exert cognitive control in a more top-down sustained manner or a more bottom-up transient manner.

Methods

Participants were young adult women (ages 23–30): one group with a history of childhood physical or sexual abuse (N = 15) and one with no trauma exposure (N = 17), as assessed …

Psychological Determinants Of Physical Activity Across The Life Course: A "Determinants Of Diet And Physical Activity" (Dedipac) Umbrella Systematic Literature Review, Cristina Cortis, Anna Puggina, Caterina Pesce, Katina Aleksovska, Christoph Buck, Con Burns, Greet Cardon, Angela Carlin, Chantal Simon, Donatella Ciarapica, Giancarlo Condello, Tara Coppinger, Sara D’Haese, Marieke De Craemer, Andrea Di Blasio, Sylvia Hansen, Licia Iacoviello, Johann Issartel, Pascal Izzicupo, Lina Jaeschke, Martina Kanning, Aileen Kennedy, Fiona Chun Man Ling, Agnes Luzak, Giorgio Napolitano, Julie Anne Nazare, Grainne O’Donoghue, Camille Perchoux, Tobias Pischon, Angela Polito, Alessandra Sannella, Holger Schulz

Publications

Low levels of physical activity (PA) are reported to contribute to the occurrence of non-communicable diseases over the life course. Although psychological factors have been identified as an important category concerning PA behavior, knowledge on psychological determinants of PA is still inconclusive. Therefore, the aim of this umbrella systematic literature review (SLR) was to summarize and synthesize the scientific evidence on psychological determinants of PA behavior across the life course. A systematic online search was conducted on MEDLINE, ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and SPORTDiscus databases. The search was limited to studies published in English from January 2004 to April …