Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

Slam Poetry: An Online Intervention For Treating Depression, Spencer J. Ruchti, Mercedes Becker, Cara Mckee, Austin Herron, Alex Swalling

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Given that depression is the “leading cause of disability worldwide,” and that less than 50% of people suffering from depression receive treatment, this study aims to provide support for a globally accessible depression treatment (WHO, 2012). The study conducted implemented an internet-based treatment for depression in which users were provided an opportunity to watch slam poetry videos related to mental health issues and write free responses regarding the content of the videos and their subjective experience of depression. Numerous studies provide support for the effectiveness of expressive writing, online mental health interventions, and slam poetry in particular for reducing symptoms …

Measuring Self-Reported Exercise, Motivation To Exercise, And Sexism In Women, Sydney C. Jensen

All Master's Theses

The harmfulness and pervasiveness of benevolent sexism is not a well disseminated issue, despite the belief that women are treated with equality in today’s society. The current study was designed to investigate whether exercise type and motivation to exercise would predict participants’ self-reported benevolent and hostile sexism, particularly in light of gender-related stereotypes about physical activity. A sample of 79 females completed an online survey that included questions about demographic characteristics, primary exercise type (i.e., cardiovascular exercise, weight-lifting, or hobbies), average number hours spent engaging in their primary exercise weekly, exercise motivations, and finally the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory which served …

The Influence Of Emotion On Memory For A Crime, Taylor Langley

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Researchers have reported errors in recall or recognition of witnessed events, accounting for the most common cause of false convictions of innocent people. Tiwari (2010) indicated that 25% of suspects who were identified in a line-up were actually innocent. Jurors are strongly influenced by eyewitness testimony and this can lead to false convictions. The validity of eyewitness identification is critical in cases in which it is used as evidence. In the current study we examined specific emotion states by inducing fear, surprise, and neutral moods. We hypothesized that participants in the Fear group would be least susceptible to the effects …

Caffeinated And Non-Caffeinated Alcohol Use And Indirect Aggression: The Impact Of Self-Regulation, Brynn E. Sheehan, Ashley N. Linden-Carmichael, Cathy Lau-Barraco

Psychology Faculty Publications

Research shows that heavier alcohol use is associated with physical aggression. Scant research has examined the way in which alcohol relates to other forms of aggression, such as indirect aggression (e.g., malicious humor, social exclusion). Given the possible negative consequences of indirect aggression and the limited evidence suggesting alcohol use can elicit indirectly aggressive responses, research is needed to further investigate the association between drinking behavior and indirect aggression. Additionally, specific alcoholic beverages, such as caffeinated alcoholic beverages (CABs; e.g., Red Bull and vodka), may potentiate aggression above the influence of typical use, and thus warrant examination with regard to …

“God Hates Fags”—The Use Of Religion As Justification For Prejudice Towards Homosexuals, Michelle S. Fabros

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Westboro Baptist Church and Phelps family are notorious for their signs proclaiming anti-homosexuality epithets such as “God Hates Fag,” and references to Biblical verses to revile homosexuality (e.g., Romans 1:24-27). Although the homonegativity bias that Westboro patrons and many traditional Christians express is often understood as being rooted in religion, I proposed the possibility that religion can be a justification rather than source of homonegativity. That is, although religion typically is seen as the source of prejudice towards LGBT+ people, I argued that this relationship might work in reverse. I examined under which conditions this “reverse” phenomena might occur …

Motivational Differences In Why Sports Fans Attend Minor League Baseball And Roller Derby Events, Anissa S. Pugh

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The aim of the current study was to examine the differences in sport fan motivation factors between mainstream (Minor League baseball) and atypical (roller derby) fans. Eighty-one fans (40 Minor League baseball and 41 roller derby) completed an 8 question demographic survey, a 26-item Sport Fan Motivation Scale, a 7-item Sport Spectator Identification Scale, and a 10-item Sport Fan Exploratory Curiosity Scale. It was believed that fans of Minor League baseball would be more motivated by the entertainment factor than roller derby fans. While roller derby fans would be more motivated by eustress, group affiliation and family factors at the …

An Examination Of Several Variables Influencing The Efficacy Of The Gateway In Street Sign Configuration On Motorist Yielding Behavior, Miles Bennett

Dissertations

This study contains five different experiments that examine the effects of several variables influencing the effectiveness of the In-Street sign and various In-Street sign configurations. Experiment 1 and 2 compared the effects of the Gateway configuration using R1-6 signs to blank fluorescent yellow-green signs arranged in the Gateway configuration on motorist yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks. The results showed that the blank signs produced an increase in yielding from 7% to 33%, while the addition of the message and symbols to the sign increased yielding to 78%. Experiment 1, 2, and 4 examined the effects of different configurations of the …

Age Differences In The Impact Of Emotional Cues On Subsequent Target Detection, Brandon Wade Coffey

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Emotional cues within the environment capture our attention and influence how we perceive our surroundings. Past research has shown that emotional cues presented before the detection of a perceptual gap can actually impair the perception of elementary visual features (e.g., the lack of detail creating a spatial gap) while simultaneously improving the perception of fast temporal features of vision (e.g., the rapid onset, offset, and re-emergence of a stimulus). This effect has been attributed to amygdalar enhancements of visual inputs conveying emotional features along magnocellular channels. The current study compared participants’ ability to detect spatial and temporal gaps in simple …

Racial Discrimination At The Crosswalk, Tara Goddard, Kimberly Barsamian Kahn, Arlie Adkins

TREC Project Briefs

A look at pedestrian fatality rates in the United States reveals that minorities are disproportionately represented. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2013 that in the first decade of this century, the fatality rates for black and Hispanic men were twice as high as they were for white men. Multi-disciplinary research has shown that racially biased behaviors are evident in many parts of society. Minorities experience differential outcomes in education, employment, health care, and criminal sentencing. Could racially biased treatment exist in transportation as well?

Implicit racial biases are subtle beliefs that individuals may hold beneath the …

The Role Of Attention In Retrieval Practice, Joshua W. Whiffen

Open Access Theses

Dividing attention during encoding is detrimental to learning. In contrast, dividing attention during retrieval appears to have very little effect on recall. However, very few studies have investigated whether dividing attention during initial recall has an impact on subsequent retrieval attempts. ^ Research on retrieval practice has clearly shown that retrieval is an active process that leads to important changes in memory that ultimately enhance long term retention. However, it has yet to be established exactly how retrieval practice derives its benefits. One possibility is that retrieval involves the reinstatement of temporal context, which leads to the updating or encoding …

The Motivation To Express Prejudice, Patrick S. Forscher, William T.L. Cox, Nicholas Graetz, Patricia G. Devine

Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g., hate speech, hate crimes) and experimental findings (e.g., Plant & Devine, 2001; 2009) suggest that some expressions of prejudice are intentional. These phenomena and findings are difficult to explain solely from the motivations to respond without prejudice. We argue that some people are motivated to express prejudice, and we develop the motivation to express prejudice (MP) scale to measure this motivation. In seven studies …

Does Humor Promote Cognitive Flexibility By Way Of Its Affective And Cognitive Components? : A Prospective Test, Stuart Jenkins Daman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Two studies tested hypotheses regarding the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility. Two components of humor are argued to promote cognitive flexibility. First, the positive emotion associated with humor may enhance cognitive flexibility. Second, the processing of humor may exercise complex cognitive processing, thus making similar processing more efficient on subsequent tasks. Participants in Experiment 1 read humorous sentences or one of two types of non-humorous sentences. Participants in Experiment 2 viewed captioned images that varied in the presence of positivity and incongruity. Results of both studies do not support the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility, nor do they …

Peer Tutoring To Teach Children To Seek Help When Lost, Andrew J. Arellano

All Master's Theses

There are many programs that are designed to teach children safety skills. Skills such as gun safety, first aid, and abduction prevention have all been taught using a method called Behavioral Skills Training (BST). However, BST only teaches a few children at a time and is often taught by an expert. This study aimed to test whether young children (5 year olds) can learn from older peer trainers (11 & 12 year olds) who have been taught to use BST. The safety skill targeted for the current study was the behavior of seeking help when lost in a store because …

East Asian Low Marriage And Birth Rates: The Role Of Social Status Affordance In Marriage And Childbearing Behavior, Jose C. Yong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Although declines in marriage and birth rates are generally associated with industrialization and economic advancement, countries with a dominantly East Asian cultural population exhibit the lowest marriage and birth rates in the developed world. This study aims to identify and verify a new latent construct, social status affordance, as an underlying account for the differences in long-term mating outcomes (i.e., marriage and childbearing) between developed East Asian countries and other developed countries. Drawing on an understanding of the specific East Asian cultural values of harmony and deference and, subsequently, the importance of social status conferred by educational and occupational prestige …

A Transdiagnostic Social Skills Intervention: Using A Structured Story To Teach Children How To Ask A Friend To Play, Elizabeth Santy

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

An (independent samples comparison) controlled study was conducted to assess the efficacy of a novel approach to social skills training for children in a local socialization group at Knippenberg, Patterson & Associates (KPA). The treatment condition involved the combination of a Structured Story (i.e., novel bibliotherapy technique for children with social skills deficits), and a behavioral rehearsal (or role-play) segment, where the children practiced the target social skill featured in the Structure Story. The control group did not receive the Structured Story nor the behavioral rehearsal. Children in both groups engaged in ten-minutes of free play that was videorecorded for …

A Comparison Of Risk-Taking Measures, Brittany Lang

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Risk-taking is an important construct that correlates with many areas of study such as substance abuse, psychological disorders, life-span changes and military involvement. As risk- taking is such a broadly defined construct, there are many different means used to measure it. Ironically, there has never been a study done to see whether or not these measures are looking at the same type of risk-taking. Our study investigated the differences and similarities in three risk- taking measures, the Balloon Analogue Risk-Task (BART), the TCU Self-Rating Form and the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale (DOSPERT). We analyzed the results within each participant to see …

Tall Tales: Editing Autobiographical Memories, Holly Elizabeth Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The impact of exaggerating when sharing an autobiographical memory with another person was investigated. Literature indicates that sharing an autobiographical memory serves a social function. However no research has investigated the impact that exaggerating when sharing specific memories has on this function. Research on lying suggests that deviating from the truth would cause the listener to like the speaker less. Research on what makes a good story indicates deviating from the truth could enhance the social benefits of sharing specific autobiographical memories by increasing the quality of the story. In Study 1, participants read scenarios of a person telling a …

Bullying: Prevention/ Intervention Strategies With High School Students, Chloe Blau

Senior Honors Projects

Bullying has been a prevalent issue within the public and private school systems for as long as they have existed. There have always been students who were victimized for various reasons, or for no reason at all, but this generation has become much more vicious when it comes to the lengths to which they will go to hurt someone. Many methods have been used in an attempt to create both prevention and intervention plans for these horrible acts, but it is quite difficult to change a person’s behavior. So what if instead of trying to alter the mind of the …

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 …

Why Do Narcissists Disregard Social-Etiquette Norms? A Test Of Two Explanations For Why Narcissism Relates To Offensive-Language Use, John Milton Adams, Dan Florell, K. Alex Burton, William Hart

Psychology Faculty and Staff Research

Narcissists often fail to abide by norms for polite social conduct, but why? The current study addressed this issue by exploring reasons why narcissists use more offensive language (i.e., profanity) than non-narcissists. In this study, 602 participants completed a survey in which they responded on a measure of trait narcissism, rated several offensive words on the degree to which the words were attention-grabbing and offensive, and then indicated how frequently they used the words. Consistent with the idea that narcissists use offensive language to gain attention, narcissists were incrementally more likely to use offensive language if they perceived such language …

Public And Private Goal Commitment : Self-Control And Choice, Rebekah L. Layton

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Public precommitment to a goal may drive goal achievement. This work explores the effects of public precommitment on goal achievement using the limited-resource model of self-control. Goal commitment which alters future choices available by inflicting a self-imposed cost for giving up is called precommitment. Public commitment to a goal can be viewed as precommitment by imposing a social cost for failure (e.g., anticipated embarrassment). This may facilitate goal pursuit through two processes: First, by shifting the cost earlier in the process via the structural route in which goal-setting processes may deplete self-control resources initially (Studies 1 and 2), while improving …

Child-Parent Attachment And The Assessment Of Self, Jin Qu

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Jin Qu on July 10, 2013.

Depression, Social Anxiety, And Attachment As Predictors Of The Use And Quality Of Cyber Communication, Stefan E. Latulip

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

This study examined the influence of depression symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and adult attachment style on the use and the perceptions of the quality of cyber communications with close friends, romantic partners, and family members. One hundred thirty-five individuals completed an initial survey, with sixty five of the original group completing a follow-up survey five weeks later. Results indicated that anxious attachment was associated with a greater reported usage of social networking sites, whereas avoidant attachment predicted less instant message use over time. Depression symptoms and avoidant attachment were generally associated with perceptions of higher negativity and lower positivity with …

The Effectiveness Of A Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program That Offer Special Benefits For Pregnant And Parenting Teens: A Qualitative Study, Marsha Brown

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Teen pregnancy continues to be a problem for families, educators, health care professionals, and the government. Teenagers are not afforded the opportunity to learn or receive reinforcement on God's laws on abstaining from premarital sex because religious education is not allowed in the public school system. This increase has led to the creation of the Teenage Parenting Center (TAPP), located in southwest Georgia. TAPP is one of 64 schools in a school district that offers special benefits for pregnant and parenting teens. This qualitative case study used a phenomenological approach to explore the experience of eight former attendees of the …

Assessing The Conceptual Equivalence Of Measure Of Suppression In Culturally Diverse Samples, Amanda Louise Haboush

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In Western populations, some emotion regulation strategies have been associated with positive interpersonal abilities and mental health outcomes, while others, such as suppression, have been associated with negative physical and mental health outcomes (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1997; Esterling, Antoni, Kumar, & Schneiderman, 1993; Gross & Muñoz, 1995; Kovacs, Joormann, & Gotlib, 2008). However, Butler, Lee, & Gross (2007) have demonstrated that the negative effects of suppression do not occur in some Eastern cultures. This inconsistency may be due to a lack of measurement equivalence across cultures.

To examine suppression in other cultural groups, researchers often adapt existing measures that …

Effects Of Societal Norm Manipulation And Presentation Order On Perceived Relationship Satisfaction, Tina Rene Negley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While many studies have examined the effects of persuasion on attitudes, few studies have focused on using norms to change perceived satisfaction. This study addressed the need for literature assessing the effects of societal norms on perceived relationship satisfaction. Participants in this study were randomly provided with one of two surveys: one with a set of normative statements regarding an "average couple" that were over-exaggerated, the other with understated norms. Analyses looked to identify whether individuals presented with the high norms were more likely to rate their relationship satisfaction lower, after controlling for demographic and personality characteristics. Hierarchical regression revealed …

Emotion, Community Development, And The Physical Environment: An Experimental Investigation Of Measurements, George E. Boone

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

A wide range of research fields have studied how emotions and behavior are affected by the physical environment. This gestalt theorist approach of experimental research as well seeks to measure emotion (using the valence-arousal scale) and micro-scale community development interactions when weighted physical environment factors are adjusted. Community development (CD) interactions at the micro-scale have received but slight attention from scholars in the CD research field and this study aims partially to investigate developing objective measures from social observations. CD interactions from recordings along with self-reported emotion through surveys in four quasi-experimental groups (where the environments were constructed based on …

You Get What You Deserve : The Relationship Between Injustice And The Consequences Of Social Exclusion, Heather A. Pease

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this current research I sought to answer two questions; 1) Do individuals have the capacity to recognize when they are being justly or unjustly socially excluded or conversely socially included? 2) Do the consequences of just and unjust social exclusion or social inclusion vary? In efforts to address these questions, I used perceptions of burden (i.e., participant’s overall contribution to a group task) to manipulate the perceived fairness of one’s inclusionary status to see how this affects the participants’ emotional and behavioral reactions.

In Study 1, participants engaged in an imaginary group interaction in which they were burdensome (performing …

Does Botox Buffer The Negative Effects Of Social Rejection?: A Test Of The Facial Feedback Hypothesis, Vicki Sharif

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Can a common facial cosmetic procedure buffer against the negative impact of adverse social interactions? This pilot tested the hypothesis that an injection of botulinum toxin (Botox) to the corrugator supercilii muscles used in anger, compared to a placebo injection to the same location, will reduce the impact of social rejection on mood, self-esteem, control, meaningful existence, and aggression. Freezing facial musculature was hypothesized to alter the first physical signal of negative emotional reactions, thereby reducing the impact of social rejection on distress and aggression. This was the first study using Botox to examine the effects of reduced facial feedback …

Processing Angry And Happy Faces: The Effect Of Perceptual Load And Familiarity, Peter D. Petronio

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science & Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Peter D. Petronio in July of 2012.