Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

Individual Differences And Ecological Validity Of Emotion Regulation In Response To Sadness, Colin M. Bosma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of research on emotion regulation processes has been restricted to controlled laboratory settingsthat use experimental paradigms to investigate short-term outcomes (Berking & Wupperman, 2012). A true understanding of emotion regulation requires an unobtrusive, ecologically valid assessment of the construct as it naturally unfolds in the environment. Digital phenotyping, or moment-by-moment quantification of individual-level human behavior using data from smartphone sensors (Torous & Onnela, 2016), is a novel method for evaluating human behavior in naturalistic settings. The present project is the first to implement digital phenotyping in the investigation of emotion regulation.

The central aim of the study was …

Investigating Affective Pathways For The Influence Of Justification On Self-Control, Morgan Hill

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

People struggle with temptation in their everyday lives. Research often attributes failures in self-regulation to overwhelming and uncontrollable impulses. However, research also supports the idea that cognitive factors (e.g., justification) can license tempting behavior and allow individuals to behave in ways that run counter to their long-term goals. In addition, it is likely that affect plays a role in justification-based self-control failure. The current set of three studies investigated the role of affect in justification-based self-control failure. Study 1 tested the prediction that recall of past successes would result in increased positive affect. Study 2 assessed whether justification results in …

Childhood Development: How The Fine And Performing Arts Enhance Neurological, Social, And Academic Traits, Katherine Rowe

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Abstract

Childhood development has always been a major topic when studying psychology and biology. This makes sense because the brain develops from the time a child is conceived to the time that child has reached around the age of twenty-seven. Doctors, psychologists, and sociologists look at numerous things when studying childhood development. However, how common is it for researchers to study how the fine and performing arts affect childhood development? Sociologists tend to be extremely open and mindful of all aspects of things such as culture, sexuality, religion, and even age. By taking a sociological standpoint when studying the arts …

Binocular Rivalry Of Emotional Expressions, Daniel Stephen Lumian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A central debate in defining emotional space is whether emotions are organized categorically (e.g., fear, happy, disgust) or continuously (i.e., along the independent dimensions of valence and arousal). Emotional facial expressions are one tool often leveraged in trying to define emotional space. Faces are rich sources of social and emotional information. Faces, like emotions, can be organized in either categorical (e.g., happy, sad) or continuous (e.g., open-closed) ways. Therefore, understanding the relatedness of emotional facial expressions to each other may shed light on the underlying structure of emotions. Binocular rivalry (BR) is a tool which can be leveraged to measure …

The Influence Of Discrete Emotional States On Preferential Choice, Andrea M. Cataldo

Masters Theses

Past research has shown that emotion affects preferential choice outcomes. The goal of the present study was to further research on emotion and preferential choice by using mathematical modeling to investigate the effects of specific dimensions of emotion on the underlying mechanisms of preferential choice. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether the concurrent effects of positive-negative valence and situational certainty on attention and information accumulation threshold, respectively, would influence the magnitude of the similarity effect, a robust phenomenon in preferential choice. Participants first underwent either an Anger (negative and certain), Fear (negative and uncertain), or no (Control) emotion manipulation. All …

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

Electronic Theses and 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 …

Color Me, Please: How Color-Emotion Pairs Affect Our Perceptions, Russell T. Rogers

Honors College Theses

Color-emotion pairings are part of everyday experience, and they develop in early childhood. Emotional experiences are typically much stronger when emotional stimuli (e.g., pictures or videos) are paired with sensory stimuli (e.g., sights or sounds). Since the presence of these sensory stimuli seems to heighten the emotional experience of emotion-evoking visual stimuli, it should be the case that such pairings will allow the manipulation of color-emotion pairings through the presence of a color (a visual stimulus) during an emotional situation (such as watching a video). In this study (N = 44), we paired both a positive and negative video …

The Influence Of Anger On Implicit Biases, Katherine Reiter

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Interpretation of ambiguous information is influenced by anxious (Richards, Reynolds, & French, 1992) and depressive (Wisco, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2010) symptoms. Emotion regulation strategies, and in particular, cognitive reappraisal has shown to be effective at reducing feelings of distress (Denson, Grisham, & Moulds, 2011). The current study seeks to understand the extent that emotion regulation can influence interpretation bias, thoughts and behaviors. In the current study, participants underwent both Angry and Neutral mood inductions. For each mood condition, participants were instructed to cognitively reappraise and attend to their emotions. Participants rated the degree of negative affect they experienced, and completed 6 …

The Automaticity Of Emotion V. Emotion-Laden Word Processing : Findings From Unmasked And Masked Priming Approaches, Stephanie Ann Kazanas

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A lexical decision task (LDT) was used to determine if there are differences between emotion word types when they are processed, both explicitly (Experiment 1) and implicitly (Experiment 2). For example, prime-target word pairs contained either emotion (e.g., love, fear, anxious) or emotion-laden (e.g., puppy, chocolate, hospital) words. Previous experiments within this area of research have investigated how emotionality, concreteness, and abstractness affect word processing (Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999). As Bleasdale (1987) first argued, abstract words were, in many ways, different from concrete words. Research has continued along this vein, confirming that emotion words are …

Mood And Creativity: The Mediating Role Of Attention, Viktoria Tidikis

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Within literature there are two opposing views regarding the role of emotions in the creative process. The most commonly held view contends that positive emotions enhance creativity, while negative emotions stifle it; yet, some studies show an opposite trend. To help resolve this conundrum, this research examined the mediating effect of attention on the relationship between mood and creativity. The results showed that positive deactivating and negative activating emotions led to broader attention, while positive activating and negative deactivating emotions caused narrowing of attention. Furthermore, the creative process is not uniform in its requirements of attentional breadth; some creative tasks …

Introversion, Extraversion, And Humor, Tanna Marlane Boucher

All Master's Theses

The differences in behavioral expression of humor for introverts and extroverts was investigated, as well as the behavioral expression of humor and humor ratings of video clips containing sound versus those with no sound. Subjects were videotaped as they watched humorous clips in a room alone. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between introverts and extroverts in terms of their behavioral expression of humor. These findings are consistent with the literature on social aspects of humor in that people tend to express more humor in social groups than when alone. However, subjects did show significantly more behavioral …