Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

Recognition Training For Faces Across Age Gaps, William Blake Erickson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Face recognition is a problem that has theoretical and applied value. However, the fact of facial aging is rarely addressed in research and unmentioned in the major theories of face recognition. Facial aging also has ramifications for missing persons and fugitive cases, confounding attempts by law enforcement to recover these people whose last known images are years or decades out of date. This dissertation reports three studies aimed at measuring baseline age-gap recognition ability and testing various training regimens designed to increase accuracy rates for this unique kind of recognition task.

Understanding Posttraumatic Stress And Academic Achievement: Exploring Attentional Control, Self-Efficacy, And Coping Among College Students, Ashley M. Cantrell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The present study examined differences in attentional control, attentional control self-efficacy, and coping as self-regulatory mechanisms among students with varying grade point averages (GPA) who experience posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Subjects included 58 college students from one large comprehensive university in the Mid-South who met the criteria for diagnosis of PTSS based on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R). Three groups were created based on college GPA and graduation requirements at the university (at-risk for graduation, on-track for graduation, and ontrack for graduating with honors). Participants completed a survey that included demographics and measures of PTSS, attentional control, attentional control …

Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The feature positive effect (FPE) is a phenomenon in discrimination learning by which learning occurs more quickly when the presence (Feature positive; FP), rather than absence (Feature negative; FN) of a stimulus indicates a response should be made. Although the FPE has been extensively corroborated, a reversal, or feature negative effect (FNE), has been found when a target stimulus comes from a smaller set of stimuli (Fiedler, Eckert, & Poysiak, 1988). Age differences in FP and FN learning indicate that older adults perform more poorly than young adults on both FP and FN tasks, and are likely related to decline …

Ua66 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Newsletter, Cheryl Stevens, Dean

Ogden College of Science & Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

The Development Of Attention To Dynamic Facial Emotions, Alison Heck, Alyson Hock, Hannah White, Rachel Jubran, Ramesh Bhatt

Psychology Faculty Works

Appropriate processing of emotions is paramount for successful social functioning. Adults’ enhanced attention to negative emotions such as fear is thought to be a critical aspect of this adaptive functioning. Prior studies indicate that increased attention to fear relative to positive or neutral emotions begins at around 7 months of age, and it has been suggested that this negativity bias is related to self-locomotion. However, these studies mostly used static faces, potentially limiting information available to the infants. In the current study, 3.5-month-olds (n = 24) and 5-month-olds (n = 24) were exposed to dynamic faces expressing fear, happy, or …

Self-Regulation In Preschoolers: Validity Of Hot And Cool Tasks As Predictive Measures Of Academic And Socio-Emotional Aspects Of School Readiness, Berenice Anaya

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Extensive research on the development of self-regulation has demonstrated that better executive functioning and effortful control during the preschool years are associated with greater kindergarten and early school achievement. Recent findings suggest that self-regulation tasks differ in their assessment of “hot” and “cool” regulation, how these processes map onto effortful control and executive functioning, and may predict school readiness. However, only a few studies have examined the validity of hot and cool regulation tasks (Allan & Lonigan, 2014; Di Norcia, Pecora, Bombi, Baumgartner, & Laghi, 2015; Willoughby, Kupersmidt, Voegler-Lee, & Bryant, 2011), and how they predict socio-emotional competence (Di Norcia …

Acculturation And Enculturation, Perception Of Depressive Symptoms, And Help-Seeking Behaviors Among Korean Americans, Kristoffer Park

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The literature suggests that acculturation, enculturation, and the perception of mental health symptoms are some of the factors that explain help-seeking behaviors in Asian Americans. While there has been previous research addressing these concerns for Asian Americans as a unified ethnic group, few studies have examined these factors to explain help-seeking behaviors specifically in Korean Americans. 107 Korean Americans were recruited from Korean American churches in a large metropolitan city in the southeast region. Participants completed an online questionnaire, which included instruments assessing acculturation (AVS-R) and enculturation (EAVS-AA-R) levels as well as their perception of how problematic depressive symptoms were …

Buffering The Associations Between Negative Mood States And The Incentive Salience Of Alcohol: A Brief Mindfulness Induction, Adrian J. Bravo

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The present study examined drinking to cope (DTC) motives and state mindfulness (via a brief mindfulness induction) as two distinct factors that may enhance (DTC) and reduce (state mindfulness) the association between negative mood states (i.e., sadness and anxiety) and the incentive salience of alcohol (i.e., subjective alcohol craving and attentional bias for alcohol-related cues) among college student drinkers. Participants were 207 undergraduate students from a large, southeastern university in the United States that consumed at least one drink per typical week in the previous month. The majority of participants identified as being either White, non-Hispanic (n = 81; 39.1%), …

Measuring Team Collaboration And Effects Of Target Guidance In A Visual Search Task, Christopher Morley

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Many professional tasks, including military operations and medical operations, involve a team of operators searching for a target on a common visual display. Previous works on collaborative visual search employed analysis of mean response time (RT) and error rates, which may not offer direct measurement of the capacity of a team nor changes in performance across task time. Workload capacity, indexed by the capacity coefficient, C(t), measures performance efficiency for cognitive systems with multiple and concurrent information-processing channels (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995). The current study applied a workload capacity analysis to quantify performance efficiency of pairs of participants in a …

Relationship Investment And Unwanted Pursuit: An Experimental Study, Phoebe Tabb Hitson

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

A significant positive correlation exists between relationship investment and the perpetration of unwanted pursuit among previous romantic partners. However, no experimental research has been conducted to enhance researchers’ knowledge of this phenomenon. This study contributed to the literature on unwanted pursuit by making investment an experimentally manipulated variable. Specifically, I employed fictional relationship scenarios with varying levels of investment to assess experimentally the impact of investment on an individual’s willingness to engage in unwanted pursuit after a breakup. It was hypothesized that higher investment would increase participants’ tendency to engage in unwanted pursuit. In addition, participants’ past perpetration of unwanted …

Effects Of Visibility And Alarm Modality On Workload, Trust In Automation, Situation Awareness, And Driver Performance, Smruti J. Shah

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Driving demands sustained driver attention. This attentional demand increases with decreasing field visibility. In the past researchers have explored and investigated how collision avoidance warning systems (CAWS) help improve driving performance. The goal of the present study is to determine whether auditory or tactile CAWS have a greater effect on driver performance, perceived workload, system trust, and situation awareness (SA). Sixty-three undergraduate students from Old Dominion University participated in this study. Participants were asked to complete two simulated driving sessions along with Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire, Background Information Questionnaire, Trust Questionnaire, NASA Task Load Index Questionnaire, Situation Awareness Rating Technique …

Associations Between Social Status Insecurity And Relational Aggression In Chinese Adolescents: Moderations Of Social Cognitive Prosesses, Yunyi Long

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Adolescents pay close attention to their social status and actively pursue it through certain social behaviors. Previous studies have revealed that when adolescents feel their social standing is unsafe, namely having social status insecurity, they often use relational aggression to cope with it. However, what roles different social cognition processes play on the association between social status insecurity and relational aggression are unclear in the literature. Additionally, given that the relationship between relational victimization and relational aggression has also been observed in the literature, social status insecurity may also exert an important mediating impact on such an association. Nevertheless, few …

The Behavioral Analysis Of Gambling, Benjamin Witts, Anne Macaskill, Mack Costello

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

A behavioral analysis of gambling is unique among the psychologies. A behavioral analysis seeks answers to questions pertaining to the prediction and influence of gambling in terms of the individual gambler, and thus emphasis is placed on well-controlled small-n studies in which findings are generalized to other individuals. Further, the behavioral analysis of gambling is concerned with environmental and historical relations in accounting for current gambling behavior, and less of a reliance is placed on internal and hypothetical causal factors. This symposium explores two data-driven analyses of gambling behavior from a behavioral account of gambling while a third conceptual and …

Psychological Abuse, Mental Health, And Acceptance Of Dating Violence Among Adolescents, Jeff R. Temple, Hye Jeong Choi, Joanna Elmquist, Michael L. Hecht, Michelle Miller-Day, Gregory L. Stuart, Meagan Brem, Caitlin Wolford-Clevenger

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Purpose

Existing literature indicates that acceptance of dating violence is a significant and robust risk factor for psychological dating abuse perpetration. Past work also indicates a significant relationship between psychological dating abuse perpetration and poor mental health. However, no known research has examined the relationship between acceptance of dating violence, perpetration of dating abuse, and mental health. In addition to exploring this complex relationship, the present study examines whether psychological abuse perpetration mediates the relationship between acceptance of dating violence and mental health (i.e., internalizing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and hostility).

Methods

Three waves of longitudinal data were obtained from …

The Effects Of Conspecifics On Dog (Canis Lupus Familiaris) Behavior During Behavioral Rehabilitation Treatments, Breanna Schultz

Theses and Dissertations

With high dog euthanasia rates increasing adoption is a significant animal welfare issue that finding methods to treat fearful animals from cruelty cases could help. This study examined the effects of conspecific presence on dogs in behavioral rehabilitation and found significant differences in boldness-fearfulness and solicitation and proximity behaviors.

A Cultural Comparison Of Two Facial Inference Studies, Janine Swiney

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

Two different samples from Pakistan and the United States were asked to infer the emotions and personality traits shown in three facial expressions (angry, sad, happy) of young white females and males in six photographs. The two studies used Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to investigate the facial inference process. Each picture was presented for 10 seconds followed by four questions about the individual in the picture. The first question asked participants to identify the emotion shown, from a list of six emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise). The next three questions consist of condensed sets of the Big Five …

The Effects Of Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Neuroinflammation On Learning And Forgetting In Juvenile Rats, Michele Barry

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The inability to remember events experienced very early in life is referred to as Infantile Amnesia (IA) and has been observed in both humans and animals. Over the years interest in the phenomenon waned, but has recently increased with the discovery of new neurobiological methods to study brain function (e.g., Callaghan, Li & Richardson, 2014). The neurobiological mechanism behind IA has yet to be determined, but several innovative theories have been developed with these new research methods. The neurogenesis hypothesis theorizes that increased neurogenesis during early development disrupts previously established memories. The hippocampus, an area that mediates both the memory …

Parametrically Constrained Lightness Model Incorporating Edge Classification And Increment-Decrement Neural Response Asymmetries, Michael E. Rudd

MODVIS Workshop

Lightness matching data from disk-annulus experiments has the form of a parabolic (2^nd-order polynomial) function when matches are plotted against annulus luminance on log-log axes. Rudd (2010) has proposed a computational cortical model to account for this fact and has subsequently (Rudd, 2013, 2014, 2015) extended the model to explain data from other lightness paradigms, including staircase-Gelb and luminance gradient illusions (Galmonte, Soranzo, Rudd, & Agostini, 2015). Here, I re-analyze parametric lightness matching data from disk-annulus experiments by Rudd and Zemach (2007) and Rudd (2010) for the purpose of further testing the model and to try to constrain …

An Image-Based Model For Early Visual Processing, Heiko H. Schütt, Felix A. Wichmann

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Possible Causes Of Increased Domestic Violence Among Military Veterans: Ptsd Or Mefloquine Toxicity?, Shawn J. Gourley

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

After more than a decade at war, our returning service members and their families are facing enormous amounts of difficulty when returning home. PTSD and TBI, the signature wounds of these wars, have been well covered in the media. The family struggles have remained hidden and mostly undiscussed. These families are facing very specific issues in military relationships like infidelity, substance misuse, and intimate partner violence; the latter of which military families are three times more likely to experience when compared to the civilian population. There is a potential effect on caregiver burden in the role of PTSD as a …

Build-Up Effect Of Auditory Stream Segregation Using Amplitude-Modulated Narrowband Noise, Harley J. Wheeler

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Recent psychoacoustic experiments (Böckmann-Barthel et al., 2014; Deike et al., 2012) have re-examined research regarding stream segregation and the build-up effect. Stream segregation is the ability to discern auditory objects within a stream of information, such as distinguishing one voice amongst background noise or an instrument within an orchestra. Initial works examining this topic proposed that auditory information is not immediately distinguished as various streams, but rather that differences accumulate over time, allowing listeners to segregate information following a period of build-up (i.e., the build-up effect); whereas more current findings indicate a build-up period is unnecessary for segregation. This experiment’s …

Refining Noncontingent Reinforcement Treatments Using Behavioral Momentum Theory, Valdeep Saini

Theses & Dissertations

One of the most effective and commonly prescribed treatments for children with autism and/or an intellectual disability who engage in severe destructive behavior is called noncontingent reinforcement (NCR). During NCR, the consequence that previously reinforced destructive behavior is delivered on a time-based schedule, independent of destructive behavior, and the contingency between destructive behavior and its reinforcer is discontinued (operant extinction; EXT). Conceptual and quantitative derivations of behavioral momentum theory (BMT) suggest that certain aspects of NCR may inadvertently promote persistence of destructive behavior, thereby prolonging the treatment process. Guided by Shahan and Sweeney’s (2011) model of resurgence based on BMT, …

Interteaching: Types Of Prep Guide Questions And Their Effect On Student Quiz Performance, Verena S. Bethke

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Although previous research indicates that interteaching is an effective alternative to more traditional teaching approaches, not many component analyses of the method exist. For example, although researchers have shown that the prep guide component contributes to the effectiveness of interteaching, no research has directly examined how the content of the prep guides affects learning. The current lab-based study investigated whether having prep guides consisting of lower-level or higher-level questions impacted students’ subsequent quiz performance. We found no significant differences in quiz performance between the two conditions, but several extraneous factors may have impacted the results.

Cultivating Empathy In Middle School Students Through Narrative Fiction, Kane M. Hamilton

Educational Specialist, 2009-2019

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether reading narrative fiction can potentiate empathy in middle school students. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: narrative fiction group and expository nonfiction group. Participants in the narrative fiction group were asked to read a passage from a novel selected from the 5^th grade Common Core reading curriculum. Participants in the expository nonfiction group were asked to read a passage from a science book from the 5^th grade Common Core science curriculum. Pretest and posttest data were collected using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Results of this study indicate …

Reinstatement Of Second-Order Fear, Matthew Nelson

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine if, after conditioning and extinction of a second-order stimulus, reinstatement of extinguished fear could be produced. The findings of Holmes et al. (2014) do not support reinstatement of second-order fear following post-extinction presentation of the unconditioned stimulus (US). The present study provides a second attempt at uncovering reinstatement following extinction of second-order conditioning. Rat subjects were randomly assigned to 5 groups (n=12), which received first- and second-order conditioning with Light and Tone counterbalanced. Responding to the second-order stimulus (S2) was extinguished through S2-alone presentations for all but the control subjects (Group NE-NR). …

Social Interactions Among Two Males In A Captive Group Of Rough-Toothed Dolphins (Steno Bredanesis), Pepper Reid Hanna

Master's Theses

There is relatively little known about the social behavior of rough-toothed dolphins (Steno bredanensis) particularly in comparison to information on the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, (Tursiops truncates). The purpose of the current study is to describe the social behavior of two juvenile male rough-toothed dolphins housed at Gulf World Marine Park in Panama City Beach, FL. Rates of affiliative social behaviors were greater between the two males within this group compared to the other pairs of dolphins. The males exhibited a high rate of association, calculated using the half-weight index. Following aggressive behavior within the overall group, the …

How Musical Oddballs Warp Psychological Time, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oddballs—low-probability, attention-capturing expectancy violations—are judged as longer than non-oddballs, but are temporal intervals that contain oddballs judged as longer than those that do not? In 2 experiments, we tested competing model predictions using a novel and covert measure of subjective duration—musical imagery reproduction. Participants verbally estimated and reproduced with musical imagery repeated, coherent, or incoherent familiar or unfamiliar chord sequences (3.5 s, 7 s, or 12 s) that either did or did not contain dynamic auditory oddballs. Participants verbally estimated repeated chord sequences that contained oddballs as shorter than those that did not, but reproduced with musical imagery incoherent chord …

Inner Experience And Self-Ratings Of Inner Speaking, Jason Michael Kelsey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Questionnaires are often used as measures of inner experience. This study questions the adequacy of such measures, using inner speech as an example. We compared two questionnaire measures of inner speaking to each other and to inner experience as apprehended by Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES, a naturalistic, high fidelity method of exploring inner experience). Undergraduate volunteers (N = 260) took two questionnaires designed to measure inner speaking: the Self-Talk Scale (STS) and the Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire (NIEQ). A subset of these (N = 16) participated in DES to investigate their inner speaking with fidelity. Scores on the NIEQ and …

Patterns Of Early Lexical And Gestural Development In Children With Williams Syndrome., Angela M. Becerra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addressed the early gestural and lexical development of very young children with Williams syndrome (WS), as measured by the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI, Fenson et al., 2007). Receptive vocabulary (RV), expressive vocabulary (EV), early gesture (EG), late gesture (LG), and total gesture (TG) abilities were considered. Findings from cross-sectional samples of 49 18-month-olds, 56 24-month-olds, and 55 30-month-olds indicated considerable variability within each age group, with almost all children evidencing significant delay as measured by the CDI norms. Strong concurrent correlations were found among RV, EV, EG, LG, and TG for each age group. Longitudinal analyses indicated …

Eyes Wide Open: Pupil Size As A Proxy For Inhibition In The Masked-Priming Paradigm, Jason Geller, Mary L. Still, Alison L. Morris

Psychology Faculty Publications

A core assumption underlying competitive-network models of word recognition is that in order for a word to be recognized, the representations of competing orthographically similar words must be inhibited. This inhibitory mechanism is revealed in the masked-priming lexical-decision task (LDT) when responses to orthographically similar word prime-target pairs are slower than orthographically different word prime-target pairs (i.e., inhibitory priming). In English, however, behavioral evidence for inhibitory priming has been mixed. In the present study, we utilized a physiological correlate of cognitive effort never before used in the masked-priming LDT, pupil size, to replicate and extend behavioral demonstrations of inhibitory …