Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

Gender And Emotional Expression In The Courtroom: Mock Juror Perceptions Of Attorney Effectiveness, Emma Cantrell

Undergraduate Theses

This quantitative study examines how gender and emotional expression influence mock jurors' perceptions of an attorney's courtroom effectiveness. Using mock jurors, this study extends previous research suggesting that assertiveness and emotional displays are evaluated differently by gender. Participants were randomly assigned to view one of four closing statements in a mock burglary trial. The videos were of either a male or a female attorney delivering a passive or an aggressive argument. Participants then evaluated the attorney’s effectiveness across four categories: competence, persuasiveness, ability to instill confidence, and emotionality. Male participants generally rated female attorneys as less effective than female participants …

The Relationship Between Trait Empathy And The Involuntary Mimicry Of Emotion: An Electromyographical Study Of Facial Suppression, Madison E. Dawes, Karlie Souder, Eddie Broad, Htoo Aye, Sian Huai

Science University Research Symposium (SURS)

Abstract

Facial expressions are one of the main communication styles that signify emotion and meaning across cultures and individuals. Despite it being one of our main forms of communication, in many social situations, people are required to suppress or control their emotional expressions to act in a socially acceptable manner. However, research has shown that a person’s facial muscles continue to exhibit subtle muscle and move in expressivity even when attempting to suppress emotions from others. To support this, Dimberg et al. (2002) found that electromyography (EMG) technology can detect these subtle facial movements even if they may be invisible …

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 …

The Perception Of Spontaneous And Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies, Gregory A. Bryan, Daniel M. Fessler, Riccardo Fusaroli, Edward Clint, Dorsa Amir, Brenda Chavez, Kaleda K. Denton, Cinthya Diaz, Lealaiailoto T. Duran, Jana Fancovicova, Michal Fux, Erni F. Ginting, Youssef Hasan, Anning Hu, Shanmukh V. Kamble, Tatsuya Kameda, Kiri Kuroda, Norman P. Li, Et Al

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human socialinteraction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language andculture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by differentvocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh wasreal or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysisrevealed that …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

Hemispheric Bases For Emotion And Memory, Tad T. Brunyé, Sarah R. Cavanagh, Ruth E. Propper

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The goal of this Research Topic was to bring together diverse scientific perspectives on lateralized brain mechanisms underlying emotion, motivation, and memory. The Topic resulted in eight articles, three of which report original research and five of which review and synthesize past research with the aim of developing new hypotheses and theory. A range of international experts with diverse backgrounds, theoretical perspectives, and experimental methods contributed to the Topic. Contributions strongly reflect this diversity, ranging from examining pupil dilation in response to viewing Rembrandt portraits to understanding how caffeine supplementation influences levels of spatial processing. In all cases, the authors …

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 …

Lateralized Difference In Tympanic Membrane Temperature: Emotion And Hemispheric Activity, Ruth E. Propper, Tad T. Brunyé

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We review literature examining relationships between tympanic membrane temperature (TMT), affective/motivational orientation, and hemispheric activity. Lateralized differences in TMT might enable real-time monitoring of hemispheric activity in real-world conditions, and could serve as a corroborating marker of mental illnesses associated with specific affective dysregulation. We support the proposal that TMT holds potential for broadly indexing lateralized brain physiology during tasks demanding the processing and representation of emotional and/or motivational states, and for predicting trait-related affective/motivational orientations. The precise nature of the relationship between TMT and brain physiology, however, remains elusive. Indeed the limited extant research has sampled different participant populations …

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 …

Asymmetry In Resting Alpha Activity: Effects Of Handedness, Ruth E. Propper, Jenna Pierce, Mark W. Geisler, Stephen D. Christman, Nathan Bellorado

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha band power during rest shows increased right, and/or decreased left, hemisphere activity under conditions of state or trait withdrawal-associated effect. Non-right-handers (NRH) are more likely to have mental illnesses and dispositions that involve such withdrawal-related effect. The aim of the study was to examine whether NRH might be characterized by increased right, relative to left, hemisphere activity during rest. Methods: The present research investigated that hypothesis by examining resting EEG alpha power in consistently-right-handed (CRH) and NRH individuals. Results: In support of the hypothesis, NRH demonstrated decreased right hemisphere alpha power, and therefore increased right hemisphere …

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 …