Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

The Effects Of Alarm System Errors On Dependence: Moderated Mediation Of Trust With And Without Risk, Eric T. Chancey

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Research on sensor-based signaling systems suggests that false alarms and misses affect operator dependence via two independent psychological processes, hypothesized as two types of trust. These two types of trust manifest in two categorically different behaviors: compliance and reliance. The current study links the theoretical perspective outlined by Lee and See (2004) to the compliance-reliance paradigm, and argues that trust mediates the false alarm-compliance relationship but not the miss-reliance relationship. Specifically, the key conditions to allow the mediation of trust are: The operator is presented with a salient choice to depend on the signaling system and the risk associated with …

The Relationship Between Executive Attention And Spatial Working Memory In Adults, Erica Ness, Emily Franzen, James Thomas, Haily Sain, Lalah Mclaughlin, Lindsey Spohr, Greg Degirolamo, Anne R. Schutte

UCARE: Research Products

The study examined the effects of executive attention on spatial working memory in adults using a location recall task. Attention is suggested to play a crucial role in maintenance of a remembered location in spatial working memory. Awh and Jonides (2001) found that reaction times to a presented stimulus were faster when the stimulus was held in spatial working memory. A subsequent study found that when holding a location in spatial working memory, tasks which shift attention cause memory performance to be worse for the remembered location. An ERP study by Awh and Jonides (2001) found similar response amplitudes between …

Examining The Effectiveness Of A Training Video On The Lmplementation And Lnterpretation Of A Functional Analysis, Alissa Anne Conway

Masters Theses

Functional behavior assessment (FBA), and more specifically functional analysis (FA), refer to structured assessment processes designed to identify the controlling variables for challenging behaviors across children, adolescents, and adults. The results from a functional analysis are used to match therapy techniques to unique causal variables for challenging behaviors and also to select more adaptive replacement behaviors that produce similar functions as the challenging behaviors. As functional analysis techniques, in all variations, have become more commonplace in applied behavior analysis (ABA), attention has turned to how to train practitioners to implement FAs, interpret the results, and use the FAs to inform …

Session-By-Session Feedback From Psychotherapy Outcome Assessment: An Analysis Of Treatment Utility, Lynn Hallberg Hall

Dissertations

This study sought to examine the effect of providing outcome assessment data to therapists treating a sample of community adults seeking mental health services at two university training clinics. The participants (N = 41) were predominantly unmarried, Caucasian females, 19 to 39 years old, with a wide range of psychological problems. The therapists were trainees from master’s and doctoral programs in counseling and clinical psychology participating in their first clinical practicums. The Outcome Questionnaire 45-2 (OQ), an instrument designed for frequent measurement of client symptom, interpersonal, and social-role distress, served as the dependent measure. The OQ was designed to show …

Increasing Vocal Behavior And Establishing Echoic Stimulus Control In Children With Autism, Joseph Shane

Dissertations

Many children with autism fail to demonstrate vocal-verbal behavior, including echoic behavior, as early as their typically developing peers. Some also make very limited vocal sounds in general, remaining mostly mute aside from crying or engaging in stereotypy. Echoic behavior involves auditory discrimination and matching, and functions as a beneficial, if not necessary, prerequisite for many other vocal-verbal skills. The purpose of this study was to develop and implement an echoic training procedure for primarily non-vocal children who did not demonstrate auditory discrimination in baseline. The intervention consisted initially of sessions in which any vocal sounds were reinforced. Then differential …

Meditative Movement As A Treatment For Pulmonary Dysfunction In Flight Attendants Exposed To Second-Hand Cigarette Smoke: Study Protocol For A Randomized Trial, Peter Payne, David Zava, Steven Fiering, Mardi Crane-Godreau

Dartmouth Scholarship

A study protocol is presented for the investigation of meditative movement (MM) as a treatment for pulmonary dysfunction in ight attendants (FA) who were exposed to second-hand cigarette smoke while ying before the smoking ban. The study will have three parts, some of which will run concurrently. The rst is a data gathering and screen- ing phase, which will gather data on pulmonary and other aspects of the health of FA, and will also serve to screen participants for the other phases. Second is an exercise selection phase, in which a variety of MM exercises will be taught, over a …

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Social Impact Of Alcoholism In The Singaporean Environment, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Alcohol addiction is treatable; strong community and familial support is key

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

Ogden College of Science & Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

Effects Of A Short-Duration Online Simulation On Global Empathy, Chad Raymond, Sally Gomaa

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

In an investigation of whether a particular instructional method is associated with greater global empathy among students, undergraduates were exposed to information about Haiti through lecture, news video, or an online game that simulated life in Haiti. Our hypothesis was that students would exhibit greater global empathy after playing the interactive online simulation than they would after hearing the lecture or watching the videos. Average scores for survey questions varied according to the instructional method, as did students behavioral responses during the experiment, but the variations were not statistically significant. A larger sample, a longer duration experiment, or the exclusion …

Promoting Global Empathy And Engagement Through Real-Time Problem-Based Simulations: Outcomes From A Policymaking Simulation Set In Post-Earthquake Haiti, Chad Raymond, Tina Zappile, Daniel J. Beers

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

We introduce a real-time problem-based simulation in which students are tasked with drafting policy to address the challenge of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in post-earthquake Haiti from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. Students who participated in the simulation completed a quantitative survey as a pretest/posttest on global empathy, political awareness, and civic engagement, and provided qualitative data through post-simulation focus groups. The simulation was run in four courses across three campuses in a variety of instructional settings from 2013 to 2015. An analysis of the data reveals that scores on several survey items measuring global empathy and political/civic engagement increased …

The Effect Of The Long Anchor Duration On Performance In The Temporal Bisection Procedure, Sho Araiba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study investigated the determinants of the location of the bisection point (BP) in the temporal bisection procedure. Interest in the study of temporal perception emerged from the finding of the scalar property such as Weber’s law for time and the ratio rule in behavior under Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning. One method to investigate temporal perception in both non-human animals and humans is the temporal bisection procedure. The primary dependent variable of this procedure is the BP, which has been taken as the subjective midpoint between two durations. The ratio similarity rule (Gibbon, 1981) hypothesizes that the location of …

The Effect Of Cognitive Load On Liars And Truth Tellers: Exploring The Moderating Impact Of Working Memory Capacity, Sarah Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two studies are presented. The purpose of the first study is to examine the moderating impact of working memory capacity (WMC) on the cognitive load produced by both the type of statement a person is making and the manner in which the person is interviewed in a mock crime scenario. The moderating impact of suspects’ WMC (measured using the automated operation span task) on this process was also assessed. Suspects were instructed to tell the truth, a relatively easy lie, or a more difficult lie. Suspects were then interviewed in a relatively easy manner, a moderately more difficult manner, or …

An Exploration Of Target Event Encoding In A Predictive Learning Task With Humans: Integrated Or Separable Processing?, Natasha B. Nadler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A major theme in the study of Pavlovian learning explores how attributes of a predicted event are represented and encoded. In Pavlovian conditioning, the conditioned stimulus (CS) is frequently assumed to associate with one or more of the various attributes of a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (US, e.g. it’s hedonic, motivational, and/or sensory features). The present research asks whether humans learn to predict and encode different aspects of motivationally neutral target events, namely, their specific sensory and temporal features in a separable or integrated manner. This question of how target events are encoded has implications for associative and timing models …

Information Behavior In The Mobile Environment: An Overview, Ziming Liu

School of Information Student Research Journal

As smartphones become ubiquitous, they increasingly influence the way in which students seek and use information. It is important to understand emerging information behavior as a result of wide spread use of smartphones. This paper provides an overview of information behavior in the mobile environment. Gender differences in mobile information seeking are discussed. People interact with mobile information in varied and unpredictable locations or while in transit. The mobility of information engagement is an important issue that human information theory should embrace.

Repetitive Motor Movement, Social Responsiveness, And Global Development In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jenny Waltzer

Theses and Dissertations

This study assessed whether specific repetitive motor movements (involving body), are associated with social abilities and global development. Additionally, we evaluated whether our observational measures of specific repetitive behaviors corresponded to standard diagnostic measures. Sixty-nine children, aged 32 to 82 months, with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder or autism were enrolled.

The Effect Of Motor Involvement And Melody Truncation On Involuntary Musical Imagery, Stephanie Audrey Mccullough

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

The term “earworm,” also known as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), refers to the phenomenon of an un-controllably repeating melody in one’s head. Though ubiquitous, it is comparatively under-researched in music cognition. Most existing studies have identified the defining characteristics of earworms, rather than explore their underlying mechanisms. This study investigates the hypothesis that overt motor involvement (humming, singing, tapping) and imagined motor involvement (imagining a continuation to an interrupted melody) will induce INMI more frequently than passive music listening. Four groups of participants were given instructions for different types of responses while listening to music; then they completed the same …

Aging And Emotion Recognition: An Examination Of Stimulus And Attentional Mechanisms, Stephanie Nicole Sedall

ETD Archive

Emotion recognition is essential for interpersonal communication. However, previous research has suggested that older adults are not as accurate as younger adults in recognizing certain emotions, particularly negative facial expressions of anger, fear, and sadness. Including additional contextual information (e.g., manipulation of certain facial features) might help us better understand these age differences. The present study investigated how potential age differences in emotion recognition are influenced by stimulus factors (target eye gaze direction) as well as facial viewing patterns, cognitive functioning, and physiological processes. A sample of younger and older adults viewed static facial expressions depicting anger, fear, sadness, happiness, …

Variability And Location Of Movement Endpoint Distributions: The Influence Of Instructions For Movement Speed And Accuracy, Abhishek Dey

ETD Archive

An influential theory of motor control predicts that targeted hand movements should be aimed at the target center and that the variability of movement endpoint distributions should fill the target region (Meyer et al., 1988). Because increases in the amount of movement endpoint variability correlates with increases in movement speed (Schmidt et al., 1979), centering the distribution on the target center and expanding variability to the limits of the target boundaries should allow for maximization of movement speed, without the production of movement errors (i.e., target misses). Slifkin and Eder (2016) recently found that those predictions only held over a …

Human Vision Inspires Cortisol And Immune Behaviors, J. Forrest Olsen

Departmental Honors Projects

Ten-minute slideshows of disease stimuli were presented to human participants who donated saliva samples before and after its completion. Much to our surprise, this research found cortisol decreased upon the visual perception of a disease threat, a response depicting the physiological consequences of Behavior Immune System activation. Even subliminal exposure to disease stimuli, totaling only 0.5 seconds over the ten-minute slideshow, was found to elicit a cortisol response.

Informational Efficiency And The Reaction To Terrorism: A Financial Perspective, Nicholas Roland

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this study is to measure the message terror organizations hope to convey using the financial markets as a proxy of measurement to determine patterns within the marketplace and the effects on the terrorists’ ability to deliver a desired message due to the increased use of digital devices and access to instantaneous news, seen over the past decade. Using death count, geographic location, and event type, this study identified 109 attacks between 1985 and 2015 to be analyzed against 5 market indices and 5 securities. Measuring the effects within a 10-day sample window from the time of the …

The Study Of The Adverse Effects Of Childhood Maltreatment, Katie A. Kennie

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study explores the link between the presence of childhood trauma and adult criminal behavior. In this study, four distinct categories of childhood trauma (physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect) were examined. In addition, this study conducts a comparative analysis of the United States crime rate with that of Switzerland and Japan. This study examines and compares the policies utilized in ensuring the protection of child welfare. The ultimate goal is to provide research which may build a foundation that will assist in creating and improving policies which will ensure a child's psychological health.

Social Grief: A Grounded Theory Of Utilizing Status Updates On Facebook As A Contemporary Ritual, Celese Catania-Opris

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

The popular Social Networking Site, Facebook, offers its users the ability tocommunicate with others from all over the globe. Individuals can create a virtual identity for themselves enabling members to call, message, and locate others in a matter of seconds. The number of Facebook users appears to increase; yet, the number of members who die daily is not normally accounted. Facebook now permits the memorialization ofthe deceased’s profile. This allows members to continue commenting, sharing photos and videos, and visiting the deceased’s Facebook page. This trend led to the central question of this study, “What benefits, if any, are individuals …

Cognitive Phenotypes And The Evolution Of Animal Decisions, Tamra C. Mendelson, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Mark E. Hauber, Charles H. Pence, Rafael L. Rodríguez, Rebecca J. Safran, Caitlin A. Stern, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Faculty Publications

Despite the clear fitness consequences of animal decisions, the science of animal decision making in evolutionary biology is underdeveloped compared with decision science in human psychology. Specifically, the field lacks a conceptual framework that defines and describes the relevant components of a decision, leading to imprecise language and concepts. The ‘judgment and decision-making’ (JDM) framework in human psychology is a powerful tool for framing and understanding human decisions, and we apply it here to components of animal decisions, which we refer to as ‘cognitive phenotypes’. We distinguish multiple cognitive phenotypes in the context of a JDM framework and highlight empirical …

Incremental Strategy-Oriented Feedback Promotes Positive Leadership Perceptions And Feedback Reactions, Lauren Murphy

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In our lab experiment, participants who received negative strategy-oriented feedback associated with an incremental theory had more positive perceptions of a feedback deliverer and the feedback itself compared to recipients of comfort-oriented feedback associated with an entity theory.

Acute And Chronic Effects Of Inhalants In Intracranial Self-Stimulation, Matthew Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

Inhalants are a loosely defined diverse group of volatile substances which people abuse. Despite widespread misuse of inhalants, there are limited preclinical methods available to study the reinforcement-like properties of inhalants. One procedure which has demonstrated substantial promise as a tool to investigate inhalant pharmacology is the intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) procedure. ICSS utilizes pulses of electrical stimulation to the mesolimbic reward pathway to serve as a temporally defined and controlled operant reinforcer with a highly adjustable efficacy. The first aim of the project was to characterize the effects of commonly abused inhalants: including toluene, trichloroethane, nitrous oxide, isoflurane and R134a …

The Effect Of Neighborhood Size And Morphology In The Chinese Language, Long Nguyen

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The Neighborhood Size Effect (NSE), characterized as the effect in word determination based on changing one orthographic aspect of that word. The amount of words that can be created through such manipulation is called a neighborhood size (NS). Number of other factors such as frequency, how often a word appears and morphology, the combination of meaningful word units, have been suggested to have an overriding effect on NSE. In addition, there is a lack of research on NSE with non-alphabetical languages such as Chinese, which uses characters comprising of a multitude of semantic or phonetic markers. In this experiment, participants …

Cynicism And Narcissism: Masking The Good Life?, Joshua B. Bell

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Gratitude is a virtue capable of conferring a constellation of benefits. Research on gratitude has mostly focused on these benefits, but in understanding the construct fully an examination of moderating factors and inhibitors is important. A recent study, utilizing a prospective design, revealed cynicism and narcissism as significant inhibitors of trait and state gratitude over time (Solom, Watkins, McCurrach, & Scheibe, 2016). The current study hoped to build upon those results by examining whether these two possible inhibitors affect grateful processing after a gratitude induction. I hypothesized that higher levels of cynicism and narcissism would moderate the experience of grateful …

An Analysis Of Stakeholders Communication In Collaborative Software Development Projects, Wei Zhang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Software development is a multidisciplinary collaboration involving many stakeholders. However, existing software development processes exhibit many issues related to that collaboration. Because prior research on stakeholder analysis and teamwork revealed the importance of communication, this study analyzed stakeholder communication with reference to team activities as a social and cognitive process. The study’s goal was to understand the collaboration process during software development and to delineate factors that influence this process. We focused on communication between the software developers and their clients during the requirements gathering phase, the team process, and the inter-team and interdisciplinary collaboration, in particular between software engineers …

Sexual Risk Taking Among Young Lgbt Individuals: Examining The Interplay Between Shame Memories And Fears Of Compassion, Elijah N. Johnson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Though there is a growing body of research concerning the impact that shame experiences can have on an individual, there is a paucity of research about what variables may mediate the relationship between central, shameful memories and resulting self-harming behavior. The purpose of this study was to explore fears of compassion as a possible mediator between shame memories and individuals' tendency to engage in risky sexual behavior, with an emphasis upon LGBT individuals, who on average are more likely to experience shaming experiences than non LGBT individuals. I predicted that fears of compassion would significantly strengthen the correlation between central …