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Full-Text Articles in Social Psychology
A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani
A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani
Summer Research
The “uncanny valley” is the effect of being ‘creeped out’ by things that are very close, but not quite, human (e.g., a ventriloquist dummy). Over the past two summers, I found that intranasal administrations of oxytocin, a hormone which affects attention to external social information, decreased participants’ reaction times when assessing uncanny valley stimuli, but did not affect their ratings of eeriness. Furthermore, oxytocin affected participants’ reaction times the most for stimuli rated to be intermediately eerie but altered their visual attention the most during the perception of stimuli rated to be either not eerie or very eerie. From these …
Assessing Empathy In Rats: The Role Of Shared Experience, Dylan Richmond
Assessing Empathy In Rats: The Role Of Shared Experience, Dylan Richmond
Summer Research
Previous research has searched for empathy in rats (Rattus norvegicus) by placing a trapped rat inside a restricting tube, and giving a donor rat the opportunity to free it (Ben-Ami Bartal et al., 2011; Silberberg et al., 2014). It is unclear if freeing behavior is due to empathetic responses by donors, or if it is motivated by desire for social contact, or some other factor. The current study utilized a novel method to measure empathy in rats. Donors had the opportunity to free trapped rats from a restricting tube into an adjacent chamber. Half the donor rats spent …