Social Psychology Commons^™

Imagined Contact Intervention With An American Muslim Target, Jamie Williams

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Recent studies have shown that imagining contact with a member of a differing social group can reduce prejudice toward said group. This type of prejudice intervention, known as an imagined contact intervention, can be beneficial when direct contact with the outgroup is not feasible. This study adds to existing research on imagined contact interventions by replicating a simple version of the intervention by Husnu and Crisp (2010) and assessing attitudes toward an American Muslim out-group. This study extends the research of Husnu and Crisp (2010) by using American participants as opposed to British participants and also uses an online distribution …

An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Pro-Anorexia Content On Eating Disorder Development, Skyler Green

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Pro-anorexia content, or content that promotes the development and sustainment of eating disorders, is an important topic that has been understudied in the literature. Previous research has primary examined the content featured on pro-anorexia websites, but few researchers have conducted experimental studies examining the direct impact viewing pro-anorexia content has on individuals struggling with an eating disorder. The current study was an experimental study that exposed participants to three conditions: proanorexia content, pro-recovery content, and a control group. The researcher examined the impact that viewing the three levels of content for 10 minutes had on individuals who met criteria and …

The Effects Of Message Matching In Climate Change Persuasion, Matthew R. Penner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Public opinions of climate change are not consistent with the reality that climate change is occurring. Effective persuasive messages must be created to ensure that irreparable damage to the environment is prevented. This study investigated the cognitive processes that occur when an individual is exposed to a persuasive message regarding environmental concerns that is matched to an individual’s personality characteristics like right wing authoritarianism and purity.

Messages on two environmental topics (solar panels and the Environmental Protection Agency) were created. Each topic was framed in multiple ways to test hypotheses about personality-based message matching. Participants completed a thought listing task …

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …