Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Glenberg, Arthur
Description
Sport is a widespread phenomenon across human cultures and history. Unfortunately, positive emotions in sport have been long vaguely characterized as happy or pleasant, or ignored altogether. Recent emotion research has taken a differentiated approach, however, suggesting there are distinct positive emotions with diverse implications for behavior. The present study applied this evolutionarily informed approach in the context of sport to examine which positive emotions are associated with play. It was hypothesized that pride, amusement, and enthusiasm, but not contentment or awe, would increase in Ultimate Frisbee players during a practice scrimmage. Further, it was hypothesized that increases in pride and amusement during practice would be differentially associated with sport outcomes, including performance (scores, assists, and defenses), subjective social connectedness, attributions of success, and attitudes toward the importance of practice. It was found that all positive emotions decreased during practice. It was also found that increases in pride were associated with more scores and greater social connectedness, whereas increases in amusement were associated with more assists. The present study was one of the first to examine change in positive emotions during play and to relate them to specific performance outcomes. Future studies should expand to determine which came first: emotion or performance.
ContributorsKuna, Jacob Anthony (Author) / Shiota, Michelle (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Danvers, Alexander (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Accurately assessing the sexual interest of others is useful for initiating courtship behaviors that have a chance of being reciprocated, and also potentially critical for survival, particularly for women, where unwanted sexual interest from men can become unwanted sexual advances, sexual assault, and worse. Previous research suggests that men overestimate women’s sexual interest to initiate courtship behaviors even if the probability of their advances being reciprocated is low. This may be because missing a potential mating opportunity is costlier than squandered courtship efforts. However, research on this male sexual overestimation effect has failed to fully appreciate the importance of the motivations and contexts of actors. Here, we primed participants with short-term mating motivations and threat contexts to compare against a control prime condition. We replicated the male sexual overestimation effect in the control and threat prime conditions and found a marginal effect in the short-term mating prime condition. The magnitude of the difference between men’s estimations and women’s self-reports of women’s sexual interest was only significantly different from the control prime in the threat condition. Additionally, we explored some interesting combinations of circumstances. We found that, in a potentially common scenario, where men are primed with short-term mating motives and women are primed with threat, the male sexual overestimation effect replicates and, further, find that this effect disappears when the mindsets of men and women are reversed. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of understanding what the default psychologies of people during the early stages of courtship are, and the effects these psychologies have on estimations of sexual interest.
ContributorsBoyd-Frenkel, Krystina Adriana (Author) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Thesis director) / Barlev, Michael (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05