Matching Items (22)
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- All Subjects: psychology
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
Description
A prior experiment by Li and colleagues found that when participants rated same sex faces in physical attractiveness, their self-reports of religiosity were higher in comparison to those that rated opposite sex faces. Could this be due to participants feeling their sexuality was threatened or misunderstood? In the current experiment, we attempted to replicate these findings and extend them by using a pseudo personality test that presented false feedback to participants. This feedback explained that their personalities were similar to homosexual or heterosexual people. Four hundred and fifty participants from Amazon Mturk were randomized into these conditions. We also measured homophobia, moral values, and the believability of the experiment. Results displayed no replication of the original findings. Men were more homophobic than women, while displaying lower moral values and religiosity. Those that self-reported being more homophobic also reported being more religious and moral. In conditions of sexual threat (homosexual personality, same sex faces) and sexual comfort (heterosexual personality, opposite sex faces), self-reports of moral values increased. Participants that reported believing the feedback displayed higher religiosity in both sexual threat and sexual comfort conditions. For a more concrete understanding of the relationship between religiosity, mating goals, and threats to sexuality, more research needs to be performed.
ContributorsHobaica, Steven Matthew (Author) / Cohen, Adam (Thesis director) / Knight, George (Committee member) / Neuberg, Steven (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / College of Public Programs (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
This project aims to help with the stigma and mystery surrounding mental health through the combination of art and psychology. The project was created by first interviewing individuals with different disorders and then researching the disorders further to acquire an accurate idea of the experiences of those afflicted. Then paintings were created to depict the emotions and struggles faced by individuals with psychological disorders. The project focusses on five different abnormal disorders: Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia. These particular ailments were chosen because they include the main diagnoses that the average American thinks of when mental health is mentioned. My thesis contains interviews that I personally conducted, descriptions of the five disorders included, and artistic representations of those disorders in the form of oil paintings. It is my hope that this project will help unafflicted individuals to better understand others who live with abnormal psychological disorders, as well as help the afflicted see themselves represented in a way that they otherwise might not.
ContributorsSanchez Rodriguez, Wendy (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Cavanaugh Toft, Carolyn (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
More than 260 million people suffer from an anxiety disorder worldwide, with 40 million in the U.S. alone—18% of the American population. And that label includes everything from Social Anxiety and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to phobias and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Thus, people with anxiety may not have a singular cause for their worry, but a myriad number of them that influence every aspect of their lives. And, that doesn’t include people who’ve never been formally diagnosed and don’t receive proper medication or therapy.
Unfortunately, medication has many possible side effects, and both medication and therapy are often expensive. However, there are alternatives for someone dealing with anxiety. This book proposal offers a range of solutions for anxiety management, from do it yourself techniques like guided imagery and yoga, to biofeedback devices like HeartMath, to research trials on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, as well as Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. The idea was not to outline every potential solution for anxiety, but to educate people on available opportunities and empower them to take control.
Though anxiety can be managed and reduced, there is no cure. That’s because anxiety is a normal part of life, and in most cases a helpful evolutionary tool to keep people on track. But, when this anxiety becomes a burden on someone’s life, there is a plethora of alternative solutions available. Understanding anxiety and learning to manage it is not an impossible task. This thesis provides an introduction to the idea and then allows the reader to move forward on their own path as they choose.
Unfortunately, medication has many possible side effects, and both medication and therapy are often expensive. However, there are alternatives for someone dealing with anxiety. This book proposal offers a range of solutions for anxiety management, from do it yourself techniques like guided imagery and yoga, to biofeedback devices like HeartMath, to research trials on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, as well as Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. The idea was not to outline every potential solution for anxiety, but to educate people on available opportunities and empower them to take control.
Though anxiety can be managed and reduced, there is no cure. That’s because anxiety is a normal part of life, and in most cases a helpful evolutionary tool to keep people on track. But, when this anxiety becomes a burden on someone’s life, there is a plethora of alternative solutions available. Understanding anxiety and learning to manage it is not an impossible task. This thesis provides an introduction to the idea and then allows the reader to move forward on their own path as they choose.
ContributorsSchneider, Sage Ann (Author) / deLusé, Stephanie (Thesis director) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The current Enterprise Requirements and Acquisition Model (ERAM), a discrete event simulation of the major tasks and decisions within the DoD acquisition system, identifies several what-if intervention strategies to improve program completion time. However, processes that contribute to the program acquisition completion time were not explicitly identified in the simulation study. This research seeks to determine the acquisition processes that contribute significantly to total simulated program time in the acquisition system for all programs reaching Milestone C. Specifically, this research examines the effect of increased scope management, technology maturity, and decreased variation and mean process times in post-Design Readiness Review contractor activities by performing additional simulation analyses. Potential policies are formulated from the results to further improve program acquisition completion time.
ContributorsWorger, Danielle Marie (Author) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis director) / Shunk, Dan (Committee member) / Wirthlin, J. Robert (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
This study aims to examine how crossover relations from one parent relate to the other parent's view of familial relationships. The study examines mood state and psychological distress as variables that relate to each other and familial relationships. Home visits were scheduled with families of normally developing three-year olds. During these home visits, naturalistic observation and surveys were done. Researchers then conducted regression analyses to examine the relation between mood state, psychological distress, and familial relationships. The data showed that there were significant relations between one parents' psychological distress and how the other parent viewed the marital relationship, indicating a crossover relation between those two variables.
ContributorsLopez, Nicole Marie (Author) / Crnic, Keith (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Nelson, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Workplace productivity is a result of many factors, and among them is the setup of the office and its resultant noise level. The conversations and interruptions that come along with converting an office to an open plan can foster innovation and creativity, or they can be distracting and harm the performance of employees. Through simulation, the impact of different types of office noise was studied along with other changing conditions such as number of people in the office. When productivity per person, defined in terms of mood and focus, was measured, it was found that the effect of noise was positive in some scenarios and negative in others. In simulations where employees were performing very similar tasks, noise (and its correlates, such as number of employees), was beneficial. On the other hand, when employees were engaged in a variety of different types of tasks, noise had a negative overall effect. This indicates that workplaces that group their employees by common job functions may be more productive than workplaces where the problems and products that employees are working on are varied throughout the workspace.
ContributorsHall, Mikaela Starrantino (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore P. (Thesis director) / Cooke, Nancy (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Abstract Chess has been a common research topic for expert-novice studies and thus for learning science as a whole because of its limited framework and longevity as a game. One factor is that chess studies are good at measuring how expert chess players use their memory and skills to approach a new chessboard con�guration. Studies have shown that chess skill is based on memory, speci�cally, "chunks" of chess piece positions that have been previously encountered by players. However, debate exists concerning how these chunks are constructed in players' memory. These chunks could be constructed by proximity of pieces on the chessboard as well as their precise location or constructed through attack-defense relations. The primary objective of this study is to support which one is more in line with chess players' actual chess abilities based off their memory, proximity or attack/defense. This study replicates and extends an experiment conducted by McGregor and Howe (2002), which explored the argument that pieces are primed more by attack and defense relations than by proximity. Like their study, the present study examined novice and expert chess players' response times for correct and error responses by showing slides of game configurations. In addition to these metrics, the present study also incorporated an eye-tracker to measure visual attention and EEG to measure affective and cognitive states. They were added to allow the comparison of subtle and unconscious behaviors of both novices and expert chess players. Overall, most McGregor and Howe's (2002) results were replicated supporting their theory on chess expertise. This included statistically significance for skill in the error rates with the mean error rates on the piece recognition tests were 70.1% for novices and 87.9% for experts, as well as significance for the two-way interaction for relatedness and proximity with error rates of 22.4% for unrelated/far, 18.8% for related/far, 15.8% for unrelated
ear, and 29.3% for related
ear. Unfortunately, there were no statistically significance for any of the response time effects, which McGregor and Howe found for the interaction between skill and proximity. Despite eye-tracking and EEG data not either support nor confirm McGregor and Howe's theory on how chess players memorize chessboard configurations, these metrics did help build a secondary theory on how novices typically rely on proximity to approach chess and new visual problems in general. This was exemplified by the statistically significant results for short-term excitement for the two-way interaction of skill and proximity, where the largest short-term excitement score was between novices on near proximity slides. This may indicate that novices, because they may lean toward using proximity to try to recall these pieces, experience a short burst of excitement when the pieces are close to each other because they are more likely to recall these configurations.
ear, and 29.3% for related
ear. Unfortunately, there were no statistically significance for any of the response time effects, which McGregor and Howe found for the interaction between skill and proximity. Despite eye-tracking and EEG data not either support nor confirm McGregor and Howe's theory on how chess players memorize chessboard configurations, these metrics did help build a secondary theory on how novices typically rely on proximity to approach chess and new visual problems in general. This was exemplified by the statistically significant results for short-term excitement for the two-way interaction of skill and proximity, where the largest short-term excitement score was between novices on near proximity slides. This may indicate that novices, because they may lean toward using proximity to try to recall these pieces, experience a short burst of excitement when the pieces are close to each other because they are more likely to recall these configurations.
ContributorsSeto, Christian Paul (Author) / Atkinson, Robert (Thesis director) / Runger, George (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
In an attempt to fix the problem of an abundance of individuals with mental health issues in the criminal justice system, mental health courts have begun to develop as the newest form of problem-solving court. These courts aim to keep individuals with easily treatable mental health issues out of prison and connect them with the treatment that they need. This paper is a literature review examining the development and implementation of mental health courts across the United States. The paper first explains the essential elements to a mental health court and how they function. The main claim addressed is that: through the institution of statewide standards as well as the blanket adoption and regular measurement of national performance measures in each accredited mental health court, the large-scale and longitudinal study of mental health courts will become more practical. When these types of studies become more prevalent, the most effective practices of mental health courts will be identified and innovation will follow. The paper develops this claim by explaining the state and national regulations currently in place and the importance of standardization. It then moves into the national performance measures that should then be examined by courts once state standards are in place. The paper then explains the importance of longitudinal study to the proper collection of the significant data needed to solidify the institution of successful mental health courts. By identifying the most effective practices in mental health courts and standardizing them, this system will be able to: better help the individuals involved get appropriate treatment, promote public safety, and more effectively use taxpayer money.
ContributorsSanta Cruz, Ignacio Luis (Author) / Rigoni, Adam (Thesis director) / Kingsbury, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Teacher assessments are often used alongside parent assessments to identify behavioral problems and patterns in school-aged children. These assessments can aid in the diagnosis of disruptive behavior disorders and are used to screen children for targeted delinquency prevention programs. Although researchers have heavily studied the relationship between parent and teacher assessments, not as much research has analyzed teacher assessments alone, specifically semiannual teacher assessments. Teacher assessments are typically conducted during the fall semester, normally a couple months into the school year, or during the spring semester, normally a couple months after the winter break period. Using data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), we aimed to determine the temporal stability and predictive utility of semiannual teacher assessments of children's behavioral problems from 2nd grade to 5th grade. Results showed that mean assessment scores increased from the fall to the spring semester across all 4 grades. We also found that teacher assessments of behavioral problems in grade school were significantly correlated with future serious violence. Although our statistical model did not identify a specific time period or semester when these assessments were most predictive, we observed a pattern where the spring semesters were more predictive for the younger grades, and the fall semesters were more predictive for the older grades. Future research could aim to understand why this pattern exists and what its implications are.
ContributorsForthun, Marisa Nicole (Author) / Pardini, Dustin (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
We compared sociability towards humans of domesticated and tame members of several Canidae: Belyaev's fox (Vulpes vulpes), red fox (Vulpes vulpes), gray wolf (Canis lupus), dingo (Canis l. dingo), New Guinea singing dog (Canis l. dingo), and dog (Canis l. familiaris). We defined sociability as motivation or willingness to engage with humans. Our operationalized definition of sociability is the latency to approach (LTA) the human experimenter and the amount of time the canid spent within one meter of the human experimenter (PTC). We added an unfamiliar and familiar experimenter condition to deduce whether or not canids discriminated on who they were more social with: an owner or a stranger. To each experimenter condition we added a passive and active phase to discern whether or not canids were more social when called or not. Across all conditions and phases dogs were significantly more social than all other canid types. We concluded genetic differences due to domestication and environmental differences due to socialization accounted for sociability differences seen in dogs compared to the other canid types.
ContributorsBeckstrom-Sternberg, David Tristan (Author) / Wynne, Clive (Thesis director) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05