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- All Subjects: psychology
- Creators: School of Life Sciences
Humans use emotions to communicate social cues to our peers on a daily basis. Are we able to identify context from facial expressions and match them to specific scenarios? This experiment found that people can effectively distinguish negative and positive emotions from each other from a short description. However, further research is needed to find out whether humans can learn to perceive emotions only from contextual explanations.
This study investigates the effects of familiarity and the size of a novel object on perception of depth. Familiar size is a visual depth cue that provides information about the distance of an object. This project explores if the familiar size illusion is a result of an automatic perceptual process or an intellectual thought process. This data was collected in two phases, a familiarization phase and a testing phase. The experimental participants were familiarized for 30 seconds with a novel object, while the control group was not shown any objects prior to presentation of test objects. The novel test stimuli were constructed in 5 sizes and participants in the familiar group were familiarized with the medium size object. Participants were then asked to indicate the perceived distance of different sized objects by moving a rod with a pointer at the end to match the distance. The smaller comparison objects subtended visual angles that participants had not previously experienced, while larger comparison objects produced a larger visual angle than the participants had seen during the familiarization phase. The testing phase was identical for both familiar and unfamiliar control groups. Apparent distance was influenced by the size of the objects. Larger objects were judged to be closer than the smaller objects. Participants not familiarized showed smaller effects of stimulus size than the familiarized group. The effect of familiarity was not significant for the smaller stimuli but was very significant for the larger stimuli. The results were not consistent with the cognitive theory which argues that familiar size is a result of a conscious thought process. These outcomes are predicted under the model of familiar size being an automatic perceptual process.
South Asian students are known for having immense pressure on them due to parental expectation and oftentimes that stress can present in psychosomatic symptoms. This investigation aimed to better understand the physical presentations of stress and how South Asians compare to their white peers. An online study was conducted with both South Asian (n = 15) and White (n = 58) individuals that use the Perceived Stress Scale and the New York State United Teachers physical stress assessment to understand the differences in stress. It was found that South Asians have a higher average perceived stress core of 25 versus 20 for whites and experience headaches, sore neck, an overall feeling of worry and anxiety, and diarrhea more frequently than their white counterparts. This suggests that South Asians may in fact have more psychosomatic manifestations of stress. It is posited that this is due to South Asian students not having an adequate outlet in which they can express negative emotions.