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- Creators: Department of Psychology
The following creative project defends that, whether intentionally or not, mental illness and substance abuse are inevitably romanticized in young adult media and discusses the dangers of this romanticization. This project is divided into three parts. The first part consists of psychological evaluations of the main characters of two popular, contemporary forms of young adult media, Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger and Euphoria by Sam Levinson. These evaluations use textual evidence and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) to determine what symptoms of psychopathology the characters appear to display. The second part consists of a self-written short story that is meant to accurately depict the life of a young adult struggling with mental illness and substance abuse. This story contains various aesthetic techniques borrowed from the two young adult media forms. The final part consists of an aesthetic statement which discusses in depth the aesthetic techniques employed within the short story, Quicksand by Anisha Mehra.
Recent studies indicate that words containing /ӕ/ and /u/ vowel phonemes can be mapped onto the emotional dimension of arousal. Specifically, the wham-womb effect describes the inclination to associate words with /ӕ/ vowel-sounds (as in “wham”) with high-arousal emotions and words with /u/ vowel-sounds (as in “womb”) with low-arousal emotions. The objective of this study was to replicate the wham-womb effect using nonsense pseudowords and to test if findings extend with use of a novel methodology that includes verbal auditory and visual pictorial stimuli, which can eventually be used to test young children. We collected data from 99 undergraduate participants through an online survey. Participants heard pre-recorded pairs of monosyllabic pseudowords containing /ӕ/ or /u/ vowel phonemes and then matched individual pseudowords to illustrations portraying high or low arousal emotions. Two t-tests were conducted to analyze the size of the wham-womb effect across pseudowords and across participants, specifically the likelihood that /ӕ/ sounds are paired with high arousal images and /u/ sounds with low arousal images. Our findings robustly confirmed the wham-womb effect. Participants paired /ӕ/ words with high arousal emotion pictures and /u/ words with low arousal ones at a 73.2% rate with a large effect size. The wham-womb effect supports the idea that verbal acoustic signals tend to be tied to embodied facial musculature that is related to human emotions, which supports the adaptive value of sound symbolism in language evolution and development.