Matching Items (118)
Description
Individuals with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) show signs of emotion-related dysfunction and disrupted interpersonal relationships. Affectionate touch is an important form of non-verbal communication in relationships that may foster emotion regulation and emotional awareness. The present online survey study included 62 individuals with PNES and 80 seizure-free trauma-exposed controls high (n=40) or low (n=40) in overall symptoms of psychopathology. As hypothesized, PNES individuals reported experiencing less frequent affectionate touch and less interoceptive awareness than either control group. They also reported more somatic symptoms, more emotion regulation difficulties, and less positive emotion than the low psychopathology group. Unexpectedly, there were no group differences in emotional awareness difficulties, nor in initiation of affectionate touch. Across participants, lower interoceptive awareness was associated with lower affectionate touch frequency, indicating that if one has difficulty understanding and being aware of their own body, affectionate touch sensations may not necessarily be understood as pleasant and may be minimized or avoided. Emotional awareness difficulties surprisingly were associated with greater affectionate touch frequency among PNES (versus the expected pattern of awareness difficulties associated with less affectionate touch, as found among controls), suggesting affectionate touch may be used as an attempt to try and understand one’s own feelings, or to compensate for, or even mask a lack of understanding. Findings indicate a distinct difference in physical affection frequency and interoceptive awareness among PNES individuals even when matched to a group similar in psychiatric distress/psychopathology. These findings offer insight into the relationships between interoceptive awareness, affectionate touch, and emotion regulation more broadly.
ContributorsVillarreal, Lucia (Author) / Roberts, Nicole A (Thesis advisor) / Burleson, Mary H (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
To reveal opinions people may not explicitly portray, researchers have implemented a methodology called the Implicit Associations Test (IAT). While this test saw widespread use after its inception, recent problems have undermined the reliability of the measure. Researchers have begun to address these limitations by evaluating different approaches, such as the Action Dynamics paradigm. Like the IAT, the aim of action dynamics is to assess underlying activation and competition amongst beliefs as they unfold in real-time, while adding a number of more sensitive measures, in addition to those used in an IAT. The trajectories of participants’ computer mouse cursors are tracked as they move from a stimulus statement to a response, providing data of the real-time decisions people are making across a number of variables. For this thesis study, the aim was to use an action dynamics paradigm to explore whether implicit biases exist toward transgender people from a larger cisgender population, even if they explicitly support or oppose others with transgender identities. These potential biases were assessed by evaluating the statements people were asked to confirm or disconfirm. There were also a number of analyses conducted in order to investigate whether such predictors such as
participants’ gender or political ideology predicted differences in responses. Although differences were seen in the reaction time to statements of a certain category, the other trajectory measures showed that participants’ implicit and explicit attitudes toward transgender people were aligned. Implications, limitations, and future directions of this
work are then discussed.
ContributorsHamlett, Mara Carol (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis advisor) / Mickelson, Kristin (Committee member) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Emotions are an important part of persuasion. Experimental research suggests that White and male jurors can use emotion to increase their influence, while other jurors cannot. This research builds on prior research by examining the relationship between naturally occurring emotion during mock jury deliberations and the influence that jurors hold. Participants (N = 708) in 153 mock juries watched a murder trial video and deliberated on a verdict. Participants self-reported their experienced emotions and rated their perceptions of the other jurors’ emotion and influence. After data was collected, I extracted acoustic indicators of expressed emotion from each deliberation and used a speech emotion recognition model to classify each mock juror’s emotional expression. I hypothesized that there would be an overall effect of emotional expression on influence such that as mock jurors’ emotion increased, their influence would also increase. However, I hypothesized that a juror’s race and gender would moderate the relationship between emotion and influence such that White male jurors will be seen as more influential when they are more emotional, and that female jurors and jurors of color will be seen as less influential when they are more emotional. I also hypothesized that female jurors of color will be doubly penalized for being emotional, due to their “double-minority” status. Bayesian model averaging suggested that the data was most probable under models that included perceived emotion, race, and the interaction between the two, compared to models that did not. Consistent with the hypothesis, as participants were perceived as more emotional, their influence increased. In contrast to the hypotheses, being perceived as more emotional increased influence for both White and non-White mock jurors but the effect was stronger for non-White jurors. In other words, while all jurors benefited from being perceived as more emotional, non-White jurors benefited more than White jurors. Male jurors were more influential than female jurors, and gender did not interact with emotion.. Although being perceived as more emotional predicted increased influence for all participants, this research demonstrates that there are racial and gender disparities in the level of influence that someone might hold on a jury.
ContributorsPhalen, Hannah J (Author) / Salerno, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Schweitzer, Nicholas (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging evidence has demonstrated that multiple object tracking (MOT) tasks draw upon visual perception, attention, and working memory cognitive processes. Functional neuroimaging studies identified the middle temporal visual area (MT+/V5) as one of several brain regions associated with MOT in humans. MT+/V5 is thought to be responsible for processing motion from visual information, regulating smooth pursuit eye movements, and encoding memory for motion. However, it is unclear how MT+/V5 interacts with attention and working memory performance processes during MOT. To investigate this question, the right MT+/V5 region was identified in 14 neurotypical subjects using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). The right MT+/V5 was stimulated using intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS), continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS), and sham transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) using a within-subjects design. Average MOT performance was measured before and 5-min, 30-min, and 60-min after each stimulation protocol. There was no significant difference in average MOT performance across time, regardless of the stimulation condition.
ContributorsAlucard, Myles (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Burleson, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
The Association Between Time to Eat and Students Fruit & Vegetable Consumption, Selection, and Waste
Description
Background: Studies have examined student fruit/vegetable (FV) consumption, selection, and waste related to lunch duration and found that longer duration at lunch was associated with greater consumption, selection, and reduced waste. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between time to eat and FVs. The aim of this research is to analyze the relationship between objective time to students took to eat (“time to eat”) as it relates to their fruit and vegetable consumption, selection, and plate waste.in elementary, middle, and high schools. Methods: A secondary analysis of cross-sectional study of 37 Arizona schools to discover the differences in the selection, consumption, and waste of FVs from students (Full N = 2226, Elementary N = 630, Middle School N = 699, High School N = 897) using objective time to eat measures. Zero-inflated negative binomial regressions examined differences in FV grams selected, consumed, and wasted adjusted for sociodemographics including race, ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced lunch, academic year, and sex and clustering for students within schools. Results are presented across school level (elementary, middle, and high school).
Results: The average time taken to eat ranged from 10-12 minutes for all students. The association of time to eat and lunch duration were not closely related (r=0.03, p = 0.172). In the count model for every additional minute spent, there was a 0.5% greater likelihood of selecting FVs for elementary kids among those who took any FVs. In the zero-inflated model, it was found that there was a statistically significant relationship between time spent eating and the selection of fruits and vegetables. For the total sample and high schoolers, a minute more of eating time was associated with a 4.3% and 8.8% greater odds of selecting FV. This means that longer eating time increased the likelihood of choosing fruits and vegetables. The results indicated that the longer students took to eat, the higher the likelihood of consuming more of FVs. Each 10 more minutes spent eating (i.e., time to eat) is associated with a 5% increase in grams of FV selected relative to mean (for those that chose FV) over 1 week this equates to 32 g increase of FV selected. However, for middle schoolers, the time to eat was not found to be significant in relation to the grams of fruits and vegetables consumed. There was some significance in the sociodemographic factors such as gender (all) and other (middle school). There was a relationship between time taken to eat and waste as a proportion for fruits and vegetables. For example, among those among the students who wasted something (as a proportion of selection), each additional 10 minutes of eating time was associated with a .6% decrease in waste relative to the mean (for those who chose fruits and vegetables) over a week, resulting in a decrease in waste percentage of 16.5%. Among high schoolers, males had a slightly higher odds of wasting a proportion of fruits and vegetables.
Conclusions: This study aimed to examine the association between the time students take to eat during lunch and their fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption, selection, and plate waste. The findings revealed that the time to eat was related to FV consumption, depending on the school level. However, it was not significantly associated with FV selection or waste. The study emphasized the need for further research on time to eat, distinguishing it from the duration of lunch. Longer lunch periods and adequate time could influence better food choices, increased FV consumption, and reduced waste. The study highlighted the importance of interventions and school policies promoting healthier food choices and providing sufficient time for students to eat. Future research should validate these findings and explore the impact of socialization opportunities on promoting healthier eating habits. Understanding the relationship between lunch duration, time to eat, and students' dietary behaviors can contribute to improved health outcomes and inform effective strategies in school settings.
ContributorsDandridge, Christina Marie (Author) / Adams, Marc (Thesis advisor) / Whisner, Corrie (Committee member) / Bruening, Meg (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
As threats emerge and change, the life of a police officer continues to intensify. To better support police training curriculums and police cadets through this critical career juncture, this thesis proposes a state-of-the-art framework for stress detection using real-world data and deep neural networks. As an integral step of a larger study, this thesis investigates data processing techniques to handle the ambiguity of data collected in naturalistic contexts and leverages data structuring approaches to train deep neural networks. The analysis used data collected from 37 police training cadetsin five different training cohorts at the Phoenix Police Regional Training Academy. The data was collected at different intervals during the cadets’ rigorous six-month training course. In total, data were collected over 11 months from all the cohorts combined. All cadets were equipped with a Fitbit wearable device with a custom-built application to collect biometric data, including heart rate and self-reported stress levels. Throughout the data collection period, the cadets were asked to wear the Fitbit device and respond to stress level prompts to capture real-time responses. To manage this naturalistic data, this thesis leveraged heart rate filtering algorithms, including Hampel, Median, Savitzky-Golay, and Wiener, to remove potentially noisy data. After data processing and noise removal, the heart rate data and corresponding stress level labels are processed into two different dataset sizes. The data is then fed into a Deep ECGNet (created by Prajod et al.), a simple Feed Forward network (created by Sim et al.), and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network for binary classification. Experimental results show that the Feed Forward network achieves the highest accuracy (90.66%) for data from a single cohort, while the MLP model performs best on data across cohorts, achieving an 85.92% accuracy. These findings suggest that stress detection is feasible on a variate set of real-world data using deepneural networks.
ContributorsParanjpe, Tara Anand (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis advisor) / Roberts, Nicole (Thesis advisor) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Dyadic coping is a couple level coping strategy, where partners respond to relationship external stressors as a unit. Dyadic coping behaviors have the ability to strengthen the relationship and improve both partners’ mental health outcomes in the face of adversity. Verbal communication is one of the primary channels of dyadic coping processes. As such, psycholinguistic investigations of predictors of successful dyadic coping comprise a growing body of research within the field of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Aspects of language such as pronoun use and emotion word use are common areas of study. In this study, I examined the effects of language alignment on dyadic coping outcomes among a sample of heterosexual couples. Specifically, I postulated that lexical and semantic alignment would lead to positive outcomes in the cognitive domain of dyadic coping, while alignment in function word use – also referred to as language style matching – would lead to positive outcomes in the affective domain of dyadic coping. I also explored the effect of the temporal dynamics of language alignment on the relevant outcomes. Findings suggest that while function word alignment is weakly predictive of the hypothesized outcomes, no detectable relationships exist between lexical and semantic alignment and cognitive outcomes relating to dyadic coping among my sample. This study also shows a potential weak recency effect of language style matching on one affective outcome of dyadic coping. The absence of statistically significant effects in this study should not be taken to mean that no such effect exists, but that a more sensitive approach with a larger sample may be necessary to uncover the subtle effects of language alignment on dyadic coping outcomes.
ContributorsMariyam Thomas, Anuja (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis advisor) / Koop, Gregory (Committee member) / Burleson, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Talking Together, Working Apart: Predicting Collaborative Problem Solving Performance Using Language
Description
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills are critical for students and workers in the 21st century. However, reports show that students and workers routinely underperform at CPS-related tasks. While many studies have investigated the factors that contribute to CPS performance, few have focused on prediction, and even fewer have focused exclusively on language. This study takes a unique prediction-first approach, where the goal is to identify the features of language that best predict CPS performance, and then use those linguistic features to build explanatory models of CPS performance. Overall, we found that more sophisticated content words indicate worse CPS performance, while more sophisticated function words indicate better CPS performance. Additionally, we saw that teams using more concrete content words performed worse at the CPS task, while teams using more abstract content words performed better. Finally, we found that teams performed better when using positive emotion words (especially positive nouns) and words indicating high arousal.
ContributorsMabrey V, William (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis director) / Nishimura, Joel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Neuroscience (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Tools designed to help match people with behaviors they identify as likely to lead to a successful behavioral outcome remain under-researched. This study assessed the effect of a participant-driven behavior-matching intervention on 1) the adoption of a new behavior related to fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption, 2) study attrition, and 3) changes in F&V consumption. In this two-arm randomized controlled trial, 64 adults who did not meet standard F&V recommendations were allocated to an intervention (n=33) or control group (n=31). Participants in the intervention group ranked 20 F&V-related behaviors according to their perceived likelihood of engagement in the behavior and their perception of the behavior’s efficacy in increasing F&V consumption. Participants in the intervention group were subsequently shown the list of 20 behaviors in order of their provided rankings, with the highest-ranked behaviors at the top, and were asked to choose a behavior they would like to perform daily for 4 weeks. The control group chose from a random-order list of the same 20 behaviors to adopt daily for 4 weeks. During the study period, text messages were sent to all participants 90 minutes before their reported bedtime to collect Yes/No data reflecting successful behavior engagement each day. The binary repeated-measures data collected from the text messages was analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression, differences in attrition were assessed using log-rank analysis, and change scores in F&V consumption were compared between the two groups using the Man-Whitney U test. P<0.05 indicated significance. The rate of successful behavior adoption did not differ significantly between the two groups (b=0.09, 95%CI= -0.81, 0.98, p=0.85). The log rank test results indicated that there was no significant difference in attrition between the two groups (χ2=2.68, df=1, p=0.10). F&V consumption increased significantly over the 4 weeks in the total sample (Z=-5.86, p<0.001), but no differences in F&V change scores were identified between the control and intervention groups (Z=-0.21, p=0.84). The behavior-matching tool assessed in this study did not significantly improve behavior adoption, study attrition, or F&V intake over 4 weeks.
ContributorsCosgrove, Kelly Sarah (Author) / Wharton, Christopher (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Marc (Committee member) / DesRoches, Tyler (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Studies have repeatedly shown that mere exposure to ideas makes those ideas seem more true, a finding referred to as the “illusory truth” effect. This feature of cognition may heighten existing concerns surrounding the spread of misinformation. Recent studies have shown that the effect extends to fake news headlines and may increase the likelihood that someone shares misinformation. But is this evidence that mere exposure can affect our beliefs? The two leading accounts of the illusory truth effect argue that after initial exposure, participants sense a feeling of familiarity or “fluency” at test that they use as a sign the statement is true. Beliefs however, extend further than just truth ratings. Beliefs also guide actions and imply other beliefs. Three pre-registered experiments were conducted to examine whether mere exposure to statements induces genuine beliefs by first examining if participants draw implications from mere exposure in Study 1. Surprisingly, results indicated that exposure to “premise” statements affect participants’ truth ratings for novel “implied” statements, which cannot be explained by the familiarity or fluency accounts of the illusory truth effect. Study 2 replicated results from Study 1 and ruled out consistency pressure as an explanation for prior findings. Finally, Study 3 replicated results from Studies 1 and 2 and ensured they were not due to demand characteristics by conducting separate analysis for suspicious and non-suspicious participants. Since these findings cannot be explained by the predominant accounts of the illusory truth effect, the authors believe this is evidence of a new effect the “illusory implication” effect. More importantly, these findings suggest that the consequences of misinformation may be larger than previously thought and warrants further study into potential mechanisms driving the illusory implication effect.
ContributorsMikell, Justin (Author) / Powell, Derek (Thesis advisor) / Smalarz, Laura (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024