Matching Items (280)
Description
The media often portrays professional basketball players as narcissistic, entitled and selfish, but are these portrayals accurate? After all, basketball is a team sport and team sport research indicates that players are more altruistic and selfless. This study proposes a way to assess narcissism and altruism through observable behaviors from all the active players in the NBA.
ContributorsPappas, Carissa Anne (Author) / Kwan, Virginia (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Mae, Lynda (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Do good readers embody more or less? The current investigation examined embodiment effects as a function of individual reading skill in the context of two cognitive theories of reading comprehension. The Construction-Integration model predicts that sensorimotor activity during reading will correlate negatively with reading skill, because good readers focus on relations among abstract ideas derived from the text. Supposedly those abstract ideas have little or no sensorimotor content, hence any sensorimotor activity while reading is wasted effort. In contrast, the simulation theory predicts that sensorimotor activity will correlate positively with reading skill, because good readers create a simulation of what is happening within the text to comprehend it. The simulation is based in neural and bodily systems of action, perception, and emotion. These opposing predictions were tested using the reading-by-rotation paradigm to measure embodiment effects. Those effects were then correlated with reading skill measured using the Gates-McGinite standardized reading test. Analyses revealed an unexpected interaction between condition and congruency, and a negative relationship between embodiment and reading skill. Several caveats to the results are discussed.
ContributorsRakestraw, Hannah Marie (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur (Thesis director) / McNamara, Danielle (Committee member) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2013-12
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
Realistic or unrealistic expectations are formed prior to having the child and can affect the relationship quality of the mother and infant at 3 months and the reported maternal stress levels at 6 months. Violated expectations can either positively or negatively change the course of the relationship quality and stress levels. To test the nature of such relations, a series of regression analyses and one-way ANOVAs examined the associations between maternal expectations (and violations of maternal expectations) and maternal stress at 6 months. Further, mother-infant relationship quality was examined as a possible mediator of this association. Results indicated that prenatal maternal expectations and maternal expectations at 6 weeks were significantly correlated with maternal stress at 6 months. The higher the maternal expectations, the lower the maternal stress. There were no significant relations discovered between maternal expectations and relationship quality or relationship quality and maternal stress. Relationship quality does not mediate the relation of maternal expectations (or violated maternal expectations) and maternal stress. Violated maternal expectations that moved towards realistic did achieve better relationship quality scores, but maternal stress scores stayed consistent no matter the direction of the change.
ContributorsFrancis, Caitlyn Noelle (Author) / Crnic, Keith (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Umaña-Taylor, Adriana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The effects that forensic-themed programs such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has on the public's understanding and expectations of the criminal justice system has been a main focus of study in recent years. This phenomenon was coined by the media and termed the "CSI Effect." This study aimed to research the correlations between age, gender, and program-watching habits on potential juries' evidence expectations in court. To do so, 70 people were surveyed and asked a series of demographic questions, as well as questions about how often they watch forensic-themed shows and their experience with the criminal justice system. They were given a mock crime scene scenario and asked about their scientific and non-scientific evidence expectations in this particular case. The most notable results showed that a longer exposure time to forensic-themed programs correlated to high evidence expectations. However, how often viewers watch forensic-themed programs did not seem to affect their evidence expectations. It was concluded that the higher evidence expectations by modern jurors may be due to a combination of the "CSI Effect" and the newly hypothesized "Tech Effect," instead of just being the consequence of the watching too much forensic-themed television.
ContributorsJones, Kristin Taylor (Author) / Kobojek, Kimberly (Thesis director) / Lafond, Sue (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Similarity Joins are some of the most useful and powerful data processing techniques. They retrieve all the pairs of data points between different data sets that are considered similar within a certain threshold. This operation is useful in many situations, such as record linkage, data cleaning, and many other applications. While many techniques to perform Similarity Joins have been proposed, one of the most useful methods is the use of indexing structures to improve the performance of Similarity Joins. After spending pre-processing time to construct an index over a given dataset, the index structure allows for queries over that dataset to be performed significantly faster. Thus, if a dataset will have multiple Similarity Join queries performed over it, it can be beneficial to use index-based techniques to perform Similarity Join queries for that dataset. We present an extension to a previously proposed index structure, the eD-Index, which provides support for Similarity Join operators. We evaluate the performance of the algorithms and also investigate the configuration of parameters that maximizes the performance of the indexing structures. We also propose an algorithm for Multi-Way Similarity Joins using this index, which allows for Similarity Join queries between more than two data sets at a time.
ContributorsPearson, Spencer Scott (Author) / Silva, Yasin (Thesis director) / Dietrich, Suzanne (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
One of the nation's most pressing health related issues is that of healthy diet and proper nutrition. Because much research has shown that many Americans are in poor health or are at risk to become so due to poor diet and nutrition, understanding the psychological factors of a healthy diet or lack thereof is of the utmost importance. In order to understand the adoption and maintenance of health related behaviors, the link between intentions and behaviors must be evaluated. Of current health behavior models, the model utilized in this study was the Health Action Process Approach model (HAPA), which addressed this "intention-behavior gap." The HAPA model proposes that planning is the key mediator of the link between intentions and behavior. The current research was performed in two stages. The first stage evaluated the psychosocial constructs of the HAPA model, and their predictive utility for current diet and the second stage evaluated a planning-based intervention that aimed to increase proper nutrition in college-aged women. All HAPA constructs were found to be significantly correlated with one another, and planning was found to significantly and fully mediate the link between intention and healthy diet. The intervention did not lead to an increase in healthy diet relative to a standard-of-care control, although all participants across conditions reported increased intention, self-efficacy, and healthy diet from pre-test to follow-up.
ContributorsWells, Jordan Rebecca (Author) / Aiken, Leona (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Hansen, Whitney (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Recent research on alcohol use among LGB young adults indicates that sexual minority youth are at increased risk relative to their heterosexual peers. One possible contributing factor is that religiosity fails to provide the significant protection for LGB youth that it has been demonstrated to provide in general population samples. Although recent studies provide some support for this hypothesis, there is little research seeking to understand the reasons that religiosity may fail to protect against heavy drinking among LGB youth. The current study attempted to address this gap by examining relations among religiosity, age of self-identification, and alcohol use in a sample of 103 young adults self identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Using multiple regression, we found that religiosity had an indirect effect on alcohol use operating through age of identification as LGB. Higher religiosity was associated with a later age of self-identification, which in turn, predicted greater increases in alcohol use among LGB youth during the transition from high school through college. Exploratory analyses found that gender significantly moderated the influence of age of self-identification on alcohol use such that a later age of self-identification was a risk factor for increased drinking for women, but not for men. The findings have important implications for understanding complex relations between religiosity and alcohol use among LGB youth. In addition, the findings may inform the development of religious support groups for LGB youth that will allow them to experience the benefits of religious involvement that heterosexual youth experience.
ContributorsOng, Thai Quang (Author) / Corbin, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Grzanka, Patrick (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Humans require sufficient social understanding and connectedness to thrive (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The current study evaluates the effectiveness of the Social Intelligence Institute's training program pilot. At a middle school in Phoenix, Arizona, students in a 7th and 8th grade class participated in this pilot program during the spring of 2013. Pre- and post-test questionnaires administered indicated changes in participants reported measures of Perspective Taking, Empathetic Concern, Interpersonal Expectations, and Relationship Self-Efficacy. The program consists of seven modules, each with several sessions, including instructional videos with reflection questions and class discussions. It was predicted that there would be a significant increase in mean scores for the dependent variables in the questionnaire mentioned above from the pre-test to the post-test. However, the null hypotheses were not rejected; statistical significance in t-tests of the measured variables were not met. Yet, the program was more effective for 8th graders than for 7th graders for Perspective Taking. This study of the SI pilot program demonstrates areas of improvement and provides support for wider implementation in the future.
ContributorsBailey, Jonathan Donald (Author) / Zautra, Alex (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Short, Robert (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
This study examined the relation between Religiosity (a motivational system) and Working Memory Capacity (a cognitive system) to determine how they interact to promote goal-directed behavior. Participants completed a religiosity questionnaire and engaged in a battery of tasks that were used to assess their Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and overall ability to maintain goal-directed behavior. The Stroop task was used to examine the participants' ability to maintain goals in the face of interference. It was predicted that religiosity and WMC would be inversely related and that when we controlled for religiosity, WMC would be the only significant predictor of Stroop performance. Furthermore, we hypothesized that religiosity and Stoop would be inversely related, whereas WMC and Stroop would be positively correlated with one another. Religiosity and Stroop performance were each divided into three different components. Religiosity was divided into: Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Motivation, and CARMA. Stroop Performance was measured through Stroop Accuracy, the Stroop Effect, and Post-Error Slowing. The results of our study supported each of our hypotheses. These findings demonstrated that there is a cognitive process underlying motivational systems, such as religion, which affect an individual's ability to sustain goal-directed behavior.
ContributorsFontes, Alejandra Maria (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2013-12