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Flexion and extension arm actions have been studied with regard to whether and in what way(s) they are associated with attitudes. In this paper, I report the results of three experiments in which I investigated the valence of the attitude objects, the meaningfulness of the attitude objects, and the repetition of the arm action as factors that might influence the relation between flexion and extension arm actions and attitudes. In Experiment 1, I tested the influence of flexion and extension on attitude formation with novel, meaningless, but valenced, stimuli (Chinese characters). I predicted an Action x Stimulus Valence interaction such that both arm flexion and arm extension would result in higher pleasantness ratings of Chinese characters, when they were paired with positive and negative stimuli, respectively. Rather than the hypothesized interaction, I observed only a main effect for Stimulus Valence: positive characters were rated as more pleasant than were negative characters. In Experiment 2, I tested the influence of flexion and extension on attitude change with familiar, meaningful, valenced stimuli (foods). I predicted a main effect for Action, such that arm flexion would result in higher pleasantness ratings than would arm extension, regardless of Stimulus Valence, I also predicted a main effect of Stimulus Valence, such that positive foods would be rated as more pleasant than negative foods. Again, I observed only a main effect for Stimulus Valence in the predicted direction. In Experiment 3, I examined the influence of arm actions on attitudes over time using novel, meaningful, valenced stimuli (faces). I predicted that attitudes, as measured by an IAT, would be less biased for participants who repeatedly practiced responding to negative stimuli with a flexing action, compared to those of participants who repeatedly practiced responding to negative stimuli with an extending action. This prediction was weakly supported. / Psychology

A robust associative self network automatically biases attention, memory, and impression formation in a heuristic-like way. This thesis examines whether this self-heuristic underlies association formation of novel person and object representations to the self network and how this structure influences perceptions. This was tested across three experiments. The first employed an implicit task to assess whether self-similar individuals were represented with greater association strength to self-concept than self-dissimilar individuals. The second used an implicit task to measure whether newly-owned, previously-owned, and unowned objects exhibited different association strength with self-concept. The third determined the impact of minimal self-similarity to another individual, presented either before or after encoding, on memory for encoded information about them. Results of these experiments support three conclusions summarizing how a self-heuristic affects perceptions of novel stimuli. First, self-relevance automatically biases cognitive representation of novel self-similar (versus self-dissimilar) people and owned (versus unowned) objects, evidenced by stronger implicit association strength between these stimuli and self-concept. Next, this representation biases memory accuracy and errors in favour of heuristic-consistent information, even in contexts of minimal self-similarity. Finally, representation of self-similar people and owned objects relative to the self network biases perception through first-order effects, whereby unrelated concepts sharing an association to the self-network can influence one-another. Owned objects were automatically more favourably evaluated due to a first-order association with self-positivity. Perception of well-established self-knowledge was malleable based on response pairing with first-order associated self-similar or self-dissimilar individuals. Finally, when memory retrieval for self-similar and self-dissimilar individuals failed, responses were predicted based on first-order associated personality traits. These conclusions provide novel support for the existence of an automatic and ubiquitous self-heuristic that biases representation formation and subsequent perception of novel people and objects. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A highly accessible network of self-representation biases attention and memory in favour of self-relevant information. I investigated how this network mediates representation of novel people and novel objects, stimulus categories that have received little attention in the social cognitive literature. An implicit test of cognitive association strength (i.e. the Implicit Association Test) revealed that novel self-similar (versus self-dissimilar) people and owned (versus unowned) objects are immediately associated to the self network. The new representations led to perceptual biases through first-order associations, whereby strictly self-relevant information was generalized to self-similar people and owned objects. For instance, even minimal self-similarity to a novel individual biased memory retrieval and reconstruction so that the retrieved information was consistent with the expectation of self-similarity. Together, the findings highlight the ubiquity and automaticity with which self-associations mediate cognitive representations and consequent perceptions of novel people and objects in realistic social situations.

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Yes / Posed facial expressions of actors have often been used as stimuli to induce mental state inferences, in order to investigate 'Theory of Mind' processes. However, such stimuli make it difficult to determine whether perceivers are using a basic or more elaborated mentalizing strategy. The current study used as stimuli covert recordings of target individuals who viewed various emotional expressions, which caused them to spontaneously mimic these expressions. Perceivers subsequently judged these subtle emotional expressions of the targets: in one condition ('classification') participants were instructed to classify the target's expression (i.e. match it to a sample) and in another condition ('retrodicting') participants were instructed to retrodict (i.e. infer which emotional expression the target was viewing). When instructed to classify, participants showed more prevalent activations in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at earlier and mid-latency ERP components N170, P200 and P300-600. By contrast, when instructed to retrodict participants showed enhanced late frontal and fronto-temporal ERPs (N800-1000), with more sustained activity over the right than the left hemisphere. These findings reveal different cortical processes involved when retrodicting about a facial expression compared to merely classifying it, despite comparable performance on the behavioral task. / Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Study Visit Grant; Young Researcher Support Grant DRM/2014-02; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHN 1481/2-1); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FOR 1097)

Combining techniques from Solution-Oriented Therapy and Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development, this study examines young children's abilities to respond to certain solution-oriented techniques. Developmentally, young children (ages up to five years) may have difficulty responding to abstract questions,. such as questions designed to generate solutions. According to Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development, children can be aided to understand more developmentally complicated concepts through a process called "scaffolding" (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Adults or peers can provide scaffolding in the form of questions, clues, prompts, or modeling. Supplementing complex ideas with concrete objects can also aid the scaffolding process. In this qualitative study, five five-year-olds were interviewed using solution-focused questions and scaling questions based upon solution-oriented techniques. These techniques aid the search for solutions and the person's awareness of resources. Concrete props and questions were the primary scaffolding techniques employed. Results of this study suggest that young children are able to respond to the solution-oriented techniques used in this study and are able to generate a variety of potential solutions. Common resources the children recognize include words, ways of sharing, adults, toys, and friends/siblings. An awareness of individual differences is naturally important when interacting with children, as they each have unique experiences and resources. Because of the individual differences and the small sample size, these results have limited generalizability. Suggestions for future research are included. In addition, recommendations for other developmentally appropriate methods of adapting solution-oriented techniques when working with young children, primarily through play and stories, are proposed. / Master of Science

Yes / Evidence has shown that older adults have lower accuracy in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) tasks compared to young adults, but we are still unclear whether the difficulty in decoding mental states in older adults stems from not looking at the critical areas, and more so from the ageing Asian population. Most ToM studies use static images or short vignettes to measure ToM but these stimuli are dissimilar to everyday social interactions. We investigated this question using a dynamic task that measured both accuracy and error types, and examined the links between accuracy and error types to eye gaze fixation at critical areas (e.g. eyes, mouth, body). A total of 82 participants (38 older, 44 young adults) completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition task on the eye tracker. Results showed that older adults had a lower overall accuracy with more errors in the ipo-ToM (under-mentalising) and no-ToM (lack of mentalisation) conditions compared to young adults. We analysed the eye gaze data using principal components analysis and found that increasing age and looking less at the face were related to lower MASC accuracy in our participants. Our findings suggest that ageing deficits in ToM are linked to a visual attention deficit specific to the perception of socially relevant nonverbal cues. / This study was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (FRGS/1/2016/SS05/SYUC/03/2) awarded to M.H.Y.