A common stereotype in our society is that athletes are not as capable of performing well academically as their non-athlete counterparts; they are “dumb jocks”. Do athletes feel that others have lower expectations of them academically? This is important because previous research in education has shown that expectations play a role in academic achievement (for example, Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Pygmalion effect (1968) and self-fulfilling prophecy research). The current study examined student-athletes’ perceptions of this stereotype. Three areas were addressed: athletes’ perceptions of their peers’ awareness that the student is a student-athlete, perceptions of their instructors and peers academic expectations of athletes, and perceptions of their instructors and peers willingness to offer help with coursework because they are athletes. This study not only examined athletes’ perception of how they are treated by their professors and non-athlete students in the academic realm, but also how the athletes view the academic abilities of their athletic peers compared to their own academic abilities. The person/group discrimination discrepancy is a phenomenon indicating that individuals tend to report a higher level of discrimination directed at their group as a whole than at themselves as individual members of that group. This study examined if student-athletes’ report similar feelings about their own academic ability as compared to athletes as a whole. Results of this study indicated that student-athletes perceive professors as having higher academic expectations and being willing to provide academic help because they are athletes. Student-athletes perceived other students as being willing to provide academic help, but having lower academic expectations of athletes. As hypothesized, the personal/group discrimination discrepancy did emerge among student-athletes. Overall, student-athletes assigned the highest grade point average (GPA) to themselves, followed by a lower GPA for teammates, and significantly lower GPAs to university athletes as a whole. Further exploratory analyses were conducted. The exploratory analyses indicated that student-athletes’ perceptions of academic ability for themselves compared to teammates and university athletes as a whole varied by gender, race, and academic scholarship. Results indicated that female athletes and males athletes (excluding football players) perceived themselves as having the highest GPA followed by a decline for teammates and university athletes respectively; however, football players perceived themselves and university athletes obtaining approximately equal GPAs with a significantly lower perceived GPA for teammates. Athletes on academic scholarship assigned the highest GPA to themselves followed by teammates and university athletes, respectively. Finally, African American athletes assigned the lowest GPA to themselves, whereas Caucasian athletes assigned themselves the highest GPA.

There is extensive evidence that structures in the anterior attentional system (i.e. dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate) are susceptible to normal aging processes, whereas structural changes in the posterior attentional system are minimal. Using the Stroop priming task, we investigated whether reducing the involvement of the anterior attentional system by pre-cuing the location of the target stimulus would eliminate age differences in interference. Older adults continued to be susceptible to interference when the location cue was ambiguous or invalid, but were less susceptible when the target location of a stimulus was presented with a valid cue.

Past models (i.e., Crick and Dodge, 1994) of children’s social information processing (SIP) have neglected to include the role of emotions in children’s reasoning during social situations. A recent reformulation (Lemerise and Arsenio, 2000) updated Crick and Dodge’s model to incorporate emotions and their impact on children’s processing. Since then, studies have examined the influence of emotion in children’s SIP, but few have investigated the impact of children’s affective ties with their peers. This study explores the effect of the participant’s relationship with the provocateur on subsequent consequential reasoning concerning possible hostile, passive, and competent response; in addition, it addresses gaps in the literature by utilizing a different age range and investigating the response decision step of SIP. A sample of second and fifth graders (N=101) completed a social cognitive interview in which they reasoned about competent, hostile, and passive responses when the provocateur was a friend, neutral peer, or an enemy. Results indicated multiple relationship effects and gender differences, which illustrated the impact relationships can have on SIP.

Human civilization is failing in the fight to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and limit the impact of anthropogenic climate change. Whilst there are likely numerous reasons for this inertia, societal risk perception plays a fundamental role in influencing the speed and effectiveness of political and social action to address climate change. This study presents the psychological, sociological and cultural reasons for variations in the perceptions of risk amongst a group of climate change sceptics in Sweden. Highlighting cognitive barriers and characteristics associated with different ideological biases and worldviews. The paper concludes that people become more or less sceptical to climate change based on a variety of potentially intersectional issues. Whilst gender, age and wisdom all play a role, the social groups with which people identify, as well as individuals’ values and ideas of what constitutes an ideal society ultimately shape ones perception of risk in relation to climate change. The implications for the communication of climate science are discussed, revealing that any inclusive communication strategy will fail unless it is presented in a way that affirms rather than challenges one’s cultural identity.

Individuals attend to a variety of various stimuli on a daily basis and their brains decide what to attend to and what to tune out. How the brain chooses what is most important to pay attention to is decided with threat level, novelty, emotion, and other criteria. The current study looked at responses from 41 participants who identified high or low with University of Kentucky, Western Kentucky University, and/or Christianity. The participants where shown two images, the UK logo and either the WKU logo, an out-ofstate team logo, or a Christian symbol. Directly after the two images were presented, a dot appeared on the screen and the participants tapped a key on the keyboard to indicate on which side of the screen the dot was placed. The hypothesis stated that participants’ mean reaction time for identifying the side of the screen the dot was on when under a logo or a symbol with which the participants highly identify would be faster than the mean reaction time to a dot under logos or symbols with which the participant had low identification. However, results of this study did not show statistically significant differences in the mean reaction times of the participants.

Language is an essential component of human behavior. It is ubiquitous, but more importantly, it is malleable and it is constantly changing. Part of the dynamic nature of informal communication is the introduction and adoption of new linguistic elements. Online communication provides a window into this informal public discourse; therefore, it may be useful for testing hypotheses about the processes underlying the acquisition and use of new words. The comprehension of informal language may lead to an understanding of how these new informal words are integrated into our mental lexicon. The current study was an electroencephalographic (EEG) investigation of the brain processes that underlie informal language. We recorded event-related potentials while participants engaged in a lexical decision task. For this experiment, participants made judgments about Twitter targets primed with semantically related or unrelated words. Classic psycholinguistic studies have shown very specific event-related potentials (ERPs) for semantic processing. Most notably, the N400 event-related potential component is an index of lexical expectancy and semantic relatedness. In contrast to the literature, we did not find classic N400 priming effects. However, our results revealed marked differences between informal and traditional targets. Our results suggest that informal language is more difficult to process than traditional language.

Research has shown that detecting and judging causal relationships requires associative learning and memory. Retrospective revaluation of causal cues requires associative memory (Aitken, Larkin, & Dickinson, 2001) to bind multiple cues together and use these associations to retrieve unseen cues for revaluation of their associative value. The difficulty that older adults experience with respect to retrospective revaluation could occur because of their deficit in associative binding and retrieval (Mutter, Atchley, & Plumlee, 2012). Like retrospective revaluation, blocking requires cue – outcome associative learning, but unlike retrospective revaluation, blocking does not require binding two cues together nor does it require using the resulting association between these cues for retrieval. Older adults display no deficit in blocking (Hannah, Allan, & Young, 2012; Holder & Mutter, in submission). To assess the effects of aging on associative learning and memory in causal judgment, this study examined age effects in retrospective revaluation and blocking using an allergy scenario in a streamed-trial task (Hannah, Crump, Allan, & Siegel, 2009; Hannah et al., 2012). This study found that older and younger adults both displayed blocking effects, which supports past research. Additionally, it was found that older and younger adults displayed retrospective revaluation in working memory. The ability for older adults to display retrospective revaluation in working memory is a new finding. It suggests that there may be a decrement in associative long-term memory, but associative processes in working memory may be intact.

Music is a powerful modality that can bring about changes in individuals of all ages. This research employed both an experimental and quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of music as it influenced psychological well-being, memory, and cognition among older adults. Specifically, it addressed three aims: (a) To determine to what extent learning to play a music instrument later in life influenced psychological well-being and cognitive function of non-institutionalized healthy seniors, (b) To determine the effects of the amount of music involvement on psychological well-being and cognitive function (c) To determine the benefit of music for those with limited/no music experience. For the first aim, it was hypothesized that individuals in the experimental music group would maintain and/or improve psychological well-being, memory, and cognitive function more than those assigned to the wait-list control group. For the second aim, it was hypothesized that participants with extensive music involvement would have higher scores on cognitive ability measures and experience greater psychological well-being than those who had not been actively involved in music throughout their life. For the third aim, it was hypothesized that the participants with limited/no music involvement throughout their life would have a larger change on the psychological well-being measures and cognitive assessments than those who had more music involvement. For the experimental portion (Aim 1), the study employed a 6-week music intervention with non-institutionalized older adults. The quasi-experimental portion (Aims 2 & 3) divided participants according to their amount of time involved in music and then looked at psychological well-being and cognitive function. This dissertation did not show a strong connection between music, memory, and cognition so it did not achieve the desired overall results. However, the findings did suggest that music may modify some areas of cognitive function (verbal learning, memory, and retention) and psychological well-being but did not influence other areas (playing a music instrument for any length of time). Therefore, the findings of this dissertation can be a basis upon which future research relating to music, cognitive functioning, psychological well-being and involvement in music can build.

The use of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) in schools continues to increase, as it is a useful brief assessment of students’ basic academic skills. CBM measures are used for multiple tasks such as identifying students at-risk, creating local norms, monitoring students’ progress during interventions, and assisting with special education eligibility determinations. Much of the research has focused on CBM in the areas of math and reading. Relatively few studies have examined the area of CBMWritten Expression. Even fewer studies exist exploring the reliability among alternate writing forms. This study determined alternate form reliability coefficients for written expression probes at the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grade levels using productiondependent, production-independent, and accurate-production scoring methods. When all grade levels are combined, alternate forms reliability coefficients are at a sufficiently high level. However, some scoring methods resulted in much higher correlations at younger grade levels than older grade levels. In general, the correlations were lower at the eighth grade level. Implications of the results for school personnel are discussed.

The visual cortex of human observers changes its functionality in response to visual deprivation (Boroojerdi et al., 2000). Behavioral studies have recently documented enhanced tactile abilities following a short period of visual deprivation (Facchini & Aglioti, 2003; Weisser, Stilla, Peltier, Hu, & Sathian, 2005). The current study investigated the effects of visual deprivation on two unique tactile tasks. While Facchini and Aglioti observed significant effects of visual deprivation, neither Wong, Hackeman, Hurd, and Goldreich (2011) nor Merabet et al. (2008) observed these effects. Corroborating these more recent results, no difference in grating orientation discrimination performance was observed between the sighted and visually deprived participants in the first experiment. A significant effect of experience was seen in both groups, however, irrespective of the deprivation period of 90 minutes. The second experiment immediately followed the conclusion of the first experiment. Using the same stimuli and procedures from past experiments (Norman, Clayton, Norman, & Crabtree, 2008), it investigated the participants’ haptic discrimination of 3-dimensional object shape. Again, no significant difference in performance was found between the sighted and visually deprived participants. Together, the current results show that a brief period of visual deprivation (1.5 hours) produces no significant behavioral changes for these tactile and haptic tasks.