<p> The current study investigated whether hypocrisy-induction &ndash; a burgeoning method of cognitive dissonance therapy &ndash; acts to increase physical exercise habits and reduce stress, as well as how physical exercise mediates the relationship between hypocrisy-induction and perceived stress, and whether self-esteem moderates the relationship between hypocrisy-induction and physical exercise. Using questionnaires and manipulations, this study measured participants&rsquo; (both work and non-work) stress, self-esteem, physical exercise habits, and physical exercise intentions. Fifty-four undergraduate students enrolled in Psychology 111 at a small Midwest university were randomly assigned to a control or treatment condition and surveyed on several constructs before being put through manipulations, and were then surveyed online four weeks following the experiment. Results supported some hypotheses, revealing that: as individuals exercise more, they perceive less stress; individuals who had their hypocrisy induced perceived less stress than those who hadn&rsquo;t; hypocrisy-induction did not affect physical exercise habits or intentions; and those with higher self-esteem are more affected by hypocrisy-induction than those with lower self-esteem. Ultimately, these results highlight the potential efficacy and versatility for hypocrisy-induction to generalize onto improving prosocial behavior.</p>

The author presents an analysis of how speakers establish references in conversation. Further, this paper focuses on what words of a reference are conventionalized as speakers coordinate multiple times. The author explores how the co-occurrence of the reference terms with the referent can be a good predictor of what words are conventionalized over time. In order to study this, the author created an online version of the reference game from Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) experiment, where a matcher and director must describe a set of ambiguous shapes to each other many times. By creating an online version of this reference game the author was able to gather significantly more data and analyze the data with computational tools. Results prove that co-occurrence is a useful predictor of terms which are conventionalized, providing a first step for accounting for statistical inference in the process of conventionalization.

<p>VADEHRA, POOJA, Ph.D. Co-resident Grandparents and Children?s Early Cognitive Development. (2015). Directed by Dr. Danielle Crosby. 112 pp. Cross-cultural research on parent?maintained multigenerational families with co-resident grandparents has shown largely positive outcomes for children, but few studies have explored the potential impact of this type of household structure on children in the American context. The goals of the current study were to investigate the association between grandparent co-residency in stable two-parent families and children?s early cognitive development (at ages 9 months and 2 years), and to examine whether grandparents? provision of child care moderated this association. A secondary set of questions asked whether the pattern of associations under study varied by children?s ethnoracial background (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Other). Data for this study were drawn from the first two waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a unique, prospective study of development for a nationally representative sample of children born in the U.S. in 2001. Analyses focused on the 6,950 children who lived in stable two-parent families during their first two years of life. Descriptive results show that 11.3% of infants living in stable two-parent families in this national sample had at least one grandparent living with them during their first two years of life. A series of multivariate logistic regressions indicated that grandparent co-residency was a more likely occurrence for children with younger mothers, children in families below the poverty threshold and those receiving federal benefits, children in families with higher incomes (once poverty was accounted for), first born children and Asian children. Interesting differences emerged in the pattern of correlates of grandparent co-residency across ethnoracial groups. Poverty and federal assistance were the strongest predictors of co-residency for White, Hispanic, and ?Other? families; whereas higher income was associated with co-residency for Black and Asian families. Hypotheses about the association between grandparent co-residency and children?s early cognitive development were not supported (for the full sample or any of the ethnoracial groups); however, supplementary analyses provided suggestive evidence of higher test scores at 9 months for children with co-resident grandmothers, and higher test scores at age 2 for children with co-resident grandfathers. I found no evidence that grandparent provision of child care moderated this association. Implications for future research and recommendations are further discussed.

What makes one more or less likely to project a novel property from an item to that item’s broader category? Research on category-based induction has documented a consistent typicality effect: typical exemplars promote stronger inferences than atypical exemplars. This work has been largely confined to categories whose central tendencies are the most typical members of the category. Experiments 1 and 2, using natural and artificial categories, showed that central tendencies have greatest induction strength even for categories that are best represented by ideal exemplars. Experiments 3-7 investigate the role of familiarity in induction. Experiments 3 and 4 directly contrast statistical averageness against familiarity through category learning procedures. Experiment 5 creates this contrast through frequency differences across stimuli. Experiments 6 and 7 investigate how the familiarity advantage found in Experiments 3-5 can be modified through fluency manipulations, independent of actual experience. Taken together, these studies suggest that category-based induction is driven largely by a familiarity heuristic. / text

The increase in student cell phone use in classrooms has led to a decrease in academic performance and satisfaction with instruction (Dietz & Henrich, 2014). Currently, it is unknown as to whether student classroom cell phone usage has any effect on the teacher. The purpose of this study was to determine student and teacher opinions of classroom cell phone usage and perceived distraction. Surveys were conducted with a sample of college students (N = 163) and college faculty (N = 289), from a university in the Southeastern region of the United States. Data indicate there are differing opinions on classroom cell phone usage between students and teachers. Results revealed teachers believe significantly more than students that cell phones should not be used during class. A majority of teachers also reported they have been distracted by students using their phones, while only about half of the students believe their teachers have been distracted by cell phones. Students using cell phones during class may affect more than just their individual academic performance; student cell phone use may actually have a negative impact on the entire class and the quality of teaching.

<p>For over 50 years, the Satisfaction of Search effect, and more recently known as the Subsequent Search Miss (SSM) effect, has plagued the field of radiology. Defined as a decrease in additional target accuracy after detecting a prior target in a visual search, SSM errors are known to underlie both real-world search errors (e.g., a radiologist is more likely to miss a tumor if a different tumor was previously detected) and more simplified, lab-based search errors (e.g., an observer is more likely to miss a target ‘T’ if a different target ‘T’ was previously detected). Unfortunately, little was known about this phenomenon’s cognitive underpinnings and SSM errors have proven difficult to eliminate. However, more recently, experimental research has provided evidence for three different theories of SSM errors: the Satisfaction account, the Perceptual Set account, and the Resource Depletion account. A series of studies examined performance in a multiple-target visual search and aimed to provide support for the Resource Depletion account—a first target consumes cognitive resources leaving less available to process additional targets. </p><p>To assess a potential mechanism underlying SSM errors, eye movements were recorded in a multiple-target visual search and were used to explore whether a first target may result in an immediate decrease in second-target accuracy, which is known as an attentional blink. To determine whether other known attentional distractions amplified the effects of finding a first target has on second-target detection, distractors within the immediate vicinity of the targets (i.e., clutter) were measured and compared to accuracy for a second target. To better understand which characteristics of attention were impacted by detecting a first target, individual differences within four characteristics of attention were compared to second-target misses in a multiple-target visual search. </p><p>The results demonstrated that an attentional blink underlies SSM errors with a decrease in second-target accuracy from 135ms-405ms after detection or re-fixating a first target. The effects of clutter were exacerbated after finding a first target causing a greater decrease in second-target accuracy as clutter increased around a second-target. The attentional characteristics of modulation and vigilance were correlated with second- target misses and suggest that worse attentional modulation and vigilance are predictive of more second-target misses. Taken together, these result are used as the foundation to support a new theory of SSM errors, the Flux Capacitor theory. The Flux Capacitor theory predicts that once a target is found, it is maintained as an attentional template in working memory, which consumes attentional resources that could otherwise be used to detect additional targets. This theory not only proposes why attentional resources are consumed by a first target, but encompasses the research in support of all three SSM theories in an effort to establish a grand, unified theory of SSM errors.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Repeated exposure to stress has been associated with negative health outcomes. The present study investigated how different emotion regulation strategies&mdash;cognitive reappraisal and suppression&mdash;are associated with stress and how executive function may influence these relationships. Thirty two women, all mothers with young children, were assessed using the emotion regulation questionnaire, the affective go/no go task, and salivary cortisol collection. Cognitive reappraisal was not significantly related to stress. Greater endorsement of suppression was significantly associated with two measures of stress&mdash;increased output of daily cortisol and increased cortisol awakening response. Executive function was not a significant moderator. This is the first study to date to examine these questions and to assess them in a naturalistic setting with a sample of mothers with young children. Given that mothers regularly experience emotion-eliciting situations, these results have several implications for how emotion regulation strategies may impact stress (cortisol levels) in this population.</p>

The purpose of this study proposal is to examine the potential relationship between linguistic creativity and mood disorders, specifically depression and bipolar disorder. Participants will be approximately 67 adults who have either bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, or serve as a healthy control group. Participants will complete prompts in order to measure linguistic creativity and then fill out several questionnaires relating to depressed mood, mania, general creativity, and rumination levels. It is predicted that bipolar disorder will have higher levels of certain types of linguistic creativity, such as lexical and semantic creativity, whereas depression will have more syntactic creativity. Furthermore, it is anticipated that higher rumination levels in the depressed group will be associated with higher levels of linguistic creativity, as opposed to participants in the depressed group with lower levels of rumination. Lastly, it is predicted that the type of writing prompt will influence the amount of creativity exhibited by each participant group. The proposed study has implications for therapeutic benefits, the emergence of a new area of research in two separate fields, and a new way of analyzing shifts in speech patterns of those with mood disorders.

The feature positive effect (FPE) is a phenomenon in discrimination learning by which learning occurs more quickly when the presence (Feature positive; FP), rather than absence (Feature negative; FN) of a stimulus indicates a response should be made. Although the FPE has been extensively corroborated, a reversal, or feature negative effect (FNE), has been found when a target stimulus comes from a smaller set of stimuli (Fiedler, Eckert, & Poysiak, 1988). Age differences in FP and FN learning indicate that older adults perform more poorly than young adults on both FP and FN tasks, and are likely related to decline in working memory (WM) throughout adulthood (Mutter, Haggbloom, Plumlee, & Schrimer, 2006). This study used a successive discrimination task to compare young and older adults’ performance across FP and FN conditions under low (three of a set of four stimuli were presented) and high (three of a set of six stimuli were presented) information load (IL). Results from rule articulation, final incorrect and 12 consecutive trials correct did not support the hypotheses, but trend analyses provided partial support. Under low IL, YA demonstrated a FN response bias whereas OA showed no bias. Under high IL, YA and OA demonstrated equivalent performance whether the target stimulus was present or absent in the FP condition. In the FN condition OA performed better when the target stimulus was absent while YA showed no bias. These findings indicate FN task performance varies by age and this variation changes based on IL condition.

<p> People often become disoriented when navigating in complex, multi-level buildings. To efficiently find destinations located on different floors, navigators must refer to a globally coherent mental representation of the multi-level environment, which is termed a multi-level cognitive map. However, there is a surprising dearth of research into underlying theories of why integrating multi-level spatial knowledge into a multi-level cognitive map is so challenging and error-prone for humans. This overarching problem is the core motivation of this dissertation.</p><p> We address this vexing problem in a two-pronged approach combining study of both basic and applied research questions. Of theoretical interest, we investigate questions about how multi-level built environments are learned and structured in memory. The concept of multi-level cognitive maps and a framework of multi-level cognitive map development are provided. We then conducted a set of empirical experiments to evaluate the effects of several environmental factors on users' development of multi-level cognitive maps. The findings of these studies provide important design guidelines that can be used by architects and help to better understand the research question of why people get lost in buildings. Related to application, we investigate questions about how to design user-friendly visualization interfaces that augment users' capability to form multi-level cognitive maps. An important finding of this dissertation is that increasing visual access with an X-ray-like visualization interface is effective for overcoming the disadvantage of limited visual access in built environments and assists the development of multi-level cognitive maps. These findings provide important human-computer interaction (HCI) guidelines for visualization techniques to be used in future indoor navigation systems. </p><p> In sum, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories from the fields of spatial cognition, information visualization, and HCI, addressing a long-standing and ubiquitous problem faced by anyone who navigates indoors: why do people get lost inside multi-level buildings. Results provide both theoretical and applied levels of knowledge generation and explanation, as well as contribute to the growing field of real-time indoor navigation systems.</p>