This thesis contains a set of empirical investigations, which explore a fundamental issue in human communication, namely the functional significance of iconic hand gestures that accompany speech. Some researchers argue that these iconic gestures function for the speaker to facilitate lexical retrieval from the mental lexicon (e.g. Butterworth and Hadar, 1989; 1997). An alternative theory is that these iconic gestures are to do with the communication of information from a speaker to a listener (e.g. McNeill, 1985; 1992). This important debate forms the basis of the current research. The research reported in this thesis was found to provide little evidence for the lexical access theoretical position but provide important supporting evidence for the argument that iconic gestures are essentially communicative. It has shown convincingly that information about the world out there is encoded into speech and gesture and seems to provide a substantial body of evidence that iconic gestures do indeed convey semantic information to respondents. It has also shown that some iconic gestures are more communicative than others and that the occurrence of these gestures is affected by certain identifiable properties of talk. One of the strengths of the current research is that it is now more precisely known what semantic information is actually received by respondents from gesture and hence this research provides a much better insight into how the linguistic and gestural codes interact in the communication of meaning. The research reported in this thesis suggests that those researchers who neglect iconic gesture in their study of how language is used in eveiyday life are missing a major component of the process of human communication.

<p> Speech perception requires that the listener identify <i>where</i> the meaningful units are (e.g., syllables) before they can identify <i> what</i> those units might be. This segmentation is difficult because there exist no clear, systematic silences between words, syllables or phonemes. One potentially useful cue is the acoustic envelope: slow (&lt; 10 Hz) fluctuations in sound amplitude over time. Sharp increases in the envelope are loosely related to the onsets of syllables. In addition to this cue, the brain may also make use of the temporal regularity of syllables which last ~200 ms on average across languages. This quasi-rhythmicity enables prediction as a means to identify the onsets of syllables. The work presented here supports neural synchrony to the envelope at the syllabic rate as a critical mechanism to segment the sound stream. Chapter 1 and 2 show synchrony to both speech and music and demonstrate a relationship between synchrony and successful behavior. Chapter 3, following up on this work, compares the data from Chapter 2 with two competing computational models&mdash;oscillator vs evoked&mdash;and shows that the data are consistent with an oscillatory mechanism. These chapters support the oscillator as an effective means of read-in and segmentation of rhythmic input.</p><p>

<p>This study was designed to evaluate the ability of Mind Reading, a computerized program created for individuals with autism spectrum disorders, to improve the emotion recognition abilities of juvenile offenders. Emotion recognition is one component of empathy, a quality that has been shown to be deficient in juvenile offenders. Determining methods to help reduce offending, including investigating whether subcomponents of empathy can be impacted individually, is necessary to help improve the safety of society and to provide effective services to offenders. The study contributed to the body of knowledge related to impacting the behaviors of juvenile offenders. A sample of 13 juveniles offenders was divided into treatment and control groups. Both groups completed pretreatment assessments of empathy and emotion recognition. The treatment group used the Mind Reading program; the control group had treatment as usual. The two control groups were reevaluated after the intervention to determine if the Mind Reading program impacted either overall empathy or emotion recognition skills. The study results did not reach statistical significance as there was not enough power to detect changes. Although not statistically significant, the treatment group demonstrated a trend toward higher levels of emotion recognition, indicating the potential utility of the Mind Reading program and the need for larger studies to further investigate the program?s utility. An individualized, computer-based education/treatment program could potentially provide support to a large number of difficult-to-reach youth.

<p> This study will help to clarify how interactions with dolphins affect people. It examines human well-being and experiential responses to scuba diving with bottlenose dolphins, <i>Tursiops truncatus</i>, and compares this to participation in a scuba dive without this interaction. Ninety-nine adults were split between an intervention and a control group in a mixed methods convergent parallel quasi-experimental design. Before and after the activity participants completed an emotional well-being scale (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS) and only afterward received a researcher-designed qualitative questionnaire targeting peak experiences. For the PANAS, a <i> t</i>-test found a significant difference in negative affect change scores between groups, <i>t</i>(97) = &ndash;2.135, <i>p</i> = .035, <i>d</i> = 0.43. The intervention group experienced a larger decrease in negative affect than the control group at a small-medium effect size. Qualitative themes endorsed more by the control group are self-confidence; level of difficulty; novelty; transformation or overcoming; nature; and physical, mental, or emotional stress or discomfort. For the intervention group, more participants expressed tranquility; numinosity; and connection to nature, themselves, or the Divine. Themes mentioned approximately equally include ineffability, presence in the moment, comfort and safety, desiring to continue, good or extraordinary experience, and freedom. Twelve intervention and 9 control group participants appeared to have a peak experience, as defined by Maslow. This indicates that a peak experience during a scuba dive, with and without dolphins, is a relatively common occurrence. This study demonstrates the importance of rigorous studies in human-dolphin interaction research. Studies on human-dolphin interaction published to date have neglected to impose appropriate controls, which has led to the misattribution of all pre- to postintervention differences to dolphin interaction. Both groups have intriguing results; the presence of dolphins led to a larger decrease in negative affect and greater likelihood of tranquility, numinosity, connection, and peak experiences.</p><p>

<p> The history of intergroup research is built on groups that represent "endpoints" of a dimension of social identity, such as White, Black, heterosexual, and gay/lesbian. Social groups who fall between these more readily recognized advantaged and disadvantaged groups (e.g., biracial people, bisexual people) have received less attention. These intermediate social groups are increasingly visible and numerous in the United States, however, and a detailed account of the biases they face can contribute to a fuller understanding of intergroup relations. This dissertation examines attitudes and beliefs about intermediate social groups, focusing on bisexual people as the primary example at first, and then expanding the investigation to biracial people and novel groups to make the case that intermediate groups elicit a distinctive pattern of biases. Across studies, participants expressed beliefs that undermined the legitimacy of intermediate groups in a variety of ways. They endorsed the view that intermediate groups are low in social realness (conceptually invalid, meaningless, lacking a concrete social existence) and that intermediate group identities are unstable (provisional, lacking a genuine underlying truth, the result of confusion). These views of social realness and identity stability partially explained prejudice against intermediate groups.</p><p> The concept of social group intermediacy is abstract; actual intermediate groups (e.g., biracial and bisexual people) are different from each other because their defining types of intermediacy stem from different dimensions of social identity (race and sexual orientation). Therefore, focused research on each specific intermediate group is necessary to fully understand the types of attitudes they evoke due to their intermediate status. To demonstrate the value of attending to the details of a particular intermediate group, Chapters 2 through 5 focused on bisexual people. The observed patterns of attitudes and beliefs about bisexual people demonstrated the role of their perceived intermediate status in the context of sexual orientation.</p><p> Chapter 2 investigated attitudes toward sexual orientation groups in a large sample of heterosexual and gay/lesbian participants. Bisexuality was evaluated less favorably and perceived as less stable than heterosexuality and homosexuality. Stereotypes about bisexual people pertained to gender conformity, decisiveness, and monogamy; few positive traits were associated with bisexuality. Chapter 3 extended these findings, demonstrating that negative evaluation of sexual minorities was more closely associated with perceived identity instability than it was with the view that sexual orientation is a choice. This relationship was moderated by both participant and target sexual orientation.</p><p> Chapter 4 addressed one reason why bisexual people are evaluated more negatively than gay/lesbian people. A common explanation given for the discrepancy in evaluation is that bisexuality introduces ambiguity into a binary model of sexuality. In line with this explanation, we found that participants with a preference for simple ways of structuring information were especially likely to evaluate bisexual people more negatively than gay/lesbian people. Chapter 5 investigated how bisexual participants saw themselves as a group. Results suggested that bisexual people largely disagree with the prevailing stereotypes of their group; these stereotypes reflect non-bisexual people's impressions of the intermediate group rather than a consensus.</p><p> Chapter 6 shifted the focus from bisexual people as an example of an intermediate social group to intermediate social groups in general. Results from a set of studies involving novel groups demonstrated that perceiving a group as intermediate can cause negative evaluation and low ratings of social realness and identity stability. Similar results held for real-world intermediate groups (biracial people and bisexual people). The extent to which an intermediate group was perceived as less socially real than other groups predicted the extent to which it was evaluated less positively than those groups. Social realness seems to be a unique explanatory factor in the relative negative evaluation of these intermediate groups, working in conjunction with the more well-known processes of intergroup attitudes traditionally studied with respect to Black people and gay/lesbian people. The effects of social group intermediacy were amplified among participants who identified strongly with an advantaged ingroup. Acknowledging an intermediate group as legitimate may require one to acknowledge shared characteristics or overlapping boundaries between one's valued ingroup and the "opposite" outgroup, which can be threatening to highly identified group members.</p><p> Taken together, these chapters make the case that intermediate social groups incur particular biases due to their perceived intermediate status. The processes of intergroup bias that result in derogation of traditionally recognized disadvantaged groups may be insufficient to account for some forms of prejudice in the modern demographic landscape. As biracial people and bisexual people become more prevalent, researchers must address the conditions under which they are recognized or dismissed, included or excluded.</p>

<p> Loneliness &ndash; the feeling that manifests when one perceives one&rsquo;s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one&rsquo;s social relationships &ndash; is a common but typically short-lived and fairly harmless experience. However, recent research continues to uncover a variety of alarming health effects associated with longterm loneliness. The present study examines the psychological mechanisms underlying how persons scoring high in trait loneliness perceive their social environments. Evaluations of transient facial expression morphs are analyzed in R using dynamical systems methods. We hypothesize that, consistent with Cacioppo and Hawkley&rsquo;s socio-cognitive model, subjects scoring high in loneliness will exhibit <i>hypervigilance</i> in their evaluations of cold and neutral emotions and <i>hypovigilance</i> in their evaluations of warm emotions. Results partially support the socio-cognitive model but point to a relationship between loneliness and a global dampening in evaluations of emotions.</p>

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This dissertation consists of three essays on behavioral economics. The first two investigate the role of a principal in solving the collective action problem in team production, and the third essay provides a critical interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's psychological insights by comparing them with the recent evidence collected in the fields of behavioral and experimental economics. The first essay develops a model in which workers have social preferences in the form of inequality aversion towards the principal. The workers face a "rent extractor" boss who selects in advance the fraction of total output that she wants to receive from them. The presence of this "rent extractor" boss may solve the free-rider problem in team production if: (1) workers take into account their subjective costs of effort when assessing inequality; and (2) workers are sufficiently averse towards positive inequality. The second essay is an experimental study on team production that compares the levels of contribution to a group project when workers face different types of bosses. The main result suggests that the endogenous creation of heterogeneous marginal benefits when a productive boss is present generates the highest levels of contribution when punishment is not allowed, and that the collective action problem is solved completely when this productive boss chooses to divide output equally. The third and last essay examines Keynes's hints and suggestions about what a realistic approach to behavior under uncertainty might be. It claims that Keynes was deeply conscious of the necessity to incorporate realistic behavioral assumptions in macroeconomic models that deal with judgment under uncertainty. It is found that his research program is broadly compatible with and finds support in most of the latest findings of behavioral and experimental economics, even though his inferences were largely based on "subjective impressions" rather than rigorous scientific studies.

Research in human factors engineering has recently begun to focus on the role of computers and powerful graphics display technology as a means for enhancing the information processing abilities of the human decision maker. This experiment evaluates different display formats (ranging from an integral polygon display to a separable digital display) for presenting system data in a process control task that requires diagnosing system state. The effect of both system state uncertainty and data reliability on classification performance (response time and accuracy) across the different display formats are explored. System state uncertainty was manipulated by creating instances within each system state that systematically vary from the system state prototype. Data reliability refers to the diagnosticity of each of four system cues. Highly significant performance differences emerged across the different display formats, uncertainty and data reliability conditions. Perhaps even more noteworthy, however, were the findings relating to individual differences in classification strategies used by operators across all display conditions. These findings are important for human factors engineers to consider when making display design recommendations for process control environments where operators must integrate system data to make diagnostic decisions.

Attentional inertia has been hypothesized to index engagement with a stimulus. In this study, the hypothesis that attentional inertia indicates increased cognitive processing of television is tested. College students' visual attention to two hours of commercial TV was rated and following a one day delay, they were given a recognition test using a unique test tape constructed of 132 audiovisual units, half of which had been presented while the viewer was in the test room while the other half served as foils. While subjects were readily able to discriminate between units that had been presented and units that had not been presented, there was no relationship between time in progress when a unit was presented and recognition memory performance. Recognition memory performance overall was better than chance. These results suggested that testing was actually tapping auditory perceptual memory.