<p> Is exposure to death the formula to accept one&acute;s own demise? The present research tested terror management theory among groups with varying degrees and types of exposures to death from Varanasi to find an answer. Study 1 included 120 funerary workers and 120 farmers. Participants were reminded of their death or a control topic and then reported their level of cultural worldview defense operationalized as attachment and glorification of India and pro-India bias. Farmers increased their worldview defense following death reminders. This increase brought farmers to the same high level of worldview defense displayed, independently from the condition, by funerary workers. This was interpreted as support for the idea that chronic exposure to death leads to a chronic use of cultural worldview defense. Study 2 tested whether a more experiential form of exposure to death involved in going through a terminal illness is the silver bullet to accept death. A group of 30 terminal cancer patients and 30 farmers with no major health concerns from Varanasi completed similar measures as in Study 1. Death reminders increased attachment to India in both groups. These findings suggest that daily exposure to death - at least to dead bodies and illness symptoms - or a Hindu cyclical view of life and death do not lead to death acceptance. Alternative types of exposure to death are offered in the discussion as possible roads to reach death acceptance. </p>

<p> This study explores the boundaries of consciousness and the possibility of awareness expanding beyond the neural constituents of the peripheral and central nervous system. This thesis investigates whether consciousness is localized in the physical body and the present moment or is nonlocalized, transcending the physical confines of matter and time. Nonlocal consciousness, a modern reverberation of Carl Jung&rsquo;s concept of the collective unconscious, stems from the idea that consciousness can be informed by nonlocal, nonordinary perception. This theory was examined utilizing a hermeneutic process of investigation, analyzing texts from depth psychology, neuroscience, physics, shamanism, and parapsychology. The findings of this thesis, that consciousness is not confined to the physical body and neural constituents of the five senses, support the possibility that depth psychological practices increase receptivity to nonordinary perception, and the validity in therapy of drawing upon images from the unconscious and both synchronistic and transpersonal experiences.</p>

<p>Throughout history, humans have gathered to create, produce, or listen to music. The ubiquity of behavior suggests music provides a social bonding mechanism, a concept however, that remains theoretically controversial. This dissertation uses four studies to examine social bonding theory, by testing the hypothesis that music structure and social context interact in the brain to produce pro-social behaviors, such as music preference similarity. To begin, we quantify and validate musical structure by employing a fractal model (1/f</p><p>&beta;of pitch interval complexity, and measure the effects on higher order systems such as perception (i.e., complexity, melodicity), emotion (i.e., mood, preference), and cognition (i.e., memory) in both a novel and repeated exposure paradigm. Results show that when complexity reflects an optimal ratio of predictability to unpredictability, random tone sequences evoke the perception of music, positive mood, and near perfect memory recognition. In addition, optimal levels are unaffected by repeated exposure, but responses to higher and lower levels become more music-like as exposure increases, providing the first evidence of a categorical response to different levels of musical complexity. Neurally, we show that optimal levels of complexity engage the primary sensory cortex (i.e., bilateral A1) and the sub-cortical reward system, specifically the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a structure known to process both pleasant music and social rewards. We finish by showing that for an adolescent population, social context (i.e., knowledge of peer ratings) interacts with the level of complexity. When sequences are initially rated as musical, knowledge of positive peer ratings increases the magnitude of ratings. In contrast, when highly complex sequences are initially rated as ambiguous (i.e., neither musical nor not musical), negative peer ratings result in subsequent strong non-musical ratings. Together, results show that social context causes an additive effect that segregates the perception of what is rated as musical and what is not, ultimately driving preference similarity. In addition, results may account for why some preferences are universal and others are highly specific to a group or culture. Future directions are discussed in light of potential neural assessment tools and sound-based therapies to facilitate social bonding.</p>

<p> The social self preservation model posits that threats to the social self result in a unique and coordinated psychobiological response that evolved due to its adaptive benefits. Stressors that threaten the social self elicit feelings of shame and other negative self-conscious emotions, as well as increased hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity. The current study sought to test this model by exposing individuals to an acute stressor, and determining if they exhibit the emotional, physiological, and behavioral components proposed by the self preservation model. In addition, the physiological and emotional reactions of an observing participant were assessed to determine if they too exhibited a physiological and emotional reaction to observing an individual under social stress. Results supported the social self preservation model in that participants undergoing the acute stressor task exhibited significantly greater cortisol response and self-reported personal distress, as compared to observing participants. The social self preservation model was also extended by the current findings in that participant submissive nonverbal behavior, particularly gaze aversion, was related to their physiological response. Observing participants exhibited a significant salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) response, demonstrating the physiological effects of observing an individual experiencing social stress. In addition, observing participants with greater trait empathy levels exhibited significantly greater physiological reactivity as well as self-reported personal distress. These findings suggest that nonverbal behavior may be a mechanism of physiological resonance of stress.</p>

<p>Through nine experiments, this research advances knowledge about the influence of metaphors grounded in the visual sensory system on creative cognition by showing that perceiving ostensibly task-unrelated visual images that carry metaphoric meaning alters consumers&rsquo; creativity. While the results of Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 provide convergent evidence that positive visual metaphors representing ideas like &ldquo;<i>I just had a light go on</i>&rdquo; increase consumers&rsquo; creative output, Experiments 3a and 3b reveals that a negative visual metaphor conveying ideas like &ldquo;<i> I am burnt out</i>&rdquo; decrease it. Experiments 4a and 4b show that aptness and familiarity moderate the metaphor creativity link, and Experiment 6 shows that the metaphor&ndash;creativity link is moderated by analogical reasoning skills. Experiment 5 uncovers the mediating role of creative intent. In addition to implying that marketers can use metaphors to enhance consumers&rsquo; creative feedback in areas like new product development, this research also makes important theoretical contributions by showing (1) that grounded visual metaphors (in addition to tangible objects or physical exercises) can not only raise but also lower creative output, (2) that the cognitive relationship to the metaphor alters the metaphor-creativity link, (3) that a unique cognitive skill alters the metaphor&ndash;creativity link, and (4) that consumers&rsquo; intentions explain that relationship. </p>

<p> Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about <i> long</i> vacations, <i>short</i> tempers, and <i>colorful </i> language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), who propose that only a small set of the concepts which make up our conceptual system emerge directly from physical experience, and it is this small number of concepts that serves to structure the ways in which we think and talk about abstract concepts (Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1980). This key assumption in cognitive linguistics&mdash;that our understanding of concrete concepts serves to ground our understanding of abstract concepts&mdash;is the focus of my research. Although indirect metaphors are thought to be the result of grounded conceptual connections, motivated by experiential knowledge and flowing from the physical to the non-physical (Grady, 1999), it is unclear whether people access these grounded connections when processing the meanings of indirect metaphors.</p><p> The prepositions <i>in</i> and <i>on</i> are an interesting test case for grounded connections: Both lexical items are used frequently by speakers not only to identify the location of one object relative to another but also to refer to more abstract relationships. Therefore, I experimentally investigated the possibility that grounded connections are available for use in tasks requiring on-line processing of these prepositions: Would participants make use of conceptual connections, and if so, would the characteristics associated with these conceptual connections be consistent with the CMT grounding assumption? Although the results for <i>in</i> were consistent with the CMT grounding assumption, the results for <i>on</i> were not. In fact, differences between <i>in</i> and <i>on</i> were found throughout stimulus development, and these differences were used to help explain this discrepancy. The patterns observed throughout this dissertation suggest that <i>in</i> may be more metaphorically active than <i>on </i>, meaning that <i>in</i>'s potential to participate in indirect metaphors is higher than <i>on</i>'s, and that one consequence of this higher metaphorical activity is an increase in the availability of grounded connections during on-line processing.</p>

Three theories on the relationship between the lexical orthographic representations utilized in reading and spelling can be distinguished. They are a common or single lexicon theory, an independent lexicons theory, and a "separate but linked" lexicons theory. Little research with normal populations has addressed these issues. Neuropsychological studies have produced mixed results. Three experiments examined the validity of each of these theories utilizing both long-term and short-term priming paradigms. Experiment 1 examined the relationship between reading and spelling utilizing a perceptual identification task, and found facilitation in terms of accuracy of later perceptual identification performance only for previously read items. Experiment 2a found marginally significant facilitation of later spelling performance from previously spelling an item at study in a spelling-probe task but no significant facilitation in a missing-letter task. Experiment 2b found significant facilitation from previously spelling a word at study to later performance on a spelling-probe task. However, this facilitation was only significant across subjects and not items. Experiment 3 examined the influence of spelling on reading and reading on spelling utilizing a short-term priming paradigm. Subjects performed either a spelling-probe or a lexical decision task, and facilitation was measured to repeated items that appeared with one, two, five, and ten items intervening between the first and the second presentations. Significant facilitation was observed from reading to reading, and spelling to spelling, as well as from spelling to reading. No significant priming was obtained from reading to spelling. Read primes produced significantly more priming than spelled primes for read targets. There was no corresponding, statistically significant, advantage for spelled primes over read primes for spelled targets. No significant interactions with the number of intervening items (lag) on the amount of priming were observed. These data are interpreted as supportive of a lexical orthographic system which involves two distinct lexicons, (one for input and one for output) which are linked together in some manner.

These three experiments examined noticing rates of an unexpected object (UO) that appeared during a dynamic aircraft threat evaluation task that required participants to shift their visual attention between multiple task-relevant locations. Experiment 1 manipulated the location at which the UO appeared; no effects on noticing rates were found. However, eye-tracking data revealed trends for UOs to be noticed more when participants were looking at locations closer to where the UO appeared, or when they were making more eye-movements while the UO was present. Eye-tracking data also showed a strong link between making an eye movement to the UO and noticing it. Experiment 2 manipulated the color, direction and speed of the UO to make it more or less similar to task-relevant objects. Also, to-be-ignored (TBI) aircraft were either present or absent for each participant. An interaction between the color of the UO and the presence of TBI aircraft was found with noticing rates being greater for uniquely-colored UO's only when no TBI aircraft were present. No overall effect of UO and target aircraft similarity was found. Experiment 3 manipulated the visual complexity and cognitive difficulty of the task. Noticing rates were higher only in the visually-simple, cognitively-easy, task pairing. These findings reveal the importance of participants' task strategies, attentional set and the interaction with task complexity unexplored by current theories of visual attention and prior findings from research on inattentional blindness. Also discussed are the implications for designers of human-machine systems.

Experiments reported here examine the susceptibility of memory to social influence. In Experiments 1 and 2, the subject's recognition memory for a list of words was tested in the presence of another respondent, with the two taking turns to report their responses aloud. The other respondent was another subject in the first experiment and a confederate in the second. In Experiment 2, each response was supplemented by a confidence rating according to a 3-point scale. In Experiment 3, rather than responding aloud, subjects recorded their answers in a booklet which contained the responses of two pseudosubjects. In all experiments responses were biased in the direction of preceding responses of other respondent(s). Conformity was greater when the word had not been studied than when it had. Thus, conformity of (reported) memory can readily be demonstrated in the laboratory. Such findings of conformity illustrate one source of false memory.

In this project explanations were studied along a continuum ranging from human-human interactions to human-expert system interactions with the goal of identifying features of successful expert system explanations. The project consisted of five distinct phases or steps: (a) defining what a successful explanation entails, (b) observing human-human explanation and formulating hypotheses about the features of successful explanations, (c) testing hypotheses formulated in step b, (d) extending results to an expert system domain and testing again, and (e) from this empirical data, formulating recommendations for expert system explanation designers. The progressive nature of this study allowed conclusions to be drawn about both human-human and human-expert system interactions and the role explanations play in these exchanges. The most salient conclusion drawn from these studies was that explanatory interactions are complex and explanation success is dependent on more than just features of the explanations involved. Individual differences such as an explanation recipient's initial abilities and their participation level in the interaction influence their understanding and performance as much, if not more so, than explanation features. Consistently subjects' participation level interacted with explanation content level. Individuals who are active participants in interactions with an expert perform better when given explanations with low levels of content, whereas passive participants benefit from explanations with high levels of content. Overall, an active participation level increases performance and understanding in human-human interactions, but this result does not generalize to human-expert system interactions where an active participation style is detrimental to performance. This and other inconsistencies between human-human and human-expert system interactions are discussed as well as the advantages of the research approach employed in this project. Finally, recommendations based on the results of these studies are provided for expert system explanation designers.