Little is known about emotional processing in individuals with Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD). Research shows that HPD is correlated with psychopathy and both disorders are associated with a deficit in emotional experience. If this relationship is due to shared underlying etiology, individuals with HPD might exhibit an emotional processing abnormality similar to what has been found in individuals with psychopathy. This study examined emotional processing in a sample of college students exhibiting a range of symptoms of HPD by using a startle eye blink paradigm and a lexical decision task. It was hypothesized that a higher number of histrionic symptoms would predict a decreased potentiation of startle eye blink response to negatively valenced pictures, as well as a decrease in emotional facilitation (an increase in reaction time) in the processing of emotional words, after controlling for psychopathic traits. These hypotheses were not supported by the data, suggesting that symptoms of HPD may not be related to abnormal emotional processing. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science. / Fall Semester, 2011. / August 24, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Jeanette Taylor, Professor Directing Thesis; Joyce Carbonell, Committee Member; Michael Kaschak, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_253245 |
| Contributors | Mikolajewski, Amy (authoraut), Taylor, Jeanette (professor directing thesis), Carbonell, Joyce (committee member), Kaschak, Michael (committee member), Department of Psychology (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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