Return to search

Physiological Arousal and Cursing: Support for a Feedback Model of Neurogenic Cursing

Many neurological disorders are characterized by uncontrolled or non-volitional cursing. The social stigma of coprophenomena can be immense, particularly for young adults with traumatic brain injury or Tourette Syndrome. Little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying non-volitional cursing, and there is no known treatment. To this end, I propose a mechanism that will prove useful as a guiding theoretical framework for modeling different types of cursing. My overarching hypothesis is that uncontrolled cursing is the breakdown of a feedback loop between physiological arousal and controlled language output. I operationalize the hypothesis that cursing occurs in the context of physiological arousal and the act of cursing further modulates arousal. This thesis will illustrate how the model predicts different patterns of impairment across different disorders of emotion and behavior dysregulation. I will test predictions of the model in two experiments both involving manipulations of arousal and linguistic content. In Experiment 1, I compare the arousal of the lexical environment of curse words to the that of randomly selected non-curse words in a large natural language corpus. In Experiment 2, I use a verbal fluency paradigm to compare physiological arousal and subsequent language production during a cursing task vs. a non-cursing task. / Communication Sciences

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/9561
Date12 1900
CreatorsPattullo, Lucia
ContributorsReilly, Jamie, Martin, Nadine, 1952-, Murty, Vishnu P.
PublisherTemple University. Libraries
Source SetsTemple University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis/Dissertation, Text
Format44 pages
RightsIN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Relationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/9523, Theses and Dissertations

Page generated in 0.0122 seconds