Psychology Dissertations

The deliberate Duchenne smile: perceptions and social outcomes

Sarah D. Gunnery — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:07:17 PDT

The Duchenne smile, which is a smile that involves activation of the cheek raiser muscle that creates crow's feet around the eyes, has long been thought of as an infallible expression of genuine happiness (Ekman, Friesen, & Hager, 2002). Recent research has begun to show that the Duchenne smile can be deliberately produced (Gunnery, Hall, & Ruben, 2013; Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009). As the ability to deliberately produce a Duchenne smile continues to be documented, the questions become why someone might want to produce a Duchenne smile deliberately, and what the social outcomes of being able to do so are....

Narcissism and other-derogation in the absence of ego threat

Sun Woong Park — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:51:16 PDT

The purpose of the present research was to investigate whether and to what extent narcissism is related to other-derogation in the absence of ego threat. In Study 1, judges watched four videotaped dyadic interactions and rated the personality of each individual identified as the target person. All judges rated the same four targets. In Study 2, each judge rated the personality of his or her own target who was the judge's friend. In Study 3, judges were asked to imagine the average Northeastern University student and rate this hypothetical person's personality. In Study 4, judges rated the personality of either...

When are apologies effective? an investigation of the components that Increase an apology's efficacy

Krista Hill — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:39:04 PDT

Although apologies are a staple of civil society, it is unclear whether they are effective and if effective, what components are involved in the perfect apology. The term "components" refers to general categories of actions (both verbal and nonverbal) that may be present in an apology. Two studies were conducted to examine (1) whether apologies are effective in eliciting positive outcomes for an apologizer and (2) potential apology components that may obtain positive outcomes for an apologizer.

For Study 1, six meta-analyses of previously published studies, examined the relation between apologies and offended parties' (1) forgiveness, (2) attributions of positive...

Altered bold fMRI response toward survival-pertinent stimuli in the early postpartum dam

Martha Kathleen Caffrey — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:02:49 PDT

The peripartum period begins during late pregnancy and extends across parturition into early lactation. During this period, the maternal brain undergoes changes resulting from central and peripheral alterations in hormone and neurotransmitter levels. These changes manifest behaviorally, anatomically, and physiologically, and lead to development of maternal behaviors. In order to address how these changes affect maternal brain response to survival-pertinent exogenous stimuli, three studies were conducted. The studies used blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake rats to evaluate differences between maternal and non-maternal brain responses to predatory fear, pain, and reward, while also addressing...

Causal explanations and judgments about children’s potentially problematic behaviors

Jennelle Elizabeth Yopchick — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:49:00 PST

Children with burgeoning psychological problems are not always correctly identified as having such problems, often do not receive necessary treatment at critical developmental periods, and subsequently suffer more serious dysfunction as adults (Garland et al., 2001; Miller, 1995; Yeh & Weisz, 2001). Why are children's early warning-sign behaviors overlooked? Previous work has shown that lay people perceive severely disordered adult behaviors as less disordered and less in need of intervention when given a plausible causal explanation (Ahn et al., 2003; Kim & LoSavio, 2009). The current work asked whether parents and lay adults without children are similarly influenced by provided...

Causal explanations and judgments about children’s potentially problematic behaviors

Jennelle Elizabeth Yopchick — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 09:46:15 PST

Anger and threat detection: increased expectancy for emotion-relevant stimuli influences object recognition

Jolie Elizabeth Baumann — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:55:21 PST

Emotions are known to influence judgments and decision making, even on tasks or in situations unrelated to the original source of the emotional experience (Schwarz & Clore, 2007; Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001). However, despite the wealth of research on incidental emotions (those elicited by a source other than the task at hand), it remains unclear whether such emotion effects extend to purely objective judgments for which there is a clear correct and incorrect response. To test this possibility, we had participants complete an emotion induction procedure and then a threat detection task in which they were shown images of...

Property effects in inductive inference

Nadezda Vasilyeva — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:02:13 PST

This project examined how people generate inductive inferences – probabilistic hypotheses rendered plausible by the given evidence but not guaranteed by it. The hypotheses people generate are often fine-tuned to specific features of the problem. For example, when one is asked to project a property from a known case to unknown – e.g., given that ducks have gene X, what else is likely to share the gene? – the nature of the projected property can have a profound effect on the generated hypotheses. Intrinsic properties, such as having a gene, tend to be projected to members of the same class...

Early scotopic dark adaptation

Rebecca J. Grayhem — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:53:32 PST

The human visual system can function over a broad range of light levels, from few photons to bright sunshine. I am interested in sensitivity regulation of the rod pathway in dim light, below the level at which the cones become effective. I obtained thresholds for large (1.3 deg) and tiny (5 min arc) circular test spots, either after 20-30 mins exposure to complete darkness (absolute threshold), or on uniform backgrounds of varying light intensities, or just after the background was removed to plunge the eye into darkness; Maxwellian view optics were used so that variations in pupil size would have...

Agreement computation in sentence production: conceptual and temporal factors

Maureen Gillespie — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 06:19:34 PST

The study of language production is concerned with how speakers translate non-verbal thoughts into meaningful, grammatical utterances. In all languages, information in one part of an utterance may depend on information that appears in another part of the utterance, and the distance between these parts of the utterance may span an arbitrary amount of intervening material. Subject-verb agreement is an example of a long-distance syntactic dependency in that the number information encoded in the subject and the verb of a sentence must agree. Agreement errors are likely to occur when a singular head noun (e.g., key) of a subject noun...

Towards more accurate recognition of patient emotion cues: meta-analysis of training literature and development of an assessment tool and multi-component intervention for clinicians

Danielle Blanch Hartigan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:02:54 PDT

The ability to make accurate perceptions of others is a valuable skill related to a variety of positive intra- and interpersonal attributes. For healthcare providers in particular, accurate perception of patients, particularly accurate recognition of patient emotions, is an ability associated with better patient care, and more satisfied and adherent patients. A critical component of quality in empathic provider-patient communication is the provider's ability to recognize the emotional needs of the patient. Despite the importance of this skill for effective communication, research on clinically relevant assessment tools and training programs for emotion cue recognition ability is extremely limited. This dissertation...

The use of video-based instruction, performance feedback and role play in teaching caregivers of preschool aged children to use dialogic reading strategies

Joanna Elizabeth Romeo Cutting — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:44:44 PDT

The benefits of dialogic reading in its ability to support children's oral language development and emergent literacy skills have been replicated using multiple training modalities including in-vivo training (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1988), video-based training (e.g., Whitehurst et al., 1994b) and video-based training with instructor feedback (e.g., Heubner & Meltzoff, 2005). The current study is the first to evaluate the effectiveness of pairing a structured performance feedback session with the Read Together Talk Together training video to teach parents to use dialogic reading strategies. Using a randomized, control group, repeated measures design with 40 caregiver-child dyads, this study sought to...

Integrating the neural systems of the lateral anterior hypothalamus in adolescent AAS-induced offensive aggression

Jared J. Schwartzer — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:55:21 PDT

Adolescence is a developmental period where neurobiological mechanisms regulating complex behaviors, such as aggression, are particularly sensitive to circulating androgens. For example, an increased incidence of aggressive behavior correlates with elevated levels of endogenous testosterone in mid-to-late adolescent males (Dabbs et al. 1987; Dabbs et al. 1991; Mattsson et al. 1980; Scerbo and Kolko 1994) but not in prepubertal males (Constantino et al. 1993; Schaal et al. 1996; Susman et al. 1987), suggesting a link between circulating androgens and the development of the aggressive phenotype. This link between testosterone and aggression is particularly concerning for adolescent populations who abuse synthetic...

Massachusetts school psychologists' concerns regarding the implementation of responsiveness-to-intervention: a concerns-based adoption model approach

Jason Perry Kaplan — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:39:16 PST

Responsiveness-to-Intervention (RTI) represents a paradigm shift in how students are evaluated for learning disabilities and found eligible for special education services. With the reauthorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) in December 2004, no longer is it a requirement for a student to show a "severe discrepancy" between intellectual ability and academic achievement in order to be diagnosed with a Specific Learning Disability (SLD). New regulations allow local education agencies to use a student's response to intervention as part of the evaluation procedures for identifying a student with an SLD. Since the reauthorization of IDEA (2004), with its...

Adolescent anabolic-androgenic steroids and the neurobiology of aggression: the role of the glutamatergic system

Maria Carrillo — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:20:39 PDT

There is substantial evidence associating the use of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) during adolescence with the development of escalated levels of offensive aggression. In our laboratory we have used the Syrian hamster (Mesocricetus auratus) as an animal model to examine the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the development of aggression in adolescent AAS-treated animals (Melloni and Ricci, 2009). In this animal model the neural network modulating aggression is centered at the level of the anterior hypothalamus (AH), an area that shares reciprocal connections with other regions implicated in aggression control including the lateral septum (LS), bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST),...

HIV-Tat Protein mediation of NeuroAIDS central nervous system pathology and behavioral deficits

Amanda Natalie Carey — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:33:36 PDT

This dissertation investigated the role of HIV-Tat protein in mediating behavioral dysfunction and neurodegeneration associated with NeuroAIDS. NeuroAIDS is the syndrome consisting of neuropsychological manifestations and central nervous system pathology resulting from HIV-1 infection. The syndrome is characterized by the progressive loss of cognitive and motor function, and is also linked to neuropsychological disturbances that include changes in mood, "personality", and drug abuse. Research suggests that the cognitive and neuropsychological dysfunction may have a common etiological and biological basis; it is theorized that the release of toxic viral proteins from HIV-infected cells is a key mechanism by which HIV-1 indirectly...

People’s knowledge of phonological universals: evidence from fricatives and stops

Tracy Jordan Lennertz — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:10:32 PDT

Do people have knowledge concerning universal restrictions on the sound structure of language? Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1994/2006) predicts that people’s knowledge about phonology includes universal, grammatical restrictions. Such restrictions are active in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of whether the particular structures occur in one’s language. The present research tests this prediction using the sonority of fricatives (e.g., f) and stops (e.g., p) as a case study.

Past research examined people’s sensitivity to universal constraints on the sonority distance of onset clusters (the co-occurring consonants at the beginning of the syllable, e.g., pl in please). The frequency...

Asymmetries in the s-cone increment and decrement pathways as revealed by pedestal masking

Scott Huston Gabree — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:15:55 PDT

The short wavelength sensitive or S-cones are known to be both physiologically and psychophysically different than both the long and middle wavelength sensitive or Land M-cones. The L- and M-cones are genetically/evolutionarily similar to one another and both quite unique from the S-cones. The S-cones are also not found in the central retina where the L- and M-cones are most densely packed. This thesis uses a classic pedestal experiment to explore yet another unique feature of the S-cone visual pathways.

In a pedestal discrimination experiment, subjects must discriminate between a constant “pedestal” stimulus and another composed of a sum of...

Contextualized personality assessment : an exploration of objective and subjective situation properties associated with behavioral consistency and situation specific behavior

Robert Griffo — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:52:55 PDT

Current social and personality psychology perspectives agree that behavior is determined by the interaction between characteristics of persons and situations. However, theoretical and empirical progress towards understanding what constitutes a "situation" and how behavior is systematically related to situation variables is limited (Funder, 2001; Funder, 2006; Hogan, 2005; Pervin, 1976; Roberts, 2007). To address this issue, the current research developed a contextualized personality assessment procedure to measure both objective and subjective properties of social situations, as well as social behavior manifested in those situations.

Over the course of three lab sessions, participants completed a battery of self-report measures of personality,...

Developing a functional view of pride in the interpersonal domain

Lisa A. Williams — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:58:26 PDT

The presented studies examined the ability of pride to serve as an adaptive emotion within the context of interpersonal situations. Two functional hypotheses for this positive self-conscious emotion are posited. First, pride should organize and direct behaviors in interpersonal settings such that domain knowledge or expertise is shared or demonstrated. Second, pride should engender behaviors that signal warrant of increase in social capital to others. Building off of previous work, which demonstrated that pride facilitates increased efforts on valued tasks in intrapersonal situations (Williams & DeSteno, 2008), two studies examined these hypotheses in interpersonal settings.

Study 1 specifically tested the...