Honors Theses (Psychology)
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All students participate in and collaborate on research as part of the academic course sequence. Interested students are encouraged to gain additional research experience through research assistant positions in faculty labs and the undergraduate Honors thesis program.
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Item Open Access The Effect of Sleep on False Memories(University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, 2018) Morocco, MadisonA false memory is recalling incorrect information or recalling an event that did not happen. Everyone is susceptible to false memories. There is no known cure or defense and relatively little is known about how they occur. Though there is relatively little known, much research shows sleep, consolidation specifically, is crucial to solidifying memories (Payne, Chambers, and Kensinger, 2012). Consolidation is a process where new, labile memories are integrated into the vast network of pre-existing long-term memories. A key component of this process is the active re-processing of these memories because this is the version of the memory that will be recalled (Diekelmann and Born, 2010). Memory is malleable, so it is important to understand how it is affected. This study seeks to find a connection between the number of hours of sleep a subject gets and how many times they experience a false memory. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM), subjects were asked to memorize three lists of 15 words all related to a single theme word. Then, subjects were asked to recall words from each list. A false memory was counted each time a subject mistakenly reported the theme word. We hypothesized that subjects sleeping a “normal” eight hours per night would experience fewer false memories compared to subjects who slept greater than eight or less than five hours per night. We sought to answer the question: is someone more or less susceptible to false memories based on the number of hours they sleep? However, results suggest there is not a significant relation between amount of sleep and false memory.Item Open Access Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Responses of Injured Athletes(University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, 1987-03) Schlossman, Carl F.To date, there has been little empirical research to support the role that psychological intervention strategies con play in the rehabilitation of injured athletes. While the concept behind psychological intervention in rehabilitation is on intuitive one, the case for such strategies could be strengthened by scientific research which determines that injured athletes do in fact respond negatively to their injuries. Consequently, it it is the purpose of this study, based on the literature reviewed, to obtain descriptive data about the use or lack of use of negative coping strategies among injured athletes.Item Open Access Expert witnesses in the courtroom: the impact of the role of the defendant and expert witness type on evaluations of procedural justice(University of Oregon, 2008-06) Hudson, Karen AlicePeople tend to cooperate with and defer future decisions to authorities when those people perceive the authorities as fair (Tyler, 2003). In the current experiment, the effects of expert witness type (adversarial, neutral court appointed, biased court appointed) and class of defendant (individual, corporation, government agency) on perceived fairness were explored. Participants were given a pre-trial questionnaire to control for the trial experience, provided with a court transcript, and then filled out a post-trial questionnaire composed of procedural justice evaluations. Neutral observers rated cases with adversarial testimony as more procedurally fair than cases with court appointed testimony, and found cases against corporations to be more procedurally fair than cases against government entities. As hypothesized, perceived fairness judgments were lowest when the plaintiff lost to more "powerful" entities and when the loss was coupled with testimony by court appointed expert witnesses. The present research continues to highlight the concern about the use of court appointed experts in the courtroom.Item Open Access Religious Housing Co-operatives and their Correlations with Religious Belief in Young Adults(University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, 2007-06) Sylwester, EvaThis study looks for differences between residents of two Christian religious housing co-operatives (N = 23) and residents of a secular fraternity house who self-identified as Christian (N = 8) on variables related to Christian religious attitudes and practices. Compared to the secular control group, religious housing co-operative residents scored significantly lower on the Religious Doubts Scale (Altemeyer, 1988), significantly lower on the Faith Development Scale (Barnes, Doyle & Johnson, 1989), significantly higher on the intrinsic subscale of the Religious Orientation Scale (Allport & Ross, 1967), significantly lower on the extrinsic subscale of the Religious Orientation Scale and significantly more indicative of Right-Wing Authoritarianism on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 2005). Religious housing co-operative residents also scored significantly higher than secular housing co-operative residents on measures of religious behavior: frequency of prayer, frequency of reading the Bible or other religious texts, current frequency of church attendance and frequency of church attendance before graduating from high school.Item Open Access Why don't kids tell? Gender and the disclosure of abuse.(2007-06-29T17:48:31Z) Spaventa, KathrynBoys are assumed to be more reluctant to disclose sexual abuse than girls but empirical evidence is lacking. Previous qualitative research by Alaggia (2005) suggests that typical nondisclosure reasons for women are related to confusion about who was responsible for the abuse and feelings that she will be blamed or not believed. Similarly boys are assumed to have gender-specific reasons for nondisclosure such as fear of being labeled as homosexual (Alaggia, 2005). We investigated gender differences in likelihood of disclosure and evaluated some reasons why males and females decided not to disclose their child sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Gender differences as well as gender similarities in reasons for nondisclosure of child sexual, emotional and physical abuse were found in responses to a questionnaire completed by a sample of college students.Item Open Access Temperament and strategies for activational and inhibitory control(University of Oregon, 2006-07) Johnson, Laura M.Individual differences in temperament include emotional reactivity and attention self regulation; both reactivity and regulation may influence the strategies individuals use in managing their own behavior and emotions. Correlations were explored between measures of adult temperament and the reported use of strategies for situations requiring inhibitory control and activational control. Participants completed Evansâ & Rothbartâ s (2005) Adult Temperament Questionnaire and a self-regulatory strategy questionnaire, based on college studentsâ open-ended generation of strategies. Multiple regression analysis found that the temperamental capacity for activational control predicted the use of strategies in inhibitory control situations as well activational control situations. Positive affect and sociability predicted the use of reward focused strategies, while fear predicted the use of punishment focused strategies.Item Open Access Nuclear war anxiety and education : can a nuclear curriculum decrease nuclear war anxiety?(University of Oregon, Clark Honors College, 1989-06) Albert, AnnmarieJunior high school students who had taken a class on nuclear war issues were tested to see whether they would differ from students who hadn't. Students were compared with regard to levels of optimism, active hope, pessimism, powerlessness, and repression. In general, the two groups did not differ from one another, although there was a trend for those who had taken the class to show less repression .Item Open Access The Relationship between Extraversion and Happiness(2006-07-11T15:46:08Z) Vallereux, ShawnA known link between extraversion and happiness has existed for decades. While this relationship is largely not understood, several theories have emerged recently to help explain this link. R.E. Lucas and E. Diener (2001) argued that extraverts may be more sensitive to rewarding social situations than introverts, and that this may manifest itself as greater feelings of happiness by extraverts. Additionally, Pavot, Diener, and Fujita (1990) suggested that extraverts and introverts both enjoy social situations, though extraverts select more social situations, resulting in greater happiness. In the present study, the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman, 2003) was utilized to test both the reward-sensitivity hypothesis as well as the situation-selection hypothesis. Data from a sample of 109 respondents were used to test the 2 hypotheses with a repeated measure of happiness on multiple reconstructed episodes. The results clearly show support for the situation-selection hypothesis with no significant support for reward-sensitivity.Item Open Access Suppressing Visual Memories Through Executive Control(University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, 2006-06) Peterson, Emily D.Forgetting is often perceived as the challenge one must overcome to have a good memory, when in fact, forgetting is actually an important component in maintaining a good memory. If people remembered everything from their daily lives they would become overloaded with unimportant thoughts, making it difficult to recognize relevant information. For example, if one remembered every parking place one's car had ever occupied it would become difficult to bring to mind only the current parking place. Irrelevant or intrusive thoughts can also be distracting and unpleasant. For these reasons the ability to push information out of mind can be a useful skill. For instance, if one's favorite restaurant changed location, one would benefit from pushing the memory of the old location from mind, so that one can more easily recall the new location. Being able to selectively forget is a useful component of memory that allows people to focus on, and thereby, facilitate retrieval of contextually relevant information from their surroundings. The current study, using the Think/No-Think (TNT) paradigm, attempted to determine how actively avoiding thought for a visual image would affect a person's ability to later recognize that item. The stimuli used were neutral words paired with complex visual-spatial pictures of faces or nature scenes. The results indicate that, relative to baseline memory performance, there is an overall inhibition of memory for items that were actively not thought about. These findings validate the hypothesis that actively avoiding thought of a picture leads to impaired recognition of that picture at a later time. Subjects' were less confident in their ability to recognize which word-picture pairs they had seen earlier. Actively thinking of a picture in some cases facilitated memory of that word-picture pair, but this was not consistent across all stimuli. These findings support the everyday use of memory inhibition by indicating that humans are able to exert executive control over what they think or don't think about, which later influences what they remember. Choosing to avoid thinking about a picture, even when presented with its cue, leads to inhibition of that memory, making it harder to recognize at a later time.Item Open Access A Discourse Comparison of Antisocial and Well-adjusted Male Adolescent Peers: Dyadic Analysis of Verbal Dominance, Submissiveness, and Agreement by Context(University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, 2006-04) Mahon, Jacob J.The interpersonal communicatory dynamics of verbal behavior were studied in an antisocial (n=20) and well-adjusted (n=20) sample of adolescent male dyads (ethnically diverse 16- and 17-year-old peers). Verbal dominance and submissiveness was measured using the Verbal Control Code and analyzed in conjunction with measures of verbal agreement utilized from the study of Piehler and Dishion (2006). Antisocial adolescent dyads were found to use significantly more verbal dominance and submission and less agreement across conversational contexts than their well-adjusted counterparts and a constant, non-adapting, level of interruptive efficiency. Findings suggest differences in the effortful maintenance of dominance and agreement behaviors across contexts in the two populations of youth studied. Further, appropriate adaptability to conversational contexts is thought to represent a prosocial ability and to be a component of verbal organization and social competence, here, significantly lacking in the antisocial youth measured. The disregard for changes in conversational context, in turn, inhibits a teen’s ability to appropriately communicate and higher levels of organization in discourse have been found to be more prominent in well-adjusted populations than antisocial ones (Dishion, 2004). Limitations and suggestions for future research are noted. Particularly, further study involving analysis of friendship dynamics and effects of speech duration in differing contexts would be worthwhile.