Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Psychology"
Now showing items 21-40 of 72
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The Evolutionary and Cognitive Basis of the Perception and Production of Dance
(2013-03-08)Dance is a universal and ancient human behavior; however, our understanding of the basis of this behavior is surprisingly weak. In this dissertation, I explore the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of human dance, ... -
An Examination of the Own-Race Preference in Infancy
(2012-10-31)The goal of this dissertation was to better characterize the nature of infants’ visual preference for own-race faces, and to test two theories regarding its origin. Chapters I and II assessed whether the race bias in infancy ... -
Examining Cognitive Impairments in Bereaved Adults With and Without Complicated Grief
(2015-08-10)Grief is a syndrome of cognitions, emotions, and behaviors that commonly arise together following the death of a loved one. It includes intense pangs of emotional pain, yearning for the deceased, emotional numbness, ... -
Examining the Relationships between Stress, Reward Processing, and Bipolar Disorder
(2013-03-08)Bipolar disorder (BD) is a prevalent illness associated with severe impairments in functioning and elusive etiological pathways. Although a strong link between negative life stress and the onset of mood episodes in BD has ... -
Exploring the nature of early social preferences: The case of music
(2012-08-06)This dissertation aims to explore the nature of early social preferences by testing attention to a cue that might have evolved as a reliable signal of shared group membership – shared cultural knowledge. Part 1 shows that ... -
Family Matters: Tracing the Social Cognitive Development of Kinship Understanding
(2018-05-10)Kinship provides the major framework for social organization, but when do infants and children develop understanding of these social relationships and how they affect social behaviors? This dissertation proposes that ... -
Flexible visual information representation in human parietal cortex
(2014-10-21)In many everyday activities, we must visually process multiple objects embedded in complex real world scenes. Our visual system can flexibly extract behaviorally relevant visual information from such scenes, even though ... -
Goal-Directed Simulation of Past and Future Events: Cognitive and Neuroimaging Approaches
(2013-08-21)Goal-directed episodic simulation, the imaginative construction of a hypothetical personal event or series of events focused on a specific goal, is essential to our everyday lives. We often imagine how we could solve a ... -
Happiness from the Bottom Up
(2013-02-15)This dissertation presents three papers organized around a central theme: understanding happiness from the bottom up, in the context of everyday life. The first paper asks whether, in the course of daily activities, people ... -
High-level neural structures constrain visual behavior
(2014-06-06)Visual cognition is notoriously limited: only a finite amount of information can be fully processed at a given instant. What is the source of these limitations? Here, we suggest that the organization of higher-level visual ... -
Infants' and toddlers' reasoning about others: Connections to prosocial development and language
(2014-10-21)Often overlooked in the study of theory of mind (ToM) development, the understanding of motivational states, such as goals and desires, is both an important capacity in its own right and also a likely precursor to more ... -
Infants' Understanding of Social Affiliation and Behavioral Conformity
(2013-03-06)This dissertation engages in two major hypotheses regarding infants' naïve theory of social relationships. First, it proposes that infants may apply a domain-specific understanding to represent and reason about social ... -
The Influence of Beliefs on Children's and Adults' Cognition and Social Preferences
(2013-09-30)Beliefs--mental representations of particular propositions as true--are fundamental to social cognition. Among the most influential beliefs are ideologies, which concern the way things should be and help people understand ... -
Large-Scale Networks in the Human Brain revealed by Functional Connectivity MRI
(2013-10-18)The human brain is composed of distributed networks that connect a disproportionately large neocortex to the brainstem, cerebellum and other subcortical structures. New methods for analyzing non-invasive imaging data have ... -
Making an IMPACT: Designing and Testing a Novel Attentional Training Game to Reduce Social Anxiety
(2015-04-30)Development of novel candidate interventions to treat anxiety disorders is an important research priority, given the burden of these disorders, barriers to treatment access, and the promising but limited success of current ... -
Man Bites Dog: The Representation of Structured Meaning in Left-Mid Superior Temporal Cortex
(2015-05-19)Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of individual words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of ‘bite’, ‘dog’, and ‘man’, we can think either of a dog biting a man, or the newsworthy ... -
Measuring, monitoring, and maintaining memories in a partially observable mind
(2014-06-06)Visual memory holds in mind details of objects, textures, faces, and scenes. After initial exposure to an image, however, visual memories rapidly degrade because they are transferred from iconic memory, a high-capacity ... -
Mid-Level Features Elicit Cognitive and Neural Representations of Object Size
(2017-05-15)Most models of object recognition assume that we first recognize objects at the basic-level (e.g., as a “cup”), and then that the resulting object representations act as pointers that allow us to access knowledge about ... -
Negative Emotional Inhibition in Nonsuicidal Self-Injury
(2018-07-17)The relationship between nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and impulsivity is unclear. There is substantial evidence that people who engage in NSSI report impulsive personality traits, or the tendency to behave impulsively ... -
Negotiating Power: Willingness to Negotiate in Asymmetric Intergroup Conflicts
(2013-09-26)In this research we investigated how group power influences the way members of groups in asymmetrical conflict approach intergroup negotiations. Drawing on theories of negotiations and of intergroup power, we predicted ...