Efficient and accurate processing of internally- and externally-generated information is enhanced by the presence of multisensory signals that can provide redundant information about percepts or events. However, efficient usage of multisensory signals requires implicit perceptual knowledge of the potential or likely relationships between signals encoded within each sensory modality. If...
Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) has enormous potential to become a paradigmatic model of individual differences. However, while its foundations in experimental genetic and neurophysiological research on nonhuman animals are among the strongest in personality psychology, it has perhaps not gained the foothold within the field that it deserves. It is...
Prejudice based on a person’s low socioeconomic status (SES) has been largely understudied in social psychology. In my dissertation research, I argue that understanding a perceiver’s mental model of SES is crucial to explaining anti-poor prejudice. I borrow from work in anthropology to characterize two main mental models of SES—ascribed...
Background: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a significant public health issue. Previous research on the pathophysiology of depression in adults has demonstrated abnormal neural processing associated with depression symptomatology including alterations in reward and aversion circuits. Loss aversion (LA), or the concept that individuals evaluate outcomes based on losses and...
Research in cognitive and developmental psychology typically focuses on urban middle-class, European American populations. Although there has been a recent surge in psychological research that focuses on cultural variation (Cohen & Kitayam, 2007), little is known about the practices that support this variation. Knowledge about these practices is critical for...
Although chronic stress has been shown to be significantly associated with depression, this relationship has not received adequate attention, particularly in adolescent samples. One gap lies in the examination of whether particular domains of chronic interpersonal stress are uniquely related to risk for depression. Furthermore, the degree to which chronic...
The majority of research on voluntary visual attention has focused primarily on specific attentional processes. While we know much about individual attentional abilities such as shifting attention among spatial locations, tracking multiple objects and maintaining attention for specific targets, we know little about how these attentional processes relate to one...
Most cognitive research on conceptual structure has studied undergraduate populations and either natural (biological) or artificial (experiment-specific) categories. This project investigates how people with extensive, rich knowledge about a complex real-world domain organize and use that knowledge. The research extends prior work on differences among types of experts within biological...
The human brain shows great flexibility to adjust itself to dynamically ever-changing environment. Despite more than 100 years of cognitive brain research, the dynamical aspect of cognitive process has remained poorly understood compared to the static aspect of that. This dissertation concerns the dynamic character and functional significance of periodically...
Although anxiety and depression are clearly distinct from a phenomenological perspective, discriminating these constructs empirically has often been difficult (Clark & Watson, 1991). Both the tripartite model of psychopathology (Clark & Watson, 1991) and the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis (Beck, 1976; Beck & Clark, 1988) were forwarded in an effort to...
On average, homosexual people are more gender nonconforming than heterosexual people. They also show increased distress, possibly due to their stigmatized minority status. Not surprisingly, gender nonconformity and psychological distress may be related, particularly in homosexual men (e.g., Skidmore, Linsenmeier, & Bailey, 2006), although the mechanisms explaining this relationship have...
In the same way that a sculptor shapes a block of stone to reveal the ideal form within, one's relationship partner can help one to become more like one's ideal self (Drigotas, Rusbult, Wieselquist, & Whitton, 1999). This interpersonal process is called "the Michelangelo phenomenon." The current research examines whether...
A striking aspect of human cognition is our capacity for acquiring and using complex knowledge structures, from learning the rules of algebra, to understanding the causal workings of a combustion engine or the structure and processes of the U.S. Congress. These structured representations underlie our ability to generate new inferences,...
Child maltreatment and violence are two major public health concerns in the United States. The relationship between maltreatment and subsequent violent behavior, also referred to as the "cycle of violence", is not well understood. The present study examines whether a history of maltreatment predicts violent behavior in a sample of...
Behavioral activation (BA) trains depressed clients to engage in more positive activities in order to increase their experience of pleasure and accomplishment, thereby reducing depression. Recent research suggested that BA might be as effective in treating depression as current leading treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and antidepressant medication (Jacobson,...
The present studies aimed at developing a lie detection paradigm immune to countermeasures, while the theoretical issues of top-down influence of task requirement on subliminal semantic priming were investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented supraliminal acquaintance and non-acquaintance names, which were subliminally primed by another acquaintance or non-acquaintance names....
"Anosognosia" or lack of insight into one's own illness is not uncommon in central nervous system disease. Neurodegenerative diseases of the brain that cause dementia are often associated with anosognosia. A lot is known about anosognosia in Alzheimer's disease but relatively little is known about lack of insight into illness...
Why would someone's judgments and choices disregard the consequences he or she cares about most? Considerable research appears to show that in many contexts, people show precisely this paradoxical tendency. Researchers interpret these results as showing that people sometimes make choices on the basis of moral factors -- factors that...
The current research tested the principles of role congruity theory of prejudice, which states that prejudice arises from an incongruity between a group stereotype and social role characteristics (i.e., the attributes and behaviors prescribed by the social role), such that prejudice occurs when members of a group enter or attempt...
The aim of the present investigation was to examine the nature of individuals' parasocial relationships (one-sided attachments to media figures, Horton & Wohl, 1956). Five studies were designed to assess the prevalence and strength of individuals' attachments to their favorite television characters, manipulate exposure to the character or control targets,...