Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    DO PRESCHOOLERS TRACK AND EVALUATE SOCIAL INCLUDERS AND EXCLUDERS?
    (2020) Woodward, Amanda Mae; Beier, Jonathan S; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Social exclusion is a hurtful experience that can lead to detrimental effects in the social, cognitive, and physiological domains. These consequences can lead to poor, potentially long-lasting, negative outcomes for children. Therefore, it is critical for excluded children to reduce the impact of its negative effects. One helpful strategy to accomplish this is to select social partners who are likely to be inclusive. The current dissertation investigates cognitive processes that may underly children’s partner choice, including the abilities to detect, track, and evaluate social excluders. In Experiment 1, 4-year-old children (n = 32) experienced direct inclusion and exclusion before evaluating target characters. Surprisingly, children in the overall sample did not evaluate excluders more negatively than includers. Experiment 2 further investigated children’s abilities to track and evaluate social excluders using several methodological improvements and a wider age range, including 4- to 6-year-olds (n = 96). With age, children in the overall sample detected social exclusion more often but did not evaluate excluders more negatively. Children who accurately identified includers (n = 68) also evaluated them more positively than excluders. Experiment 3 investigated whether 3- to 6-year-old children who observed third-party games could detect and evaluate social excluders. While children detected and evaluated social excluders, only older children preferred to play with includers. Overall, this work suggests that young children who detect exclusion also evaluate social excluders negatively, although these evaluations may not influence play partner choices until later in development.
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    INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION ON FACE PROCESSING
    (2017) Woodward, Amanda Mae; Beier, Jonathan S; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Because social exclusion leads to adverse effects, excluded individuals exhibit altered social information processing. In particular, these individuals process social information from faces differently than their included counterparts. However, the cognitive mechanisms leading to this difference are unknown. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether or not a decrease in holistic processing, and consequent increase in attention to individual facial features, might characterize some of the observed effects of exclusion on how people process facial information. Adult participants were either excluded or included during a game of Cyberball and then completed the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Task (VHFPT). Excluded and included individuals did not differ in performance on the VHFPT, suggesting that excluded individuals do not attend to facial features differently than included individuals. Results are discussed in conjunction with previous research and future directions.