College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item THE EMBODIED EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES OF BLACK MEN PARTICIPATING IN A HOSPITAL-BASED VIOLENCE INTERVENTION PROGRAM(2024) Wical, William Grant; Richardson, Joseph; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gun violence is a public health and racial justice issue which requires significant societal change to effectively decrease its impact on the lives of Black men and their communities. While hospital-based violence intervention programs have been identified as a promising mode of prevention, they have largely overlooked the ways Black men who survive gunshot wounds feel, determine what constitutes effective violence prevention, and subjectively experience trauma. This dissertation explores how those who received psychosocial support from an intervention program interpret their emotional experiences related to trauma, healing, and loss to make claims about society, themselves, and justice. Their affective experiences contrast significantly with dominant discourses of violence, race, and emotionality. Attention to these emotional experiences can provide a foundation for a fundamentally different ethics of caring. This redefinition of what it means to provide care challenges the current usage of trauma as the primary analytic to evaluate Black men’s experiences related to violence and underscores the need to shift prevention efforts away from individualistic models toward those geared at creating structural change.Item THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR EMOTIONAL MAINTENANCE AND REDUCED GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOR IN SCHIZOPHRENIA(2014) Llerena, Katiah; Blanchard, Jack J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The current study investigated the neurophysiological underpinnings of emotional maintenance in schizophrenia (SCZ) and whether aberrant neural responses predicted deficits in affective decision making and real-world motivated behavior. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 27 SCZ outpatients and 23 healthy controls (CN) during an emotional maintenance task in which participants were presented an initial image for 3 seconds and then required to maintain a mental representation of the intensity that image over a delay period of varying lengths and determine whether the initial image was more or less intense than the second image. The Late Positive Potential (LPP) was used as a neurophysiological marker of emotional maintenance during the delay period. SCZ showed normal in-the-moment emotion experience to positive stimuli; however, SCZ rated negative and neutral pictures as more intense than CN. SCZ also displayed deficits in emotional maintenance accuracy. Furthermore, ERP data indicated reduced LPP amplitude during picture viewing for SCZ compared to CN, and only CN showed persistence of the LPP for positive stimuli into the offset delay period for approximately 1 second and this was significantly associated with behavioral emotional maintenance performance. Behavioral emotional maintenance performance also significantly predicted clinically rated negative symptoms (motivation and pleasure) and poor functional outcome. Thus, impairments in emotional maintenance may offer a promising new theory as to why people with SCZ fail to pursue goal-directed activities.Item THE EFFECTS OF VALENCE AND AROUSAL ON ITEM AND SOURCE MEMORY IN CHILDHOOD(2011) Graham, Meghan; Riggins, Tracy L.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion can be characterized in terms of valence and arousal. Both of these dimensions enhance memory in adults by specifically enhancing a form of memory called recollection. Recollection is required for memory of source or encoding context, and shows prolonged development throughout childhood. The specific effects of valence and arousal on memory, and specifically on recollection, have thus far not been studied developmentally. The current study examined how valence and arousal affect memory in 8-year-olds, using a source memory paradigm that allowed for the examination of emotion effects on recollection. Results showed that, after statistically controlling for effects of age, valence enhanced memory for items, but not source, and that there were gender differences in the effects of arousal on source memory, with girls showing better performance in the high-arousal condition and boys showing better performance in the low-arousal condition.Item Experience and Expression of Emotion in Social Anhedonia: An Examination of Film-Induced Social Affiliative State in Schizotypy(2006-08-02) Leung, Winnie; Blanchard, Jack; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social anhedonia is an important feature of schizophrenia and it is a promising indicator of schizotypy. Although social anhedonia is defined as an affective construct (less pleasure derived from social encounters), little is actually known about the affective correlates of social anhedonia. Prior laboratory research is limited in that no prior study has used affiliative social stimuli in examining affective reactions associated with anhedonia. This study sought to extend prior research through an examination of the expression and experience of emotion in social anhedonics by using a novel social affiliative film stimulus. After screening a large sample of female undergraduate students (N = 1,085), a cohort of psychometrically identified social anhedonics (n = 34) and normally hedonic controls (n = 45) participated in laboratory assessments involving trait affectivity, self-reported dispositional emotional expressiveness, and the expression and experience of emotion in response to neutral, non-affiliative (i.e., comedy) and affiliative film clips. Results showed that social anhedonics have lower trait positive affect compared to controls, but there were no group differences in trait negative affect. At baseline, social anhedonics reported lower state positive affect and less warmth and affection compared to controls, but there were no group differences in state negative affect. Social anhedonics also reported the disposition to be less expressive. Consistent with their reports of attenuated emotional experience and expression outside of the laboratory, social anhedonics reported less positive affect and displayed less facial expressions in response to affect eliciting films in the laboratory. Social anhedonics, however, did not report less warmth and affection across the films as compared to controls. Additionally, social anhedonics did not report less positive emotions or warmth and affection in response to the affiliative film, as compared to the non-affiliative (i.e., comedy) film. Implications and study limitations are discussed.