Psychology
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Item The Effects of Experimentally Induced Attachment Security on Children's Fear Reactions(2012) Stupica, Brandi Shawn; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The feeling that an attachment figure is available and responsive when needed (also referred to as attachment security) is an important factor in the activation of the fear system such that attachment security is thought to decrease fearfulness. To date, no study has examined whether attachment security causes decreased fearfulness. Adult attachment researchers have used priming techniques to investigate whether increased security causes improvement in various adult psychosocial outcomes (for a review see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) and priming techniques have been useful in research with children. As such, attachment security priming may be a valuable research tool to determine whether attachment security reduces children's fear reactions. In addition, mothers' negative and unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions are associated with poor socio-emotional outcomes for children (Eisenberg et al., 1998). As such, maternal negative and unsupportive responses may be linked to children's fear responses. Child temperament is also an important factor in children's fear reactions such that temperamentally more fearful children may be more influenced by the effects of attachment security and maternal responses to child distress. The present study was designed to extend attachment security priming methods to research with children between 6- and 7-years-of-age by employing a multi-method experimental approach to examine (a) whether experimentally induced attachment security causes less fearful reactions to fear-inducing tasks in children, and (b) whether maternal emotion socialization is associated with the fear reactivity of children randomly assigned to the neutral control group. Additionally, the present study also seeks to examine (a) whether the effects of experimentally-induced attachment security on children's fear reactions vary as a function of children's temperamental fearfulness, and (b) whether the link between maternal emotion socialization and children's fear reactivity is moderated by children's temperament fearfulness. After having been exposed to subliminally presented attachment security picture primes, six- and seven-year-old children had lower physiological fear reactions during observations of fear-inducing pictures than children exposed to subliminally presented happy or neutral picture primes. There were no links between maternal responses to child distress and children's fear-reactions. Results did not differ as a function of child temperamental fearfulness.Item Testing a dynamic account of neural processing: Behavioral and electrophsyiological studies of semantic satiation(2008-08-13) Tian, Xing; Dougherty, Michael; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In everyday perception, we easily and automatically identify objects. However, there is evidence that this ability results from complicated interactions between levels of perception. An example of hierarchical perception is accessing the meaning of visually presented words through the identification of line segments, letters, lexical entries, and meaning. Studies of word reading demonstrate a dynamic course to identification, producing benefits following brief presentations (excitation) but deficits following longer presentations (habituation). This dissertation investigates hierarchical perception and the role of transient excitatory and habituation dynamics through behavioral and neural studies of word reading. More specifically, the effect of interest is 'semantic satiation', which refers to the gradual loss of meaning when repeating a word. The reported studies test the hypothesis that habituation occurs in the associations between levels. As applied to semantic satiation, this theory supposes that there is not a loss of meaning, but, rather, an inability to access meaning from a repeated word. This application was tested in three behavioral experiments using a speeded matching task, demonstrating that meaning is lost when accessing the meaning of a repeated category label, but is not lost when accessing the category through new exemplars, or when the matching task is changed to simple word matching. To model these results, it is assumed that speeded matching results from detection of novel meaning to the target word after presentation of the cue word. This model was tested by examining neural dynamics with MEG recordings. As predicted by semantic satiation through loss of association, repeated cue words produced smaller M170 responses. M400 responses to the cue also diminished, as expected by a hierarchy in which lower levels drive higher levels. If the M400 corresponds to the post-lexical detection of new meaning, this model predicted that the M400 to targets following repeated cues would increase. This unique prediction was confirmed. These results were tested using a new method of analyzing MEG data that can differentiate between response magnitude versus differences in activity patterns. By considering hierarchical perception and processing dynamics, this work presents a new understanding of transient habituation and a new interpretation of electrophysiological data.