Recent Kalman Symposium Research
Susie Doughty, Psychology Department, Class of 2009, Faculty advisor: JT Ptacek
Assessing Support Sensitivity
Lauren Rutter, Psychology Department, Class of 2009, Faculty advisor: William F. Flack, Jr
Victims' and Perpetrators' Understanding of Consent and Intoxication in Sexual Assault
Carolyn Shainheit, Psychology Department, Graduate student class of 2009: Faculty advisor: William F. Flack
Responsiveness to Self-Produced Cues of Emotion and Mindfulness Meditation
Elizabeth Wieland, Psychology Department, Graduate student class of 2009: advisor: Andrea Halpern
Encoding of Musical Notation by Violinists and Pianists
Tejal Raichura, Psychology Department, Class of 2009, Faculty advisor: Andrea Halpern
Cross-modality Encoding of Affect in Music and Paintings
Mallory St. Pierre, Animal Behavior Program, Class of 2009, Advisor: Dr. Peter Judge, Abroad Spring 08
A test for picture recognition of familiar conspecifics in brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)
Susie Doughty
Psychology Department, Undergraduate student class of 2009
Faculty advisor: JT Ptacek
Assessing Support Sensitivity
To gain a better understanding of the characteristics that enhance an individual’s ability to give effective support, a new construct, support sensitivity, was proposed. A survey was designed to measure this construct, which was defined as the ability to recognize that social support is needed and to offer an effective type of support in a way that is accepted by the stressed individual. Support-relevant qualities were categorized into four subscales: emotional intelligence, availability/willingness, variety and quality of support techniques, and personal coping skills. Drawing from research in these fields, a support sensitivity survey was developed and administered. A series of reliability, correlation-based, and factor analyses were performed on the items and subscales of the survey. In response to these analyses, a number of modifications were made to the SS scale, further enhancing its effectiveness and reliability. Other published measures were administered in conjunction with the SS scale to measure its convergent and divergent validity. Information was also gathered from close friends of the participants to measure criterion validity. A relationship was found between the four support sensitivity subscales and self-reported evidence of support provision, providing empirical support was found for the four dimensional model. Scores on the SS scale were found to vary in predictable ways to personality measures and outside support ratings, providing validation for the Support Sensitivity Scale.
Lauren Rutter
Psychology Department, Undergraduate student class of 2009
Faculty advisor: William F. Flack, Jr
Victims' and Perpetrators' Understanding of Consent and Intoxication in Sexual Assault
An obstacle to understanding unwanted sex on college campuses is the matter of consent. Legally, consent cannot be given if the victim is intoxicated. Many unwanted sexual experiences begin as a hookup involving alcohol. Hooking up is defined as a sexual encounter that may or may not include sexual intercourse between two strangers or casual acquaintances with no intention of future commitment (Paul, McManus & Hayes, 2000; Klein, Geaghan & MacDonald, 2007; Bogle, 2008). However, the issue of hooking up and consent is further complicated because consent is often nonverbal and indirect. Unwanted sex (UWS) is common on college campuses and often associated with negative psychological effects such as feelings of regret, guilt, and disgust, but also responses that fit the post traumatic stress disorder clusters of re-experiencing, avoidance/numbing, and hyperarousal Web-based survey data was collected from systematically drawn samples of 600 male and 600 female Bucknell undergraduates. Three hundred and twelve students completed the survey (26% of the total possible students). Of the three hundred and twelve participants, 114 were male (36.5%) and 198 (63.5%) were female. Eighty women (43.7%) reported one or more experiences of attempted or completed sexual victimization, and 12 men (11.7%) reported an attempted or completed perpetration experience. It is expected that t-tests will reveal gender differences in ratings of consent scenarios with differences being more extreme between perpetrators and victims. This research is an effort to develop a better conception of how college students understand consent, and will not only help understand sexual consent in the context of alcohol intoxication, but also inform sexual assault prevention.
Carolyn Shainheit
Psychology Department, Graduate student class of 2009
Faculty advisor: William F. Flack, Jr
Responsiveness to Self-Produced Cues of Emotion and Mindfulness Meditation
William James' What is an Emotion? (1884) proposed that physiological arousal determined emotional experience. A descendant of that theory, the facial feedback hypothesis, posits that there are fundamental emotions with characteristic facial, vocal and physiological expressions that provide a unique feedback and generates feelings of those emotions (as cited in Hager & Ekman, 1983). In my research, data were collected from 244 college students over two studies in order to examine the relationships between cue response style and responsiveness to mindfulness meditation. Participants provided baseline measures of their emotions, provided demographic information, completed a social desirability scale, and then completed the directed facial action task (DFA), and a mindfulness meditation task. Self-report measures after each facial expression and after mindfulness meditation were completed. Study one found that emotional experiences of self-produced and situational cuers were influenced by anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust facial expressions. However, self-produced cuers felt changes of a greater magnitude. Study two found that self-produced cuers were responsive to the anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust facial expressions; but situational cuers were responsive to the anger and disgust facial expressions. Additionally, both studies found that self-produced cuers may be more responsive to mindfulness meditation. In closing, these studies suggest that individuals whose emotions are influenced by changes in their facial expressions may also be more affected by mindfulness mediation.
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Elizabeth Wieland
Psychology Department, Graduate student class of 2009
Faculty advisor: Andrea Halpern
Encoding of Musical Notation by Violinists and Pianists
For musicians, reading the musical notation of a phrase may appear to be as simple a process as non-musicians reading a sentence of literature, but in fact much is still unknown about how musicians encode musical notation. Music readers are assumed to mentally process musical notation the same way regardless of their instrument, but it is possible that they in fact differ due to different production routines. In general, we predicted that pianists would be more affected than violinists by pitch interference, and vice versa for temporal interference. We also predicted violinists will demonstrate initial processing in the right hemisphere, whereas pianists would be more symmetrical. The interference task tested if different aspects of musical notation (rhythm and pitch) are processed independently or interdependently. The participants were asked to recall a ten note musical phrase while an interference melody was played. If pitch and rhythm are independent processes, a rhythmic distractor should only disrupt rhythmic processing whereas a pitch distractor should only interfere with the processing of pitch. The concurrent task tested the locus of the initial processing of musical information by creating hemispheric competition. The participants were asked to tap their index finger on one hand while identifying musical intervals presented visually. This task occupied the contralateral hemisphere with the tapping task, and depending on the hemisphere used for initial processing of the musical notation, hemispheric competition would create a decrement in the tapping rate. In the interference task, pianists were better than violinists in both pitch and rhythm recall, but a main effect of Interference was found only in pitch recall. Pitch interference reduced pitch accuracy the most with a trend toward pianists being more affected than violinists. Temporal accuracy was not affected by any interference. Pilot testing of the concurrent study suggests the expected asymmetry in violinists, with a larger decrement in tapping rates of the left hand than pianists. Although performance seemed to be better for pianists than violinists overall, a significant interaction was not found (although data collection is ongoing). This implies that musicians do encode musical notation similarly.
Tejal Raichura
Psychology Department, Class of 2009
Faculty advisor: Andrea Halpern
Cross-modality Encoding of Affect in Music and Paintings
This study examined how the affect of one type of art can influence the memory for another. Specifically, I tested how the affect of a piece of music, viewed simultaneously with a painting, would influence the way it is encoded, thereby influencing memory of the painting and piece of music. Participants initially encoded the music and paintings whose valences were congruent, incongruent, or solo at presentation. They were asked to make tempo and redness judgments on music and paintings respectively. After a 48-hour period participants returned to give recognition ratings to both new and old artwork. The results showed that the difference for music and paintings when presented congruently, incongruently, or solo were not significantly different thus implying that valence is not a factor for the memory of music or paintings. These findings suggest that there is no inhibitory (or excitatory) influence of mood congruency on the memory for music or paintings, and the memory for each form of art does not show an interaction.
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Mallory St. Pierre
Animal Behavior Program, Class of 2009
Advisor: Dr. Peter Judge
Abroad Spring 08
A test for picture recognition of familiar conspecifics in brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)
Two-dimensional computer images are often used to test cognitive capacities of non-human primates; however, it remains unclear whether monkeys recognize images of conspecifics as the individuals they portray. To test for conspecific recognition capabilities in non-human primates, one male and one female adult brown capuchin monkey were tested using a touch screen computer. Both monkeys previously demonstrated picture recognition of food during an experiment in which, after being trained that they would receive a piece of the food whose image they touched, they spontaneously selected images of their preferred foods when given a choice between two images. In this study, a similar method was used to test whether animals would select images of their preferred social partners in order to gain access to them. Differential selection of images of preferred social partners would provide evidence that the subjects recognized the individuals portrayed in the images. Prior to testing, both monkeys’ social preferences were determined by collecting behavioral observations of their affinitive interactions with group mates. Images of medium-preference monkeys were used in a training phase in which a subject was presented with images of two different monkeys, each of which were visible in compartments to the left and right of the subject. Upon selection of an image by the subject, a door to that animal's compartment was opened and the subject was given assess to the monkey whose image they selected. The purpose of the training was to teach the subjects that they would be released into the compartment with the individual whose image they selected. Following training, images of the subjects’ most and least preferred social partners were used with those animals in adjacent compartments to test whether the subjects would select images of their preferred partners in order to be released into the compartment with them rather than the compartment with their least-preferred partners. Neither subject selected images of their preferred social partners more than images of their least preferred partners (male subject: Results suggest that the subjects did not recognize the images as pictures of familiar group members. Alternatively, if they did recognize the images, either they had not adequately learned that they would be released into the compartment of the individual whose image they selected or they did not exhibit preferences for their usual social partners within the context of the experimental situation.
