Cascadia is the physiographic region defined by the active tectonics and attendant geo-hazards of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. In contrast to many other coastal environments in the U.S., geo-hazards along the Cascadia coast are dominated by a tectonic context on the Pacific rim “ring of fire.” Washington, Oregon, and California...
Naturally, we may assume that group rapport is critical for producing high-quality group performance (such as among work groups, sports teams, or even research collaborators). With this in mind, the purpose of this investigation was to test this assumption by exploring the relationship between self-reported group rapport and group-level social...
Objective: In 2018, suicide was the leading cause of death for individuals between the ages of 10-24 in Oregon (OHA, 2019) and was the second leading cause of death for this age range in 2020 (OHA, 2021). In 2019, 12% of Black high school students reported a suicide attempt in...
Objective: Alcohol and cannabis use and co-use among college students is prevalent in the United States (Bravo et al., 2021). These substances have been linked to poor collegiate academic performance in past research. The present study examines varying levels of single-substance alcohol use and alcohol and cannabis co-use in their...
Past research has shown that individual's word usage can reveal aspects of who they are and how they behave (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). For instance, couples who use inclusive pronouns such as “we,” as opposed to singular pronouns such as "I" cope better in relationships (Moran, 2018). Further, the use...
Do freshmen achieve less of their personal and academic short-term goals in comparison to upperclassmen?
Some may intuitively assume that due to age, or lack of experience, college freshmen would have lower perceived task-specific ability (self-efficacy) and actually achieve less (goal-completion ranging from 0% to 100%). Differences between various class-standing...
Any interaction with another person requires some judgement of their characteristics from a short amount of time. Each day a person can interact with many individuals and quick judgments have to be made in each situation to decide how to act or react. This means a person can make hundreds...
The ambiguity plaguing the definition of empathy has not only been constrained to its content (i.e., assessing decoding or encoding) but how it is expressed in the individual (i.e., as a trait or ability). Any separation in the theorizing of a construct should be clearly reflected and labeled in the...
Presented at the 2018 Celebrating Undergraduate Excellence showcase.
People respond more quickly and accurately when the stimulus appears in the same spatial location as the response than when it appears in the different location, even when stimulus location is irrelevant to the task. This robust phenomenon is know as a...
A focus group format was used to investigate and identify favorable and unfavorable communications between two strangers, an AAC (Augmentative/Alternative Communication) device user and their communication partner. The principal interest was in the feedback gained from an ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) support group at the Salem Hospital which included participants...
The science of how people interact socially with robots is still fairly young. One area of ongoing study is how people figure out the way the robot works -- that is, form a "mental model" of the robot. We are especially ignorant of how this happens over time, starting with...
The science of how people interact socially with robots is still fairly young. One area of ongoing study is how people figure out the way the robot works -- that is, form a "mental model" of the robot. We are especially ignorant of how this happens over time, starting with...
Previous research has suggested that how a task is framed can have a significant impact on subsequent performance. These effects seem to be especially important in educational settings where learners are already self-conscious about their likelihood to succeed. Difficult subjects have shown to cause cognitive disequilibrium when confronting dead ends...
Previous behavioral studies have suggested that the automaticity of face recognition depends on familiarity. We sought converging evidence for this claim using electrophysiological measures. In Experiment 1, participants first rated their familiarity with 6 male celebrities. They then performed dual tasks in which Task 1 required a tone/noise discrimination. For...
The goal of this research was to analyze what different types of perceived barriers affect student veterans' access to mental healthcare services. Previous research has shown that veterans who return from combat and later attend universities are not receiving adequate mental healthcare for mental health problems, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...
Self-disclosure is a complex process that impacts social, cultural, and individual contexts of people’s lives. Under ideal circumstances, disclosure strengthens social bonds, enhances intimacy in relationships, and fosters a more unified sense of the self. Disclosing information about a stigmatized identity, however, is associated with a variety of risks and...
In rapid serial visual presentation, identification of the second of two targets is impaired when it closely follows the first target. This phenomenon is known as the attentional blink (AB) effect. Awh and his colleagues (2004) found that face discrimination was immune to AB when performed together with a digit...
The social and medical models of disability are sets of underlying assumptions explaining people's beliefs about the causes and implications of disability. The medical model is the predominant model in the United States that is associated with the belief that disability is an undesirable status that needs to be cured...
In rapid serial visual presentation, identification of the second of two targets is impaired when it closely follows the first target. This attentional blink (AB) effect suggests limited capacity in processing successive visual stimuli in working memory. Awh et al. (2004) found that face identity Target 2 was immune to...
Objective: Cell phone use while driving (CPUWD) is an increasingly predominant form of distracted driving. Given the widespread prevalence of CPUWD, it is important for researchers to identify who is more likely to engage in this risky behavior. Prior research has focused largely on adolescent and young adult populations, and...
Fat Studies (FS) is a new interdisciplinary field that addresses oppression based on body weight, shape, and size as it intersects with oppression based on other areas of difference. As such, FS incorporates a weight-neutral approach to health, Health At Every Size® (HAES), that decries weight bias, promotes body self-acceptance...
The HEXACO personality framework is an emerging perspective to explain the phenotypic structure of personality, and is believed to replicate across natural language lexical studies better than the Five-Factor Model. Although similar to the “Big Five,” the primary difference between the two structural models is the recovery of the Honesty-Humility...
Perea, Vergara-Martínez, and Gomez (2015) claimed a late locus of case mixing in visual word recognition. In their masking priming study, participants performed a lexical-decision task on an uppercase target, which was preceded by an identity or unrelated prime (e.g., “plane” or “music” followed by “PLANE”, respectively) in lowercase or...
Vitamin D sufficiency supports cardiovascular health and lower cancer risk. Rates of vitamin D insufficiency vary by racial/ethnic group, in part because skin pigment limits sunlight penetration. However race/ethnicity is an unreliable marker of vitamin D deficiency, given individual differences in skin pigment, or phototype, and other characteristics. Clarifying associations...
Lien, Ruthruff, and Naylor (2014) recently reported that switching target search strategies (e.g., from identifying the letter that is uniquely colored [singleton search] to the letter that has a specific color [feature search] or vice versa) made the attentional system more vulnerable to capture by salient-but-irrelevant objects. In the present...
Interpersonally, power is normally associated with the constructs of dominance and status. However, the current investigation offers a conceptualization of power that has more to do with capturing the impact people have on others rather than it does having control over their fate. In this conceptualization, power is associated with...
Those scoring high in emotional intelligence typically can read the room well, understand relational connections, detect deception, and other various aspects of human interaction. But how do we learn to be emotionally intelligent? When it comes to interpersonal perception, it turns out to be difficult to learn from our mistakes...
Visual working memory (VWM) allows us temporarily hold images in our minds and manipulate them. As an example, you can remember a face you just saw, or try to imagine how a room would look with a different arrangement of furniture. Previous studies have shown that individuals with low VWM...
Alexithymia is a trait where individuals have difficulty identifying feeling and finding a word to express emotion. Some studies have suggested that this deficit is due to dissociation (repression), or an inability to perceive emotions, whereas others argued that the deficit is due to suppression of emotional information after it...
The purpose of this research was to discover if using online homework contributes to an overall higher enjoyment of the Introductory Psychology class, given that other factors are held constant. Students who used the online homework PsychPortlal for the Introductory Psychology 202 class would rate the “overall enjoyment of the...
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a mood disorder that is characterized by depressive symptoms that onset and remit at the same times each year. Whereas few people (about 1%) experience problems severe enough to be labeled SAD, many people (estimates range from 30%-90%) may experience mild to moderate changes in...
Previous studies have suggested that LEET words can automatically activate lexical information because of their physical similarity to real words (e.g., Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008). Lien, Allen, and Martin (in press) recently used electrophysiological measures (event-related brain potentials; ERPs) to show similar lexical/semantic activation (based on the N400 effect,...
Seasonality is defined as a change in mood and behavior with the seasons. Research shows there is a possible connection between vitamin D levels and mood (Murphy & Wagner, 2008; Lansdowne & Provost, 1998). Given that vitamin D is produced when skin is exposed to sunlight and varies with sun...
Our responses are faster when the response key location is compatible with target location than when it is incompatible, even when target location was irrelevant to the task (the Simon effect). This effect is observed even when two people shared the task (e.g., one pressing the left key and the...
Lien, Ruthruff, and Johnston (2010) reported that the attentional control system is able to rapidly and fully switch between different search settings (e.g., red to green), with no carryover. The present study examined whether such impressive flexibility is possible even with more complicated switches, namely singleton search and the feature...
The present study examined whether semantic activation for words occurs by encoding whole word shape in addition to individual letters. We used LEET stimuli, where digits were used as parts of words, such as “R34DING” instead of “READING”. Previous studies have suggested that LEET stimuli are encoded in a letter-like...
Previous studies have suggested that negatively valenced faces (e.g., angry faces) automatically capture attention away from faces with other emotional valences (e.g., happy faces and neutral faces). The present study evaluated whether this attentional bias enhances memory of the negative emotional faces. Participants first performed a gender discrimination task on...
The present study examined whether semantic activation for words occurs by encoding whole word shape in addition to individual letters. We used LEET stimuli, where digits were used as parts of words, such as “R34DING” instead of “READING”. Previous studies have suggested that LEET stimuli are encoded in a letter-like...
It has been claimed that stimuli signaling threat are processed rapidly and
draw our attention (e.g., Fox, Russo, & Dutton, 2002). Similarly, it has been
argued that expressions of fear have a strong pull on our attention because
they signal threat (e.g., Phelps, Ling, & Carrasco, 2006; Vuilleumier &
Schwartz,...