Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2011, Psychology

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that stereotypic expectancies exacerbate the cross-race effect in face recognition (CRE). Experiment 1 examined this stereotyping hypothesis by pairing cross-race (CR) Black targets and same-race (SR) White targets with either firearms or tools. Given the stereotypic linkage that exists between Blacks and firearms (Correll et al., 2002; Payne, 2001), the stereotyping hypothesis predicts an exacerbated CRE in the firearm relative to tool conditions. Furthermore, it was predicted that this increase should be predicted by the strength of participants‟ own race-weapon associations. Experiment 2 investigated attentional bias as a possible mechanism for these effects using a dot probe paradigm. Across both experiments, SR faces were better recognized than CR faces (consistent with the CRE), and faces were better recognized in the firearm than tool conditions. Neither the presence of a firearm nor the strength of participants‟ own race-weapon associations predicted the CRE. Possible theoretical implications for social cognitive models of the CRE and applied implications for eyewitness memory are discussed as well as possible directions for future research.

Committee: Kurt Hugenberg (Advisor); Heather M. Claypool (Committee Member); Maria L. Cronley (Committee Member); Amanda B. Diekman (Committee Member); Allen R. McConnell (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology; Social Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Social Work

Knowledge derives from practice, or practice wisdom, is as important as formal knowledge in the clinical decision making process of social work practitioners. A number of theoretical studies of clinical decision making recognize the importance of this implicit way of knowing but there is a lack of empirical research that examines how implicit knowledge affects clinical decision making in social work treatment. The purpose of this study is to examine the existence of implicit knowledge from a cognitive science perspective and explore how it influences the clinical decision making process in social work practice. This study involves both deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning derives a set of hypotheses from Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) theory and uses experimental design to examine the relationships between implicit knowledge, experience and decision making. Inductive reasoning analyzes the participants' retention, diagnosis, reasoning, and clarification of the case scenarios as well as in-depth interview and utilizes content analysis to explore the nature of clinical decision making process by comparing the differences between experienced and inexperienced practitioners. Findings from deductive reasoning support the usage of implicit knowledge but do not support the assumption that experienced participants have a better understanding of the client's situation than inexperienced practitioners. Findings from inductive reasoning conclude that making diagnosis is a continuing and ongoing process of understanding clients' situation. Findings pertaining to the structure of information retained by research participants reflect how practitioners understand a case scenario and that practice knowledge can also be explained by a similar conceptual framework. It is not the content of the memory but the structure of practitioners' memory that affects how they perceive a client's situation. Implicit knowledge that helps practitioners to make a decision can b (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mo-Yee Lee (Advisor) Subjects: Social Work

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2002, Psychology

The intuitive prosecutor metaphor of human judgment is a recent development within causal attribution research. The history of causal attribution is briefly reviewed, with an emphasis on explanations of attributional biases. The evolution of such explanations is traced through a purely-cognitive phase to the more modern acceptance of motivational explanations for attributional biases. Two examples are offered of how a motivational explanatory framework of attributional biases can account for broad patterns of information processing biases. The intuitive prosecutor metaphor is presented as a parallel explanatory framework for interpreting attributional biases, whose motivation is based on a threat to social order. The potential implications for person memory are discussed, and three hypotheses are developed: That intuitive prosecutors recall norm-violating information more consistently than non-intuitive prosecutors (H1); that this differential recall may be based on differential (biased) encoding of behavioral information (H2); and that this differential recall may also be based on biased retrieval of information from memory rather than the result of a reporting bias (H3). A first experiment is conducted to test the basic recall hypothesis (H1). A second experiment is conducted that employs accountability in order to test the second and third hypotheses.

Committee: Marilynn Brewer (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2007, Psychology

Research exploring the Cross Race Effect (CRE) indicates that individuals show better recognition accuracy for same-race faces compared to cross-race faces (Malpass, 1981), an effect thought to be due to a reduction in motivation to individuate cross-race faces (Hugenberg, Miller, & Claypool, 2007). Furthermore, research indicates that power reduces the motivation to individuate others while powerlessness increases the motivation to individuate others (Stevens & Fiske, 2000). Combining these research domains, the current study primed participants with either high or low power and had them complete a traditional CRE recognition task. The results indicated that compared to control participants, individuals primed with low power showed a larger CRE effect. High power participants, however, did not differ from control participants. Furthermore, the effect power on the CRE was not related to participants' information processing style, which did not vary by power condition.

Committee: Kurt Hugenberg (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Social

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / School of Biomedical Sciences

Social behavior is essential to an animal's survival and has been widely studied in a variety of species. All are regulated by the central nervous system and modulated by neuropeptides. One neuropeptide that is known to play a role in the regulation of social behavior is arginine vasopressin (Avp). Most of Avp's effects on behavior have been attributed to its action via its 1a receptor (Avpr1a). However, there is compelling evidence from knockout studies that the Avp 1b receptor (Avpr1b) also plays a significant role in the modulation of social behavior. Avpr1b knockout (-/-) mice show deficits in social behaviors, such as reduced aggression and impaired social recognition. The Avpr1b is more discretely distributed than the Avpr1a being found primarily in the CA2 region of the hippocampus by in situ hybridization. The presence of the Avpr1b within the CA2 region is of particular interest because animals with lesions to the hippocampus that include the CA2 region show social behavior deficits similar to that of Avpr1b -/- mice. This dissertation set out to study the role of the Avpr1b within the CA2 region of the hippocampus in the neural regulation of social behaviors, including aggression, social memory, and social motivation.

Committee: Heather Caldwell PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Endocrinology; Neurosciences

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2007, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Dance Studies

This dissertation examines how late medieval dance serves as a medium for creating and performing communal belonging in Augsburg, Germany and the surrounding region in southern Germany. I analyze how the regulation and practice of dance in Augsburg between 1300 and 1550 C.E. helped define the city's urban communities in the late medieval period, and how the ongoing remembrance of premodern dance today in southern Germany helps reaffirm or redefine Germanness in the cultural imaginary. Employing methods from dance, performance, history, and critical race studies and building upon recent work on racialization in medieval studies, this dissertation challenges predominant narratives of late medieval dance that centers elite Christians as the main agents of dance and other movement practices. By plumbing the legacies of medieval dance—in archival traces, reenactments, and popular imaginings—my work further examines how the memory and practice of medieval dance continues to transmit the multi-layered embodied politics of medieval southern Germany. Through archival methods and discourse analysis, I examine city laws, chronicles, and pictorial sources to ascertain how people in the medieval era approached, practiced, and regulated dance. Municipal records evidence that elite, Christian city leaders legislated dancing to construct and enforce a patriarchal and hierarchical social order within the city. Examining Jewish archives, the spatial landscapes of medieval cities, and depictions of the moresca dance in Jewish and Christian sources, I trace how Jewish and Christian residents used dance to form their own communities and how dance fostered Jewish-Christian relations. Finally, by working through these archival tracings of medieval dance, I consider how the reception and interpretation of medieval dance archives shape understandings of historical and contemporary community in the Bavarian region. In particular, I examine how medievalist narratives, built partially from t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hannah Kosstrin (Advisor); Sara Butler (Committee Member); Karen Eliot (Committee Member) Subjects: Dance; European History; History; Judaic Studies; Medieval History; Performing Arts

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Leadership Studies, Xavier University, 2023, Leadership Studies and Human Resource Development

This study was designed to explore the relationship between normal, non-SMI Instagram users' Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) attitudes (Fiedler, 1971) and their self-reported purposes (self, social, therapeutic, and directive) for posting on Instagram, as measured by Wang's (2020) Purposes of Online Memory Sharing Scale (POMSS) assessment. A convenience sample of participants was solicited from the employees of a Midwestern marketing and data analytics company, who were also invited to post the solicitation message to their contacts on social media. Anonymous survey respondents completed the two validated assessment instruments on a secure Qualtrics server. Linear correlation analysis conducted by the dissertation advisor was used to test directional hypotheses predicting statistical relationships between LPC scores and four POMSS subscales assessing reasons for posting on Instagram: self, social, therapeutic and directive. LPC was predicted to be positively correlated with social and therapeutic motivations for posting on Instagram and negatively correlated with self and directive motivations. None of the correlations between LPC and POMSS were significant, thus none of the directional hypotheses tested were supported. LPC was found to have no utility for predicting reasons why individuals post to Instagram.

Committee: Gail F. Latta Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Karin Hansee Ed.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Marketing; Multimedia Communications; Social Research; Web Studies

Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2022, Computer Science

Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today's world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app that would be available on both Google Play and Apple Store for easy access to the providers. This highly realistic, interactive, and captivating app is essential for creating mindfulness about SDoH and generating long-lasting compassion and empathy in health care workers for their real patients and helping them to build a good clinician-patient relationship. An important aspect of this simulation is the realism of the characters and their behavior. This thesis specifically focuses on the strategy and experience of designing and developing realistic human character models and animations so that the players connect naturally and deeply with the virtual characters. This contributes to the generation of a greater level of empathy in the providers and decreases the level of biases. In addition to its contribution to creating efficient design methodologies, this effort also resulted in a portfolio of high-quality, low-memory multi-modal avatars resembling diverse people of various ethnicities, ages, body types, and gender.

Committee: Yong Pei Ph.D. (Advisor); Paul J. Hershberger Ph.D. (Committee Member); Thomas Wischgoll Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Design; Educational Software; Health Care; Information Technology; Systems Design

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, English

This dissertation analyzes the rhetorical tactics 21st century southern activists have used and/or are currently using to resist the hegemonic South in its multiple (and oftentimes status quo) manifestations. In the United States, the South's political transformation from solidly Democratic to Republican coincides with a merger between national politics and regional rhetorical appeals, i.e., the Southern Strategy. From Richard Nixon's opposition to federally mandated busing to de-segregate the South in 1968 to Donald Trump's insistence on defending Confederate monuments to preserve southern "heritage" in 2020, the South surfaces in national politics in ways that coincide with attempts to stem progressive waves of social justice and civil rights advancement. The oft-repeated South that serves the Southern Strategy narrates the region as a site of white supremacist inevitability, in ways that obscure contemporary, liberatory visions of the region. As a corrective, I analyze the rhetorics of resistance southerners are deploying to take down key "monuments" - both material and discursive - that uphold a hegemonic, white supremacist South. Although my analysis extends across multiple sites, it proceeds in two movements. Starting with takedown contests over Confederate flags and Confederate statues in 2015, I document the tactics southern activists are deploying to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces. In addition, I discuss how southern resisters leverage Confederate icons to indict modern-day white supremacist contexts. In the second part of my study, I contend that the rise of President Trump and his MAGA nationalism evidences a contemporary "southernization," a moment when southern discourses enjoy mainstream appeal. After explaining how Trump's updated appeal to "God, guns, and country" puts a nationalistic spin on entrenched southern discursive monuments, I document the tactics three southern organizations are using to resist his rh (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: W. Michele Simmons (Committee Chair); Jason Palmeri (Committee Member); John Tassoni (Committee Member); Stephen Norris (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

This dissertation illuminates how the experience of growing up during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) affected the individual's sense of self as citizen and the impact on their sense of democratic agency, civic-mindedness, and political engagement in their country's current democracy. To understand that impact, the researcher chose to study her own generation, the “Pinochet-era” generation (Cummings, 2015) and interviewed those who were part of the Chilean middle class, who despite not being explicit victims of perpetrators, were raised in dictatorship and surrounded by abuse of state power including repression, disappearance, and imprisonment. The theoretical frame of the Socio-Political Development Theory (Watt, Williams, & Jagers, 2003) helped to understand the process that participants went through and how they moved from an A-Critical Stage, with a complete absence of awareness and understanding about what was happening in their world at the time of the coup d'Etat, to a stage of critical consciousness surrounded by empathy for those who were suffering human rights violations which were the main drivers to latter participate in a liberation process. This development of a critical consciousness was influenced—among others—by specific family and social context which promoted transgenerational (Uwineza & Brackelaire, 2014) and intergenerational dialogue (Reyes, Cornejo, Cruz, Carrillo, & Caviedes, 2015) processes, where values, heritage, and ways of acting were transmitted. The narrative approach helped to elicit stories about participants' life events from the coup d'Etat to present. Through the exploration of 15 narrative interviews it was also possible to collect participants' memories and observe how they currently manifest their civic commitment and social responsibility. Their collective memory, influenced by a collective grief (Metraux, 2005b), still lingers over 40 years later and helps us to understand their life-long commitment and passion to fight (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway PhD (Committee Member); Jean-Luc Brackelaire PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Hispanic American Studies; Hispanic Americans; History; International Relations; Latin American History; Latin American Studies; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Psychology; Social Psychology; Social Research; Social Structure; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Mass Communication (Communication)

This research examines how Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in Columbus, Ohio, have employed social media to retain and reinforce their cultural identity and community, and how their migration experiences have been mediated on these platforms. This study seeks to explore how migrants use social media in their daily interactions as a tool for personal communication. In particular, how it contributes to individual and collective memory, retention of their culture, survival, resilience and wellbeing, identity formation in relation to the question of integration, and survival. This study also explores how the application of various social media has improved their lives. The epistemological assumption is that for far too long migrant voices have been neglected and relegated to the background as they are often not given the platform to tell their own lived experiences. As a result, pertinent issues concerning migrants' lives have been muted, their stories have not been told, and their voices have not been heard and this impacts them and society at large. The argument is that social media have provided migrants the platform to express their voice, including their memories, joys, shared information, anxieties, and even trauma. The hope is that my work gives migrants the opportunity to tell their own stories as they have experienced them against a set of key theories, notably, communication, postcolonial and decolonial theories as they pertain to social media. The research used an ethnographic approach to delve into the conditions and the migrants' everyday life, what I refer to as quotidian. In this research, the participants used the word “everyday” a great deal. They talked about the rituals, memories and actions as everyday things, both in the past and in the present, like drinking coffee, or eating injera, remembering their loved ones, re-living their horror, going to church, or calling or sending texts to their loved ones, in the USA or elsewhere. I used a qualitative (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steve Howard (Committee Chair); Devika Chawla (Committee Member); Laeeq Khan (Committee Member); Assan Sarr (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Communication

Individuals are often exposed to science information from both expert and non-expert sources. Previous work has yet to examine whether individuals are more likely to remember the information conveyed by an expert compared to a non-expert. In the research reported here, we examine (1) people's likelihood of remembering information conveyed by domain-specific expert and non-expert scientists and (2) whether information from experts is more likely to survive the social transmission process. We find that information from expert sources are more likely to be remembered than non-expert sources and that information from experts are more likely to remain intact over person-to-person transmission. These are important findings for the field of science communication as it illustrates that individuals are distinguishing expert and non-expert sources when encoding information into memory.

Committee: Jason Coronel Ph.D. (Advisor); Shelly Hovick Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2017, Psychology - Experimental

Recent research has suggested that our memory systems have evolved to prioritize processing information that enhances our fitness (e.g., location of food, distance of predators). In a provocative line of research, a number of studies have shown that people who merely think about survival demonstrate enhanced recall for word lists compared to those in control conditions who think about non-survival topics (e.g., Kang, McDermott, & Cohen, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007; Weinstein, Bugg, & Roediger III; 2008). Researchers have attributed this to an evolved sensitivity to fitness-relevant content, which enhances attention and memory processes when prompted to think about survival contexts. More recent research has suggested cognitive explanations rather than evolutionary motives, such as encoding stimuli in ways that are congruent with the context, explain these effects (Butler, Kang, & Roediger III, 2009). To date, nearly all tests of the survival processing advantage have been conducted in non-social domains involving word lists and no study has assessed the functional value of the survival processing advantage for outcomes other than memory, such as judgments and decisions. Given the proximal role of social information in modern and ancestral life, this dissertation tested between evolutionary and cognitive explanations (i.e., a congruency-incongruency account) of the survival processing advantage for social memory and judgments/decisions. After establishing the appropriateness of stimuli in a pilot study, participants in the main study were randomly assigned to read one of two scenarios: a survival scenario where participants imagined being stranded in foreign grasslands or a non-survival scenario where they imagined leading the robbery of a well-guarded bank. As part of the task, participants were told that they needed to connect with other social groups to assist in meeting the scenario goal, wherein information about four social groups were presented. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jason Rose (Committee Chair); Yueh_Ting Lee (Committee Co-Chair); Daniel Kruger (Committee Member); Andrew Geers (Committee Member); Revathy Kumar (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, Geography

The Egyptian government is increasingly monitoring, prosecuting, and limiting political dissent. This thesis examines how Egyptian activists use, experience, and construct physical and virtual spaces in their activism. To answer the research question I interviewed protesters who participated in the 25 January Revolution in downtown Cairo. Additionally, I conducted discourse analysis of interviews and social media content. In the current restrictive political environment, respondents are concerned with contesting government narratives and reclaiming spaces for resistance. I present this argument in two main sections. First, I present a conceptual discussion of the connection between resistance and memory in physical and virtual places of resistance. I argue that the spaces in downtown Cairo connected to the revolution are being appropriated by both the government and activists often resulting in contested narratives about the revolution and broader notions of citizenship. Secondly, I argue that both public and social media places used by activists to plan and orchestrate the revolution are now utilized to commemorate dead and jailed revolutionaries.

Committee: Bruce D'Arcus PhD (Advisor); Marcia England PhD (Committee Member); Ian Yeboah PhD (Committee Member); Mark Peterson PhD (Committee Member); Nathan French PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Geography

During the last four decades, diverse spokespeople for a post-1968 student left in Mexico City have developed an organized memory of 1968. Their commemorative reactivations of the year represent the state's repression of the 1968 student movement on October 2, 1968 – in the shorthand, `Tlatelolco' – as the point of departure for an antagonism that continues to run through young people's politics today. This dissertation draws from eight rounds of ethnographic and historical fieldwork, and an engagement with theories of space, politics, and aesthetics (of Doreen Massey, Jacques Ranciere, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), to examine how and to what effect these spokespeople for Mexico City's post-1968 student left have used Tlatelolco to mobilize for political engagement as well as how young people might practice politics otherwise. Analysis suggests that, in response to a first erasure immediately after Tlatelolco through which governing elites sought to cover up the massacre and downplayed their responsibility, activists and affiliated cultural producers (visual artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and so on) have established and continue to maintain a second erasure that reduces the multiplicity of politics in the late 1960s to a predictable, enduring antagonism between a force of repression embodied by the PRI and a heroic student movement that resists repression in the name of a self-sacrificing movement family. I show that young people act into a repression-heroism political framework erected around this antagonism, and that by performing politics within the limits of that framework, they produce student movement space in which young people – even if not enrolled in school – will tactically identify as student activists in order to gain access to politics. Analysis suggests that student-left rituals of anti-state protest contribute to socially reproducing a `police state' of fixed social categories through which post-1968 young pe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mathew Coleman (Advisor); Stephanie Smith (Committee Member); Mary Thomas (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2009, Psychology

The Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) (Tombaugh, 1996) is a widely used measure of response style and effort. Although it has been shown to be a helpful measure in a variety of adult samples, there are no norms based on the performance of children and adolescents. The present study investigated the TOMM performance of adolescents who are involved in the juvenile court system. Their performance was compared against adult normative data, and analyzed by levels of intellectual functioning. Overall, the adolescents performed at levels that have been found in adult community samples, thus indicating that adult norms for the TOMM can be used with adolescents of a wide range of intellectual functioning.

Committee: Kathleen J. Hart Ph.D., ABPP (Committee Chair); Susan Kenford Ph.D. (Committee Member); Myron Fridman Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Quantitative Psychology

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2000, Psychology

The relationship between social cognition and impression formation was investigated through an examination of the immediate effects of newly presenting homosexually-cued behavior on recognition memory. Participants read an elaborate case history depicting the life of either a woman named Betty K. or a man named Bob K. Immediately after reading the case history, participants learned that the character they read about either pursued a heterosexual lifestyle or a homosexual lifestyle. The impact of this information on recognition memory was then assessed. Information regarding participants beliefs about sexual expression and the degree to which they adhered to homophobic beliefs was also collected as a means of grasping the effect of these variables on recognition memory for information considered stereotypic of homosexual men and women. The results indicated that mean effects for sexual orientation, participant gender, and character gender were not significant. However, an interaction between participant gender and character gender emerged such that male participants attributed more stereotypes to the female stimulus persona than to the male stimulus persona. Additionally, participants who were more conservative in their views regarding sexual practices made a significant number of memory errors when reflecting upon the stimulus persons about whom they read.

Committee: Cynthia Crown Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christine Dacey Ph.D. (Committee Member); Janet Schultz Ph.D., ABPP (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, Psychology

This paper investigates the role of category activation in the Own Group Bias in face recognition. In two experiments, I attempted to show that manipulations altering the salience of group memberships moderated the Own Group Bias, and that category activation mediated these effects. Experimental manipulations emphasized one of multiple possible group identities, and participants were expected to show the Own Group Bias along the salient category dimension. Experiment 1 was intended to establish the effectiveness of the manipulations in moderating the Own Group Bias, and Experiment 2 investigated the possible mediating role of category activation. Neither study supported the hypotheses, but Experiment 2 did provide some evidence for the moderation of the Cross Race Effect when other category dimensions are salient. Results are discussed with a focus on clarifying the conditions under which categorization may be most flexible and most likely to lead to differential Own Group Biases.

Committee: Kurt Hugenberg (Advisor); Amanda Diekman (Committee Member); Allen McConnell (Committee Member); Monica Schneider (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Psychology

Causal Uncertainty (CU; Weary & Edwards, 1996) is an aversive motivational state associated with beliefs that one is uncertain about the causes of events. Some people experience CU more often than others and develop chronically-accessible CU beliefs that are resistant to change over time (Weary & Edwards, 1994). In three studies, I examined how memories of uncertain events differed as a function of CU, and how these differences could contribute to the maintenance of CU beliefs over time. I predicted that higher levels of CU would be associated with greater focus on the details of causal events, and hence, inhibit individuals from “working through” past uncertain memories. In Study 1, participants high in CU showed evidence for reliving past uncertain events by recalling them more from the 1st person visual perspective. Study 2 used additional measures of memory perspective to demonstrate greater immersion by high CU individuals when recalling uncertain events. Study 3 directly manipulated whether participants focused on the concrete details or the more abstract meaning of an uncertain event. Findings demonstrated that focusing on the meaning of the event increased feelings of uncertainty, indicative of the initial stages of “working through” a past negative event. Results are discussed in terms of extensions to work on expressive writing, memory perspective, as well as the causal uncertainty model.

Committee: Gifford Weary PhD (Advisor); Robert Arkin PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Libby PhD (Committee Member); Walden W. James PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology