Browsing by Author "McDowell, Christine L., 1950-"
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- The relationship of coping and choice to verbal memory and behavioral reactivityMcDowell, Christine L., 1950- (Virginia Tech, 1988-11-05)Evidence suggests that individuals cope with stressful life events more effectively if they believe that they are in control of their environment. Rotter's Locus of Control is a measure of this belief about personal control. An individual with an internal locus of control would be more likely to believe that events are contingent on his or her behavior, and could thus be expected to feel more in control of his or her environment than an external locus of control individual. In addition to locus of control, it has been shown experimentally that allowing subjects to make a choice about outcomes also leads to enhanced perception of control in individuals. To test the hypothesis that perceived control will lead to better performance on a stressful memory task, and that individuals who believe they are in control will employ more problem-focused and fewer emotion-focused coping strategies, 60 undergraduate students from introductory psychology were given three lists of words to memorize and recall. Subjects were assigned to one of four groups: Internal/choice, Internal/No choice, External/Choice, External/No Choice. Blood pressure and heart rate were taken for a behavioral reference. While subjects in the internal locus of control condition and the choice condition performed better than those in the external and no-choice condition, as predicted, results did not reach statistical significance. However, it was shown that internal locus of control subjects used significantly fewer avoidance coping responses than external locus of control subjects, and that there were significant differences in the number of coping responses recalled from memory and from immediately after the task.
- Right hemisphere decline in the perception of emotion as a function of agingMcDowell, Christine L., 1950- (Virginia Tech, 1991)The hypothesis that the right cerebral hemisphere declines more quickly than the left cerebral hemisphere in the normal aging process was tested in two studies using a facial recognition and a response time task. In Study 1, subjects (N=60) were asked to identify facial affect fram 50 standardized photographs of 5 affective categories: Happy, Neutral, Sad, Angry, and Fearful, and were asked to rate the intensity of each photograph. The results of the analysis indicate that the elderly group was significantly less accurate at identifying negative and neutral affective expressions than the younger group, with no significant differences seen between groups in the identification of positive affect. The results also indicate that the elderly rated the affective expressions as being significantly more intense than the younger group. Study 2 (N=60) investigated response times for the recognition of the affective stimuli as 4 function of visual field of presentation and valence of the stimuli, using the same subject population. The results of this analysis reveal that the elderly show an increase in cerebral lateralization in comparison to the younger group. The elderly exhibited increased response times to negative affect presented to the left hemisphere. The results of this study also indicate that both groups had faster response times to positive affect, and that both groups had a response bias in favor of positive affect when neutral facial affective slides were presented to the left hemisphere. The results are interpreted as partially supporting the right hemi-aging theory. The elderly showed a diminished ability to identify negative affect across both studies, suggestive of lowered right hemisphere functioning. However, the increased rather than decreased cerebral asymmetry in the response time task, and slower response times to negative affect presented to the left hemisphere are suggestive of bilateral changes in affective processing for the elderly. Overall, these findings suggest that the elderly have more difficulty processing negative affect, while their ability to process positive affect remains intact. This finding has implications for research using facial affective paradigms designed for use with younger subjects, and suggests the need for more studies of emotional aging processes in normal populations.