Psychology
This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Psychology .
Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).
Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.
Recent deposits
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Are you as important as me? Self-other discrimination within trait-adjective processing
(Elsevier, 2020-07-01)Healthy adults typically display enhanced processing for self- (relative to other-) relevant and positive (relative to negative) information. However, it is unclear whether these two biases interact to form a self-positivity ... -
Why do people (not) take breaks? An investigation of individuals’ reasons for taking and for not taking breaks at work
(University of Waterloo, 2021-01-18)Employees sometimes need breaks to deal with the demands of their jobs. Indeed, studies show that breaks allow employees to stay energized and maintain high levels of performance throughout the day. However, few studies ... -
Unclaimed Prize Information Increases the Appeal of Scratch Card Games
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-11-03)Previous research suggests that intuitively appealing, yet uninformative unclaimed prize information is capable of biasing gambling-related judgments when people compare scratch cards that vary in the number of unclaimed ... -
On the Relationships Between Mind-Wandering, ADHD, Engagingness, and Effort
(University of Waterloo, 2020-12-21)Existing research on mind-wandering (MW) has found that adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience it more frequently and find it more disruptive to their daily lives than individuals without ... -
Does caring for yourself lead to seeking care from others? Investigating the relationship between self-compassion and interpersonal emotion regulation
(University of Waterloo, 2020-12-11)The benefits of self-compassion for intrapersonal emotion regulation have been well-documented, but few studies to date have examined how self-compassion might relate to the use of interpersonal strategies that aim to ... -
Children use probability to infer other people’s emotions
(University of Waterloo, 2020-12-09)People’s emotional reactions often depend on probability. However, it is unknown whether children consider probability when inferring other people’s emotions. Across three papers, this dissertation shows that children (N ... -
Overconfidently Underthinking: Narcissism negatively predicts Cognitive Reflection
(Taylor & Francis, 2020)There exists a large body of work examining individual differences in the propensity to engage in reflective thinking processes. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical research examining the role of dispositional ... -
Not so fast: Individual differences in impulsiveness are only a modest predictor of cognitive reflection
(Elsevier, 2020-02-01)The extent to which a person engages in reflective thinking while problem-solving is often measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005). Some past research has attributed poorer performance on the ... -
Choosing what to read out loud while studying: The role of agency in production
(University of Waterloo, 2020-11-20)Both the acts of reading aloud (the production effect) and of making a choice are known to be beneficial for memory, however these benefits are yet to be established outside of typical laboratory settings. In this dissertation, ... -
The Downside of Building Up: An Exploration into the Psychological and Physiological Impacts of Exposure to High-Rise Buildings
(University of Waterloo, 2020-11-17)Cities are densifying at a rapid rate and, accordingly, are constructing high-rise buildings to accommodate more people. The aim of this dissertation was to quantify the physiological and psychological impacts of being in ... -
Gender Stereotypes and the Relational Consequences of Interpersonal Justice Violations
(University of Waterloo, 2020-10-30)A large body of organizational justice research has demonstrated that manager-subordinate relationships are damaged when managers violate justice rules. Yet, this relational damage may be unequal across managers. In the ... -
Context reinstatement reconsidered: Investigating boundary conditions of the effect
(University of Waterloo, 2020-09-23)The context reinstatement (CR) effect suggests that target items are easier to recognize when encoding and retrieval contexts are matched. In this PhD thesis, I manipulated features of the target and the context, in ... -
Investigating positive and threat-based awe in natural and built environments
(University of Waterloo, 2020-09-17)Staggeringly immense or beautiful awe-inspiring structures, such as religious monumental architecture, have long been important to human culture and society. With the emerging psychological literature on awe, a nascent ... -
The effects of positive interpretation bias on cognitive reappraisal and social performance: Implications for social anxiety disorder
(Elsevier, 2020-08)People with social anxiety disorder (SAD) lack non-socially anxious individuals' tendency to interpret ambiguous social information in a positively biased manner. To gain a better understanding of the specific in-vivo ... -
Active Navigation in Virtual Environments Benefits Spatial Memory in Older Adults
(MDPI, 2019-03)We investigated age differences in memory for spatial routes that were either actively or passively encoded. A series of virtual environments were created and presented to 20 younger (Mean age = 19.71) and 20 older (Mean ... -
Emotional Encoding Context Leads to Memory Bias in Individuals with High Anxiety
(MDPI, 2018-01)We investigated whether anxious individuals, who adopt an inherently negative mindset, demonstrate a particularly salient memory bias for words tainted by negative contexts. To this end, sequentially presented target words, ... -
On the Determinants of Human Spatial Organization
(University of Waterloo, 2020-09-15)Humans routinely organize and reorganize their environments, such as keeping one’s bookshelves tidy or placing important documents in obvious locations to avoid forgetting about them. Spatial organization is widely thought ... -
Investigating the relation between boredom and media multitasking
(University of Waterloo, 2020-09-09)Media multitasking entails simultaneously engaging in multiple tasks when at least one of the tasks is based in media. Despite the abundance of research devoted to understanding the antecedents of media multitasking, little ... -
Mental Model Updating and Eye Movements
(University of Waterloo, 2020-08-31)Two studies investigated what eye movements can reveal about how we process surprising information and use it to update mental models. Mental models guide our actions to make decisions in a dynamic environment. Participants ... -
Knowledge Gaps, Perceived Barriers, and Perceived Rewards in Sexual Consent
(University of Waterloo, 2020-08-27)Sexual consent, or the communication of willingness to participate in sex, is crucial in all sexual interactions. Whereas educators and researchers emphasize an ideal of consent (i.e., “affirmative” consent; Muehlenhard ...
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