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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Young Children’s Ability to Integrate Social and Numerical Information: The Origins of Base-rate Neglect
(University of Waterloo, 2019-08-02)The seminal work of Kahneman and Tversky (1973) sparked an interest in the biases that govern decision-making, notably due to their findings on adults’ tendency to neglect base-rate information (i.e., prior probability) ... -
Re-evaluating Whether Bilateral Eye Movements Influence Memory Retrieval
(University of Waterloo, 2019-07-30)Several recent studies have reported enhanced memory when retrieval is preceded by repetitive horizontal eye movements, relative to vertical or no eye movements. This reported memory boost has been referred to as the ... -
Children use ownership to understand actions and preferences
(University of Waterloo, 2019-07-19)Actions are often dictated by an individual’s desires. While this may be appropriate in many situations, there are important exceptions, such as when an individual desires someone else’s property. Across three papers, this ... -
The Desire to Act: Exploring Situational, Dispositional and Genetic Correlates of a Fundamental Motivational State
(University of Waterloo, 2019-07-02)Animals do not simply act to survive and maximize pleasure. They also act for the sake of action itself. Although such intrinsically motivated actions are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom, the mechanisms by which ... -
Perceived Gaze Direction Differentially Affects Discrimination of Facial Emotion, Attention, and Gender – An ERP Study
(Frontiers, 2019-05-24)The perception of eye-gaze is thought to be a key component of our everyday social interactions. While the neural correlates of direct and averted gaze processing have been investigated, there is little consensus about how ... -
Spontaneous eye-movements in neutral and emotional gaze-cuing: An eye-tracking investigation
(Elsevier, 2019-04)Our attention is spontaneously oriented in the direction where others are looking. This attention shift manifests as faster responses to peripheral targets when they are gazed at by a central face instead of gazed away ... -
A “BAD APPLE” OR A “SPOILED BARREL”?: OBSERVING OVERT RACISM PREDICTS DIVERGING PERCEPTIONS OF RACISM AND RACE RELATIONS IN AMERICA
(University of Waterloo, 2019-06-03)Blacks and Whites draw different interpretations of the blatant racism that they witness, even when their reactions appear to be identical. Across three studies, we hypothesized that Blacks would endorse the idea that ... -
Joint Modulation of Facial Expression Processing by Contextual Congruency and Task Demands
(MDPI, 2019-05-17)Faces showing expressions of happiness or anger were presented together with sentences that described happiness-inducing or anger-inducing situations. Two main variables were manipulated: (i) congruency between contexts ... -
The Role of Regulatory Focus Motivation in Experiencing Relationship Success
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-26)Successful close relationships lie at the heart of people’s health and happiness. Relationship science has argued for several critical relationship qualities that are essential for the maintenance and well-being of romantic ... -
Probabilistic Adaptation and Voluntary Attention
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-25)The following experiments considered the general phenomenon of behavioural adaptation in response to statistical regularities—which we refer to as probability learning (PL). In particular, these experiments focused on ... -
Comparing the Estimation of Internally and Externally Defined Interval Durations
(University of Waterloo, 2019-01-16)In this thesis I distinguish between two types of temporal intervals: internally-defined and externally-defined. Prior research on how humans estimate the durations of temporal intervals has been focussed almost entirely ... -
Dunning-Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence
(Springer, 2017-12)The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to the observation that the incompetent are often ill-suited to recognize their incompetence. Here we investigate potential Dunning-Kruger effects in high-level reasoning and, in particular, ... -
Workplace Gossip, Paranoia, and a Deviance Dilemma: A Warning for Deviance/CWB Research
(University of Waterloo, 2018-12-04)Organizational research has long conceptualized workplace gossip as a form of deviance and included gossip in many measures of deviance and counterproductive work behaviors (CWB). However, empirical evidence regarding the ... -
One versus two eyes makes a difference! Early face perception is modulated by featural fixation and feature context
(Elsevier, 2018-12-01)The N170 event-related potential component is an early marker of face perception that is particularly sensitive to isolated eye regions and to eye fixations within a face. Here, this eye sensitivity was tested further by ... -
Uniquely Diverse: Ethnic Diversity and Interethnic Contact Predict Individualistic Values and Behaviour
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-20)Research on social change suggests that cultural values and behaviour have become increasingly individualistic over the past century. Prior researchers theorized that shifts in sociodemographic variables—e.g., changes in ... -
Approach Motivation Gives Rise to Meaning in Life
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-18)Coherence, purpose, and significance have emerged as the three contributors to meaning in life. Current theories have primarily emphasized coherence as key to meaning, neglecting purpose and significance. A theoretical ... -
Music Performance Anxiety and Arousal Imagery: Development of the Musician’s Self-Regulation Imagery Scale
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-05)Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a common experience for musicians regardless of their level of expertise and can have a negative impact on performance quality. Arousal imagery is a technique that has been used to help ... -
Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder: Evidence for False Meaning Transfer Across Domains
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-05)The purpose of this thesis was to explore the decision making underlying the perception of meaning in abstract art. In particular, I explore if features adjacent to the content of the art itself predominantly drive the ... -
Concrete Resolve: How Concrete Mindset Spurs Approach Motivation and Improves Task Persistence and Performance for Behaviourally Inhibited People
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-04)This dissertation examines the motivational consequences of concrete mindset, e.g., thinking about specific details of how to do things (vs. why). The guiding premise is that concrete mindset initiates a motivational state ... -
To Look, or Not to Look? Attention to Threat and Avoidance of Threat While Checking
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-04)It has been argued that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) exhibit facilitated attention to threat (early attentional capture) and difficulty disengaging from it (persistent attentional capture), which in turn ...
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