Physiological aspects

Recent research has provided evidence that speech-related visual feedback presented to people who stutter may enhance fluency as effectively as well-established forms of altered auditory feedback. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of visual feedback during speaking conditions that approximated naturalistic conversation. In order to determine what aspects of visual feedback may contribute to fluency enhancement, the feedback was manipulated in terms of synchronicity and linguistic congruence to the original signal. Participants included ten adults diagnosed with developmental stuttering with no concurring conditions. The study consisted of the following four conditions: synchronous visual feedback, asynchronous visual feedback, non-speech related visual feedback, and a control condition. Speech samples were analyzed for the percent of syllables stuttered per condition. Upon analysis of data, no statistically significant effect of visual feedback was found on stuttering frequency, although individual results varied greatly.

This dissertation focuses on the elements of performance that contribute to the actress's development of somatic practices. By mastering the art of articulation and vocalization, by transforming their bodies and their environment, these actors created their own agency. The female actors lived the life of the characters they portrayed, which were full of multicultural models from various social and economic classes. Somaesthetics, as a focus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and somatic awareness, provides a pragmatic approach to understanding the unique way in which the woman of the early modern Spanish stage, while dedicating herself to the art of acting, challenged the negative cultural and social constructs imposed on her. Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, I use somaesthetics to shed light on how the actor might have prepared for a role in a comedia, selfconsciously cultivating her body in order to meet the challenges of the stage.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of poser and perceiver gender on the Happiness/Anger Superiority effect and the Female Advantage in facial expression recognition. Happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions were presented on male and female faces under Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). Participants of both genders indicated when the presented faces broke through the suppression. In the second experiment, angry and happy expressions were reduced to 50% intensity. At full intensity, there was no difference in the reaction time for female neutral and angry faces, but male faces showed a difference in detection between all expressions. Across experiments, male faces were detected later than female faces for all facial expressions. Happiness was generally detected faster than anger, except when on female faces at 50% intensity. No main effect for perceiver gender emerged. It was concluded that happiness is superior to anger in CFS, and that poser gender affects facial expression recognition.

High Summer is a manuscript-length compilation of narrative science essays that trace the relationship the narrator has with her father. These essays focus on the ongoing presence of drugs, their historical basis, and their pharmacological effects on the body.

Many errors in recognition are made because various features of a stimulus are attended inefficiently. Those features are not bound together and can then be confused with other information. One of the most common types of these errors is conjunction errors. These happen when mismatched features of memories are combined to form a composite memory. This study tests how likely conjunction errors, along with other recognition errors, occur when participants watch videos of people both with and without unusual facial features performing actions after a week time lag. It was hypothesized that participants would falsely recognize actresses in the conjunction item condition over the other conditions. The likelihood of falsely recognizing a new person increased when presented with a feature, but the conjunction items overall were most often falsely recognized.

Contemporary understanding of human visual spatial attention rests on the hypothesis of a top-down control sending from cortical regions carrying higher-level functions to sensory regions. Evidence has been gathered through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments. The Frontal Eye Field (FEF) and IntraParietal Sulcus (IPS) are candidates proposed to form the frontoparietal attention network for top-down control. In this work we examined the influence patterns between frontoparietal network and Visual Occipital Cortex (VOC) using a statistical measure, Granger Causality (GC), with fMRI data acquired from subjects participated in a covert attention task. We found a directional asymmetry in GC between FEF/IPS and VOC, and further identified retinotopically specific control patterns in top-down GC. This work may lead to deeper understanding of goal-directed attention, as well as the application of GC to analyzing higher-level cognitive functions in healthy functioning human brain.

The current study utilized a quasi-experimental nonequivalent groups design to investigate whether a 5-week long Mindfulness Meditation Intervention (MMI), would impact measures of attention, positive and negative affect, state and test anxiety, mindfulness, and reactive cortisol levels in 107 school aged children. A series of reliability corrected ANCOVAs were performed on all behavioral variables. Results indicated that those in the MMI group did not differ from their cohorts on any of the behavioral measures. Reactive levels of salivary cortisol were also collected and assayed in a subsample of 25 participants. An ANCOVA on cortisol change scores was performed and findings did not reach statistical significance. Post-hoc power analyses revealed that this could be due to inadequate sample size. To conclude studies utilizing a MMI of longer duration or with larger sample sizes may be required in assessing the usefulness of MMIs in behavioral and physiological measures in non-clinical child populations.

Purpose: To evaluate the influence of compression socks worn post exercise on the perceived rating of muscle soreness. Methods: In a randomly cross over design, 16 subjects performed a soreness inducing protocol. Below knee CG (Compression garments) were worn for the next 6 hours post exercise. HR (Heart Rate), RPE (rate of perceived exhaustion) and time to complete one cycle was measured throughout the intervention. PS (Perceived Soreness) was assessed prior, immediate post, 6h, and 24h post exercise. Results: There was no significant difference in perception of soreness between compression and no compression at 6h post exercise (p=.136) and at 24h post exercise (p=286). Conclusion: Compression socks worn post exercise did not significantly alter ratings of perceived soreness after a soreness inducing protocol.

Forty-one women filled out surveys about their heterosexual sexual behavior over the course of 30 days. These surveys tracked their menstrual cycles, sexual behavior, sexual desires, and orgasm frequency. Although the sample size was small, a number of borderline statistically significant (p < .10) trends emerged from the analysis: women experienced more copulatory orgasms on average when fertile and women who were not in relationships tended to have more frequent non-copulatory orgasms. Naturally cycling women also experienced significantly more non-copulatory orgasms when fertile. Although no strong conclusions can be drawn from the current sample, the results suggest many avenues for future research.

Number perception, its neural basis and its relationship to how numerical stimuli are presented have been challenging research topics in cognitive neuroscience for many years. A primary question that has been addressed is whether the perception of the quantity of a visually presented number stimulus is dissociable from its early visual perception. The present study examined the possible influence of visual quality judgment on quantity judgments of numbers. To address this issue, volunteer adult subjects performed a mental number comparison task in which two-digit stimulus numbers (Arabic number format), among the numbers between 31 and 99 were mentally compared to a memorized reference number, 65. Reaction times (RTs) and neurophysiological (i.e. electroencephalographic (EEG) data) responses were acquired simultaneously during performance of the two-digit number comparison task. In this particular quantity comparison task, the number stimuli were classified into three distance factors. That is, numbers were a close, medium or far distance from the reference number (i.e., 65). In order to evaluate the relationship between numerical stimulus quantity and quality, the number stimuli were embedded in varying degrees of a typical visual noise form, known as "salt and pepper noise" (e.g., the visual noise one perceives when viewing a photograph taken with a dusty camera lens). In this manner, the visual noise permitted visual quality to be manipulated across three levels: no noise, medium noise (approximately 60% degraded visual quality from nonoise), and dense noise (75% degraded visual quality from no-noise).