Lanning, Kevin

In this thesis, I examine three psychological characteristics – psychopathy, autism, and intelligence – and consider how they are related. Psychopathy is a condition that has long captured the public imagination. Articles and blogs are devoted to murderers with psychopathic features. Movies and TV shows have been based on real-life famous psychopaths narrating the horrible crimes they have committed. Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and guilt, manipulation of other people, and violent antisocial behavior. Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. “Successful psychopaths” are those who have all the traits of a regular psychopath, but instead of using them for violence, they use the traits to succeed in their exploitation. At least some successful psychopaths appear to be characterized by high intelligence. The third psychological characteristic, autism, is a developmental disability that impairs the ability to communicate and interact. Several researchers have explored links between autism, psychopathy, and intelligence. I then examine how these characteristics may be embodied in a case study of Elon Musk.

The Hedonometer analyzes Twitter data using human evaluations of happiness to give a happiness score for a given day. The goal of this study was to be able to predict the Hedonometer’s happiness score for a given day using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Using a sample of over 15 million Tweets gathered from Archive.org’s Twitter Stream Grab, the positive emotion dictionary of the LIWC was able to predict happiness on an independent sample, R2 = .57, p < .001. When adding seven additional LIWC dictionaries and using lasso regression, predictive power improved, R2 = .85, p < .001. This reveals that different language analysis metrics may also be able to reveal positivity and happiness within the population of Twitter.

Researchers in moral psychology have established relatively strong evidence of moral development during students’ time in undergraduate university education. Intuition would suggest that one’s major of choice has an impact on this development, but the existing research appears mixed. Conducting a review of the existing literature pertaining to the subject, I establish a firm understanding of broad trends in the data. Correlative effects of major choice do exist in some specific areas, but it is currently unclear whether such effects exist as a product of student self-selection or from direct impacts of the curricula.

The following novella is a fictional case study of Jethro Jones, a young male who suffers
from three pathologies including Binge Eating Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, and Panic
Disorder. It traces the development of his suffering from infancy through childhood trauma into
adolescent manifestations such as severe panic attacks, a suicide attempt, and weekly episodes of
binge eating. The creative nature of the piece was inspired by works such as The Bell Jar (Plath)
and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (Hornbacher). The character and story were
informed by peer-reviewed studies about the aforementioned pathologies including risk factors,
manifestation and course, subtypes, and treatments. While research exists on all three of these
topics separately, little of the literature exists on the comorbid presentation of these disorders,
despite its common occurrence. Thus, this is what the novella attempts to tackle.

The first ten pages are comprised of a psychological analysis that explores language and rhetoric of candidates during campaigns, sexism in campaigns, voter suppression and the influence social media in campaigns based on the events in this play. The premise of the play is as follows: Last year’s Student Government at Lakeside University was riddled with scandal and favoritism. Students from the university’s press prepare to chronicle the student government election that starts out as “politics as usual,” with the typical candidates (political science and law students) announcing their candidacy. But when one of student government’s very own announces his candidacy in a way that changes the landscape of the election, a political cynic takes to the stage, and the campaigns take an unexpected and unusual turn. The student body desires change in its student government and some decide an outsider may not be such a bad idea. As the battle between candidates for campus governor intensifies, the student body becomes deeply divided.

To what extent are we responsible for the actions performed in our dreams? If I hurt someone while I’m sleepwalking, should my behavior be excused? In cases of multiple personalities, if one identity commits a crime, should the main identity be accountable? We can raise such questions in courts today due to early psychological research in consciousness and awareness. I will begin by reviewing the early notions that have been explored in psychology, such as sleep, repression and even hypnosis that all tie back to theories of consciousness. I will then review various disorders that involve irregularities in consciousness: sleep disorders such as sleepwalking and sleep apnea, as well as less frequently observed mental disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder. After discussing criminal cases involving consciousness related disorders, I argue that a consensus on treatment of individuals with severe consciousness related disorders should be established.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which the lines between senses are blurred, suggesting permeable boundaries in the mind. This notion of boundary permeability is inherently linked with Openness to Experience, one of the Big Five personality traits. Conversely, some people are characterized by heavy boundaries and thus a lack of Openness. Since the 1930s, the relationship between Openness and boundaries has been important in political psychology, as previous research has established that conservatives tend to be low in Openness, while the opposite is true for liberals. Authoritarianism can be seen as the embodiment of a mind with thick boundaries, while the most pure example of a thin-bounded mind would be synesthesia. I perform a text analysis of Reddit comments made by 117 self-reported synesthetes and compare their responses to the Openness category of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to examine whether synesthesia correlates with Openness.

This exploratory analysis aims to examine personality in relation to geographical location. As opposed to grouping participants by state, participants are grouped based on cultural regions outlined by Colin Woodard in American Nations (2012). By taking into account the sub-nations that exist in the United States and the history of their settlements, we can illustrate a more comprehensive and complete picture of the people who live there. In order to examine geographical regions according to personality scores, Colin Woodard’s American Nations data was used in conjunction with William Revelle’s and Lorien Elleman’s SAPA data and corresponding code. Participants were divided into nations and personality scores were then calculated for each nation. The personality scale Liberalism (e.g. Left Coast)/Conservatism (e.g. Deep South) was the greatest measure of variability across nations. Despite small effect sizes, results showed distinct personality profiles for each nation, based on a seven-factor model produced from factor analysis.

National attachment refers to the emotional bond one forms with the abstract conception of a nation, similar to how one might imagine a relationship with a god. Although there is a multidisciplinary literature investigating the effects and antecedents of national attachment, there is a distinct lack of research into patterns of national attachment informed by attachment theory. I review the national attachment literature in order to frame the argument for why national attachment ought to be examined from an attachment theory approach. Then, I conduct a study with 217 American adults exploring the associations between two dimensions of national attachment (anxiety and avoidance) and four psychological constructs conceptually linked with national identity (political ideology, interpersonal attachment, moral concerns, and theory of mind) in order to empirically ascertain how national attachment styles are situated within social and political psychology. A consistent association between nationalism and low anxious attachment was found.

As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the study of consciousness is informed by a variety of scholarly perspectives that, when integrated, deepen our understanding of consciousness as a functional system of semiotic communication. This thesis explores linguistic behavior as a manifestation of collective consciousness via the incorporation of theory from psychology, sociology, and philosophy into an analytical framework for studying consciousness. Using this analytical framework, I present an analysis of patterns of linguistic behavior from online religious communitas on reddit.com. I analyze the patterns of linguistic behaviors in this data using tokenization and semantic analysis techniques, revealing the divergent manifestations of identity in each collective consciousness. Ultimately, I find a striking similarity between the language used across all the subreddits, but the differences between them validate the consideration of these as divergent interpretants of collective consciousness.