Previous Research

Perception of Support in Faces Following SubliminalStress – ChadMarsolek

In (SLS), the study was a follow-up of earlier research that had shown an atypical conditioning effect between the subliminal presentation of instinctually threatening stimuli, for which images of snakes were used in both studies, followed by randomized artificial faces that had been altered to be either neutral, positive, or negative in their affect. The effect that was found showed a positive emotional association with those faces that possessed positive and negative affect when they were paired with the threatening imagery and a negative association for those faces with neutral affect. In this study, we hoped to discover further evidence of this and eventually run subjects through fMRI scans to pin down the role and activity of certain opioid centers, though this stage had not been reached by the time I had graduated.

My role in the research was primarily running subjects: having them sign release forms,making sure their consent was informed through an explanation in broad terms of the study, saving the results, and awarding them credit for having taken part. Additionally,as research was gathered, my supervisor and I would meet often, both casually and semi-weekly with other undergrad research assistants, to discuss the results and what implications they had. Though the (SI?) felt that finding a positive association with the negative affect faces ruined our results, my direct supervisor and I felt that the original theory which stated that we look for support when threatened should simply be widened. Instead of merely looking for those individuals who would soothe us, we also look for those who would share our emotional state, that we’re looking for allies to support us in either sense. The dislike of those faces with neutral affect reflects this, as those who are unwilling to respond to our emotional state and whatever triggered it are not only unhelpful, but possible obstacles as well.





Attachment Theory in Support Roles – Jeffrey Simpson

In this study, we were looking for a correlation between attachment style (as posited by Attachment Theory ~ Avoidant, Normal,and Neurotic) and manner in which support was given and received in response to a problem. For this, couples who had their first baby within a year of the testing were used as subjects with the rationale that since attachment styles typically manifest most strongly during times of stress and that there are fewer periods of reliable stress than that following the birth of a couple’s first child.

I was part of a team of double-blind behavioral coders reviewing tapes of the couples interacting after being asked to discuss and give support to the other about a problem they feel needs repair. Results were not finished by the time I graduated.



Terror Management Theory (word recall + subliminal words)– Chad Marsolek

A replication of an earlier study, it was meant to reproduce the effects of an experiment by a colleague. Participants had been shown to be more likely to remember words associated with groups and other group affiliations when subliminally preceded by the words “death” and “dead”, but not “pain” and similar. The basic theory expounded by the original researcher was that, when faced with death, we seek to ensure our immortality through identification with organizations more likely to live on indefinitely past our own demise, explaining upswings in nationalism during times of crisis. To test this, we used the same stimuli word set. Participants watched a fixation point and were asked to identify which side of the screen a word appeared on. The appearance of each word was preceded by a flashed word that was either neutral(i.e. “basket”), death-related, or pain-related. Data-gathering was not finished at the time of my graduation. The original premise explaining the effect always seemed too deeply philosophical to be entirely acceptable and I proposed to the researcher an evolutionary-psychology-based counter-explanation wherein viewing outside death triggered a defensive set of behaviors, including those which smoothed over group dynamics in favor of cooperative defense. This seemed more likely given humans’ lack of natural weaponry and favoring of group tactics. Instead of it being a result of identification with some greater ideal, the greater support of an abstract group was more likely a relatively recent display of the misapplication of a simpler process that had been developed long before social groups larger than a tribe was common.





Memory: Categorical vs. Identical Identification Between Age Groups – Wilma Koutstaal

With a fair amount of research supporting multiple types of memory, new correlations had to be found and with what are often significant differences between ages in performing memory-based tasks, one study I ran participants for compared Categorical versus Identical memory tasks. The set-up was fairly simple. Participants viewed images of objects and were asked to make a size-judgment (in this case to determine whether the object, as it would be in real life during normal use, was bigger than a 3’X3’ box they were shown previous to the experiment beginning). A mathematical task was then used as an interrupter before a final identification task. In the final task, participants were asked to determine whether the images on the screen were either the exact same image shown previously (exact same brown cow) or if they were the same type of image (a cow), depending on which group they were assigned. The end results showed that though younger (20-30yrs) participants had an easier time with identifying identical stimuli, they had the same success rate at identifying categorical stimuli as older (30-50yrs) participants with older participants having more false positives in the identical identification task. My interpretation was that over time, with the general “neurons that fire together, wire together” effect, general associations are increasingly reinforced since categorical identification not only seems to occur more often,but due to being less specific also has lower requirements for forming a connection. Given enough time, this overall categorization process may start to overshadow identification of specifics due to its greater strength of association or simply being easier to access thanks to being wired into a greater network of neurons.