Browsing by Subject "Attention."
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Item Appreciation : its nature and role in virtue ethical moral psychology and dialectical moral agency.(2013-09-16) Carson, Nathan Paul.; Roberts, Robert Campbell, 1942-; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.This dissertation is focused on appreciation and its role in virtue ethical psychology and moral agency. While appreciation is a central concept in aesthetics, I argue that it still needs to play a deeper and more precise role in virtue ethical discussions of moral understanding, experience, and agency. Overall, I contend that close examination of appreciation opens up a compelling dialectical picture of moral agency that is phenomenologically realistic, narratively unified, progressively unfolding and, ideally, marked by wholehearted engagement with morally significant features of reality. In chapter one I clarify the nature of appreciation, arguing (among other things) that appreciation does not always involve pleasure, sometimes displays minimal understanding, and is often an unfolding activity. Overall, I suggest that there are three broad, sometimes incompatible but often overlapping types of appreciation: (1) phenomenal-affective experience, (2) engaged evaluative understanding, and (3) the activity of evaluative attention. I argue that evaluative attention holds particular promise as a unitive principle for a dialectically unfolding conception of appreciative moral agency. In chapter two I import these distinctions into virtue ethics, and argue that through greater clarity and liberality about appreciation, we can identify one type that is fundamental to the moral life, clarify the types that express virtue, and better articulate the relationship between appreciation(s) and ethical wisdom. In chapter three I challenge Talbot Brewer’s Neo-Aristotelian view that virtuous activity appreciation involves full motivational harmony with the activity and supervening pleasure taken in it. A thorough critique of Brewer’s view, partly through cases of appreciative motivational conflict and emotional pain, opens us toward a more realistic and broadly applicable notion of unfolding appreciation as responsively plural, and closely allied with thoughtful evaluative attention. This conception of virtuous appreciating also suggests a new, concerned engagement understanding of wholehearted agency. Finally, in chapter four I examine Iris Murdoch’s notion of moral attention, and develop it as the appreciative activity of evaluative attention that unites developmental appreciative agency. Moving beyond Murdoch, I then articulate the basic elements of such dialectical appreciation as genuinely interactive, perennially unfinished, responsively plural, and a source of formal and personal unity.Item Associations between sleep and memory in a clinical sample of obese children and adolescents.(2014-09-05) Passanante, Natalie M.; Limbers, Christine A.; Psychology and Neuroscience.; Baylor University. Dept. of Psychology and Neuroscience.Today more than one third of U. S. children and adolescents are classified as overweight or obese. While interventions have produced short term improvements in weight status, treatment effects are infrequently maintained. Standard interventions may not be well-suited for the cognitive profile associated with obesity, which is characterized by impaired executive functioning. The literature on memory consolidation during sleep suggests that sleep problems associated with obesity may contribute to this cognitive profile in ways that have yet to be elucidated. The present study examined the associations between sleep and multiple indices of memory in a clinical sample of 45 obese children and adolescents. Sleep was assessed from both child and parent perspectives. Memory was evaluated using the Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning, Second Edition (WRAML2). Multiple linear regression analyses revealed that sleep duration and sleep quality explained the most variation in visual memory abilities. The results underscore the importance of early intervention in childhood obesity and illuminate the importance of targeting sleep as a component of weight loss interventions.Item Does viewing bullying violence affect the allocation of attention in young adults?(2012-08-08) Sulak, Tracey N., 1975-; Saxon, Terrill F.; Educational Psychology.; Baylor University. Dept. of Educational Psychology.The purpose of the current study was to experimentally test the relationship between symptoms of inattention and vicarious experiences of bullying. The research questions of the current study were: 1) Can vicarious bullying induce symptoms of inattention?; 2) What happens to inattention after multiple exposures to vicarious bullying?; and 3) Are there sex differences in inattention after exposure to bullying experiences? The participants were graduate and undergraduate students from a private university with a 0.2% diagnosis rate of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Participants viewed four videos with three depicting scenarios of bullying, and after each video, the Stroop test was used to assess inattention. Heart rate was also assessed following each video. After finishing participation in the video phase of the experiment, participants completed a demographic survey, a bullying experiences survey, and the Screener for Inattentive Symptoms. The findings indicated exposure to vicarious bullying led to an increase in symptoms of inattention. The effects appeared to be cumulative, such that with additional exposure to vicarious bullying, a participant’s symptoms of inattention increased. The heart rate of participants appeared to mirror the symptoms of inattention, with heart rate increasing over the course of the experiment. There were no significant differences in reaction to vicarious bullying by sex. Implications of the findings include the need to assess experiences with bullying when diagnosing ADHD inattentive.Item Emotion and attention in the psychopath : an investigation of affective response and facilitated attention using event related potentials.(2011-12-19) Anderson, Nathaniel Erik.; Stanford, Matthew S.; Psychology and Neuroscience.; Baylor University. Dept. of Psychology and Neuroscience.A prominent concern in psychopathy research is a deficit in processing emotionally relevant information, which may occur in the very early neural processing stages of stimulus evaluation. While contemporary functional imaging techniques like fMRI have unparalleled spatial resolution, their poor temporal resolution makes them inadequate for measuring the time-course of very early stages of information processing. Conversely, electrocortical measures, particularly event related potentials (ERPs), are capable of determining the time-course of such processing on the order of milliseconds. The goal of this investigation was to establish the existence of differences between psychopaths and controls in their integration of emotional information in the very early stages of information processing as indexed by ERP waveform differences, and determine whether manipulations of attentional focus are capable of modulating these differences. In a series of presentations of emotionally evocative pictures and words, psychopaths and controls indeed displayed robust differences in their ERP waveforms. Psychopaths lacked a persistent emotion-related positivity present in controls beginning around 200 ms into the processing stream and continuing throughout the 900 ms epoch of interest. Under conditions where the emotional information was relevant to an ongoing task, psychopaths showed moderate changes in ERPs for emotional stimuli, yet these waveforms remained dissimilar from those of controls. These data provide evidence that psychopaths present with deficits in early-stage discrimination of emotionally salient information, which may be partially sensitive to manipulations of effortful attention. These outcomes have implications for later-stages of processing such as the integration of this information into memory systems and the utilization of this information for the modification of ongoing behavior.