ABSURD REALITY: A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF MEANING THREAT ON THE INTERPRETATION OF UNRELATED WORD PAIRS

dc.contributor.advisor Langston, William
dc.contributor.author D'Archangel, Micah Ammon
dc.contributor.committeemember Magne, Cyrille
dc.contributor.committeemember Fuller, Dana
dc.contributor.department Psychology en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2017-10-04T20:13:28Z
dc.date.available 2017-10-04T20:13:28Z
dc.date.issued 2017
dc.description.abstract When situations or objects violate our expectations of the way reality is supposed to operate, certain mental processes step in to alleviate the distress, including a pattern seeking behavior. Would the propensity for pattern seeking in meaning threat translate into behavioral differences in semantic evaluation? Thirty-one participants from an undergraduate population were recruited and completed personality questionnaires. Participants then evaluated 64 sets of related or unrelated word pairs before and after reading either an absurd story by Franz Kafka or a control story. Reaction time and accuracy were recorded for all participants. Results of two 2x2x2 factorial ANOVAs indicated that there were no significant differences between the control and meaning threat groups on reaction time or accuracy. This suggests that even though people were given a story known to cause meaning threat, there seemed to be no effect on behavioral responses.
dc.description.degree M.A.
dc.identifier.uri http://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/xmlui/handle/mtsu/5381
dc.publisher Middle Tennessee State University
dc.subject Accuracy
dc.subject Behavior
dc.subject Meaning
dc.subject Psychology
dc.subject Semantics
dc.subject Threat
dc.subject.umi Psychology
dc.subject.umi Cognitive psychology
dc.subject.umi Social psychology
dc.thesis.degreegrantor Middle Tennessee State University
dc.thesis.degreelevel Masters
dc.title ABSURD REALITY: A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF MEANING THREAT ON THE INTERPRETATION OF UNRELATED WORD PAIRS
dc.type Thesis
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