Psychology Department

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    The relationship of academic cramming to flow experience
    (Middle Tennessee State University, Department of Psychology, 2001) Brinthaupt, Thomas M. ; Chin, Chul M.
    Research has neglected to examine the experiential aspects of academic cramming. In the present study, we assessed the relationship between cramming and Csikszentmihalyi's (1990, 1997) flow state. We expected that experiencing such a state would be more likely for students who typically cram than for non-crammers. One hundred sixty-one undergraduates participated in the study. Following a simulation of a cramming session, they completed a measure of flow experienced during the task. Results indicated that students who normally cram performed better on the test and reported higher flow scores than the non-crammers. Implications for research on flow and study habits are presented.
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    Words and Melody Are Intertwined in Perception of Sung Words: EEG and Behavioral Evidence
    ( 2010-02-26) Gordon, Reyna L. ; Schön, Daniele ; Magne, Cyrille ; Astésano, Corine ; Besson, Mireille ; Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni
    Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processing of words and melodies in song. Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded while non-musicians listened to pairs of sung words (prime and target) presented in four experimental conditions: same word, same melody; same word, different melody; different word, same melody; different word, different melody. Participants were asked to attend to either the words or the melody, and to perform a same/different task. In both attentional tasks, different word targets elicited an N400 component, as predicted based on previous results. Most interestingly, different melodies (sung with the same word) elicited an N400 component followed by a late positive component. Finally, ERP and behavioral data converged in showing interactions between the linguistic and melodic dimensions of sung words. The finding that the N400 effect, a well-established marker of semantic processing, was modulated by musical melody in song suggests that variations in musical features affect word processing in sung language. Implications of the interactions between words and melody are discussed in light of evidence for shared neural processing resources between the phonological/semantic aspects of language and the melodic/harmonic aspects of music.
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    What the best online teachers should do
    (Middle Tennessee State University, Department of Psychology, 2011-12) Brinthaupt, Thomas M. ; Fisher, Lawanna S. ; Gardner, Justin G. ; Raffo, Deana M. ; Woodward, Jennifer B.
    As a core project, a university eLearning Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community (FLC) chose to apply recommendations for the “art” of good teaching to the online realm. There is relatively little discussion of this issue in the literature. In this paper, we use Bain‟s (2004) book What the Best College Teachers Do to discuss some of the major ways that the practices of effective teaching in general can be applied to online teaching in particular. Specifically, we explore methods of fostering student engagement, stimulating intellectual development, and building rapport with students when teaching online. This analysis provides a much-needed “art of teaching” set of recommendations that complements the “science of teaching” best practices approach to online pedagogy.
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    Thematic Apperception Test Narrative Archive
    (Digital Scholarship Initiatives, Middle Tennessee State University, 2022-08-10) Brown, Cindi ; Parker, Heather ; Brinthaupt, Thomas M.
    We describe the development and contents of an archive of narratives collected in response to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), to be shared with psychology researchers, teachers, and students. This archive holds demographic data of respondents as well as the complete text of the narratives themselves. Some of the included narratives are historical, archived from previously published sources and from the records of clinicians; others will be newly collected from introductory psychology students at Middle Tennessee State University. We discuss possible uses and the strengths and weaknesses of the archive. This document describes the creation of an open-data archive of narratives collected in response to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and illustrates some of the archive’s potential uses for researchers, teachers, and students. KEYWORDS: open science, archival data, Thematic Apperception Test, narratives