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

dc.contributor.advisorLangston, William
dc.contributor.authorD'Archangel, Micah Ammon
dc.contributor.committeememberMagne, Cyrille
dc.contributor.committeememberFuller, Dana
dc.contributor.departmentPsychologyen_US
dc.date.accessioned2017-10-04T20:15:24Z
dc.date.available2017-10-04T20:15:24Z
dc.date.issued2017
dc.description.abstractWhen 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.degreeM.A.
dc.identifier.urihttp://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/xmlui/handle/mtsu/5412
dc.publisherMiddle Tennessee State University
dc.subjectAccuracy
dc.subjectBehavior
dc.subjectMeaning
dc.subjectPsychology
dc.subjectSemantics
dc.subjectThreat
dc.subject.umiPsychology
dc.subject.umiCognitive psychology
dc.subject.umiSocial psychology
dc.thesis.degreegrantorMiddle Tennessee State University
dc.thesis.degreelevelMasters
dc.titleABSURD REALITY: A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF MEANING THREAT ON THE INTERPRETATION OF UNRELATED WORD PAIRS
dc.typeThesis

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