Date Thesis Awarded
4-2010
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Science (BS)
Department
Psychology
Advisor
Glenn Shean
Committee Members
Leisa D. Meyer
Paul Kieffaber
Abstract
The area of dissociation has many competitive theories. The relationship of dissociation and magical thinking is of much interest. If dissociation causes magical thinking, it could lead to an elimination of many dissociative disorders from the study of psychology. In this study, emotional and neutral stimuli were shown to 62 females and 31 males. The participants were separated into high magical thinking and low magical thinking groups. After the stimulus was shown, the participants completed a simple cognitive task which recorded the time between the beginning and end of movement (AT), the time between the beginning of stimulus and the beginning of movement (AD) and the total time (RT). Each participant filled out a Dissociative Experiences Scale, a Magical Ideation Scale, and a Creative Experiences Questionnaire. No significant results were found between the scales and response times; however a gender difference was discovered for AD and AT scores. The difference score for AD when looking at the emotional stimuli (found by subtracting the Neutral score from the Emotional score) showed a significant difference when compared to the Neutral scores. Males took a shorter time to respond (Mean = -20.81, SD = 85.71) than females: (Mean of 51.42; SD = 146.66; F (1, 92) = 6.40, p < .01). A similar gender difference was discovered for AT, showing males having a faster AT response to emotional stimuli, but a slower one to neutral, and females having the opposite effect. This could mean that males and females process emotional stimuli differently, perhaps due to a difference in the way males and females process emotions or due to societal pressures for females to be more emotional than males.
Recommended Citation
Burk, Virginia, "The Dissociation Approach and Associations to Visual Stimuli and Their Impact on Information Processing" (2010). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 650.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/650
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.