Assessing for Shame Using the Dot Probe Task
Mentor 1
Shawn Cahill
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
24-4-2015 2:30 PM
End Date
24-4-2015 3:45 PM
Description
Shame has been linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety, depression, and a history of sexual victimization. Furthermore, shame may inhibit a patient from getting well (Baumeister & Bushman). The Awareness of Women’s Emotional Experiences (AWEE) study recently started collecting data from undergraduate women with high, medium, and low levels of shame. The study utilizes a novel dot-probe test to assess for attention vigilance or attention avoidance patterns for shame-inducing stimuli. During the dot-probe test, participants are shown negative, positive, and neutral images. A vigilant-avoidant pattern to negative stimuli is quite common in those with anxiety. This means that at first, anxious participants pay a lot of attention to the threatening stimuli and then later try to avoid it. The main goal of AWEE is to compare the performance on the dot-probe task of participants of low, medium, and high shame. We hypothesize that participants in the high shame group will exhibit this vigilant-avoidant pattern. In addition, there is a survey that consists of questions about demographics as well as participants’ possible histories as sexual abuse victims. There are also multiple brief surveys collected throughout the study that ask the participants to self-report their current moods to monitor whether the participants are unintentionally becoming aggravated with the study’s procedures or if they are perhaps upset by anything that happens during their session in the lab. Gaining a better understanding of shame could help those with a range of mental health problems.
Assessing for Shame Using the Dot Probe Task
Union Wisconsin Room
Shame has been linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety, depression, and a history of sexual victimization. Furthermore, shame may inhibit a patient from getting well (Baumeister & Bushman). The Awareness of Women’s Emotional Experiences (AWEE) study recently started collecting data from undergraduate women with high, medium, and low levels of shame. The study utilizes a novel dot-probe test to assess for attention vigilance or attention avoidance patterns for shame-inducing stimuli. During the dot-probe test, participants are shown negative, positive, and neutral images. A vigilant-avoidant pattern to negative stimuli is quite common in those with anxiety. This means that at first, anxious participants pay a lot of attention to the threatening stimuli and then later try to avoid it. The main goal of AWEE is to compare the performance on the dot-probe task of participants of low, medium, and high shame. We hypothesize that participants in the high shame group will exhibit this vigilant-avoidant pattern. In addition, there is a survey that consists of questions about demographics as well as participants’ possible histories as sexual abuse victims. There are also multiple brief surveys collected throughout the study that ask the participants to self-report their current moods to monitor whether the participants are unintentionally becoming aggravated with the study’s procedures or if they are perhaps upset by anything that happens during their session in the lab. Gaining a better understanding of shame could help those with a range of mental health problems.
