Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Program

Cognitive Neuroscience

Advisor

Wei Wang

Committee Members

Tony Ro

Subject Categories

Cognitive Science

Keywords

Eye tracking, Aggression

Abstract

The study of aggression offers opportunities to more deeply understand criminal behavior, personality and temperament. A deeper understanding of aggression has many implications in applied settings, including work, education and health. The knowledge gained may improve the treatment of behavioral misconduct and antisocial behavior. Additionally, the study of aggression has the potential to inform assessments of quality of life and development while offering information to guide early intervention and improve behavior trajectories.

Understanding aggression has many real-world applications, such as creating a better understanding of criminal activity, identifying who might be more likely to become a criminal, allowing for early intervention, or being able to get into the mind of aggressive people to understand whether their minds may process information in a fundamentally different way. Levels of aggression can vary greatly within individuals. The field of aggression is a poorly understood area of study due to some types of aggression being subtle, such as passive aggression, some people managing or hiding aggression very well, and overreliance on self-reported measurements.

In previous studies, researchers have primarily focused on the static structure of emotions with little focus on actual mechanisms of action and dynamic properties of emotions. This functions as one of the goals of this study. The current study utilizes ecologically valid emotional stimuli, and primarily probes the influence of aggression levels on eye movement behaviors by using eye-tracking technology.

The current study involved a total of 357 college students recruited through the Subject Online Research Assistant (SONA) system (211 females, 121 males, mean age = 23.85 years, SD = 9.95 years). Participants performed two tasks. First, participants viewed faces displaying different emotions (happy, angry, fearful, neutral) while simultaneously undergoing eye tracking. Second, participants were asked to fill out a Brief Aggression Questionnaire (BAQ; Webster et al., 2014). The collected data was then used to identify correlations and findings within and between both datasets. Overall, findings from the study indicated there was a relationship between BAQ scores and eye tracking measures. Within multiple regression plots correlations ranged from .13 to -.97. Within quadratic regression plots, four significant p values were found which were all for the Anger subdomain. Findings from this study imply further exploration is warranted.

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