Stephanie Kazanas

• Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at Tennessee Technological University

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions In this study, we examined memory performance in a bilingual population, in an effort to compare depth of processing and complexity across first and second languages. Design/methodology/approach Complexity was investigated with a pleasantness rating task and an elaborative encoding, scenario-based rat...

The focus of this study was to determine when and if female counselors-in-training (CITs) will self-advocate (i. e., avoid non-disclosure) when they experience an inappropriate sexual behavior from clients during their field experience training. Quantitative methods were used to gauge CIT sensitivity to and awareness of ICSBs, as well as to calcula...

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their...

The past decade has produced great strides in understanding the functional aspects of human cognition. One prolific area of research asserts that memory is optimized when information is processed for its fitness, or “survival relevance” (see, e.g., Nairne et al., J Exp Psychol 33:263–273, 2007). Early work conducted in this area used a simple recal...

Linguistic research on bilinguals has sometimes focused on either first vs. second acquired language or dominant vs. non-dominant language despite situations in which the dominant and first language are no longer the same. Many bilinguals in the U.S. and other countries experience a change in language dominance from a home language to a majority la...

This chapter explores the ways in which emotion processing, in the form of words, images, and other stimuli, differs across a bilingual's two languages. Findings from the behavioural, physiological, neuroimaging, and clinical literatures support the notion of a bilingual's first language (L1) garnering emotion processing advantages and preferences....

Long Abstract (496/500 words): Epistemology examines the nature of knowledge and how it is knowable. "What is knowledge?" "How do we know?" These are higher level questions that undergraduate students should be asking in preparation for their academic and professional lives, yet pedagogically we focus too often on facts, methods, and skills. A cruc...

Individuals’ behavior can be influenced by cues in their surroundings (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). In the current study, behavioral priming was applied to examine if exposing individuals to subliminally presented food items would later influence their behavior when selecting a snack and completing cloze sentences. Phase I of this experiment...

Research focused on the cognitive processes surrounding bilingual language representation has revealed the important role that translation ambiguity plays in how languages are stored in memory (Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). In addition, translation of emotionally related information has been shown to be challenging because a direct translation does not...

The survival processing effect is the finding that items processed for their survival relevance are remembered better than those processed using other elaborative types of encoding strategies. This effect has been attributed to more elaborative encoding processes engendered by the survival scenario; however, there are various limitations with previ...

Decades of cross‐cultural research have revealed an interesting and important relationship between culture and emotion. The effects of culture are far‐reaching, with emotion sensitivity and recognition affected by cultural familiarity, a type of ingroup advantage. This entry describes cross‐cultural similarities and differences with regard to emoti...

In recent decades, researchers have noted consistent costs in lexical access among bilingual participants. Using a variety of fluency measures, but primarily picture-naming with switching, bilinguals are often outperformed by their monolingual peers. Bilingual deficits on fluency measures are observed across the lifespan, though recent findings wou...

Recent research at the intersection between multicultural psychology and rehabilitation psychology has acknowledged the linguistic and cultural factors affecting therapeutic outcomes. For Hispanic patients, their growing population, limited access to adequate healthcare, and numerous risk factors present unique challenges to their therapists. Hispa...

Recent findings from the memory literature indicate that the human memory system may prioritize survival-relevant information, relative to other types of information. The original work led by Nairne and colleagues (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007) suggested that survival processing may be a more efficient...

This study was designed to investigate the impact of survival processing with a novel task for this paradigm: the Stroop color-naming task. As the literature is mixed with regard to task generalizability, with survival processing promoting better memory for words, but not better memory for faces or paired associates, these types of task investigati...

A primed lexical decision task (lot) was used to determine whether emotion (e.g., love, fear) and emotion-laden (e.g., puppy, hospital) word processing differs, both explicitly and implicitly. Previous experiments have investigated how emotion word processing differs from both abstract and concrete word processing (Altarriba&Bauer, 2004; Altarriba,...

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and prim...

Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the function of memory in our evolutionary history. According to Nairne and colleagues (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, and Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada, 2007), the best mnemonic strategy for learning lists of unrelated words may be one that addresses the same problems that our Pleistoce...

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in Int J Billing 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in Am J Psychol, in press), and rapid serial visual processing (Knickerbocker and Altarriba i...

Research with multilinguals has highlighted the general memory advantages of knowing more than one language. For example, Schroeder and Marian have cited better executive functioning in bilinguals than monolinguals, and research in the medical field has found a buffering effect of multilingualism on memory loss in the elderly. Other research has em...