Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Honors College Thesis

Academic Program

Psychology BS

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Mark Huff, PhD

Advisor Department

Psychology

Abstract

This study examined the relationships between social pain, attentional control, and episodic memory. Fifty-five University of Southern Mississippi undergraduates (Mage = 19.78 years; Range = 17-29) wrote responses to one of three prompts designed to elicit feelings of social pain, physical pain, or no pain (i.e., control). Participants then completed a battery of attentional control (AC) and episodic memory (EM) tasks consisting of the Stroop squared, Flanker squared, Simon squared, and dual-list recall tasks. Participants also completed a series of questionnaires including Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to assess any change in affect caused by the writing prompts and the Big Five personality inventory. Inconsistent with predictions, no differences were found across the three writing prompts indicating that reflections of both social or physical pain had no effect on AC or EM, and the PANAS also yielded no differences between the three groups. Correlations between the Big Five factors yielded typical relationships between neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and openness, and openness and agreeableness were correlated with some of the AC tasks. Collectively however, writing about past painful experiences does not seem to affect cognition as assessed by the AC and EM tasks, though the sample sizes across the three groups lacked sufficient power to detect small or medium effects.

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