By Diana Meso and Dr. Dana Basnight-Brown

Associate Professor of Psychology Dr. Dana Basnight-Brown in collaboration with three other scholars presented two research papers during the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, held in New Orleans, Los Angeles, US in November last year.

The first paper titled “A mixed method study of Emotion Processing in a Highly Proficient Multilingual Population” which was in collaboration with Asiya Ayoob Jafferani (University of Nottingham) was based on the study of emotions in bilingual’s population. It focused on highly proficient multilinguals in Sub-Saharan Africa to understand how a person’s emotion processing relates to their L1 (first Language), L2 (Second Language) or L3 (third language).

The study found out that L1 was most often used to express negative emotions, while L2 and L3 were used to express positive emotions revealing that language selection depended on valence.
The second paper “Adaptive Memory: An Exploration of the Survival Advantage in Sub-Saharan Africa.” was based on better understanding the role of survival relevant information and its influence on memory recall. It focused on determining whether traditional survival memory scenarios extend to Nonwestern population. Results indicated that 175 participants located in East Africa revealed no difference in recall for control, grasslands and urban survival conditions. Dr. Dana presented the paper together with Stephanie Kazanas (Tennessee Technological University) and Jeanette Altarriba (University of Albany).

The Psychonomic Society is the pre-eminent society for the experimental study of cognition. Members are cognitive scientists and include some of the most distinguished researchers in the field who are concerned with the application of psychology to health, technology, and education. Members also have a common interest in studying the basic, fundamental properties of how the mind works by using behavioral techniques to better understand mental processing.