Writing-up Cocaine Use and Facial Emotion Recognition - Online Survey - £25 Prize Draw!!

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lh411

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Apr 1, 2016
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Hi All,

I am a postgraduate psychology student at the University of Sussex, UK and I'm looking to recruit cocaine users for a study that investigates the relationship between drug use, personality, and facial emotion recognition. This study has been approved by the University of Sussex Psychology School Ethics Committee.

The survey can be accessed by clicking here: https://universityofsussex.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0BzsVdZ63BeiUxn

The survey itself should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete, responses are strictly confidential and the survey can be completed anonymously, there is also the opportunity to enter into a £25 prize draw!!

This study began on the 25th March 2016 and will run until 30th April 2016. It is open to anyone above the age of 18 and I am looking for regular cocaine users, as well as those who rarely use or never use cocaine.

If you would like further information, I can be contacted at [email protected] or via the Bluelight private messaging system.

Thank you in advance for your participation, I hope you find the study interesting.
 
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Wow really cool idea for a study.

My prediction will be that heavy cocaine users will recognize facial emotion to a greater degree though maybe not while high.

EDIT: Education levels were confusing to me.

Question 42 in the yes no is confusing.. maybe quality was meant there as well?

Question 46. whats pot holing?

Seemed like the study included a large sociopath/psychopath aspect.
 
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Thank you so much for your participation and your feedback!

You are correct, the main personality trait of interest is psychopathy and the other questionnaires measure traits associated with this.

Apologies about the education levels, I used a pre-set question for this that was based on the education system in the UK.

"Pot holing" is the UK term for caving/spelunking, and I agree, question 42 would make more sense if quality was added to the end. Unfortunately I am unable to make any changes to the questionnaires.

I believe they encourage sharing of results on this forum, so I will be sure to return once the data has been analysed - hopefully with interesting results!

Thank you again for participating, your help is greatly appreciated!
 
Thank you to everyone who has participated so far, I'm still looking for participants and would really appreciate your help.

Maybe I should give some more details to hopefully get more people interested.

Previous research has suggested that a deficit in fear recognition is present in psychopathy (both clinical and self-reported), and in regular cocaine use. To the best of my knowledge, no study has directly compared the deficits seen in psychopathy to those seen in regular cocaine use, or investigated the combination of the two factors. This is the aim of my study.

If you regularly use cocaine, I could really do with your help!

Thanks again.


 
Wonder why it's fear. Do they instead perceive it as something else.. What would happen if "weakness" was one of the options.

I had trouble with some of the faces, but some of the faces seemed to show very weak or little emotion.
 
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Its actually negative emotions in general that are impaired in psychopathy, but fear has been linked to both psychopathy and cocaine use. In psychopathy, it could be due to a lack of cognitive empathy. It has been suggested that psychopaths do not experience fear and for that reason they may not be able to identify fear in others. In cocaine use I'm not so sure, but people with higher levels of psychopathy are apparently more likely to use cocaine so that could be a possible reason.

The faces are morphed from 0%(neutral) to 100%(full expression) intensity, in this set of pictures there are male and female expressions of each of the six emotions at either 30%, 50%, and 70% intensity. So there are 12 pictures that will appear very close to neutral, but have very subtle tells as to which emotion it is.

I'm still struggling to get enough participants who use cocaine once a month or more, so I'm not sure whether I will get any significant results but I will come back to post results regardless.
 
I have actually been thinking about the pictures you used quite a bit. If the pictures are based off actors depicting emotions then I think aspects of non verbal communication may be missing.

It would be interesting to see the results of a study that used facial emotion recognition expressed by an animal such as a dog. Because the dog would not be acting, it would be expressing the full spectrum of non verbal emotional communication. I wonder if we would see a significant difference in results.
 
I see what you mean, cues given from acting out an emotion isn't the same as the cues that would be given from actually experiencing that emotion. I think people would definitely enjoy the facial task more if it included pictures of dogs!
 
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