Jason Young

Impact of mood and arousal on safer-sex decision-making in homosexual male dating couples
Undergraduate honors student Stefanie Ambrosio is conducting a replication and extension of the above study, focusing on gay male dating couples from the New York metropolitan area. While the basic procedures remain the same, this study explores those heuristics and other reasoning strategies that may be unique to the gay male population.

Link between math phobia and personal daily financial behavior
This project is using experiments and surveys examining the psychological influence of math anxiety, several personality traits (e.g., locus of control), and personal demographic characteristics on attitudes and behaviors involving general financial and personal spending habits. (In collaboration with master's students David McNew and Yana Litovsky, and Honors students Alex Lemell and Leah Kashani.)

Fear of crime
Continuing collaborations with Prof. Darlene Defour of Hunter College and Prof. Derek Chadee at the University of the West Indies involve developing a follow-up survey from a 2004 survey conducted in New York City.

1. The revised survey is being developed with Prof. Defour and master's student Chris Gettings (a CUNY Grad student in the Social Psychology PhD program) and Dr. Sonia Suchday (new chair of the Psychology Department at Pace University).
2. Master's student Danielle Cohen, Prof. Chadee, and I are analyzing data from a conceptual replication of Young (2003) conducted in Trinidad on the impact of fear of crime on viewers’ perceptions of the importance of televised news stories.

International Situations Project
The International Situations Project is a multi-site project coordinated by Dr. David Funder at UC-Riverside and involves data collection at sites in the US and internationally. The study focuses on the development of a cross-culturally-reliable metric to characterize social situations. Currently, Honors student Carolina Herrera is collecting data from Hunter College students and will be comparing these results with data collected at 9 other U.S. sites. In addition, undergraduate research assistant Taylor Gerard is conducting a linguistic analysis of participants’ open-ended descriptions of recent situations to examine key phrases used to characterize different types of scenarios.

Impact of personal identities on life satisfaction, positive and negative affect, and pro-and anti-social behaviors
In collaboration with Hunter adjunct professor Warren Reich, master's students Joshua Wright, Helen Tan, and Ian Taras, recent graduate Celeste Sangiorgio, and undergraduate research assistant Kyosha Pierre-Francois, we have been conducting experiments to examine the time-course of multiple personal identities and their relation to measures of life satisfaction, general affect, and social behavior.

Exploring the underlying cognitive and emotional components of regret
In collaboration with Prof. Mark Hauber and undergraduate research assistant Amine Eighouayel, we are developing a paradigm to identify the key stages of regret, as well as examining those situational triggers that increase or decrease the likelihood that regret will be experienced. Future studies will focus on how regret enhancement may be used to reduce risky decision-making.

• Ellis, P., & Young, J. (2004). Evolutionary thinking within Political Science: Addressing some feminist concerns. Journal of Women and Politics, 25, 31-53.
• Young, J. (2003). The role of fear in agenda setting by television news. American Behavioral Scientist, 46, 1673-1695.
• Young, J., & Persell, R. (2000). On the evolution of misunderstandings about evolutionary psychology. In. D. LeCroy & P. Moller (Eds.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (Vol. 907): Evolutionary perspectives on human reproductive behavior. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 218-224.