Date of Award:

5-2016

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

Amy L. Odum

Committee

Amy L. Odum

Committee

Kerry E. Jordan

Committee

Gregory J. Madden

Committee

Timothy A. Shahan

Committee

Timothy A. Slocum

Abstract

Jonathan E. Friedel, a graduate student in the Experimental and Applied Psychological Sciences program at Utah State University, will complete this dissertation as part of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology.

Outcomes that are received far in the future are less valuable than outcomes that are to be received more proximally. Delay discounting describes how outcomes in the future lose value. The goal of this dissertation is to examine how people discount different types of delayed outcomes. Two experiments examine the value of a wide
variety of delayed outcomes for cigarette smokers and nonsmokers. These experiments indicate that these outcomes have far less value for cigarette smokers than for nonsmokers. Also, the degree to which one outcome loses value is related to the degree to which other outcomes lose value. The final experiment, compares a popular model of delay discounting to a newer model of delay discounting, the additive utility model. This experiment indicates that the newer additive utility model is just as good as the more popular model. While the newer model is as good as the popular model, the newer additive utility model does provide potential causal factors for delay discounting that the popular model does not.

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