Digital Commons Network^™

The Effects Of Different Navigational Aids On Wayfinding And Spatial Memory For Older Adults, Ling Ai, Yingying Yang, Qi Wang

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Parental Participation In Intellectual And Developmental Disability Research: A Review Of Diversity, Lauren Grove, Yingying Yang, Dai’Jah Diggs, Arielle Hershkovich

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Parents provide important insights into the psychology, behaviors, and activities of themselves and their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). However, it is unknown how prevalent parental participation in IDD research is in general, nor the diversity of geographical locations and research methods of these studies with parental participation. The current review screened 7845 published works in 7 IDD-focused journals between 2010-2019. A total of 1519 articles, accounting for 19.37% of all screened articles, included at least one parental measure. For each parental article, we coded the country/continent of authors/participants, measurement tools used to obtain data from parents (e.g., …

Racial And Gender Discrimination Predict Mental Health Outcomes Among Healthcare Workers Beyond Pandemic-Related Stressors: Findings From A Cross-Sectional Survey, Rachel Hennein, Jessica Bonumwezi, Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, Petty Tineo, Sarah R. Lowe

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Racial and gender discrimination are risk factors for adverse mental health outcomes in the general population; however, the effects of discrimination on the mental health of healthcare workers needs to be further explored, especially in relation to competing stressors. Thus, we administered a survey to healthcare workers to investigate the associations between perceived racial and gender discrimination and symptoms of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and burnout during a period of substantial stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic and a national racial reckoning. We used multivariable linear regression models, which controlled for demographics and pandemic-related stressors. Of the 997 participants (Mean …

Everyday Memory In People With Down Syndrome, Yingying Yang, Zachary M. Himmelberger, Trent Robinson, Megan Davis, Frances Conners, Edward Merrill

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Although memory functions in people with Down Syndrome (DS) have been studied extensively, how well people with DS remember things about everyday life is not well understood. In the current study, 31 adolescents/young adults with DS and 26 with intellectual disabilities (ID) of mixed etiology (not DS) participated. They completed an everyday memory questionnaire about personal facts and recent events (e.g., school name, breakfast). They also completed a standard laboratory task of verbal long-term memory (LTM) where they recalled a list of unrelated words over trials. Results did not indicate impaired everyday memory, but impaired verbal LTM, in people with …

Learning In Multi-Team Systems: A Qualitative Study Of Learning Triggers, Readiness To Learn And Learning Processes, Valerie Sessa, Jessica Francavilla, Manuel London, Marlee Wanamaker

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose

Multi-team systems (MTSs) are expected to respond effectively to complex challenges while remaining responsive and adaptable and preserving inter-team linking mechanisms. The leadership team of an MTS is expected to configure and reconfigure component teams to meet the unique needs of each situation and perform. How do they learn to do this? This paper, using a recent MTS learning theory as a basis, aims to begin to understand how MTSs learn and stimulate ideas for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use two case studies to address research questions. The first case was a snapshot in time, while the second …

How Multidimensional Is Emotional Intelligence? Bifactor Modeling Of Global And Broad Emotional Abilities Of The Geneva Emotional Competence Test, Daniel Simonet, Katherine E. Miller, Kevin Askew, Kenneth Sumner, Marcello Mortillaro, Katja Schlegel

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Drawing upon multidimensional theories of intelligence, the current paper evaluates if the Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECo) fits within a higher-order intelligence space and if emotional intelligence (EI) branches predict distinct criteria related to adjustment and motivation. Using a combination of classical and S-1 bifactor models, we find that (a) a first-order oblique and bifactor model provide excellent and comparably fitting representation of an EI structure with self-regulatory skills operating independent of general ability, (b) residualized EI abilities uniquely predict criteria over general cognitive ability as referenced by fluid intelligence, and (c) emotion recognition and regulation incrementally predict grade point …

An Evaluation Of Wayfinding Abilities In Adolescent And Young Adult Males With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Yingying Yang, Weijia Li, Dan Huang, Wei He, Yanxi Zhang, Edward Merrill

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background

Wayfinding refers to traveling from place to place in the environment. Despite some research headway, it remains unclear whether individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show strengths, weaknesses, or similarities in wayfinding compared with ability-matched typically developing (TD) controls.

Method

The current study tested 24 individuals with ASD, 24 mental-ability (MA) matched TD (MA-TD) controls, and 24 chronological-age (CA) matched TD (CA-TD) controls. Participants completed a route learning task and a survey learning task, both programmed in virtual environments, and a perspective taking task. Their parents completed questionnaires assessing their children’s everyday wayfinding activities and competence.

Results

Overall, CA-TD …

Who Is Empowered? Relative Importance Of Dispositional And Situational Sources To Psychological Empowerment, Daniel Simonet, Katherine E. Miller, Sylvia Luu, Kevin Askew, Anupama Narayan, Sydnie Cunningham, Camila Pena, Amen Attar, Rose Fonseca, Holly M. Kobezak

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Major reviews of psychological empowerment (PE) suggest four broad sources to becoming empowered: organizational, leadership, job, and dispositional. This study examines the redundancy, uniqueness, and relative importance within and across these situational and dispositional domains using commonality and dominance analyses. Across multiple samples, we find (a) within socio-structural domains, empowering leadership, knowledge sharing, and task significance are the most unique organizational sources of PE, (b) dispositional predictors augment situational features in explaining PE, and, perhaps most importantly, (c) job characteristics (JC) along with core self-evaluation (CSE) occupy the most dominant role on PE. In study 1 (N = 229), rank …

A Lack Of Exposure To School Psychology Within Undergraduate Psychology Coursework, Joel O. Bocanegra, Aaron A. Gubi, Gregory L. Callan, Sally Grapin, John Mccall

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

School psychology is experiencing a personnel shortage crisis, and scholars suggest that a possible contributing factor is its underrepresentation in undergraduate psychology curricula. Most school psychology trainers do not teach at the undergraduate level, thus undergraduate psychology students may not be adequately exposed to school psychology during undergraduate training. Research suggests that increased knowledge and exposure to school psychology are associated with increased intentions for school psychology. In the current study, 55 undergraduate students completed measures of knowledge, exposure, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and choice intentions at the beginning and end of professional psychology courses. Results indicated that students enrolled in …

The Montclair Map Task: Balance, Efficacy, And Efficiency In Conversational Interaction, Jennifer Pardo, Adelya Urmanche, Hannah Gash, Jaclyn Wiener, Nicholas Mason, Sherilyn Wilman-Depena, Keagan Francis, Alexa Decker

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper introduces a conversational speech corpus collected during the completion of a map-matching task that is available for research purposes via the Montclair State University Digital Commons Data Repository. The Montclair Map Task is a new, role-neutral conversational task that involves paired iconic maps with labeled landmarks and a path drawn from a start point, around various landmarks, to a finish mark. One advantage of this task-oriented corpus is the ability to derive independent objective measures of task performance for both members of a conversational pair that can be related to aspects of communicative style. A total of 96 …

Children's Response, Landmark, And Metric Strategies In Spatial Navigation, Jennifer Yang, Edward C. Merrill, Qi Wang

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

When interacting with the environment, one can encode spatial information via egocentric or allocentric perspectives. Allocentric processing can include both landmark and geometric information. The current study examined egocentric response-focused, allocentric landmark-focused, and allocentric metric-focused processing strategies in large-scale spatial environments among 38 children aged 6–8 years, 31 children aged 9 and 10 years, and 53 young adults. The current study used a new testing paradigm that made it possible to investigate all three spatial strategies in the same setting. Participants completed a series of experiments in a modified radial arm maze. By systematically changing the starting locations and landmark …

Clinician Experience And Attitudes Toward Safety Planning With Adolescents At Risk For Suicide, Jazmin Reyes-Portillo, Eleanor L. Mcglinchey, Josefina Toso-Salman, Erica M. Chin, Prudence W. Fisher, Laura Mufson

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examined clinician experiences and attitudes toward safety planning in a large urban pediatric psychiatry department serving primarily Latino youth. A total of 46 clinicians completed a survey assessing their experience with and attitudes toward safety planning with adolescents at-risk for suicide. The majority of clinicians were female (78%), non-Latino White (54%), and aged 30–39 (52%). Clinicians’ attitudes were largely positive (M = 3.69 SD = 0.47, Range = 2.42–4.42). However, many clinicians (n = 24) were not convinced that safety planning reduces the imminent risk of suicidal behavior in patients. This study provides more depth to our understanding …

Guilty Pleas Of Youths And Adults: Differences In Legal Knowledge And Decision Making, Tina Zottoli, Tarika Daftary Kapur

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Few studies have examined differences in the guilty plea decisions of youth and adults. In interviews with 64 youth (X = 15.9, SD = 1.2) and 56 adults (X = 38.5, SD = 11.5) who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City, we found important differences between the youths and adults in their understanding of the plea process, the factors they considered when making decisions, and their rationales for their decisions. Youth were less likely to recognize that a guilty plea resulted in a criminal record and to understand the trial process, and they reported having considered fewer potential …

Racial Bias In Perceptions Of Size And Strength: The Impact Of Stereotypes And Group Differences, David J. Johnson, John Paul Wilson

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Recent research has shown that race can influence perceptions of men’s size and strength. Across two studies (Study 1: N = 1,032, Study 2: N = 303) examining men and women from multiple racial groups (Asian, Black, and White adults), we found that although race does impact judgments of size and strength, raters’ judgments primarily track targets’ objective physical features. In some cases, racial stereotypes actually improved group-level accuracy, as these stereotypes aligned with racial-group differences in size and strength according to nationally representative data. We conclude that individuals primarily rely on individuating information when making physical judgments but do …

The Relation Between Descriptive Norms, Suicide Ideation, And Suicide Attempts Among Adolescents, Jazmin Reyes-Portillo, Alison M. Lake, Marjorie Kleinman, Madelyn S. Gould

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examined the relationship between adolescents' beliefs about the prevalence of youth suicide ideation (ideation descriptive norms) and suicide attempts (attempt descriptive norms) with self-reported suicide ideation and attempts. Descriptive norms, suicide ideation, and suicide attempts as well as gender, race/ethnicity, and exposure to family, peer, and others' suicide were assessed in 2,109 students at six suburban New York State high schools. After controlling for demographic variables and exposure to suicide, elevated ideation descriptive norms and attempt descriptive norms were associated with higher rates of suicide ideation and lifetime suicide attempts among adolescents. Adolescents who believed suicide ideation and …

How Multiteam Systems Learn, Valerie Sessa, Manuel London, Marlee Wanamaker

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: Extending a model of how teams learn, this paper aims to present a model of multiteam system (MTS) learning, comparing similarities and differences between how MTSs learn and how component teams learn. The paper describes the value of adaptive, generative and transformative learning for increasing MTS development over time. Design/methodology/approach: The model proposes that environmental demands trigger adaptive, generative and transformative MTS learning, which is further increased by the MTS’s readiness to learn. Learning can happen during performance episodes and during hiatus periods between performance episodes. Findings: Learning triggers coupled with readiness to learn and the cycle and phase …

How Children Talk About Events: Implications For Eliciting And Analyzing Eyewitness Reports, Sonja P. Brubacher, Carole Peterson, David La Rooy, Jason J. Dickinson

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Legal and social service professionals often question whether various features of young witnesses’ responses during interviews are characteristic of children’s event reports or whether these features are concerning findings that reflect degraded memory, outside influence, or other phenomena. To assist helping professionals and researchers who collect data through interviews, we aggregated findings from child eyewitness studies and revisited transcript sets to construct fifteen principles that capture how children talk about events. These principles address children’s earliest event narratives, how children report information as interviews unfold and typical features of their narratives, threats to the accuracy of answers, the influence of …

How Children Talk About Events: Implications For Eliciting And Analyzing Eyewitness Reports, Sonja P. Brubacher, Carole Peterson, David La Rooy, Jason Dickinson, Debra Ann Poole

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Legal and social service professionals often question whether various features of young witnesses’ responses during interviews are characteristic of children's event reports or whether these features are concerning findings that reflect degraded memory, outside influence, or other phenomena. To assist helping professionals and researchers who collect data through interviews, we aggregated findings from child eyewitness studies and revisited transcript sets to construct fifteen principles that capture how children talk about events. These principles address children's earliest event narratives, how children report information as interviews unfold and typical features of their narratives, threats to the accuracy of answers, the influence of …

Longitudinal Effects Of Rti Implementation On Reading Achievement Outcomes, Sally Grapin, Nancy Waldron, Diana Joyce-Beaulieu

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Because several studies have investigated student outcomes in schools implementing Response to Intervention (RtI), relatively little research has investigated the impact of implementation on students’ long-term achievement outcomes (i.e., several years after exposure). The purpose of this study was to describe one elementary school's RtI implementation process and to examine students’ long-term reading comprehension outcomes following their exposure to various phases of implementation. Four cohorts of students who experienced different implementation phases (i.e., a baseline condition or Phases I, II, or III of implementation) during Grade 2 were subsequently followed across Grades 3, 4, and 5 to examine their outcomes …

Do Familiar Memory Items Decay?, Timothy J. Ricker, Joshua Sandry, Evie Vergauwe, Nelson Cowan

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There is a long-standing debate over whether the passage of time causes forgetting from working memory, a process called trace decay. Researchers providing evidence against the existence of trace decay generally study memory by presenting familiar verbal memory items for 1 s or more per memory item, during the study period. In contrast, researchers providing evidence for trace decay tend to use unfamiliar nonverbal memory items presented for 1 s or less per memory item, during the study period. Taken together, these investigations suggest that familiar items may not decay while unfamiliar items do decay. The availability of verbal rehearsal …

Relations Of Emotion Regulation, Negative And Positive Affect To Anxiety And Depression In Middle Childhood, Kristen Uhl, Leslie F. Halpern, Celia Tam, Jeremy K Fox, Julie L. Ryan

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Objectives: The associations between coping, emotion regulation, and child psychopathology have been the subject of extensive research. Many studies have focused on voluntary processes of emotion regulation. In addition to controlled regulatory processes, children’s involuntary, automatic processes based in individual differences in temperament may also impact emotion regulation and children’s psychological adjustment. The current study examined the relations of emotion regulation and temperament to children’s symptoms of anxiety and depression in middle childhood. Methods: Study participants included 126 children (50% Male, 68.0% Caucasian; M = 9.60 years, SD = 0.52) recruited from a suburban school district. Participants completed self-report measures …

Perceptions Of Violence Prevention Climate And Strain: A Mediated Model, Jeremy A. Bauer, David L. Sexton, Kevin Askew, Joshua S. Rodefer, David C. Daniel, Jacob W. Highsmith, Natalie Evans, Mark A. Whatley

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The current study investigated the interrelationships across perceptions of violence prevention climate and several workplace strain variables (i.e., job satisfaction, turnover intentions, physical symptoms of strain, and burnout). By adopting a social exchange framework, trust was identified as a potential mediator of the relationships between the focal variables. One hundred and eight employees participated in the cross-sectional design by completing a self-report survey. Correlational analyses revealed support for significant associations between perceptions of violence prevention climate and the workplace strain variables. Moreover, mediational analyses revealed that trust fully mediated the relationships between perceptions of violence prevention climate and job satisfaction, …

Pilot Investigation Of The Relationship Between Hippocampal Volume And Pattern Separation Deficits In Multiple Sclerosis, Mark D. Zuppichini, Joshua Sandry

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Memory impairment and hippocampal atrophy are common in multiple sclerosis (MS). In the present pilot study, we investigate whether the mnemonic process of pattern separation is impaired and a predictor of hippocampal volume in relapsing remitting MS. MS participants and healthy controls completed the Mnemonic Similarities Task (MST) along with traditional neurocognitive assessments of memory. 3T structural magnetic resonance imaging was used to estimate whole hippocampal volumes (main aim) and hippocampal subfield volumes (exploratory aim). Results revealed that pattern separation performance was worse for MS participants compared to healthy controls (Cohen's d = 0.96). For MS participants, hippocampal volume was …

School-Based Bullying And Teen Dating Violence Prevention Laws: Overlapping Or Distinct?, Michele Cascardi, Christopher King, Daniel Rector, Jill Delpozzo

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The most recent legislative attempts to curb violence in schools have been school-based dating violence prevention laws. In the previous decade, there was an increase in legislation designed to prevent bullying in schools; these laws now exist in 50 states. However, most anti-bullying laws provide an expansive definition of bullying that includes any type of peer aggression, harassment, or teen dating violence (TDV). Having several different state and federal laws aimed at curtailing multiple forms of aggression may produce confusion about appropriate intervention and disciplinary responses, requiring school districts to develop parallel sets of policies, educational curricula, intervention approaches, and …

Spatio-Temporal Distribution Of Negative Emotions In New York City After A Natural Disaster As Seen In Social Media, Oliver Gruebner, Sarah R. Lowe, Martin Sykora, Ketan Shankardass, Sv Subramanian, Sandro Galea

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. We used Twitter to (1) extract negative emotions indicating discomfort in New York City (NYC) before, during, and after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. We further aimed to (2) identify whether pre- or peri-disaster discomfort were associated with peri- or post-disaster discomfort, respectively, and to (3) assess geographic variation in discomfort across NYC census tracts over time. Our sample consisted of 1,018,140 geo-located tweets that were analyzed with an advanced sentiment analysis called ”Extracting the Meaning Of Terse Information in a Visualization of Emotion” (EMOTIVE). We calculated discomfort rates for 2137 NYC census …

Parent Reports Of Wayfinding By Their Children With Down Syndrome, Jennifer Yang, Gayle G. Faught, Edward C. Merrill

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background: Navigating the environment, or wayfinding, is integral to independent living. Laboratory studies have consistently indicated an impairment in wayfinding in people with Down syndrome (DS). However, very little is known regarding their real-life wayfinding abilities. Method: Eighty-six parents of children with DS completed an online survey on their children’s wayfinding behaviours and their own feelings and expectations about their children’s wayfinding. Results: Parents reported their children had few wayfinding skills, yet much confidence in their own abilities. Many parents had taught/planned to teach their children wayfinding skills. Parents also expressed concerns over their children’s independent wayfinding. Parents teaching wayfinding …

Hypernasal Speech Is Perceived As More Monotonous Than Typical Speech, Monique Tardif, Larissa Cristina Berti, Viviane Cristina De Castro Marino, Jennifer Pardo, Tim Bressmann

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background/Purpose: Anecdotal clinical reports have stated that hypernasal speech sounds monotonous. However, the relationship between the perception of intonation (i.e., the fundamental frequency variation across an utterance) and hypernasality (excessive nasal resonance during the production of non-nasal sounds) has not been investigated in research. We hypothesized that auditory-perceptual ratings of intonation would be significantly lower for more hypernasal stimuli. Methods: One male and one female voice actor simulated 3 levels of intonation (monotone, normal, and exaggerated) at 4 different levels of hypernasality (normal, mild, moderate, and severe). Thirty participants listened to the simulations and rated the intonation on a visual …

Vortioxetine Differentially Modulates Mk-801-Induced Changes In Visual Signal Detection Task Performance And Locomotor Activity, Todd M. Hillhouse, Christina R. Merritt, Douglas A. Smith, Manuel Cajina, Connie Sanchez, Joseph H. Porter, Alan Pehrson

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Attention impairment is a common feature of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and MDD-associated cognitive dysfunction may play an important role in determining functional status among this patient population. Vortioxetine is a multimodal antidepressant that may improve some aspects of cognitive function in MDD patients, and may indirectly increase glutamate neurotransmission in brain regions classically associated with attention function. Previous non-clinical research suggests that vortioxetine has limited effects on attention. This laboratory previously found that vortioxetine did not improve attention function in animals impaired by acute scopolamine administration, using the visual signal detection task (VSDT). However, vortioxetine has limited effects on …

The Effect Of Wrapper Color On Candy Flavor Expectations And Perceptions, Debra Zellner, Nancy Greene, Monica Jimenez, Arturo Calderon, Yaritza Diaz, Mimi Sheraton

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The color of a product's metallic paper wrapper influences the expectations concerning the flavor of the product. These color-induced expectations are consistent with flavors associated with those colors (e.g., cherry-red) but vary somewhat with the product to be wrapped (e.g., a candy or beverage). Beverages wrapped in green were expected to have a lemon/lime flavor while candies wrapped in the same color were expected to have a mint flavor. Although flavor expectations were affected by the wrapper color there was no effect of the color of the wrapper on the identification of the flavor of a plain white spun sugar …

Proportional Reasoning In 5- To 6-Year-Olds, Wei He, Jennifer Yang, Dingguo Gao

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There have been mixed results in studies investigating proportional reasoning in young children. The current study aimed to examine whether providing visual scaling cues and structuring the reasoning process can improve proportional reasoning in 5- to 6-year-old children. In a series of computerized tasks, children compared the sweetness of 2 mixtures. Each mixture was represented by a juice rectangle stacked on top of a water rectangle. Two rectangles shared the same width but were of same or different heights. The mixtures were scaled by either changing their widths or their heights. In Experiment 1, children’s performance was poor when judging …