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Clear Adjustment: Status Self-Concept Clarity And Emotion Regulation, Isidro Landa

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One factor associated with a person’s adjustment during important life transitions is self-concept clarity (SCC)—“the extent to which the contents of an individual's self-concept (e.g., perceived personal attributes) are clearly and confidently defined…”. However, it is not fully understood why and for whom SCC predicts adjustment. Recent work suggests that SCC may function as a resource for regulatory functions, allowing one to focus on long-term self-relevant goals rather than narrowly focusing on regulating immediate discomfort associated with uncertainty. It is possible that having high SCC facilitates emotion regulation in such a way that it allows one to engage and further …

Person-Centered Profile Consistency: A Test Of Longitudinal Personality Consistency, Amanda Wright

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Test-retest correlations are a common way to quantify stability in personality. However, these single estimates obscure patterns of consistency as well as individual differences in consistency. Importantly, examining patterns of consistency provides insights into the underlying processes driving personality development. The current study used Bayesian multilevel asymptotic models to examine trends of person-centered consistency using item-level profile correlations across four to nine waves with four datasets (N = 21,616). Results indicated that there were, on average, very high levels of profile consistency across time, highlighting one aspect of the stable nature of personality. There were notable individual differences in …

Emotion Differentiation Moderates The Effects Of Rumination On Depression: A Longitudinal Study, Yunjing Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Elevated trait rumination is associated with and predicts the onset of major depressive disorder (MDD), but not all people with elevated trait rumination develop MDD. We hypothesize that certain emotional processes weaken the rumination-depression link, protecting people against increases in depression. In the current prospective longitudinal study, we examined one such process, emotion differentiation—the ability to identify and label specific emotions. Because higher negative emotion differentiation (NED) has been associated with greater psychological well-being and people typically ruminate in the context of negative affect, we predicted that NED, but not positive emotion differentiation (PED), would moderate the rumination-depression association, such …

Understanding Child Maltreatment Report Risks As A Function Of Age, Socioeconomic Status, Race, And Neighborhood, Hyunil Kim

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: This study seeks to improve our understanding of risk and protective factors for child maltreatment both over time and within an ecological context. First, this study examines longitudinal patterns of child maltreatment reports (CMR) with child age from 1 to 17 years based on various risk and protective factors (Aim 1). This study also examines neighborhood contextual effects on CMR (Aim 2).

Methods: This study used secondary data from a larger longitudinal study which had followed up two samples from the 1991-1994 St. Louis birth cohorts. The CAN sample included all children aged 3 or under with a first-time …

Longitudinal Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers Of Alzheimer Disease: Movement Toward The Diagnosis, Prognosis And Staging Of Disease, Courtney Sutphen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease that slowly claims the memories and experiences that comprise the life experiences of individuals that suffer from the disease. Despite a continually accelerating pace of research and discovery, a viable therapeutic intervention for AD has yet to be realized. There are a multitude of factors that may contribute to this difficulty including the challenge of separating the overall disease of Alzheimer’s from the clinically recognizable memory loss that occurs in what is now known to be the end-stage of the disease. Efforts to treat AD have increasingly turned toward very early disease …

Neurogenetics Of The Externalizing Spectrum, Caitlin E. Carey

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Externalizing spectrum disorders, which include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, alcohol and substance use disorders, and antisocial personality disorder, are characterized by behavioral disinhibition and are thought to be manifestations of a common heritable liability factor throughout the lifespan. However, relatively little is known about their underlying etiology. Here, I probe genetic and neural risk mechanisms for externalizing psychopathology in three complementary studies. First, I report an indirect association between genetic risk for childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and problem drinking in young adulthood, mediated by heightened reward-related neural activity within the ventral striatum, among 404 college students. I …

Developmental Trajectories Of Executive And Verbal Processes In Children With Phenylketonuria, Zoe Hawks

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a recessive disorder characterized by disruption in the metabolism of the amino acid phenylalanine. Using a verbal fluency task, previous studies demonstrated that word production is reduced in individuals with PKU relative to controls. Beyond word production, verbal fluency output can be scored for clustering and switching, which enable characterization of verbal and executive processes, respectively. The present study is the first to evaluate clustering and switching in PKU within a longitudinal design, thereby elucidating the developmental time course of core cognitive processes. To this end, semantic (animals, food/drink) and phonemic (S words, F words) fluency data …