Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Antenatal Physical Activity Counseling Among Healthcare Providers, Jenn Leiferman, Margaret Gutilla, James Paulson, Jim Pivarnik

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective: Pregnant women often report a lack of knowledge concerning the safety of exercising during pregnancy. Healthcare providers play an integral role in providing pregnant women with the necessary knowledge to promote antenatal physical activity. Thus, the objective of this study was to assess healthcare providers’ beliefs, attitudes, knowledge and practices related to antenatal physical activity counseling.

Study Design: 188 Providers (i.e. obstetricians, midwives, and family medicine physicians) completed a 39 closed-item survey. Characteristics among healthcare providers’ physical activity counseling practices as well as belief, attitudes and knowledge were explored.

Results: The majority of all providers agreed that physical activity …

Training Evaluation In Virtual Worlds: Development Of A Model, Richard N. Landers, Rachel C. Callan

Psychology Faculty Publications

Many organizations have adopted virtual worlds (VWs) as a setting for training programs; however, research on appropriate evaluation of training in this new setting is incomplete. In this article, we address this gap by first exploring the unique issues relevant to evaluation faced by training designers working in VWs. At the macro-organizational level, the primary issue faced is an organizational culture unreceptive to or otherwise skeptical of VWs. At the micro-organizational level, two major issues are identified: individual trainees unreceptive to VWs and general lack of experience navigating VWs. All three of these challenges and their interrelationships may lead to …

Drinking Buddies And Their Prospective Influence On Alcohol Outcomes: Alcohol Expectancies As A Mediator, Cathy Lau-Barraco, Abbly L. Braitman, Kenneth E. Leonard, Miguel Padilla

Psychology Faculty Publications

The process by which peers or the social network influence individual alcohol use, particularly among adults, remains a necessary area of research. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal influence of "drinking buddies" on alcohol outcomes (i.e., alcohol use, heavy drinking, and alcohol-related problems) as mediated by alcohol expectancies of social facilitation. Participants were 1347 (men = 660, women = 687) newly married individuals recruited from the community. They were assessed at the time of marriage and through the fourth wedding anniversary. Longitudinal mediation across time was evaluated using latent growth modeling. Overall, the prospective association …

Investigating Insight As Sudden Learning, Ivan K. Ash, Benjamin D. Jee, Jennifer Wiley

Psychology Faculty Publications

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or restructure that knowledge. While there has been a considerable amount of research on the type of problem solving processes described by the Gestalt psychologists, less has focused on the learning that results from these processes. This paper begins with a historical review of the Gestalt theory of insight learning. Next, the core assumptions of Gestalt …

Pathways To Early Coital Debut For Adolescent Girls: A Recursive Partitioning Analysis, Matthew R. Pearson, Tatyana Kholodkov, James M. Henson, Emily A. Impett

Psychology Faculty Publications

This study examined pathways to early coital debut among early to middle adolescent girls in the United States. In a two-year longitudinal study of 104 adolescent girls, recursive partitioning (RP) analyses were conducted to examine the specific factors that were related to engaging in first intercourse by the 10th grade among adolescent girls who had not yet engaged in sexual intercourse by the 8th grade. RP analyses identified subsamples of girls who had low, medium, and high likelihoods of engaging in early coital debut based on six variables (i.e., school aspirations, early physical intimacy experiences, depression, body objectification, body image, …