Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Positive Functioning Among Chinese Adolescents: Conceptualizing A Framework And Testing Effects Of Parenting, Mingzhu Xia

Doctoral Dissertations

Chinese adolescents’ development has received increasing attention over recent decades. However, following a traditional deficit model, most of the attention has been on problematic functioning of adolescents (e.g. depression). This emphasis is not consistent with evidence that the large majority of Chinese adolescents do not manifest such problem behaviors. Little is known about positive functioning among Chinese adolescents and how it is related to key socialization practices such as parenting. The purpose of the present study was to begin to fill these gaps.

Using theory, past empirical practice, and characteristics of Chinese culture, the study posited a second-order structure for …

Juvenile Competence To Stand Trial: An Examination Of The Effects Of Cognitive Ability, Psychiatric Symptomatology, And Psychosocial Maturity, Aaron John Kivisto

Doctoral Dissertations

As the courts have evolved over the past 30 years towards increasingly punitive sanctions for youthful offenders, the fundamental protections afforded to adult defendants have become increasingly relevant for youthful offenders. Among these protections, the right of juveniles to be competent to stand trial has gained nearly universal recognition throughout this country’s courts. Congruent with theory and previous research, we hypothesized that age, intellectual ability, psychiatric symptomatology, and maturity would all be directly related to adolescents’ competence. It was also anticipated that adolescents in the detention sample would evidence lower maturity and competency-related abilities compared to the community sample. Expanding …

The Impact Of Repeated Sensory-Motor Experience With Multimodal Objects Upon The Emergence Of Infant Reaching, Joshua L Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Previous studies found that providing infants with repeated opportunities for reaching improved the emergence and quality of the behavior, presumably via exploratory and selective processes (Bojczyk & Corbetta, 2004; Lobo et al., 2008). Here we further examined the effects of opportunities for reaching by exposing infants to multimodal objects that were activated either continuously by a hidden motor or contingently by hand-toy contact. We asked if such objects would motivate infants to try to reach for them even more than still and silent objects.

Forty-four pre-reaching infants were recruited within the week prior to turning three months of age and …

Emotion Regulation As A Mediator Of Adolescent Developmental Processes And Problem Outcomes, Katherine Little Kivisto

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent models of adolescent development and psychopathology emphasize the importance of the social regulation of emotion during adolescence (Allen & Manning, 2007; Allen & Miga, 2010), and emotion regulation as a mediating factor between multiple aspects of adolescent development and adolescent adjustment (Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007). The present dissertation investigated these two phenomena in two separate studies of adolescent development, emotion regulation, and psychological adjustment.

In study one, a new measure of adolescent social regulation of emotion – the Managing Distress Interpersonally Scale, or MANDI – showed good internal consistency, test-retest reliability and factor structure across two …

Personality Traits And Career Decidedness: An Empirical Study Of University Students, Ryan M. Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Research on vocational behavior has made progress in identifying broad personality traits associated with career indecision; however, important questions remain unanswered about the temporal stability of relationships between broad personality traits and Career Decidedness (CD), and about the role of narrow personality traits as predictors of CD, both of which were addressed in this longitudinal field study. A total of 2,046 undergraduate students completed an online personality inventory and CD questionnaire. A sub-group (N=267) responded to a follow-up questionnaire seven months later. Results indicated, as hypothesized, that CD correlated positively with the broad (Big Five) personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, and …