Psychology Commons^™

Effects Of Repeated Quetiapine Treatment On Conditioned Avoidance Responding In Rats, Jun Gao, Min Feng, Natashia Swalve, Collin Davis, Nan Sui, Ming Li

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The present study characterized the behavioral mechanisms of avoidance–disruptive effect of quetiapine in the conditioned avoidance response test under two behavioral testing (2 warning signals vs. 1 warning signal) and two drug administration conditions (subcutaneous vs. intravenous). In Experiments 1 and 2, well-trained adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were tested under the subcutaneous (s.c.) quetiapine treatment (5.0, 15.0, 25.0, 50.0 mg/kg) for 7 days in a novel procedure consisting of two conditioned stimuli (CS) (white noise serving as CS1 and pure tone as CS2). Only the highest dose (50.0 mg/kg) produced a persistent suppression of the avoidance response without impairing the …

Latina/O First Generation College Students And College Adjustment: An Examination Of Family Support Processes, Patricia R. Cerda-Lizarraga

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

First generation Latina/o college students are at a higher risk for not completing their college degrees when compared to other ethnic minorities due to added barriers and challenges of being the first to go to college. Researchers reported that poor college adjustment is one of the factors contributing to the lack of college completion among Latina/o college students. A few studies exist on the role that family support has on the college adjustment of Latina/o students and these yielded mixed findings. The central role of the family among Latina/o students and their support during the college adjustment period merits attention. …

Adherence And Dosage Contributions To Parenting Program Quality, Thomas J. Gross, W. Alex Mason, Gilbert R. Parra, Robert Oats, Jay Ringle, Kevin P. Haggerty

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Objective—The 3 most frequently examined elements of treatment fidelity are adherence, dosage, and quality. The relationships between these fidelity elements are complex, and additional research is needed to provide clarity. Improving clarity may be especially relevant to parenting programs, which tend to include direct explicit instruction (DEI) elements (i.e., instruction, modeling, and practice). The adherence to and dosage of these DEI elements are frequently assumed to improve program quality; however, little information is available to determine if such adherence and dosage affect program quality. This study examines whether adherence to and dosage of DEI elements predict quality ratings for …

Sexual Minority Stigma And System Justification Theory: How Changing The Status Quo Impacts Marriage And Housing Equality, Jordan A. Blenner

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Sexual minorities (i.e. lesbians and gay men) experience systemic discrimination throughout the United States. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in many states, same-sex couples could not marry and sexual minorities were not protected from sexual orientation housing discrimination (Human Rights Campaign, 2015). The current, two-experiment study applied Jost and Banaji’s (1994) System Justification Theory to marriage and housing discrimination. When sexual minorities question dissimilar treatment, thereby threatening the status quo, members of the heterosexual majority rationalize sexual minority discrimination to maintain their dominant status (Alexander, 2001; Brescoll, Uhlmann, & Newman, 2013; Citizens for Equal …

Strategies And Resources To Enhance Test Evaluation And Selection, Janet F. Carlson, Nancy Anderson

Buros Center: Professional Staff Publications

Testing serves an important function for SLPs in offering an evidence base that is useful in screening, diagnosing, monitoring progress, and documenting outcomes. Tests are used to measure diverse constructs such as communication, literacy, oral and written language, receptive and expressive vocabulary, articulation, phonological awareness and processing, and auditory perception and processing. In addition, specific impairments may require specialized measures to evaluate conditions such as stuttering and orthographic competence.

When using tests to diagnose language impairments, Betz, Eickhoff, and Sullivan (2013) suggest that SLPs consider carefully a test’s psychometric properties, particularly because of the “increasing emphasis on evidence-based practice, specifically, …

Perceptions Of Tornadoes, Tornado Warnings, Safety Actions, And Risk: Effects On Warning Response Among Undergraduates In Nebraska, Sabrina T. Jauernic

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Few studies show how university students perceive and respond to tornado warnings, or how they gain tornado-related knowledge. Lacking in the literature are investigations of how perceptions of tornado risk may influence actions. Using two separate surveys and two large samples of undergraduates enrolled in the University of Nebraska, the author determined significant relationships between student demographics, perceptions, and response actions. Incorrect perceptions were found, such as overpasses and southwest corners of buildings being safe, and cities being invulnerable to tornadoes. International students, especially, assumed cities were safe from tornadoes. Students had a tendency to confirm their risk instead of …

Traditional Grain Alcohol (Bai Jiu, 白酒) Production And Use In Rural Central China: Implications For Public Health, Ling Qian, Ian M. Newman, Wen Xiong, Yanyu Feng

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Background: An estimated 25 % of the alcohol consumed in China is traditional unrecorded alcohol produced and distributed informally. Consequently there is concern about its safety and its contribution to public health risk. Little has been written about this type of alcohol in China.

Methods: Researchers observed the manufacture of traditional bai jiu in a rural area of Hubei Province, Central China. Two hundred fifty-nine individuals were interviewed, either individually or in small groups, about their use of and attitudes toward bai jiu. Individuals who made or sold bai jiu were interviewed about local production, distribution, and sale. Key community …

Adopting A Group Attention Perspective: An Exploration Of Moderators And Future Directions, Ashley M. Votruba, Oliver Sng, Virginia S. Y. Kwan

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Shteynberg (this issue) reviews how group attention increases the psychological prominence of the information observed in group settings, serves to better embed descriptive norms making them more dominant in people’s cognitions, and acts as an axis of group communication and cooperation. We find the research on group attention compelling and an interesting addition to this special issue on Intersubjective Norms. The findings regarding group attention suggest that it generally functions like a cognitive heuristic (i.e., an automatic process that occurs largely without people’s awareness or control). Yet, we question whether there are conditions under which individuals would not use group …

Construction Of An Anti-Mexican American Bias Scale And Its Validation, Leslie N. Martinez

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of the dissertation is to develop a meaningful measure of Anti-Mexican American attitudes and to test that measure for its utility in predicting biased attributions for Mexican Americans. Attention has mainly focused on bias against Blacks, and this has produced important gaps in the understanding of race/ethnic bias that must be addressed. For the past few decades, the number of racial minorities, especially the number of Latinos/Hispanics, has been on the rise. The psychometric properties and validation of the new Anti-Mexican American Attitude Scale (AMAAS) were investigated through study 1 and study 2. The principal components analysis pulled …

Exposure And Responses To Pre-Incident Behavior In A College Student Sample, Brandon A. Hollister

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Campus threat assessment has included gathering, assessing, and intervening in situations with pre-incident behavior. However, with limited general population examination, concerns regarding the prevalence, assault correspondence, and reporting of pre-incident behavior exist. With an undergraduate student sample (n = 1,063), this dissertation utilized a survey regarding exposure and response to campus safety concerns. In comparison to students not witnessing concerns, students seeing problematic behavior had higher self-reported antisocial history and campus connectedness. Students witnessing physical assault were more likely to see multiple pre-incident behaviors, multiple incidents of pre-incident behavior, threatening statements, and threatening gestures from the perpetrator than students witnessing …

The Impact Of Sexual Violence On Intimate Relationship Dynamics: A Grounded Theory Study, Nicole M. Lozano

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study intended to develop a theory that explains the relationship dynamics of opposite-sex couples in which the female partner has been sexually victimized as an adult outside of the couple relationship. Four couples participated in the study sharing their experiences of disclosing the assault, communicating about the assault, physical intimacy, and salience of the assault to the relationship. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach the model emerged from the data. Overall, the women decided to disclose because they felt secure in their current intimate relationship. Disclosure happened for one of two reasons: (a) either to test the relationship and …

Fear Of Negative Evaluation, Social Anxiety And Response To Positive And Negative Online Social Cues, Chandra L. Bautista, Debra A. Hope

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

High social anxiety is associated with negative interpretations of social feedback, maladaptive attributions for success and failure, and excessive attention to internal and external threat cues. In the present study, 40 undergraduate participants with either high or low levels of social anxiety engaged in a series of social interactions with varying types of social feedback: negative, mixed-negative, mixed-positive, and positive. Given the increasing engagement in computer-mediated communication among individuals with high levels of social anxiety, these interactions took place via instant messaging software. Compared to participants with low social anxiety, participants with high social anxiety experienced more self-focused thoughts, negative …

Using The New Kindergarten Readiness Assessment: What Do Teachers And Principals Think?, Rachel E. Schachter, Tara M. Strang, Shayne B. Piasta

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

This white paper presents the results of a survey completed by teachers and principals in central Ohio concerning their perceptions of Ohio’s new Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) during its inaugural implementation year. All kindergarten teachers and principals in Franklin County public elementary schools were invited to complete the survey; 150 responded. Although teachers and principals generally reported using assessments, including the previous state-mandated KRA-L screening tool, to guide their instructional decisions, the majority of participants did not perceive that the KRA, in particular, was useful for guiding instruction. Moreover, teachers reported that administering the KRA took away valuable time needed …

Escalating Risk And The Moderating Effect Of Resistance To Peer Influence On The P200 And Feedback-Related Negativity, John Kiat, Elizabeth Straley, Jacob Cheadle

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Young people frequently socialize together in contexts that encourage risky decision making, pointing to a need for research into how susceptibility to peer influence is related to individual differences in the neural processing of decisions during sequentially escalating risk. We applied a novel analytic approach to analyze EEG activity from college-going students while they completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a well-established risk-taking propensity assessment. By modeling outcome-processing-related changes in the P200 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) sequentially within each BART trial as a function of pump order as an index of increasing risk, our results suggest that analyzing the …

Patterns Of Marital Relationship Change Across The Transition From One Child To Two, Brenda L. Volling, Wonjung Oh, Richard Gonzalez, Patty X. Kuo, Tianyi Yu

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Patterns of marital change after the birth of a second child were explored in a sample of 229 married couples, starting in pregnancy, and at 1, 4, 8 and 12 months postpartum. Five trajectory patterns that reflected sudden, persistent decline (i.e., crisis), sudden, short-term decline (i.e., adjustment and adaptation), sudden, short-term gain (i.e., honeymoon effect), linear change, and no change were examined with dyadic, longitudinal data for husbands and wives. Six distinct latent classes emerged using growth mixture modeling: (a) wife decreasing positivity-husband honeymoon (44%), (b) wife increasing conflict-husband adjustment and adaptation (34.5%), (c) wife honeymoon-discrepant spouse positivity (7.4%), (d) …

Modeling Sources Of Teaching Self-Efficacy For Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics Graduate Teaching Assistants, Sue Ellen Dechenne, Natalie A. Koziol, Mark Needham, Larry Enochs

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have a large impact on undergraduate instruction but are often poorly prepared to teach. Teaching self-efficacy, an instructor’s belief in his or her ability to teach specific student populations a specific subject, is an important predictor of teaching skill and student achievement. A model of sources of teaching self-efficacy is developed from the GTA literature. This model indicates that teaching experience, departmental teaching climate (including peer and supervisor relationships), and GTA professional development (PD) can act as sources of teaching self-efficacy. The model is pilot tested with 128 GTAs …

Kin Selection, Raymond Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

When Hamilton (1964) published his theory of inclusive fitness it had no immediate impact in the social and behavioral sciences, even though ethnographers knew kinship to be a universally fundamental factor in human social organization, especially in egalitarian societies in which humans have spent nearly all their evolutionary history. In many ways, it was a theory that perhaps anthropologists should have devised: Anthropologists knew kinship fundamentally structured cooperation, identity, coalition formation, resource exchange, marriage, and group membership in traditional societies. It was not until 1974 with the publication of Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and especially Richard Alexander’s The Evolution of Social …

Development And Validation Of A State-Based Measure Of Emotion Dysregulation: The State Difficulties In Emotion Regulation Scale (S-Ders), Jason M. Lavender, Matthew T. Tull, David Dilillo, Terri Messman-Moore, Kim L. Gratz

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Existing measures of emotion dysregulation typically assess dispositional tendencies and are therefore not well suited for study designs that require repeated assessments over brief intervals. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a state-based multidimensional measure of emotion dysregulation. Psychometric properties of the State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) were examined in a large representative community sample of young adult women drawn from four sites (N = 484). Exploratory factor analysis suggested a four-factor solution, with results supporting the internal consistency, construct validity, and predictive validity of the total scale and the four subscales: Nonacceptance (i.e., …

A Comparison Of The Effects Of Choice And Differential Reinforcement On The Computation Fluency Of Students With Escape-Maintained Academic Performance Problems, Maureen A. O'Connor

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation compared antecedent- and consequence-based strategies to determine which treatments or combination of treatments produced the strongest improvements in math computation fluency with four elementary-aged students who displayed escape-motivated behaviors. Functional analyses were conducted to identify elementary-school students whose academic responding was under a negative-reinforcement contingency. Next, a preference assessment was administered to each student to identify potentially effective reinforcers in the form of permissible school activities. These high-preference activities were used during the DRA and Task-Choice + DRA conditions. A multielement design was used to examine the impact of four treatments – Task Choice, DRA, Task Choice+DRA, and …

Adolescent Bullying: Do Weight, Body Size, And Body Size Dissatisfaction Influence Victimization?, Paige T. Lembeck

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The current study investigated how body mass index (BMI) z-score, peer context, and body size dissatisfaction influence bullying victimization in adolescents. Participants were 11-18 year-old patients at pediatrician’s offices in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Path analyses and percentile bootstrapping procedures were employed to investigate the research questions. A zero-inflated Poisson approach was used to examine whether there was an indirect effect between BMI z-score and bullying victimization through perceived difference from friends’ body size and body size dissatisfaction. An alternative model was investigated to determine whether BMI z-score indirectly affected body size dissatisfaction through perceived difference from friends’ body size …

Examining The Role Of Antisocial Personality Disorder In Intimate Partner Violence Among Substance Use Disorder Treatment Seekers With Clinically Significant Trauma Histories, Rita E. Dykstra, Julie A. Schumacher, Natalie Mota, Scott F. Coffey

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This study examined the associations among posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) diagnosis, and intimate partner violence (IPV) in a sample of 145 substance abuse treatment-seeking men and women with positive trauma histories; sex was examined as a moderator. ASPD diagnosis significantly predicted both verbal and physical aggression; sex moderated the association between ASPD diagnosis and physical violence. PTSD symptom severity significantly predicted engaging in verbal, but not physical, aggression. Overall, these results suggest that an ASPD diagnosis may be an important risk factor for engaging in IPV among women seeking treatment for a substance use …

The Association Between Stalking And Violence In A Sample Of Spanish Partner Violence Cases, Rosa Viñas-Racionero, Chitra Raghavan, Miguel Ángel Soria-Verde, Remei Prat-Santaolaria

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The present descriptive study analyzes stalking in a sample of 278 Spanish court cases involving partner violence and contrasts the benefits of the new bill article 172ter, which criminalizes stalking, compared with the Organic Law 1/2004 on partner violence. Thirty-seven percent (37%) of the total sample included stalking behaviors, which manifested in intimidatory (60%) and controlling (45%) unwanted verbal communications (62%) and physical approaches (42%) that ended violently in a third of the cases (35%). Cases involving violent stalking, non-violent stalking, and physical violence without stalking were compared. A closer look at violent stalking cases uncovered that intimacy-seeking stalking behavior …

Competing Infant Feeding Information In Mothers’ Networks: Advice That Supports V. Undermines Clinical Recommendations, Sato Ashida, Freda B. Lynn, Natalie A. Williams

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Objective: To identify the social contextual factors, specifically the presence of information that supports v. undermines clinical recommendations, associated with infant feeding behaviours among mothers in low-income areas.

Design: Cross-sectional survey evaluating social support networks and social relationships involved in providing care to the infant along with feeding beliefs and practices.

Setting: Out-patient paediatric and government-funded (Women, Infants, and Children) clinics in an urban, low-income area of the south-eastern USA.

Subjects: Eighty-one low-income mothers of infants between 0 and 12 months old.

Results: Most mothers reported receiving both supportive and undermining advice. The presence of …

Competing Infant Feeding Information In Mothers’ Networks: Advice That Supports V. Undermines Clinical Recommendations, Sato Ashida, Freda B. Lynn, Natalie A. Williams, Ellen J. Schafer

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Objective: To identify the social contextual factors, specifically the presence of information that supports v. undermines clinical recommendations, associated with infant feeding behaviours among mothers in low-income areas.

Design: Cross-sectional survey evaluating social support networks and social relationships involved in providing care to the infant along with feeding beliefs and practices.

Setting: Out-patient paediatric and government-funded (Women, Infants, and Children) clinics in an urban, low-income area of the south-eastern USA.

Subjects: Eighty-one low-income mothers of infants between 0 and 12 months old.

Results: Most mothers reported receiving both supportive and undermining advice. The presence …

A Comparison Between Telehealth And Face-To-Face Brief Alcohol Interventions For College Students, Sarah Christine King

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Problematic alcohol use is a common occurrence among college students. While empirically supported interventions exist, their access is typically limited to those who attend large universities. In the health care field there has been an expansion of services provided via telehealth to increase client access to treatment. However, the evidence is mixed regarding the effectiveness of face-to-face versus telehealth interventions and there is a gap in the literature regarding the use of telehealth interventions for brief alcohol interventions in college students. As such, the purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a well-validated brief alcohol screening and …

Response Bias On Self-Report Measures Of Sexual Fantasies Among Sexual Offenders, Kindra Seifert, Jenna Boulas, Matthew T. Huss, Mario J. Scalora

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The impact of sexual fantasies in future risk and treatment response among sexual offenders has long been known. However, as we develop objective self-report measures of sexual fantasies, response bias is becoming an increasing concern. In examining a sample of institutionalized sex offenders, the present study suggests that offenders’ responses on these measures are prone to response bias, the bias does not negate their associations with other self-report measures of sexual deviance, and relationship of their sexual fantasies does not appear to relate to actual behavioral indications. Clinical and research implications for these findings are discussed.

Impaired Synaptic Development In A Maternal Immune Activation Mouse Model Of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Pierluca Coiro, Ragunathan Padmashri, Anand Suresh, Elizabeth Spartz, Gurudutt Pendyala, Shinnyi Chou, Yoosun Jung, Brittney Meays, Shreya Roy, Nagsen Gautam, Yazen Alnouti, Ming Li, Anna Dunaevsky

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Both genetic and environmental factors are thought to contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders with maternal immune activation (MIA) being a risk factor for both autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. Although MIA mouse offspring exhibit behavioral impairments, the synaptic alterations in vivo that mediate these behaviors are not known. Here we employed in vivo multiphoton imaging to determine that in the cortex of young MIA offspring there is a reduction in number and turnover rates of dendritic spines, sites of majority of excitatory synaptic inputs. Significantly, spine impairments persisted into adulthood and correlated with increased repetitive behavior, an ASD relevant …

Avoidance As An Explanatory Mechanism For Poor Outcomes In Treatment For Substance Use Disorders, Andrew Oakland

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are prevalent and lead to significant impairments in people's lives in a variety of ways. One area which has gained attention is that of SUDs and their high comorbidity with mood and anxiety disorders. Many theories exist as to why these conditions often occur together, and the self-medication hypothesis is one that has perhaps the most research and general support behind it. The self-medication hypothesis states that individuals use substances to reduce negative affect which creates a feedback loop of negative reinforcement. Individuals then develop problematic substance use in addition to emotional dysregulation. One recent theory …

Mixed-Effects Location-Scale Models For Conditionally Normally Distributed Repeated-Measures Data, Ryan Walters

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Hypotheses about psychological processes are most frequently dedicated to individual mean differences, but individual differences in variability are likely to be important as well. The mixed-effects location-scale model estimates individual differences in both mean level and variability in a single model, and represents an important advance in testing variability-related hypotheses. However, the mixed-effects location-scale model remains relatively novel to empirical scientists as statistical software is often handicapped by more complex models and a paucity of methodological studies exist examining the statistical properties of this model.

This dissertation investigates the mixed-effects location-scale model through the development of open-source software for its …

Behavioral And Pharmacological Investigation Of Anxiety And Maternal Responsiveness Of Postpartum Female Rats In A Pup Elevated Plus Maze, Yu Yang, Jingxue Qin, Weihai Chen, Hong Chen, Ming Li

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The present study investigated the validity of a novel pup-based repeated elevated plus maze task to detect reduced anxiety and increased maternal responsiveness in postpartum female rats and explored the roles of dopamine D2, serotonin transporter and GABA/benzodiazepine receptors in the mediation of these processes. Sprague–Dawley postpartum or nulliparous female rats were tested 4 times every other day on postpartum days 4, 6 and 8 in an elevated plus maze with 4 pups or 4 pup-size erasers placed on each end of the two open arms. When tested with erasers, untreated postpartum mother rats entered the open arms proportionally more …