Psychology Commons^™

Re-Considering Female Sexual Desire: Internalized Representations Of Parental Relationships And Sexual Self-Concept In Women With Inhibited And Heightened Sexual Desire, Eugenia Cherkasskaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Psychoanalytic and sociocultural thinkers and researchers suggest that the etiology of low female sexual desire, the most prevalent sexual complaint in women, is multi-determined, implicating biological and psychological factors, including women's early relational experiences and sexual self-concept that stem from gender dynamics of a patriarchal culture. Further, recent studies indicate that highly sexual women exhibit heightened sexual desire, and high levels of sexual agency and sexual esteem. The study evaluated a model that hypothesized that sexual self-concept (sexual subjectivity, self-objectification, genital self-image) explains (i.e., mediates) the relations between internalized representations of parental relationships (attachment, separation/individuation, parental identification) and sexual …

Characterization Of Somatosensory Processing In Relation To Schizotypal Traits In A Sample Of Nonclinical Young Adults, Maureen Patricia Daly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A core feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) is a basic sensory (e.g., visual, auditory) processing disruption, yet few studies have examined somatosensation. The current dissertation project examined somatosensory processes among individuals at varying degrees of psychometric risk for psychosis using tactile texture and spatial discrimination and letter recognition tasks. Differential patterns of associations of somatosensory abilities with schizotypal trait dimensions (positive, negative, disorganized), independent of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and the relative contributions of bottom-up (peripheral and morphologic features) versus top-down (error types) processing were examined. It was hypothesized that: 1) performance on somatosensory tasks would account for significant …

Developing A Culture Of Citizenship In Elementary School Classrooms: How Democratic Schools Teach Children About Rules, Rights And Responsibilities, Mindi Reich-Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to explore development of civic participation in children in primary grade (K-2) classrooms. Young children are accorded neither the rights nor responsibilities of adolescents or adults, nor given many opportunities to participate meaningfully in the decisions that directly impact their lives. The public school classroom is, in a sense, the first opportunity for children to develop a sense of how to participate in a diverse community organized to address the needs of many. As such, it is a microcosm of the larger society within which children are learning to engage as active participants. The …

The Legal System And Memory For Analogue Traumatic Experiences, Daisy A. Segovia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trauma and its consequences are ubiquitous in the courtroom. Research on memory for trauma suggests there is reason to suspect that traumatized people may be prone to memory errors. Additionally, jurors' views of witnesses are important as they tend to mistrust evidence given by witnesses they believe to be not credible. If traumatized people are prone to errors, is there a way to safeguard against those errors and make jurors more trusting of their memory reports?

In Part One, I polled participants on their views toward traumatized people and trauma memory (Study 1). Results of this study suggest people have …

Psychic Collapse And Traumatic Defense: How The Mind Mediates Trauma Living In The Body, Patricia Kim Yoon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this exploratory study was to link psychoanalytic theories of trauma and its impact on the mind with psychobiological research of how trauma lives in the body. The study has expanded on prior research (Cramer, 2003) to evidence that defense mechanisms do in fact moderate the relationship between stress and physiological response, and that there are likely individual differences in physiological response to traumatic stress. This study goes further to identify the psychological concomitants of these individual differences within an adult population exposed to potentially traumatic events (PTEs), and their proclivity for using different defense mechanisms. Defense use …

Risk Assessment Of Sexually Abusive Clergy: Utility Of Sex Offender Risk Instruments With A Unique Offender Subgroup, Anthony Perillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sex offender risk instruments provide empirically based outlooks on recidivism risk and often serve as a critical part of sex offender management. If applied to unrepresented offender groups, these instruments may offer inaccurate pictures of risk and hinder efforts to reduce sexual violence. With little research available on sexually abusive clergy prior to the abuse scandal of the early 2000s, sexually abusive clergy are one group not represented in the research used to develop risk measures. An understanding of the validity of current risk assessment practices with sexually abusive clergy is critical and timely, as changes to the handling of …

When Less Can Be More: Dual Task Effects In Stuttering And Fluent Adults, Naomi Nechama Eichorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study tested the counterintuitive hypothesis that engaging cognitive resources in a secondary task while speaking could benefit aspects of speech production. Effects of dual task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and error patterns were examined in stuttering and fluent speakers based on specific predictions derived from three related theoretical frameworks. Twenty fluent adults and 19 adults with confirmed diagnoses of stuttering participated in the study. All participants completed two baseline tasks: (1) a continuous speaking task in which spontaneous speech was produced in response to given prompts; and (2) a working memory (WM) task involving manipulations of WM …

Conflict And Playmaking: The Impact Of A Recess Enhancement Program On Elementary School Playgrounds In New York City, Elizabeth Lake

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As time demands for schooling increase and children's freedom to play is under threat, the question of how play during school recess can best be designed to serve children has grown in importance. This research examines whether a peer-training program can influence children's activity choices and social behaviors and reduce conflict on elementary school playgrounds during recess and what aspects of such a peer-training program are important to this goal. Three general recess issues are considered: conflict, activity level and choice, and gender inclusion. The data was collected as part of a Recess Enhancement Program in a select group of …

Exploring The Illusion Of Transparency When Lying And Truth-Telling: The Impact Of Age, Self-Consciousness, And Framing, Jason Mandelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals often overestimate the ability of others to accurately determine their internal states. This illusion of transparency has been shown to manifest itself in everyday scenarios, including when people are asked to estimate if others can tell when they are lying. Yet it has not been observed when truth-telling, nor investigated developmentally. The current experiments tested for an illusion of transparency when individuals were truth-telling and lying and investigated how a participant's age, dispositional self-consciousness, situational self-awareness and how questions were framed impacted the strength and prevalence of the illusion of transparency.

In Experiments 1 and 2, children and adolescents …

Striving For Integration: Referential Activity And Object Relational Level In A Sample Of Bisexual Women, Lauren Demille

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sexuality has been theorized as a particular human experience that is driven, unmirrored in development, and enigmatic, not reaching what Fonagy describes as "second order representation." Yet, as a social being, one is expected to declare and publically live out a sexual identity. This study is situated within this point of contact between the visceral and the sociolinguistic, with particular attention paid to the experiences of bisexual women, whose potential challenges in articulating a sexual identity are considered. The study sample was comprised of forty bisexual women participating in the Dually Attracted Women's Narratives study (Levy-Warren, 2013) returning for the …

Mental Representations, Social Exclusion, And Neurobiological Processes In Borderline Personality Disorder: A Multi-Level Study, Jeffrey K. Erbe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is an ongoing public health crisis. Poor developmental quality of differentiation-relatedness of object representations and attachment insecurity have been clinically and empirically demonstrated as core patterns of intrapsychic and interpersonal dysfunction in this particular form of personality pathology. Differentiation-relatedness (D-R), which involves a complementary relationship between intrapsychic autonomy and interpersonal relatedness, has been shown to be a significant aspect of internal psychic experience that relates directly to external relationship patterns, including characteristic response to interpersonal interactions and has been a specific target for treatment of BPD. Specifically, individuals with BPD have shown lower developmental quality of …

Factlessness & Faultlessness: Individual Differences & Dimensions Of Philosophical Dispute, Geoffrey Scott Holtzman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project addresses the question of why philosophical disputes persist, and tackles the problem of how we might better approach them. I demonstrate empirically several ways in which personality, gender, and other factors are associated with specific philosophical beliefs. Typically, one might assume that these individual difference factors are irrelevant to philosophy, and can only serve to bias philosophical disputants. Against this view, I present four case studies, which collectively highlight the different ways in which individual differences in lived experience may be inseparable from philosophical concepts themselves.

Biological Motion Processing In Typical Development And In The Autism Spectrum, Aaron Krakowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Biological motion (BM) analysis and interpretation is a fundamental process of human neurocognition that has been only minimally explored neurophysiologically. In addition to its importance in understanding the underlying roots and development of social cognition, BM processing is a prime candidate domain for exploring the underlying etiology of social cognitive disorders such as the autism spectrum.

In an initial experiment, typical adults observed BM point-light displays of a human actor (UM) as well as their spatially scrambled counterparts (SM), in both an unattended distractor task as well as an explicit attention task. Results showed a neurophysiological response manifested as three …

A Meta-Analysis Of The Prediction Of Violence Among Adults With Mental Disorders, Hing Po Lam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study of the risk for violence among persons with mental disorders has received substantial scientific attention over the past few decades; however, many uncertainties and controversies remain due to the wide disparities in the reported results. Using the state-of-the-art perspective of public health, a meta-analysis was conducted to clarify the ambiguities by synthesizing quantitative findings from 85 research reports (completed between January 1970 and May 2010) on violence risk assessment among mentally disordered adults. Results of this meta-analytic study revealed that the estimates of the prevalence of violence among the psychiatric population varied considerably from 1.1% to 78.4% with …

Age-Related Aspects Of Mirror-Use By Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Rachel A. Morrison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bottlenose dolphins are neuroanatomically different and evolutionarily divergent from primates yet they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), a rare cognitive ability in non-human animals. This research investigated the developmental and age-related aspects of MSR in this species. During a longitudinal study, a social group of bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium, Baltimore, MD were exposed to a mirror and their behavioral responses were recorded to: 1) further confirm the presence of MSR in this species, 2) determine the age of emergence of MSR and 3) draw comparisons with data documenting the emergence of this ability in humans and great ape species. …

Work-Life Experiences For People With Mobility Disabilities In New York City, Jessica A. Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Work-family (or work-life) studies aim to measure interactions between the realms of work and home. It is necessary to examine these interactions within a broad context to understand external sources of tension on the work-life dynamic, including environmental, economic, and political factors. Exploratory interviews were conducted with participants of working age with a mobility disability, and when applicable, their significant others. Questions focused on work, home and transportation environments. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, a model of contextual issues was constructed as the basis for an in-depth analysis of work-life issues for people with a mobility disability. Contextual research and …

The Influence Of An Appetitive Conditioned Stimulus On Interval Timing Behavior, Joseph Daniel Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pavlovian incentive motivation provides a theoretical framework on the basis of which experiments can be designed to examine the effects of motivational variables on timing behavior. The Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm is a prototype for studying Pavlovian incentive motivation. The current study examined the effect of a Pavlovian appetitive conditioned stimulus (CS) on timing performance, based on the PIT paradigm. Nine pigeons were exposed to pairings of a 120-s conditioned stimulus (flashing or steady houselight) and unconditioned stimulus (food). The pigeons were then trained on the peak procedure (FI 30 s). In a subsequent testing phase, the effect of the …

A Derivation Of The Tonal Hierarchy From Basic Perceptual Processes, David Smey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades music psychologists have explained the functioning of tonal music in terms of the tonal hierarchy, a stable schema of relative structural importance that helps us interpret the events in a passage of tonal music. This idea has been most influentially disseminated by Carol Krumhansl in her 1990 monograph Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Krumhansl hypothesized that this sense of the importance or centrality of certain tones of a key is learned through exposure to tonal music, in particular by learning the relative frequency of appearance of the various pitch classes in tonal passages. The correlation of pitch-class …

Telework And Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: The Underexplored Roles Of Social Identity And Professional Isolation, Lauren Mondo Kane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although telework--a flexible work arrangement in which employees work from a remote location at least some of the time--has been increasing in practice, little research has investigated its implications for employee behaviors and performance. The main focus of this study was to identify the mediating processes that explain the relationship between telework frequency and OCB performance, and to determine whether personality moderates the psychological consequences of teleworking. Survey data were collected from 286 teleworkers and 62 of their coworkers across organizations from a range of industries, jobs, and locations. Coworkers were recruited in order to assess teleworkers' OCBs, but OCBs …

Psychometric Properties Of A Multichannel Battery For The Assessment Of Emotional Perception, William H. Krause

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Perceiving the emotions of others is an important, even critical, skill for success in social interactions. The lack of this skill has been associated with decreased social competence and poor interpersonal relationships (Shimokawa et al., 2001). It frequently co-occurs with psychopathology.

Furthermore, there is a large and rapidly growing literature examining the neural substrates of emotional processing. Studies have examined the processing of particular emotions, as well as how emotions conveyed through different modalities are processed.

The New York Emotion Battery (NYEB; Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) includes tests for the perception of eight discrete emotions across three communication channels: …

Executive Dysfunction And Reward Dysregulation: Interactions In Drug Addiction, Kristen Paula Morie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cocaine addiction is a serious public health hazard, and contributes to disastrous outcomes for individuals who suffer from it. Addiction is accompanied by an inability to control one's own behavior, and a preoccupation with cocaine at the expense of other rewarding pursuits. Previous research has suggested that difficulties with executive function and reward processing may underlie these problems, but the extent to which each contributes to addiction severity, or how these two factors may interact, remains to be elucidated. By using event related potential (ERP) measures in combination with information about self-reported anhedonia over three experiments, we set out to …

The Influence Of Advanced Cognitive Ability On The Development Of Psychological Defenses And In Understanding And Managing Affect: A Study Of Latency-Aged Gifted Students, Kahlila Ife Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the influence of advanced cognitive ability on the development of psychological defenses and in understanding and managing affect, using the lens of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Theories of psychological defense maturity state that defense mechanisms are influenced both by the cognitive level of the individual and by the cognitive complexity of the defense itself (Cramer, 1999; Cramer, 2009). Individuals with exceptional cognitive ability may therefore show a corresponding "match" with complex defense use. In addition to defense use, how well one is able to identify, understand, manage and use emotion to facilitate thought, abilities often labelled Emotional …

Verbal Behavior In Individuals With Generalized Anxiety Disorder And Depressive Disorders, Tzachi Slonim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression are both internalizing disorders characterized by sustained negative affect and have mainly been studied utilizing either self-report or physiological measures. Fewer studies have focused on behavioral indices of these disorders, and little is known about their overlapping and distinct linguistic features. The present research examined the above gap in two separate studies. Study 1 synthesized previous efforts made to study the linguistic features of individuals with depression. Previous investigations found that depressed individuals evidence high proportions of I-words, high proportions of negatively-valenced words, low proportions of positively-valenced words, and high proportions of cognitive …

Facial Affect Recognition And Social Functioning In Individuals At Risk For Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, Marta Ewa Statucka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Facial affect recognition (FAR) is impaired in schizophrenia patients and to a lesser extent in individuals at familial/genetic, clinical, and psychometric risk for psychosis. Reduced FAR reaction time and negative bias are present in patients; however, their role is less clear in at-risk samples. Impaired social functioning, a hallmark of schizophrenia, is also impaired in at-risk individuals and is associated with FAR impairment. Given FAR deficits in schizophrenia, the current study aimed to elucidate the nature of FAR and social functioning impairments among individuals at high psychometric risk for psychosis and to examine whether FAR acts as a mediator in …

The Relationship Of Adaptive And Pathological Narcissism To Attachment Style And Reflective Functioning, Petra Vospernik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the relationship of adaptive and pathological (grandiose and vulnerable) expressions of narcissism to attachment style and the capacity for reflective functioning (RF). Narcissism serves a relevant personality construct in clinical theory, social psychology and psychiatry but remains inconsistently defined across these disciplines. Theoretical accounts support the notion that attachment difficulties and maladaptive patterns of mentally representing self and others serve as the substrates for narcissistic pathology but are less pronounced in adaptive narcissism. A multiple regression analysis was conducted in a college student sample of 345 participants applying a cross-sectional, survey design. It was hypothesized that pathological …

Cognitive And Emotional Abnormalities In People With Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Philip Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a multi-system autoimmune disorder characterized by the production of autoantibodies (ABs). Approximately 30-50% of patients produce ABs directed against N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid receptors (NMDARs). Previous research with animals has identified these ABs as being associated with amygdala damage and a deficit in fear conditioning. People with SLE can have damage to the amygdala. This study aimed to determine if emotional processing deficits occur in people with SLE and to associate such deficits, if they exist, with anti-NMDAR AB presence, length of disease, cognition, and mood. Fifty-eight (11 AB+, 24 AB-, 23 healthy) women participated in tasks …

The Effects Of Environmental Enrichment On Abstinence And Relapse Using An Animal Conflict Model, Joshua Alan Peck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heroin addiction is a significant health and societal problem for which there is no effective and well-accepted long-term behavioral or pharmacological treatment. Therefore, strategies that prolong heroin abstinence should be the primary focus of heroin treatment research. There is promising evidence that environmental enrichment may indeed support drug abstinence in animals using the reinstatement model of abstinence and relapse. The current studies used an animal conflict model that captures the aversive consequences of drug seeking (as are typical in humans, e.g., arrest, incarceration, job loss, and strained social relationships) to test the effects of environmental enrichment on heroin abstinence, prolonged …

Modifying The Criminalization Hypothesis: Predicting Jail Diversion Outcome With Clinical, Criminological, And Personality Factors, Wen Gu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There are a disproportionate number of individuals with serious mental illness in the criminal justice system, compared to the general population. Mental health courts and jail diversion programs were developed to divert individuals with mental illness out of jails into community treatment to ease the overburden of treating psychiatric disorders in the criminal justice system. These programs have become increasing popular, but little is known about the characteristics of the diverted individuals that result in successful outcomes. The purpose of this study is to test different causal models of noncompliance as predicted by clinical, criminological, and personality variables, and examine …

Depressives And The Scenes Of Queer Writing, Allen Durgin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick's brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to …

The Influence Of Naive And Media-Informed Beliefs On Juror Evaluations Of Forensic Science Evidence, Victoria Zoe Lawson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The National Academy of Sciences (2009) concluded that with the exception of nuclear DNA, none of the forensic sciences has been scientifically validated. It is not clear, however, that people are aware of these deficiencies. Indeed, people tend to think quite highly of forensic science, and find it to be convincing trial evidence. It is not clear to what extent their erroneous beliefs about validity influence the weight given to such evidence, or how best to challenge these beliefs. In the present research, I examined people's beliefs about forensic science and how their beliefs influenced their evaluations of forensic evidence. …