Psychology Commons^™

Development And Validation Of Makeup And Sexualized Clothing Questionnaires, H. Smith, Marisol Perez, M. R. Sladek, Carolyn Becker, T. K. Ohrt, A. B. Bruening

Psychology Faculty Research

Background: Body acceptance programs on college campuses indicated that collegiate women often report feeling pressure to dress in a sexualized manner, and use makeup to enhance beauty. Currently, no quantitative measures exist to assess attitudes and daily behaviors that may arise in response to perceived pressure to wear makeup or dress in a provocative manner. The goal of the current studies was to develop brief self-report questionnaires aimed at assessing makeup and sexualized clothing use and attitudes in young women.

Methods: An exploratory factor analysis in a sample of 403 undergraduate women was used in Study 1 to create items …

From Efficacy To Global Impact: Lessons Learned About What Not To Do In Translating Our Research To Reach, Carolyn Becker

Psychology Faculty Research

Although members of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies have made significant strides towards the collective goals outlined in our mission statement, we routinely acknowledge that our ability to develop empirically supported treatments exceeds our success in improving dissemination and implementation of said interventions. Further, as noted by Kazdin and Blase (2011), even if we succeeded in having every clinician world-wide administer our best treatments with excellent competency, we still would be unsuccessful in markedly impacting the worldwide burden of mental illness because most treatments require intensive labor by expensive providers. To this end, Kazdin and Blase and others …

The Female Athlete Body (Fab) Study: Rationale, Design, And Baseline Characteristics, Tiffany M. Stewart, Tarryn Pollard, Tom Hildebrandt, Robbie Beyl, Nicole Wesley, Lisa S. Kilpela, Carolyn Becker

Psychology Faculty Research

Background: Eating Disorders (EDs) are serious psychiatric illnesses marked by psychiatric comorbidity, medical complications, and functional impairment. Research indicates that female athletes are often at greater risk for developing ED pathology versus non-athlete females. The Female Athlete Body (FAB) study is a three-site, randomized controlled trial (RCT) designed to assess the efficacy of a behavioral ED prevention program for female collegiate athletes when implemented by community providers. This paper describes the design, intervention, and participant baseline characteristics. Future papers will discuss outcomes.

Methods: Female collegiate athletes (N = 481) aged 17–21 were randomized by site, team, and sport type to …

Food Insecurity And Eating Disorder Pathology, Carolyn Becker, Keesha M. Middlemass, Brigitte Taylor, Clara Johnson, Francesca Gomez

Psychology Faculty Research

Objective: The primary aim of this study was to investigate eating disorder (ED) pathology in those living with food insecurity. A secondary aim was to investigate whether any-reason dietary restraint, weight self-stigma, and worry increased as level of food insecurity increased.

Method: Participants (N = 503) seeking food from food pantries completed questionnaires assessing level of food insecurity, demographics, ED pathology, dietary restraint, weight self-stigma, and worry.

Results: Consistent with hypotheses, participants with the highest level of food insecurity (i.e., adults who reported having hungry children in their household) also endorsed significantly higher levels of binge eating, overall ED …

From Efficacy To Effectiveness To Broad Implementation: Evolution Of The Body Project, Carolyn Becker, Eric Stice

Psychology Faculty Research

Objective: At the turn of the millennium, eating disorders (EDs) prevention was largely nonexistent. No program had reduced future onset of EDs in even a single trial, and most had not reduced ED symptoms. Sixteen years later, the ED prevention field has translated basic risk factor research into interventions, with demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness in reducing ED risk factors and symptoms, as well as future ED onset in some trials. This article reviews the aforementioned progress focusing on a model intervention (i.e., the Body Project [BP]).

Method: The article is a qualitative review of the existing BP literature.

Results: Although …

Social Context-Dependent Activity In Marmoset Frontal Cortex Populations During Natural Conversations, Samuel U. Nummela, Vladimir Jovanovic, Lisa De La Mothe, Cory T. Miller

Psychology Faculty Research

Communication is an inherently interactive process that weaves together the fabric of both human and nonhuman primate societies. To investigate the properties of the primate brain during active social signaling, we recorded the responses of frontal cortex neurons as freely moving marmosets engaged in conversational exchanges with a visually occluded virtual marmoset. We found that small changes in firing rate (∼1 Hz) occurred across a broadly distributed population of frontal cortex neurons when marmosets heard a conspecific vocalization, and that these changes corresponded to subjects' likelihood of producing or withholding a vocal reply. Although the contributions of individual neurons were …

Behavioral Phenotypes Associated With Mptp Induction Of Partial Lesions In Common Marmosets (Callithrix Jacchus), Kimberley A. Phillips, C. N. Ross, J. Spross, C. J. Cheng, Alyssa Izquierdo, K. C. Biju, C. Chen, S. Li, S. D. Tardif

Psychology Faculty Research

Parkinson’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder with the core motor features of resting tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and postural instability. Non-motor symptoms also occur, and include cognitive dysfunction, mood disorders, anosmia (loss of smell), and REM sleep disturbances. As the development of medications and other therapies for treatment of non-motor symptoms is ongoing, it is essential to have animal models that aid in understanding the neural changes underlying non-motor PD symptoms and serve as a testing ground for potential therapeutics. We investigated several non-motor symptoms in 10 adult male marmosets using the MPTP model, with both the full (n …

Insightful Problem Solving And Emulation In Brown Capuchin Monkeys, E. Renner, Allison M. Abramo, M. K. Hambright, Kimberley A. Phillips

Psychology Faculty Research

We investigated problem solving abilities of capuchin monkeys via the "floating object problem," a task in which the subject must use creative problem solving to retrieve a favored food item from the bottom of a clear tube. Some great apes have solved this problem by adding water to raise the object to a level at which it can be easily grabbed. We presented seven capuchins with the task over eight trials (four "dry" and four "wet"). None of the subjects solved the task, indicating that no capuchin demonstrated insightful problem solving under these experimental conditions. We then investigated whether capuchins …

Integrating Spatial Working Memory And Remote Memory: Interactions Between The Medial Prefrontal Cortex And Hippocampus, Ryan A. Wirt, James M. Hyman

Psychology Faculty Research

In recent years, two separate research streams have focused on information sharing between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus (HC). Research into spatial working memory has shown that successful execution of many types of behaviors requires synchronous activity in the theta range between the mPFC and HC, whereas studies of memory consolidation have shown that shifts in area dependency may be temporally modulated. While the nature of information that is being communicated is still unclear, spatial working memory and remote memory recall is reliant on interactions between these two areas. This review will present recent evidence that shows that …

Does Variability Across Events Affect Verb Learning In English, Mandarin, And Korean?, Jane B. Childers, Jae H. Paik, Melissa Flores, G. Lai, Megan Dolan

Psychology Faculty Research

Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language. Children (aged 2 1⁄2 to 3 years) in the United States, China, Korea, and Singapore learned verbs linked to simple and complex events. Sets of events included one or three agents, and children were asked to extend the verb at test. Children learning verbs linked to simple movements …

Engaging Stakeholder Communities As Body Image Intervention Partners: The Body Project As A Case Example, Carolyn Becker, Marisol Perez, Lisa S. Kilpela, Phillippa C. Diedrichs, Eva Trujillo, Eric Stice

Psychology Faculty Research

Despite recent advances in developing evidence-based psychological interventions, substantial changes are needed in the current system of intervention delivery to impact mental health on a global scale (Kazdin & Blase, 2011). Prevention offers one avenue for reaching large populations because prevention interventions often are amenable to scaling-up strategies, such as task-shifting to lay providers, which further facilitate community stakeholder partnerships. This paper discusses the dissemination and implementation of the Body Project, an evidence-based body image prevention program, across 6 diverse stakeholder partnerships that span academic, non-profit and business sectors at national and international levels. The paper details key elements of …

Evidence Of A Conserved Molecular Response To Selection For Increased Brain Size In Primates, Amy M. Boddy, P. W. Harrison, S. H. Montgomery, J. A. Caravas, Mary Ann Raghanti, Kimberley A. Phillips, N. I. Mundy, Derek E. Wildman

Psychology Faculty Research

The adaptive significance of human brain evolution has been frequently studied through comparisons with other primates. However, the evolution of increased brain size is not restricted to the human lineage but is a general characteristic of primate evolution. Whether or not these independent episodes of increased brain size share a common genetic basis is unclear. We sequenced and de novo assembled the transcriptome from the neocortical tissue of the most highly encephalized nonhuman primate, the tufted capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). Using this novel data set, we conducted a genome-wide analysis of orthologous brain-expressed protein coding genes to identify …

Cognitive And Neural Consequences Of Memory Suppression In Major Depressive Disorder, M. D. Sacchet, B. J. Levy, J. P. Hamilton, A. Maksimovskiy, Paula T. Hertel, Jutta Joormann, M. C. Anderson, A. D. Wagner, Ian Henry Gotlib

Psychology Faculty Research

Negative biases in cognition have been documented consistently in major depressive disorder (MDD), including difficulties in the ability to control the processing of negative material. Although negative information-processing biases have been studied using both behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms, relatively little research has been conducted examining the difficulties of depressed persons with inhibiting the retrieval of negative information from long-term memory. In this study, we used the think/no-think paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the cognitive and neural consequences of memory suppression in individuals diagnosed with depression and in healthy controls. The participants showed typical behavioral forgetting effects, but …

Cognitive Bias Modification: Retrieval Practice To Simulate And Oppose Ruminative Memory Biases, Paula T. Hertel, Amaris Maydon, Julia Cottle, Janna N. Vrijsen

Psychology Faculty Research

Ruminative tendencies to think repetitively about negative events, like retrieval practice in laboratory experiments, should enhance long-term recall. To evaluate this claim, ruminators and non-ruminators learned positive, negative, and neutral adjective-noun pairs. Following each of four study phases, “practice” participants attempted cued recall of nouns from positive or negative pairs; study-only participants performed a filler task. Half the pairs of each valence were tested after the learning cycles, and all pairs were tested a week later. Large practice effects were found on both tests, even though ruminators showed a trait-congruent bias in recalling unpracticed negative pairs on the immediate test. …