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University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Full-Text Articles in Developmental Psychology

Associations Between Early Childhood Sleep, Memory Function, And Brain Development Across The Nap Transition, Sanna Lokhandwala Mar 2024

Associations Between Early Childhood Sleep, Memory Function, And Brain Development Across The Nap Transition, Sanna Lokhandwala

Doctoral Dissertations

Preschool-age children often distribute their sleep across a midday nap and overnight sleep. Skipping the nap is suggested to increase the duration and depth of deep sleep (i.e., slow wave activity; SWA). Moreover, missing the midday nap has been shown to impair learning processes. This may be because children’s brains at this point in development are immature, necessitating the intervening nap period to strengthen memories before they are forgotten. Nonetheless, at some point during the preschool years, many children begin transitioning naturally out of napping. It is unclear whether the memory benefits of overnight SWA after a skipped nap depend …


Not All Numbers Were Created Equal: Evidence The Number One Is Unique, Jenna L. Croteau Nov 2023

Not All Numbers Were Created Equal: Evidence The Number One Is Unique, Jenna L. Croteau

Masters Theses

Universally across modern cultures children acquire the meaning of the words one, two, and three in order. While much research has focused on how children acquire this knowledge and what this knowledge represents, the question of why children learn numbers in order has been comparatively neglected. To address this question, a non-verbal anticipatory looking task was implemented. In this task, 35 14- to 23-month-old infants were assessed on their ability to form implicit category structures for the numbers one, two, and three. We hypothesized that children would be able to form the implicit category structure for the number one …


For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz Aug 2023

For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz

Doctoral Dissertations

Moral aspects of teaching arise each and every day, yet we lack information about how prepared teachers feel about this critical aspect of teaching. This multi-case study explores perceptions of five pre-service teachers in an elementary teacher education program in Western Massachusetts. A series of interviews explore their histories prior to the program and their experiences in the program as related to the pre-service teachers’ orientations to the moral work of teaching. Research questions address the awareness and self-efficacy of student teachers in implementing the moral aspects of teaching. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006), this study explores beliefs …


Youth-Perceived Variability In Harsh Parenting From 8-14 Years As A Predictor Of Internalizing And Externalizing Symptoms At 15 Years, Ann E. Folker Oct 2022

Youth-Perceived Variability In Harsh Parenting From 8-14 Years As A Predictor Of Internalizing And Externalizing Symptoms At 15 Years, Ann E. Folker

Masters Theses

Harsh parenting behaviors have been shown to predict internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children. These symptoms of psychopathology can persist into adolescence, which can negatively impact social, academic, and emotional functioning. Most studies, however, focus on between-person differences in average harsh parenting, rather than within-person changes in harsh parenting over time. This variability in harsh parenting has a potentially unique impact on the development of adolescent psychopathology. The present study aims to understand if child/adolescent-perceived variability in harsh parenting over time (intraindividual variability; IIV) predicts higher levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in mid-adolescence, while controlling for average levels of …


Familial And Environmental Contributions To Child Theory Of Mind Development, Sarah Mccormick Oct 2022

Familial And Environmental Contributions To Child Theory Of Mind Development, Sarah Mccormick

Doctoral Dissertations

Theory of mind is a social cognitive domain, reflecting the understanding that internal mental states motivate outward behavior, that develops rapidly over the preschool time period. While critical for healthy social development, less is known about the how aspects of the family environment interact to influence this development or the neural mechanisms that support it. Several decades of research have demonstrated behaviorally that aspects of parent behavior and language are associated with theory of mind skill use in early childhood. Many of the earliest social interactions occur with parents within the family context and little research to date has examined …


Acculturative Parenting Cognitions: Bicultural Socialization Beliefs Among Chinese American Parents, Albert Lo Oct 2022

Acculturative Parenting Cognitions: Bicultural Socialization Beliefs Among Chinese American Parents, Albert Lo

Doctoral Dissertations

Chinese American and Chinese immigrant parents within the United States possess parenting cognitions that reflect their multidimensional cultural experiences. One such parenting cognition is parents’ bicultural socialization beliefs, defined as their desire for their children to adopt both heritage Chinese values as well as destination American values in order to be successful in the United States. The aim of the current dissertation was to quantitatively examine bicultural socialization beliefs among Chinese American parents of adolescents and young adults. Four studies were conducted to model a pathway from parents’ social and cultural experiences to outcomes in their children. Study 1 examined …


Explicit Norms Promotes Costly Fairness In Children, Gorana Gonzalez May 2022

Explicit Norms Promotes Costly Fairness In Children, Gorana Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Children have an early-emerging expectation that resources should be divided fairly amongst agents, yet their behavior does not begin to align with these expectations until later in development. This dissociation between knowledge and behavior raises important questions about the mechanisms that encourage children to behave how they know they should behave. Here I tested whether explicitly invoking fairness norms encourages costly fair decisions in 4- to 9-year-old-children. I examine children’s responses to unequal resource allocations in the Inequity Game by varying the direction of inequity (advantageous versus disadvantageous inequity) and normative information (to be fair or to act autonomously). The …


Motivated Attention To Social And Nonsocial Reward Images: Examining Relations With Externalizing Risk In Children, Adaeze C. Egwuatu May 2022

Motivated Attention To Social And Nonsocial Reward Images: Examining Relations With Externalizing Risk In Children, Adaeze C. Egwuatu

Doctoral Dissertations

Children that exhibit issues with externalizing behaviors often experience maladaptive outcomes in later life. Externalizing problems during middle childhood (e.g., 6-10 years old) are linked to issues with emotion regulation, which are, in turn, caused by disrupted attention and emotion reactivity to reward. Externalizing problems during this period have also been linked diminished processing of social reward stimuli, suggesting externalizing risk in children may be reflected in contrasting patterns in processing of non-social and social rewards. However, research comparing how differences in affective processing of specific reward content (i.e. social versus non-social) patterns relate to externalizing behavior within normative development …


Counting Sequences Are Processed Across Multiple Levels Of Cortical Hierarchy, Eli Zaleznik Mar 2022

Counting Sequences Are Processed Across Multiple Levels Of Cortical Hierarchy, Eli Zaleznik

Masters Theses

Learning the count list (one, two, three, …) is a critical stepping-stone for the acquisition of number concepts. Most research about counting, however, is done in the behavioral domain, and little is known about the neural representations underlying counting sequences. Here, we test the hypothesis that transitional knowledge within a counting sequence exist both at sensory and conceptual (ordinal and magnitude) levels. To test this hypothesis, we employed a passive-listening violation-to-expectation fMRI paradigm where adult participants heard auditory count sequences that were correct (4 5 6 7) or violated at the end (4 5 6 8; consecutiveness) and, orthogonally, that …


Mobile Technology Use And School Readiness In Low-Income Preschoolers, Trina M. Harmon Oct 2021

Mobile Technology Use And School Readiness In Low-Income Preschoolers, Trina M. Harmon

Masters Theses

Once a luxury, mobile devices are now utilized by most members of society, including those in even the poorest communities. Unfortunately, little research has examined the effects of mobile media use in young children, and even less on young children from low-SES communities. Past research on television, and preliminary research on mobile technology, suggests that mobile media may affect school readiness, and that the direction and strength of this relation could depend on the content and context of the use. The current study examined the relation between mobile media use and a composite school readiness measure that included preliteracy, emergent …


Representation Of Reward And Risk In The Brain’S Motor System: Studies In Adolescents And Adults, Xingjie Chen Jun 2021

Representation Of Reward And Risk In The Brain’S Motor System: Studies In Adolescents And Adults, Xingjie Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

In the neuroscience of economic decision making, the brain’s motor system has been ascribed a role in implementing choice actions. However, recent work has revealed canonical motor signals much in advance of choice action, possibly indicating their role in evaluation of decision options. In the current dissertation, we applied multimodal neuroimaging combining EEG and fMRI and used a novel paradigm that temporally separated the evaluation phase from the action phase of a decision-making process to investigate the mechanisms through which the motor control system contributes to decision making. Additionally, we further examined the developmental changes during the two phases of …


Slow Wave Sleep In Naps Supports Episodic Memories In Early Childhood, Sanna Lokhandwala Apr 2021

Slow Wave Sleep In Naps Supports Episodic Memories In Early Childhood, Sanna Lokhandwala

Masters Theses

Naps have been shown to benefit declarative memories in early childhood. This benefit has been associated with sleep spindles during the nap. However, whether young children’s naps and their accompanying physiology benefit other forms of declarative learning is unknown. Using a novel storybook task, we found performance was better following a nap compared to performance following an equivalent interval spent awake. Moreover, performance was better the following day if a nap followed learning. Further, change in post-nap performance was positively associated to the amount of time spent in slow wave sleep. This suggests that slow wave sleep in naps may …


Children's Understanding Of Compositionality Of Complex Numerals, Jihyun Hwang Apr 2021

Children's Understanding Of Compositionality Of Complex Numerals, Jihyun Hwang

Masters Theses

Counting is the first formal exposure for children to learn numerals, which are constructed with a set of syntactic rules. Young children undergo many stages of rote-memorization of the sequence and eventually count through 100. What core knowledge is necessary to expand their number knowledge to higher numbers? The compositionality of numerals is a key to understanding the natural number system as in learning languages. Higher numbers (e.g., two hundred five) are constructed with the lexical items such as earlier numbers (e.g., one to nine) and multipliers. If children develop their understanding of the compositionality of numerals, they might comprehend …


Differential Harsh Parenting And Sibling Differences In Conduct Problems: The Role Of Effortful Control, Yelim Hong Apr 2021

Differential Harsh Parenting And Sibling Differences In Conduct Problems: The Role Of Effortful Control, Yelim Hong

Masters Theses

Differential parenting has been shown to be an important correlate and possible cause of positive and negative adjustment of sibling children. However, it is not known whether sibling differences in temperament affect this link between differential harsh parenting and sibling differences in adjustment outcomes. The current study addressed this gap in knowledge. The sample included 92 monozygotic (MZ, 63% female) twin pairs and 137 dizygotic same-sex (DZ, 52% female) twin pairs who had complete temperament survey data collected near the third annual wave in the longitudinal study. Children were 6.09 years old (SD = .69) years old at wave 1. …


Stigmatization And Community Connections: Associations With Mental Health, Sexual Identity Development, And Peer Relationships In Emerging Adults With Lgbq+ Parents, Krystal K. Cashen Sep 2020

Stigmatization And Community Connections: Associations With Mental Health, Sexual Identity Development, And Peer Relationships In Emerging Adults With Lgbq+ Parents, Krystal K. Cashen

Doctoral Dissertations

The present mixed-method research project aimed to examine the community connections of emerging adults with LGBQ+ parents as well as how these connections may mitigate associations between stigmatization experienced throughout development because of having LGBQ+ parents and developmental outcomes in emerging adulthood. Study 1 used a qualitative approach to examine whether emerging adults with LGBQ+ parents (N = 15) formed a connection to the LGBTQ+ community and/or a community of others with LGBTQ+ parents as well as whether connections to these two communities served distinct functions. Participants were interviewed through using a semi-structured interview protocol that included sections such …


Recursion In Language And Number: Is There A Relationship?, Diego Guerrero Sep 2020

Recursion In Language And Number: Is There A Relationship?, Diego Guerrero

Masters Theses

Numbers are an important part of the cultural knowledge in the modern world. Its use is fundamental in the conception and development of modern science. There are different sets of numbers called numerical systems. The most frequently used numerical system is the set of natural numbers that is composed of positive integers. Natural numbers have several forms to express the cardinality; the most frequently used is the base-10 number system, it represents the number using base quantities and powers of ten. For example, the current calendar year could be expressed as 2018 ; it’s notation describes the additive and multiplicative …


Father Knows Best: The Interactive Effects Of Fathering Quantity And Quality On Child Self-Regulation, Mamatha Chetlur Chary Jul 2020

Father Knows Best: The Interactive Effects Of Fathering Quantity And Quality On Child Self-Regulation, Mamatha Chetlur Chary

Doctoral Dissertations

In the past decade, developmental research has seen a surge of work regarding fathers and their influences of various aspects of child outcomes- cognitive and socioemotional. Studies show that father involvement, or “quantity” of time the father spends with the child, as well as fathering “quality”, or the characteristics marking the father-child relationship (warmth, supportiveness, sensitivity etc.), can both contribute to variance in the development of individual differences in child outcomes such as language skills, academic success and psychological well-being. One facet of adaptive development, self-regulation (SR), is a robust and consistent predictor of high academic success, fulfilling interpersonal relationships, …


Early Neural And Environmental Predictors Of Later Emotion Dysregulation In Children With And Without Adhd Symptoms, Shannon Gair Apr 2020

Early Neural And Environmental Predictors Of Later Emotion Dysregulation In Children With And Without Adhd Symptoms, Shannon Gair

Masters Theses

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood neurodevelopmental disorders and is characterized by excessive inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity. There is evidence that many children with ADHD experience emotion dysregulation, but little is known about the mechanisms by which children with ADHD develop difficulties with emotion dysregulation. The goal of the present study is to identify early neural and environmental predictors of emotion dysregulation and determine whether these factors interact in contributing to later emotion dysregulation. In this study, children (aged 4-7) with ADHD symptoms and typically developing children participated. Measures of emotion socialization and neural …


Development Of Neural And Behavioral Inhibitory Control During Adolescence: The Integrative Effects Of Family Socioeconomic Status And Parenting Behaviors, Mengjiao Li Mar 2020

Development Of Neural And Behavioral Inhibitory Control During Adolescence: The Integrative Effects Of Family Socioeconomic Status And Parenting Behaviors, Mengjiao Li

Doctoral Dissertations

Inhibitory control (IC) has drawn great attention from researchers and practitioners and the concurrent association between family socioeconomic status and IC in adolescence is well-documented. However, little is known about whether and how family socioeconomic status influence the individual differences in the development of adolescent IC. The current investigation aimed to address this gap in knowledge by employing two multiple-wave longitudinal studies of IC. In the early adolescent sample (N = 311), color-word Stroop task performance was assessed as a measure of IC when individuals were 10 and 13 years old. In the middle adolescent sample (N = 167), multisource …


Home Learning In The New Mobile Age: Parent-Child Interactions During Joint Play With Educational Apps, Shayl Griffith Oct 2018

Home Learning In The New Mobile Age: Parent-Child Interactions During Joint Play With Educational Apps, Shayl Griffith

Doctoral Dissertations

The rapidly increasing popularity of touch screen mobile devices, and accompanying educational applications (“apps”) targeted towards preschool children, calls for a new look at parent-child interactions around educational media. Research has shown that parental involvement in children’s educational media exposure can improve engagement and learning outcomes. However, to date little information is available on how parents navigate their children’s use of educational mobile technology, or how similar or different these interactions are to more commonly studied parent-child interactions, such as around shared reading. This study described, using observational data, parent-child interactions around educational apps and mobile devices in a sample …


Conceptualization And Measurement Of Adolescent Prosocial Behavior: A Two-Study Mixed Methods Investigation, Shereen El Mallah Oct 2018

Conceptualization And Measurement Of Adolescent Prosocial Behavior: A Two-Study Mixed Methods Investigation, Shereen El Mallah

Doctoral Dissertations

Prosocial behavior is a multifaceted construct that may be expressed and received in a myriad of ways, thereby posing several challenges in measurement. Undoubtedly, significant advancements in the measurement of prosocial behavior have been made since the construct first found its way onto the research stage; however, a few fundamental problems persist with regard to: 1) the absence of a universally employed definition, 2) substantial variation in operationalization and measurement of the construct, and 3) inconsistent reports regarding the nature of prosocial development during the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. These issues are further compounded under conditions of adversity …


The Effects Of Reward And Risk Level Associated With Speeded Actions: Evidence From Behavior And Electroencephalography, Xingjie Chen Oct 2018

The Effects Of Reward And Risk Level Associated With Speeded Actions: Evidence From Behavior And Electroencephalography, Xingjie Chen

Masters Theses

Choosing a course of action in our daily lives requires an accurate assessment of the associated risks as well as the potential rewards. The present two studies investigated the mechanism of how reward and risk level influence the motor decisions of speeded actions (Chapter 2) and its neural dynamics (Chapter 3) by focusing on the beta band (15-30 Hz) oscillation patterns reflected in the EEG signals. Participants performed a modified version of the Go-NoGo task, in which they earned reward points based on the speed and accuracy of response. On each trial, the reward points at stake (120 vs. 6) …


Influence Of Household Chaos On Associations Between Physiology And Behavior, Sarah Mccormick Oct 2018

Influence Of Household Chaos On Associations Between Physiology And Behavior, Sarah Mccormick

Masters Theses

Internalizing behaviors, or behaviors related to behavioral inhibition and the tendency to withdraw from novelty or uncertainty, are stable over time. There is substantial evidence indicating the association between greater resting right lateralized frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and negative affect as well as internalizing behaviors (Coan & Allen, 2003; Henderson, Fox, & Rubin, 2001; Fox, 1991). Further, right frontal asymmetry has been shown to be a stable marker of the presence of psychosocial risk (e.g. child maltreatment; see Peltola, Bakermans-Kranenburg, Alink, Huffmeijer, Biro, & van IJzendoorn, 2014 for meta-analyses). However, little is known about the influences of the home and …


The First Person Perspective: Language, Thought, And Action, Pengbo Liu Jul 2018

The First Person Perspective: Language, Thought, And Action, Pengbo Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

What it is to have a first person perspective? How do we come to understand our own perspective in the world? How do we take into account other people's perspectives in our social and linguistic interactions? This dissertation is an exploration of these issues. But instead of approaching them in the abstract, it aims to shed light on these difficult questions through a series of case studies. First, I examine the role of the first person perspective in our agency, and explain the sense in which it is essential for action. Next, drawing on recent work in psychology, I propose …


Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron Jul 2018

Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants’ perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12- and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct ‘kinds’ or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., ‘human face’). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-of-expectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive …


Children's Self-Regulation During Reward Delay, Abigail Fontaine Jul 2018

Children's Self-Regulation During Reward Delay, Abigail Fontaine

Masters Theses

Individuals who display high levels of reward sensitivity are motivated by and respond to reward related cues, thus exhibiting more approach-motivated behaviors. A majority of the research on physiological indices of reward sensitivity in relation to self-regulatory abilities has focused on adults or adolescents, with relatively little work examining these associations in children. Thus, the current study sought to examine whether a common neural measure of reward sensitivity, left frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, assessed in early childhood was predictive of children’s later self-regulation abilities in the context of reward delay. Emerging inhibitory control skills were also examined as a potential …


Understanding Relational Competence In Emerging Adult Adoptees: A New Way To Conceptualize Competence In Close Relationships, Krystal K. Cashen Mar 2018

Understanding Relational Competence In Emerging Adult Adoptees: A New Way To Conceptualize Competence In Close Relationships, Krystal K. Cashen

Masters Theses

Relatively little research has focused on the positive adjustment of emerging adult adoptees (Palacios & Brodzinsky, 2010). Given the developmental context of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000), it is important to select a measure of adjustment that reflects the increased ambiguity seen in this time period. The present study aims to develop and validate a measure of relational competence, or competence in one’s closest relationship regardless of relationship type (i.e., romantic vs. nonromantic). This measure will be created by adapting the Romantic Competence Interview, a measure of romantic competence previously used with emerging adults (Shulman, Davila, & Shachar-Shapira, 2011). Participants …


Mediators And Moderators Of Childhood Family Adversity And Adult Cortisol Response: The Role Of Marital Conflict Behavior, Jeffrey P. Winer Nov 2017

Mediators And Moderators Of Childhood Family Adversity And Adult Cortisol Response: The Role Of Marital Conflict Behavior, Jeffrey P. Winer

Doctoral Dissertations

Childhood family adversity influences behavioral and physiological response processes to acute interpersonal stress. Additionally, conflict behaviors in marriage are primary determinants of stress response and related psychological problems in adulthood. As little research has examined these two important literatures simultaneously, further work is warranted to clarify the role of marital conflict behavior in the relation between childhood family adversity and adult cortisol response to conflict. The current study examined relations between childhood family adversity, observed marital conflict behaviors, and salivary cortisol in response to acute marital conflict among 228 different-sex newlywed couples. We examined intrapersonal “actor” effects as candidate mediators …


Intraracial And Intraethnic Microaggressions Experienced By Korean American Internationally And Transracially Adopted Persons, Karin J. Garber Nov 2017

Intraracial And Intraethnic Microaggressions Experienced By Korean American Internationally And Transracially Adopted Persons, Karin J. Garber

Doctoral Dissertations

This research examined the microaggressions that Korean American internationally and transracially adopted persons (ITAPs) reported based on intraracial/intraethnic interpersonal exchanges. This research tested a conceptual model that: 1) determined the themes of intraracial/intraethnic microaggressions reported by Korean American ITAPs; 2) investigated how psychological symptoms and emotion outcomes were predicted from these microaggressions; and 3) tested specific moderators (i.e., age, engagement coping, disengagement coping, ethnic identity, stigma consciousness, parental racial, ethnic, and cultural socialization, and level of interaction with other Asians) that could change the relationship between these microaggressions and negative psychological symptoms and emotion outcomes. Two studies with different samples …


The Cognitive Effects Of Light Color Temperature, Lauren Hartstein Jul 2017

The Cognitive Effects Of Light Color Temperature, Lauren Hartstein

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of the current studies is to explore the conditions by which light color temperature impacts cognitive abilities and the development of this relationship. Experiments 1 and 1A explored whether exposure to light fluctuating around a central color temperature leads to increases in attention in adult participants. Results showed that, under the dynamic lighting condition, participants’ showed a significant decrease in reaction time on a measure of sustained attention, beyond those of a static light source at a cooler color temperature. Experiment 2 tested whether preschool-aged and 7-year-old participants would show increases in attention and cognitive flexibility after exposure …