Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

The Role Of Language In The Development Of Temporal Cognition In 6- To 10-Year-Old Children, Danielle Denigris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to represent and make sense of time requires the mental representations of the ordering of events and temporal relations, abstract time concepts, natural biological rhythms, the self and other through time, and causal relationships. This representational ability undergoes significant refinement in middle childhood concurrent with advances in children’s language and nonverbal skills. This study explored the representational development of temporal cognition, diachronic thinking, and behavioral prediction in relation to a battery of language and nonverbal abilities with the aims of confirming age-related improvements, exploring whether disparate measures are indices of an underlying ability, and examining the role of …

Letter To The President: Longitudinal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Academic And Hip Hop Genres In A Rap Narrative Program, Debangshu Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this study was to examine an in-school rap narrative workshop through critical discourse theory (Bamberg, 2012; Daiute, 2014). Twelve youth from a public school serving youth in urban Houston, TX were recruited from an in-school and after-school Hip hop/Rap narrative program to participate in a two-year cohort research study. The primary research question guiding the study was “How do young people participating in a school-based Hip hop/Rap program use a wide range of narrative genres for literacy and psycho-social development over two years in the program?”

The data-intensive study involved assessments of literacy and psycho-social development via …

Exploring The Relationship Between Sequence Learning, Motor Coordination, And Language Development, Rita Obeid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual-route approaches to language acquisition posit separable mechanisms for acquisition of vocabulary and grammar (e.g., Pinker, 1998). Working within the dualistic framework, Ullman and Pierpont (2005) proposed the procedural deficit hypothesis, which proposes that impairments in rule-based aspects of language (e.g. grammar, phonology) observed in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) may be linked to neural deficits that govern procedural memory and are critical for the procedural/sequence learning of both, cognitive and motor skills. In support of this hypothesis, recent meta-analyses indicate significant deficits in sequence learning in children with SLI relative to controls (Lum et al., 2014). Further research …

An Evaluation And Revision Of The Children’S Behavior Questionnaire Effortful Control Scales, Scott R. Frohn

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

The Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001) is a popular parent report measure of children’s temperament. Effortful control, which refers to processes involved in regulating reactivity to internal and external stimuli, is one factor of temperament measured by the CBQ using five scales tapping multiple dimensions. Numerous studies examining the psychometric properties of the CBQ have shown some problems with the scales, including inconsistent factor structures and measurement noninvariance. Furthermore, the way effortful control is typically defined in the literature, and even according to the CBQ’s authors, is inconsistent with how it is actually measured with …

Narrating Power And Injustice: How Young People Make Sense About Fairness, Svetlana Jovic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Our concrete embodiments as members of a specific class, race, and gender, as well as our historical situations play important roles in shaping our perspective of the world. The goal of this dissertation was to explore how different socioeconomic circumstances shape adolescents’ sense-making about fairness and their capacity to relate to different actors in a social situation including an instance of injustice. Additionally, the study explored the systematic shift in youth’s sense-making – their capacity to adjust one’s ways of knowing and being, depending on the perspective they assume and different others they address. I used narrative methodology to explore …

A Time For Creativity: How Future-Oriented Schemas Facilitate Creativity, Brandon Yuan Rui Koh

Dissertations and Theses Collection

According to the creative cognition approach, the infrequent generation of truly creative ideas could be due to the pervasive reliance on schemas during creative ideation. People tasked to generate creative ideas tend to anchor on accessible schemas, thus many of these ideas predictably conform to pre-existing exemplars or concepts. It is reasonable to argue that suppressing the reliance on conventional schemas coupled with activating unconventional schemas could broaden the sources of inspiration and facilitate creativity. Grounded in social schema research, I hypothesize that people tend to project high societal change in the future, and that future construal will activate these …

How Stable Are Human Aesthetic Preferences Across The Lifespan?, Cameron Pugach, Helmut Leder, Daniel J. Graham

Publications and Research

How stable are human aesthetic preferences, and how does stability change over the lifespan?Here we investigate the stability of aesthetic taste in a cross-sectional study. We employed a simple rank-order preference task using paintings and photographs of faces and landscapes. In each of the four stimulus classes, we find that aesthetic stability generally follows an inverted U-shaped function, with the greatest degree of stability appearing in early to middle adulthood. We propose that one possible interpretation of this result is that it indicates a role for cognitive control (i.e., the ability to adapt cognition to current situations) in the construction …

Identifying Domain-General And Domain-Specific Predictors Of Low Mathematics Performance: A Classification And Regression Tree Analysis, David J. Purpura, Elizabeth Day, Amy R. Napoli, Sara A. Hart

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

Many children struggle to successfully acquire early mathematics skills. Theoretical and empirical evidence has pointed to deficits in domain-specific skills (e.g., non-symbolic mathematics skills) or domain-general skills (e.g., executive functioning and language) as underlying low mathematical performance. In the current study, we assessed a sample of 113 three- to five-year old preschool children on a battery of domain-specific and domain-general factors in the fall and spring of their preschool year to identify Time 1 (fall) factors associated with low performance in mathematics knowledge at Time 2 (spring). We used the exploratory approach of classification and regression tree analyses, a strategy …

Flesh And Blood, Clayton Petras

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my work, I look for ways to visualize and document the degenerative mental disease of Parkinson’s and transform it into portrayals of the disease itself, its effects, and those it afflicts. Being a physical breakdown of the body, both popular culture and my own corporal understanding influence my interpretation and representation. This document outlines those influences and their buildup towards a shared understanding of the interests behind the work, as well as implies what the work does through these contexts.

How do we give identity to a disease that is difficult to diagnose or view on medical technology, currently …

Easi-Crispr: A Robust Method For One-Step Generation Of Mice Carrying Conditional And Insertion Alleles Using Long Ssdna Donors And Crispr Ribonucleoproteins., Rolen M Quadros, Hiromi Miura, Donald W Harms, Hisako Akatsuka, Takehito Sato, Tomomi Aida, Ronald Redder, Guy P Richardson, Yutaka Inagaki, Daisuke Sakai, Shannon M Buckley, Parthasarathy Seshacharyulu, Surinder K Batra, Mark A Behlke, Sarah A Zeiner, Ashley M Jacobi, Yayoi Izu, Wallace B Thoreson, Lisa D Urness, Suzanne L Mansour, Masato Ohtsuka, Channabasavaiah B Gurumurthy

Journal Articles: Munroe-Meyer Institute

BACKGROUND: Conditional knockout mice and transgenic mice expressing recombinases, reporters, and inducible transcriptional activators are key for many genetic studies and comprise over 90% of mouse models created. Conditional knockout mice are generated using labor-intensive methods of homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells and are available for only ~25% of all mouse genes. Transgenic mice generated by random genomic insertion approaches pose problems of unreliable expression, and thus there is a need for targeted-insertion models. Although CRISPR-based strategies were reported to create conditional and targeted-insertion alleles via one-step delivery of targeting components directly to zygotes, these strategies are quite inefficient. …

59. Ask Versus Tell: Potential Confusion When Child Witnesses Are Questioned About Conversations, Stacia N. Stolzenberg, Kelly Mcwilliams, Thomas D. Lyon

Thomas D. Lyon

Unpacking The Ontogeny Of Gesture Understanding: How Movement Becomes Meaningful Across Development, Elizabeth M. Wakefield, Miriam A. Novack, Susan Goldin-Meadow

Psychology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children's learning, memory, and thinking (e.g., Goldin‐Meadow, 2003). However, it remains unknown how children distinguish gestures from other kinds of actions. In this study, 4‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 339) and adults (n = 50) described one of three scenes: (a) an actor moving objects, (b) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them), or (c) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants across all ages were equally able to identify actions on objects as goal directed, but the ability to …

Age-Related Changes In Visual Spatial Performance, Samantha Farrell

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Visual spatial skills allow individuals to understand the relationship between objects, people, and the environment for their everyday activities. Visual spatial abilities incorporate visual, motor, and cognitive components, each of which changes across the lifespan. The current study examined the effects of age-related changes and practice type on visual spatial performance. Participants between 40 and 79 years of age were asked to complete the Block Design Task (BDT) by using nine blocks to recreate various designs. Both accuracy and latency were measured to examine these changes. Task difficulty and practice type were varied and cognitive abilities were measured via MMSE …

Curiosity: Emergent Behavior Through Interacting Multi-Level Predictions, Douglas S. Blank, Lisa Meeden, James Marshall

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

Over the past 15 years our research group has been exploring models of developmental robotics and curiosity. Our research is based on the premise that intelligent behavior arises through emergent interactions between opposing forces in an open-ended, task-independent environment. In an initial experiment we constructed a recurrent neural network model where self-motivation was "an emergent property generated by the competing pressures that arise in attempting to balance predictability and novelty". The system first focused on its error, then learned to successfully predict its error, and finally became habituated to what caused the error. This process of focusing, learning, and habituating …

Alcohol Flushing Social Reactions Survey Data 2011, Ian Newman, Lanyan Ding, Duane F. Shell, Lida Lin

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Format: XLSX file

Brief description of the data set:

Tab 1 of the Excel file contains the variable codes.

Tab 2 of the Excel file contains the de-identified survey responses from 2912 undergraduate students attending universities in southwestern, central, and northeastern China (People’s Republic of China). The survey was conducted in the spring university term of 2011.

Spreadsheet data file is attached below as an "Additional file".

(The "Download button retrieves a copy of this metadata.)

Peer Rejection And Emotion Development: The Role Of Peer Rejection And Coming Out On Emotional Health Among Gay And Bisexual Men, Joseph A. Carter

Theses and Dissertations

Gay and bisexual men experience a higher prevalence of negative mental health outcomes than their heterosexual counterparts. This study examines sexual identity milestone achievement—the age of first coming out to friends—for mediation on the association between childhood experiences of peer rejection and levels of emotion dysregulation in adulthood.

Ruminative Exploration In Late Adolescence And Its Relationship To Depression, Self-Esteem, And Parental Autonomy Support, Kelsey A. Redmayne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ruminative exploration is considered a maladaptive dimension of identity development that appears to be at its highest during emerging adulthood (Luyckx, Klimstra, Duriez, Petergem, & Beyers, 2013a). Previous studies have assessed the relationship between ruminative exploration and well-being in populations in Dutch speaking populations of university students in Belgium (Luyckx, Gossens, & Soenens, 2006a; Luyckx, Gossens, Soenens, & Beyers, 2006b; Luyckx et al., 2007a; Luyckx et al., 2008; Luyckx et al., 2013a). Following the Dutch research, it was predicted that ruminative exploration will be positively correlated with symptoms of depression and low self-esteem among US college students. Beyond replicating the …

The Effects Of Pointing Gestures On Visual Attention, Samaria J. Hamilton

Honors College Theses

Visual attention is a process that involves concentrating on select features, such as sensory cues, within the complex environment. Sensory cues within the visual field capture and redirect our attention. Previous research on eye gaze revealed that direct gaze captures attention. In the present study, pointing gestures and motion cues were tested together in a visual search task to examine their effects on attention. Participants were instructed to identify a target letter presented on one of four hands. Initially, two hands displayed a pointing gesture while the other two displayed an open gesture. Next, a target letter appeared, one open …

Infant Locomotor Skill Development In The Context Of Mother-Infant Interactions, Sabrina Lynn Thurman

Doctoral Dissertations

The acquisition of locomotor skills and transitions within them leads to changes in infants’ exploratory abilities and interactive behaviors, which affects several aspects of parent-infant exchanges. Here, we tracked how the onset of crawling and walking affected both infants’ and mothers’ spatial exploration, interactive behaviors, and use of postures in 10-minute free play sessions held in a laboratory setting. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed longitudinally with biweekly sessions occurring from before crawling onset until infants had two months walking experience. We focused on two 6-session transition periods centered around the onsets of hands-and-knees crawling and walking. Behavioral data …