Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Power Of Dialogue: Understanding Developmental Origins And Processes Underlying Mother-Child Conversations About Past Emotional Events, Celia Hsiao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mother-child emotion dialogues represent an integral medium through which children’s autobiography develops. This study sought to understand the developmental origins and processes underlying this co-construction process by examining the inter-relations between: mother-infant attachment relationships, maternal attachment representations, maternal sensitivity during interactions in infancy, maternal affective mindset during toddlerhood, and mother-child emotion dialogues.

Our findings are consistent with past research on the links between the three organized categories of mother-infant attachment relationships and later mother-child emotion dialogues. Children in disorganized attachment relationships displayed a lack of consistent and coherent strategy during emotion communication. Our results emphasize the important role of maternal …

An Observational Assessment Of Peer Group Contributions To Adolescent Identity Development, Tara M. Dumas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that interaction-based peer groups play an important role in adolescents’ identity development. Peer group members’ current identity development and peer group interaction processes were examined as predictors of teens’ later identity exploration and commitment. Participants (n = 1070; 522 girls; M_age = 15.45 years) reported on their identity development and a subset of participants took part in an interactive group decision task within peer triads (n = 258; 86 triads). Task-related interactions were coded for support (openness to opinions) or discouragement (teasing of opinions and controlling behaviours) of …

Dissociable And Dynamic Components Of Cognitive Control: A Developmental Electrophysiological Investigation, Matthew Waxer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One standard task used to investigate the development of cognitive control is the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). Performance and patterns of brain activity associated with the DCCS show continued age-related advances into early adolescence. According to many theoretical accounts, the DCCS places demands on a single underlying executive control process. Three experiments examined the possibility that the DCCS places demands on multiple control processes that follow distinct developmental trajectories. In Experiment 1, rule switching and conflict processing made orthogonal contributions to DCCS performance. Rule switching was associated with a cue-locked late frontal negativity (LFN) event-related potential (ERP) and conflict …