Psychology Commons^™

Understanding The Impact Of Psychological Empowerment, Workplace Motivation, And Social Capital On The Job Performance Of Farmers In Honduras: A Mixed Methods Study, Susan Lale Karimiha

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A farmer’s job performance is critical to the production of raw materials such as food, fiber, and fuel and is therefore an important concern for individuals, businesses, and economies across the world. The literature on improving farmers’ job performance has focused more on introducing new technologies, and less on the psychosocial factors that improve job performance. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the impact of psychological empowerment, workplace motivation, and social capital on farmers’ job performance in Honduras.

A mixed methods approach was used to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data. For quantitative data, a …

The Impact Of Mindfulness Training On Post-Event Processing In Social Anxiety: A Multi-Method Investigation, Elizabeth Mara Lewis

LSU Master's Theses

Post-event processing (PEP) is theorized to maintain pathological social anxiety. However, little is known about the impact of interventions that may interfere with this maintenance factor. The current study examined the impact of mindfulness training on PEP and state anxiety among socially anxious individuals. Participants were 81 persons (74.07% female, 61.72% non-Hispanic White, M_age = 21.83) with clinically elevated social anxiety who attended one appointment in the laboratory during which they were randomized to receive a brief mindfulness-based training (n = 41) or no training (i.e., thinking as usual control group; n = 40). After the training period, …

Teacher Attitudes Toward Addressing Mental Health In Schools (Tatams): Development And Initial Validation Of An Attitude Scale, Jacob Landon Deboer

LSU Master's Theses

The mental health of students continues to be an overlooked topic. Although research surrounding school-based mental health has increased, this increase in research has yet to translate effectively to practice. Past studies have questioned teachers regarding their perceptions of mental health and school-based mental health services. A significant limitation to past research is the absence of a consistent scale used to measure teacher perception. This inconsistency across studies in terms of the measurement tools used (e.g., surveys versus focus groups) limits the ability to compare the findings across research. The purpose of the current study was to develop and establish …

The Relationship Between The Development Of Communicative Functions In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Isabelle Bankston

LSU Master's Theses

In regard to the assessment of language, it is difficult to determine exact communicative functions that are exhibited early in development that could indicate a prognostic value of verbal abilities and outcomes of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Verbal Behavioral Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP, Sundberg, 2008) is frequently used in Applied Behavior Analysis for standard assessment procedures to measure development over time. The current study was designed to use the VB-MAPP to determine a relationship between certain communicative functions (i.e., mand, tact, listener responding, echoic, and intraverbal) that may suggest a correlation in growth in each …

Effect Of Linguistic And Nonlinguistic Attentional Direction On English Speakers’ Eyewitness Memory And Similarity Judgements Of Path And Manner Differences, Logan Bryce Fontenot

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Relationships Between Extracurricular Activities, Rehearsal, And Short-Term Memory Recall In Children, Scarlett Hammond

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Relative Contribution Of Taxonomic And Thematic Knowledge When Making Similarity Judgements, Niels Dickson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Parental Mental Health Help-Seeking: Addressing Service Utilization Disparities Across Ethnic Minorities, Quyen Nguyen

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Ssrif: A Replication And A Discussion About Future Experiments, Jon Odell

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between Vocational Interests And Parenting Styles Moderated By Work-Family Integration, Kendall Mcgoey

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Physical Therapist Burnout On Spousal Emotional Exhaustion And Marital Satisfaction, Hannah E. Perkins

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Quantifying Brain Network Coordination During The Imaginal Replay Of Naturalistic Shared Experiences Through Role-Playing Games, Zachary Traylor

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Factors Associated With Restricted, Repetitive Behaviors And Interests And Diagnostic Severity Level In Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Esther Hong

LSU Master's Theses

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and social interactions and the presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior (RRBIs). The presence of RRBIs can be detrimental to a child’s development, as RRBIs can lead to impairments in other areas of functioning, impede learning, and contribute to parental stress. Previous studies have identified several factors that are associated with RRBI severity and topography. The current study aims to assess whether impairments in adaptive functioning predict RRBI severity, using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Third Edition (VABS-3) and Baby and Infant Screen for Children …

Mental Health Help-Seeking In Adolescence: An Exploration Of Variables Associated With Help-Seeking Intent In Schools, Sam Allouche

LSU Master's Theses

Internalizing disorders (including anxiety and depressive disorders) affect up to one third of adolescents ages 13-18. Although these disorders are associated with impairments in psychological, academic, social, and family domains, they are often left untreated. Schools have great potential to address this service-underutilization gap by identifying those students at risk for internalizing problems through mental health screening tools and by providing treatment at no cost for students. However, at the secondary level, school personnel partly expect high school students to initiate support for themselves. The present study advances research by exploring the variables related to adolescent mental health help-seeking intentions …

Leveling The Viewing Field: The Impact Of Target Prevalence On Searcher's Functional Viewing Field, Juan D. Guevara Pinto

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is well known that target prevalence impacts various cognitive processes. In visual search, rare search targets are more difficult to detect than common targets. The present research investigated novel questions about target prevalence, focusing on observers’ functional viewing field (FVF) during passive search tasks. The FVF is the area in a display where attention is focused and item processing is enhanced. According the FVF framework (Hulleman & Olivers, 2017), the size of the FVF is modulated by the ease of target detections, such that visual search involving difficult target detection reduces the FVF. Although this would suggest that low …

The Influence Of Personality And Losses On Search In Decisions From Experience, Michael Mordechai Hay

LSU Master's Theses

Research in decision making has focused increasing attention on understanding search behavior without focusing on how individual differences might influence people’s search behavior. To increase our understanding of this topic, the present study examined how personality predicted the amount of search an individual engages in before making a risky decision. It was hypothesized that conscientiousness would be a positive predictor of search behavior and would emerge as an even stronger predictor of search behavior when choosing between options with negative outcomes. It was also hypothesized that neuroticism would be a negative predictor of search behavior and that individuals with higher …

Using Sleep Quality And Alcohol Expectancies As Predictors For Problematic Alcohol Use, Shelby Alexandra Stewart

LSU Master's Theses

College students who experience problematic alcohol use report poorer health and endorse more health-related problems, like sleep deprivation, than their counterparts who engage in safer alcohol consumption behaviors (Demartini & Carey, 2009; Ham & Hope, 2003). Students who engage in higher rates of problematic alcohol use also report the anticipated effect of relaxation and tension reduction as part of their decision to consume alcohol than students who do not engage in problematic alcohol use (Brown, Christiansen, & Goldman, 1987). The link between sleep problems and the use of alcohol as both a relaxant and sleep aid increase the risk for …

Interactions Among Amygdala Volume, Cortical Thickness, And Structural Connectivity In Youth: Relationship To Emotion Regulation, Peter James Castagna

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Emotion regulation includes adaptive (e.g., reappraisal) and non-adaptive behaviors (e.g., avoidance) designed to alter ones’ affective responses. The central hypothesis is that emotional consciousness – being self-aware that you are currently in a particular emotional state – and emotion regulation share the same underlying brain mechanisms/networks. In addition, it is argued that the more appropriate dichotomy, in regard to non-adaptive and adaptive emotion regulation strategies, is dependent on whether they are unconscious or conscious (respectively), positing a two-system framework of emotion regulation. Evidence for the proposed framework draws and builds off of recent theories of higher-order emotional consciousness (LeDoux & …

Ageism And Embodied Stereotypes: A Study Of Adult Learners In Community College At Midlife, Marla Jane Erwin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Adult students are generally classified as a single group for study, yet developmental psychologists recognize separate developmental periods during adulthood that suggest adult students at midlife may experience development within higher education differently that younger adult students, in part due to ageism expressed at individual, institutional and internalized levels. This project applies the concept of lifespan developmental periods to distinguish students at midlife as a focus of inquiry using a mixed method design. Twenty-nine faculty and 205 students responded to the Relating to Older People Evalution (ROPE; Cherry & Palmore, 2008) to assess self-reports of both positive and negative ageist …

The Impact Of Experimentally-Induced Perceived Discrimination On Substance Use, Kimberlye Elise Dean

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are among the most debilitating psychiatric disorders. Although prevalence rates of SUDs are similar between White and Black adults, these groups experience differential treatment outcomes (e.g., Black adults with SUDs are more likely to report greater pre- and post-treatment substance use). Examining culture-specific correlates of racial differences in substance use is vital to improve understanding of the etiological and maintaining mechanisms of SUDs among Black adults. Perceived racial discrimination (PRD) is prospectively related to various substance use-related outcomes. Thus, some may use substances to alleviate psychological distress (e.g., anxiety) associated with PRD, which may over time …

Validation Of The Dual-Factor Model Of Mental Health In College Students: An Investigation Of Group Characteristics, Ashley Perle Galsky

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The dual-factor model of mental health proposes that symptoms of mental illness and markers of mental wellness can occur simultaneously, while functioning as discrete factors that contribute to mental health and adaptive functioning (Keyes, 2005). The current study investigated the utility of the dual-factor model of mental health (cf. Greenspoon & Saklofske, 2001; Suldo & Shaffer, 2008; Suldo, Thalji, & Ferron, 2011) in college students (N = 1,023). Using self-reported symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, inattention, and hyperactivity/impulsivity as indicators of psychopathology, in combination with self-reported subjective well-being (SWB) as an indicator of wellness, participants were classified into one …

A Longitudinal Study Of Two Teacher-Report Screening Measures For Student Mental Health: Comparing The Swtrs And Saebrs, Anthony Joseph Roberson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study compared the comparative utility of two teacher-report universal screeners for student mental health, the Student Wellbeing Teacher-Report Scale (SWTRS) and the Social, Academic, and Emotional Behavior Risk Screener (SAEBRS), across two occasions during the school year. Both instruments measure aspects of academic, social, and emotional student behavior from the teacher’s perspective but differ in their inclusion of both positive and challenging behaviors (i.e., SAEBRS) or positive behaviors only (i.e., SWTRS). Results suggest that both have strong concurrent and predictive validity characteristics in identifying student risk but differ in which outcomes they are better at predicting.

Derivational Development: Derivational Word Processing In Three English-Speaking Populations, Lisa Suzanne Kemp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. farmer becomes farm-er). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking adults. This study tested an identical experimental procedure across three English-speaking populations: native speaking adults, non-native speaking adults and elementary age children. The first task tested how readers use base and suffix information in complex words and nonwords when the word featured only a base word, only a suffix, both a base and …

Addressing Racial Disparities In Parent Training Enrollment: An Examination Of Help-Seeking For Child Behavior Problems Among African American Mothers, Kasia Plessy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The consideration of African American mothers’ mental health help-seeking attitudes and intentionsis important when developing culturally sensitive parent training programs and potentially help bridge a critical knowledge and service gap for this population. The purpose of this study is to examine the parental help-seeking for child externalizing behavior problems in order to delineate variables that might influence BPT enrollment among African American families. To address the lack of research considering cultural factors, this study examines the influence of racial group identification, cultural childrearing values, and mental health stigmatization on African American mothers’ problem recognition and willingness to engage in behavioral …

Attention As A Mechanism For Object-Object Binding In Complex Scenes, Kacie Mennie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The current study attempted to determine whether direct binding between objects in complex scenes occurs as a function of directed attention at encoding. In Experiment 1, participants viewed objects in one of these different types contexts: unique scenes, similar scenes, or arrays with no contextual information. Critically, only half of the objects were attended for each encoding trial. Participants then completed an associative recognition task on pairs of items created from the previously studied scenes. Test pairs consisted of two attended or unattended objects, and were associated with a unique scene, a similar scene, or an array. Evidence of binding …

Thelonious Monk's Prototypical Style: Close And Distant Readings Of Jazz Stylings, Connor Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thelonious Monk’s style has been considered non-conformist, modernist, technically stilted, intentionally unconventional, even incompetent. His performing is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, by what metric is his performing idiosyncratic, or, framed another way, in what ways do Thelonious Monk’s performances deviate from the prototypical performance? Situated within family resemblance theories of prototypicality, I utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to categorize jazz solos based on their melodic usage of standard jazz language (novel corpus of 530 jazz solo improvisations). Using these distant readings to determine which solos are prototypical, I perform a close reading of these prototypical solos …

Developmental Regression In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Associated Factors And Outcomes, Jasper Abarte Estabillo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an increasingly common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in socialization skills and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors. In addition to a number of medical and psychological comorbidities, ASD is associated with a complex phenomenon: developmental regression (i.e., loss of skills in developmental domains). Although present in other disorders (albeit rare), developmental regression is prevalent among individuals with ASD. Thus, interest in studying the phenomenon has grown. However, research on associated risk factors and outcomes is limited and findings have been inconsistent. The current study had two aims: (1) examine potential factors associated with …

Empathic Responsivity And Callous-Unemotional Traits Across Development, Julia Elizabeth Clark

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with deficits in empathy and emotional responses to others. Specifically, CU traits are consistently correlated with under-reactivity to others’ distress cues. However, it is unknown whether CU traits are also associated with more general deficits in emotional reactivity (e.g., to situations involving threat to the self). Further, the relationship between CU traits and the ability to accurately identify others’ emotions is not well established, and prior work often has not considered possible developmental changes in this relationship. To address these questions, the current study recruited a school-based community sample of children from kindergarten, third, and …

An Examination Of The Effects Of Post-Identification Feedback On Jurors, Daniella Cash

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Post-identification feedback (PIF) occurs when witnesses are given feedback following their identification choices. This feedback has been shown to alter witnesses’ retrospective judgments regarding their witnessing experience (e.g., they are more confident that they made a correct identification). PIF effects are robust; they impact witnesses’ memory of their experience, and also appear to act as confirmation to jurors who are asked to assess witness reliability. A current recommendation for eyewitness procedures is that identifications should be recorded and shown to jurors at trial, but this might be harmful if jurors are also negatively impacted by this suggestive feedback. The goal …

Examining Two Self-Assessment Measures Of Teacher Multicultural Competence And Their Predictive Value To Student Behavior Outcomes, Melissa Jo Hamilton Grisdale

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Multicultural competence is a construct that has been discussed in the education literature as an essential skill for teachers' success in reaching all children in the classroom. The current study advances the literature on multicultural competence, specifically pertaining to teachers within their classrooms. Additional evidence was found building upon the technical adequacy of two, theoretically different, measures of teacher multicultural competence. Teachers who received a greater number of hours of multicultural training had significantly higher self-efficacy regarding engaging in culturally responsive teaching practices, than those who had received fewer hours. This study also replicated previous research (Hamilton, 2016) finding that …