Psychology Commons^™

School-Level Predictors Of Student Office Disciplinary Referrals, Andrew Martinez

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Student misbehavior has become a problem gaining much warranted national attention. To monitor student behavior problems schools are increasingly relying on student office disciplinary referral (ODR) data to identify and monitor students who may be at-risk for future behavioral problems. While research has examined individual-level predictors of student disciplinary referrals, few studies have examined multilevel models, which take into account the nested nature of these data (e.g., students within schools). The current study draws upon Social Disorganization Theory to guide an investigation of student office disciplinary referrals. This study examines office disciplinary referrals among 1,501 students across 13 schools in …

Mentoring Youth With Emotional And Behavioral Problems: A Meta-Analytic Review, David Aron Meyerson

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Our current service delivery models are falling short of helping youth with mental health problems. Mentoring is one option that may be effective at helping us address this shortcoming. Youth mentoring theory and research have typically treated mentoring as a prevention intervention (i.e., preventing school dropout, academic decline, psychopathology development, etc.), and research has found youth mentoring to be effective in a variety of domains. The benefits of mentoring may also be applicable to youth with known mental health problems. Research has begun to tackle this question. This meta-analysis addresses the questions of the effectiveness of mentoring programs targeting youth …

Collateral Consequences: The Impact Of State-Level Policies On Perceived Stigma And Stigma Coping Strategies Among Ex-Offenders, Bronwyn Anne Hunter

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Incarcerated individuals have many needs that are not addressed while incarcerated or upon return to the community. These needs are exacerbated by the 'collateral consequences,' and 'invisible punishments' of a criminal conviction which are the state and federal social policies that limit formerly incarcerated persons opportunities for voting, employment, housing, financial benefits, and education, among others. The stigma associated with a criminal conviction may impact offender reentry and reintegration and be compounded by reentry policies. For example, studies have demonstrated that ex-offenders' perceive stigma related to the ex-offender label and that perceived stigma often leads to adverse coping strategies. Furthermore, …

Exposure To Community Violence And The Trajectory Of Internalizing And Externalizing Problems In A Sample Of Low-Income Urban Youth, Jeremy Jay Taylor

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Intro: The transition from childhood to adolescence is a period of increased risk for psychological problems (e.g. Keiley, & Martin, 2002). Exposure to community violence, may impact the degree to which psychological problems emerge during adolescence (Grant et al., 2004). Previous research also indicates that low-income urban youth are disproportionately exposed to severe community violence, leaving them at higher risk to experience psychopathology (Grant et al., 2004). However, recent longitudinal research suggests that this elevated risk may decline throughout the adolescent years (Murphy et al., 2000) especially for internalizing problems (J. Twenge & S. Nolen-Hoeksema, 2002). The current research hypothesizes …

A Range-Frequency Theory Account Of The Effects Of Mood On Evaluations, Megan Marie Lombardi

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

Parducci's Range-Frequency Theory (1965) is applied to the discussion of the effect of mood on evaluations. Consistent with prior research on the effect of mood on judgment, the current study predicts that evaluations of overall satisfaction will be higher among participants experiencing happy moods and lower among those experiencing sad moods. Contrary to prior research, however, it is further hypothesized that evaluations of specific attributes will be lower for participants experiencing happy moods and higher for those experiencing sad moods, which is consistent Frequency Theory. with principles outlined in Parducci's Range-Frequency Theory.

Individual And Community Factors Associated With Thriving Among African American Adolescents In The Context Of Stressors, Adia Shani Gooden

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation used the transactional-ecological framework along with principles from positive youth development literature to examine naturally occurring individual and contextual factors

that promote thriving among African American adolescents. Specifically, this study examined how religiosity, religious support, racial identity, and communalism relate to thriving. This study

also assessed the negative influence of stressors on thriving in order to understand how thriving manifests in the context of risk factors. This cross-sectional study included 152 youth

participants who were surveyed at five Black churches on the south side of Chicago. Structural equation modeling was used to assess whether the proposed model fit …

Using A Resiliency Framework To Examine Natural Mentoring Relationships And The Coping Efficacy As Buffers Of The Negative Impact Of Stressors On Academic Outcomes In Urban, Low-Income Ethnic Minority Youth, Rachel M. Feuer

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

This paper used Resiliency theory to examine natural mentoring and coping efficacy as protective factors that may buffer the negative impact of stressors on academic and psychosocial outcomes in urban, low-income, Latino youth. Research has demonstrated that natural mentoring may serve a protective role for youth who are experiencing high levels of stressors, and that coping efficacy may correlate with positive outcomes. The present study used Structural Equation Modeling to test the compensatory and protective factors models of resilience to examine the ways in which stress, coping efficacy and natural mentoring interact to predict a variety of academic outcomes for …

Identifying Barriers And Facilitators Of Successful School-Based Mental Health And Behavioral Programs Delivered In The Context Of Urban Poverty: A Qualitative Exploration Of Perspectives From Service Providers And Youth, Farahnaz K. Farahmand

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this study was to identify the barriers and facilitators of successful mental health and/or behavioral programs implemented within inner-city schools. The impetus for this study came from prior meta-analytic research which demonstrated programs being offered within inner-city schools, as a whole, showed very low effect sizes, with many of the programs offered to youth within these settings showing iatrogenic effects. The use of qualitative methods, specifically a phenomenological approach, provided an in-depth understanding of 1) service providers' experience(s) delivering mental health and/or behavioral programs in inner-city schools; and, 2) low-income, urban youths' experience(s) with receiving school-based mental …

Twelve-Month-Olds’ Discrimination Of Monkey Faces: Evidence For Perceptual Narrowing?, Ross Magnum, Dr. Ross Flom

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Experience plays a critical role in the development of infants’ perceptual abilities. Studies have shown that during the early stages of development, about six months of age, infants are capable of discriminating between a large number of faces, including faces from different species or races (Pascalis, 2002). Some time after 6 months of age, infants begin to develop a facial “prototype” according to the various faces towards which they have the most familiarity. While they gain expertise on this particular face type, they lose their generalized ability to discriminate between broad ranges of different faces, a phenomenon known as “perceptual …

Patere Legem, Quam Ipse Talisti: Nietzsche And The End Of Christianity, Matthew Faulconer, Van Tongeren, Dr. Travis Anderson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche says that every lawgiver eventually receives the call “patere legem, quam ipse tulistr” which means, “submit to the law you yourself proposed.” Nietzsche believes this call is being made to Christianity and that because of this, Christianity’s moral code will condemn Christianity. He calls this the self-overcoming of Christianity which is “the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe.”

Why Be Moral: The Rational Basis For Morality, Michael Durham, Dr. C. Terry Warner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Of the many questions in modern meta-ethical debates, the question, “Why be moral?” immediately stands out as one of the most provocative. It seems to embody the moral skepticism notoriously rampant in contemporary society, insolently questioning not just particular moral demands, but the power and validity of any moral demands whatsoever.

Strengthening The Pathway To Stem Research Leadership At Hope College, Catherine Mader

Faculty Presentations

Over the past 20 years, awards from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have supported Hope's efforts to conduct STEM research and to prepare students to pursue careers as STEM researchers. The current program is building upon prior successes to create a deliberate pathway for students as they enter Hope as novices, build STEM Researcher skills through coursework and summer research and eventually become student leaders in STEM Research groups.

Innovation Exposition: Advanced Research Course In Psychology (Psy 390), John Shaughnessy, Sonja Trent-Brown, Daryl R. Vantongeren

Faculty Presentations

The innovative Advanced Research course was designed in the early 1980s, well before the pedagogical approach of enquiry-based instruction was widely championed in the late 1990s to early 2000s (National Science Educational Standards, 1996; National Research Council, 2000). Enquiry-based instruction entails “learning through doing” and is a method of teaching and learning based on self-directed enquiry (EBL) or research (RBL) by the student (University of Manchester, 2007; University of Reading, n.d.). This course integrates a research experience for students in the psychology curriculum that reflects a cutting edge approach to teaching psychology. The “lone-wolf” model of science is outdated and …

25 Years Of Psychology Internships, Charlotte Vanoyen-Witvliet, Patricia V. Roehling

Faculty Presentations

Psychology Internships at Hope College are academic semester-long, supervised, pre-professional work experiences related to Psychology and the student's vocational interests. Students pursue agreed upon learning goals in a written learning contract, are supervised on-site, complete weekly assignments, and participate in a class on campus for academic credit.

The Effect Of Self-Monitoring And Manipulated States Of Self-Awareness On Attitude Change In A Dissonance Paradigm, Rachel E. Crook, Dr. Robert D. Ridge

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Personality and situational forces can affect the self-awareness necessary for cognitive dissonance to occur. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory assumes that people are motivated to maintain a consistency between their thoughts and their actions1. For example, if a person is not in favor of a tuition increase and chooses to write an essay against raising tuition, then, according to dissonance theory, she would experience consonance, because her attitude and behavior are consistent.

"Take A Sad Song And Make It Better": Exploring Rewards Related To Liking Unfamiliar Sad Music, John Hogue

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis tested some of Levinson's (1997) ideas on why people like music that makes them sad. A path model of this effect was interpreted from Levinson's theory, and 5 of the paths were tested. These paths were that music would directly create a communion with the song, that happiness and sadness would mediate this effect, that absorption would moderate the direct path, that absorption would moderate the songs' ability to evoke the emotions, and that satisfaction would moderate the emotions' influence on liking the songs.

A pilot study was conducted to determine if the songs evoked their intended emotions. …

Using Behavioral Incentives To Promote Exercise Compliance In Women With Cocaine Dependence, Leila Islam

Theses and Dissertations

To date, low rates of patient compliance have made it impractical to study whether regular exercise can contribute to positive outcomes in women with substance use disorders (SUD). One robust strategy for promoting and maintaining behavior change is contingency management (CM). CM has been used successfully to reinforce drug abstinence, treatment attendance, and other pro-social behaviors. CM delivers incentives (prizes) contingent upon target behaviors, though can be expensive. To reduce costs, CM is often delivered with an escalating variable-ratio schedule, first tested by Petry and colleagues (2005). As a Stage Ib behavioral therapies development project (Rounsaville et al., 2001), the …

Mormonism And The Concept Of A Temporal Deity: The Beckwith- Parrish Dilemma, Jeremy B. Pettit, Dr. David L. Paulsen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In their book The Mormon Concept of God1, evangelical scholars Francis Beckwith and Stephen Parrish (hereafter referred to as BP) present several critiques of what they understand to be the Latterday Saint (LDS) concept of God which they claim is philosophically implausible. The majority of their arguments against the incoherency of the LDS concept of God stem from two dilemmas. My paper focused on the second dilemma which can be formally outlined as:

Lessons On Love From The Back Of The Pew, Ann M. Sasala

SURGE

Saturday marked the one year anniversary of the death of the most important man in my life, my paternal grandfather. Despite the desire of each of his grandchildren to be his one and only favorite, somehow, looking back, I now understand that he saw the same amount of value in each of us, and that is not something that can be quantified. I learned so much from him: how to shoot a gun, how to remove a splinter, and how to be a good, kind and compassionate human-being under any circumstances. [excerpt]

Parenting Preschoolers With Disruptive Behavior Disorders: Does Child Gender Matter?, Antonya M. Gonzalez

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Parental responses to child behavior can have an important impact on later behavioral outcomes. Children with Disruptive Behavior Disorders often engage in externalizing and disruptive behaviors, which usually elicit negative responses from parents. Boys are more frequently diagnosed with these disorders, resulting in a dearth of literature on parental responses to girls with Disruptive Behavior Disorders. Studies have found that parents react more negatively when girls engage in disruptive behavior, plausibly because it is contrary to societal gender expectations. The current study investigates this dynamic within the population of preschoolers with Disruptive Behavior Disorders. I predicted that parents would show …

Predictors Of Online And Offline Sexual Activities And Behaviors Among Adolescents, Anna Ševčíková, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, Janelle Širůček, Štěpán Konečný

Psychology Faculty Publications

Despite the fact that many adolescents spend much time on the Internet, it is unknown who engages in sexually related online activities (SROA) and how these affect adolescent sexual development. The present longitudinal study on 323 adolescents (51.1% girls) aimed to explore how peer attachment processes predicted both SROA and offline sexual behaviors at the age of 17, while also considering puberty and prior offline sexual experiences in order to elucidate potential similarities or differences. Findings based on hierarchical, binary logistic regression analyses revealed that SROA were predicted by alienation attachment to peers (OR=3.36, p<0.05), puberty (OR=1.03, p<0.05), and prior SROA (OR=0.56, p<0.001), while only previous offline sexual experiences at the age of 15 increased the likelihood of offline sexual behaviors at the age of 17 (OR=6.04, p<0.001). Study findings indicate that the Internet provides an additional context for acquiring sexual experiences during adolescence.

The Test Re-Test Reliability And Criterion Validity For The Yoq Self-Report Version, Stephen Thomas Ewing, Dr. Gawain Wells

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Youth Outcome Questionnaire Self Report (YOQ S-R) is a new psychological measure for adolescents. It is designed to track how an adolescent feels that he or she may be changing in mental health treatment. In order to do that, we took a sample of adolescents from Provo High School who had never been in treatment. They completed a questionnaire at two different times about two weeks apart. In doing so, we are able to compare our “normal” data base with those who are receiving therapy. Therefore, we can establish norms for the psychometric characteristics of the instrument. The self-report …

Combining The Tripartite And Cognitive-Specificity Models Of Anxiety And Depression, Scott A. Baldwin, Dr. Diane L. Spangler

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Depression and anxiety are often comorbid and several theories have been proposed to account for their co-occurrence. The tripartite model accounts for the comorbidity between anxiety and depression in terms of the underlying symptoms that are associated with the two disorders. According to the tripartite model, low positive affect (PA) is unique to depression, while autonomic arousal (AA) is unique to anxiety. Negative affect (NA) is common to both disorders; therefore, the relationship between the disorders in due to a common set of symptoms—NA.

Emotion Regulation And Strain In Corrections Officers: Examining The Role Of Recovery Experiences And Coping Mechanisms, Frankie Guros

Dissertations and Theses

Research has begun to identify recovery experiences during nonwork time as an important mechanism explaining the relationship between job characteristics and strain (Geurts & Sonnentag, 2006; Kinnunen, Feldt, Siltaloppi, Sonnentag, 2011). Corrections officers face challenges unique to their occupation (Armstrong & Griffin, 2004) that may contribute to the high levels of strain that currently characterize their occupation (i.e., short life expectancy, high suicide rates; Spinaris & Denhof, 2011; Stack & Tsoudis, 1997). Though previous research has not examined emotion regulation, recovery experiences, and coping within corrections officers, these constructs may be of particular importance to an occupation that requires employees …

A Correlation Study Of Y-Oq And Os Performance In A Youth Outpatient Setting, Jacob Z. Hess, Shelby L. Ferrin, Dr. Michael J. Lambert

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Psychological outcome measures are designed to measure the effectiveness of psychotherapy. The continued conversion of our health care system to managed care increases the need for such outcome instruments as insurance companies require therapists to have evidence that counseling is really helping a client. Initially, outcome measures were developed for adults; more recently, variations on these measures have been designed for children (Burlingame, et al., 1996). In this study, we compared two questionnaires designed to measure psychotherapy with children. Both instruments included a form for parents and a form for their child, from ages 12 to 17. Our comparison went …

Effects Of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation In A Rat-Model Of Human Depression, Brian J. Higginbotham, Dr. Erin Bigler

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a relatively new technology that extends the ability to noninvasively stimulate cortical brain structures (Walsh and Rushworth, 1999). TMS involves placing an electromagnet on the scalp and turning it rapidly on and off through the discharge of capacitors, thereby producing a time-varying magnetic field that passes unimpeded through the skull and soft tissue. This altering magnetic field induces a changing electric field, which causes current flow in cortical tissue, resulting in neuronal depolarization.

Age Differences In Women’S Anger Experience And Expression, A. Antonio González-Prendes, Nancy Praill, Poco Kernsmith

Social Work Faculty Publications

Research on women’s anger is relative scarce. In this study the authors examined differences in anger experience and expression in women across three distinct age groups: 18-30, 31-49, and 50 and above. The authors used the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2) to survey a sample of 239 women in the United States and Canada. The groups were established according to hypothesized transitional life stages of changing responsibilities and expectations. A MANCOVA was used to test the effect of age and covariates of education, employment, relationship status, and country of residence on participants’ experience and expression of anger. The authors discuss …

An Exploration Of Relations Among The Wechsler Scales, The Woodcock-Johnson Iii Cognitive And Achievement Batteries, And Mental Health Measures In A Sample Of College Students With Suspected Disabilities, C. Lee Affrunti

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reports results of analyses of an archival dataset created at a large Midwestern public university, where staff at the university's resource center for students with disabilities conduct neuropsychological evaluations of students suspected of psychological disabilities, learning disabilities, or both. To explore the relations among the variables, analyses included standardized cognitive and achievement test scores, psychological rating scales results, resource center service utilization, and seven to eight consecutive semesters of grade-point average information of approximately 1292 students evaluated from 2000 to 2012. Descriptions of the cognitive and achievement variables are provided for the largest demographic and diagnostic groups. Demographic …

An Investigation Into Peripersonal Space Representations In Older Adults, Emily K. Bloesch

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Peripersonal space is the space immediately surrounding one's body. This space is believed to have a unique representation in order to facilitate successful interaction with the surrounding environment. Supporting this theory, there are consistent findings of changes in cognition within as compared to beyond peripersonal space, including differences in visual attention and perception. However, research on peripersonal space in healthy populations has largely focused on young adults. Representations of peripersonal space take place in multimodal brain regions, areas that show structural and functional changes during senescence. Because of this, there is reason to suspect that older adults represent peripersonal space …

The Enhancing Effect Of Retrieval On Subsequent Encoding: Understanding Test-Potentiated Learning, Kathleen Marie Arnold

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Retrieval practice directly enhances later memory of tested material, a robust effect known as the testing effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b). Numerous experiments have provided support for this effect. However, another important effect of retrieval practice has received far less attention. Retrieval practice can also indirectly enhance learning by potentiating subsequent encoding of tested material, an effect known as test-potentiated learning (Izawa, 1966). Although introduced over four decades ago, little is known about how and when tests enhance subsequent encoding, information that has both practical and theoretical importance. The aim of this dissertation was to enhance understanding of test-potentiated learning …