Psychology Commons^™

Societal Individualism–Collectivism And Uncertainty Avoidance As Cultural Moderators Of Relationships Between Job Resources And Strain, Seulki Jang, Winny Shen, Tammy D. Allen, Haiyan Zhang

Psychology Faculty Publications

The job demands–resources model is a dominant theoretical framework that describes the influence of job demands and job resources on employee strain. Recent research has highlighted that the effects of job demands on strain vary across cultures, but similar work has not explored whether this is true for job resources. Given that societal characteristics can influence individuals' cognitive structures and, to a lesser extent, values in a culture, we address this gap in the literature and argue that individuals' strain in reaction to job resources may differ across cultures. Specifically, we theorize that the societal cultural dimensions of individualism–collectivism and …

A Change Of Heart: Internal Narratives, Forgiveness & Health, Keiko Ehret

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

In this thesis I investigate the interconnectedness of forgiveness as a narrative, as a philosophical, religious and cultural phenomenon, and the ways in which forgiveness is increasingly being used as a vehicle for improving health and psychological well-being. By threading together how scholars in a variety of fields have approached these areas of study, we can better understand the way the interdisciplinary nature of forgiveness grants access to heal not merely relationships with others, but also our bodies, our minds, and our relationship with ourselves.

Important to my investigation is understanding that the life circumstances that prompt forgiveness consist of …

When “Right Makes Might”: Moral Superiority And Its Effects On Decision-Making For Others, Emily Shakal

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Within the psychological literature of morality, little research has been done on the concept of moral superiority. The aim of this study was to determine whether a self-perception of moral superiority led to increased severity of judgment toward social issues and harsher moral action against perpetrators. Participants in the experimental condition were given a moral identity prime prior to all tasks. The results showed that the moral prime was not effective in increasing a sense of moral superiority in comparison to the control condition. Severity of judgment also did not differ between groups. There was no difference between groups on …

Separating Self-Esteem From Self-Concept Processes: An Investigation Of Emotional Responses To Self-Image Threat, Andrew Schwarzkopf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The researcher examined self-concept/self-image and self-concept maintenance processes in response to self-image threat. Replicating previous research, the researcher hypothesized that those who had self-image threatened would not engage in derogatory behavior in order to maintain self-concept (Fein & Spencer, 1997). Participants completed a false intelligence test giving negative, neutral, or positive feedback and were given an opportunity to evaluate members of a locally stereotyped or locally nonstereotyped social group for a hypothetical job position. No significant main effects or interactions were found for feedback or applicant social group on participant evaluations of applicants, indicating that derogation did not influence judgements …

The Influence Of Parental Control And Parent-Child Relational Qualities On Adolescent Internet Addiction: A 3-Year Longitudinal Study In Hong Kong, Daniel T. L. Shek, Xiaoqin Zhu, Cecilia M. S. Ma

Pediatrics Faculty Publications

This study investigated how parental behavioral control, parental psychological control, and parent-child relational qualities predicted the initial level and rate of change in adolescent internet addiction (IA) across the junior high school years. The study also investigated the concurrent and longitudinal effects of different parenting factors on adolescent IA. Starting from the 2009/2010 academic year, 3,328 Grade 7 students (M_age = 12.59 ± 0.74 years) from 28 randomly selected secondary schools in Hong Kong responded on a yearly basis to a questionnaire measuring multiple constructs including socio-demographic characteristics, perceived parenting characteristics, and IA. Individual growth curve (IGC) analyses …

Middle-Class / White / Woman: The Unexamined Center In Expressive Therapies Education, Kelly J. Reed

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Counseling psychology and the expressive therapies are majority-white, majority-female professions, and whiteness is the unnamed, normative center of expressive therapies and drama therapy education. As a middle-class white woman, I posit that by failing to examine this center we risk perpetuating the same systems that exacerbate our own and our clients' suffering. I review the available literature and investigate the socio-historical, cultural, and political significance of whiteness and the historical role of white women in maintaining oppressive systems. I then explore the identity reconstruction process for white people seeking to divest from whiteness, specifically looking at the key emotions of …

Music Therapy With Premature Infants And Their Parents In The Nicu Setting, Samantha Martin

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Music therapy research with premature (or pre-term) infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) setting began over 25 years ago, and has expanded to include music therapy with premature infants, music therapy with parents of premature infants, and music therapy with both premature infants and parents combined. This literature review demonstrates the importance of continued research in this field to improve physiological, psychological, social, and behavioral health outcomes for premature infants and their parents. Current music therapy research has established the success of certain music therapy interventions, such as the Pacifier Activated Lullaby (PAL), Rhythm, Breath, Lullaby (RBL), Auditive …

Body Image, Fear Of Fat, And Attentional Bias For Thin And Non-Thin Bodies, Neusha Khaleghi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study examined the impact of Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) on body image and fear of fat in college women. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an ABM condition or a non-ABM placebo condition in viewing a series of thin and non-thin body stimuli. Extending previous work documenting associations between attentional biases and body dissatisfaction and the effects of ABM on body dissatisfaction, we hypothesized that effects of an ABM task designed to direct attention toward non-thin bodies would: (a) decrease body dissatisfaction, (b) increase body appreciation, and (c) decrease fear of fat. There were no significant …

A Noble Task: Testing An Operational Model Of Clergy Occupational Health, Drake Terry

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In many ways, clergy and religious leaders are an ignored yet high-risk population. A clergy member unable to cope with challenges in his or her own life may be ineffective at helping church members to cope with their stress. The purpose of the present study was to develop and test an operational model of clergy holistic health, including occupational demands, and personal and job-related resources. Data were collected from clergy (N = 418) and analyzed using correlational and regression based techniques. Results from the present study provided support for the demands-control-support model (Johnson & Hall, 1988). Specifically, clergy mental health …

Evaluating Implicit Self-Compassion In College Students, Emily Kutok

Senior Honors Projects

Typically, research on self-compassion and mental health has used the measurement tool of self-report (explicit) surveys to examine self-compassion. Implicit Association Tests (IAT) can be applied to a number of di erent constructs, some of which include racial biases, gender stereotypes, and suicidal ideation. ey are used to measure the strength of a person’s automatic association between two concepts (in this case, between self and compassion). By measuring implicit self-compassion, a researcher can expect less self-report bias related to self- presentational concerns and the limits of introspection, and they can capture psychological processes that occur without full conscious awareness but …

Impact Of Facebook On Employability, Ileana Lagrutta

Senior Honors Projects

The rise of social media undoubtedly has led to many benefits for its users: it allows individuals to stay in contact with family members and friends both near and far, it can serve as a medium to promote social change, and it provides users with an easily accessible space in which they can express who they are, among other things. However, despite the positive impact social media has had on society, there is also the potential for social media to negatively impact users, dependent upon how they utilize such sites. One way in which individuals can be impacted negatively by …

Why We Ask Why: The Ways In Which Control And Stereotyping Biases Affect Internal Attributions, Tia Francis

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since the idea of attributions was famously discussed by Fritz Heider (1958), a wide array of empirical research has focused on the phenomenon. Included within the sphere of attributional theories are internal attributions, which have been of particular interest to the psychological community for decades. Although there is no comprehensive theory for why people make these attributions, literature points to establishing control as a possible motivator. In addition, research suggests that people may make more extreme internal attributions about minorities, particularly when they are not aware they are relying on stereotypes. Participants (N = 377) observed a modified version of …

An Eye-Tracking Investigation Of Facial Affect Recognition In Traumatic Brain Injury And Healthy Individuals, Joseph Walter Deangelis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is considered a public health issue and affects millions of people worldwide. While individuals with TBI suffer from a variety of motor and cognitive deficits, this project focused on the social cognitive problems that individuals with TBI experience, specifically facial affect recognition. The primary goal of this study was to better understand facial affect recognition and how it is affected by attention abilities in individuals with TBI. In Experiment 1, we examined how facial affect recognition is associated with attentional abilities using correlational analyses in a sample of 28 participants. In Experiment 2, which was divided …

Garden Path Sentence Processing As A Measure Of Belief Updating, Alexis Diana Grant

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Handedness is a marker for individual differences in brain organization. Garden path sentences (GPS), those that require a mid-sentence change in understanding to capture sentence meaning require the updating of beliefs via the right hemisphere. Inconsistent-handers (ICH) have increased access to right hemisphere processes, which has previously been shown to result in increased belief updating. It was hypothesized that ICH would be more accurate and more rapid in their processing of GPS relative to consistent right handers (CRH) due to increased access to the neural structures involved. Additionally, men and women differ in their brain organization, and in their cortical …

Leadership Developmental Readiness : Furthering Our Understanding Of This Multi-Dimensional Construct, Quinn E. Knudsen

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Although Leader Developmental Readiness (LDR) has been discussed in the leadership literature for over a decade, there has been little consensus on what factors constitute whether one is ready to develop as a leader. The purpose of our research was to consolidate and provide a cohesive model of the motivational components of LDR that encompasses the existing body of research. We used a longitudinal database containing 328 first semester freshmen students from five universities involved in leadership development programs to assess how the proposed LDR factors cluster and the antecedents of these factors. Our model suggests LDR as constituting a …

Meaningfulness Of Work And Family In Working Parents As A Predictor Of Work Family Balance, Enrichment, And Conflict, Sydney Reeves

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

There are arguably great benefits when employees experience a sense of purpose or meaningfulness in their work. The current study examined whether felt meaningfulness of work and family predicts one’s tendency to manage work/life outcomes. Via survey methodology, 386 participants reported the sense of meaningfulness they derived from their work and from their family responsibilities. Analyses explored how individuals’ relative ratings of work and family meaningfulness, as well as the similarity of these perceptions with those of their spouses/partners, affect Work Family Conflict, Balance, and Enrichment. Results showed that meaningfulness of work and family significantly affected work family outcomes. Furthermore, …

Measuring Early Emergence Of Self-Awareness In Infants Using Eye Tracking, Melanie Lawrie

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Recent attention has been paid to the neurological, evolutionary, and developmental correlates of human self-face recognition. In the present study, we examined 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds using eye tracking to determine if there was a unique visual scan path of faces for self-recognizers as compared to non-recognizers. Results indicated that overall, 12- and 24-month-olds have different scan-paths compared to 18-month-olds. Eighteen-month-olds have an increased number of fixations and fixation time spent on the eyes, mouth and top half of the face, while 12- and 24 month-olds have more fixations on the nose and bottom half of the face. Furthermore, self-recognizers …

How Big Is Too Big? : The Potentially Coercive Effects Of Plea Discount On Innocent Defendants, Ryan Schneider

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the United States, approximately 95% of all criminal cases end in guilty pleas. Many scholars are concerned with plea bargaining’s potential to be coercive, and cite data on wrongful convictions as proof that an innocence problem exists. Estimates of false guilty pleas may range between 18 and 27 percent, though a true base rate is difficult to establish. Using vignettes, I examined the effects of guilt, trial penalty and plea discount size on plea decisions of adult participants recruited online through TurkPrime. Guilt was the strongest predictor of plea acceptance, but guilty plea rates increased for all participants with …

Examining Quadratic Relationships Between Traits And Methods In Two Multitrait-Multimethod Models, Fredric A. Hintz

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Psychological researchers are interested in the validity of the measures they use, and the multitrait-multimethod design is one of the most frequently employed methods to examine validity. Confirmatory factor analysis is now a commonly used analytic tool for examining multitrait-multimethod data, where an underlying mathematical model is fit to data and the amount of variance due to the trait and method factors is estimated. While most contemporary confirmatory factor analysis methods for examining multi-trait multi-method data do not allow relationships between the trait and method factors, a few recently proposed models allow for the examination of linear relationships between traits …

The Effect Of Idiomatic Language On Event Processing, Katrina Turick

Honors Scholar Theses

Mental representations of object states are necessary to keep track of changing objects in the world. When the object undergoes change and there are two representations, it creates competition between the object states. This is seen in sentences during which an object changes and is then subsequently referred to again (e.g. “The chef will chop the onion. And then, he will sniff the onion.”). When there is a larger degree of change between the states of the object, there is more competition, which is indicated by an increase in reading time when the object is referred to for the second …

A Guide To The Multiple Errands Test, Carly Jessup

Honors Theses

Executive function plays an important role in everyday life skills such as planning, organizing, controlling and sustaining attention, and socializing. Until recently, executive function was measured almost exclusively using laboratory-based assessments. However, many participants would score satisfactorily on those laboratory assessments, while having significant difficulty with activities of daily living. A potential solution to this issue is the Multiple Errands Test (MET), which is an ecologically valid assessment that can help predict performance of everyday life skills. The MET is a flexible assessment that can be modified in order to fit the needs of the setting and patient. Indeed, many …

Examining The Potential Of The “Csi Effect” To Create False Expectations In Jurors In Regard To Expert Testimony, Sarah Stewart

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The “CSI Effect” has been generally defined as the effect that watching forensic shows, such as the wildly popular, 15-season long television show CSI, has on the general public’s perception of forensic evidence presented at criminal trials. A major concern expert witnesses have is that the existence of the “CSI Effect” can affect the outcomes of the trials, over the strength of the case itself. Whether or not the defendant is guilty should not rest on how well the forensic evidence presented lived up to the jury’s expectations, and as such, the potential existence of this effect has been a …

The Influence Of Dispositional Greed On Creativity: A Conservation Of Resources Perspective, Allyson Tiriolo

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Although historical literatures view greed as an important factor affecting work effort and innovation, scholarly research examining such influences remain scant. Drawing from the principles of conservation of resources theory (COR), I predict dispositional greed will be negatively associated with individual creativity. In addition, I examine the potential for creative identity to weaken this negative relationship. The proposed model was tested among 161 matriculated students at a large Northeastern University. My results indicate no direct relationship between greed and creativity. Rather, my results indicate that the negative relationship between greed and creativity exists only when creative identity is low and …

Consumer-Brand Relationships: How And Why We Form Them, Kristian Perez

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Humans are inherently social creatures. For this reason, it is important to understand the role of social psychology in all other disciplines. This study focuses on the role of social psychology in marketing and brand management. The goal of any brand manager is to develop and foster a mutually beneficial relationship between brand and consumer. The nature of human relationships has been studied in the past and significant results have been found. The purpose of this study is to test if those results still occur when the relationship involves a brand rather than another person. Studies such as this one …

Accuracy Of Target Detection In Two Rsvp Tasks, Shealyn O'Halloran

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is an experimental method in which participants are asked to detect a target within a sequence of stimuli, such as letters or numbers, in order to test the abilities of our visual systems. In previous RSVP studies, participants were above chance at recognizing a target at a very rapid rate of 13ms per item, even when given the target after presentation of the scene (Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, and McCourt, 2014). Researchers have also found that participants are more accurate in a single feature search condition than in a twofeature, or conjunction, condition in the spatial …

Shame And Guilt Proneness Pre-Diagnostic Scale For Depression, Ptsd, And Suicidal Ideation In Active Duty Veterans, Elizabeth Fantini

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

PTSD was discovered in 1980 (Friedman, J. M., 2007), since then an increasing number of veterans and active duty soldiers have been affected by it. Not only have our soldiers been affected by PTSD but depression and suicidal ideation, the repercussions of war, combat zones or any type of severe stress felt while they were active duty. There are two key emotions linked to the diagnosis of PTSD, depression or suicidal ideation; guilt and shame. It has been concluded that guilt and shame both have effects of the diagnosis of PTSD, depression and suicidal ideation. There have been multiple studies …

The Role Of Patient-Provider Communication In Parent Perceptions About Adhd And Treatment, Yelim Chung

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

There is a lack of studies examining the role of provider (e.g. primary care physician) communication in parent perceptions of and treatment decision-making for common childhoodonset mental health disorders, especially attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This mixed-methods study focused on the role of parent: pediatrician communication about ADHD before a child’s evaluation at a specialty ADHD clinic. Specifically, this study aimed to 1) develop a deeper understanding of parents’ initial experiences with their child’s inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive symptoms and attitudes about their child’s possible ADHD diagnosis, 2) evaluate how parents' relationships with pediatricians are related to their understanding …

How Ptsd And Alcohol Misuse In Veterans Differ According To Family Structure And Support, Alexandra Berge

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

PTSD, depression and alcohol misuse are all very prominent issues for active duty personnel and veterans. In this experiment, I examined how a family’s support can help either make these symptoms and behaviors worse or better depending if they display average or poor support. My hypothesis was that if a veteran has a strong support system, their PTSD, alcohol misuse/ AUD and depression symptoms will be lower when first assessed and decrease as time goes on compared to veterans who have poor support. I looked at three types of family support: support from family outside the home, inside the home …

Illusory Correlation And Perceived Criminality., Rachel A. Carter

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Illusory correlation is the false perception that a relationship exists between two variables. Previous studies have shown that people sometimes perceive a relationship between minority-group members and negative characteristics, when in fact, there is no informational basis for this perception. The current study investigates whether people readily perceive a relationship between criminality and minority groups, as is sometimes seen in society. Participants learned about the behaviors of members of two groups, arbitrarily labeled S and T. The ratio of positive:negative behaviors was the same for both groups (2:1). However, participants were shown fewer statements about Group T, making it a …

Pavlovian Conditioning: History And Application Of The Revaluation Procedure, Bana Odeh

Honors College Theses

While Pavlovian conditioning is a widely recognized form of learning, the nature of this learned association continues to be debated and has significant implications for human and animal behavior. This paper will first address the basic structure of Pavlovian conditioning as well as the two major historical hypotheses—Stimulus-Stimulus (S-S) learning and Stimulus-Response (SR) learning—regarding the underlying neural representation of first-order conditioning. Next, the revaluation procedure, an experimental method used to distinguish between these two hypotheses, will be discussed. Furthermore, the history of revaluation studies on rats will be analyzed, with an emphasis on the specificity of the learned association formed, …