Other Psychology Commons^™

Psychologists’ Graduate Training Experience And Attitudes In Religion And Spirituality, Kristi Santiago

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

In a nationwide poll, 76% of the population of the United States identifies with a formal religion of some kind (Gallup Organization, 2021). Despite the prevalence of religion and spirituality (R/S) throughout the country, graduate programs appear to neglect training on this multicultural issue. The purpose of this paper is to better understand psychologists’ attitudes toward the quality and depth of their graduate training in R/S, determine how competent psychologists feel at managing discussions of R/S within psychotherapy, and recommend necessary improvements to graduate training in R/S. Data was collected using a 24-item, online survey, which was circulated throughout college …

Athletic Injury And Resources For Student-Athletes: A Proposal For An Athlete Injury Playbook, Jessica J. Pauley

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Athletic injury happens frequently and is rarely predictable. While injury is common in sport involvement at all levels, this proposal focused on National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) student-athletes and expanding the resources they have available to them. The vast literature on athletic injury and rehabilitation in sport has served researchers and academic consumers, and unfortunately, has lacked an easily accessible resource for student-athletes and sports medicine professionals to utilize. Therefore, the purpose of this doctoral paper was to propose a resource focused on post-athletic injury and written for collegiate student-athletes to understand called, The Secret Playbook. This playbook included information …

Timing Of Childhood Adversities And Self-Injurious Thoughts And Behaviors In Adolescence, Samantha J. North, Kathryn R. Fox, Jenalee R. Doom

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Greater childhood adversity predicts a higher likelihood of later self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB). There is little research focused on whether the timing of childhood adversity predicts SITB. The current research examined whether the timing of childhood adversity predicted parent- and youth-reported SITB at age 12 and 16 years in the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) cohort (n = 970). We found that greater adversity at age 11–12 years consistently predicted SITB at age 12 years, while greater adversity at age 13–14 years consistently predicted SITB at age 16 years. These findings suggest there may be sensitive …

Parental Buffering In The Context Of Poverty: Positive Parenting Behaviors Differentiate Young Children's Stress Reactivity Profiles, Samantha M. Brown, Lisa J. Schlueter, Eliana Hurwich-Reiss, Julia Dmitrieva, Elly Miles, Sarah Enos Watamura

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Experiencing poverty increases vulnerability for dysregulated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis functioning and compromises long-term health. Positive parenting buffers children from HPA axis reactivity, yet this has primarily been documented among families not experiencing poverty. We tested the theorized power of positive parenting in 124 parent–child dyads recruited from Early Head Start (Mage = 25.21 months) by examining child cortisol trajectories using five samples collected across a standardized stress paradigm. Piecewise latent growth models revealed that positive parenting buffered children's stress responses when controlling for time of day, last stress task completed, and demographics. Positive parenting also interacted with income such that …

The Role Of Dehumanization In The Nazi Era In Activating The Death Drive Resulting In Genocide, Stewart Gabel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dehumanization can be defined in part as a process by which a powerful individual or group (the victimizers) actively denies or withdraws a second individual’s or group’s (the victim’s) sense of human worth or personal value. Dehumanization is an especially virulent form of denigration of the Other and is known to have harmful psychological consequences on victims.

The thesis of this dissertation is: Dehumanization, applied in an increasingly severe manner to demean, subjugate and control Jews in Nazi dominated territories during the Nazi era (1933-1945), activated a “death instinct/drive” (Freud 1920; 1923/1960; 1930) that was used to resolve an extreme …

Anger Bias In The Evaluation Of Crowds, Diana Mihalache

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although people are good at classifying emotions, they also make mistakes. These errors tend to be negatively biased and potentially serve a protective function. Research on biases in emotion perception has largely focused on perception of individual faces and little is known about biases in evaluations of crowds. In the first investigation, I conducted six experiments, evaluating anger bias—a tendency to judge facial expressions as angry—in the context of single faces and emotionally homogenous crowds. I found that observers were biased to classify faces as angry, especially when evaluating crowds. This amplified bias emerged in the context of perceptual uncertainty …

“But I’M Not Racist”: How Implicit Racial Bias, Feedback And Racial Affective States Impact Clinical Judgment In Mental Health Treatment, Dhriti Tiwari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Implicit bias has gathered research interest in healthcare, yet remains less directly examined in the mental health field (Merino et al., 2018). Mental health providers can continue to be influenced by implicit bias despite higher ratings of cultural competence (Boysen, 2010). The purpose of this study was to supplement the limited research examining the impact of implicit bias on the clinical judgment process. The study aimed to examine whether: 1) implicit race bias scores were related to diagnostic impressions, 2) feedback about implicit bias was related to diagnostic impressions, and 3) racial affect mediated the relationship between receiving feedback and …

Child Abuse And Revictimization: Improving Models Of Revictimization Risk, Julie M. Olomi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Child abuse (CA) puts women at risk for later victimization by a different perpetrator, referred to as revictimization (RV); however, how this risk is conveyed is not well understood. CA is associated with a diverse set of negative sequelae (e.g., posttraumatic symptomology, emotion regulation difficulties), many of which could plausibly affect risk for RV. To date, most empirical studies of RV have mainly compared groups of women with and without abuse and RV histories using variablecentered approaches. This approach has led to a focus on differences between abused and non-abused women on a few CA-related variables tested at a time. …

Mechanisms Of Sensory Adaptation In The Primate Visual System, Boris Isaac Peñaloza Rojas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Under ecological conditions, the luminance impinging on the retina varies within a dynamic range of 220 dB. Stimulus contrast can also vary drastically within a scene, and eye movements leave little time for sampling luminance. In addition, the amount of information reaching our visual system far exceeds the brain’s information processing capacity. Given the limited dynamic range of its neurons and its limited capacity in processing visual information in real-time, the brain deploys both structural and functional solutions that work in tandem to adapt to the surroundings. In this work, employing visual psychophysics and computational neuroscience, we study the mechanisms …

Testing A Sociocultural Model Of Body Image In Women Athletes With Disabilities, Brooke R. Lamphere

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Evidence suggests that athletes and people with disabilities (PWD) experience multiple body images that change relative to their social context (e.g., Petrie & Greenleaf, 2012). The powerful influence of social factors on body image and disordered eating in women athletes is well-documented (e.g., Schaefer, et al., 2015; Fitzsimmons-Craft et al., 2014), as is the centrality of the body in the lived experience of athletes and PWD (Behel & Rybarczyk, 2012; Galli et al., 2016); yet, limited research has explored the effects of social factors on body image in athletes with disabilities (i.e., AWD; e.g., Galli et al., 2016; Sousa et …

The Relationship Between The Supervisory Alliance And Novice Supervisees’ Risk-Taking Behavior, Aleis Pugia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Supervisee risk-taking is the process by which supervisees take the new skills and interventions they learn in supervision and implement them in therapy with clients. Risk-taking overlaps with many of the skills supervision is intended to develop: clinical decision-making, supervisee self-efficacy, supervisee skill development, and clinical reflection (Bambling & King, 2014; Ellis et al., 2014; Rousmaniere et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2016). Risk-taking has not been examined before the in the supervision literature, however, it is an important process to understand as it represents a process bridging supervision and clinical practice. The current study was an exploratory study intended …

Comparison Of Forensic Interview Techniques, Avery Stackle, Naomi Wright, Anne Deprince

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

Experts question whether the techniques used to interview crime victims and witnesses during investigations are optimized to gather the most accurate information while minimizing the potential for negative experiences for the interviewee. In response, this study used a randomized-control design to compare a novel trauma-informed interview created for this study against an established interview, the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI). Participants (N = 45) were recruited from a university human subjects pool. Participants watched a video depicting a robbery, responded to surveys during a 30-minute delay, and were randomized to answer questions about the video in the trauma-informed (n = 21) …

Co-Constructing Stigma: Treating Trauma In Adolescence, Isabelle Sanderson

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Public stigma and self-stigma are major factors that impede the seeking of mental health treatment as well as the development of an effective therapeutic alliance. This paper explores the co-creation of stigma dynamics from an intersubjective systems theory lens suggesting these dynamics may play a role for adolescent clients who have experienced significant trauma. Specifically, the potential overlooking and/or misdiagnosis of trauma-related experiences and symptoms often occurring with adolescents diagnosed with ADHD may be contributing to a co-constructed dynamic between the therapist and client to avoid an exploration of trauma that would be experienced as more stigmatizing, more threatening, and …

Affective Brain Patterns As Multivariate Neural Correlates Of Cardiovascular Disease Risk, Peter J. Gianaros, Thomas E. Kraynak, Dora C.-H. Kuan, James J. Gross, Kateri Mcrae, Ahmad R. Hariri, Stephen B. Manuck, Javier Rasero, Timothy D. Verstynen

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

This study tested whether brain activity patterns evoked by affective stimuli relate to individual differences in an indicator of pre-clinical atherosclerosis: carotid artery intima-media thickness (CA-IMT). Adults (aged 30–54 years) completed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks that involved viewing three sets of affective stimuli. Two sets included facial expressions of emotion, and one set included neutral and unpleasant images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Cross-validated, multivariate and machine learning models showed that individual differences in CA-IMT were partially predicted by brain activity patterns evoked by unpleasant IAPS images, even after accounting for age, sex and known cardiovascular …

Cognitive Reappraisal Of Negative Emotional Images In Borderline Personality Disorder: Content Analysis, Perceived Effectiveness, And Diagnostic Specificity, Alexander R. Daros, Achala H. Rodrigo, Nikoo Norouzian, Bri S. Darboh, Kateri Mcrae, Anthony C. Ruocco

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) report using cognitive reappraisal less often than healthy individuals despite the long-term benefits of the emotion regulation strategy on emotional stability. Individuals with BPD, mixed anxiety and/or depressive disorders (MAD), and healthy controls (HC) completed an experimental task to investigate the tactics contained in cognitive reappraisal statements vocalized for high and low emotional intensity photographs. Self-reported effectiveness after using cognitive reappraisal to decrease negative emotions was also evaluated. Although BPD and MAD used a similar number of cognitive reappraisal tactics, they perceived themselves as less effective at reducing their negative emotions compared to HC. …

Could A Robot Be Your Psychotherapist?, Benjamin Huston

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

As technology has advanced over the years, it has been integrated into psychotherapy and changed the way that people receive mental health care (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). Many of these advances, such as telehealth practices, were seen as unsustainable until the public Internet offered broader access to technology-based care in the 1990s (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). These technology-based practices have since grown in popularity and with a recent increase in telehealth practices, text-based therapies, and applications to aid in mental health practices, modern therapy looks very different than it did even ten years ago (Fiske, Henningsen, & Buyx, …

Underachieving Profoundly Gifted Adolescents, Marisa Soto Harrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Underachieving Profoundly Gifted Adolescents is a phenomenological study that explores the lived experiences of five underachieving profoundly gifted adolescents. Profoundly gifted individuals are those whose IQ scores are at the 99.9th percentile. This study was a means to explore factors that contribute to underachievement among this subpopulation of gifted students. In-depth interviews with young adults provided insight into the personal experiences of underachievement in profoundly gifted adolescents. Parents also took part in interviews to provide an additional perspective on the underachievement experience. Findings indicated five themes that contribute to underachievement among this population. Expectations were a major contributor to underachievement. …

Feminist Therapy With Severe Mental Illness And Complex Trauma: A Case Example, Mimiko Watanabe

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Feminist therapy emphasizes empowerment through an egalitarian therapeutic relationship and collaborative approach of understanding symptoms and treatment. Feminist therapy can be used with all types of clients, including those with severe mental illness (SMI) as well as complex posttraumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD) which refers to the unique presentation of those who have experienced chronic developmental trauma (Herman, 1992). This case example focuses on a feminist therapist’s work with a young woman who has both SMI and complex PTSD, resulting in struggles across several domains. Feminist therapeutic interventions of developing an egalitarian relationship, exploration of intersectional multicultural dynamics, building empowerment, …

The Zero Suicide Initiative: Implementation Tailored For Individuals With Chronic Suicidality In Community Mental Health Centers, Helen Louise Littrell

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

In 2018, Suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019), and the American suicide rate continues to rise (Hedegaard, Curtin, & Warner, 2018). The lack of impact in reducing the suicide rate highlights the need to further understand how to help suicidal individuals. Nearly one third of suicides are preceded in the previous year by a visit to a mental health physician (Luoma, Martin, and Person, 2002). This paper proposes a tractable and research-validated strategy for Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) to appreciably reduce the suicide rate among their …

Are There Shared Neural Correlates Between Dyslexia And Adhd? A Meta-Analysis Of Voxel-Based Morphometry Studies, Lauren M. Mcgrath, Catherine J. Stoodley

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Background

Dyslexia and Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are highly comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders (estimates of 25–40% bidirectional comorbidity). Previous work has identified strong genetic and cognitive overlap between the disorders, but neural overlap is relatively unexplored. This study is a systematic meta-analysis of existing voxel-based morphometry studies to determine whether there is any overlap in the gray matter correlates of both disorders.

Methods

We conducted anatomic likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analyses of voxel-based morphometry studies in which individuals with dyslexia (15 studies; 417 cases, 416 controls) or ADHD (22 studies; 898 cases, 763 controls) were compared to typically developing controls. We generated ALE …

Humor Improves Women’S But Impairs Men’S Iowa Gambling Task Performance, Jorge Flores‑Torres, Lydia Gómez‑Pérez, Kateri Mcrae, Vladimir López, Ivan Rubio, Eugenio Rodriguez

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study, we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model (EVM) were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean …

Neural Processing Of Infant And Adult Face Emotion And Maternal Exposure To Childhood Maltreatment, Aviva K. Olsavsky, Joel Stoddard, Andrew Erhart, Rebekah C. Tribble, Pilyoung Kim

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Face processing in mothers is linked to mother–infant social communication, which is critical for parenting and in turn for child development. Neuroimaging studies of child maltreatment-exposed (CME) mothers are sparse compared to studies of mothers with postpartum depression, which have suggested blunted amygdala reactivity to infant stimuli. We expected to see a similar pattern in CME mothers. Based on broader studies in trauma-exposed populations, we anticipated increased amygdala reactivity to negative adult face stimuli in a comparison task in CME mothers given heightened evaluation of potential threat. We examined Neuroimaging studies of mothers with childhood maltreatment exposure (CME) (18–37 years …

“A” For Effort: Rewarding Effortful Retrieval Attempts Improves Learning From General Knowledge Errors In Women, Damon Abraham, Kateri Mcrae, Jennifer A. Mangels

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Previous research has shown that the prospect of attaining a reward can promote task-engagement, up-regulate attention toward reward-relevant information, and facilitate enhanced encoding of new information into declarative memory. However, past research on reward-based enhancement of declarative memory has focused primarily on paradigms in which rewards are contingent upon accurate responses. Yet, findings from test-enhanced learning show that making errors can also be useful for learning if those errors represent effortful retrieval attempts and are followed by corrective feedback. Here, we used a challenging general knowledge task to examine the effects of explicitly rewarding retrieval effort, defined as a semantically …

Turning Down The Heat: Neural Mechanisms Of Cognitive Control For Inhibiting Task-Irrelevant Emotional Information During Adolescence, Marie T. Banich, Harry R. Smolker, Hannah R. Snyder, Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock, Detre Godinez, Tor D. Wager, Benjamin L. Hankin

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

One major question in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control is whether prefrontal regions contribute to control by upregulating the processing of task-relevant material or by downregulating the processing of task-irrelevant material. Here we take a unique approach to addressing this question by using multi-voxel pattern analysis, which allowed us to determine the degree to which each of the task-relevant and task-irrelevant dimensions of a stimulus are being processed in posterior cortex on a trial-by-trial basis. In our study, adolescent participants performed an emotion word – emotional face Stroop task requiring them to determine the emotional valence (positive, negative) of …

Utilizing Music Therapy To Enhance Competency Restoration Treatment, Cory Linder

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

In Dusky v. the United States (1960), the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution requires all defendants to be competent to proceed before the judge issues a verdict. Specifically, to stand trial, defendants must have a factual and rational understanding of court proceedings and the capacity to work with their attorneys. Those who are found incompetent to proceed frequently have severe and persistent mental illness and often exhibit cognitive deficits (Mossman et al., 2007). Competency restoration utilizes therapeutic services to treat symptoms that inhibit defendants from being opined competent to proceed. Existing research suggests music therapy can be used …

B.F. Skinner's Theory Of Performance Excellence: A Radical Behavioral Perspective, Thomas Fritze

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner was a revolutionary in the field of psychology, particularly noted for his development of a philosophy of science and an approach to psychological study labeled radical behaviorism (Rachlin, 1995). To Skinner, psychology was synonymous with an organism's interactions between its environment and its own behavior - and behavior was defined accordingly. This way of studying psychology differed greatly from preceding behavioral iterations in psychology and kept up with advances in ·established fields of science. Due to the deficiencies of the behavioral tradition coming before Skinner, misunderstandings by many psychologists and scientists of the Skinnerian approach were …

Becoming A Better Therapist: Eight Lessons From Running, Kelsey Hyde

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

This paper seeks to identify lessons that can be taken from the sport of running to serve as a map for learning skills needed to become a better therapist. The practice of running mirrors the practice of learning therapy skills. This paper takes the lens of how to practice to become a better runner and applies it as a new approach to skill development for therapists. Additionally, this paper incorporates self-reflection and disclosure as I myself identify as a female runner and therapist. I will use personal examples to highlight the ways that lessons from running have served as a …

Brief Report: Attentional Cueing To Images Of Social Interactions Is Automatic For Neurotypical Individuals But Not Those With Asc, Marcus Neil Morrisey, Catherine L. Reed, Daniel N. Mcintosh, M. D. Rutherford

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Human actions induce attentional orienting toward the target of the action. We examined the influence of action cueing in social (man throwing toward a human) and non-social (man throwing toward a tree) contexts in observers with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC). Results suggested that a social interaction enhanced the cueing effect for neurotypical participants. Participants with ASC did not benefit from non-predictive cues and were slower in social contexts, although they benefitted from reliably predictive cues. Social orienting appears to be automatic in the context of an implied social interaction for neurotypical observers, but not those with ASC. Neurotypical …

Motivational Valence Alters Memory Formation Without Altering Exploration Of A Real-Life Spatial Environment, Kimberly S. Chiew, Jordan Hashemi, Lee K. Gans, Laura Lerebours, Nathaniel J. Clement, Mai-Anh T. Vu, Guillermo Sapiro, Nicole E. Heller, R. Alison Adcock

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Volitional exploration and learning are key to adaptive behavior, yet their characterization remains a complex problem for cognitive science. Exploration has been posited as a mechanism by which motivation promotes memory, but this relationship is not well-understood, in part because novel stimuli that motivate exploration also reliably elicit changes in neuromodulatory brain systems that directly alter memory formation, via effects on neural plasticity. To deconfound interrelationships between motivation, exploration, and memory formation we manipulated motivational state prior to entering a spatial context, measured exploratory responses to the context and novel stimuli within it, and then examined motivation and exploration as …

Vmpfc Activation During A Stressor Predicts Positive Emotions During Stress Recovery, Xi Yang, Katelyn M. Garcia, Youngkyoo Jung, Christopher T. Whitlow, Kateri Mcrae, Christian E. Waugh

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Despite accruing evidence showing that positive emotions facilitate stress recovery, the neural basis for this effect remains unclear. To identify the underlying mechanism, we compared stress recovery for people reflecting on a stressor while in a positive emotional context with that for people in a neutral context. While blood–oxygen-level dependent data were being collected, participants (N = 43) performed a stressful anagram task, which was followed by a recovery period during which they reflected on the stressor while watching a positive or neutral video. Participants also reported positive and negative emotions throughout the task as well as retrospective thoughts …