Quantitative Psychology Commons^™

Recognizing And Anticipating Stress Related Complacent Behavior In Manufacturing Industries, Ricardo Alberto Pineda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Numerous safety studies suggest that stress complacency related accidents in manufacturing industries continue to cause injuries or fatalities because of the absence of emotional resources for leaders, who are unable to prevent accidents when these conditions exist. Leaders of the manufactory industries may not have the appropriate emotional measures which are significant to recognize employees' underlying complacent behavior. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to evaluate the relationship between leaders' emotional intelligence resources and their ability to manage to prevent injuries and fatalities in the workplace. The research questions address key traits of emotional intelligence regarding emotional perceptions …

Parental Behaviors Of Mothers In Low Socioeconomic Hispanic Families, Melanie Ballardo Rodriguez

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Parental functioning and behaviors in the family impact the outcomes of adolescents; however, few researchers have identified how age-specific parental behaviors and parental stressors impact young children's social-emotional problems in low socioeconomic Hispanic families with children ages 6-11. Based on the family stress model, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between parental behaviors (parental support, involvement, communication, and limit setting) and parental stress on children's social-emotional problems (internalizing and externalizing behavior problems), and the mediating effect of parental behaviors in low socioeconomic Hispanic families with children ages 6-11. A sample of 63 low socioeconomic, …

The Relationship Between Personality Characteristics And Creativity On Judgements Of Facial Attractiveness, Zhelin Wu

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

People may or may not realize that when they meet a physically attractive person, they are more likely to evaluate him or her as a smart and positive person compared to a less attractive person in the absence of other features besides physical attractiveness. This attractive halo effect has influenced multiple areas that include the job market, dating, and academic success. However, it is possible for other factors, such as one’s creativity and personality to affect one’s judged attractiveness level. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of facial attractiveness, creativity, and warm-cold personality characteristics when judging …

The Effects Of Oral Contraceptives On Mood And Affect: A Meta-Analysis, Erica M. Motter

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Combined oral contraceptive (COC) pills are widely used by women of reproductive age, but there is still little conclusive evidence that exists about the mood-related side effects associated with their use. This meta-analysis examined the relationship between oral contraceptive use and mood effects such as depression and anxiety to determine what role, if any, that COCs may have in the worsening or improvement of women’s mood when taking them. Effect sizes compared the differences in women’s mood scores before taking COCs and after one or more cycles of use. Seventeen studies made up of 25 individual samples contributed 71 effect …

Neurobehavioral Measurements Of Natural And Opioid Reward Value, Aaron Paul Smith

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

In the last decade, (non)prescription opioid abuse, opioid use disorder (OUD) diagnoses, and opioid-related overdoses have risen and represent a significant public health concern. One method of understanding OUD is as a disorder of choice that requires choosing opioid rewards at the expense of other nondrug rewards. The characterization of OUD as a disorder of choice is important as it implicates decision- making processes as therapeutic targets, such as the valuation of opioid rewards. However, reward-value measurement and interpretation are traditionally different in substance abuse research compared to related fields such as economics, animal behavior, and neuroeconomics and may be …

When Empathy Only Goes So Far: Development Of A Trait Parochial Empathy Scale, Anna Maria C. Behler

Theses and Dissertations

Empathy, the ability to feel and/or understand another’s emotional state, plays a significant role in interpersonal interactions, mitigating hostility and enhancing affiliation and helping. However, empathy also biases interpersonal reactions. For example, at the group level empathy can become amplified towards members of their ingroup and blunted towards individuals in outgroups, a term called parochial empathy. Currently, no validated measures of parochial empathy at the dispositional level exist, and development of such a scale would be important to understanding the role of group-based emotions in prejudice and discrimination against outgroups. I conducted five studies to develop and validate a …

The Psychology Of Performance In Elite Youth Soccer Players, Matthew Best

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This study is a holistic assessment of psychological mindsets, which are one’s attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, in elite youth male soccer players between the ages of 13 and 18 and the exploration of the relationships between these mindsets and performance outcomes. The mindsets that were assessed were expectancy, growth mindset, value, goals, belongingness, grit, and self-regulation, and the performance outcomes were minutes played, goals scored, and goals allowed. The mindsets were selected through a review of research in education and sport. I conducted Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient analyses to assess the validity and reliability of the …

Color-Blind Racial Ideology, Social Justice Attitudes, And Cultural Competency In U.S. Medical Students And Resident Physicians, Jennifer G. Hahm

Dissertations

Health disparities disproportionately affect the lives of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2015; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services NHQR, 2013). Social conditions, social determinants, and structural inequities have been acknowledged as influential forces on minority health (Link & Phelan, 1995; World Health Organization, 2011). Focusing on eliminating environmental and social conditions affecting the health status of racial and ethnic minorities should be a prerogative for healthcare professionals in reducing health disparities. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between color-blind racial ideology and social justice attitudes …

Using Bayesian Multilevel Models To Control For Multiplicity Among Means, Michael J. Zweifel

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is well known that the Type I error rate will exceed α when multiple hypothesis tests are conducted simultaneously. This is known as Type I error inflation. The probability of committing a Type I error grows monotonically as the number as the number of hypothesis being tested increases. A class of methods, known as multiple comparison procedures, has been developed to combat this issue. However, in turn for maintaining the Type I error rate below α, multiple comparison procedures sacrifice power to correctly reject false hypotheses. The loss of power is exacerbated when variance heterogeneity is present.

In …

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology Through A Distributed Collaborative Network, Hannah Moshontz, Lorne Campbell, Charles R. Ebersole, Hans Ijzerman, Heather L. Urry, Patrick S. Forscher, Jon E. Grahe, Randy J. Mccarthy, Erica D. Musser, Jan Antfolk

Psychological Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological research. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions, or attempt to replicate prior …

Employee Perceptions Of Well-Being Programs, Alice V. Edwards, Susan Marcus

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

Measuring the effectiveness of well-being programs in the workplace is important for optimizing the return on investment and selection of programs that meet organizational objectives. A pilot study was performed to assess employee well-being using the Happiness Mini-Survey and a one-sample pre–post study design intended to quickly allow employees to subjectively rate their well-being before and after participating in various classes as part of a well-being program. The findings demonstrated statistical significance in employee subjective ratings; they reported feeling better emotionally, physically, and mentally after participating in the classes. The employees’ self-rating for stress level also had statistically significant improvement …

Using Context Specific Measures Of Maximizing Tendency To Reduce Inconsistency In Findings, Thomas Holzhauer

Theses and Dissertations

The relation between maximizing tendency, the tendency to search for alternatives to make the highest quality decision, and its theorized outcome, regret, has mixed support in previous maximizing tendency literature. In the current study, it was hypothesized that measuring maximizing tendency in different contexts, as opposed to measuring maximizing tendency globally, could reduce this inconsistency. This hypothesis was tested by administering measures of maximizing tendency from different contexts and maximizing tendency without context and using the results in hypothesized models. The models were tested using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and path analysis. Results showed that using context specific …

A Comparison Of Alternative Bias-Corrections In The Bias-Corrected Bootstrap Test Of Mediation, Donna Chen

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Although the bias-corrected (BC) bootstrap is an oft recommended method for obtaining more powerful confidence intervals in mediation analysis, it has also been found to have elevated Type I error rates in conditions with small sample sizes. Given that the BC bootstrap is used most often in studies with low power due to small sample size, the focus of this study is to consider alternative measures of bias that will reduce the elevated Type I error rate without reducing power. The alternatives examined fall under two categories: bias correction and transformation. Although the bias correction methods did not significantly decrease …

Applying Conditional Distributions To Individuals: Using Latent Variable Models, Feng Ji

Theses and Dissertations

This study proposes a new method to interpret individual results of psychological test batteries. The Mahalanobis distance is a commonly-used measure of how unusual an individual’s profile of scores is compared to a population of score profiles. In models in which there is a set of predictors and a set of dependent variables (e.g., cognitive abilities predicting academic abilities), it is useful to distinguish between a profile of dependent scores that is unusual because its profile of predictor scores is unusual and a profile of dependent scores that is unusual even after controlling for the predictors. The conditional Mahalanobis distance …

Internalizing Outcomes Of Self-Objectification As Predictors Of Behavior In Sexual Situations, Kyla Marie Cary

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to examine various outcomes of self-objectification by creating latent variables encompassing several outcomes. Self-objectification was expected to predict self-surveillance, the behavioral manifestation of self-objectification. Self-surveillance was then expected to predict a latent variable termed internalizing states which encompassed: body shame, appearance anxiety, and sexual self-esteem. Finally, the latent variable of internalizing states was expected to predict a latent variable termed behavior in sexual situations which encompassed: sexual assertiveness, control over sexual encounters, and risky sexual behavior. The participants were 383 undergraduate women between the ages of 18 and 25. The majority of participants …

Measuring Symmetry In Real-World Scenes Using Derivatives Of The Medial Axis Radius Function, Morteza Rezanejad, John D. Wilder, Kaleem Siddiqi, Sven Dickinson, Allan Jepson, Dirk B. Walther

MODVIS Workshop

Symmetry has been shown to be an important principle that guides the grouping of scene information. Previously, we have described a method for measuring the local, ribbon symmetry content of line-drawings of real-world scenes (Rezanejad, et al., MODVIS 2017), and we demonstrated that this information has important behavioral consequences (Wilder, et al., MODIVS 2017). Here, we describe a continuous, local version of the symmetry measure, that allows for both ribbon and taper symmetry to be captured. Our original method looked at the difference in the radius between successive maximal discs along a symmetric axis. The number of radii differences in …

Global Estimation Of Signed 3d Surface Tilt From Natural Images, Seha Kim, Johannes Burge

MODVIS Workshop

The ability of human visual systems to estimate 3D surface orientation from 2D retinal images is critical. But the computation to calculate 3D orientation in real-world scenes is not fully understood. A Bayes optimal model grounded in natural statistics has explained 3D surface tilt estimation of human observers in natural scenes (Kim and Burge, 2018). However, the model is limited because it estimates only unsigned tilt (tilt modulo 180deg). We extend the model to predict signed tilt estimates and compared with human signed estimates. The model takes image pixels as input and produces optimal estimates of tilt as output, using …

Discovery Of Activities Via Statistical Clustering Of Fixation Patterns, Jeffrey B. Mulligan

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Posterior Predictive Model Checking Of Local Misfit For Bayesian Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Chi Hang Au

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Posterior predictive model checks (PPMC) are one Bayesian model-data fit approach. Thus far, PPMC for Confirmatory Factor Analytic applications focused primarily on global fit evaluation, ignoring the nuanced information in local misfit diagnostics. This study developed a PPMC approach for local misfit and applied it to a test-taking motivation scale. If the PPMC approach is effective, fit conclusions derived from the PPMC approach should be congruent with the fit conclusions derived from the Frequentist approach. Number of item-pairs flagged as misfitting and number of disagreements were computed to evaluate congruence. Congruence is achieved if the number of item-pairs flagged as …

Beyond Motivation: Differences In Score Meaning Between Assessment Conditions, Nikole Gregg

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Written communication is a skill necessary for not only the success of undergraduate students, but for post-graduates in the workplace. Furthermore, according to employers the writing skills of post-graduates tend to be below expectations. Therefore, the assessment of such skills within higher education is in high demand. Written communication assessments tend to be administered in one of two conditions: 1) course embedded and 2) a low-stakes, non-embedded condition. The current study investigated possible construct-irrelevant variance in writing assessment scores by using data from a mid-sized public university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Specifically, 157 student products were …