Psychology Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/995

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Psychology Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Integrating Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills and Parenting for Emotionally Dysregulated Parents: Intervention Development
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Everett, Yoel; Zalewski, Maureen
Parental emotion dysregulation (ED) is linked to less effective parenting behaviors that are associated with increased child emotional and behavior problems. There is a lack of integrated adult mental health + parenting interventions that can improve these interlinked domains in families experiencing clinical-level symptoms. Integrating Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills with parenting may be a promising, transdiagnostic treatment approach to intervening on parental ED and parenting. This dissertation aimed to advance intervention development in this area.In study 1, an integrated DBT Skills + Parent Training (DBT Skills + PT) group therapy intervention for parents of preschoolers was developed and tested in a case study with dually-dysregulated parent-child dyads. The study used idiographic analyses of repeated measures of parental ED, child ED and parenting quality to evaluate changes throughout treatment. In study 2, the intervention was pilot tested with parents struggling with ED and substance misuse. Study 2 examined changes in parent, child and parenting outcomes, and evaluated feasibility, implementation and acceptability of DBT Skills + PT. Group-level analyses of pre-post effects, idiographic individual-level analyses of cascading effects between parental ED, parenting and child behavior, and qualitative analyses of participant feedback were all conducted. Across both studies, parents reported improvements in their ED, their children’s behavior and emotion regulation, and their parenting, often with large effect sizes. The pattern of changes varied across parents. Some showed a cascading effect and others showed evidence of bidirectional effects of children’s behavior on parent outcomes. Parents had high rates of attendance, good implementation of skills, and found the intervention highly acceptable. Study 3 coded video-recorded sessions of Standard DBT Skills Training for mothers with severe ED to identify skills mothers reported were helpful to improving parenting. Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation skills were useful to increasing positive parenting and Distress Tolerance skills were useful to decreasing negative parenting behaviors. Study 3 findings can aid in selection of DBT Skills to include in an abbreviated version of DBT Skills + PT. Together, these three studies lay the groundwork for a larger scale randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of DBT Skills + PT.
Embargo
The Impact of Early Life Adversity and Parenting Skills on Emotion Regulation in a Child Welfare-Involved Sample
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Rock, Alexus; Skowron, Elizabeth
Child Welfare (CW) involved children are vulnerable to developmental problems, including deficits in emotion regulation. Emotion regulation is crucial for understanding and responding to situations appropriately. The capacity of emotion regulation skills is sensitive and can be affected by early life adversity, family climate, and quality of parenting. This study investigates the emotion regulation skills of 189 CW-involved children and their associations with observed parenting behaviors and early life adversity. Children aged 3-7 (M = 4.86 years) completed an Emotional Go/No-Go Task to assess emotion regulation abilities and a series of DPICS-IV coded interaction tasks with their caregiver. CW-involved parents showed low rates of positive parenting skills (M = 2.5) and 9x higher rates of negative parenting skills (M = 23.6). Additionally, there was a significant amount of controlling parenting behavior, with almost half of the verbalizations children received being commands that were impossible to comply with. These controlling parenting behaviors were associated with higher false alarm rates and quicker reaction times. Exposure to early life adversity was unrelated to performance on the Emotional Go/No-Go Task. As predicted, older children showed faster, more accurate responses and fewer mistakes in correctly identifying facial emotions. Gender differences also emerged, with girls resisting error more efficiently than boys to both happy and angry distractor emotions and boys being quicker in accurately identifying angry faces in the presence of happy and neutral distractor emotions. These findings provide new insights into CW children’s emotion regulation, aiding clinicians in understanding the challenges CW-involved children and caregivers face.
Open Access
Contextual Factors Influencing Posttraumatic Stress After Campus Sexual Assault
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Adams-Clark, Alexis; Freyd, Jennifer
Sexual assault has been repeatedly associated with multiple types of psychological distress, including posttraumatic stress. Post-assault outcomes are frequently linked to intrapersonal or psychological processes (e.g., cognitions, behaviors, biology), yet contextual factors also play important roles. In this dissertation, I examine how intrapersonal and contextual factors are associated with posttraumatic stress among student survivors of campus sexual assault – a specific type of sexual violence that occurs within the context of important interpersonal and institutional relationships. In Chapter I, I review the extant theory and research on psychological outcomes of sexual assault, with an emphasis on socioecological and betrayal trauma theories and their application to campus sexual assault. Using prior theory and research as justification, I then describe twocomponents of one empirical project that investigate how intrapersonal and contextual factors influence posttraumatic stress among survivors of campus sexual assault at the University of Oregon. The first analysis (Chapter II) examines how factors at various layers of the social ecology are related cross-sectionally to posttraumatic stress in a large student sample. Results suggest that intrapersonal factors (e.g., self-blame cognitions, avoidance coping), relational factors (e.g., relationship with perpetrator, reactions to disclosure), and institutional betrayal each explain unique variance in posttraumatic stress. The second analysis (Chapter III) examines the relationships between campus sexual assault victimization, institutional betrayal, and posttraumatic stress among a subsample of women and gender minority students across a period of six months. Results suggest that campus sexual violence victimization and institutional betrayal are consistently associated with posttraumatic stress across time, with the highest levels of posttraumatic stress experienced by sexual assault survivors in a context of institutional betrayal. Chapter IV closes by discussing the results and limitations of both analyses within the context of the larger empirical and theoretical literature. Overall, this dissertation supports the feasibility and value of taking a socioecological and betrayal-informed approach to understanding and researching campus sexual assault and points to avenues for prevention and intervention efforts at multiple levels of the social ecology.
Open Access
An Exploration of Fear of Sleep and Experiential Avoidance in the Context of PTSD and Insomnia Symptoms
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Kelly, Shay; Casement, Melynda
Fear of sleep (FoS) has been posited to develop following trauma exposure and significantly contribute to the maintenance of insomnia symptoms. While FoS has been operationalized within the Fear of Sleep Inventory - Short Form (FoSI-SF), preliminary examinations of the measure have yielded diverging factor structures. Experience avoidance (EA), a trait-based measure of avoidance implicated in PTSD and insomnia symptomatology, is thought to be conceptually akin to FoS and may be an important foil to clarify the unique contributions of the construct in trauma-induced insomnia. In the present study, the psychometric properties of the FoSI-SF were evaluated in a population of college students (N = 197), including the underlying factor structure, convergent validity with EA as well as discriminant validity with sleep hygiene, another sleep-related process implicated in insomnia. A conceptual model of FoS was investigated within a subsetted sample (n = 50) that had clinically-significant PTSD and sub-threshold insomnia symptoms. An exploratory factor analysis revealed the following three-factor structure: (1) fear of loss of control and/or vulnerability (FoSI-V); (2) fear of darkness (FoSI-D); and (3) fear of re-experiencing traumatic nightmares (FoSI-N). The FoSI-SF was found to have convergent validity with EA, but did not display discriminant validity with sleep hygiene. The FoSI-V and FoSI-N were significantly predicted by trauma-related hypervigilance and nightmares, respectively. Analyses indicated that FoS was a more robust predictor of PTSD and insomnia symptom severity than EA. Theoretical implications of the findings were discussed to guide future research into the role of FoS in trauma-induced insomnia.
Open Access
The Pathology of Imagination: Picturing the Worst
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Castillo, Andrew; Condon, David
This pre-registered study evaluates the relationship between imagination and maladaptive personality traits using the Four-Factor Imagination Scale and Personality Inventory for DSM-5. Large-scale, multinational, cross-sectional data (N = 114,559) were collected from the SAPA-Project using a planned-missingness design. Functional sample size (pairwise-n = 600) was derived from the mean number of pairwise-complete administrations of all items. Significant associations were found between imagination and PID-5 facets saturated with negative affect and psychoticism. Extreme groups analysis demonstrated participants with non-normative levels of PID-5 Depressivity and Anxiousness had elevated levels of emotionally negative imagination (mean d =1.14, p < 0.001); non-normative Perceptual Dysregulation and Emotional Lability featured greater overall imaginative activity (mean d = 1.00, p < 0.001). Item-level analyses using machine learning revealed the content of PID-5 items predicted facet-level imagination scores, suggesting imagination features in some pathological traits. All statistical analyses are reproducible and publicly available in the Supplemental Materials file.
Open Access
Background Functional Connectivity Reveals Neural Mechanisms of Top-Down Attentional Control
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Li, Yichen; Hutchinson, Ben
Top-down attentional control is essential for efficiently allocating our limited attentional resources to process complex natural environments, focusing on information relevant to our goals. The neural mechanism underlying this pervasive cognitive ability can be dichotomized into externally-oriented, which allocates attention to perceptual details, and internally-oriented, which direct attention to mnemonic episodes. Extensive research has investigated these neural mechanisms by focusing on the operations of attentional control, executed in response to a stimulus, by examining the evoked activity patterns in the brain. However, growing evidence indicates the importance of exploring these neural mechanisms supporting the states of attentional control that persist over time, by scrutinizing the intrinsic functional interaction patterns among brain regions. The present dissertation follows along the latter perspective to extend our current knowledge of the neural mechanism of top-down attentional control. In a series of two experiments, background functional connectivity (BGFC) analyses were applied to isolate intrinsic functional organizations of the brain from stimulus-evoked signals. Utilizing a whole-brain, data-driven approach combined with machine learning, important neural interaction circuits and pathways were revealed in response to switching between externally and internally oriented attentional control states (Chapter 2) and concurrently representing multiple states requiring either external or internal attention (Chapter 3). Moreover, evidence was provided suggesting the systematic distinctions between stimulus-related signals (captured by evoked activity) and state-related signals (captured by BGFC) in reflecting the process of top-down attentional control. Finally, in Chapter 4, a self-developed open-source Python library (BGFC-kit) was introduced for streamlining the preprocessing steps of BGFC analyses. Together, the works in this dissertation provide important insights and facilitate future investigations of the general neural mechanisms underlying top-down attentional control.
Open Access
Maternal Stress, Family Functioning, and Child Well-Being According to Latinx Mothers With Young Children: A Mixed Methods Approach
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Hernandez, Ana; Zalewski, Maureen
While there is an inextricable link between parental stress and child well-being, considerably less research has examined this relationship among Latinx parent-child dyads despite their unique experiences in the United States. The well-being of U.S. Latinx children is often shaped by economic hardship, family interactions, and the level and types of stress their mothers experience. The Coronavirus 2019 pandemic was an unprecedented situation by which the relationship between stressors experienced by Latinx mothers and child well-being may be further understood. The goal of this dissertation was to use mixed methods to advance the field's understanding of the relationship between maternal stress, family functioning, and child well-being in Latinx mothers who have young children in a sample of mothers who participated in the Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development–Early Childhood project between April 2020 and April 2022. Part one tested the association between material hardship, maternal stress, intrafamily conflict, maternal experiences of racism and discrimination, and child well-being via quantitative data from a national sample of Latinx mothers. Part two explored mothers' lived experiences of stress via qualitative data from a subsample of Latinx mothers who resided in Oregon. This dissertation found evidence that material hardship was associated with Latinx mothers' maternal stress, which was associated with their child's well-being. These associations were found after examining quantitative data from the national sample of Latinx mothers and contextualized by qualitative data analysis from the subset of Latinx mothers who lived in Oregon. When further examining factors that may influence the association between maternal stress and child well-being, this dissertation did not find evidence that the association was mediated by intrafamily conflict or moderated by maternal experiences of racism and discrimination. When asked about their most significant challenges, mothers noted concerns about factors such as the availability of childcare and school, their health and safety, and concerns around maternal stress, child well-being, and family relationships. Mothers also reported many factors that helped them and their families through the pandemic, including financial support, having a positive mindset with coping skills, and culturally relevant factors such as family cohesion and community support.
Open Access
When “Self-Harm” Means “Suicide”: Adolescent Online Help-Seeking for Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Lind, Monika; Allen, Nicholas
The sensitive period of adolescence facilitates key developmental tasks that equip young people to assume adult roles. Adolescence features important strengths, like the need to contribute, and some risks, like vulnerability to the onset of mental ill health. Adolescence increasingly occurs online, where existing in-person dynamics and new affordances of digital technology combine. Online help-seeking suits the needs and preferences of adolescents, and online peer support capitalizes on adolescent strengths. The success of online peer support communities for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB) may depend on the balance of social support and social contagion in these communities. In this study, we investigated adolescent help-seeking and peer support for SITB online. We used topic modeling, machine learning classification, and multilevel modeling in pursuit of three aims. In the first aim, we discovered the topics that characterized help-seeking expressions of over 100,000 posters who chose to post in the “Self Harm” category of an online peer support platform. In the second aim, we measured the amount and type of social support provided in over a million comments in response to these posts. In the third aim, we tested whether the topics of help-seeking expressions predicted the presence and type of social support provided. The over-arching goal of these aims was to help inform policy and guide the design of online spaces to support healthy adolescent development, especially amongst adolescents experiencing mental health challenges. From the first aim, we learned that adolescents seek help online for serious problems and suffering. From the second aim, we learned that their peers provide social support most of the time, but this social support often lacks specificity and elaboration. From the third aim, we learned about the power of help-seeking expressions focused on “hopeless suicide,” “self-harm abstention,” and “hiding self-harm” to elicit social support. Across all three aims, we learned that platform design matters, and platform designers can do more to support healthy development. Adolescent online help-seekers need help that makes them feel connected. Academic researchers and corporations must work together to help young people help each other.
Open Access
Stereotypes and Social Decisions: The Interpersonal Consequences of Socioeconomic Status
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Hughes, Bradley; Srivastava, Sanjay
Interpersonal perceptions of socioeconomic status (SES), those formed in face-to-face interactions, can perpetuate inequality if they influence interpersonal interactions in ways that disadvantage people with low SES. There is indirect evidence to support that SES is perceived accurately, elicits SES-based stereotypes, and influences interpersonal decisions but these effects and the underlying mechanism have not been examined in social interactions. This dissertation extends the study of the interpersonal effects of SES into real world social interactions between people from a socioeconomically, and otherwise diverse population. To study how SES impacts these interactions, I developed a novel computer mediated online round robin method (CMORR) that uses videoconferencing technology to recruit a diverse online sample. In Study 1, I describe the CMORR procedure and shows that impressions of personality traits formed in CMORR interactions are comparable to those formed in-person. In Study 2, I used CMORR to facilitate interactions among N = 297 participants from across the United States. Participants interacted dyadically in virtual rooms and then provided judgments of their interaction partner’s SES, personality traits, and the credibility of their consumer experience. The results showed that in these interactions perceptions of SES were accurate and elicited negative interpersonal stereotypes for people with low SES, in all 12 of the personality traits measured. SES was also associated with social decisions about affiliation, credibility, and sympathy, and these effects were mediated by the interpersonal stereotypes. I finish by discussing the implications for the interpersonal perpetuation of inequality and future directions for studying the interpersonal effects of SES.
Open Access
Utilization of Linguistic Markers in Differentiation of Internalizing Disorders, Suicidality, and Identity Distress
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Ivie, Elizabeth; Allen, Nicholas
The adolescent period of development is associated with a significant increase in the occurrence of mental illness. In addition, death by suicide is one of the leading causes of death amongst adolescents. Identity formation is a key developmental task of adolescence, and successful navigation of this process is associated with greater well-being and resilience, while difficulties are associated with risk for mental health disorders and suicidality. Adolescents today spend enormous amounts of time on digital devices, which have become a new instrument by which they explore and confirm their identities and experiences. The study of natural language use is related to wide range of psychological phenomena, including psychopathology, and offers a tool by which we can begin to ask and answer these questions utilizing new tools that allow us to passively collect adolescents’ language use directly from their digital devices. The current study leverages a unique clinical sample of adolescents who have been followed over six months to explore the relationship between both between and within participant measures of psychopathology, suicidal thought and behaviors, and putative linguistic markers of adolescent identity formation derived from online communications in order to further understand the association between these variables using ecologically valid measures in a community sample of adolescents experiencing significant mental health challenges. The aims of the study were to (1) assess whether there are differences in how adolescents with psychopathology, suicidal ideation, and previous suicide attempts use language, (2) language differences associated with mental illness symptomology, (3) and language differences in hypothesized identity domains associated with mental illness symptomology communicated through social communication apps via text. Participants completed baseline measures of depression, suicidality, and anxiety symptoms. Participants downloaded the EARS tool onto their digital devices that passively collected text data sent through social communication applications. The results of this study indicated that there are natural language use differences between adolescents with psychopathology and those who experience suicidality, depression, and anxiety symptoms.
Open Access
The Role of Fractal Fluency on Visual Perception
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Robles, Kelly E.; Sereno, Margaret
From quarks to galaxies, the natural world is organized with fractal geometry. Fractal fluency theory suggests that due to their omnipresence in our visual world, fractals are more fluently processed by the visual system resulting in enhanced cognitive performance and aesthetics. However prior research has yet to define the boundaries of fractal perception. Thus, the present dissertation aims to explore 1) how individual differences and 2) inclusion of additional structure impact fractal perception, as well as define the unique contribution of fractal statistics on 3) visual judgments in Euclidean space and 4) memory performance. In four empirical chapters, I demonstrate robust trends in fractal perception across wide variation in viewing conditions. Moreover, fractals are shown to be perceived as definitively unique compared to nonfractal images. Together these findings provide insight into how the visual system handles self-repeating patterns and reaffirms the vast potential of fractal installments for occupant wellbeing.
Open Access
The Anatomy of Antagonism: Exploring the Relations of 20 Lexical Factors of Personality with Machiavellianism, Grandiose Narcissism, and Psychopathy
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Kay, Cameron; Arrow, Holly
Despite being the focus of extensive research over the past two decades, the structure of the “Dark Triad”—or, as I will refer to it here, the “Aversive Triad”—is still shrouded in confusion. Much of this confusion stems from disagreements over (1) which aspects of personality unite Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy and (2) which aspects of personality differentiate Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy. The present set of studies attempts to answer these two questions by using the 20-Lexical Factor Model of Personality (Lex-20) to decompose the Aversive Triad into smaller elements of personality. In Study 1, the Aversive Triad is assessed using the three most popular measures of each trait, thus capturing how the traits are most commonly represented in the existing literature. Study 2 builds upon Study 1 by using a wider array of Aversive Triad measures to capture the diversity of ways that these traits have been represented in the existing literature. Study 3 further builds upon Study 1 and Study 2 by using broader samples of participants recruited from the US, India, and Nigeria to examine whether the results found using US undergraduate students in Study 1 and Study 2 generalize to other populations. At least among the US samples, the findings for the three studies were fairly consistent. The Aversive Triad traits were united by a core of egotism, manipulativeness, temperamentality, deceitfulness, cruelty, and prejudice. Machiavellianism was further defined by aspects of cynicism (e.g., negativity) and reservedness (e.g., low directness). It was not, however, defined by greater organization, which is inconsistent with the theoretical notion that Machiavellian individuals engage in long-term machinations. The results for grandiose narcissism were theoretically consistent; it was defined by aspects of extraversion (e.g., talkativeness) and self-promotion (e.g., sophistication). The results for psychopathy were also theoretically consistent, with psychopathy being defined by excessive cruelty and a reckless lifestyle (e.g., disorganization). The findings from the Indian and Nigerian samples departed from those found in the US samples, perhaps because of low internal consistencies among some of the scales for the Lex-20 factors in these two countries.
Open Access
Content Representation in Lateral Parietal Cortex
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Zhao, Yufei; Kuhl, Brice
While the lateral parietal cortex (LPC) in the human brain is traditionally investigated for its functions in visual perception, more recent evidence has highlighted its substantial contribution to supporting human episodic memory. Early univariate neuroimaging studies suggest that the strength and direction of LPC activation during memory-related tasks is closely related to memory performance. Moreover, recent multivariate fMRI studies show that the neural activity patterns of LPC actively represent mnemonic contents at various granularities. Despite advances in understanding parietal contributions to episodic memory, the relationship between LPC multivariate content representation and univariate activation changes remains unexplored. Moreover, the mechanisms through which the LPC content representation supports episodic memory success are yet unidentified. In the current dissertation, I aim to investigate these topics by incorporating fMRI techniques with neural networks and multivariate pattern analysis methods in a set of two experiments. In chapter II, I demonstrate that repetition-related neural activity differences in the lateral parietal cortex represent stimulus-specific content information, and a greater amount of decodable content information contributes to memory success. In chapter III, I show that content representations in lateral parietal cortex can be adaptively distorted along a feature dimension in order to resolve memory interference, and the degree of such adaptive change contributes to memory success. Together, these studies provide new insights into the nature of content representation in the lateral parietal cortex and how it supports memory success.
Open Access
Sociocultural Contexts of Emotion Socialization in BIPOC Families
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Lee, Angela; Zalewski, Maureen
Having effective emotion regulation skills is critical to socioemotional well-being, and parents play a key role in the development of children’s emotion regulation through emotion socialization behaviors. However, since emotion socialization research has been primarily conducted with majority culture families, extant studies have often lacked consideration of BIPOC families’ unique sociocultural contexts. The current dissertation aimed to expand our understanding of parent emotion socialization behaviors and their impact on child functioning among minoritized families through two studies. The first was a scoping review of how a predominant parent-report emotion socialization measure, the Coping with Children's Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES), has been utilized among ethnoracial minority families in the United States. Findings are discussed in relation to adaptation and psychometric validation of the CCNES. Results suggested that parent emotion socialization behaviors traditionally categorized as “supportive” or “nonsupportive” may be differentially associated with child outcomes among BIPOC families. Recommendations for best practices for using the CCNES are provided. The second study was an empirical evaluation of the association between maternal emotion socialization and child emotion regulation, testing the moderating role of racial identity among African American and White American families. Results showed that for Black/African American families, increased maternal emotion/problem-focused emotion socialization behaviors were associated with children's increased knowledge of sadness emotion regulation strategies, but this association was not significant among White families. Additionally, we conducted a preliminary examination of the role of culturally specific moderators with a subsample of Black/African American participants. Results suggested that associations between parent emotion socialization and child behavior problems were dependent on maternal racial socialization behaviors. Together, these results emphasize the importance of examining proximal factors of emotion socialization and considering normative developmental processes for minoritized youth that overlap with emotion regulation development. Future researchers should test the unique and additive role of various emotion socialization behaviors, consider employing mixed-methods approaches to facilitate understanding of culturally nuanced emotion socialization responses, and examine culturally specific mechanisms. By incorporating these factors, researchers will be able to go beyond cross-cultural comparisons toward a conceptualization of child emotional development that integrates the dynamic interactions between emotion socialization and sociocultural context.
Open Access
Cross-ideological Communication: The Impact of Real Conversations Compared to Imagined Ones
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Niella, Tamara; Hodges, Sara
Political polarization has visibly increased in the last few years. A sense of divisiveness has been exacerbated by a surge in social media communication about contentious issues which has been replacing face-to-face conversations about these topics. Evidence shows that people avoid discussing hot-button topics face-to-face and hold pessimistic expectations about how these interactions will go. However, research has shown that these conversations tend to go better than expected. Intergroup Contact Theory suggests that interacting with those in other groups can reduce intergroup conflict. This opens the question of whether there are benefits of having people engage in face-to-face cross-ideological conversations. The present dissertation aims to answer this through an experimental study conducted online via video calls. In one condition, pairs of people with opposing views on a moral issue were instructed to have a short conversation about that issue. In the other condition, people imagined such conversations instead. Outcomes from the actual conversations were compared to expectations about the imagined ones. Using a broad sample of adults from Argentina (n = 170) with polarized opinions, this study measured A) whether an agreement on the topic was reached or expected; B) participants’ assessments about the quality (real or imagined) of the conversation and their partner; C) participants’ willingness to engage in future cross-ideological conversations; and D) change in participants’ opinion on the issue after conversation or imagination. Contrary to predictions, there were no significant differences in the proportion of participants reaching agreement between those who had conversations and those who imagined them. Also contrary to predictions, participants’ opinions on the issue did not change. However, consistent with hypotheses, those who engaged in an actual conversation rated the experience more positively than those who imagined one, regardless of whether an agreement (actual or expected) was reached. Finally, participants who had actual conversations reported greater willingness to engage in future cross-ideological communication than those who merely imagined them. This study demonstrates the benefits of face-to-face dialogue in communication about contentious ideological issues and offers a practical paradigm for future studies.
Open Access
Inflammation, Mental Health, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Pilot Study with Child Welfare Service Involved Families
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Horn, Sarah; Fisher, Philip
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has posited unique challenges for families and significantly disrupted several aspects of children’s environments. The pandemic is an ongoing risk experience, with young children being repeatedly exposed to multiple stressors, such as school closures, social isolation, material hardship, and worsening mental health. For child welfare service involved (CWS) families, these stressors may be amplified in both frequency and severity. For both caregivers and children, the pandemic-related cumulative environmental risk may also be reflected in parallel physiologic and neurobiological processes, such as the immune system. Alterations to immune level functioning may in turn correlate to children’s current mental health and impact their future response to available support systems and life stressors. Using a longitudinal design, I evaluated the degree to which parental stressors, parent and child inflammation (C-reactive protein, assayed via dried blood spots), and parent and child outcomes changed from before the pandemic to during the pandemic. I investigated associations underlying these complex relationships. Pre-pandemic data was collected on 22 parent-child dyads between 2016-2019 and pandemic data was collected between August 2021- December 2021.As predicted, household chaos significantly increased during the pandemic but was unexpectedly inversely associated with child’s inflammation. Contrary to predictions, child’s mental health symptoms (i.e., behavioral problems and trauma symptoms) and parenting stress decreased from the pre-pandemic time point to the current study, though this was primarily accounted for by the child’s age. Parent anxiety did not significantly change between timepoints. Parent depressive symptoms increased during the pandemic and parent inflammation significantly interacted with parent depression to predict the intensity of children’s behavioral problems. Parent and child inflammation both increased between the pre-pandemic time point to the current study, though this change was not statistically significant. This initial pilot study identified important patterns among parent mental health, inflammation, and child well-being that should be evaluated in a larger sample. Further research will help to inform intervention efforts designed for parents and children most impacted by the pandemic.
Open Access
Testing Novel Norm Interventions for Promoting Pro-environmental Consumption
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Lieber, Sara; Saucier, Gerard
The purpose of the current project was to investigate how a social psychology approach could be used to develop an effective climate-change mitigation tool. A commonly used technique in the social psychology literature for promoting the adoption of pro-environmental behaviors is the norm intervention. In the current project, three methodological changes to the norm-intervention approach were implemented and tested, including 1) broadening the range of types of norm-intervention conditions, 2) including both a pro-environmental and a self-enhancing framing, and 3) communicating how pre-existing motivations to engage in environmentally harmful behaviors can be achieved by adopting a new pro-environmental behavior. Overall, the pro-environmental framing that has been typically used in prior research was the most effective at improving people’s pro-environmental behaviors. Norm conditions did not appear to persuade people to change their pro-environmental consumer intentions and behaviors by much. Additionally, it was actually people’s values, a dispositional factor, which had the strongest predictive power compared to the study’s attempt to modify people’s pro-environmental outcomes by varying the situational context. Consistent with previous research, biospheric values positively predicted, and egoistic values negatively predicted, pro-environmental consumer intentions and behaviors consistently across most framing and norm conditions.
Open Access
Understanding the Misunderstood Emotion: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Variants of Anger
(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Razavi, Pooya; Srivastava, Sanjay
In cultural accounts and scholarly writings about anger, we see conceptualizations that reflect the existence of two variants: an anger perceived as moral, appropriate, and justified; and an anger considered wrong and unjustified. The present dissertation is focused on finding the boundaries between the two. From a functionalist perspective, it has been proposed that anger in response to harm to others is a justified prosocial reaction. Consistent with this notion, in Studies 1 and 2, I demonstrate that the expressivity norms and social consequences of anger depend on whether it is a response to harm to self or a reaction to harm to others. In the subsequent studies, I take a bottom-up approach to provide an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of the anger variants. Namely, in Study 3, I analyze participants’ narratives about their past experiences of justified and unjustified anger using qualitative thematic analysis, closed-vocabulary, and open-vocabulary text processing methods. In Study 4, I use a prototype approach to differentiate justified and unjustified anger experiences across ten dimensions. I demonstrate that these variants of anger have crucial differences in appraisals, perceptions of the targets, and the intra- and interpersonal consequences of anger. The insights from this research program have implications for constructing theories capable of explaining diverse anger experiences and can inform future interventions to address the maladaptive behaviors associated with anger.
Open Access
Measuring long-term memories at the feature level reveals mechanisms of interference resolution
(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Drascher, Maxwell; Kuhl, Brice
When memories share similar features, this can lead to interference, and ultimately forgetting. At the same time, many highly similar memories are remembered vividly for years to come. Understanding what causes interference and how it is overcome is key to understanding the vast human memory capacity. One unresolved challenge is that interference has primarily been studied with dichotomous measures of memory (“remembered”, “forgotten”). This limits our understanding because memories are not all-or-none, they are comprised of multiple features, each of which can be recalled with different levels of detail or bias. In order to investigate this issue, this dissertation focuses on the use of face stimuli. Faces are a unique class of stimuli for studying memory interference in that they are readily parameterizable and humans are experts at perceiving them. This means that they can be manipulated to be similar enough to cause interference, but subtle differences can also be stored and later probed from long-term memory. This dissertation develops a methodology to create synthetic faces that can be manipulated and probed along a set of perceptually-important feature dimensions. This development process included documenting face landmark positions, sorting faces based on perceived similarity, and collecting subjective ratings on a corpus of 1,148 face images. In a series of three experiments, I then applied this novel methodology to understand how memories change at the feature level when there is interference between highly similar memories. I found two memory changes that specifically occurred when there was interference between highly similar stimuli: (1) during recollection there was a bias to exaggerate the subtle differences and (2) distinguishing features were recalled with greater consistency. Critically, these memory changes were adaptive in that they were associated with less interference-related errors. Finally, in a separate fMRI experiment, I used the same corpus of faces and feature dimensions to reconstruct faces based on patterns of fMRI activity evoked while viewing them. I argue that this approach can be utilized in the future to measure neural representational changes during interference resolution. Together our findings provide important insights into how the memory system resolves interference between highly similar memories.
Open Access
The Role of Hierarchical Structures in Cognition
(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Moss, Melissa; Mayr, Ulrich
Individuals routinely execute complex tasks that involve multiple, dependent levels of information, such as driving a car or cooking dinner. It is amazing that our cognitive system is able to represent such complex, hierarchical tasks without becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information needed to successfully complete the task. Hierarchical tasks require the integration of multiple levels of information. How the cognitive system organizes and uses this hierarchical information is a key question in cognitive psychology. Through disparate literatures in psychology, including serial-order control, task switching, and learning, this phenomenon has been studied from multiple angles. Many findings from these different areas point to the existence of hierarchical cognitive structures for representing complex tasks, though many questions remain. In this dissertation, I first address the question of how relationships between hierarchical components are defined and used by the cognitive system. Then I assess how the cognitive system allocates resources when executing hierarchical tasks. Finally, the question of related cognitive processes and of the application of hierarchical control to different types of complex tasks is addressed, using an individual differences approach.