Psychology Theses and Dissertations
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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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What Does Accuracy Get You? Empathic Accuracy During a Negotiation.
(University of Oregon, 2017-05-01)Accurately guessing the thoughts and feelings of another person, known as empathic accuracy, is thought to be a useful skill across many domains. However, the evidence supporting the value of empathic accuracy has been ... -
Understanding Patterns in Infant-Directed Speech in Context: An Investigation of Statistical Cues to Word Boundaries
(University of Oregon, 2017-05-01)People talk about coherent episodes of their experience, leading to strong dependencies between words and the contexts in which they appear. Consequently, language within a context is more repetitive and more coherent than ... -
The Axiology of Necrologies: Using Natural Language Processing to Examine Values in Obituaries
(University of Oregon, 2017-05-01)This dissertation is centrally concerned with exploring obituaries as repositories of values. Obituaries are a publicly-available natural language source that are variably written for members of communities that are wide ... -
Is Belongingness the Key to Increasing Student Wellness and Success? A Longitudinal Field Study of a Social-Psychological Intervention and a University’s Residential Communities
(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)Institutions of higher education are replete with programs designed to position incoming undergraduate students to successfully persist toward a degree and to do and be well along the way. This longitudinal field study of ... -
The Biological, Psychological, and Social Properties Children and Adults Attribute to Virtual Agents
(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)For children, high quality friendships are associated with adaptive social, emotional and academic functioning. There is also evidence that children experience real and imaginary friendships in similar ways, and that ... -
The Effects of Parenting on Well-Being in Families Reunited After Foster Care
(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)Child maltreatment is a costly social problem that carries with it significant risk of poor outcomes across the lifespan. There is a large body of research on risk and protective factors associated with child maltreatment. ... -
IDENTIFYING PERINATAL PREDICTORS OF DISORGANIZED INFANT-MOTHER ATTACHMENT: AN IMPORTANT STEP TOWARD CONNECTING FAMILIES WITH APPROPRIATE EARLY INTERVENTIONS
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)Four decades of research demonstrates that infant-caregiver attachment has important implications for subsequent socio-emotional functioning, with attachment security predictive of a wide range of positive outcomes, and ... -
Social Status across Contexts
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)Social groups without formally designated leaders spontaneously form status-based hierarchies in order to facilitate efficient and effective progress toward a common goal. The prevailing theoretical perspectives about who ... -
First, Do No Harm: Institutional Betrayal in Healthcare
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)Seeking healthcare is an act of trust: patients reveal private information, pain, and vulnerability to physicians who have specialized knowledge and skills. Patients may endure risk and uncertain treatment outcomes based ... -
PARENT-TEACHER ATTITUDES TOWARD SEX EDUCATION AND THE FILM, HUMAN GROWTH
(University of Oregon, 1935-06) -
Susceptibility to Peer Influence, Social Exclusion, and Adolescent Risky Decisions
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)Understanding the mechanisms of poor decision making and risk behavior in adolescence is an important goal. Two important features of adolescence relevant to these concerns are the saliency of social acceptance and increased ... -
The Interaction of Emotion and Gender on the Social Amplification of Risk: Why Twitter?
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)Micro blogging sites such as Twitter have fundamentally changed the way that individuals communicate and spread information, with greater speed and greater representation of how affected individuals feel about given ... -
Military Sexual Assault Prevention Training: Evaluation of the Experimental Leadership Challenge Module
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)This study evaluated a new sexual assault prevention-training module, the Experimental Leadership Challenge (ELC), designed primarily for officers in training at Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs. Students ... -
Relationships and Personality Trait Levels and Change in Adulthood
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)How does the role of parenting and marriage relate to personality development over three age decades in adulthood? To examine this, participants (T1AgeRange = 20 to 55) self-reported on their personality traits (at the ... -
Sharing All the Way to the Bank: A Neuroimaging Investigation of Disclosure, Reward, and Self
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)No neuroimaging investigation to date has considered the effects of social context on self-referential processing, despite the fact that the hypothesis that people engage different selves in different contexts has been ... -
Visual Working Memory Representations Across Eye Movements
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)We live in a rich visual world that we experience as a seamless and detailed stream of continuous information. However, we can only attend to and remember a small portion of our visual environment. The visual system is ... -
Neural Mechanisms of Selective Auditory Attention in Lower Socioeconomic Status Preschoolers: Individual Differences, Genetic Influences, and Gene x Intervention Interactions
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)Selective attention refers to the ability to enhance the processing of relevant stimuli, while suppressing the processing of irrelevant distractors. The neural mechanisms of selective attention are vulnerable in children ... -
The Contribution of Alpha Oscillations to Working Memory Processing
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)Working memory, which enables the temporary storage of information in an active “online” state, is an exceptionally capacity limited system. Given this capacity limit, irrelevant information in our environment must be ... -
Mood Constraint on Self-Appraisal; Toward Brain-Based Assessment of Dysfunctional Thinking
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)Self-evaluation is mood state dependent. A transient decrease in positive self-evaluation bias may co-occur with sad mood. In clinical depression this decrease is lasting and exaggerated. The act of self-evaluation engages ... -
A Two-Factor Structure to the Systemizing Quotient-Revised Differentially Predicts Susceptibility to Local and Global Visual Cues
(University of Oregon, 2014-10-17)Although Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are often characterized by deficits in social domains, increasing evidence suggests that individuals with ASD have perceptual biases associated with a shift from reliance on global ...