Many female undergraduate students engage in disordered eating, an umbrella term for sub clinical behaviors such as food restriction, binge eating, over exercising, and general preoccupation with food, weight, and body. Depending on the type of behavior and the length of time engaged with the behavior, disordered eating behaviors can...
About one-quarter of the U.S. adult population lives with a disability, yet ableist presentations of disability as a tragedy in need of a cure (i.e., the medical model) continue to predominate, even in higher education. Previous, qualitative research showed that people with disabilities (PWDs) desire changes in individual and societal...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) samples report elevated rates of substance use and substance use disorder compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts across a wide variety of substances (Connolly & Gilchrist, 2020; Krueger et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2019), in part due to the experience of minority stress....
During the first full school year of the Covid-19 pandemic, two central contexts for adolescent development—home and school—changed utterly. In Oregon, most middle- and high schoolers attended school entirely remotely from the beginning of the pandemic, in March, 2020, through the end of April, 2021, removing both the supports available...
Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) disproportionately effects hematologic cancers when compared to solid tumor malignancies. Self-management of CRF has received increasing attention in solid tumor cancers, however, fatigue self-management in hematologic cancers has received significantly less systematic investigation. The purpose of this research was to determine effective strategies for self-managing fatigue across...
College students today have a lot to contend with in their journey as young adults. The college years are often a transitional time for students, and as such there is a vulnerability to mental health declines. Financial, academic, and social strain are some of the factors that can contribute to...
The imposition of sexually objectifying experiences on women socializes women to engage in self-objectification, or the act of placing greater value in physical appearance than internal well-being. These two studies explored the underlying mechanisms linking self-objectification to negative subjective well-being among a group of young adult women (ages 18-26) and...
Cannabis use rates have been escalating in recent years within the United States. The effects of cannabis on motivation and effort-based decision making have been of increased interest. Amotivational syndrome is a term used to refer to a lack of motivation, passive personality, non-productive behavior, and lowered educational attainment due...
Objective. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit substance in the United States and in 2018 alone, an estimated 40.3 million adults reported using marijuana in the past year. As legalization for medical and recreational marijuana has been expanding, perceived risk of using marijuana has been steadily declining since the...
Jung, Ruthruff, Tybur, Gaspelin, and Miller (2012) reported behavioral evidence that the perception of facial attractiveness requires central attentional resources. We evaluated this conclusion using more sensitive electrophysiological measures. Participants first made an attractiveness rating on faces to validate the assigned level of attractiveness (low vs. high). They then performed...
Marijuana (MJ) is a widely used illicit substance among adolescents and young adults. Frequent MJ use has been associated with impairments in cognitive flexibility and inhibition, both of which play important roles in decision-making. However, the impact of frequent MJ on decision-making performance is mixed and not well understood. The...
The purpose of this dissertation was to contribute to the current understanding about identity development in young adults who experience psychosis and schizophrenia. The article in Chapter 2 Using Authentic Identity Theories to Address the Stigmatization of Young People Who Experience Psychosis and Schizophrenia examined the literature on identity development...
A primary aim of bereavement research is to alleviate suffering and promote well-being at the junction of life and death for the survivor in an attachment relationship. Bereavement research in the last decade has focused primarily on examining grief recovery within the context of intrapersonal processes. This emphasis has often...
The bulk of resilience research has focused on developmental outcomes in a single domain of functioning (e.g., academic achievement), overlooking the complex interplay of positive and negative developmental outcomes that may co-occur within an individual (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). Resilience may strengthen over time and across domains (e.g., psychological...
Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), this study assessed the implications of the division of labor on relationship intimacy for married and cohabitating dual-earner couples (N= 392 couples). The study focused on what mothers and...
The present study characterized physiological responsivity during moral elevation, or elevation, a prosocial emotional state triggered by witnessing displays of altruism and moral beauty. Participants watched video stimuli that induced elevation, or amusement as a control condition, while heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), skin conductance responses (SCR), and...
This research focused on characterizing the relationship between self-enhancing humor, self-compassion, and long-term emotional traits.. It was hypothesized that self-enhancing humor would be related to self-compassion and the related subscales of mindfulness and self-kindness. In addition, it was predicted that self-enhancing humor would relate most strongly to positive emotional traits....
study investigated the validity of the Perceiving Emotions branch of the Mayer-Salovey-
Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). This was conducted through a correlational analysis with
three previously validated measures of nonverbal communication proficiency; The Profile of Nonverbal
Communication (PONS), the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2 (DANVA2), and the Affective
Communication...
Behavioral self-regulation has emerged as an important predictor of academic success as early as preschool. Few studies, however, have examined ways to improve children's behavioral self-regulation in preschool, prior to formal school entry. This dissertation includes two studies examining a pilot intervention using classroom games to improve behavioral self-regulation with...