Although early adversity has been linked to worse mental and physical health in adulthood, few studies have investigated the pathways through which positive and negative dimensions of early experiences can jointly influence psychological well-being in later life. This study examined: (a) profiles of early experiences across multiple domains, (b) the...
The literature on first-generation South Asian American (SAA) mental health is limited despite the increased focus of studies on help-seeking behaviors and subjective well-being over the past decade. Therefore, we designed a web-based survey seeking to address two research questions. Research Question 1 informed Study 1 of this dissertation project:...
Mental health professionals are dedicated to improving outcomes in therapy. Research over the past 50 years has shown psychotherapy to be effective in both improving the functioning of and diminishing the overall distress experienced by clients. Several factors have been constant predictors of outcome in therapy, including length of treatment,...
Ethical and training standards across counseling-related professions contain competencies related to race and ethnicity as necessary research and practice components. One such counseling-related sub-specialty is Play Therapy, which acknowledges that professionals utilizing play therapy techniques must consider racial and cultural context, trauma, and intersectionality when working with children. However, there...
Prior research has demonstrated that unique and salient objects in a visual display may capture an individual’s attention. However, researchers have shown that some individuals, such as those with video game experience, are better at resisting salient-driven capture compared to others (Chisholm et al., 2010). The first manuscript presented in...
Historically, Psychology education about disability focused narrowly on psychiatric and cognitive disabilities. Furthermore, disability tends to be viewed from the medical model, rather than the social model endorsed by disability scholars, which describes disability as primarily socially constructed. Course offerings for the Psychology departments of 98 top-ranked undergraduate programs in...
Prior research has revealed evidence for both proximity seeking and relational distancing following interpersonal rejection (Williams, 2007). The present study explored evidence for both processes in the context of face-to-face interactions. Participants were accepted or rejected by one person then asked to interact with a new relationship partner for the...
The current study examined two family process predictors of parent-reported child sleep problems at 4.5 years in an adoption sample: marital hostility and hostile parenting. Participants were 361 linked triads of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted children. We examined direct and indirect pathways from marital hostility to child sleep...
Although age-related deficits in emotion perception have been established using photographs of individuals, the extension of these findings to dynamic displays and dyads is just beginning. Similarly, most eye-tracking research in the person perception literature, including those that study age differences, have focused on individual attributes gleaned from static images;...
The goal for this study was to examine within-person processes driving individual development related to social goals. We examined how social regulatory processes travel together over time to understand if daily social goal progress is sensitive to variation in experiences of support and hindrance, and the extent to which maintenance...