Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
Background. Rates of common bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are at an all-timereported high in the United States, while rates of new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
infections are declining. Among HIV-negative men and transgender women who have sex with
men, whom are theoretically at risk for both HIV and bacterial...
This dissertation investigates two ways in which personality psychology should move beyond the traditional approach of measuring personality with broad domains composed of trait descriptors, as exemplified by the Big Five taxonomy. The first study (Chapter 2) suggests an alternative to the traditional approach of aggregating personality items into domains....
The role of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease can expose friends and family caregivers to significant stress over an extended period of time, resulting in a host of negative outcomes like increased depression and anxiety, and diminished quality of life. However, previous studies have found that...
Dynamic decision-making is a complex process that relies on our ability to generate, evaluate and implement a variety of strategies. Understanding how people navigate this process is a difficult problem that requires a wide range of methodologies. This study details a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging that...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...
People are exposed to inaccurate claims and ideas every day, from sources intended to inform, entertain, or do both. A large body of research has demonstrated that exposure to inaccurate statements, even when conveying obviously false ideas, can affect people’s subsequent judgments. Contemporary accounts suggest that these effects may be...
Women living with human immunodeficiency virus (WLWH) have unique health challenges. Understanding psychological strengths that help WLWH manage their disease and improve health outcomes could reduce disease burden. Although spirituality, a multidimensional construct that includes a search for meaning and purpose, connection with a higher dimension, and experiences and feelings...
Orienting attention enables us to select, process, and react to relevant objects in complex environments. Just as we can orient attention in space and to certain object features, recent research has shown that we can also orient attention in time (temporal orienting). This dissertation investigates the mechanisms and the effects...