In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and... and An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
Sexual minority individuals are at increased risk for negative health outcomes relative to heterosexual individuals (Meyer, 2003), and accumulating evidence indicates experience the greatest burden (for a review, see Feinstein & Dyar, 2017). These health disparities are due, in large part, to stigma-related stressors (e.g., discrimination; Meyer), and bisexual individuals...
Negative body image in women has been a prevalent issue throughout history. Societal expectations have left many women feeling insecure and dissatisfied. Current research has indicated that oftentimes negative body image is passed down from mother to daughter. While there is a variety of research on mother-daughter interactions with body...
We think data is definitive, but our perception of it contains bias from expectations and motivations. For example, when Democrats and Republicans view the same depiction of global temperature trends, Democrats see an increasing trend, while Republicans see overall flatness. Could prior beliefs bias our perception of relations depicted in...
Life stories are strong predictors of identity, since the specific narratives adults tell about themselves represent individual differences in personality characteristics. One way researchers analyze these life stories in adults is by measuring the story’s coherence, which is comprised of a clear context, a linear chronology, and an explanation of...
Memory systems research has established the importance of two distinct types of memory systems in the brain: explicit and implicit. While a robust literature exists on individual differences in the explicit domain (Chapter 3), research on individual differences in implicit learning remains relatively limited. The key question guiding the investigation...
Students often change majors during college, and most workers change jobs throughout their careers. Yet the diverse opportunities for entering natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are often overlooked during college and beyond. This dissertation therefore analyzed four large nationally representative datasets to characterize the pathways for joining...
There has long been an interest in the idea of generativity the concern for and commitment towards promoting the well-being of future generations. In Western societies, generativity can be characterized through societal contributions and acts dedicated towards others. Since the early 1960s, when Erikson proposed generativity as the major developmental...
Research shows that psychometrically-assessed spatial abilities (e.g., spatial visualization and spatial orientation) can be improved through training, and that some training yields improvements that are transferable to novel contexts and tasks (Uttal et al., 2013). While the training of these spatial abilities may be valuable for some forms of STEM...
Research has found that both schizophrenia populations and populations at clinical high risk for psychosis show alterations in facial affect expressivity, specifically blunting. However, it is unknown whether these alterations occur prior to onset, or whether they develop as a consequence of psychosis onset processes. The current study sought to...
Past research suggests that stereotypes about collective identities (i.e. race, ethnicity, and gender) shape aspirations. However, less is known about how actual representation of collective identity relates to aspirations. The proportion of an identity in a given career will be used as an indicator of numeric representation and I hypothesize...
Personality traits and personal values represent individual differences that influence many forms of behavior including psychopathology (Hanel & Wolfradt, 2016; Jarden, 2010; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006; Schwartz, 2006). Extensive research has highlighted the importance of personality traits in the development of psychopathology in children. However, the association between values and...
Shared emotions are associated with thriving in relationships (Anderson, Keltner & John, 2004; Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradbury, 2007), and greater liking for new individuals (Larson & Gardner, 2015). However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well-understood. Emotions are fleeting experiential states and, seen through this lens, finding someone...
This dissertation explores human coordination in rhythmic, verbal, and spatial activity, and how coordination in one of these modes may subsequently impact behavior in another mode. My research examines what effects non-conversational actions have on the alignment of spatial perspectives during conversation. I hope to clarify how data about non-linguistic...
The availability and importance of data is accelerating, and our visual system is a critical tool for understanding it. The research field of data visualization seeks design guidelines – often inspired by perceptual psychology – for more efficient visual data analysis. Data visualization can borrow phenomena, tasks, and methods of...
This dissertation examined gender differences in youth externalizing comorbidity via three studies. Study 1 was a meta-analytic review that provided the first robust estimate of gender differences in youth externalizing comorbidity. Studies 2 and 3 unpacked these gender differences at two levels of analysis: personality (Study 2 and 3) and...
Our visual system organizes lines, shapes, and colors into groups, objects, and scenes. This dissertation explores how these higher-level organizations arise, focusing on the contribution of feature-based attention, our ability to selectively enhance a color, shape, or orientation across our visual field. I will present evidence that feature-based attention enables...
Psychophysiological investigations of human sexuality have revealed more complexity than might be naively assumed. The sexual arousal patterns of heterosexual and homosexual men are relatively straightforward, with both groups showing substantial responses to erotic stimuli of their preferred sex and much smaller responses to their nonpreferred sex. Bisexual men, in...
Across all levels of education, persistent academic achievement gaps exist between students from higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Despite these daunting odds, many students from lower-SES backgrounds manage to maintain high levels of academic motivation and persist in the face of difficulty. One factor that has been shown...
Humans possess the ability to infer and track mental states, which allows for successful interaction in the social world. The collection of processes and representations that makes this possible is referred to as a theory-of-mind (ToM). A large body of work has examined how these abilities develop from infancy to...
Efficient and accurate processing of internally- and externally-generated information is enhanced by the presence of multisensory signals that can provide redundant information about percepts or events. However, efficient usage of multisensory signals requires implicit perceptual knowledge of the potential or likely relationships between signals encoded within each sensory modality. If...
Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) has enormous potential to become a paradigmatic model of individual differences. However, while its foundations in experimental genetic and neurophysiological research on nonhuman animals are among the strongest in personality psychology, it has perhaps not gained the foothold within the field that it deserves. It is...
Prejudice based on a person’s low socioeconomic status (SES) has been largely understudied in social psychology. In my dissertation research, I argue that understanding a perceiver’s mental model of SES is crucial to explaining anti-poor prejudice. I borrow from work in anthropology to characterize two main mental models of SES—ascribed...
Background: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a significant public health issue. Previous research on the pathophysiology of depression in adults has demonstrated abnormal neural processing associated with depression symptomatology including alterations in reward and aversion circuits. Loss aversion (LA), or the concept that individuals evaluate outcomes based on losses and...
Research in cognitive and developmental psychology typically focuses on urban middle-class, European American populations. Although there has been a recent surge in psychological research that focuses on cultural variation (Cohen & Kitayam, 2007), little is known about the practices that support this variation. Knowledge about these practices is critical for...
Although chronic stress has been shown to be significantly associated with depression, this relationship has not received adequate attention, particularly in adolescent samples. One gap lies in the examination of whether particular domains of chronic interpersonal stress are uniquely related to risk for depression. Furthermore, the degree to which chronic...
The majority of research on voluntary visual attention has focused primarily on specific attentional processes. While we know much about individual attentional abilities such as shifting attention among spatial locations, tracking multiple objects and maintaining attention for specific targets, we know little about how these attentional processes relate to one...
Most cognitive research on conceptual structure has studied undergraduate populations and either natural (biological) or artificial (experiment-specific) categories. This project investigates how people with extensive, rich knowledge about a complex real-world domain organize and use that knowledge. The research extends prior work on differences among types of experts within biological...
The human brain shows great flexibility to adjust itself to dynamically ever-changing environment. Despite more than 100 years of cognitive brain research, the dynamical aspect of cognitive process has remained poorly understood compared to the static aspect of that. This dissertation concerns the dynamic character and functional significance of periodically...
Although anxiety and depression are clearly distinct from a phenomenological perspective, discriminating these constructs empirically has often been difficult (Clark & Watson, 1991). Both the tripartite model of psychopathology (Clark & Watson, 1991) and the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis (Beck, 1976; Beck & Clark, 1988) were forwarded in an effort to...
On average, homosexual people are more gender nonconforming than heterosexual people. They also show increased distress, possibly due to their stigmatized minority status. Not surprisingly, gender nonconformity and psychological distress may be related, particularly in homosexual men (e.g., Skidmore, Linsenmeier, & Bailey, 2006), although the mechanisms explaining this relationship have...
In the same way that a sculptor shapes a block of stone to reveal the ideal form within, one's relationship partner can help one to become more like one's ideal self (Drigotas, Rusbult, Wieselquist, & Whitton, 1999). This interpersonal process is called "the Michelangelo phenomenon." The current research examines whether...
A striking aspect of human cognition is our capacity for acquiring and using complex knowledge structures, from learning the rules of algebra, to understanding the causal workings of a combustion engine or the structure and processes of the U.S. Congress. These structured representations underlie our ability to generate new inferences,...
Child maltreatment and violence are two major public health concerns in the United States. The relationship between maltreatment and subsequent violent behavior, also referred to as the "cycle of violence", is not well understood. The present study examines whether a history of maltreatment predicts violent behavior in a sample of...
Behavioral activation (BA) trains depressed clients to engage in more positive activities in order to increase their experience of pleasure and accomplishment, thereby reducing depression. Recent research suggested that BA might be as effective in treating depression as current leading treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and antidepressant medication (Jacobson,...
The present studies aimed at developing a lie detection paradigm immune to countermeasures, while the theoretical issues of top-down influence of task requirement on subliminal semantic priming were investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented supraliminal acquaintance and non-acquaintance names, which were subliminally primed by another acquaintance or non-acquaintance names....
"Anosognosia" or lack of insight into one's own illness is not uncommon in central nervous system disease. Neurodegenerative diseases of the brain that cause dementia are often associated with anosognosia. A lot is known about anosognosia in Alzheimer's disease but relatively little is known about lack of insight into illness...
Why would someone's judgments and choices disregard the consequences he or she cares about most? Considerable research appears to show that in many contexts, people show precisely this paradoxical tendency. Researchers interpret these results as showing that people sometimes make choices on the basis of moral factors -- factors that...
The current research tested the principles of role congruity theory of prejudice, which states that prejudice arises from an incongruity between a group stereotype and social role characteristics (i.e., the attributes and behaviors prescribed by the social role), such that prejudice occurs when members of a group enter or attempt...
The aim of the present investigation was to examine the nature of individuals' parasocial relationships (one-sided attachments to media figures, Horton & Wohl, 1956). Five studies were designed to assess the prevalence and strength of individuals' attachments to their favorite television characters, manipulate exposure to the character or control targets,...
Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight,...
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
The representation and communication of spatial information is important to the functioning of children and adults in the physical world. Yet little research has included both areas in the same studies. This research program was designed to investigate both the communication and representation of spatial information within a developmental context....
Recent work exploring children's verb learning in the laboratory has generated some interesting contradictions. Some studies have found that children as old as 4 years old are unable to reliably map a novel verb to an action (e.g., Kersten & Smith, 2002; Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005), even though much...
A survey of adults (n = 706) found low levels of awareness of two social movements aimed at decreasing weight stigma: the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size movement. For HAES, providing a brief story of an overweight person who endorses HAES improved perceptions of the movement.
According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether...
Marital emotional functioning is one of the most important predictors of marital outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction), which in turn has important consequences for wellbeing and health factors for both spouses and their children. Thus far, negative emotions (e.g., anger) have been the central focus in distinguishing dissatisfied from satisfied couples...
Affective science has long been interested in the coherence between different emotion response systems (e.g., subjective emotional experience, behavior, physiology). Although evolutionary functionalist accounts of emotion hold that emotional coherence should be related to greater adaptation, few studies have analyzed links between emotional coherence and wellbeing. Thus, in this laboratory-based...
This dissertation presents a program of research on cultural cognition of the natural world, involving long-term research with indigenous Ngöbe partner communities (Panama) and selected comparisons to Western samples (US). In two series of experiments focused on agency concepts, we show that cultural frameworks recruit distinct principles for inferring agency...
Traditionally, research on perception and sensory systems has considered the senses as independent and modular functions that only converge after sufficient processing in unisensory areas. Recently, however, that view has been called into question with a number of demonstrations of multisensory interactions that may occur as early as primary cortex....
A failure to effectively regulate emotions elicited by a stressful life event contributes to symptoms of psychopathology. This regulatory failure may result from a deficit in executive control. For some individuals, executive control is impaired following stress exposure. Thus, for some individuals, when executive control is needed to regulate emotions...
This dissertation aims to address a gap in the literature regarding the effect of the achievement-focused student identity on prosocial values and behaviors, specifically among students who predominantly value prosociality. Largely, research on identity and motivation addresses academic outcomes and psychological well-being outcomes (Settles, Sellers, & Damas, 2002; Jaret &...
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...
Exposure to violence, which includes child abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic or community violence, crime, and sexual assault, is a national concern. Over the course of a year, 68% of children under age 17 are exposed to at least one form of violence (Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, & Hamby, 2015). Young children...
Interpersonal hierarchies are one of the most fundamental structures by which human interactions are organized (Yu & Kilduff, 2019), and dual-strategies theory suggests that humans navigate these hierarchies through the use of dominance (force and coercion) or prestige (display of valued traits to gain respect; Maner & Case, 2016). In...
Introduction: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a disorder of gut-brain interaction associated with reduced quality of life, increased rates of depression and anxiety, and high economic burden to society and the individual. Current behavioral interventions, which target well-known symptom exacerbating factors such as catastrophizing and gastrointestinal- specific anxiety, have demonstrated...
Difficulties in prosody (e.g., intonation, volume, rate), turn-taking, and overly formal speech constitute common social communication deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can significantly hinder social interactions (Paul et al., 2009). Subtle parallel differences in social communication have also been noted in parents of individuals with ASD, suggesting that...
The overall goal of this dissertation, comprised of three empirical studies, was to examine the role of social support as a source of resilience in the face of two chronic stressors: low socioeconomic status and first-generation college student status. Study 1 of this dissertation sought to examine neighborhood support from...
Conversation is an important part of human life. Given globalization and the numerous languages around the world, it is increasingly likely that we will be communicating with others speaking in their second language (L2) rather than their first language (L1). In these situations, communication may require more effort. However, people...
The advent of advanced computing and AI has led to social technologies becoming agentic teammates in human-autonomy teams. Interpersonal trust, vital for team functioning, is crucial in determining these teams' success or failure. Trust, while essential, can be easily broken and requires maintenance and repair. This dissertation addresses two questions:...
Interactions between working memory and long term memory systems are still not well understood, as the systems have long been thought to be mostly separate. An interesting intersection of these memory systems is domain-specific expertise, whereby individuals are able to show supra-span memory for information related to the area of...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political...
Competitive gaming, or esports, is a high-skill endeavor embedded in a highly gendered social context. Using multiple methodological approaches, this dissertation argues that gender-gaming inequality is a result of changeable stereotypes that impact women throughout their lives. Specifically, gender-gaming stereotypes limit women’s initial access to gaming, discourage their continued interest...
Rising social inequality across economic, gender, and racial lines is a pressing issue of our time. Despite widespread agreement that inequality exists, there are stark ideological disagreements about its extent, its victims, and about what – if anything – should be done to address it. Prior work demonstrates that the...
Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning, purpose, and temporal coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Moreover, narrative identity has been found to be associated with...
We structure our lives around social groups – belonging to them and thinking about them. In this dissertation, I develop a new stereotype content measure to assess the attributes associated with groups in America today, propose and support a theory of sociocultural essentialism, and explore the strategic activation of sociocultural...
A greater number of strategies in one’s coping repertoire (i.e., the number of diverse strategies used across stressors or use habitually across several situations) may be beneficial and a precursor to coping flexibly across situations (Bonnano & Burton, 2013). Indeed, previous studies have demonstrated a benefit of having larger number...
Much prior research on memory systems has focused on establishing dissociations between different types of memory based on behavior, subjective experience, and the brain: explicit memory depends on the medial temporal lobe and is thought to operate consciously through a relatively slower processing bottleneck, while implicit memory is a term...
Health literacy has been shown to be a key component of patient understanding of medical diagnoses, adherence, and self-efficacy. Limited health literacy has been associated with a number of negative outcomes— including more severe illness, increased use of emergency services, and mortality. The concept of mental health literacy has arisen...
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...
Recent studies have begun to examine white matter connectivity aberrations in psychiatric populations, such as major depressive disorder. Several studies have found reduced white matter integrity (WMI) in depressed samples, though the location of this reduction is not clear. Incorporating symptom measures of depression severity and rumination may allow for...
This dissertation examines caregiving contexts in early childhood. Specifically, I look at how caregiving contexts are related to or influenced by other caregiving contexts and broader social contexts. The dissertation is composed of an introductory chapter that provides a theoretical overview and summary of the dissertation followed by two additional...
Agency is a broad orientation aimed to advance the self and one’s own abilities, whereas communion is a broad orientation aimed to interact with others and connect to people in a larger social context. In Chapter 1, I introduce a new framework to conceptualize the constructs of agency and communion....
Relative to individual level exposures (such as childhood trauma, life events, and bullying exposure), contextual or systems level environmental factors have received relatively less attention in the psychology literature. While landmark epidemiological and sociological studies have uncovered key insights with regards to systems, this knowledge has not often been translated...
People need to feel authentic at work, but authenticity is not always a priority in organizations. This dissertation shows feeling authentic is essential to feeling human. Chapter 1 provides an overview of research on authenticity and self-dehumanization, describing why feeling inauthentic leads to self-dehumanization. Chapter 1 empirically supports the association...
The concealed information test (CIT) has garnered more empirical support than other methods of recognition detection and has a firm theoretical foundation. Because it occurs involuntarily, even when recognition is denied, P300 amplitude is a robust indictor of concealed information. Although the P300-based CIT shows great promise for field use,...
The groups that we identify with help to make us who we are. This dissertation investigates the impact of the way that each of us understands those identities, through the newly introduced construct of collective self-concept clarity (Gardner & Garr-Schultz, 2017). Two aspects of collective self-concept clarity are introduced and...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
Individuals experience a wide variety of emotions in their everyday lives. Some experience more variety, or complexity, than others, called emotional complexity. There is a body of research that suggests that emotional complexity is beneficial for mental and physical health; yet more recent work has called these associations into...
How do people make meaning of risk-taking? The present dissertation proposes a normative lay theory of risk-taking. The proposed model promotes the following core ideas: (a) Risk-taking is generally an ambiguous construct and requires the illumination of at least some dimensional parameters to disambiguate the risk behavior and risk-taker; (b)...
The study of employee engagement and its consequences in the workplace has gained traction in the business world over the past decade, with dramatic claims of the direct consequences of engagement including lower absenteeism, higher sales, improved productivity, and increased profitability for organizations that are more engaged (The Gallup Organization,...
Sexual orientation is conventionally understood as relative attraction to men versus women. It has recently been argued that male sexual orientation in particular can be extended to include other dimensions of sexual attraction besides gender, such as sexual maturity and location. With respect to the dimension of location, most men...
Speech recognition in complex acoustic environments is dependent on myriad bottom-up (i.e., peripheral) and top-down (i.e., central) processes. While bottom-up processes remain fairly stable during childhood, the development of top-down processes persists into young adulthood. The immaturity of top-down processes places younger children at considerable risk for poorer speech recognition...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
An important tenet in memory research is the dissociation between explicit and implicit memory systems in the brain. Whereas a robust literature exists on the consolidation of memories in the explicit domain, research on implicit memory consolidation is relatively understudied, particularly questions about what is being consolidated and the mechanisms...
Selective attention enables people to focus on a small number of objects, features, or events with good resolution. Sometimes attention may also be less selective and distributed across numerous items, which allows more information to be processed at a lower resolution. The degree to which attention is more or less...