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...
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...
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...