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...