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....