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...