Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Personality
Description
Sometimes difficult life events challenge our existing resources in such a way that routinized responses are inadequate to handle the challenge. Some individuals will persist in habitual, automatic behavior, regardless of environmental cues that indicate a mismatch between coping strategy and the demands of the stressor. Other individuals will marshal adaptive resources to construct new courses of action and reconceptualize the problem, associated goals and/or values. A mixed methods approach was used to describe and operationalize cognitive shift, a relatively unexplored construct in existing literature. The study was conducted using secondary data from a parent multi-year cross-sectional study of resilience with eight hundred mid-aged adults from the Phoenix metro area. Semi-structured telephone interviews were analyzed using a purposive sample (n=136) chosen by type of life event. Participants' beliefs, assumptions, and experiences were examined to understand how they shaped adaptation to adversity. An adaptive mechanism, "cognitive shift," was theorized as the transition from automatic coping to effortful cognitive processes aimed at novel resolution of issues. Aims included understanding when and how cognitive shift emerges and manifests. Cognitive shift was scored as a binary variable and triangulated through correlational and logistic regression analyses. Interaction effects revealed that positive personality attributes influence cognitive shift most when people suffered early adversity. This finding indicates that a certain complexity, self-awareness and flexibility of mind may lead to a greater capacity to find meaning in adversity. This work bridges an acknowledged gap in literature and provides new insights into resilience.
ContributorsRivers, Crystal T (Author) / Zautra, Alex (Thesis advisor) / Davis, Mary (Committee member) / Kurpius, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
People express themselves differently on social media than in physical life. Some seem as if they were a different person on social media than offline. However, little research has tested whether the perceived similarity between offline and social media contexts is linked to psychological well-being. Whether people perceive themselves as similar between offline and social media contexts may contribute to understanding the links between social media use and psychological well-being. This dissertation addresses whether people perceive themselves as the same on social media as offline (Studies 1 and 2), whether this perceived similarity is linked to psychological well-being (Study 2), and the potential role of generation (Study 2)—focusing on comparisons between digital “natives” (Generation Z) and “immigrants” (Baby Boomers) who show different patterns of social media use. Across two studies of college student and online samples, participants completed measures of the Big Five personality traits specified for offline and social media contexts. Study 2 participants further completed measures of psychological well-being (e.g., depression, life satisfaction, self-esteem) and submitted records of their logged mobile phone use. Findings showed that across generations, people tend to view themselves as similar between offline and social media contexts but not the same in terms of their personality traits. Boomers actually perceived themselves as more similar between offline and social media than Gen Z, even when controlling for logged mobile phone use. Perceived similarity between offline and social media selves was not linked positively to psychological well-being (and there were small generation differences whereby the link appeared to be more negative in Gen Z relative to Boomers). The expectation that perceived similarity between offline and social media should be linked to positive outcomes in terms of psychological well-being may not apply to the context of social media, particularly for Gen Z. Studying psychology in offline and social media contexts separately and jointly will be important to understand the social well-being of the emerging digital world.
ContributorsBunker, Cameron (Author) / Kwan, Virginia (Thesis advisor) / Varnum, Michael (Committee member) / Kenrick, Douglas (Committee member) / Ha, Thao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023