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Description
Perceived social support, broadly defined as resources or assistance provided by another person, has been consistently identified as a predictor of health and well-being. These outcomes may be partially explained by direct physiological effects, or the effects of perceived social support on psychological mechanisms that influence engagement in health behaviors,

Perceived social support, broadly defined as resources or assistance provided by another person, has been consistently identified as a predictor of health and well-being. These outcomes may be partially explained by direct physiological effects, or the effects of perceived social support on psychological mechanisms that influence engagement in health behaviors, though what exactly these mechanisms are remains unclear. Previous work has proposed that through enhanced self-efficacy and self-esteem, perceived social support increases engagement in health behaviors, though direct evidence for this relationship is limited. Attachment, which plays a crucial role in healthy romantic relationships, may relate to social support’s influence on behavioral outcomes. This study utilized a novel social support priming task to examine if attachment-related working models of romantic partners mediate the relationships among different forms of social support, self-efficacy, and self-esteem in predicting behavioral intentions for self-nominated health goals. Broadly, primed social support positively predicted how supported individuals felt, which in turn predicted working models of their romantic partners. Working models significantly predicted self-esteem, self-efficacy, and intentions to work toward a personally relevant health goal. Self-esteem and self-efficacy also predicted behavioral intentions.
ContributorsVornlocher, Carley (Author) / Shiota, Michelle N (Thesis advisor) / Kwan, Virginia Sy (Committee member) / Ha, Thao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
When questions about a person’s mental state arise in court, psychologists are often called in to help. Psychological assessment tools are routinely included in these evaluations to inform legal decision making. In accordance with the Daubert standard, which governs the admissibility of expert testimony, courts are obligated to exclude evidence

When questions about a person’s mental state arise in court, psychologists are often called in to help. Psychological assessment tools are routinely included in these evaluations to inform legal decision making. In accordance with the Daubert standard, which governs the admissibility of expert testimony, courts are obligated to exclude evidence that relies on poor scientific practice, including assessment tools. However, prior research demonstrates that psychological assessment tools with weak psychometric properties are routinely admitted in court, rarely challenged on the basis of their reliability, and if a challenge is indeed raised, often still admitted (Neal et al., 2019). Is neuropsychological assessment evidence in particular vulnerable to the same pitfalls? The present research aimed to 1) quantify the quality of neuropsychological assessment evidence used in court, 2) evaluate whether courts are calibrated to the quality of these tools through the rate and success of legal admissibility challenges raised, and 3) compare forensic mental health evaluators’ experiences and practices with regard to the quality of neuropsychological versus non-neuropsychological assessment tools. Neuropsychological tools appeared to perform worse than non-neuropsychological tools in terms of psychometric quality. However, in a case law analysis, significantly fewer challenges were observed to the legal admissibility of neuropsychological tools than to non-neuropsychological tools. To protect the legitimacy of the legal system and prevent wrongful decisions, it is critical that the evidence on which psychologists’ expert opinions are formed is scientifically valid, and that judges and attorneys adequately scrutinize the quality of evidence introduced in court.
ContributorsMathers, Elizabeth (Author) / Neal, Tess M.S. (Thesis advisor) / Burleson, Mary (Committee member) / Roberts, Nicole (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Military sexual trauma (MST) is a risk factor for suicide among service members/veterans. Research reported that 41.79% of male and 63.58% female MST survivors were exposed to pre-military sexual trauma, making MST a revictimization experience. Unfortunately, little is known about mechanisms of the association between revictimization and suicide risk among

Military sexual trauma (MST) is a risk factor for suicide among service members/veterans. Research reported that 41.79% of male and 63.58% female MST survivors were exposed to pre-military sexual trauma, making MST a revictimization experience. Unfortunately, little is known about mechanisms of the association between revictimization and suicide risk among MST survivors. One possible mechanism is posttraumatic cognitions (PTCs), which include the survivor’s (1) negative thoughts and beliefs about themselves, (2) negative thoughts and beliefs about the world, and (3) self-blame. The current study examined each of the PTC subscales as mediators of the association between sexual revictimization and suicide risk. Participants were 383 service members/veterans reporting a history of MST that involved assault (50.65% female), recruited via Qualtrics., Inc. in 2021. Participants completed self-report questionnaires assessing demographics, suicide risk, history of sexual victimization (MST only, MST and pre-military sexual victimization), and PTCs. Of these, 340 (88.8%) reported a history of MST and pre-military victimization and comprised the revictimization group. Parallel mediation analysis with suicide risk regressed on each of the PTCs subscales and covariates accounted for 43.48% of the variance, and revealed that negative cognitions about the self had a significant indirect effect on the association between revictimization and higher suicide risk, above and beyond negative cognitions about world and self-blame. Targeting negative cognitions about the self among sexual revictimization survivors may be an effective therapeutic strategy to most effectively reduce suicide risk. Cognitive Processing Therapy may be particularly useful among revictimization survivors given the focus on altering posttraumatic cognitions.
ContributorsXu, Bingyu (Author) / Blais, Rebecca (Thesis advisor) / Gewirtz, Abigail (Committee member) / Edwards, Mike (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
This study investigated whether the patterns of direct association, and of gene-environment interaction (GxE), between family variables (i.e., parenting, family conflict, and attitudinal familism) and youth externalizing behaviors differed across racial/ethnic groups. The sample was composed of 772 twin pairs from the Adolescent Brain Development Study (ABCD) and analyses were

This study investigated whether the patterns of direct association, and of gene-environment interaction (GxE), between family variables (i.e., parenting, family conflict, and attitudinal familism) and youth externalizing behaviors differed across racial/ethnic groups. The sample was composed of 772 twin pairs from the Adolescent Brain Development Study (ABCD) and analyses were run on three racial/ethnic groups (White [n=1023], Black/African American [n=220], Hispanic [n=152]; Mage=10.14 years). Youth reports of parental warmth, parental monitoring, family conflict, parent-reported attitudinal familism, and parent reports of youth externalizing behaviors were collected at baseline when children were 10 years old. Regression analyses tested the direct association between the family variables and youth externalizing behaviors, and moderated heritability models tested for GxE. Family conflict was associated with more externalizing behaviors for White youth, and parental warmth was associated with fewer externalizing behaviors for Hispanic youth. Parental attitudinal familism composite and familism support were associated with fewer externalizing behaviors for Black youth but more externalizing behaviors for Hispanic youth. We found no effects for parental monitoring, familism obligations, and familism referent on youth externalizing behaviors. Additive genetic and non-shared environmental influences explained the variance in youth externalizing behaviors across all groups. For White youth, parental warmth, parental monitoring, and familism support moderated additive genetic (A), shared-environmental (C), and non-shared environmental (E) influences on externalizing behaviors, and familism obligations moderated C and E influences. Results from exploratory moderated heritability analyses conducted for the Black/African American and Hispanic samples are discussed. Altogether, these findings highlight the multiple avenues through which the family context can impact the development of youth externalizing behaviors, and reinforce the need to examine how these relations differ across racial/ethnic groups.
ContributorsTrevino, Angel Daniel (Author) / Su, Jinni (Thesis advisor) / Lemery-Chalfant, Kathryn (Committee member) / Causadias, Jose (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
As threats emerge and change, the life of a police officer continues to intensify. To better support police training curriculums and police cadets through this critical career juncture, this thesis proposes a state-of-the-art framework for stress detection using real-world data and deep neural networks. As an integral step of a

As threats emerge and change, the life of a police officer continues to intensify. To better support police training curriculums and police cadets through this critical career juncture, this thesis proposes a state-of-the-art framework for stress detection using real-world data and deep neural networks. As an integral step of a larger study, this thesis investigates data processing techniques to handle the ambiguity of data collected in naturalistic contexts and leverages data structuring approaches to train deep neural networks. The analysis used data collected from 37 police training cadetsin five different training cohorts at the Phoenix Police Regional Training Academy. The data was collected at different intervals during the cadets’ rigorous six-month training course. In total, data were collected over 11 months from all the cohorts combined. All cadets were equipped with a Fitbit wearable device with a custom-built application to collect biometric data, including heart rate and self-reported stress levels. Throughout the data collection period, the cadets were asked to wear the Fitbit device and respond to stress level prompts to capture real-time responses. To manage this naturalistic data, this thesis leveraged heart rate filtering algorithms, including Hampel, Median, Savitzky-Golay, and Wiener, to remove potentially noisy data. After data processing and noise removal, the heart rate data and corresponding stress level labels are processed into two different dataset sizes. The data is then fed into a Deep ECGNet (created by Prajod et al.), a simple Feed Forward network (created by Sim et al.), and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network for binary classification. Experimental results show that the Feed Forward network achieves the highest accuracy (90.66%) for data from a single cohort, while the MLP model performs best on data across cohorts, achieving an 85.92% accuracy. These findings suggest that stress detection is feasible on a variate set of real-world data using deepneural networks.
ContributorsParanjpe, Tara Anand (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis advisor) / Roberts, Nicole (Thesis advisor) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
With its ever-increasing prevalence throughout the world, social media use has become a primary means of communication and connection with others. Much research has been dedicated to the topic of social media use, suggesting both positive and negative outcomes for those who are online more frequently. While uploading content and

With its ever-increasing prevalence throughout the world, social media use has become a primary means of communication and connection with others. Much research has been dedicated to the topic of social media use, suggesting both positive and negative outcomes for those who are online more frequently. While uploading content and interacting with posts that others have created is associated with social comparison and identity formation, there is little research to date that examines the relationship between social media use and an individual’s meaning in life. One of the greater benefits of social media use is the ease with which people can curate their own personal identities, and this has led to an increase in users—particularly young adults—posting sexualized images of themselves for social gain. Untested in prior research is the relationship between self-objectification via social media and life meaning. For my thesis, I proposed a moderation model in which participants who reported higher levels of self-objectified beliefs and online habits would also report lower levels of meaning in life. Furthermore, I hypothesized that there would be unique differences between genders and sexual orientations that would also serve as moderators, such that heterosexual women and LGBQ men would demonstrate the lowest levels of life meaning when reporting high levels of self-objectification. Results from analyses found that while there was no significant relationship between active social media use and meaning in life, there was a significant three-way interaction between objectified social media use, gender and sexual orientation, and meaning. Findings from this study provide support for previous research that has found LGBQ men and heterosexual women face the most adverse effects from self-objectification. These results suggest that self-objectified social media use can negatively impact life meaning for certain populations.
ContributorsMostoller, Alexis (Author) / Mickelson, Kristin (Thesis advisor) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / Burleson, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Multiple psychological frameworks have been developed to conceptualize how people internalize colonial logics about their cultural identity and culture, and how these logics in turn influence their psychological wellbeing. The extant literature has also offered various empirically supported frameworks to understand the role colonialism may have on the cultural identity

Multiple psychological frameworks have been developed to conceptualize how people internalize colonial logics about their cultural identity and culture, and how these logics in turn influence their psychological wellbeing. The extant literature has also offered various empirically supported frameworks to understand the role colonialism may have on the cultural identity and psychological wellbeing of Puerto Ricans, a community still enduring colonial oppression. This study analyzes cultural control as a mechanism of internalized colonialism, or more specifically, what messages Puerto Ricans internalize about their culture. The current qualitative research involved individual phone interviews with 12 self-identified Puerto Ricans living in Arizona and Florida. This study used qualitative thematic analysis of the transcripts, and hypothesized that Puerto Rican participants will internalize colonial logics. This study contributes to the foundational understanding of Puerto Ricans’ perception of culture, so a more complete framework can be utilized by clinicians who provide therapy to this unique and understudied population.
ContributorsKasad, Karishma (Author) / Capielo Rosario, Cristalís (Thesis advisor) / Truong, Nancy (Committee member) / Bludworth, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Cyberbullying has become increasingly prevalent, difficult to detect, and harmful to its victims. Whereas correlates of cyberbullying victimization and perpetration have been studied extensively, there has been less research on the critical role that bystanders to cyberbullying instances can play. This study explored the extent to which Big Five personality

Cyberbullying has become increasingly prevalent, difficult to detect, and harmful to its victims. Whereas correlates of cyberbullying victimization and perpetration have been studied extensively, there has been less research on the critical role that bystanders to cyberbullying instances can play. This study explored the extent to which Big Five personality traits, social dominance orientation, narcissism, moral disengagement, self-control, and cyberbullying severity level are related to bystander behavior in cyberbullying situations. Adults in the U.S. took part in an online survey in which they were presented with a series of 12 simulated social media interactions in the form of screenshots that involved exchanges between two social media users. Each screenshot depicted one of three distinct levels of cyberbullying severity: none, low severity, and high severity. For each screenshot, participants were asked to report the likelihood that they would respond in a range of ways as a bystander. Participants then completed a series of individual difference scales. The results indicated that as the severity of the cyberbullying depicted in a screenshot increased, bystanders were more likely to support the victim, flag the post, and confront the bully, and less likely to be passive observers or support the bully. Higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were associated with a lower likelihood of remaining a passive observer, while social dominance orientation and moral disengagement were positively correlated with bystander interaction in support of the bully. Additionally, agreeableness and extraversion were positively correlated with the likelihood of supporting the victim; and agreeableness was positively correlated with the likelihood of confronting the bully. No significant relationship was discovered between self-control, narcissism, and cyberbystander behavior. This research offers experimental validation for the predictive value of both cyberbullying severity and individual differences for understanding diverse forms of cyberbystander behavior.
ContributorsLi, Haojian (Author) / Hall, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Powell, Derek (Committee member) / Kuo, Trudy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
The inspiration to undertake this pilot study came after observation and reflection by the clinician-researcher, a board-certified music therapist who has used the harp as the primary instrument when facilitating sessions, on hundreds of music therapy sessions that took place at a facility for behavioral health and chemical dependency.

The inspiration to undertake this pilot study came after observation and reflection by the clinician-researcher, a board-certified music therapist who has used the harp as the primary instrument when facilitating sessions, on hundreds of music therapy sessions that took place at a facility for behavioral health and chemical dependency. It was observed that the use of improvised harp music as a therapeutic intervention within the context of a music therapy session seemed to relax patients who reported that they were nervous or anxious, and it was also noted that following a listening exercise that consisted of improvised harp music, patients appeared calmer and reported that they felt more comfortable. This research aims to determine if improvised harp music at the opening of a music therapy session creates a calmer environment in which to share information, compared with a guided verbal relaxation and ambient ocean drum sounds for the opening of the music therapy session. Social-behavioral research was conducted in the form of a fifty minute individual music therapy session with six subjects. Each therapy session used improvised music and verbal processing with the therapist, with three subjects in the experimental group and three in the control group. Each individual rated two different types of affective responses on scales of one to ten and completed a five-question survey at the end of the session. All the research subjects showed an increase in positive affect at the end of the music therapy session.
ContributorsRaunikar, Mary Frances (Author) / Rio, Robin (Thesis advisor) / Aspnes, Lynne (Committee member) / Norton, Kay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Millions of men and women experience intimate partner violence (IPV), including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse behaviors within romantic relationships each year. IPV negatively impacts individuals’ lifelong physical and mental health. Decades of research on IPV have shown that negative family-of-origin experiences in early childhood and adolescence, particularly coercive and

Millions of men and women experience intimate partner violence (IPV), including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse behaviors within romantic relationships each year. IPV negatively impacts individuals’ lifelong physical and mental health. Decades of research on IPV have shown that negative family-of-origin experiences in early childhood and adolescence, particularly coercive and harsh parenting, are significant predictors of future IPV involvement. Deviant peer relationships also predict future IPV, due to peer socialization of coercive romantic relationship norms. However, much less is known about protective factors for IPV. One potential key protective factor is peer prosocial socialization, which protects against violent behavior, but has not been investigated in the context of coercive parenting on IPV. Thus, the proposed study investigates how coercive maternal parenting during adolescence predicts adulthood IPV involvement, and whether adolescent peer prosocial socialization serves as a protective factor. The sample consists of 371 individuals (Mage at T1 = 16.98 years, SD = 0.76; Mage at T2 = 28.99 years, SD = 0.81; 48.2% White, 29.9% Black, 9.7%) Hispanic/Latino, 10.5% other). A latent moderated structural equation model revealed that coercive maternal parenting did not significantly predict IPV in adulthood, and there was not a significant interaction between coercive maternal parenting and prosocial peers. Prosocial peers were a direct predictor of IPV, indicating that peer socialization of prosocial behaviors and norms in adolescence was associated with lower IPV in adulthood. Findings emphasize the importance of peer relationships in socialization of prosocial norms in adolescence in reducing adulthood IPV involvement.
ContributorsMaras, Olivia (Author) / Ha, Thao TH (Thesis advisor) / Grimm, Kevin KG (Committee member) / Lemery-Chalfant, Kathryn KL (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023