Matching Items (309)
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- All Subjects: psychology
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Arizona State University
- Status: Published
Description
This study was designed to investigate whether workplace positivity of full-time workers was related to health ratings. Positivity was conceptualized by a high rating of perceived work-performance, and work-engagement as defined by the Utrecht Work-Engagement Scale, including vigor, dedication, and absorption (Schaufeli, & Bakker, 2004). Health was measured utilizing the RAND SF-36 health survey including the eight subscales: overall, general health, physical and social functioning, emotional well-being, role limitations due to physical health or emotional problems, energy or fatigue, and bodily pain. All measures were collected simultaneously. It was predicted that perceived work-performance and all measures of work-engagement are positively associated with the aforementioned health ratings. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher (positive) perception of work-performance and vigor were positively related to health ratings. Absorption was negatively related to health ratings. Dedication was only negatively related to physical functioning. These findings suggest that not all measures of positivity in the workplace are related to better health. Implications and future directions are discussed.
ContributorsFlores, Melissa Ann (Author) / Vargas, Perla A (Thesis advisor) / Burleson, Mary H (Committee member) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Intimate couple relationships are integral to the lives of most adults, and a typical stepping-stone in beginning a family. Thus, it is imperative to understand personal and interpersonal factors associated with healthy, long-lasting relationships (e.g., relationship satisfaction). One factor that may promote healthy relationships is mindfulness. Mindfulness has been linked to positive physical and psychological outcomes (see Kabat-Zinn, Lipworth, & Burney; Carmody & Baer, 2008), but has been minimally studied in the context of couple relationships. Research has also identified the corrosive effect of hostile communication cues on relationships (Gottman, 1994). The current study examined associations between mindfulness, corrosive communication cues, and relationship satisfaction in the context of cohabiting couples using actor-partner interdependence models (APIM; Kenny, Kashy, and Cook, 2006). Self-report questionnaires assessed five aspects of mindfulness: observing, describing, awareness, non-judgment of inner experience, and non-reactivity to inner experience. Women's non-judgment of inner experience, one of five mindfulness facets, was positively associated with the women's own relationship satisfaction. Other facets of mindfulness were not significantly associated with relationship variables. These findings and considerations for future research are discussed.
ContributorsFord, Annalise (Author) / Shapiro, Alyson (Thesis advisor) / Iida, Masumi (Thesis advisor) / Christopher, F (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
When discussing human factors and performance, researchers recognize stress as a factor, but overlook mood as contributing factor. To explore the relationship between mood, stress and cognitive performance, a field study was conducted involving fire fighters engaged in a fire response simulation. Firefighter participants completed a stress questionnaire, an emotional state questionnaire, and a cognitive task. Stress and cognitive task performance scores were examined before and after the firefighting simulation for individual cognitive performance depreciation caused by stress or mood. They study revealed that existing stress was a reliable predictor of the pre-simulation cognitive task score, that, as mood becomes more positive, perceived stress scores decrease, and that negative mood and pre-simulation stress are also positively and significantly correlated.
ContributorsGomez-Herbert, Maria Elena (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Becker, Vaughn (Committee member) / Branaghan, Russell (Committee member) / Hyunjin, Song (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Although research has documented robust prospective relationships between externalizing symptomatology and subsequent binge drinking among adolescents, the extent to which internalizing symptoms increase risk for drinking remains controversial. In particular, the role of anxiety as a predictor of binge drinking remains unclear. Recent evidence suggests that one possible reason for these mixed findings is that separate dimensions of anxiety may differentially confer risk for alcohol use. The present study tested two dimensions of anxiety - worry and physiological anxiety -- as predictors of binge drinking in a longitudinal study of juvenile delinquents. Overall, results indicate that worry and physiological anxiety showed differential relations with drinking behavior. In general, worry was protective against alcohol use, whereas physiological anxiety conferred risk for binge drinking, but both effects were conditional on levels of offending. Implications for future research examining the role of anxiety in predicting drinking behavior among youth are discussed.
ContributorsNichter, Brandon (Author) / Chassin, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Barrera, Manuel (Committee member) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Previous research has shown that people can implicitly learn repeated visual contexts and use this information when locating relevant items. For example, when people are presented with repeated spatial configurations of distractor items or distractor identities in visual search, they become faster to find target stimuli in these repeated contexts over time (Chun and Jiang, 1998; 1999). Given that people learn these repeated distractor configurations and identities, might they also implicitly encode semantic information about distractors, if this information is predictive of the target location? We investigated this question with a series of visual search experiments using real-world stimuli within a contextual cueing paradigm (Chun and Jiang, 1998). Specifically, we tested whether participants could learn, through experience, that the target images they are searching for are always located near specific categories of distractors, such as food items or animals. We also varied the spatial consistency of target locations, in order to rule out implicit learning of repeated target locations. Results suggest that participants implicitly learned the target-predictive categories of distractors and used this information during search, although these results failed to reach significance. This lack of significance may have been due the relative simplicity of the search task, however, and several new experiments are proposed to further investigate whether repeated category information can benefit search.
ContributorsWalenchok, Stephen C (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Hout, Michael C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Effects of early internalizing symptoms on speed of transition through stages of alcohol involvement
Description
Alcohol use disorders and internalizing disorders are highly comorbid in adults, but how this comorbidity unfolds over development is not well understood. Previous retrospective studies in adults have shown that internalizing problems are associated with a rapid transition from first drink and first regular drinking to the onset of alcohol dependence. Some results also suggest that internalizing is a stronger predictor of rapid transitions through later stages of alcohol involvement, but these stage-specific effects have not been explicitly tested. The present study utilized a prospective dataset to investigate effects of adolescent internalizing symptoms on speed of transition through multiple stages of alcohol involvement. Specifically, it was hypothesized that greater early internalizing symptoms would predict a later age of first drink, a slower transition from first drink to first binge, and a faster transition from first binge to first dependence symptom. The moderating effects of gender were also examined. Data were from a longitudinal study of children of alcoholics and matched controls (n = 454) followed from late childhood to mid-life. Linear regression and Cox regression were the primary analytic strategies. Covariates were externalizing symptoms, family history of alcohol use disorders, and gender. Analyses also controlled for age at which the participant entered each interval. Generally, stage-specific hypotheses concerning the effects of internalizing were not supported. Internalizing symptoms marginally predicted an earlier age of first drink and a faster transition from first binge to first dependence symptom, and significantly predicted a faster transition through the overall interval from first drink to first dependence symptom. Internalizing was a stronger predictor of rapid transitions for women, and the effects of internalizing were not specific to early or later stages of alcohol involvement among women. These results suggest that early internalizing problems are a general risk factor for a rapid transition through all stages of alcohol involvement, and this risk may be stronger for women than for men. These results have important implications for our theoretical understanding of the relationship between internalizing problems and alcohol use disorders as well as prevention and intervention efforts targeting these problems.
ContributorsMenary, Kyle (Author) / Corbin, William R. (Thesis advisor) / Chassin, Laurie A (Committee member) / Meier, Madeline H (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Students' ability to regulate and control their behaviors during learning has been shown to be a critical skill for academic success. However, researchers often struggle with ways to capture the nuances of this ability, often solely relying on self-report measures. This thesis proposal employs a novel approach to investigating variations in students' ability to self-regulate by using process data from the game-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) iSTART-ME. This approach affords a nuanced examination of how students' regulate their interactions with game-based features at both a coarse-grained and fine-grain levels and the ultimate impact that those behaviors have on in-system performance and learning outcomes (i.e., self-explanation quality). This thesis is comprised of two submitted manuscripts that examined how a group of 40 high school students chose to engage with game-based features and how those interactions influenced their target skill performance. Findings suggest that in-system log data has the potential to provide stealth assessments of students' self-regulation while learning.
ContributorsSnow, Erica L (Author) / McNamara, Danielle S. (Thesis advisor) / Glenburg, Arthur M (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Protectors who do harm are often punished more severely because their crime is perceived as a betrayal of trust. Two experiments test whether this will generalize to protectors who incur harm while serving in their protective role, and if not, whether collective guilt for the harm they suffered provides an explanation. Study 1 tested competing hypotheses that a veteran (versus civilian) with PTSD would be punished either more harshly because of the trust betrayal, or more leniently because of increased guilt about the harm the veteran suffered during war. Men and women were both more lenient toward a veteran (versus civilian) but this effect was mediated by collective guilt only among men. In Study 2, guilt inductions increased leniency among participants less likely to classify the veteran as an in-group member (women, low national identifiers), but not in those who are more likely to classify the veteran as an in-group member (men, high national identifiers), who were lenient without any guilt inductions.
ContributorsJay, Alexander Charles (Author) / Salerno, Jessica M (Thesis advisor) / Schweitzer, Nicholas (Committee member) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Attachment relationships serve a variety of important functions for infants and adults. Despite the importance of attachment relationships in adults, the mechanisms that underlie the formation or maintenance of these kinds of relationships outside of romantic relationships remains chronically understudied. The current research investigated whether the mechanism of synchrony, which is associated with attachment formation in the parent-infant literature, may still be tied to attachment in adults. To measure this association, these studies showed participants videos to prime synchrony, and then measured activation of attachment concepts in a word completion task. The results of Experiment 1 showed that attachment style moderated the effects of the video prime such that those who were securely attached showed activation of attachment concepts while watching the Synchrony video. Those with a preoccupied attachment style showed activation of attachment concepts when they viewed the Asynchrony video. Those with a dismissive attachment style showed an unhypothesized activation of social distance concepts when viewing the Synchrony video. Experiment 2 suggested an overall effect of the Synchrony video on activation of attachment concepts. However, there was no effect of attachment style on these results. Limits of these studies and future directions are discussed.
ContributorsYee, Claire Ida (Author) / Shiota, Michelle L (Thesis advisor) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Committee member) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
An emerging literature on the relation between memory and importance has shown that people are able to selectively remember information that is more, relative to less important. Researchers in this field have operationalized importance by assigning value to the different information that participants are asked to study and remember. In the present investigation I developed two experiments, using a slightly altered value-directed-remembering (VDR) paradigm, to investigate whether and how value modifies the dynamics of memory organization and search. Moreover, I asked participants to perform a surprise final free recall task in order to examine the effects of value in the recall dynamics of final free recall. In Experiment 1, I compared the recall dynamics of delayed and final free recall between a control and a value condition, in the latter of which numbers appeared next to words, in random order, denoting the value of remembering each word during recall. In Experiment 2, I manipulated the order of presentation of the values by adding an ascending and a descending condition where values were presented in either an ascending or a descending order, respectively. Overall, my results indicated that value affected several measures of delayed and final free recall, without, in most cases, taking away the serial position effects on those same measures.
ContributorsStefanidi, Aikaterini (Author) / Brewer, Gene A. (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015