Matching Items (179)
Description
Recent research on alcohol use among LGB young adults indicates that sexual minority youth are at increased risk relative to their heterosexual peers. One possible contributing factor is that religiosity fails to provide the significant protection for LGB youth that it has been demonstrated to provide in general population samples. Although recent studies provide some support for this hypothesis, there is little research seeking to understand the reasons that religiosity may fail to protect against heavy drinking among LGB youth. The current study attempted to address this gap by examining relations among religiosity, age of self-identification, and alcohol use in a sample of 103 young adults self identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Using multiple regression, we found that religiosity had an indirect effect on alcohol use operating through age of identification as LGB. Higher religiosity was associated with a later age of self-identification, which in turn, predicted greater increases in alcohol use among LGB youth during the transition from high school through college. Exploratory analyses found that gender significantly moderated the influence of age of self-identification on alcohol use such that a later age of self-identification was a risk factor for increased drinking for women, but not for men. The findings have important implications for understanding complex relations between religiosity and alcohol use among LGB youth. In addition, the findings may inform the development of religious support groups for LGB youth that will allow them to experience the benefits of religious involvement that heterosexual youth experience.
ContributorsOng, Thai Quang (Author) / Corbin, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Grzanka, Patrick (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Humans require sufficient social understanding and connectedness to thrive (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The current study evaluates the effectiveness of the Social Intelligence Institute's training program pilot. At a middle school in Phoenix, Arizona, students in a 7th and 8th grade class participated in this pilot program during the spring of 2013. Pre- and post-test questionnaires administered indicated changes in participants reported measures of Perspective Taking, Empathetic Concern, Interpersonal Expectations, and Relationship Self-Efficacy. The program consists of seven modules, each with several sessions, including instructional videos with reflection questions and class discussions. It was predicted that there would be a significant increase in mean scores for the dependent variables in the questionnaire mentioned above from the pre-test to the post-test. However, the null hypotheses were not rejected; statistical significance in t-tests of the measured variables were not met. Yet, the program was more effective for 8th graders than for 7th graders for Perspective Taking. This study of the SI pilot program demonstrates areas of improvement and provides support for wider implementation in the future.
ContributorsBailey, Jonathan Donald (Author) / Zautra, Alex (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Short, Robert (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
This study examined the relation between Religiosity (a motivational system) and Working Memory Capacity (a cognitive system) to determine how they interact to promote goal-directed behavior. Participants completed a religiosity questionnaire and engaged in a battery of tasks that were used to assess their Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and overall ability to maintain goal-directed behavior. The Stroop task was used to examine the participants' ability to maintain goals in the face of interference. It was predicted that religiosity and WMC would be inversely related and that when we controlled for religiosity, WMC would be the only significant predictor of Stroop performance. Furthermore, we hypothesized that religiosity and Stoop would be inversely related, whereas WMC and Stroop would be positively correlated with one another. Religiosity and Stroop performance were each divided into three different components. Religiosity was divided into: Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Motivation, and CARMA. Stroop Performance was measured through Stroop Accuracy, the Stroop Effect, and Post-Error Slowing. The results of our study supported each of our hypotheses. These findings demonstrated that there is a cognitive process underlying motivational systems, such as religion, which affect an individual's ability to sustain goal-directed behavior.
ContributorsFontes, Alejandra Maria (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Increasing vegetable consumption among the adult population is a major goal, as the health benefits of vegetables can decrease one's risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. The current study examined a potential strategy to increase consumption of vegetables by pairing them with a dip and a TV distraction. Based upon results of previous, similar research studies (Blass et al., 2006; Fisher et al., 2012; Johnston et al., 2012; Mittal, Stevenson, Oaten, & Miller, 2011), we hypothesized that eating vegetables with dip or while distracted with a television sitcom would result in increased consumption. We also hypothesized that both dip and a distraction together will synergistically increase vegetable consumption. A total of 126 college students were assigned to one of four conditions: eating vegetables with dip, with dip and a television distractor, with only a television distractor, or without either dip or a television distractor. While television had no significant influence on vegetable consumption, pairing vegetables with a dip significantly increased consumption of vegetables. Pairing vegetables with a dip may prove to be an effective strategy for increasing vegetable intake in the adult population.
ContributorsBeagley, Marin Caroline (Author) / Phillips, Elizabeth Capaldi (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Bajaj, Devina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
This project, which consists of a review article and an applied creative project, proposes mirror neurons as being a physiological mechanism for motor imagery. The review article highlights similarities between motor imagery research and research on mirror neurons. The research is roughly divided into three types of studies: neuroimaging studies, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electromyography (EMG) studies, and electroencephalography (EEG) studies. The review also discusses the associative hypothesis of mirror neuron origin as support for the hypothesis and concludes with an assessment of conflicting research and the limitations of the hypothesis. The applied creative project is an instructional brochure, aimed at anyone who teaches motor skills, such as dance teachers or sports coaches. The brochure takes the academic content of the review and presents it in a visually pleasing, reader-friendly fashion in an effort to educate the intended audience and make the research more accessible. The brochure also prescribes research-based suggestions for how to use motor imagery during teaching sessions and how to get the best benefits from it.
ContributorsNgai, Valerie Christina (Author) / Hoffner, Kristin (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis presents a gas sensor readout IC for amperometric and conductometric electrochemical sensors. The Analog Front-End (AFE) readout circuit enables tracking long term exposure to hazardous gas fumes in diesel and gasoline equipments, which may be correlated to diseases. Thus, the detection and discrimination of gases using microelectronic gas sensor system is required. This thesis describes the research, development, implementation and test of a small and portable based prototype platform for chemical gas sensors to enable a low-power and low noise gas detection system. The AFE reads out the outputs of eight conductometric sensor array and eight amperometric sensor arrays. The IC consists of a low noise potentiostat, and associated 9bit current-steering DAC for sensor stimulus, followed by the first order nested chopped £U£G ADC. The conductometric sensor uses a current driven approach for extracting conductance of the sensor depending on gas concentration. The amperometric sensor uses a potentiostat to apply constant voltage to the sensors and an I/V converter to measure current out of the sensor. The core area for the AFE is 2.65x0.95 mm2. The proposed system achieves 91 dB SNR at 1.32 mW quiescent power consumption per channel. With digital offset storage and nested chopping, the readout chain achieves 500 fÝV input referred offset.
ContributorsKim, Hyun-Tae (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Vermeire, Bert (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Distributed inference has applications in fields as varied as source localization, evaluation of network quality, and remote monitoring of wildlife habitats. In this dissertation, distributed inference algorithms over multiple-access channels are considered. The performance of these algorithms and the effects of wireless communication channels on the performance are studied. In a first class of problems, distributed inference over fading Gaussian multiple-access channels with amplify-and-forward is considered. Sensors observe a phenomenon and transmit their observations using the amplify-and-forward scheme to a fusion center (FC). Distributed estimation is considered with a single antenna at the FC, where the performance is evaluated using the asymptotic variance of the estimator. The loss in performance due to varying assumptions on the limited amounts of channel information at the sensors is quantified. With multiple antennas at the FC, a distributed detection problem is also considered, where the error exponent is used to evaluate performance. It is shown that for zero-mean channels between the sensors and the FC when there is no channel information at the sensors, arbitrarily large gains in the error exponent can be obtained with sufficient increase in the number of antennas at the FC. In stark contrast, when there is channel information at the sensors, the gain in error exponent due to having multiple antennas at the FC is shown to be no more than a factor of 8/π for Rayleigh fading channels between the sensors and the FC, independent of the number of antennas at the FC, or correlation among noise samples across sensors. In a second class of problems, sensor observations are transmitted to the FC using constant-modulus phase modulation over Gaussian multiple-access-channels. The phase modulation scheme allows for constant transmit power and estimation of moments other than the mean with a single transmission from the sensors. Estimators are developed for the mean, variance and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the sensor observations. The performance of these estimators is studied for different distributions of the observations. It is proved that the estimator of the mean is asymptotically efficient if and only if the distribution of the sensor observations is Gaussian.
ContributorsBanavar, Mahesh Krishna (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Duman, Tolga (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
Childhood obesity is a societal cost that affects children across the world. Although childhood obesity affects children of various ethnic backgrounds, childhood obesity is disproportionately prevalent in lower income, minority households. Current interventions for childhood obesity center around a “one size fits all” model that is poor in efficacy amongst minority populations. However, through the examination of parent feeding strategies, the efficacy of interventions may increase. This literature review wishes to examine the role of parent feeding strategies as an indicator of childhood obesity and to examine whether there is an association between parent feeding strategies, child unhealthy eating, weight status, and ethnicity. An examination of the literature on childhood obesity, suggests that childhood obesity can be attributed to genetic, social, and environmental influences. Research has indicated that having parents who exhibit the indulgent feeding style are more strongly associated with child unhealthy eating when compared to other feeding styles. Given this literature review, I predict that the association between indulgent feeding style and child unhealthy eating is stronger among overweight/obese children than normal weight children. Lastly, I conclude that the association of indulgent feeding styles, child unhealthy eating, and child weight status will be more strongly associated amongst Latinx households when compared to African American and White households.
ContributorsBuckner, Nia Lavette (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur (Thesis director) / Nelson, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Recent findings support that facial musculature accounts for a form of phonetic sound symbolism. Yu, McBeath, and Glenberg (2019) found that, in both English words and Mandarin pinyin, words with the middle phoneme /i:/ (as in “gleam”) were rated as more positive than their paired words containing the phoneme /ʌ/ (as in “glum”). The present study tested whether a second largely orthogonal dimension of vowel phoneme production (represented by the phonemes /æ/ vs /u/), is related to a second dimension perpendicular to emotional valence, arousal. Arousal was chosen because it is the second dimension of the Russell Circumplex Model of Affect. In phonetic similarity mappings, this second dimension is typically characterized by oral aperture size and larynx position, but it also appears to follow the continuum of consonance/dissonance. Our findings supported the hypothesis that one-syllable words with the center vowel phoneme /æ/ were reliably rated as more rousing, and less calming, than matched words with the center vowel phoneme /u/. These results extend the Yu, et al. findings regarding the potential contribution of facial musculature to sounds associated with the emotional dimension of arousal, and further confirm a model of sound symbolism related to emotional expression. These findings support that phonemes are not neutral basic units but rather illustrate an innate relationship between embodied emotional expression and speech production.
ContributorsGreenstein, Ely Conrad (Author) / McBeath, Michael (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Patten, Kristopher (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Accurately assessing the sexual interest of others is useful for initiating courtship behaviors that have a chance of being reciprocated, and also potentially critical for survival, particularly for women, where unwanted sexual interest from men can become unwanted sexual advances, sexual assault, and worse. Previous research suggests that men overestimate women’s sexual interest to initiate courtship behaviors even if the probability of their advances being reciprocated is low. This may be because missing a potential mating opportunity is costlier than squandered courtship efforts. However, research on this male sexual overestimation effect has failed to fully appreciate the importance of the motivations and contexts of actors. Here, we primed participants with short-term mating motivations and threat contexts to compare against a control prime condition. We replicated the male sexual overestimation effect in the control and threat prime conditions and found a marginal effect in the short-term mating prime condition. The magnitude of the difference between men’s estimations and women’s self-reports of women’s sexual interest was only significantly different from the control prime in the threat condition. Additionally, we explored some interesting combinations of circumstances. We found that, in a potentially common scenario, where men are primed with short-term mating motives and women are primed with threat, the male sexual overestimation effect replicates and, further, find that this effect disappears when the mindsets of men and women are reversed. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of understanding what the default psychologies of people during the early stages of courtship are, and the effects these psychologies have on estimations of sexual interest.
ContributorsBoyd-Frenkel, Krystina Adriana (Author) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Thesis director) / Barlev, Michael (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05