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Publication Influence of Cognitive Flexibility on Gender Stereotyping of Spatial Activities(2025-02) Vizzini, VictoriaEarly experiences with spatial toys are often associated with involvement in STEM subjects that rely on spatial skills. Spatial toys related to the development of spatial skills are predominantly gender-stereotyped as masculine, often leading girls to have fewer early experiences with them. Previous research has suggested that cognitive flexibility can impact how children view gender roles across development and their willingness to engage with gender-inconsistent beliefs, like choosing to engage with male-typed spatial toys. Thus, cognitive flexibility may be crucial to understanding how to overcome the gender stereotyping of spatial activities and bridge the gender gap in STEM fields. This study examined if cognitive flexibility influences the extent to which children gender stereotype spatial activities. It also examined if cognitive flexibility helps children use counter-stereotypic information. In one task, children made selections between a male-typed and a female-typed spatial toy when presented with a fictional child’s name and gender. In another task, the children experienced a similar setup but were presented with an additional piece of information: a counter-stereotypic interest. For the third task, we presented children with a more open-ended context where they sorted spatial toys into boxes (boy, girl, or both). The Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) was used to measure cognitive flexibility as it requires children to flexibly switch in order to match several objects. Results showed that there was a trending, but not significant relationship in a forced choice context, but there was a significant relationship between cognitive flexibility and gender stereotypic responses in the presence of counter stereotypic information. When given more open-ended measures, children with higher cognitive flexibility were more likely to make gender neutral responses than children with lower cognitive flexibility.Publication THE PARADOXICAL INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL IDENTITY THREAT ON SELF- GROUP DISTANCING IN THE CONTEXT OF GENDER DISCRIMINATION(2025-02) Setia, AanchalThe present study (N=347) investigates the effect of social identity threat and meritocratic beliefs on women’s willingness to align themselves with male leaders and distance themselves from female leaders. Employing a 2 between subjects design, I manipulated the social identity threat in an online study where participants applied for a leadership position and completed a measurement to assess their belief in meritocracy. Subsequently, participants were rejected from the leadership position, either because of gender discrimination (threat condition) or due to a schedule conflict (no-threat condition). Post rejection, participants were asked to respond to several questions on their motivation to interact with male vs. female leaders, motivation to interact with gender stereotypic vs. non-stereotypic leaders, inclusion (vs. exclusion) of male and female leaders within one’s self-concept, associating the self with stereotypically masculine vs. feminine attributes and perceived dissimilarity and detachment from the female leaders. Results showed that the participants showed a movement towards the male leaders, but they did not show any distancing from female leaders.Publication Uneasy on the Eyes: Manipulating the Appeal of Androgynous Faces Through Categorization(2025-02) Nikiforova, MarHow does the subjective experience of categorization interact with the perception of gender? When observers perform a binary categorization task on stimuli manipulated along a continuous dimension, stimuli that can unambiguously fit into either category elicit more positive appraisals than those that cannot. A potential mechanism for this phenomenon is that the relative processing fluency of the categorization adds a positive valence to the associated stimuli (Winkielman et al., 2003). This extends to social categories: when observers sort human cross-gender facial blends according to conventional binary gender (”male” vs ”female”), androgynous faces are subsequently rated as as less attractive (Owen et al., 2016). We expand this paradigm by adding label conditions designed to increase the fluency of the androgynous faces rather than the gender-conforming ones. While the alternate categorical labels reliably changed RT and attractiveness ratings given to the stimuli, overall response patterns did not straightforwardly fit a task-based fluency account alone. Through modeling, we explore multiple ways to best characterize the observed trends.Publication Stressful Life Events and Postpartum Depressive Symptoms: Resilience among Black Mothers(2024-09) Venter, CiaraUpwards of 40% of Black women within the U.S. experience postpartum depression compared to 12.5% of the general population. While studies have shown that a significant predictor of postpartum depression is the experience of stressful life events, less research has focused on developing a better understanding of contextual and personal factors that protect Black women from poor mental health outcomes, particularly during the perinatal period. Using a sample of 482 rural, low-income African American mothers, the current study examined (a) whether stressful life events predicted levels and changes in depressive symptoms across the postpartum period and (b) whether social support and a sense of mastery moderated the association between stressful life events and depressive symptoms across the postpartum period. Results from path analyses revealed that the experience of multiple life stressors was associated with higher levels of depression at each time point. Contrary to what was expected, mothers’ depression increased over time, and the depression levels for mothers with multiple stressors did not increase as steeply as those with fewer life stressors. Moderation analyses revealed that social support and mastery moderated the positive association between stressful life events and depression at two months postpartum, such that under conditions of high stress, mothers who reported more support and more mastery had lower levels of depression than mothers who reported low support and low mastery, respectively. Furthermore, stressful life events and mastery interacted to predict the rate of change in depression over time in an unexpected way. Specifically, while mothers with high stress and low mastery experienced the highest levels of depression across the postpartum period as hypothesized, these women experienced less steep increases in their depression over time compared to high stress mothers with high mastery as well as mothers with low stress and either level of mastery. Explanations for these findings are further discussed. Focusing on within-group differences among African American mothers rather than between-group comparisons with other racialized groups can help to better inform perinatal interventions aimed at identifying conditions that enhance Black mothers’ mental health and well-being.Publication Self-narration, Prefrontal Cortex Functional Connectivity, and Psychopathology in Early Childhood Development(2024-09) Gonzalez, KatieSelf-narration is the universal experience of talking to oneself mentally or verbally, in order to process and interpret the world. In response to emotional challenges, emotional self-narration is a crucial tool one uses to regulate and make sense of one’s emotions and the inability to successfully regulate and express one’s emotions is at the forefront of a myriad of disorders. While most of the literature examining self-narration has focused on adolescents and adults, little attention has been given to the development of this crucial skill, the neural networks that support it, and its relation to early symptoms of psychopathology, particularly in young children. The goal of the present study was to examine the relation between psychopathology symptoms and emotional self-narratives, as well as the interplay between simultaneous prefrontal cortex functional connectivity and emotional self-narration skill in preschool age children. Fifty-three children aged 3 to 5 completed two cartoon self-narration tasks while lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) data was recorded via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). fNIRS data was used to calculate lPFC functional connectivity and children’s responses were coded using criteria that examined emotional content and complexity within self-narratives. Early symptoms of psychopathology were examined using parent questionnaires. Children who expressed more emotional narratives had lower levels of psychopathology, while children who expressed less complex and emotionless narratives had higher levels of psychopathology and decreased lPFC functional connectivity. Our findings suggest that the link between self-narratives and psychopathology in early childhood may be a possible etiological factor in early psychopathology. Our findings also suggest that underlying neural mechanisms may indicate potential abnormal neural patterns that contribute to children’s difficulty in expressing emotional self-narrations.Publication "Leap before you look": Conditions that Promote Implicit Visuomotor Adaptation without Explicit Learning(2024-05) Savalia, TejasHow do we learn to drive a car? A teacher sits next to us and gives explicit instructions about the components that we need to interact interact with, the rules of the road, and directions to turn. But there are parts of driving that we get used to without such explicit instructions like adjusting to minor curves in the road, adjusting to the steering height and weight, adjusting how hard we push the breaks and the gas pedal to stop. In this thesis, through simpler versions of learning tasks and computational modeling, I investigate how the explicit and implicit learning components interact to allow us to adapt to changing environments. Specifically, this thesis, while focusing on motor learning, investigates the nature of instructions, the magnitude of required adaptation, and the nature of feedback we receive as key factors that control the proportion of how much we rely on our implicit and explicit learning. The first chapter introduces the implicit vs explicit learning literature in context of a simplistic laboratory task called “Visuomotor Adaptation". Chapter 2 discusses a version of the Visuomotor adaptation task study that was conducted and analyzed to assess the importance of task instructions, and adaptation magnitude on implicit and explicit learning. Finally, chapter 3 modifies the visuomotor adaptation task and discusses the effect of the nature of feedback participants received while they were adapting to the experimentally induced motor manipulation.Publication The Role of Family Routines and Rituals in the Psychological Well Being of Emerging Adults(2012-01-01) Yoon, YeselAdolescence and emerging adulthood are both critical transition phases wrought with developmental changes and challenges. One of the major developmental tasks that families of children, adolescents and emerging adults deal with is facilitating the development of emotion regulation. The practices that families engage in that attempt to create order and stability within the family—their routines and rituals—may be one key family variable that helps develop better emotion regulation. Family routines and rituals tend to create a more stable environment, which in turn may predict better outcomes for individuals (Crespo, Davide, Costa & Fletcher, 2008; Fiese, 2007; Leon & Jacobvitz, 2003). The current study examined the extent to which routines and rituals in the family of origin during adolescence contributed to longer term, post-adolescent positive psychological outcomes in emerging adults. The current study used a sample of 492 college students between the ages 18-24 years old. The college students completed a series of online questionnaires about their family routines and rituals during adolescence, their current psychological well being and emotion regulatory skills. A subset of college student had their parents participate in the study who completed similar online questionnaires about their past family routines and rituals. When emerging adults ascribed greater meaning to past family routines and rituals, this was directly related to greater psychological well being. Emerging adults and parents ascribed a different level of meaning to the family routines and rituals, which predicted greater psychological well being of emerging adults. The results of the study showed that emotion regulation was a significant mediator of the relationship between family routines and relationships and emerging adults’ psychological well being. The findings of the current study support the notion that mechanisms such as family routines and rituals that families implement are related to better outcomes for individuals. When families engage in meaningful family practices during adolescence, the impact of these practices can carry over into emerging adulthood.Publication Are Age-Related Changes in Sleep Magnified in Individuals with Depressive Symptoms?(2008-01-01) Akerstedt, Anna MPublication How Your Spouse May Save You: An Analysis of Early Environment, Physiological Stress Responses, and Spousal Support(2012-09) Roth, Dana P.Growing up in an adverse early environment is related to a number of negative health outcomes later in life, and dysregulation of the HPA axis may serve as the means by which this process occurs (Repetti et al., 2002). Indeed, early environment has been linked to altered physiological responses to general stressors in adulthood, but it remains unclear whether physiological responses to marital stress are also affected. Thus, the present work addresses two central questions in 129 newlywed couples: (1) How does growing up in an adverse early environment relate to physiological stress responses (assessed by cortisol) to a relationship conflict? (2) Does having a supportive spouse moderate this relation? The results provide some support for the link between early environment and cortisol reactivity among husbands, and marginal support for the moderating role of spousal support.Publication The Psychometric Properties of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children: Disruptive Behaviors in Preschool-Age Children(2012-01-01) Rolon Arroyo, BenjaminThe present study examined the psychometric properties of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC-IV), specifically the disruptive behavior module for preschool-age children. The participants were 128 children (M = 4.43 years, SD = .54; Girls = 63) of African American (n = 37), European American (n = 41), Latino American (n = 38), and Mixed Ethnic (n = 12) background from Western Massachusetts. The overall internal consistency, concurrent validity, and predictive validity of the ADHD and ODD subsections were examined. Gender and ethnicity were examined as potential moderators of those as well. The DISC-IV and a behavior rating scale for teachers were administered at the beginning of the school year and the administration of the rating scale occurred again at end of the school year. The DISC-IV ADHD and ODD subsections exhibited acceptable overall internal consistency. The concurrent validity of the ADHD subsection was also found, but not for the ODD subsection. Most importantly, both DISC-IV subsections exhibited overall predictive validity, above initial teacher ratings. Partially supporting our hypotheses, ethnicity moderated the concurrent validity of the DISC-IV ADHD subsection, with DISC-IV scores of African American children having a stronger association with teachers’ ratings; boys also exhibited a stronger association than girls although not reaching significance. Also approaching significance, the DISC ADHD subsection appeared to predict year-end teacher ratings better for African American children than for European American and Latino American children. Overall, the DISC-IV was found to be a psychometrically reliable and valid diagnostic instrument for preschool-age children.Publication Parenting Style Discrepancies: A Comparison of Inter-ethnic and Intra-ethnic Couples(2008-02) Thakar, DharaParenting and family interactions are thought to play a critical role in children’s development and are often key targets in clinical interventions for children with behavioral problems. Multiple factors are thought to determine patterns of parenting behavior including child and parent characteristics as well as broader social and cultural factors (Abidin, 1992; Belsky, 1984; Maccoby, 1992). Because culture is thought to influence parenting, it is possible that inter-ethnic couples may experience a greater discrepancy than intra-ethnic couples in their parenting styles, but research considering the role of different cultural backgrounds and parenting has been sparse. The current study examined whether inter-ethnic couples showed greater differences in their parenting styles than couples in which parents were of the same ethnic background, and if so, whether consequences of discrepancy were reflected in children’s behavior. Marital conflict and the number of years spent co-parenting were also examined as potential predictors of variability between couples. Results indicated no significant differences between inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic couples in parenting style, and no significant associations between discrepancies in parenting style and child behavior. Marital conflict was found to be significantly associated with discrepancy in warmth for fathers in intra-ethnic relationships, in support for the spillover hypothesis (Margolin, 2001). This is the first study to examine parenting discrepancies between inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic couples. This research contributes to a growing understanding of the co-parenting relationship among inter-ethnic couples and has important clinical implications for family intervention with multi-cultural families.Publication Dishes and Diapers: The Division of Labor and Marital Quality across the Transition to Parenthood(2012-09) Newkirk, Katherine EThis study examines relationships between the division of housework and childcare and marital love and conflict and perceived fairness as a mediator of those relationships. Gender role ideology is also examined as a moderator of the relationships between the division of labor predictors and perceived fairness. To this end 112 working-class, dual-earner couples having their first child were interviewed at three time points during the first year of parenthood after mothers returned to work. Findings indicate that wives’ reported greater marital love when their husbands performed more housework and more childcare, with fairness as a mediator of those relations. Husbands’ greater participation in both housework and childcare was directly related to their reports of marital love. For marital conflict, wives reported less conflict when husbands performed more childcare with perceived fairness as a mediator. Husbands reported less conflict when they performed a greater proportion of housework, with wives’ perceived fairness as a mediator. The division of childcare and perceived fairness were more strongly related for wives with egalitarian gender role ideology than for more traditional wives.Publication Culture and the Emotion Socialization of Preschoolers(2012-09) Lugo-candelas, Claudia IObjective:The present study examined mothers’ emotion socialization of 3-year–old children with behavior problems, to determine whether emotion socialization practices, as well as the relation between these practices and child functioning, varied across ethnicities. Method: Participants were 156 preschoolers with behavior problems. Mothers were European American (n = 98), Latina American (n = 40; predominately Puerto Rican), and African American (n = 18). Audio taped mother-child interactions were coded for emotion socialization behaviors. Results: Overall, this study provided evidence for both differences and similarities across ethnicities on parental emotion socialization practices. Ethnic differences in use of emotion socialization practices were only found for mothers’ emotion focused reactions, minimizing reactions, and non-responses to negative affect. However, ethnic differences emerged in the relations between emotion socialization practices and child functioning. Several emotion socialization parental behaviors were differentially related to current child internalizing and externalizing problems across ethnic groups. Conclusions: Results provide some support for the existence of cultural differences in emotion socialization practices and their associated child outcomes.Publication Infant Attention to Foreground Television and Relationship to Joint Visual Attention(2008-01-01) Demers, Lindsay B.The research described here examines infant and parent attention to a familiar baby video. Also of interest, was if infant viewing behaviors influenced parent viewing behaviors, and vice versa. Subjects were 12-15 and 18-21 month-old infants who were observed watching a familiar baby video with one parent. Overall infants and adults spent less than one-third of the time watching the television. This measure varied greatly across dyads. However, there was a strong, positive relationship within dyads, suggesting that infants and parents may be influencing each other’s viewing behavior. Further analyses revealed that there was a social component that influenced when infants and parents initiated and terminated looks to the television that extended above and beyond the common influence of the formal features of the program. Though this influence was mutual for both the infant and parent, overall, infants tended to ‘lead’ their parents’ looks more frequently than parents’ led their infants’.Publication A Distibutional Analysis of Frequency and Predictability Effects on Fixation Durations in Reading(2012-01-01) Benatar, AshleyThe most important predictors of fixation durations in reading are a word’s frequency of occurrence (as measured by counts in large corpora) and its predictability in context (as measured by cloze probability). Two recent eye-tracking studies investigated distributional effects of word frequency (Staub et al, 2010) and word predictability (Staub, 2011) separately. The present study investigates the distributions associated with these two variables when they are manipulated in the same experiment. When considering the overall means, frequency and predictability showed significant main effects (LF>HF; LP>HP), with no interaction. In addition, we found evidence supporting the previous distributional findings where frequency and predictability affect all fixations (causing a shift in the distribution), but frequency also has a special influence on the longest fixations. Interestingly, the model fits suggested that there was an interaction between the predictors in first fixation duration. However, this effect was not visible in the vincentiles (which are plots of the actual data) and it appeared to be conditional on four particular subjects. Since we did not find convincing evidence of an interaction in our distributional analysis, the present findings provide support for theories of fixation durations whereby frequency and predictability combine additively.Publication The Priming Effects of Video Viewing on Preschoolers' Play Behavior(2012-01-01) Lavigne, Heather JThis thesis investigates the relationship between educational television content and children‘s play behaviors immediately after viewing. Children ages 41-43 months of age were randomly assigned to view a television program with predominantly object-constructive or social dramatic content. All children participated in a period of video viewing, approximately 25 minutes in length, followed by a 30-minute play session. Each participant was subsequently administered a brief card sorting task to assess categorical knowledge of constructive and social activities. Each child‘s session was coded for looking at the television, toy choice, and play content (constructive or social-narrative). Video viewing condition and the interaction between categorical knowledge and condition significantly predicted children‘s subsequent play content. Taken as a whole, these findings imply that short-term priming effects of educational video viewing on children‘s play are present in 42-month old children but that these effects are moderated by children‘s categorical understanding of TV content.Publication Coalition or Competition?: The Effects of Category Salience on Inter-Minority Prejudice(2012-01-01) Gupta, ManishaTraditionally, the discourse on race relations in the U.S. has focused on relations between Whites and ethnic minorities, with little being known about the antecedents and consequences of inter-minority prejudice. This paper will present results from two studies that were conducted with Asian, Black, and Latino undergraduate students, assessing motivations to embrace a collective identity with ethnic minorities (versus express prejudice towards other ethnic minority groups). Blacks,’ Asians’, and Latinos’ ethnic group identification, as well their identification with a superordinate "people of color" (POC) category were assessed. POC identification was found to be closely aligned with one's political beliefs (e.g., perceptions that the system is unjust, and that racial minorities face discrimination in the U.S.) For Asian participants, POC identification predicted more positive attitudes towards other ethnic minority groups perceived to face similar discrimination in the U.S. (e.g., Latinos and Blacks.) However, Blacks' identification as POC actually predicted negative attitudes towards Asians, who were not seen as facing the same barriers to upward mobility as other racial minority groups in the U.S. The results indicate that the politics of POC identification might actually contribute to increased tension between ethnic minorities in the U.S.; implications for more effecting coalition building between racial minorities in the U.S. are also discussed in this paper.Publication The Influence Of Perceptual Narrowing On Emotion Processing During Infancy(2012-01-01) Vogel, Margaret WDuring the first year of life, infants’ capacities for face processing are shaped by experience with faces in their environment; a process known as perceptual narrowing. Perceptual narrowing has been found to lead to a decline in infants’ abilities to identify and differentiate faces of other races. In the current study, it is hypothesized that this decline may also lead to differential processing of emotion information in own- versus other-race faces. In the current research, we recorded electrophysiological data (Event-related potential; ERP) from 5- and 9-month-old infants while they were presented with paired emotion non-verbal sounds and faces. ERPs in response to the sounds suggest that both 5- and 9-month old infants differentiate happy and sad sounds. The pattern of results, however, is different across ages. ERPs in response to the faces suggest that whereas 5-month-olds exhibit differential responses to happy and sad faces for both the N290 and P400 components, 9-month-olds did not differentiate happy and sad faces. Nine-month old infants did exhibit a great P400 in response to own- relative to other-race faces. These results suggest that although both 5- and 9-month olds differentiate happy and sad emotional sounds, their processing of emotion faces differs.Publication Responses to Group-Based Provocations: The Role of Identification and Emotion Regulation(2012-02) Steele, Rachel RThe studies originated from research on group-based emotions and examine emotions and emotion regulation in the context of group-based provocations. In addition, the studies examined the ways in which people identify with their group and how that affects responses to group provocations. I hypothesized that the process of ruminating in contrast to reappraising would increase anger and negative action intentions and attitudes towards the provoking outgroup. I hypothesized that individual differences in ingroup glorification and trait emotion regulation would moderate the relationship between a group provocation and affective and attitudinal responses such that high glorification and high rumination would lead to more anger and more negative attitudes and behavioral intentions. The participants were University of Massachusetts-Amherst undergraduates in the psychology participant pool who identified as United States citizens. Study 1 was an experimental three-level design (rumination, reappraisal control). Study 2 was an experimental three-level design (provocation, no provocation, control). Study 1 demonstrated that response to provocation was affected by the emotion regulation manipulation and level of ingroup identification. Study 2 revealed that individual differences in chronic emotion regulation style and identification interacted to predict responses to the provocation. Implications of the research are discussed.Publication Effects of Knowledge and Anxiety on Willingness to Screen for Alzheimer's Disease(2012-01-01) Lundquist, Tessa SWhile the prevalence rates of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are increasing, the screening rates for the disease are low. A major barrier to AD screening is older persons’ lack of knowledge about the disease (Ayalon & Arean, 2004). Older adults have anxiety about AD (Corner & Bond, 2004; Devlin et al., 2007), but less is known about how that anxiety may affect their screening behavior. The current study measured AD Knowledge and AD Anxiety and determined how these factors were related to Willingness to Screen for AD in a sample of midlife and older adults (N = 96, mean age = 62.45, range 55 to 86). It was expected that greater AD Knowledge would be associated with more Willingness to Screen and that higher AD Anxiety would be associated with less Willingness. Further, it was hypothesized that AD Anxiety would moderate the relationship between AD Knowledge and Willingness. AD Knowledge and Trait Anxiety were not significant predictors of Willingness to Screen, while AD Anxiety was positively associated with Willingness. AD Anxiety moderated the relationship between AD Knowledge and Willingness. When individuals had lower AD Anxiety, their Willingness increased as their AD Knowledge increased. In contrast, for participants with relatively more AD Anxiety, their Willingness decreased as their AD Knowledge increased. Understanding how knowledge about AD affects older adult screening preferences differently based on the amount of anxiety they have about AD will facilitate development of the most effective interventions to increase awareness about AD and promote screening.