Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication Children's Awareness of Institutional Racism in Policing and the Role of Parent Socialization(2024-09) Gonzalez, GoranaBlack youth are disproportionately affected by the negative consequences of witnessing or experiencing biased policing. Through socialization processes starting early in human development, children develop sophisticated and nuanced beliefs about the social world and groups around them, learning about race, racism, and policing. Across the two experiments included in this dissertation, I examined what children’ racialized beliefs about themselves and peers and the role parents play in shaping children’s behaviors when encountering a white, male police officer. In Study 1, I recruited 239 children from the east coast of the United States who identify as Black, white, or mixed Black and were between the ages of 5 to 12 years. Children completed two tasks as part of a larger study. In the Ambiguous Situation Task, children saw and ambiguous image of a white, male police officer and a peer who was wither Black, white, or mixed Black. Children evaluated whether the encounter was positive or negative for their peer. In the Police Interaction Task, children learned about hypothetical scenarios that might warrant police assistance and predicted whether they and their peers would ask for help in those situations. Results revealed that children, regardless of the participant’s own race, believed that a white peer would be more likely to receive and ask for help from a police officer as well as be treated more fairly than a Black peer. In Study 2, I explored whether these behavioral patterns in children can be explained by parental ethnic-racial socialization and legal socialization. We recruited parents of the children from Study 1 and 89 parents completed an online survey where they shared their ethnic-racial socialization practices: including color evasive, preparation for bias, promotion of mistrust, and cultural socialization; as well as legal socialization orientations: such as police contact, beliefs about police fairness, and police legitimacy beliefs. We found that parents' ethnic-racial socialization and beliefs about police legitimacy do not directly impact children's willingness to seek help from the police. However, these factors may have an indirect effect, as parents' beliefs about police legitimacy influence their children's beliefs about police legitimacy, consistent with existing literature. This dissertation research has implication for public safety policies concerning young children.Publication Stored Multiword Representations and their Usage during Chinese Reading(2024-09) Huang, Kuan-JungWhat are the building blocks of language stored in memory and how are they utilized in linguistic tasks? It has been proposed that meaningful strings of all lengths—morphemes, words, and sequences of multiple words—can be stored, with the last kind playing a crucial role in language processing. This dissertation investigates the existence of stored multiword representations and their usage in Chinese reading. Stored multiword representations are operationalized by using two words that frequently co-occur and comparing them with those that do not. Morphosyntactic structure is also manipulated, with the main comparison between noun-noun and verb-object sequences. Two tasks are used to study visual recognition of multiword sequences: (1) a rapid masked visual presentation without sentence context probes how many words in a string can be simultaneously recognized and whether this limit is modulated by the co-occurrence frequency of the two words in the string; (2) a naturalistic sentence reading task with a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm probes how far/deep Chinese ix readers process downstream text not yet directly fixated (i.e., parafoveal processing) and whether this limit is modulated by the co-occurrence frequency of the two words in the downstream string. The results show that co-occurrence frequency facilitates rapid visual recognition without sentence context, making parallel recognition of the two embedded words possible. This is the case for both noun-noun and verb-object sequences. In sentence reading, however, co-occurrence frequency influences online processing differently for strings of different structures. It facilitates processing extremely early on for noun-noun sequences: readers process Characters n+3 and n+4 in the parafovea beyond the visuo-orthographical level, while no such evidence is found for verb-object sequences. However, relatively late foveal processing does appear to be facilitated by co-occurrence frequency, for both kinds. Based on the findings, I argue that while language users are highly sensitive to statistical regularities of word sequences of various structures, this possibly yields only familiarity with the surface multiword forms and ease of on-the-fly composition of the two embedded words for verb-object sequences. Compound nouns on the other hand may be lexically stored to have direct form-meaning mapping via frequent exposure, hence the additional early facilitation observed. Future models of Chinese reading must incorporate mechanisms to explain the current data: (1) extremely fast access to frequently co-occurring strings’ orthography, which suggests that a single decomposition route alone is likely insufficient; (2) distinctive processing patterns throughout the time course between noun-noun and verb-object sequences, which points toward structural/semantic composition in addition to utilization of word statistics and contextual probability.Publication Reciprocal Effects of Parent Emotion Socialization and Child Emotion Expression During Dyadic Interactions(2024-09) Gair, ShannonEmotion socialization plays an important role in children’s socio-emotional and behavioral development. Understanding the short-term bidirectional effects of parents’ and children’s emotion-related behavior within dyadic interactions—as well as individual differences in these process—is important for understanding how long-term maladaptive patterns of emotion socialization practices are maintained through short-term social learning processes. Participants included 261 (141 boys; 120 girls) 3-year-old children and their caregivers who took part in a 3-year longitudinal study. Results support the notion that emotion socialization processes are dynamic, with parents and children influencing one another’s emotional responses within their dyadic interactions. Further, past parent emotion socialization and child emotion expression changed subsequent concurrent relations between parent and child behavior, suggesting that past parent and child behavior changes the way dyads respond to one another in the future. Parent and child effects varied across parent and child gender and psychopathology, indicating that there are individual differences in the ways that parents and children respond to one another emotionally. Lastly, these early patterns of parent and child effects differed for children with high levels of psychopathology 3 years later, suggesting that early maladaptive patterns of parent-child interaction may lay the groundwork for future psychopathology. These findings suggest that long-term maladaptive patterns of emotion socialization may be maintained through short-term social learning processes and offer intervention targets for clinicians working with families with psychopathology.Publication Investigating the Role of Predictive Representations in Implicit Event Boundaries, Statistical Learning, and Categorization(2024-09) Savalia, TejasWe make sense of the world by extracting meaningful information from a continuous sensory stream. Extracting meaningful information involves first segmenting this continuous sensory stream into shorter, processable chunks. These discrete chunks of events represent our recalled experiences and allow us to develop heuristics representing the statistical regularities in our environment. In this dissertation, I present a predictive context representational account of segmenting the continuous sensory stream into smaller chunks. I demonstrate that maintaining a distributed context representation defined by an expectation of upcoming future events and learned through temporal difference learning naturally leads to the separation of temporally disjoint events without perceptually explicit markers. I contrast this predictive, error-driven account of context representation with an associative learning account and provide behavioral evidence in support of the predictive representational account. I then show that such predictive context representations can be used as a common framework to understand higher order cognitive processes of event cognition and categorization. I first assess whether implicitly operationalized event boundaries, where changes in ongoing context that mark boundaries are not perceptually salient, provide the same behavioral properties as explicitly operationalized event boundaries thereby providing evidence for shared representations between the two. Finally, I apply the representational framework to understand the cognitive processes behind implicit category learning. I show that predictive representations can arbitrate category learning via the shared temporal context for items in each category. Work in this dissertation provides a mechanistic account for statistical learning through widely applicable framework of temporal difference learning. I further demonstrate a use of predictive representations as a common framework to understand higher-order cognitive processes such as event cognition, and categorization.Publication Stress and Racial Health Disparities in Multiracial Families: Understanding the Link between Family Support and Stress(2024-09) Rowley, ChristinaMultiracial families have increased dramatically in the U.S.: rising from approximately one percent of the population in 1970 (approximately 470,000 individuals; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1972) to 19 percent in 2022 (a little over 11.5 million couples; Hernandez & Hemez, 2023); these rates are projected to triple by 2060 (Bialik, 2017). The term “multiracial” refers to couples from different racial backgrounds (e.g., White-Black). Research indicates that multiracial couples face more stress and family conflict than their monoracial (i.e., same race) counterparts, resulting in increased rates of separation and divorce. To date, little research addresses the determinants of stress that may lead to relational distress for multiracial parents, although it is likely that a key challenge is the stress of merging two different racial backgrounds. The early years of parenthood are a time in which multiracial couples may experience heightened stress because they must merge the values, behaviors, and beliefs of two unique racial groups into one family system. Family support may serve as a key resilience factor during this time, buffering the stress of new parenthood on marital and coparenting conflict, and supporting positive adjustment to stress. The current study employed a sequential explanatory mixed methods design to 1) examine the relationship between racial composition of parent dyads and stress, including the role of family support in mediating and/or moderating that relationship and 2) utilize qualitative interviews to better understand the quantitative results regarding the factors that contribute to the transmission of stress in multiracial couples. Our findings demonstrated that parents in multiracial families experience disparate levels and types of stress compared to parents in monoracial families, and that family support may function as a stressor as well as a stress reliever for multiracial families playing a unique role in their experience of stress. Specifically, a novel finding in this study supported by the quantitative and qualitative results was the unique contribution of financial family support as a source of stress for multiracial families. Future research should continue examining the unique dynamics of family support for multiracial families and its role in their stress.Publication Psychometric, Theoretical, and Experimental Contributions toward an Integrated Understanding of Mental Health Stigma Over Time and Across Disciplines(2024-09) Huff, NathanThis dissertation presents three unique and complementary studies aimed at integrating the mental health stigma literature over time and across disciplines. Chapter 1 describes the overall theoretical and measurement landscape of mental health stigma, arguing for unified theorizing, consistent measurement, and replicable work. Chapter 2 presents an umbrella review that reveals the widespread presence of stigma within a constellation of factors that influence help-seeking and utilization of mental healthcare services. Using an established framework, I organize intrapersonal (n = 37), interpersonal (n = 14), institutional (n = 9), community (n = 7), and public policy (n = 6) factors, identifying stigma as a widely referenced and multi-level factor. This braids mental health stigma into a broader literature on healthcare utilization. Chapter 3 targets measurement. Using quantitative and qualitative data (n = 749), I refine existing knowledge of a widely cited public stigma scale — the Community Attitudes Towards Mental Illness Scale. Confirmatory factor analysis supports a modified version of Morris' (2012) structure — fear/exclusion, social control, and goodwill. Even though the scale is designed to measure stigma towards mental health in general, most participants (73.6%) considered specific conditions when completing the scale, with bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia most common. Chapter 4 highlights the importance of replicable work that examines stigma over time. Drawing on data from an experimental vignette study conducted across three waves of the General Social Survey (1996, 2006, 2018; Total N = 2448) and a new experiment (n = 791) that I conducted, this chapter demonstrates that perceptions of danger explain a substantial portion of the relationship between mental health conditions and desire for distance. I show that this link did not change over time (Study 1), was elicited by diagnoses alone while holding target behavior constant (Study 2), and predicted stigma towards schizophrenia more strongly than towards depression (Studies 1 and 2). Chapter 5 concludes by summarizing all chapters, discussing theoretical and applied considerations for an integrative theory of stigma, and touching on future directions for contributing to this vision.Publication Raising IPad Kids: Parents' Rules and Management Strategies for Children's Mobile Device Use(2024-09) Harmon, TrinaManaging children’s screen time has become a central parenting challenge, but shockingly little is known about parental screen management practices. Past research has mainly focused on time rules or has not been specific to newer forms of technology, like tablets and smartphones. The current study provides a more complete and nuanced model of parents’ mobile device management, and how rule type, extent of monitoring, implementation, and rule processes all affect child’s compliance with mobile device rules. Utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), this study surveyed 295 parents of children from 1st to 5th grade across the United States to compare differences in mobile device management compliance across four rule types: time, content, context, and contingent rules. Per parent report, mobile devices were children’s primary source of screen time, and they spent over two hours per day on them, not infrequently without a parent present. Only about half of parents had all three types of rules suggested by the American Academy of Pediatrics and rules were often not entirely specific or clear. The least common rule type were time rules, and parents reported less rule monitoring and implementation than the other rule types. Content rules, on the other hand, were the most common, and the most well managed, with high reported monitoring, enforcement, and consistency. Parents employed a variety of management strategies to control their children’s mobile device use, slightly differing based on rule type. But parents who knew when children were on their devices, enforced their rules, were consistent, clear, and aligned with other caregivers, reported that they had noncompliance issues less often. However, parents reported child-compliance issues more often with time rules. Content rules, again, were the most well managed and complied with, but some findings raise the possibility that parents are not employing ideal content rules. More research is needed to establish causal associations and better understand the mechanisms underlying healthy and less healthy screen time use, but the present study provides a step towards these goals. Results from this study can help guide interventions for families, so that parents can promote healthier screen time habits.