Psychology Masters Theses: Recent submissions
Now showing items 21-40 of 47
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Development, Validation and Reliability of the Chrononutrition Profile
(North Dakota State University, 2019)Chrononutrition, or the circadian timing of food intake, has garnered attention as a topic of study due to its associations with health (e.g., weight gain); however, a valid assessment of chrononutrition in daily life has ... -
Health Risk Feedback: The Effects of ACE Insight on Stress Reactivity
(North Dakota State University, 2018)Exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has lasting repercussions throughout an individual’s lifetime. An adult with a history of childhood trauma is at increased risk for excessive stress reactivity, which ... -
Buddhism is More Than Just Meditation: A Cognitive Non-Attachment Training for Social Stress
(North Dakota State University, 2018)Buddhism is essentially a cognitive-behavioral intervention where oral teachings and meditation work together to develop nonattachment, a mind-state considered to be the antidote to all human suffering. The present work ... -
Aging and Object-Based Inhibition of Return
(North Dakota State University, 2018)Inhibition of return (IOR) is a cognitive mechanism to bias attention from returning to previously engaged items. While aging models have proposed deficits within select inhibitory domains, older adults have demonstrated ... -
The Role of Distress Tolerance in Cognitive Control Training for Dysphoria
(North Dakota State University, 2018)Cognitive Control Training (CCT) is an area of research which has been hypothesized as a way to decrease symptoms of depression. The purpose of this study was to replicate the results found by others using the PASAT, and ... -
Belief and Belongingness: Are Supernatural Agents and Forces Social Surrogates?
(North Dakota State University, 2018)Motivational approaches to the study of supernatural beliefs propose that such beliefs serve psychological functions. I tested the proposal that supernatural agents and forces are sought out as social surrogates to fulfill ... -
Dual Effects Model of Social Control: Extending the Model to 24-Hour Health Behavior
(North Dakota State University, 2017)The Dual Effects Model of Social Control suggests that partners can positively and negatively influence the health behaviors of their partner. However, the model fails to consider the impact of control on non-targeted ... -
Are You a Good Partner? Using the Situation Judgment Test Method to Identify and Measure Romantic Competence
(North Dakota State University, 2017)We devised a measure seeking to assess competency within romantic relationships using a scenario-based paradigm that was informed by the situation judgment test (SJT) and emotional intelligence literatures. Pilot data ... -
An Examination of the Relationship Between Alcohol Use and Capability for Suicide
(North Dakota State University, 2016)The relationship between alcohol use and suicide has been well documented in past research. However, there have been few studies interested in examining potential mediators to explain the alcohol-suicide link. The current ... -
A Unitary Framework Defining the Functional Significance of Neural Oscillations in the Alpha Frequency
(North Dakota State University, 2016)Neural oscillations in the alpha frequency band (8-12 Hz) are among the most salient and ubiquitous phenomena observed in human electroencephalographic recordings. There have been various proposals regarding the functional ... -
Applying the Situational Judgment Test Method to Assess Individual Differences in Health Competence
(North Dakota State University, 2017)People regularly make decisions about their health, yet they clearly differ in their ability to successfully make healthy decisions. We sought to understand this important individual difference by developing a scenario-based ... -
Visuospatial Attention and Autism Spectrum Trait Expression
(North Dakota State University, 2016)Pseudoneglect (PN: Bowers & Heilman, 1980) references neurotypical leftward attentional bias reflective of right hemisphere (RH) specialization for spatial attention. Phasic visual cues can alter PN magnitude (McCourt et ... -
Do Highly Mindful Individuals Experience Less Interference as a Result of Better Attention Control and Emotion Regulation?
(North Dakota State University, 2016)Mindfulness has been found to be beneficial to psychological health. Furthermore, research suggests that mindfulness is associated with better attention control and fewer difficulties in emotion regulation. The purpose ... -
Bridging Attention Across Space and Time: Do Positive Emotion Generated Shifts in Spatial Attention Lead to Changes in Attention Across Time?
(North Dakota State University, 2016)Previous research has demonstrated that positive emotion influences various aspects of attention including spatial attention and attention across time. Research has commonly focused on how emotion influences one aspect of ... -
Urgency Predicts Differences in Cigarette Consumption
(North Dakota State University, 2015)Smokers have been classified into three separate groups based on cigarette consumption where regular smokers consume more than 5 cigarettes a day, chippers consume 5 cigarettes a day or less, and social smokers only smoke ... -
The Body Inversion Effect: The Role of Visual Appearance on Body Processing
(North Dakota State University, 2015)The purpose of this study was to determine if body stimuli are uniquely processed by the visual recognition system. First, my results supported past findings showing that body processing differs from object processing ... -
False Memories in Depression: Vulnerability Factor or Symptom?
(North Dakota State University, 2015)False memories are sometimes generated when recalling words from lists in which the words are conceptually related. People think of concepts that are associated with the lists but which were never presented. Previous ... -
Sleep Quality and Sympathovagal Balance during Stress
(North Dakota State University, 2015)Sleep has been shown to be associated with the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system at rest and during stress. However, sleep has not been examined in the context of sympathovagal balance ... -
Effortful Control Moderates the Association Between Emotional Instability and Binge Eating
(North Dakota State University, 2015)We hypothesized that (H1) emotional instability would be associated with an increased likelihood of a binge episode, and that (H2a) this relationship would be potentiated among individuals with low cognitive control and ... -
Treating Objects like Women: The Impact of Terror Management and Objectification on the Perception of Women's Faces
(North Dakota State University, 2014)According to terror management theory, humans are threatened by the awareness of death and counter this threat by investing in cultural systems that make them feel like they are more than mortal animals. Based on this ...