Psychology
Presenter(s): Natasha Hikita, Amber Osorno, Carlie Taurosa
Advisor(s): Dr. Brooke Jenkins
Over 85% of children experience postoperative pain. If poorly treated, pediatric postoperative pain may lead to various negative health outcomes. Adult behaviors may be associated with child experiences in the postoperative environment. For example, adult behaviors such as distraction, humor, and coping advice divert a child’s attention away from their pain and thus, may significantly reduce child postoperative distress. In contrast, adult behaviors such as empathy, reassurance, and apology direct a child’s attention towards their pain which may increase a child’s overall postoperative distress. Moreover, patient demographic factors, like child ethnicity, may significantly alter the frequency of use of these adult behaviors. Therefore, this study aimed to determine which participant demographic factors are associated with the use of certain adult behaviors in response to child postoperative distress. This study included children ages 2 to 10 years old (N=112) undergoing elective surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Participant demographics including ethnicity and race were collected prior to surgery. Nurse, parent, and child postoperative behavioral interactions were video recorded in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU). From these video recordings, adult behaviors were coded for their frequency of use. Multiple regressions analyses showed that adults were more likely to use humor with Non-Hispanic White children compared to Hispanic children (b = 0.393, p = 0.049). Moreover, fathers were marginally more likely to use empathy, reassurance, and apology with Hispanic children compared to Non-Hispanic White children (b = 0.249, p = 0.05). These results suggest that Hispanic and Non-Hispanic White children may receive different behavioral treatment in response to their postoperative distress. Implications for these findings suggest that child ethnicity may be predictive of different adult PACU behaviors which may illustrate how cultural differences can influence the child postoperative experience.
Mind over Matter: Is Affect Variability Associated with Mental versus Physical Health?
Presenter(s): Lydia Ong
Advisor(s): Dr. Brooke Jenkins, Dr. Julia Boehm
Greater affect variability (i.e., higher fluctuations in affect over time) has been associated with poor mental health in a number of investigations. Physical health outcomes, however, are rarely studied. In the current investigation, we examined the impact of affect variability on both mental and physical health outcomes using the Midlife in the United States Study data to examine these associations (N=1,500). Participants self-reported affect during 8 days of daily diary reporting and self-reported mental and physical health outcomes 9 to 10 years later. Affect variability was calculated using standard deviation. Simple and ordinal logistic regression and negative binomial models were used. Results indicated that greater affect variability, regardless of valence, was associated with worse mental health. Greater negative affect (NA) variability was associated with worse self-rated physical health and greater positive affect (PA) variability was associated with worse physical health for five of the seven physical health outcomes. Although greater variability tended to be associated with worse health, variability interacted with mean affect levels such that variability was associated with better health for individuals high in mean NA and low in mean PA, which were already less favorable for health. More variability may provide breaks from high NA and low PA, thus leading to better health. Overall, results indicate that greater affect variability over time is associated with worse mental and physical health. Findings suggest additional investigations of mean levels of affect and affect variability in relation to health outcomes are warranted. Future research can use objectively measured physical health to assess its relationship with affect variability.
Message Helping Others, Helping Oneself: Can Generativity Priming Boost Percecptions of Successful Coping with the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Presenter(s): Natalie Standridge, Erin Bonham, Clarissa Tadros, Brianna Dinn, Danielle Zahn
Advisor(s): Dr. Tara Gruenewald
Generativity is care and concern directed towards others. This motivation is hypothesized to take on greater significance to individuals’ self-concepts with advancing age. Our past research has also demonstrated that greater perceptions of generativity and greater engagement in generative activity, such as helping behavior and volunteerism, also predict better trajectories of mental, physical and cognitive functioning and health in older adulthood. In a prior study, we demonstrated that priming older individuals with a representation of older adults being a generative and contributory group in society led to enhanced memory performance in elder participants as compared to being exposed to a social burden prime. The current study extended our prior work by replicating our previous study with a larger national sample and adding a neutral prime condition for additional comparison. A total of 300 participants aged 55 and older across the U.S. are being recruited to participate in a web experiment in which participants will complete an online survey of demographic and psychosocial factors, a set of cognitive performance tasks, and be randomized to a priming task which primes participants with older individuals as representing a generative force in society, a social burden to society, or a neutral non-group prime. Analyses will examine whether priming individuals with a message that their social group represents a generative force in society will enhance cognitive function (memory performance) and positive affect as compared to exposure to a neutral or social burden prime. We expect study findings to contribute significantly to our understanding of how messages regarding the generative potential of specific social groups in society can affect the cognitive and affective well-being of members of those groups.
Message Framing and Health Behaviors: Moderating Effects of Self-efficacy and Current Stage of Behavior Change
Presenter(s): Stella Wallace
Advisor(s): Dr. Tara Gruenewald, Eunice Choi
Past research has shown that the way in which a message is framed (gain vs. loss) can have differing effects in various contexts. While research has examined message framing in the context of health behaviors, the current study sought to examine how individuals’ self-efficacy and current behaviors could affect this relationship. Participants were young adult, college students who completed an online assessment where they were randomly assigned to receive either a gain or loss framed message about diet and regular physical activity. Participants completed measures of self-efficacy and their current stage of change before reading each message, then indicated their attitudes and behavioral intentions toward diet and physical activity. Data collection is ongoing, but it is expected that analyses will indicate that individuals self-efficacy and current stage of change will moderate the effect of message framing on the behavioral intentions and attitudes. This study may contribute to the current fight against chronic diseases and obesity which are greatly impacted by health behaviors such as physical activity and diet by providing data that can inform the most effective health messages to promote healthier behaviors.
Race, Culture, and the Self
Presenter(s): Gigi Cliatt
Advisor(s): Dr. Tara Gruenewald, Eunice Choi
Race/ethnic identities are key components of individuals’ views of themselves, yet knowledge of how racial centrality is linked to individual self-esteem remains limited. How these links might be moderated by cultural orientations of the self-other interface, such as where an individual falls on an individualistic to collectivistic cultural orientation, also remains underexplored. . The association of racial centrality with self-esteem and how that might vary by cultural orientation are key aims of the current study. Participants were recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform to complete a brief web survey. Self-esteem was measured with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, racial centrality with the centrality subscale of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI), and cultural orientation with Singelis et. al’s Identity Self-Construal Scale. Data collection is ongoing, but it is expected that the proposed analyses will shed light on the role of racial centrality in individuals’ self-concepts and potential variation in this association as a function of cultural orientation.
Decoding the Time-Course of Abstract Intentions
Presenter(s): Alexandra van der Hoeven, Alexandra Rudis, Jake Gavenas, Elnaz Lashgari
Advisor(s): Dr. Uri Maoz, Dr. Aaron Schurger
Decoding a person’s intentions from noninvasive recordings of brain activity is a major goal in neuroscience. Furthermore, such decoding efforts have revealed non trivial facts about decision-making. For instance, Salvaris and Haggard (2014) decoded motor intentions (left or right button press) in a delayed-response reaction time task. Motor intentions were highly decodable before movement for both instructed and free choice scenarios. Furthermore, the decoding accuracy improved gradually and then plateaued, as if matching the evolution of a decision-making process. However, this paradigm was solely motor-based and thus confounded intention with motor preparation. Therefore, we modified their paradigm to study abstract decisions, where participants first make a decision without knowing the motor output required to express their decision. In our experiment, participants make a free decision between two colors (or are instructed on which color to press), and are told the mapping of decision to button only after a delay, all the while having their brain activity recorded (electroencephalography; EEG). Thereby we will investigate whether it is possible to decode abstract intentions with similar accuracies as motor intentions. Furthermore, we investigate the time-course of decoding accuracy as well as reaction times to early and conflicting cues to assess differences between abstract and motor intentions.