Binge drinking and non-suicidal self-injury are significant health-risk behaviors that are often initiated during adolescence and contribute to a host of negative outcomes later in life. Selective prevention strategies are targeted toward individuals most at-risk for developing …
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Over the last two decades, the number of children in the United States who experience parental incarceration along with parents navigating the reentry process have drastically increased. Making this population of parents more vulnerable is the fact that 20% of incarcerated indiv…
A common behavioral therapeutic target in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease is activation of values-consistent living, which can facilitate positive lifestyle behavior change. However, the empirical study of values-consistent living has been limited by signi…
This dissertation is composed of projects on three aspects of gathering and learning from data in the social sciences: drawing representative samples, taking valid measurement, and making warranted inductive inferences.
Depression increases the risk of suicide death and non-fatal suicide attempt. Between 2 - 6% of persons with depression will die by suicide and 25 - 31% of persons with depression will make a non-fatal suicide attempt during their lifetime. Despite the strong association between…
Worldview is an individual difference construct that is linked to various social, behavioral, and mental health outcomes, such as prejudice (Greenberg & Arndt, 2011), adaptive versus maladaptive behaviors following a natural disaster (Call, 2012), and PTSD symptoms (Jinkerson, 2…
The Enneagram has become popular among evangelical Christians as a spiritualized personality typology that claims to help people better understand themselves and others. Several influential evangelical Christian leadership ministries have promoted the Enneagram as a tool in form…
Leukodystrophies (LDs) and genetically determined leukoencephalopathies (gLEs) are a heterogeneous group of rare genetic disorders of the cerebral white matter. LDs are primary disorders of the cerebral white matter (i.e. glial cells, myelin sheath), while gLEs include all leuko…
This dissertation details the development and validation of the CARS Political Viewpoints Scale (PVS). The construct is defined as preferences about how society should be organized, how power in society should be allocated, the goals that society should aim to achieve, and the m…
Locus of control (LOC) has moved from experimental and clinical psychology, where it originated, to many other subfields including health and religion. Currently, the psychometric evidence for God Health Locus of Control (God HLOC) measures’ reliability and validity is relativel…
Recent advances have been made to measure suicidal thoughts implicitly using the Death Implicit Association Test (D-IAT). This measure is promising, but the D-IAT has some methodological flaws, one of which is that it relies solely on reaction time to map cognitive indecisivenes…
Personality is a social and organizational construct with a substantial history and discourse. One particular area in personality that is of interest is gender differences in personality. Gender differences have been found on scales measuring various aspects of personality, such…
The general problem addressed in this study is the failure of male juvenile clients in sex offender treatment programs to take responsibility for their offending behaviors and therefore treatment is required to assist them in addressing this. The purpose of this mixed method stu…
This study presents the results of factors that contribute to deconversion from Christianity. The common themes revealed by the data include “explicating themes of judgmental,” “can no longer relate,” “people of the church do not understand ideas,” etc. About 689 participants (m…
The majority of people around the world report wanting “the good life.” But how do they achieve it? Most research in well-being science operationalizes “the good life” as subjective well-being, which is comprised of positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction. This p…
Religiosity is an oft-studied construct with few consistent findings. There are many reported physical and psychological health benefits to religiosity (such as being at lower risk for depression), in addition to deleterious effects, such as: being positively linked to increased…
Psychological assessment represents a core competency and a highly specialized skill in professional psychology that is central to the identity of many practicing psychologists. However, more research is needed on the quality of assessment training that psychology doctoral stude…
Neural systems do not exist in stasis; rather the brain is composed of an ever-evolving ensemble of neural networks that are responsible for changes in behavior and cognition across the lifespan. However, our understanding of these processes in the field of developmental neuroim…
With the psychological constructs of coping and optimism as the overarching research interest shared by the two studies, different directions of inquiry could further probe into the life course theory, the stressor process, and the ecological system theory on work-family interac…