Department of Psychology Graduate Theses
Recent Submissions
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Mechanisms of Social Cognition in Early Episode Psychosis
The mental abilities required to identify, understand, and respond to social information are broadly referred to as social cognition, and individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders display significant impairments ... -
Negative Feedback-Seeking in Depression: Examination of Maladaptive Schemas and Rumination as Cognitive Mechanisms, and the Prospective Prediction of Interpersonal Stressful Events
Coyne’s (1976) interpersonal theory of depression describes a process through which depressed individuals communicate with others such that aversive aspects of their interpersonal behaviour can exacerbate or maintain their ... -
Impact of various stimulus properties on fusional vergence range and heterophoria
Binocular fusion is our ability to combine the two separate retinal images into a single fused image, even if the images are separated by a certain amount of disparity. We hypothesized that lower spatial frequencies sampled ... -
Sleep Contributions to Hippocampal Gist Extraction
To better understand the world, humans scan the information contents of our experiences for patterns, corresponding to the extraction of gist, or essential meaning (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990). Research suggests that some forms ... -
What's odd? Cognitive processing of social contexts based on autistic traits within the general population
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communicative deficits, such as being able to identify and understand a joke. These social deficits can be understood in a cognitive ... -
Mechanisms Contributing to the Specificity of Gynephilic Men’s Sexual Responses
Men’s sexual responses have historically been characterized by their gender specificity, meaning that men show stronger genital and subjective arousal to preferred (i.e., sexual stimuli that include one’s preferred gender) ... -
An ERP Investigation into the Influence of Spatial Relevance on Attentional Deployment
In visual search, top-down task knowledge and bottom-up stimulus salience interact to determine where observers are most likely to attend. Past research has demonstrated that during search tasks, scene regions with a high ... -
Life After Prostate Cancer: An Investigation of Patients' Health-Related Quality of Life, Sexual Outcomes, Mental Health, Social Support, and Healthcare Experiences
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canadian males. Survivorship rates, particularly for early-stage diagnoses, are high, meaning that the majority of diagnosed individuals must live with the consequences ... -
FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING OF THE SPINAL CORD/BRAINSTEM AND BRAIN IN WOMEN WITH PROVOKED VESTIBULODYNIA
Vulvodynia (i.e., idiopathic chronic pain affecting the vulva) is a common but poorly understood pain condition, affecting 16% of women in the general population and leading to negative impacts in many life domains, including ... -
A COGNITIVE-MOTIVATIONAL APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING GENDERED SEXUAL RESPONSE: THE ROLE OF ATTENTIONAL MECHANISMS
Sexual arousal involves changes in physiology, emotions, and cognitions, and is positively associated with sexual outcomes (e.g., sexual activity, sexual desire) and well-being (e.g., physical and mental health, overall ... -
Peer Victimization in the School Context: A Study of School Climate and Social Identity Processes
Schools provide adolescents with opportunities to form healthy relationships and feel a sense of belonging connected to others. Although youth are provided with opportunities to belong at school, some adolescents are ... -
A randomized controlled trial of Bikram yoga and aerobic exercise in the treatment of depression: Efficacy and underlying physiological and psychological mechanisms
Empirical interest in alternative treatment options for major depression has been on the rise, in part because of the shortcomings of conventional approaches. Despite a growing body of evidence supporting the use of various ... -
Examining the Role of Biopsychosocial Factors in Disability Among Individuals with Inflammatory Bowel Disease
IBD is an inflammatory disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract, encompassing two conditions (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis). IBD negatively affects patients in a physical and psychosocial manner, which ... -
"Time is Money": Examining the Influence of Temporal Focus Across the Adult Lifespan
Seniors represent the fastest growing demographic in Canada. Internationally, it is projected that the world’s senior population will continue to increase over the next several decades. Thus, more research is needed in ... -
Effects of Reticular Activation on Long-Term Depression in Primary Visual Cortex of the Long-Evans Rat
Long-term depression (LTD) is a widely studied form of activity-dependent synaptic plasticity, typically induced by prolonged low-frequency stimulation (LFS). LFS is highly effective in eliciting LTD in vitro, but several ... -
Self-Perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Recent research suggests that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are unaware of their competencies in a variety of domains and overestimate their competencies above what is normative in the general population. ... -
Catcalls or Compliments: Men's Attitudes on Street and Sexual Harassment in Relation to Their Personality
Street harassment, also known as public harassment, sexual harassment in the public, and stranger harassment, is defined as physical and verbal unwanted behaviours done by a stranger in the public sphere. Sexual harassment ... -
The Wandering Mind: An Examination of the Predictors and Consequences of Mind Wandering
It has been reported that when listening to a lecture, the average student spends approximately one third of lecture time thinking about things unrelated to the lecture material (Szpunar et al., 2013). With that said, ... -
Age-Related Differences in Preschoolers’ ability to Change a Belief as Evidenced by Load-Force Adaptation
Over the preschool years, children’s core beliefs about the world go through significant changes in a number of content domains. Although the characteristics and timetables of these changes are well mapped out, little is ... -
Socioemotional Flexibility in Mother-Daughter Dyads Across Multiple Time Scales: A Longitudinal Follow-Up
Socioemotional flexibility involves shifting in and out of emotion states, and the range of emotional states expressed during interpersonal interactions (Hollenstein et al., 2013). Previous research has shown that ...
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