Department of Psychology Graduate Theses
Recent Submissions
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Tracking the Temporal Dynamics of Distraction in a Continuous Performance Task
Many daily life tasks require sustained attention (e.g., studying) and are impacted by distractions that are irrelevant to the current task (e.g., friends talking). However, distraction paradigms typically fail to capture ... -
STEALING THUNDER: THE INFLUENCE OF SPECIFICITY, ELABORATION, AND ARGUMENT QUALITY
Stealing Thunder is a phenomenon where transgressors reveal potentially damaging information about their transgressions before its details can be revealed by a third party. Much research has been done on the Stealing ... -
Attentional Orientation and Vocabulary Size
Quickly looking to a plausible referent of a word is both an indicator of effective lexical processing and an opportunity to learn new words. Beginning in infancy, faster attentional orientation during recognition and ... -
Causal Uncertainty and Computer-Mediated Communication
Causal uncertainty is the experience of persistent doubts about one’s ability to identify the causes of social events (Weary & Edwards, 1996). Causally uncertain people are more depressed (Weary & Edwards, 1994, 1996), ... -
Parenting in the Digital Age: An Examination of Predictors and Outcomes of Parental Mediation
Parents are important socializing agents who influence their children’s development throughout childhood and adolescence. The parenting practices they choose to engage in or not can have significant impacts on youth ... -
Defending defined: Exploring how youth defending against peer victimization
The current dissertation comprises three research studies that examined how youth defend their peers from victimization, as well as the social-emotional correlates of these defending behaviors. Theories of prosocial behavior, ... -
Psychological Mechanisms of Desired Attitudes
Attitudes are people’s evaluations of specific objects as being good or bad. Sometimes people wish that they held attitudes other than the ones they actually do (desired attitudes). Previous work has demonstrated that ... -
Development and Initial Testing of a Brief Mindfulness Meditation Training Intervention for Preoperative Patients: An Application of the ORBIT Model
Over 1,500,000 surgical procedures occur in Canada every year. Although medical and technological advances have greatly improved outcomes, surgery is not risk free: for instance, 3-16% of patients receiving general anesthesia ... -
MEMORIES AND FORECASTS IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS: A CROSS-CULTURAL INVESTIGATION
Interpersonal memories and forecasts can be influenced (or shaped) by individuals’ current relationship experiences. The present research examined cultural differences in interpersonal memories and forecasts, situated in ... -
Epistemic Emotions and the Number of Sources Explored
Several theories postulate that epistemic emotions, such as curiosity and surprise, motivate information-seeking. In these theories, information-seeking is treated as a unitary, singular construct, with the motivation ... -
Beta-Band EEG Activity and False-Belief Reasoning in Adults
The ability to reason about other’s beliefs, and in particular their false beliefs, is a fundamental part of having a theory of mind (ToM) – an understanding of the role that mental states (i.e., beliefs, desires, and ... -
Characterizing the long-lasting impact of stress in mid-adolescence in the rat.
Exposure to stressors in adolescence, in both humans and rodents, leads to long-lasting alterations in their behaviour and corresponding neuroanatomical structures. The experiments presented herein were designed to further ... -
Maternal Attitudes and Infant/Child Temperament: Questionnaire Assessment and Applied Intervention
The importance of the parent-child relationship is reflected in a great deal of research, theory, and public health programs. The complexity of these relationships creates methodological challenges for researchers and ... -
An Exploratory Study of Novel Measures to Capture Situational Expressive Suppression
Expressive suppression is widely believed to be a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy due to its association with poor social functioning. Nonetheless, controlling when and how to express emotions is also the hallmark ... -
Exploring The Role of Referential Context in Young Children's Cross-Situational Word Learning
A fundamental question in early language acquisition concerns how young children learn new words despite often hearing them in visually complex and noisy environments. One potential mechanism that has emerged in recent ... -
Exploring Victimization Experiences of Sexual Minority Adolescents and their Associations with Mental Health and Help-Seeking Behaviours: A Minority Stress Perspective
Victimization in adolescence is associated with a variety of negative psychopathological and social outcomes, and is predictive of recurrent victimization over the lifespan (Wolke & Lereya, 2015; Feiring & Furman, 2000). ... -
The role of avoidance and stress in understanding emotional dysfunction in adults and adolescents with a fixed emotion mindset
Emotion mindsets refer to global beliefs about the controllability of one’s emotions. Individuals with fixed emotion mindsets view their emotions as uncontrollable and believe that no effort or strategy on their part can ... -
Behavioural Manifestations and Relational Correlates of Individual Differences in Theory of Mind
Although it is impossible to know the contents of others’ minds with absolute certainty, we can (and do) make probabilistic guesses about what others are thinking or feeling. When these judgments are made based on observable ... -
Neural Correlates of Sexual Response: An ERP Investigation of Responses to De-Contextualized Sexual Cues
Sexual response relies on the perceptual and cognitive processing of sexual stimuli. With its high temporal resolution, the event-related potential (ERP) technique offers an ideal tool for studying early processes involved ... -
Exploring the Role of Oxytocin in Rodent Defensive Behaviours
Although evidence implicates oxytocin (OT) in anxiety regulation, little is known about where this occurs in the brain or if this system is altered by social affiliation. I hypothesized that infusions of OT into the lateral ...
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