Tag: Psychology

Evaluating Responsive Caregiving Behaviors within the FIND Intervention

Presenter: Heather Ralph – Biology, Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Andrea Imhof, Phil Fisher

Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Connection and Community

Interventions that emphasize responsive caregiving can reverse the negative effects of early life stress exposure on development in early childhood. Despite this knowledge, there is a lack of consensus in the field about which behaviors define “responsive caregiving”. The Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) Intervention is a responsive caregiving intervention that guides caregivers towards serve and return interactions that follows the child’s lead. Preliminary evidence from pilot trials suggest that the FIND intervention may significantly impact both caregiver and child outcomes, but it is not yet known how FIND changes the way caregivers and children interact. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether FIND increases the frequency of caregiver “following” behaviors during a dyadic freeplay tasks. Results from a pilot trial using 18 mother-infant dyads (9 FIND families and 9 control families) will be presented, highlighting ways that the FIND intervention changes the nature of dyadic interaction. Implications for analyzing responsive caregiving behaviors, limitations, and next steps for evaluating the FIND intervention will be discussed.

Adoptee Formations of Kinship: Queer Diasporic Traditions in Chinese America

Presenter: Alayna Neher – Ethnic Studies, Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Sharon Luk

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Chinese American adoptees are part of a tradition of non-normative kinship and exist in relationships that transcend racial, gendered, and physical borders. It is hypothesized, given the history of transnational adoption, that Chinese American adoptees seek to navigate identity in predominantly white families and communities, negotiate kinship, and participate in the queering of relationships in biological, adoptive, and/or chosen families. In-depth interviews were conducted with 19 adult adoptees (18 women, 1 man; ages 18-26), all of whom were born in China and adopted to the United States. Results show generally strong connections between adoptees and their immediate family members and other adoptees, although adoptees experience varying quality and strength of relationships with all people in their lives. Relationships with other adoptees and non-adopted Asian Americans are less frequent when adoptees are raised in predominantly white communities. Relationships between adoptees are particularly important for humanizing adoptee experiences, providing space for nuance and fluidity in identity, and coalition-building. Adoptee relationships and identity form a constellation of kinships and offer a new understanding Asian American identity.

What Makes A Voice Sound Black?

Presenter: Mary Mugeki – Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Rachel Weissler

Session: (Virtual) Oral Panel—Read, Speak and Act

This research explores the nature of linguistic perception upon hearing African American English versus Standard American English. By having speakers from each category and low pass filtering their speech, we can explore how people perceive both vernaculars given the emotional prosody (the emotion reflected in the melody of their voices). Low pass filtering the audio is beneficial since it removes the acoustic characteristics of speech and leaves only the melody. The importance in exploring the relationship between emotion and race is due to the cultural stereotyping that is prevalent in the U.S. which has an influence on perceptions of these two factors. The hypothesized results are that the Happy guises will be perceived as more white, the Angry guises will be perceived as more black, evidencing the power of emotional prosody on the perception of the speech signal. This research impacts the broader fields of speech perception and sociolinguistics, focusing on specifically the parts of the speech signal which influence socio-cultural perceptions in day to day life.

Spatial Location and Memory Integration

Presenter: Dahlia Mohd Razif – Business Administration, Human Physiology, Neuroscience, Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Lea Frank, Dasa Zeithamova

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Memory is flexible and can be influenced by other items or events that we have encountered. Memory integration refers to the concept that related memories are stored in the brain as overlapping representations which form a memory link that allow us to make new inferences or extract related information. Studies have shown that memory integration is enhanced by time proximity when items or events occur within a close time frame but not much is known regarding how spatial positioning affects memory integration. 160 participants will be split into a spatial overlapping condition and a no spatial overlapping condition. This experiment consists of a study trial, an associative inference test and an associative memory test. During the study trial, participants will be presented with object images positioned relative to base object images. For the associative inference test and memory test, object images will be presented as cues to evaluate the extent that participants can integrate the associations that share the common element of the base object as well as remember presented pairs during the study trial. As the date of submission of this abstract is prior to data collection, conclusions have not been realized. We hypothesize that spatial overlapping of items will result in diminished memory integration due to interference. This research can help deepen our understanding of how the brain encodes separate items and creates an integrated representation of the shared information.

Caregiving and Depression: Moderating Effects of Social Cohesion among SAGE Individuals

Presenter: Zag McDowall – Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Alicia DeLouize, Josh Snodgrass

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Caregiving for children, people with disabilities, and the elderly is essential for society as a whole. These responsibilities disproportionately fall upon women, especially low-income women. Support, whether from other family members, the community, or the government is often minimal, and their labor is largely undervalued. The high demand on caregivers can impact mental health, and, for individuals where providing care is a larger time commitment, engaging in buffering activities related to social connection may be challenging. Analyzing the relationship between burden of care, social support, and income on depression in caregivers provides a better understanding of how these factors contribute to or mitigate the burden of care. With data collected from the World Health Organization’s Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE) in Mexico, India, Russia, China, Ghana, and South Africa, we performed a three-way ANOVA. For women in South Africa, the number of hours caregiving and social cohesion were not associated with depression. We hope that further research will elucidate the characteristics that link caregiving with depression in some communities.

Social Connection and Fiction: The Possible Benefit of “Interacting” with Fictional Characters

Presenter: Brinna Mawhinney – Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Sara D. Hodges, Eliott Doyle

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

This study addresses one role that fiction may play in people’s lives—specifically, providing social “interaction.” Participants (265 University of Oregon students) completed a writing task that involved writing about fictional characters and completed measures of loneliness and social fuel to see if that interaction may fulfill social needs and alleviate loneliness. We hypothesized that higher transportation scores—a participant’s overall immersion in the story as judged by an outside reader’s perspective—would predict lower participant loneliness scores who are writing either from the perspective of a fictional character, to a fictional character, or their own journal entry. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the media source of each fictional character will moderate this relationship, with written source media producing higher transportation scores and lower loneliness scores than visual source media. Finally, we hypothesized that participants who wrote more fiction or journaled outside of the context of the study would earn higher transportation scores and also report lower loneliness scores. Results indicated that coder-rated transportation does significantly predict a larger reduction in loneliness scores. Neither media type nor participants’ own writing outside of the study moderated the relationship between transportation and change in loneliness. Results may have implications for developing a writing intervention to alleviate loneliness.

Code-Switching: Students in Formal v.s Informal Settings

Presenter: Ashling Mahony − Psychology

Co-Presenter(s): Sofia Martin, Taylor Bollenbaugh, Simone Baeza

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: (Virtual) Poster Presentation

The way we communicate is always changing. It even changes when we speak to different people or in different settings. We decided to look further into the details of how specifically college- aged students change their lexicon and grammar in formal and informal settings. This is known as code-switching–alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in a single conversation. We have looked at responses from students from each scenario and have drawn conclusions from both sets of responses. We want to see how college-aged students code-switch their language in different situations. The two different environments we are going to study are formal/classroom settings and informal/social media settings. We want to see how college-aged students react to online school versus in-person school. We sent out questionnaires for students to complete anonymously. UO academic residential communities and Instagram stories will be how we get the majority of our responses. Hybrid learning has created an academic environment that is formal, yet informal. When students code-switch in response to a change in setting, the type of language they speak reflects their attitudes and interests in those different situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly transformed many students’ attitudes towards education in the United States. We can use our results to help predict what the future of education may look like post- pandemic.

The effects of physical violence on mental health in Tunisian women

Presenter: Makenzie Litty − Data Science, Psychology

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Physical violence is a public health problem because it not only affects the physical wellbeing of victims short-term, but also negatively affects their mental health long-term. Although much research has been done on the effects of intimate-partner violence, less has been done looking at overall risk of personal violence and its effects on mental health. In this study, we analyzed the World Health Organization’s Tunisian Health Examination Survey (2016) responses to better understand the association between women experiencing physical violence and rates of depression. Results are forthcoming, but we hypothesize that experiencing physical violence will be associated with the presence of depression for women in Tunisia. With this research we hope to highlight how experiencing deliberate violence by another person [stabbings, being struck by an object] in your community lead to long-term effects on mental health.

Possible Benefits of Maternal Thiamine Supplementation for Mother-Infant Joint Attention in Cambodia

Presenter: Sera Lew – Global Studies, Psychology

Co-Presenter(s): Audrey Saing

Faculty Mentor(s): Dare Baldwin, Jeffrey Measelle

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

Thiamine deficiency is a common micronutrient deficiency in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia (Measelle, et al., 2020). Severe thiamine deficiency contributes to infant mortality, while subclinical levels undercut infants’ neurocognitive development (Fattal-Valevski, et al. 2009). This study focuses on the possible implications of mother-infant thiamine status for neurocognitive development in terms of joint attention interactions where caregivers and babies simultaneously engage with the same object. This study is part of a larger randomized controlled trial in rural Cambodia investigating how low-dose thiamine supplementation of breastfeeding mothers might benefit infants’ cognitive development. Cambodian mothers (N=335) were randomly assigned to receive daily supplements of either 0mg, 1.2mg, 2.4mg, or 10mg of thiamine hydrochloride from 2 to 24 weeks postnatal. We hypothesized that mothers and infants who received thiamine would display longer joint attention interactions than those in the control group. Preliminary findings from 70 mother-infant dyads (control: 18; supplementation: 52) provided possible confirmation of these predictions; joint attention interactions were marginally longer for dyads who received supplemental thiamine than those who did not, F(1, 68) = 3.69, p = .059. If these findings are reflected in the full sample, they would indicate that thiamine facilitates infants’ joint attention interactions, a key catalyst for neurocognitive development.

Usage of Taboo Words in Online Settings of Varying Anonymity

Presenter: Dylan Lew – Psychology

Co-Presenter(s): Olivia Ward, Josh Weinrobe, Evan Wong

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Communication: How and Why

This is an observational study to see how the use of taboo language on social media platforms changes depending on the anonymity of its users. To accomplish this, we examined the contents of comments on posts from three different social media platforms: Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. Each of these varies slightly in how much emphasis is put upon the user’s image, with Instagram emphasizing personal content production (selfies, snapshots, etc.) while Twitter and Reddit content being more impersonal (e.g. discussions, news, etc.). We hypothesized that users on platforms that promote personal content less would correlate with less frequent usage of taboo words, as usage of these words could be considered harmful to a user’s image. For several days, we collected 100 comments total across several posts and tallied the number of total swears present across all comments. We also categorized each swear into either definite swears, and non-definite swears whose taboo nature is debated in order to measure the intensity of swearing. Our preliminary results conform to our initial hypothesis, with Instagram comments having much lower amounts of swearing present than on Reddit or Twitter. This may indicate that anonymity plays a significant role in user behavior online regarding swearing, with more anonymity corresponding with more intense and/or frequent swearing.