The role of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease can expose friends and family caregivers to significant stress over an extended period of time, resulting in a host of negative outcomes like increased depression and anxiety, and diminished quality of life. However, previous studies have found that...
Conversation is an important part of human life. Given globalization and the numerous languages around the world, it is increasingly likely that we will be communicating with others speaking in their second language (L2) rather than their first language (L1). In these situations, communication may require more effort. However, people...
The advent of advanced computing and AI has led to social technologies becoming agentic teammates in human-autonomy teams. Interpersonal trust, vital for team functioning, is crucial in determining these teams' success or failure. Trust, while essential, can be easily broken and requires maintenance and repair. This dissertation addresses two questions:...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
We structure our lives around social groups – belonging to them and thinking about them. In this dissertation, I develop a new stereotype content measure to assess the attributes associated with groups in America today, propose and support a theory of sociocultural essentialism, and explore the strategic activation of sociocultural...
Health literacy has been shown to be a key component of patient understanding of medical diagnoses, adherence, and self-efficacy. Limited health literacy has been associated with a number of negative outcomes— including more severe illness, increased use of emergency services, and mortality. The concept of mental health literacy has arisen...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...
Students often change majors during college, and most workers change jobs throughout their careers. Yet the diverse opportunities for entering natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are often overlooked during college and beyond. This dissertation therefore analyzed four large nationally representative datasets to characterize the pathways for joining...
Research shows that psychometrically-assessed spatial abilities (e.g., spatial visualization and spatial orientation) can be improved through training, and that some training yields improvements that are transferable to novel contexts and tasks (Uttal et al., 2013). While the training of these spatial abilities may be valuable for some forms of STEM...
According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether...