To provide a sense of the range of disseration research in the Department of Psychology, recent dissertation titles are listed below, organized by the year the dissertation was successfully defended. Not all students formally graduate the year of their defense. Clinical students, e.g., delay graduation until their internship is complete, thus the number of titles may not agree with the number of PhD graduates for a given year.

2002

Number concepts in chimpanzees: Analogues of addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

The influence of fathers' presence, gender role, beliefs, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background on daughters' achievement motivation.

Women who attempt suicide: A comparison of multiple attempters and single attempters.

Language and literacy: Effects of parent practices, child interests, and shared book reading.

Auditory temporal processing in children with reading disabilities.

Predicting lack of awareness of cognitive deficits in Alzheimer's disease.

Parental mediation of television viewing: Influences on ethnic identity development among African American college students.

Precipitating events to treatment seeking for PTSD in Vietnam veterans.

A qualitative analysis of the presence of sense of community, perceived social support, and social participation behaviors in small, rural assisted living facilities.

Testing for the reliability and validity of the job-person reiteration scale (JPIS) intended to measure contributing factors involved in the development of occupational burnout among health care providers in AIDS care.

The effect of a 24-hour fast on the eating behavior of free-living humans.

Grief following perinatal loss and the impact of hospital-based support services.

Language factors influencing early reading development in bilingual (Filipino-English) children.

Reaction time measures of death attitudes: Examining the correlates of death anxiety and testing terror management hypotheses.

Neurobiological mechanisms of conditioned defeat in male Syrian hamsters.

Promoting healthy sexual behavior among adolescents: The role of the parent-adolescent relationship.

Mobilizing the village: Collaborating with parents and community members to increase parental involvement in a high school of the arts.

Materialism, attachment style, and relational ethics: Interpersonal correlates of materialistic orientation.

Predictors of African American adolescent sex.

The effects of emotional arousal on recall, blood glucose, and salivary cortisol levels in young and older adults.

Social support psycho-social determinants and contextual influences on HIV risk behaviors among incarcerated women.

Domestic violence and problems in housing: A contexual analysis of women's helpseeking, received informal support, and formal system response.

Cultural attributes and adaptive strategies that promote positive school values among immigrant Latino adolescents.

The mediating role of personality in the association between relational ethics and dispositional envy.

The relation between alexithmia and aggression in a nonclinical sample.

2001

Reactive aggression: Attitudes and triggers in Black and Latino adolescents.

The reduction of disruptive behavior exhibited by youth in residential group care by increasing positive interactions with direct care providers.

The role of perceived fairness and gender in the relationship between parentification and emotional and social adjustment.

The use of functional analysis to assess behavioral deficits: increasing compliance in the developmentally disable population.

A developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging study of behavioral inhibition.

Prevention of HIV infection among gay and non-gay identified men who have sex with men.

The home literacy environment of children with reading disability and effects on reading outcome after intervention.

The quality of mother-child interaction and its relation to social competence in deaf and hearing pre-schoolers.

The roles and relations of phonological awareness and naming speed in early reading development.

The role of spirituality and meaning-based coping on psychosocial adjustment to HIV/AIDS.

Self-esteem, coping, and social support as moderators of the relation between executive functions and high risk behavior among urban African American adolescent girls.

A smoking cessation trial among pregnant women: Bupropion and motivational enhancement therapy.

The role of the locus coeruleus and its effects on spontaneous motor activity in response to the intraperitoneal lipopolysaccharide in rats.

2000

The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on the mutual regulation of attention in mother-infant dyads.

Assessing stress/trauma among Israelies before and after their immigration to the USA.

The influence of partner type on condom use among African American women.

Ending violence against women: The utility of using an individual-level strategy to affect social change.

The exploration of narrative by young children and their mothers.

Mothers' ideas about infants' development: A comparison of African American and West African women.

The psychological variables related to compulsive buying and consumer debt.

Relation of conduct disorder: antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy among juvenile offenders.

Acculturative stress, cultural content, and therapist race: Its effects on Black women's ratings of therapist credibility.

Acculturative stress and the academic performance of African American college students.

Intrafamiial sexual abuse of preadolescents.

Irrational health beliefs as predictors of glycemic self-control in types 1 and 2 diabetes mellitus.

Functional neuroimaging of pure alexia.

Contextual theory and writing about upsetting events: An outcome story.

The Von Restorff effect as a function of attributes of the isolated item.

Weight gain in humans.

Family and community level moderators of adolescent exposure to community and domestic violence.

Predictors of partner dissatisfaction among abused and non-abused African American women.

The effects of psychological assessment on self-perceptions.

1999

Factors that moderate and mediate the effects of childhood abuse and later suicidal behavior among women.

Empirical investigation of the flexibility model of bisexuality.

Time of day effects on cognitive processing and cerebral blood flow.

Acceptance of group therapy: Effects and interactions of personality and social interest.

Vietnamese individuals' attitudes toward seeking mental health services: Influence of cultural variables.

Predictors of cognitive, adaptive and behavioral functioning in pre-school and school aged children with HIV.

The effects of shame on creative processes.

Neuropsychological predictors of mathematical ability in college students.

A search for common ground: A theoretical evaluation and integration of object relations theory, self-psychology, and the psychoanalytic school of interpersonal psychotherapy

Making sense of AIDS: the development of a meaning scale.

The relation of personality characteristics and reported history of childhood maltreatmnt to vicarious emotional responding.

The use of goal attainment scaling in assessing outcome in solution-focused couple therapy.

Correlates of participation in drug treatment.

Attributions of aggressive driving behavior.

A psychometric study of the affective ratio of the Rorschach.

An investigation of the different effects of sex gender on the neuropsychological performance and brain morphology in schizophrenia.

An investigation of participation, leadership, and governance in Georgia's comprehensive community collaboratives for children and families.

1998

An experimental trial of a home visiting program to prevent child maltreatment.

The impact of risk and resistance factors on the adjustment of children with sickle cell disease.

Toward development of a model of executive functions in adults.

Who follows through with therapy? Stage of chance and severity as predictors of therapy utilization.

The efficacy of a culturally tailored HIV educational intervention for deaf adults.

The influence of sibling relationships on adolescent suicide.

A program evaluation of a model assertive community treatment.

Psychosocial functioning in children with acquired brain injury and the impact on the family and caretaker functioning.

Respite and reduction of caregiver burden.

Religious and non-religious aspects of spirituality and their relationship to Jung's psychological types.

The effect of instruction on the processing of irrelevant information: A schema approach to explaining negative priming.

Etiological factors of alcoholism in lesbian and heterosexual women and the relationship between homophobia and alcoholism.

Predictors of binge eating: Role of dissociation and attachment.

Cognitive adaptation styles among persons with spinal cord injuries: The effects of meaning, personal control, self-esteem, and coping on sexual behavior.