Psychological Sciences electronic theses and dissertations (MU)
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The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of the Department of Psychological Sciences. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Columbia. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item The cognitive and neural basis of mathematical performance : evidence from meta-analytic and experimental approaches(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Ünal, Zehra Emine; Geary, David C.; Cowan, NelsonCognitive skills like working memory and reasoning are associated with academic achievement. These skills have been consistently correlated with performance across different academic areas, including math and reading, and thus, are named domain-general abilities. Despite their well-replicated relations with academic skills, the behavioral and neural underpinnings of these domain-general effects are not fully understood. This dissertation explores how domain-general cognitive mechanisms contribute to academic achievement, focusing particularly on mathematics and its relationship to reading. It consists of three studies. In the first study, I conducted two meta-analyses to examine the link between different mathematics and reading skills and the role of domain-general cognitive abilities in the observed relations. The initial analysis (378 studies, 1,282,796 participants) revealed an overall significant relation (r=0.52), as were all associations between specific reading and mathematics measures (rs = 0.23 to 0.61, ps<.05). The subsequent analysis (138 studies, 39,836 participants) showed domain-general cognitive model explained most of the covariance between reading and mathematics outcomes, indicating the associations are largely due to domain-general processes. In the second study, I applied activation probability estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to neuroimaging data (537 experiments) to identify common brain networks involved in reading and math associated with domain-general processes identified in the first study. The results revealed cognitive control networks, including salience, cingulo-opercular, and fronto-parietal networks, involved in domain-general processes associated with mathematics and reading. In the third study, I used an experimental dual-task design to examine domain-general mechanisms in mathematics. By manipulating cognitive and visual demands in algebra tasks, I tested how working memory supports symbolic and spatial algebra and whether its effects are specific to algebra or generalizable in other mathematics domains, including arithmetic and geometry. The results revealed that domain-general attention mechanisms help actively maintain working memory items while performing algebraic and arithmetic tasks and are involved in mathematics performance. Taken together, these studies are advancing our understanding of how domaingeneral cognitive mechanisms function in mathematics, shedding light on their behavioral and neural underpinnings. The findings have implications for the design of educational interventions that target general cognitive processes to support academic learning.Item Retrospective revaluation effects during interpersonal attributions(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Michener-Portock, Paige; Schachtman, ToddFour experiments examined competition of causes in a retrospective revaluation paradigm during judgments of causal attribution in social situations in which individuals or environmental causes were responsible for an outcome. In Phase 1, two causes were described as possible causes of a bad outcome. In Phase 2, one cause received a manipulation that either increased or decreased its status as a possible cause. Participants rated the extent that the non-manipulated (target) cause was the cause of the outcome before and after Phase 2. The difference in these scores was examined to determine whether the Phase 2 information influenced attributions regarding the target cause, and retrospective revaluation effects were found, specifically in deflation conditions (Experiment 1). The importance of the strength of the association between two causes was evaluated in inflation manipulations in Experiments 2 and 3, revealing that this factor was important for observing retrospective revaluation, particularly when the strength of the association was either weak or strong. A fourth experiment examined whether the moral valence of the Phase 2 manipulation influenced retrospective revaluation effects in inflation manipulations and found that morally questionable scenarios showed greater retrospective revaluation effects than accidental scenarios in which a Phase 2 event occurred that was no one's responsibility. Overall, retrospective revaluation effects were found in a variety of situations with both inflation and deflation manipulations.Item Explaining the Christian (vs. nonreligious) advantage in self-concept clarity and self-concordance : it’s the community not the philosophy(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Goffredi, Ryan; Sheldon, KennonPast research on goal striving in religious and nonreligious populations has primarily focused on the contents of goals (Emmons et al., 1998; Emmons, 2005) being pursued rather than the reasons participants have for pursuing those goals, i.e., their motivations. To date there has been no formal attempt at investigating the extent to which religious and nonreligious individuals tend to choose and strive towards selfconcordant goals, i.e., goals pursued out of autonomous, rather than controlled, motivation. The current work aimed to establish reliable comparisons of idiographic goal choice between Christian and nonreligious samples, as well as to demonstrate relevant conative and social processes underlying differences and similarities between the two populations. Studies 1 and 2 established variation in autonomous striving between religious and nonreligious samples such that Christians demonstrate increased selfconcordance, on average. Study 3 replicated and extended these findings to include related constructs of value salience and self-concept clarity. Finally, study 4 explored reasons why Christians may evidence greater self-concordance of idiographic goals and higher scores on related outcomes compared to the nonreligious. It was found that membership in organizations with shared philosophical leanings, and consequent social contextual support, may explain variations in self-concordance, value salience, and selfconcept clarity in these two groups. Implications are discussed as well as contributions of this work to expanding the extant literature in this area of psychology.Item Mapping the course of AUD symptoms : a network perspective(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Conlin, William Edward; Sher, Kenneth J.Contemporary models of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) suggest a stage-like progression wherein certain features (i.e., symptoms) may play key roles in different stages of the disorder. For example, allostatic processes (tolerance, withdrawal) are suggested to play important role in escalation from recreational substance use to addiction, while corticostriatal- limbic neuroadaptations have been found to contribute to craving and subsequent relapses. To further elucidate the role that individual symptoms of AUD play in the development and continuation of other symptoms, the current study used data from NESARC Waves 1 and 2 (n = 34,653) to explore how each individual symptom contributes to the onset, persistence, and recurrence of each other symptom of AUD. After creating subsamples for symptom onset, persistence, and recurrence, cross-lagged panel network models were calculated using Wave 1 symptoms to predict the presence of Wave 2 symptoms. The structure of the onset, persistence, and recurrence networks had low agreement, indicating that inter-symptom relationships differed as a function of course. High frequency, low severity symptoms had the greatest effect on the course of other symptoms, while the course of low frequency, high severity symptoms were most greatly influenced by other symptoms. While broad patterns emerged regarding symptom centrality, some symptoms appeared to have uniquely important roles in the various stages of course. When findings were compared to conceptual addiction models, results were mixed, and processes from multiple theoretical models were reflected in the data. Notable limitations include the presence of only two waves of data, issues related to symptom measurement and variable selection, and analytic limitations. The findings highlight need for additional work understanding the temporal course of individual AUD symptoms.Item Sex-specific neurobiological mechanisms of feeding, motivation, and opioid reward(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Cam, Yonca; Will, Mattthew J.Obesity and opioid use disorder (OUD) are two of the most pressing public health crises in the United States. While often studied separately, both are influenced by overlapping neurobiological systems involved in reward and motivation. This dissertation investigated sex differences in the (1) methodological approach to examining feeding patterns; (2) ventral striatal mechanisms underlying motivational effort for palatable food; (3) and the interaction of palatable diet and hedonic feeding on morphine-associated reward and relapse-like behaviors. In the first study, male and female rats were exposed to conditions of food deprivation and morphine administration to examine changes in diet choice between standard chow and a palatable diet. Both sexes preferred the palatable diet, but only males increased chow intake after deprivation, indicating sex-specific responses to homeostatic signals. The second study assessed the role of intra-accumbens (Acb) MCHR1 signaling in DAMGO-induced motivation for sucrose using a progressive ratio task. Intra-Acb administration of the MCHR1 antagonist SNAP-94847 blocked DAMGO's enhancement of motivational effort in females, without affecting low-effort free feeding in either sex. These findings suggest MCH modulates opioid-driven appetitive effort-based motivation specifically. The third study explored the effects of an opioid-driven model of hedonic feeding on expression of morphine conditioned place preference (CPP) and reinstatement. The opioid-driven hedonic feeding treatment reduced morphine CPP expression in males but had no effect in females, while neither treatment produced reinstatement of morphine CPP in either sex. The final study explored the influence of providing access to a palatable diet, or standard chow, on morphine CPP reinstatement, and in a separate experiment, on morphine CPP extinction. Palatable diet access, compared to chow access, prior to extinction sessions significantly prolonged the number of trials to reach morphine CPP extinction, and also induced morphine CPP reinstatement.