Virtual reality (VR) educational games are growing in demand, partly because of evidence found of the benefit of using embodied gestures in educational VR games. Little research has investigated how presence, which is the subjective experience of existing in a virtual world, impacts player learning gains when playing an embodied STEM VR games. The current study investigates how presence impacts learning gains in four conditions. This study evaluated 122 participants’ subjective experiences of presence via an experimenter-designed Presence Scale after playing an educational STEM VR game. ANOVAs were conducted to evaluate differences in learning gains by condition and to also ascertain how presence was affected by cognitive load. Results revealed that presence did not impact learning gains, although high embodiment and high immersion significantly predicted presence. These findings contribute to understanding the effects of embodiment on VR educational games, and how to design for VR user-ability.

Catholic confession is one of the most practiced and well-known religious acts in the world. Although Catholic confession has proven to be an important component in the lives of millions of people, little research has been conducted exploring trust engagement within Catholic confession or the variables that affect one’s willingness to confess. The purpose of this study was to examine Catholic confession and find whether variables such as perception of the sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, ability, benevolence, and integrity of the priest, Catholic Church, and pope, propensity to trust, trust, and intrinsic religiosity have a significant relation with one’s willingness to confess. This study was conducted through a series of anonymous questionnaires, including two measures that were created for the purpose of this study—the Sex Abuse Perception Measure and Willingness to Confess Measure. Linear regressions and correlations were used to analyze relation between variables. Results revealed that the perception one has of the sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is significantly related to the perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity for a priest, Catholic Church, and the pope. Additionally, ability and benevolence had a moderate positive relation with trust in a priest and the pope and benevolence and integrity had a moderate positive relation with trust in the Catholic Church. Surprisingly, there were no significant relations between propensity to trust and trust in the priest, Catholic Church, or the pope. Similarly, there were no significant relations between trust in the priest, Catholic Church, or the pope and one’s willingness to confess. Intrinsic religiosity did have a positive relation with willingness to confess. This study highlights that individual and organizational religious figures possibly have differing origins of trust (ability, benevolence, and integrity). This difference may be related to one’s perception of the sexual abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church.

Alcohol consumption in first-year college students is both prevalent and problematic. Although several interventions have been shown to decrease alcohol consumption in college students, effect sizes tend to be small. Previous programs have focused on reducing risk factors; however, some research has shown potential in bolstering promotive and protective factors. The main objective of the current study was to further our understanding of the use of promotive and protective factors in alcohol prevention and intervention for first-year college students. A sample of 290 college psychology majors were assigned to either a treatment group or the standard curriculum of a first-semester course on achieving academic success. The intervention included activities aimed to increase academic engagement and community engagement, promote healthy minds and bodies, and promote positive social lives, including engagement in alcohol-free social activities. Students completed baseline measures at the beginning of the fall semester of their first year in college and a follow-up near the end of the semester. Analyses examined proximal targets (use of university resources, perceptions of peer alcohol use, academic engagement, school connectedness) and behavioral targets (personal alcohol use and GPA) of the intervention. Analyses demonstrated changes in proximal targets, but no significant effects of the intervention on behavioral targets. Students in the treatment condition utilized more school resources, had lower perceptions of peer alcohol use, and were marginally higher in school connectedness than those in the control condition. This suggests that the use of promotive and protective factors in alcohol prevention and intervention may contribute to attitudes and behaviors that are associated with better academic performance and less engagement in risk behavior. However, no significant changes were found for personal alcohol use or GPA. Future studies involving longer follow-ups and adding a skills-based component are needed to fully evaluate the potential of this approach.

Family influences are known predictors of adolescent health and well-being trajectories, yet little research has investigated how adolescents’ orientation to family may be associated with their physiological stress responses. Influenced by the strength-based approach to culture, this study evaluated 418 Hispanic adolescents' familism values and perceived life stress in family, school, and peer domains to investigate prospective associations with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress responses to the Group Public Speaking Task for Adolescents (GPST-A). Prior growth-mixture modeling on this sample revealed a five-class solution of cortisol responding to the GPST-A that was used here as the dependent variable: one class showed a more pronounced pattern of reactivity, potentially indicative of hyper-responsivity to the stress task; two classes showed evidence of a low to moderate cortisol response, potentially indicative of an adaptive physiological response to the challenge; and two classes showed patterns of non-responsivity, potentially indicative of hypo-responsivity. Results demonstrate that the role of familism is nuanced in the context of stressors, potentially offering both promotive and risk-amplifying effects for the physiological stress response system. This study offered several novel findings in the relation between cultural factors, salient stressors of adolescence, and HPA activity.

Internal and external validity of the BIDR was examined in college students and with forensic clients. The study also investigated the equivalence of the original format of the BIDR and the revised (the PDS). Results showed the IM scales of the BIDR and the PDS can be regarded as equivalent, but the SDE scales can not. Correlations with concurrent validity scales were generally stronger for the IM scale than the SDE scale. For both groups, the SDE and IM scales were substantially correlated with each other. Analyses of the undergraduate data did not support Paulhus' intention of two major factors for either the BIDR or the PDS; but did show this pattern for forensic data.

Females are highly vulnerable to the effects of methamphetamine, and understanding the mechanisms of this is critical to addressing methamphetamine use as a public health issue. Hormones may play a role in methamphetamine sensitivity; thus, the fluctuation of various endogenous peptides during the postpartum experience is of interest. This honors thesis project explored the relation between anxiety-like behavior, as measured by activity in an open field, and conditioned place preference to methamphetamine in female versus male rats. The behavior of postpartum as well as virgin female rats was compared to that of male rats. There was not a significant difference between males and females in conditioned place preference to methamphetamine, yet females showed higher locomotor activity in response to the drug as well as increased anxiety-like behavior in open field testing as compared to males. Further study is vital to comprehending the complex mechanisms of sex differences in methamphetamine addiction.

In this study, potential differences in the manifestation and rates of eating disorders and symptoms (body dissatisfaction, weight and shape concerns, food restriction, and compensatory behaviors) in college women across sexual orientations were examined. The sociocultural model of eating disorders was also examined for these women across sexual orientations. The participants were organized into three different sexual orientation groups for analysis: heterosexual (group 1), bisexual, pansexual, and polysexual (group 2), and lesbian, gay, queer, transsexual, asexual, and other (group 3). Using cross-sectional data, it was revealed that there were significant group differences when comparing the three sexual orientation groups on loss of control over eating, but no significant group differences on body dissatisfaction, thin ideal internalization, and weight-related eating pathology, and total eating disorder symptoms scores. The sociocultural model was not predictive of eating disorder symptoms among non-heterosexual groups. Longitudinal analyses revealed that the sociocultural model of eating disorders prospectively predicts eating disorder symptoms among heterosexual women, but not non-heterosexual women. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that non-heterosexual women may be protected from societal pressure to subscribe to the thin ideal and its subsequent internalization. However, the comparison group of heterosexual women in our study may not have been completely representative of undergraduate women in terms of total eating disorder symptoms or eating pathology. Additionally, regardless of sexual orientation, our sample reported more total eating disorder symptoms and emotional eating than previous studies. These findings have both clinical and research implications. Future research is needed to determine what risk factors and treatment target variables are relevant for non-heterosexual women.

The purpose of this study was to examine executive cognitive functioning (ECF) and drinking induced disinhibition as potential mechanisms through which a family history (FH) of alcohol problems contributes to off-spring alcohol-related problems. We also examined the hypotheses that indirect effects of family history would be moderated by age of drinking onset, hypothesizing that indirect effects of family history through ECF and drinking induced disinhibition would be stronger among those with an earlier age of drinking onset. The sample included 177 college aged heavy drinking participants (66.2% men; 33.8% women; 78.8% Caucasian; 10.1 % African American; 6.9% Hispanic; 4.2% Multi-racial; 4.8% other) participating in a randomized controlled trial of naltrexone (vs. placebo) plus brief motivational counseling for drinking reduction. Measures of family history, self-control, working memory, and drinking induced disinhibition collected prior to randomization to treatment condition (intake assessment), were used to explore the hypothesized mechanisms of FH effects. Although FH was not related to either working memory or self-control, self-control predicted both drinking induced disinhibition and alcohol-related problems, with a marginal indirect effect of self-control on problems through drinking induced disinhibition. Age of drinking onset did not moderate relations between FH and measures of ECF (working memory and self-control). The findings suggest that self-control is a major factor contributing to the development of alcohol-related problems. Thus self-control may be an important target of intervention regardless of age of drinking onset or family history status.

The benefits of earning a college degree are clear, yet nearly half of first-time, full-time college students do not complete their degree within 6 years. Completing college is no simple task and students must regularly make decisions not to prefer the smaller, immediate rewards over the larger, future reward of graduation (i.e. temporal discounting). Recent research shows initial support that temporal discounting can be reduced by heightening future self-continuity. This thesis study pilot tested an ecological, scalable approach to increase future-self continuity by heightening three components, similarity, vividness and positivity, within the framework of social media. Participants completed measures of these components before and after simulating the creation of a social media profile for themselves 10 years after college graduation. A significant increase in perceived similarity to the future self from Time 1 to Time 2 was detected in a within-subjects test. The findings in this study are encouraging and may inform the development of interventions aimed at increasing future self-continuity in college students.

Background: Noninvasive MRI methods that can accurately detect subtle brain changes are highly desirable when studying disease-modifying interventions. Texture analysis is a novel imaging technique which utilizes the extraction of a large number of image features with high specificity and predictive power. In this investigation, we use texture analysis to assess and classify age-related changes in the right and left hippocampal regions, the areas known to show some of the earliest change in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Apolipoprotein E (APOE)'s e4 allele confers an increased risk for AD, so studying differences in APOE e4 carriers may help to ascertain subtle brain changes before there has been an obvious change in behavior. We examined texture analysis measures that predict age-related changes, which reflect atrophy in a group of cognitively normal individuals. We hypothesized that the APOE e4 carriers would exhibit significant age-related differences in texture features compared to non-carriers, so that the predictive texture features hold promise for early assessment of AD. Methods: 120 normal adults between the ages of 32 and 90 were recruited for this neuroimaging study from a larger parent study at Mayo Clinic Arizona studying longitudinal cognitive functioning (Caselli et al., 2009). As part of the parent study, the participants were genotyped for APOE genetic polymorphisms and received comprehensive cognitive testing every two years, on average. Neuroimaging was done at Barrow Neurological Institute and a 3D T1-weighted magnetic resonance image was obtained during scanning that allowed for subsequent texture analysis processing. Voxel-based features of the appearance, structure, and arrangement of these regions of interest were extracted utilizing the Mayo Clinic Python Texture Analysis Pipeline (pyTAP). Algorithms applied in feature extraction included Grey-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Gabor Filter Banks (GFB), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Discrete Orthogonal Stockwell Transform (DOST), and Laplacian-of-Gaussian Histograms (LoGH). Principal component (PC) analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the algorithmically selected features to 13 PCs. A stepwise forward regression model was used to determine the effect of APOE status (APOE e4 carriers vs. noncarriers), and the texture feature principal components on age (as a continuous variable). After identification of 5 significant predictors of age in the model, the individual feature coefficients of those principal components were examined to determine which features contributed most significantly to the prediction of an aging brain. Results: 70 texture features were extracted for the two regions of interest in each participant's scan. The texture features were coded as 70 initial components andwere rotated to generate 13 principal components (PC) that contributed 75% of the variance in the dataset by scree plot analysis. The forward stepwise regression model used in this exploratory study significantly predicted age, accounting for approximately 40% of the variance in the data. The regression model revealed 5 significant regressors (2 right PC's, APOE status, and 2 left PC by APOE interactions). Finally, the specific texture features that contributed to each significant PCs were identified. Conclusion: Analysis of image texture features resulted in a statistical model that was able to detect subtle changes in brain integrity associated with age in a group of participants who are cognitively normal, but have an increased risk of developing AD based on the presence of the APOE e4 phenotype. This is an important finding, given that detecting subtle changes in regions vulnerable to the effects of AD in patients could allow certain texture features to serve as noninvasive, sensitive biomarkers predictive of AD. Even with only a small number of patients, the ability for us to determine sensitive imaging biomarkers could facilitate great improvement in speed of detection and effectiveness of AD interventions..