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Theses and Dissertations - Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methodology, and Counseling

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations - Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methodology, and Counseling by Subject "Behavioral sciences"

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    Autonomic arousal and its relationship to child behavior: the moderating role of parenting practices
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Romero, Devon Elizabeth; Lochman, John E.; Burnham, Joy J.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Moderated multiple regression analyses were conducted in order to examine parental involvement, poor monitoring and supervision, and inconsistent discipline as moderators in the relationship between autonomic arousal (i.e., baseline skin conductance level, baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia, skin conductance reactivity, respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity) and externalizing behavior. Data was collected from a sample of 360 fourth grade students identified by their teachers and parents as at-risk for moderate to high levels of aggression. The results did not support the research hypotheses posed in the current study. Despite the lack of significant results for the planned hypotheses, exploratory analyses produced useful findings about the complex relationships among these behavioral, physiological, and contextual constructs. Five predictor variables (i.e., parental involvement, poor monitoring and supervision, inconsistent discipline, gender, and RSA reactivity) predicted parent rated externalizing behavior, while gender was the single predictor of teacher rated externalizing behavior. This provided a unique look into how the predictor variables manifest themselves in different environments. Further, this study highlighted the main effects of sympathetic and parasympathetic functioning, which suggest that at-risk preadolescents are maladaptively regulated. For example, higher RSA reactivity indicated that at-risk youth have inflexible parasympathetic responding, which negates sympathetic activation. This main effect of RSA reactivity demonstrates that parasympathetic functioning predicts child behavior over sympathetic functioning in an at risk sample of children. Additionally, physiological response patterns in at-risk children appear to be more convoluted than originally suggested. The current study found higher levels of baseline RSA to be associated with higher ratings of teacher rated hyperactivity in the presence of high inconsistent discipline. This suggests that externalizing behaviors may not be entirely characterized by a single pattern of autonomic arousal (e.g. low baseline). Overall, these results confirm the influence of bioecological interactions on externalizing behavior in an at-risk sample of children and point to a nuanced and complicated picture of the maintenance of externalizing behaviors. This study highlighted relationships among the study variables that will serve to contribute to future research, treatment, and prevention of externalizing behavior in at-risk children.
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    The psychological construction of confusion and its relationship to complex inferential reasoning performance in a learning environment
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Poole, Territa L.; Thoma, Stephen; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    A growing body of evidence suggests that meaningful learning is improved when students engage in tasks and activities that require complex thinking or inferential reasoning. In turn, many educationalists have responded to this finding by attempting to intensify the cognitive rigor of learning tasks given to students. But this strategy alone may prove ineffective because interdisciplinary investigations suggest that complex reasoning involves both cognitive and affective processes. In fact, the emotional experience of learning-related confusion, categorized as an epistemic emotion, is purported to foster or improve students’ complex inferential reasoning, although specific mechanisms of action which underpin confusion’s reported benefit have not been well studied and thus remain unclear. One hypothesis, proposed by this dissertation, is that confusion is a psychologically constructed emotion, where confusion concept knowledge and epistemological beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning represent constitutive elements that are in turn associated with differences in how students perceive the feeling of, and respond to confusion in the context of performing complex reasoning tasks. To shed light on this phenomenon, the Theory of Constructed Emotion was utilized as a guiding framework, in conjunction with hierarchical regression analyses, to investigate how students might psychologically construct two different perceptions of confusion, as well as the ways in which different confusion constructions appear to either help or hinder complex inferential reasoning performance. Results suggest that there are differences in students’ psychological constructions of confusion and that these differences are related to variation in their reasoning performance.