326 research outputs found
Ludwig_OpenPracticesDisclosure_rev – Supplemental material for Predicting Exercise With a Personality Facet: Planfulness and Goal Achievement
No full textSupplemental material, Ludwig_OpenPracticesDisclosure_rev for Predicting Exercise With a Personality Facet: Planfulness and Goal Achievement by Rita M. Ludwig, Sanjay Srivastava and Elliot T. Berkman in Psychological Science</p
The impact of adverse childhood experiences on food choice during adulthood
No full textExcessive amounts of stress and adversity during childhood can have an overwhelming impact on cognitive development and can result in health-risking behaviors later in life. This phenomenon has been found within a variety of diet-related health disorders, including obesity, heart disease, and cancer (Korotana et al., 2016; Fuemmeler et al. 2009; Aquilina et al., 2021) One risk factor for health-risking behaviors in adulthood is having experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The number of ACEs a person experienced in childhood is liked with poor self-regulation processes, elevated levels of impulsivity (Lovallo, 2013), and negative emotional urgency (Shin et al., 2018). One paper identified impulsivity as a moderator of the link between child maltreatment and elevated body mass index (Brown et al., 2017). According to Kirlic et al. (2020), ACEs appears to affect brain network architecture, particularly displaying lower connectivity strength within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), also known for its role in subjective reward value (van Meer et al., 2016). The relations among adverse childhood experiences, impulsivity, and health-risking behaviors are well-established, but how ACEs relate to food choice in adulthood is unknown. The current study intends to fill in this gap by investigating the association between ACEs and food choice while understanding impulsivity’s role in this relationship through self-report, behavioral, and neurological methods.
This is a partial analysis of a data set gathered throughout sessions of the Devaluation Food to Change Eating Behavior study preregistered through Clinical Trials. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03557710?term=Berkman&draw=2&rank=
A Contextual Psychology Approach to Improving Health Outcomes in the Perinatal Period
No full textThe United States holds alarming records for highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the developed world. The US infant mortality rate is on par with many low and middle income countries, and despite the decline in maternal mortality rates globally, pregnancy-related deaths in the US have trended upwards. The Birth Your Way perinatal health promotion program was designed to address this US public health crisis by amplifying the ability of federal maternal child health programs to mitigate the primary infant mortality risk factors, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) admissions, low birthweight and preterm deliveries, and the key maternal mortality risk factor, Cesarean delivery. The federal Medicaid program buffers mortality risk via increased access to perinatal healthcare services; while the federal Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (WIC) improves health outcomes via improved prenatal nutrition. Employing an implementation science approach, the Birth Your Way intervention has been developed and evaluated in collaboration with Medicaid and WIC partners in a model public health test site. The Birth Your Way intervention is the first to utilize an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach to increase pregnant individuals’ adherence to the WIC prenatal nutrition protocol via increases in psychological flexibility, the psychological mechanism underlying ACT. A pragmatic randomized clinical trial was conducted to examine Birth Your Way program effects on psychological flexibility, perinatal nutrition and infant and maternal birth outcomes. Results from the Birth Your Way pragmatic randomized clinical trial demonstrate the ACT-based intervention’s potential to bolster WIC program effects and mitigate poor infant birth outcomes when a minimum dose is received. The current study documents a promising role for the application of ACT in the prenatal period to increase maternal engagement in values-directed actions and healthy dietary behaviors and to decrease the likelihood of NICU admissions, low birthweight, and preterm deliveries. Expanding the reach of ACT-based programs across Medicaid distributors to amplify WIC program engagement could prove a critical component in the public health effort to mitigate the US infant and maternal mortality crisis
Mindfulness and Appraisal-based Interventions for Promoting Distress Tolerance and Preventing Chronic Illness and Persistent Psychological Distress
No full textAddressing the psychological and emotional components of chronic physical and mental health issues is crucial for overall well-being and disease management. Psychoeducational interventions that target meta-cognitive skills and are informed by mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches show great promise in enhancing distress tolerance and fostering health-promoting skills. This dissertation explores the efficacy of interventions that pair contemplative practices with psychoeducational programs in two high-risk populations. The first study focuses on a brief, computer-delivered intervention for T2D prevention in a high-risk adult population, while the second study examines the impact of a mindful self-reflection training combined with a positive psychology and neuroscience course for college-transitioning adults at risk for chronic psychological and emotional distress. Study 1 presents findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a brief (45-min), computer-delivered mindfulness- and acceptance-based intervention for T2D prevention in a screen-identified high-risk population, compared to conventional diabetes prevention education (DPE). Despite strong evidence that Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) can be prevented through lifestyle changes, traditional programs have limited effectiveness in altering behaviors or reducing incidence. Effective, accessible interventions targeting key psychosocial mechanisms and implementable virtually after risk assessments or primary care visits are needed. This intervention aims to enhance meta-cognitive skills (present-moment awareness, psychological flexibility, controllability awareness, experiential acceptance, cognitive defusion, and values identification) and reduce perceptions of threat and diabetes distress, a known barrier to health behavior change. The ACT + DPE group showed significantly higher controllability awareness and emotional acceptance, along with lower state anxiety, perceptions of diabetes risk-related threat, and state stress compared to the DPE-only group. Groups demonstrated equivalent readiness to change, self-management activation, or self-efficacy. This RCT is one of the first to test a brief, web-based, ACT-informed diabetes prevention program, demonstrating its potential to increase specific meta-cognitive skills and reduce anxiety, stress, and diabetes risk-related threat when engaged immediately after learning about being at high risk for diabetes.
Study 2 explores the impact of meta-cognitive skills on college-transitioning adults' well-being through a 4-week mindful self-reflection training combined with a 10-week positive psychology and neuroscience (PPN) course for first-year undergraduate students, compared to a control group (general psychology course). The meta-cognitive skills of mindful awareness and psychological distance are valuable for reflecting on adverse life experiences and promoting emotional and psychological well-being, particularly among college-transitioning adults prone to psychological distress. We employed a multi-modal assessment that included psychological surveys, linguistic analysis, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both the PPN course alone and the Mindful Self-reflection training + PPN course groups showed significant increases in self-distancing (i.e., reduced psychologically immersed speech and blame attributions) and self-transcendence. The PPN course alone led to greater increases in interpersonal perspective-taking, while the Mindful Self-reflection training + PPN course group showed greater increases in other-focus and well-being (relationship quality, self-acceptance, sense of purpose, and personal growth), as well as decreases in perceived stress, interpersonal distress, and depression. The Mindful Self-reflection training + PPN course group also had greater pre-to-post decreases in neural activity in the posterior precuneus, dmPFC, and TPJ during self-distancing tasks compared to the control group. Training in mindfulness and adaptive self-reflection on emotionally difficult events during the first year of college can alter the thought content and neural mechanisms of meta-cognitive skills, including self-referential processing, self- and other-mentalizing, self-distancing, and emotion regulation, ultimately reducing psychological and interpersonal distress and increasing multiple dimensions of well-being
Goal Representation and Reflection: The Crucial Roles of How We Think About Our Goals
No full textThis dissertation investigates how people perceive and reflect on their goals, with the broader aim of contributing to an understanding of how to set goals that foster a fulfilling pursuit experience. Across three studies, the central focus is on goal representation, which refers to the way individuals perceive and evaluate their goals. This dissertation aims to expand the understanding of the dynamics of goal representation, its roles in shaping goal pursuit, and its relations to the self, as well as to explore interventions that guide goal reflection in order to improve well-being during goal pursuit. Study 1 was a three-month longitudinal study that examined relative differences in six goal representation components, namely value, external motivation, attainability, instrumentality, consensus, and measurability, and their prospective associations with goal pursuit outcomes. Components showed distinct prospective associations with effort, progress, and action crisis. Additionally, the six-component structure remained aligned across two timepoints whereas components varied in stability. This project provided empirical evidence supporting a multifaceted, dynamic model of goal representation in multiple-goal contexts.
Study 2 introduced a novel network-based approach to capture the relationships between multiple goals and multiple identities with a cross-sectional design. Participants nominated their personal goals and identities, and then rated each pairwise connection between a specific goal and a specific identity. Descriptive patterns showed that goals tend to connect to distinct subsets of identities. At the goal level, broader goal–identity integration, measured as the proportion of identities connected to a goal, was associated with higher perceived value, attainability, commitment, effort, and satisfaction with progress. At the person level, greater centralization of the goal–identity network was linked to higher life satisfaction. This network approach expands how the self-relevance of one’s goals is conceptualized and opens new possibilities for understanding how the self shapes goal representation and pursuit.
Study 3 was an online experiment aimed at testing whether brief, single-session guided reflections could enhance momentary subjective well-being during goal pursuit. Participants were randomly assigned to an attainment-focused reflection, a value-focused reflection, or a non-goal-related control condition. Across conditions, participants reported significant reductions in ill-being immediately after reflection, suggesting that both goal-related reflection strategies can buffer against negative affect and stress in the moment. Reductions were smaller for the attainment-focused condition than for the control, and no differences were observed for positive well-being or need satisfaction. Moderation analyses indicated that the effects of each strategy varied depending on the representation of the selected goal. For example, value-focused reflection was more effective for goals high in clarity, while attainment-focused reflection was less effective for goals high in value. These findings suggest that tailoring reflection strategies based on goal representation may optimize their effects on subjective well-being.
These studies establish goal representation as a multifaceted construct, demonstrate the utility of mapping goal–identity systems, and provide initial evidence that brief, structured reflections can reduce ill-being during goal pursuit
The Psychology of Socioeconomic Inequality in the United States
No full textEffective, evidence-based public policy is of critical importance to address issues of socioeconomic inequality, poverty, and class mobility. Psychological science has a valuable opportunity to inform the development of effective policy through its person-centered approach to understanding social phenomena. The core thesis of this dissertation is that the ability to design effective social welfare is dependent upon a comprehensive understanding of inequality as a systemic social phenomenon, and that psychological science can fill gaps in this understanding that are unaccounted for by traditionally dominant sociological and economic theories. To demonstrate this, I present two novel empirical studies that link socioeconomic status and mobility to psychological factors. The first study (Chapter II) tests whether personality traits such as conscientiousness and impulsivity, discounting of distant financial rewards, and socioeconomic status are related in a sample of N = 1100 American adults with annual income ranging from at or below the poverty line (20,000) to upper-middle class ($200,000+). The second study (Chapter III) builds on the former with a sample of N = 313 American adults who recorded their daily financial expenditures to test whether and how personality traits and affective experience relate to everyday purchases. I conclude with a general discussion (Chapter IV) reviewing how extant psychological theories can account for the muted successes of real-world policy, and make recommendations for those seeking to further address issues of socioeconomic inequality through research and policy initiatives.
This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material
Investigating Dopamine- and Norepinephrine-Linked Variability in Cognitive Control in Lab and in Life
No full textA series of experiments investigated the relationship between locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) function and striatal dopamine (DA) tone and the flexibility of stability of cognitive control. Across 4 experiments, participants completed an attention shifting task, in which they had to periodically switch the focus of their attention while avoiding distraction. In 3 of the 4 experiments, participants’ eyes were tracked to collect eye blink rate and pupil size, indices of striatal dopamine and LC-NE function respectively. A second aim of this project was to determine whether DA- and NE-linked variability in cognitive control was predictive of more ecologically valid real-world behaviors. To this end, participants in Experiment 4 also completed an additional lab session, in which they performed an internet search task, designed to be similar to what a student might experience in their everyday life. Participants then completed 2 weeks of follow-up questionnaires to provide a self-report of their daily experience of distractibility and flexibility. We hypothesized that observable indices of flexibility and distractibility during the internet search task would mediate the relationship between attention task performance and real-world experiences.
Results indicated that EBR is related to attentional flexibility; however the specific shape of the effect was inconsistent across studies, with one showing a linear effect on the ability to update the attentional set, and the other showing a quadratic effect. There were large, consistent main effects of both tonic and phasic pupil measures on attention task performance, with longer latencies, larger phasic responses, and larger baseline pupil sizes all tending to predict slower responding and a higher error rate. There was no clear pattern of pupil effects across conditions, however, and so it is not clear whether pupil-linked changes in task performance are related to specific effects on cognitive control processes, or rather a more general arousing effect on performance. Finally, there were also no clear links suggesting that observable behaviors on our internet search task could be used to bridge between attention task performance and real-world behavior
Towards an Integrative Study of Self
No full textThe study of self within psychology has been limited in a number of ways. Two sets of empirical studies extended the study of self beyond traditional trait-based self-perception. In the first set of studies, seven hundred and eighty-nine adults listed their multiple “self-aspects” that represent meaningful elements of their lives and completed trait ratings for each of their self-aspects. The similarity between trait responses for the different self-aspects indicated the degree of “self-complexity” for a participant, as well as the degree of “self-integration.” Results replicated previous findings indicating that lower self-complexity is associated with higher well-being, and that network-based approaches for measuring self-complexity were more strongly with well-being. Finally, participants who completed the same task 3 weeks later demonstrated an increase in self-integration. Broadly, the results demonstrate that network-based approaches are an effective metric for studying the structure of the self and that future work may have success using networks to inform identity-based interventions.
In the second set of studies, five hundred and ninety-four adults completed studies about personal identity and morality. Participants imagined that some trait about someone had changed and were asked to indicate the degree to which the trait change would change the person’s identity. Comparisons of interest examined the degree to which moral trait changes led to more perceived identity change than non-moral trait changes and the degree to which imagining changes to oneself versus to another person yielded differences in perceived identity change. Results replicated previous work indicating that morals lead to most perceived identity change and find that changes to self yielded large perceived identity change than changes to a friend. Moreover, neuroimaging work revealed that thinking about identity change for both targets recruits regions of the cortical midline and that thinking about moral trait words does not recruit any regions compared to thinking about non-moral trait words, challenging previous assumptions about the nature of self-perception and personal identity. Results from both sets of studies were integrated with philosophical and translational perspectives to consider the overall contributions to real-world, self-control issues and broader questions about the nature of the self
Boredom and the Need for Agency
No full textHumans are highly motivated to avoid boredom. What is the functional role of boredom, and why is it so aversive? An empirical study tested the hypothesis that a need for agency, or control over one’s actions and their effects, plays a role in our avoidance of boredom. The study also explored the role of an individual difference called experiential avoidance, which captures the tendency to avoid negative internal experiences, sometimes via problematic behaviors. Results were integrated with current clinical techniques that use mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches to address such avoidance of internal experiences.
In the study, one hundred twenty-three adults completed a series of computer tasks in which their sense of agency was manipulated. After being oriented to high and medium levels of agency, participants completed a series of 30-second low agency trials in which they had the opportunity to escape to high or medium agency, at a cost. The amount of money they were willing to forego indicated their motivation to avoid low agency, or “need for agency.” After a break, they were then asked to complete a series of 30-second trials in which they did nothing, but again had the option to escape to high or medium agency at a cost. The amount of money they were willing to forego in this task indicated their motivation to avoid doing nothing, or “need for action.” Results demonstrated that on average, people were willing to give up money to avoid both low agency and to avoid a boring situation (doing nothing). Furthermore, their motivation to avoid boredom indeed was driven by the extent to which they felt that doing nothing afforded them a low sense of agency. Finally, those who were higher in experiential avoidance demonstrated a higher need for agency and action, and those lower in mindfulness demonstrated a higher need for agency. These results demonstrate that the motivation to avoid boredom may be rooted in a need for agency, and that acceptance- based clinical approaches may have success addressing this avoidance and the problematic behaviors that follow
Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms of Mindfulness and Meditation
No full textMeditation is a useful construct with which to bridge the divide between physiology and psychology because of its impacts on both physical and mental health. Examining the same construct from different perspectives allows for the synthesis of knowledge from psychology and from physiology, and establishing the mechanisms by which mindfulness exerts its eects is important for understanding and intervening on the proximal factors that contribute to mental and physical health. The goal of this dissertation is to advance the understanding of the mechanisms of meditation and mindfulness using a multi-method approach. Chapter 2 asks "How well is trait mindfulness perceived by outside observers?" via self-other agreement (SOA), observability, and evaluativeness of mindfulness. Study 1 investigated SOA of trait mindfulness. SOA correlations suggest that the internal process of mindfulness likely manifests in observable behaviors. Study 2 investigated the observability and evaluativeness of mindfulness. There were no strong relationships between SOA and either observability or evaluativeness of mindfulness, suggesting that SOA is not strongly impacted by enhancing biases in self report or the observability of the process of mindfulness. The behavioral outcomes of mindfulness, rather than the mental processes alone, may determine how mindfulness impacts relationships. Chapter 3 investigated the effects of mindfulness training on parents' neural activity and the parent-child relationship. Parents completed a fMRI mindfulness task before and after attending a mindfulness course with their early-adolescent children. Parent neural activation increased in areas related to self-awareness, interoception, and emotion regulation. Changes in parents' activation in an area related to empathy correlated with changes in children's reports of the parent-child relationship. These findings suggest that parent emotion regulation is a potential mechanism by which mindful parenting interventions affect change. Chapter 4 tested endogenous opioid involvement in meditation analgesia using cross-over administration of the opioid antagonist Naloxone and experienced meditators. Pain was significantly lower during meditation than at baseline under Naloxone, indicating that long-term meditation practice inhibits pain via a non-opioid pathway and presents the first evidence that opioids inhibit another neurochemical pathway leading to pain relief. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material.10000-01-0
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