2022-2023 Senior Honors Theses
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/13940
This collection contains theses produced by Class of 2023 Honors students
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Browsing 2022-2023 Senior Honors Theses by Department "Psychological, Health, and Learning Sciences, Department of"
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Item Exploring the Relationship Between Parental Mental Health and Parental Perceptions of Infant Vulnerability(2022-12) Sampige, RituA mismatch in vulnerability perception occurs when parents’ perceptions of their children’s medical vulnerability level differ from children’s objective medical risk status, and such mismatch negatively affects children’s health. The goal of this thesis is to determine how parental perceptions of infant vulnerability compare with objective infant vulnerability status and to identify the role of parental mental health in this relationship. This thesis fills the current gap in vulnerability-related research by elucidating parental perceptions of infant vulnerability across a broad range of infant health (NICU and well-baby nursery infants). Deidentified longitudinal data from the BabySeq Project was utilized for this study. Conducted between May 14, 2015 and May 21, 2019, the BabySeq Project was a randomized controlled trial that aimed to determine the psychosocial impact of newborn genomic sequencing results on families (519 parents of 325 infants). Data collected at 3 months and 10 months after disclosure of sequencing results were the focus of this present study. The data set included information regarding parental anxiety (GAD-7), depression (PHQ-9), perceptions of children’s vulnerability (CVS), and reported medical history of infants. From the data set, two novel variables were developed, including the objective vulnerability score to identify infants’ medical risk status and the Match/Mismatch score to determine parents’ risk for misperceiving their infants’ vulnerability. Parental mental health scores were significant predictors of Match/Mismatch scores and perceived vulnerability, and vice versa, within each timepoint at 3 and 10 months post-disclosure. When controlling for demographic variables, Match/Mismatch scores at 3 months, but not parental mental health at 3 months, longitudinally predicted Match/Mismatch scores at the 10-month timepoint. Additionally, parental mental health at 3 months, but not Match/Mismatch scores at 3 months, longitudinally predicted future parental mental health at the 10-month timepoint. There is a need for health care professionals to identify parents who are at risk for mismatch in infant vulnerability perception. By recognizing such at-risk parents, physicians can subsequently provide resources that will assist parents in better understanding their infant’s objective health status, and physicians can allocate resources to help alleviate parents’ potential mental health severity.Item YouTube Kids: Understanding Gender and Emotion through Modern Media.(2023-05-04) Lyles, LaurenThrough emotion socialization, children learn what emotions are, how to express them, and how to respond to them from the models they observe (Eisenberg et al., 1998; Gottman et al., 1996). Modeling of emotional displays is often gendered: American stereotypes of masculinity and femininity include emotional display rules, which are reflected in media (Oliver & Green, 2001). Masculine characters display more anger, while feminine characters showed more positive emotions, fear, and sadness (Oliver & Green, 2001). YouTube Kids is more interactive than traditional media, providing a more responsive media context of emotion socialization that has not been previously studied, and I endeavored to explore how these videos function as contexts of emotion socialization during middle childhood. We coded gender and emotion content to determine whether gendered patterns of emotion were present. I created two ghost users, to span the middle childhood range (6- to 12-years-old) and analyzed the top twenty recommended videos. Teams of independent researchers coded at the character and video levels. Each video received a gender global rating, as either completely feminine; mainly feminine with some masculinity; equally feminine and masculine; no gender-typed content; mainly masculine with some femininity; or completely masculine. Gender presentation of each character was coded as only feminine; both masculine and feminine; neither feminine nor masculine; or only masculine. Each video also received a global rating for emotion, for both positive and negative emotionality on a three-point Likert scale (0-2). Emotion coding for each character also used a three-point Likert scale (0-2) to indicate the extent of prototypical emotions such as pride, love, excitement, happiness, positive surprise, negative surprise, shame/guilt, anger, fear, and sadness/distress. Paired t-tests revealed there were significantly more positive emotions than negative emotions displayed within these videos (t (301) = 20.49, p < .001). There was a non-significant trend for video gender rating to interact with the within-subjects factor of positive vs negative emotionality, F (2, 17) = 3.14, Wilks' lambda = 0.73, p = .069. Though this finding must be interpreted with caution, this trend suggests that the disparity between positive emotionality and negative emotionality differed according to the video’s gender rating. When emotion and gender are observed at the character level, there was a significant difference in positive and negative emotions displayed by characters according to their gender presentation (F (3, 298) = 4.46, Wilks' lambda = 0.96, p = .004) with feminine characters displaying more positive emotions than their masculine and non-gendered stereotypes. Tentative findings suggest emotionality is gendered in YouTube Kids videos, but replication research is required to clarify these findings. Media has potential to be an avenue to reduce gender boundaries on emotions by promoting equal representations of people and their sentiments. However, current findings suggest videos on YouTube Kids may perpetuate gender-stereotyped emotionality.