Background: Black South Africans were forced to live under the oppressive regime of apartheid for more than four decades. This system of government not only restricted the economic and educational opportunities for Blacks, but it also marginalized women by encouraging the preservation of a violent, patriarchal society. As a result of a long history of nationalized oppression, Black women in South Africa continue to be an economically and socially vulnerable group. Their vulnerability is translated into limited intimate relationship power, which confers a host of health and safety risks. Thus, the current study explored whether negative life events and/or HIV infection related directly to women’s intimate relationship power or was moderated by community-level variables (knowledge, helpfulness, and use of resources). Method: Participants were 104 women living with HIV and 152 non-infected women, who were recruited in and around Pretoria, South Africa. Two aspects of intimate relationship power were considered: relationship control (e.g. Partner controls what I wear) and decision making dominance (e.g. Who usually decides when you have sex?). Decision-making dominance was divided into three subscales (male dominant, female dominant and mutual). Results: For relationship control, fewer undesirable life changes were associated with more control. For decision-making dominance, several main and interaction effects were observed. Negative serostatus and women’s knowledge of community resources were directly associated with more mutual decision-making. However, more frequent family use of community resources was related to less female dominated decisions. For helpfulness of resources, a significant interaction revealed that women living with HIV/AIDS perceived their male partners as less dominant when they perceived their community resources to be more helpful. Conclusions: Power in intimate relationships may enhance the quality and length of life for Black South African women; thus, it is important to identify factors that promote or compromise power. The results of this study suggest that undesirable life changes, HIV infection, and great reliance on community resources (i.e. frequent use) are negatively associated with perceived relationship power. Alternatively, the current study identified the perceived helpfulness of community resources as one possible factor that promotes relationship power.

Revictimization, defined as victimization occurring at different points in time, has been found repeatedly in college, community, and clinical samples. Attempts to understand this relation have been theoretically and methodologically limited. Theoretically, most studies have considered only individual level characteristics such as personality traits, and methodologically, the variety of definitions and measures used makes comparisons difficult. This study investigated the effect of homelessness, an exosystem factor, as a moderator of the revictimization relation in a sample of 370 underserved women (191 in prison and 179 seeking healthcare at an urban, public hospital). A series of logistic regressions were conducted to predict adult physical and adult sexual victimization using four different definitions of child sexual abuse and one definition of child physical abuse. Main effects for child abuse, regardless of the definition used, incarceration status and homelessness on both adult physical and adult sexual victimization were consistently found. However, homelessness did not moderate the revictimization relation. The high reported rate of adult physical victimization may have prevented finding an interaction effect, as almost 82% of women reported this experience. Findings underscore the multitude of traumas experienced by this population and the need for primary prevention of child abuse and homelessness.

Most of the extant humor research has focused on humor comprehension with only a few studies investigating humor appreciation as a separate construct. The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relation between humor and underlying cognitive processes. Literature on brain injured individuals has indicated that working memory, verbal and visual-spatial reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and concept formation are related to performance on comprehension tests of humor. In this study, cognitive processes underlying both verbal and nonverbal humor were investigated in a sample of healthy young adults. There is evidence that semantic and phonological humor are associated with different neural networks; therefore, both semantic and phonological humor were explored. Studies investigating physiological arousal and humor have indicated that arousal is necessary for the experience of humor. This suggests that the appreciation of humor may require the integration of cognitive and affective information, a process mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). Thus, a second goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between humor comprehension and appreciation and the VMPFC, by including experimental tasks that previously have been linked to VMPFC functioning. Participants included 94 undergraduate psychology students between the ages of 18 and 39 years. Participants watched film clips and listened to jokes. After the presentation of each joke and each film clip, they completed a humor comprehension/appreciation inventory developed for this study. They also completed measures assessing a range of cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie humor perception. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that verbal reasoning was predictive of semantic humor comprehension, indicating that verbal reasoning is a core cognitive ability for the comprehension of jokes in which the humor depends on factors other than simple word play. Cognitive measures were not predictive of phonological humor comprehension or nonverbal humor comprehension. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the indicators of VMPFC functioning did not correlate with either humor comprehension or humor appreciation and did not moderate the relation between humor comprehension and humor appreciation. Future research is necessary to elucidate the relationships between cognitive abilities and humor perception and to further explore the contribution of the VMPFC to humor appreciation.

Understanding the development of adolescent sexual risk behavior is complicated by the co-occurrence of sexual risk with substance use and delinquency, conceptualized as “problem behavior syndrome,” with common causes and influences underlying all three problem behaviors (Jessor & Jessor, 1977). Explaining the development of sexual risk becomes even more complex given the changing patterns of adaptation and maladaptation over the course of adolescence (Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). Research also suggests that multiple pathways may forecast adolescent engagement in sexual risk behavior, underscoring the ideas of equifinality and multifinality in developmental psychopathology (Cicchetti & Rogosh, 1996). To understand the diverse nature of sexual risk taking, researchers must identify these pathways and disentangle co-occurring problem behaviors from sexual risk. Revealing the course of sexual risk taking and the early risk and protective processes through which problem behavior develops allows researchers to identify the developmental periods that would be most amenable to intervention efforts (Rolf et al., 1990). Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), this study aimed to disentangle problem behavior syndrome by identifying the unique developmental pathways of adolescent sexual risk, alcohol use and delinquency. This study also investigated how early adolescent processes of risk and protection were associated with the growth of these risk behaviors during adolescence. Using a developmental psychopathology and resilience framework, risk trajectories were measured with adolescents aged 15 to 24, and antecedents were measured with early adolescents ages 10 to 14 (N= 1778). Using Latent Class Growth Analyses (LCGA), joint trajectory analyses revealed five distinct adolescent risk taking groups: high sex and alcohol, moderate problem behavior, problem behavior, alcohol-only, and alcohol and delinquency experimentation. Early adolescent externalizing problems were particularly important in understanding adolescent risk group membership. The co-occurrence between sexual risk and alcohol use, the diversity of problem behavior syndrome, and potential intervention and prevention efforts are discussed.

Adolescents raised in impoverished environments are at substantial risk of making poor life decisions because they are often exposed to high levels of neighborhood violence and substance use, and attend under-resourced schools. Despite facing these risks, many youth experience adaptive developmental outcomes in the face of these challenges. Resilience literature identifies the presence of a supportive adult relationship and a positive future orientation (i.e., an optimistic conceptualization of the future) as factors related to decreases in negative outcomes and increases in positive outcomes among youth exposed to conditions of risk This study examined both mediation and moderation as possible mechanisms explaining the interplay of future orientation and supportive adult relationships as contributors to resilient outcomes in African-American youth raised in areas of risk. Specifically, this study assessed (1) whether youth develop a positive future orientation through their contact with supportive adults which results in decreased engagement in problem behaviors and increased grades (i.e., a mediated effect), and (2) whether the associations of supportive adult relationships with problem behavior and academic achievement differ as a function of variation in future orientation (i.e., a moderated effect). Data from an evaluation conducted in a low-income, high risk area in Atlanta were used to tests these mechanisms. This study found that these processes are complex and depend on the outcome variable being assessed. Specifically, future orientation mediated the association between supportive adult relationships and problem behaviors, but moderated the association between supportive adult relationships and academic achievement. In the mediation model, supportive adult relationships were associated with decreases in problem behaviors through its association with future orientation. In the moderation model, among youth with a low future orientation, supportive adult relationships were associated with increases in school grades. This study also found that future orientation interacted with gender associations, such that among youth with high future orientation, girls had higher school grades and among youth with low future orientation, girls engaged in more problem behaviors. This study has implications for future research on future orientation, youth development prevention and intervention programming, and policy around low-income youth.

This study examined the association between traumatic exposure and mental health outcomes in sheltered homeless children. Also investigated was the moderating role of perceived social support in the pathway between traumatic exposure and emotional distress. Trauma exposure was conceptualized in two ways: first through lifetime exposures to abuse, neglect, negative peers, community and interpersonal violence, and the loss of significant attachment figures, and; second through highly stressful events that occur s pecifically in the context of homelessness. Mental health outcomes included symptoms of depression, anxiety, anger, aggression and posttraumatic stress. Perceived social support was measured through inventories of relationships with mothers, fathers, siblings and best friends. The sample consisted of 81 children between the ages of 8-16 and one of their parents. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses found that lifetime trauma exposure and homeless specific complex stress independently accounted for a significant amount of the variance in symptoms of depression, anxiety, aggression, and posttraumatic stress. Lifetime trauma alone accounted for the variance in anger and anxiety related symptomatology. Perceived social support was found to have no influence on mental health morbidity. The study consisted of a novel approach to understanding the psychological experiences of sheltered homeless children. These findings inform the design of clinical interventions for this vulnerable population of children and may have important public policy implications.

This project examined whether the executive functions of set maintenance and switching, as assessed by neuropsychological testing, were predictors of set maintenance and switching within a more ecologically valid task that used metacognitive strategies during reading comprehension tasks as a framework for evaluation. Gaze times to key words during reading were used as an indirect measure of strategy use. A few significant relationships were found between set maintenance and set switching on the neuropsychological measures and the strategy learning and application tasks. Participants were more likely to switch to appropriate strategies in a situation in which they were given free choice of strategies to use, and in which characteristics of the text pulled for the use of a particular strategy. In contrast, participants were less consistent with expected strategy use when they had just learned a strategy and were asked explicitly to apply it to a text that did not pull for use of a particular strategy. Factors such as visual scanning, motor speed, working memory, and passage comprehension affected the relationship between executive functions and the more ecologically valid task.

This longitudinal study uses a cultural ecological-transactional perspective (Garcia-Coll, et. al., 1996; Kuperminc, et al., in press) to examine whether relational factors (familism and parental involvement) predict processes of motivation and achievement one year later among 199 Latino adolescents from immigrant families. Parent involvement predicted higher present-oriented and future-oriented motivation, and familism predicted higher present-oriented motivation. Future-oriented motivation predicted higher perceived school competence, while present-oriented motivation predicted lower perceived school competence. Both future and present-oriented motivation increased over time for recent immigrants significantly more than for US-reared youth. Findings suggest that 1) familism and parent involvement relate significantly to processes of achievement motivation among Latino youth 2) future-oriented and present-oriented motivation are distinct from one another and are linked to perceived school competence in unique, and inverse ways among Latino youth and 3) immigration age plays an important role in the motivational processes of Latino youth over time.

Over the past few decades, researchers have firmly established that a wide range of nonhuman animals exhibit some form of numerical competence. The focus of this research was to define further the extent of numerical ability in rhesus monkeys, and specifically to determine whether the animals possess a symbolic understanding of Arabic numerals. This required examining the stimulus attributes (e.g., number vs. hedonic value) represented by the numerals, as well as the precision (e.g., absolute vs. relative) and generality of those representations. In chapters 2 and 3, monkeys were required to compare and order numerals and were rewarded with either proportional or probabilistic rewards. The results indicated that monkeys were relying on the ordinal or absolute numerical values associated with each numeral and not hedonic value or learned 2-choice discriminations. The studies in chapters 4 and 5 indicated that monkeys can use numerals to symbolize an approximate number of sequential motor responses. The study in Chapter 6 tested the generality of the monkeys’ symbolic number concept using transfer tests. The results indicated that some monkeys are able to abstract number across presentation mode, but this ability is only exhibited under limited conditions. Collectively, these studies provide evidence that rhesus monkeys view Arabic numerals as more than sign-stimuli associated with specific response-reward histories, but that numerals do not have the same precise symbolic meaning as they do for humans.

Today’s youth have been exposed to more gambling-related media than previous generations, and they have grown up in an era in which states not only sanction but also run and promote gambling enterprises. Social Learning Theory proposes that one can develop new attitudes or expectancies about a specific behavior by watching others engage in that behavior, and that the media is one avenue through which one can develop new expectancies (Bandura, 2001). In addition, the Theory of Reasoned Action proposes that one’s behaviors are influenced directly by both subjective norms and attitudes (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). A mixed methods explanatory design was used to test a modified version of the Theory of Reasoned Action in which subjective norms and gambling-related media were hypothesized to have an effect on gambling behaviors directly and indirectly through both positive and negative expectancies. Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the hypotheses, and semi-standardized interviews were used to help explain the results of the quantitative analyses and provide a richer and more accurate interpretation of the data. The hypothesized model was partially supported: the model was a good fit with the female college student data, accounting for 27.8% of variance in female student gambling behaviors, and it fit the male college student data reasonably well, accounting for 35.2% of variance in male student gambling behaviors. Results indicated that perceived subjective norms were more important for female college students. Results also indicated that exposure to gambling-related media has a direct positive association with both male and female college student gambling behaviors, and that exposure to gambling-related media has an indirect, positive association with male college student behaviors through positive expectancies. However, exposure to gambling-related media is not associated with positive expectancies about gambling for female college students. Data from the qualitative interviews supported the findings from the qualitative analyses and provided some clues about the progression from non-problematic to problematic behaviors, which may inform future research in this area.