Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: B, page: 6604. Adviser: Edward R. Hirt.

As researchers in the social sciences increasingly become interested in gay and lesbian issues and investigate questions pertaining to sexual orientation and nonheterosexual populations, methodological and sociopolitical problems with the conceptualization and measurement of sexual orientation must be addressed. Historical problems with this construct include compelling arguments that an essentialist, categorical conceptualization of sexual orientation is a sociopolitical artifact; that unidimensional and single-domain models are insufficient to capture the complete range of possible sexual expressions; and that the category of bisexuality is often neglected. Current measures of sexual orientation confound sexual orientation with sexual identity or they are impractical to use and difficult to interpret. This dissertation reviews how sexual orientation has been defined as a construct and measured for the purpose of psychological research, while discussing the theoretical and methodological problems that have emerged and proffering solutions to these problems. It proposes a conceptual and operational definition of sexual orientation that incorporates these solutions to past problems, providing a more theoretically sound and methodologically pragmatic approach to the study of sexual orientation issues. The Sexual Orientation Scale, a multidimensional self-report measure of sexual orientation that follows directly from the proposed model for defining that construct, is presented along with data establishing its reliability and validity and recommendations for its future use. The Sexual Orientation Scale comprises separate subscales for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors within sexual and romantic domains. Each subscale comprises two independent dimensions: androphilia (orientation to men) and gynophilia (orientation to women). Subscales may be analyzed separately or combined into grosser measures. The measure was designed to be temporally located in the present and to tap objective frequencies of actual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; it therefore assesses actual sexual orientation independently of idealized sexual orientation or sexual identity.

Impulsive behavior is a common theme in psychology, but human decision making, animal choice, foraging, and personality research define and measure impulsiveness differently. The first goal of this study was to determine how much agreement exists between impulsiveness measures based on these different perspectives. A review of these literatures suggests that individual differences in sensitivity to rate of reward and punishment may be an important factor in impulsive decision-making. The second goal of the present study was to investigate this possibility. College undergraduates (n = 159) responded to a four-part questionnaire. The first part was a series of duplex bets that assessed each subject's relative attention to four risk dimensions: amount to win, amount to lose, rate or probability of winning, and rate or probability of losing. The second part of the questionnaire represented the common definitions of impulsiveness in decision theory with 20 items posing hypothetical choices between immediate and delayed rewards. The third part was the 42-item Eysenck Impulsivity Scale used in personality research. Finally, subjects responded to a single 7-point self-rating of impulsiveness, and gave examples of impulsive and unimpulsive behavior. The decision theory items and personality measure of impulsiveness were very weakly related. The findings suggest that reliability and validity issues with regard to hypothetical choices of this type should be investigated carefully before using them in further research. Regarding the suggestion that individual differences in sensitivity to rate account for impulsive behavior, the results of the study indicate that impulsive individuals may instead be particularly sensitive to punishment or cost. When unavoidable cost is explicitly associated with reward, as in the choices in the duplex bets and hypothetical choices in the questionnaire, impulsives weight that information heavily, but in many everyday decision situations, like those described in elicited examples, they may actively avoid cost considerations, which leads to rapid action, sometimes with objectively negative outcomes.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 2168. Adviser: Ruth V. Russell. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 12, 2008)."

A relationship was predicted between identity and depth of involvement in sexual activity. According a theory of identity development, people with weak identities should feel threatened by the empathy and suspension of identity characteristic of deep sexual involvement. In contrast, people with strong identities should feel free to be more deeply involved in sexual activity. Marcia's ego-identity statuses were used as predictors of frequency of nonnormative sexual activities, the reasons for engaging in sexual activities, sexual conflict, and the affective quality of sexual encounters. The Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status was used to assess the identity statuses of 25 female and 19 male sexually active college students. These students then documented their interpersonal sexual behavior over four weeks with forced-choice diary entry forms. Largely consistent with the hypotheses, subjects in the moratorium identity status, when compared to nonmoratorium subjects, showed greater tendencies to avoid deep involvement in sex or with their partner, but also had greater tendencies to express themselves sexually. The exact relations between identity and sexual practices depended on domain of identity crisis. An interview of the subjects designed to assess the subjects' identity statuses in the sexual domain categorized almost all subjects as foreclosed, although most subjects reported changes in their sexual preferences, standards, and behaviors over the past few years. Apparently, sexual identity development does not involve conscious and rational evaluation of alternatives, as is the case for vocational or ideological identity development, nor does sexual identity evolve from declarations of norms by authority figures or peers. The standards of students are based on their emotional reaction to past experience. These emotions draw from the students' beliefs that sexual activity symbolizes either mutual love or mutual debasement. By their actions towards each other, particularly after an episode of sex, the partners approach a consensus on which of these meanings the sexual activity symbolizes. Through this process, students unwittingly socialize each other toward a common sexual standard.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Counseling and Educational Psychology, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 19, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: B, page: 1325. Adviser: Rex Stockton.

Recent research on the long-term effects of parental divorce has provided few clear answers as to how experiencing a parental divorce while growing up may affect an individual's subsequent romantic love relationships. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship between parental divorce and young adults' romantic love relationships. The literature on the long-term effects of parental divorce has generally paid very little attention to subjects' perspectives on how their parents' divorce affected them. However, recent research on traumatic life events has shown that subjects' interpretations of an event are intimately related to how that event affects them. The meaning that a person creates about a traumatic life event has profound consequences for adjustment to that event. The present study used a written narrative method to solicit young adults' views of their own strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, and how these were influenced by their family experiences. In order to avoid unintentionally pressuring subjects to discuss parental divorce, subjects were not informed that the study was about parental divorce until after the data were collected. They were encouraged to write freely in response to three openended questions. The first asked them to describe their strengths and weaknesses in romantic relationships, the second asked them to explain how they came to be the way they are in romantic relationships, and the third asked them how their family experiences might have influenced their romantic relationships. Three times as many young adults with divorced parents reported having poor relationships with one or both parents than those with married parents. Students from divorced households also reported experiencing much more interparental conflict than students from the non-divorced group. Despite describing these negative family experiences, subjects with divorced parents reported feeling as successful in their romantic relationships as their peers with married parents. Much of their success seemed to be due to their insight, creativity, and motivation. By overlooking the personal understandings that adult children of divorce have about their parents' divorce, the literature on divorce might have overlooked a great deal of their strength and resilience.