<p> Two studies tested hypotheses regarding the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility. Two components of humor are argued to promote cognitive flexibility. First, the positive emotion associated with humor may enhance cognitive flexibility. Second, the processing of humor may exercise complex cognitive processing, thus making similar processing more efficient on subsequent tasks. Participants in Experiment 1 read humorous sentences or one of two types of non-humorous sentences. Participants in Experiment 2 viewed captioned images that varied in the presence of positivity and incongruity. Results of both studies do not support the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility, nor do they show evidence that humor promotes cognitive flexibility because of the positive emotion or incongruity associated with it. Explanations for the failure to find support for hypotheses focus on the stimuli used in non-humor conditions and the stimuli and method of measuring cognitive flexibility. Alternative methods of testing the hypotheses are also offered, such as investigating sense of humor as a personality trait, using different types of humor and a different method of measuring cognitive flexibility. This project hoped to provide elementary evidence for the notion that humor is beneficial for health, but did not do so. It is hoped that future research can elucidate the relationship between humor and health.</p>

<p> Through social network measures, this study investigates Shared Leadership and other structures of team leadership as they relate to team performance and team work engagement. A sample of 59 interdisciplinary teams, composed of students at a Midwestern university, were studied during a semester long course that engages students in complex applied projects. Students were rated on their team performance at the end of the semester, and were also asked to rate their individual work engagement and social network interactions within their team. Regression analyses revealed that social network density, but not decentralization, was a consistent positive predictor of team performance and team work engagement. Additionally, network measures and team leadership structures, would relate differentially to either team outcome depending on the type of network content (i.e. instrumental or socio-emotional). Results of moderator analyses reveal that surface (i.e. gender) and deep-level (i.e. academic major) diversity moderate the relationship between instrumental decentralization and team performance. Moreover, deep-level diversity moderates the relationship between teams engaged in instrumental Shared Leadership and team performance. A discussion of the results and implications for research and practice are provided.</p><p>

<p> Loneliness is a human experience that often influences the individual&rsquo;s mood, perception, self-concept, relationship, and physical heath. The existing body of research on loneliness often associates loneliness with a mental illness (e.g., anxiety or depression) and/or a cognitive deficit. Moreover, although, researchers have identified different types of loneliness, there is limited research on the experience of profound loneliness while in the company of another person with whom one is in a close relationship. Therefore, this study was framed to contribute information in the field by exploring the meaning of this particular type of loneliness as a lived experience. The question this research sought to answer through narrative inquiry was: &ldquo;What is the meaning of participants&rsquo; experience of loneliness while in the company of another person with whom they were in a close relationship?&rdquo; </p><p> The current study examined oral narratives of adult participants. Five participants were recruited and interviewed. The transcribed data was analyzed following Gee&rsquo;s (1991) structural analysis of oral narrative. Through analysis of the narrative data this study aimed to gain an understanding of subjective, psychological meanings of this particular loneliness experience. </p><p> The results of the analysis showed that participants, in relationship with another, characterized as close but not experienced as intimate, was retrospectively experienced as loneliness and was lived with a sense of profound hopelessness in a multidimensional manner, which implied the participant&rsquo;s desired ideals for intimate relationship. </p><p> Many factors appear to influence the loneliness experience while in the company of a close other for adults, including the individual&rsquo;s desire to avoid experiencing pain and loss. The findings indicate that increasing the individual&rsquo;s awareness of their multidimensional experience through non-pathologizing reflection in a clinical context could allow him or her to reach a deeper understanding of the experience.</p><p>

<p> A noted discrepancy between the skills demanded by industry and the skills engineering graduates are proficient in has engendered a push for reform in undergraduate engineering curriculum. As a result, many institutions are now implementing supplemental leadership development programs to better prepare students for the collaborative work and leadership roles they will encounter on the job. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of one such program, and then to measure self-perceived success of program alumni when compared to a non-leadership-program control group. Archival survey data and focus groups were utilized to confirm proposed hypotheses. Obtained results suggested significant improvements in engineering undergraduate students following leadership development exposure. Following graduation, these improvements persisted as increased self-perceived competency and a heightened awareness of the importance of leadership, teamwork, and communication in the workforce. This research suggests formalized leadership development training as a complimentary curriculum for engineering undergraduates facilitates the successful transition into the workplace following graduation.</p><p>

<p> Profiling has its traditions in criminal investigations where it is used to assist in apprehending an offender by examining and attempting to understand his or her psychological motivations and personality. Terrorist specialists and theorists have applied traditional profiling techniques in hopes of distinguishing nonterrorists from terrorists and in an endeavor to understand the motivators for radicalization. However, these attempts have created a divide between the theorists resulting in contradictory data and debate. With the rise of social media, the methods of terrorism have changed. The Islamic State (IS) in particular has tapped into using media, not only to recruit, but as a form of technological combat, which in turn has added to their success and strength. This dissertation introduces the theory of Combat Branding. The findings of this dissertation suggest that it is possible to create a deductive profile of Western IS recruits by beginning with the examination of IS&rsquo;s Combat Brand. This is a qualitative visual narrative study of official IS media consisting of video and still images. It is my hypothesis that starting with an analysis of the Combat Brand is a missing link to approaching a deductive profile of the intended target audience.</p><p>

<p> Relationship conflict in groups has been shown to be detrimental to group outcomes, and research notes that emotion or affect plays a significant part in its development. The Need for Affect (NFA) is a construct that reflects an individual&rsquo;s attitude toward emotion and their level of desire to either approach or avoid emotion-inducing situations This study examined the relationship between NFA and relationship conflict in groups, then sought to determine whether the neuroticism personality trait was a moderator to that relationship. Members of 14 small workgroups (N = 68) in various organizations were administered a 67-question survey designed to (1) measure their individual need for affect level, (2) score their Big Five personality traits, and (3) measure intragroup conflict in their respective groups. Neuroticism was one of the five personality traits of interest because it has been shown to have a negative correlation with NFA. Pearson&rsquo;s correlational analysis was run to test the neuroticism &ndash; NFA relationship, as well as the NFA &ndash; relationship conflict relationship. PROCESS moderation analysis was also conducted to test the moderation effect of neuroticism on the NFA &ndash; Conflict relationship. There was a significant negative correlation between neuroticism and NFA. However, no significant relationship existed between NFA and relationship conflict, and neuroticism did not significantly moderate that relationship.</p><p>

<p> The history of intergroup research is built on groups that represent "endpoints" of a dimension of social identity, such as White, Black, heterosexual, and gay/lesbian. Social groups who fall between these more readily recognized advantaged and disadvantaged groups (e.g., biracial people, bisexual people) have received less attention. These intermediate social groups are increasingly visible and numerous in the United States, however, and a detailed account of the biases they face can contribute to a fuller understanding of intergroup relations. This dissertation examines attitudes and beliefs about intermediate social groups, focusing on bisexual people as the primary example at first, and then expanding the investigation to biracial people and novel groups to make the case that intermediate groups elicit a distinctive pattern of biases. Across studies, participants expressed beliefs that undermined the legitimacy of intermediate groups in a variety of ways. They endorsed the view that intermediate groups are low in social realness (conceptually invalid, meaningless, lacking a concrete social existence) and that intermediate group identities are unstable (provisional, lacking a genuine underlying truth, the result of confusion). These views of social realness and identity stability partially explained prejudice against intermediate groups.</p><p> The concept of social group intermediacy is abstract; actual intermediate groups (e.g., biracial and bisexual people) are different from each other because their defining types of intermediacy stem from different dimensions of social identity (race and sexual orientation). Therefore, focused research on each specific intermediate group is necessary to fully understand the types of attitudes they evoke due to their intermediate status. To demonstrate the value of attending to the details of a particular intermediate group, Chapters 2 through 5 focused on bisexual people. The observed patterns of attitudes and beliefs about bisexual people demonstrated the role of their perceived intermediate status in the context of sexual orientation.</p><p> Chapter 2 investigated attitudes toward sexual orientation groups in a large sample of heterosexual and gay/lesbian participants. Bisexuality was evaluated less favorably and perceived as less stable than heterosexuality and homosexuality. Stereotypes about bisexual people pertained to gender conformity, decisiveness, and monogamy; few positive traits were associated with bisexuality. Chapter 3 extended these findings, demonstrating that negative evaluation of sexual minorities was more closely associated with perceived identity instability than it was with the view that sexual orientation is a choice. This relationship was moderated by both participant and target sexual orientation.</p><p> Chapter 4 addressed one reason why bisexual people are evaluated more negatively than gay/lesbian people. A common explanation given for the discrepancy in evaluation is that bisexuality introduces ambiguity into a binary model of sexuality. In line with this explanation, we found that participants with a preference for simple ways of structuring information were especially likely to evaluate bisexual people more negatively than gay/lesbian people. Chapter 5 investigated how bisexual participants saw themselves as a group. Results suggested that bisexual people largely disagree with the prevailing stereotypes of their group; these stereotypes reflect non-bisexual people's impressions of the intermediate group rather than a consensus.</p><p> Chapter 6 shifted the focus from bisexual people as an example of an intermediate social group to intermediate social groups in general. Results from a set of studies involving novel groups demonstrated that perceiving a group as intermediate can cause negative evaluation and low ratings of social realness and identity stability. Similar results held for real-world intermediate groups (biracial people and bisexual people). The extent to which an intermediate group was perceived as less socially real than other groups predicted the extent to which it was evaluated less positively than those groups. Social realness seems to be a unique explanatory factor in the relative negative evaluation of these intermediate groups, working in conjunction with the more well-known processes of intergroup attitudes traditionally studied with respect to Black people and gay/lesbian people. The effects of social group intermediacy were amplified among participants who identified strongly with an advantaged ingroup. Acknowledging an intermediate group as legitimate may require one to acknowledge shared characteristics or overlapping boundaries between one's valued ingroup and the "opposite" outgroup, which can be threatening to highly identified group members.</p><p> Taken together, these chapters make the case that intermediate social groups incur particular biases due to their perceived intermediate status. The processes of intergroup bias that result in derogation of traditionally recognized disadvantaged groups may be insufficient to account for some forms of prejudice in the modern demographic landscape. As biracial people and bisexual people become more prevalent, researchers must address the conditions under which they are recognized or dismissed, included or excluded.</p>

<p> Loneliness &ndash; the feeling that manifests when one perceives one&rsquo;s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one&rsquo;s social relationships &ndash; is a common but typically short-lived and fairly harmless experience. However, recent research continues to uncover a variety of alarming health effects associated with longterm loneliness. The present study examines the psychological mechanisms underlying how persons scoring high in trait loneliness perceive their social environments. Evaluations of transient facial expression morphs are analyzed in R using dynamical systems methods. We hypothesize that, consistent with Cacioppo and Hawkley&rsquo;s socio-cognitive model, subjects scoring high in loneliness will exhibit <i>hypervigilance</i> in their evaluations of cold and neutral emotions and <i>hypovigilance</i> in their evaluations of warm emotions. Results partially support the socio-cognitive model but point to a relationship between loneliness and a global dampening in evaluations of emotions.</p>

The current research integrates social cognitive theories of psychological construals and information processing with theories of social identity to identify the conditions under which multiculturalism helps versus hinders positive intergroup relations. Three experiments investigated how abstract vs. concrete construals of multiculturalism impact majority group members' attitudes and behavioral intentions toward ethnic minorities in the US. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that construing multiculturalism in abstract terms by highlighting its broad goals reduced majority group members' prejudice toward ethnic minorities by decreasing the extent to which diversity is seen as threatening the national group. However, construing multiculturalism in concrete terms by highlighting specific ways in which its goals can be achieved increased majority group members' prejudice toward minorities by amplifying the extent to which diversity is seen as threatening the national group. Experiment 3 then revealed that a different concrete construal that incorporates values and practices of both majority and minority groups reduced perceived threats to the national group and in turn attenuated prejudice and increased desire for contact with ethnic minorities. Collectively, these experiments demonstrate when and why multiculturalism leads to positive versus negative intergroup outcomes, while identifying new ways in which multiculturalism can be successfully implemented in pluralistic nations.

Past work has linked psychological trauma to problems in romantic relationships and to the quality of social attachment in clinical populations and adult married couples. Little work has focused, however, on late adolescent dating relationships or community samples. Further, no studies have evaluated the extent to which specific behaviors mediate the relation between trauma and relationship quality. The current study evaluated the relation between trauma and relationship quality in a sample of 199 18-21 year-old opposite-sex dating couples. This study also evaluated whether secure base behaviors (i.e., attachment processes) partially mediated the relation between psychological trauma and couples' ratings of perceived relationship quality. While the mediating model was not supported, the relation between trauma and relationship quality was supported in this sample. This finding extends previous work with adult married relationships and clinical populations by demonstrating that higher levels of trauma exposure and symptoms in a community sample of late adolescent couples is associated with negative perceptions of relationship quality. Future directions for developmentally sensitive approaches to the study of trauma and relationships are discussed.