The hippocampus (HPC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are two structures crucial for effective decision-making, and it has been shown that these two structure communicate when spatial working memory (WM) recall is necessary in rats. The hippocampal system is critical for episodic memory, and is especially important in the acquisition and retrieval of spatial information, while the mPFC’s major function is to form and store representations of events and contexts, so that in the future, the most appropriate behavioral response is used in a given context. We will be investigating the correlation between a rat’s behavior and neural activity in the mPFC and the HPC simultaneously to better understand the detailed interaction between these two structures. Rats are trained on a task where they must switch between two types of spatial learning strategies while on the maze to obtain a food reward. While the rat performs the task, we will monitor neural activity in the HPC and mPFC as well as the rat’s behavior. Past research has shown that identification of a certain deliberative behavior can be determined by looking at hippocampal oscillatory data. We predict there will be a correlation between this deliberative behavior made by the rat and an identifiable pattern in hippocampal-prefrontal engagement. We also expect to observe the two structures align their activity as the rat learns to switch from one strategy to the other, giving insight into the involvement of the hippocampal-prefrontal network in learning and decision-making. Understanding the neural mechanism employed in memory-guided decision-making has tremendous implications for the field of medicine, as disadvantageous decision-making and impaired volitional control are characteristic of many mental health disorders, such as addiction, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders.

In 2020 marijuana use among college students was at an all-time high with 44% reporting using in the past year. Research demonstrates individuals with ADHD are at risk for increased marijuana use later in life. Additionally, some studies demonstrate self-reported symptoms of ADHD among undiagnosed college students prospectively relate to increased marijuana use, which was mediated by changes in perceptions of typical peer marijuana use (i.e., descriptive norms). However, this is complicated by frequent marijuana use being linked to issues with attention, impulsivity, and memory; all captured by self-reported ADHD measures. This study will evaluate bidirectional relations between ADHD-related symptoms, marijuana descriptive norms, and marijuana use among college students. Data collection is in progress and will be completed in March 2022 as part of a larger study. Students completed assessments at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. A cross-lagged panel model will be conducted in R using the lavaan package to evaluate the bidirectional associations over a 1-year period, as well as test whether marijuana norms at 6 months mediate the longitudinal associations between ADHD-related symptoms and marijuana use from baseline to 12 months.  We hypothesize those reporting more ADHD-related symptoms will use marijuana more frequently 6 months later. Additionally, those who use marijuana more frequently will report more ADHD-related symptoms after 6 months. We also hypothesize that those experiencing more ADHD-related symptoms at baseline will have increased marijuana norms at 6 months and subsequent greater marijuana use at 12 months. This study attempts to disentangle the bidirectional associations between ADHD-related symptoms, marijuana norms, and marijuana use over a one-year period. Conclusions and future directions for research will be presented. Additionally, this study may have implications for norms-based interventions to better address memory, impulsivity, and other ADHD-related symptoms in association with marijuana use and perceptions.

Although the best psychological treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, for anxiety disorders already rely on fear extinction mechanisms, these treatments underutilize principles of vicarious extinction learning. Vicarious extinction learning is a form of social safety learning that involves learning safety from the experience of others and can potentially enhance treatment potency. Social anxiety disorder (SAD), which is characterized by persistent social avoidance due to fear of negative evaluation by others, may uniquely benefit from vicarious extinction learning. Broader social contexts, like cultural norms, can also have influence on social learning and the efficacy in treatments of social anxiety. Although culture is a broad and nuanced construct, interdependent and independent self-construals have been shown to capture two of the many facets of culture. In this study, we propose that cultural factors, such as interdependent and independent self-construals, may impact vicarious extinction learning in people with high levels of social anxiety symptoms. Twenty socially anxious adults and twenty healthy controls will complete the Self-Construal Scale (SCS) and undergo a vicarious extinction task while undergoing fMRI. We expect that those with interdependent self-construals will show enhanced safety learning due to their value for seeing themselves as similar to others, as compared to those with independent self-construals. This will be evidenced by lower skin conductance responses (SCR) and greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation during the reinstatement phase of the task. Our results will highlight a potentially important cultural moderator of social safety learning and advance our understanding of the boundaries and clinical implications of learning safety from others.

Rejection sensitivity (RS) is a core component of social anxiety that may impact symptom severity and treatment outcomes. There may be substantial differences in both neural and behavioral responses to fear as a function of trait RS in socially anxious individuals, as reflected in altered regional brain activation patterns underlying fear and self-referential processing. Individuals with the highest levels of RS may struggle to extinguish learned social fears but it is unclear if they learn safety differently by watching another person doing so, a process called vicarious extinction learning. Recent work has highlighted the advantage of vicarious extinction learning in fear regulation over traditional extinction learning, but this has not yet been tested in socially anxious populations. Given the relevance of social learning processes in social anxiety, vicarious extinction learning may enhance the effectiveness of exposure-based therapy in this population. In this study, individuals will undergo a social fear task in which they learn to pair images of angry faces with a mild electric shock. During Phase II, participants will watch a video of another person undergoing the same task and learning safety from one of the photos previously associated with a shock. The final phase will test if participants can apply the model's safety learning to themselves. I hypothesize that high trait RS may moderate vicarious extinction learning, as seen by differential activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). It is possible that those with higher RS might show increased vmPFC activation during extinction and might benefit more from vicarious safety learning because social signals are more salient in this population and they have more to gain from learning safety, but it is also possible that they may not benefit, or even worsen, if they are unable to empathize with the learning model and remain vigilant to cues of social rejection, as evident by decreased vmPFC activation during extinction. Regardless of the direction of the effect, trait RS may be an important variable to consider when treating socially anxious patients using extinction-based principles and may influence the development of novel interventions to target this population. 

Previous studies show that the high prevalence of body image concern and disordered eating among Western women precipitates from the promotion of an unrealistically thin body ideal. Exposure to thin-idealized images on social media has been found to increase body dissatisfaction and perpetuate internalization of anti-fat attitudes. The present research examined whether implicit anti-fat attitudes can be internalized without ever being visually exposed to body shapes. Preliminary results from a sample of blind women (N = 18) in Israel revealed that implicit anti-fat attitudes in blind females are comparable to those of sighted controls. The purpose of this study was to expand on these original findings by administering a novel auditory weight-bias Implicit Association Test (IAT) to larger samples of blind women (N = 30) and sighted controls (N = 30) across the United States. Participants completed an auditory IAT in which they paired words describing thin bodies and words describing overweight bodies with either negative or positive words in congruent and incongruent blocks. Afterwards, they answered self-report questionnaires to evaluate body dissatisfaction, pursuit of the thin ideal, and perceived pressure from family, friends, significant others, and the media to attain a thin body. In our analysis, I helped compare reaction times of blind and sighted female participants. Implicit anti-fat bias was reflected as slower reaction times when words describing overweight bodies were paired with positive words compared to when they were paired with negative words. If results of the present study replicate the preliminary results, we will develop stronger evidence towards the existence of non-visual influences that contribute to thin-ideal internalization. Additionally, these results would demonstrate that internalization of the thin-ideal can occur without any visual exposure to body shapes.These results may shed light on sociocultural factors that should be considered in evaluating disordered eating risk among blind women.

There is often a stigma associated with bilingualism due to the mistaken belief that bilingual children develop language skills at a significantly slower rate than monolingual children. To combat this misconception, it is necessary to conduct research showing that bilingualism either helps or does not harm language acquisition when compared to monolingualism. This study attempts to meet that general need by determining how bilingual and monolingual children compare in metaphor comprehension. I decided to focus on metaphors because they can be challenging for children to interpret correctly, and I hypothesized that bilingual children would perform better on metaphor comprehension tasks than monolingual children because of their regular use of second labels. I investigated how 127 monolingual and bilingual children ages 2.5-4.5 years old responded to a set of metaphors by using a game-like format to gather data via Qualtrics. Specifically, I gave children a series of 10 metaphor questions in which they needed to choose which of two pictures best fit a provided metaphorical phrase. Children were also given 10 vocabulary questions derived from the metaphor questions to ensure that children knew the literal meaning of the words. Results showed that bilingual children performed slightly but significantly better than monolingual children on metaphor comprehension questions. Currently, I am also collecting data for a follow-up study to replicate and extend my findings. These results are important because they give us insight into how child language development differs between monolingual and bilingual children and counter negative stereotypes about bilingualism.

Episodic memory is a crucial element of the human condition. It allows us to remember what happened, where it happened, when it happened, and then piece these components together to form comprehensive memories. However, the ability to remember when an event happened lags years behind the ability to remember what happened and where it took place. At the root of this phenomenon is the concept that temporal reasoning ability takes a more gradual path to maturation as well. In several cultures, the challenge of reasoning with time is alleviated using a spatiotemporal model called the mental timeline—a representation of time based on a left-to-right linear frame. With the proposed research I aim to prime 32 6-year-old children with a left-to-right spatiotemporal model, and 32 additional 6-year-old children with a nonlinear model of events before examining each of their spatial and temporal memory binding abilities. The first phase of this study—in which children are primed to think about time in a spatial format—entails a short animation of a character visiting nine places around the world. Icons corresponding to each event are then placed either in order from left to right, or in a nonlinear format. After completing the priming task, children participate in an unrelated memory game to assess the effects of spatiotemporal priming on their temporal memory abilities. They watch three animations, each consisting of a character completing nine activities in nine different locations. After each animation, they answer three corresponding location-related and order-related questions each. I expect children primed with a left-to-right model to outperform children in the nonlinear priming group on temporal-order probing questions. We hope that the anticipated results can be used in academic settings to strengthen memory abilities in young children and shift the nature of how we communicate with children about time.

Inequities in healthcare have led to disparities for many populations, including autistic individuals. One structural factor associated with health inequities for autistic individuals are the tools used to screen for autism, which do not work equitably within minority populations. There is, therefore, a great need for culturally sensitive screening tools. My study assesses the cultural sensitivity of “My Toddler’s Social Communication” (MTSC), a tool developed by UW’s ReadiLab to screen toddlers at autism risk. Unlike existing screening tools, MTSC employs photographs of toddlers engaging in social communication behaviors, along with brief behavioral descriptions. I used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design to investigate whether caregivers of toddlers find MTSC to be feasible for use with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families; and find the photos and behaviors culturally relevant. For the first phase, 10 caregivers of toddlers completed MTSC and answered questions regarding its acceptability and feasibility for CLD families. For the second phase, I interviewed 15 CLD caregivers. I then analyzed survey data using descriptive statistics and the interviews using thematic analysis. Survey results showed that 80% of caregivers found the photos representative of a broad range of cultures. However, only 30% of respondents agreed that MTSC was easy to complete for caregivers from diverse backgrounds. Thematic analysis revealed five themes: visual representation deficits, cultural relevance differences, accessibility to non-native English speakers, and accuracy challenges. Overall, results suggest that MTSC has fair visual representation, but can become more feasible and accessible by accommodating caregivers who utilize daycare services, and including photos with a greater range of races, cultures, and caregiver genders. This study is one step of many toward creating measures that can assess the cultural sensitivity of tools to make cultural sensitivity accessible for researchers developing instruments and improve the lack of diversity and equity in Clinical Psychology.

According to the World Health Organization, 10% of pregnant women and 13% of recent mothers suffer from adverse mental health, particularly depression. The pregnancy process is an already tumultuous experience as mothers undergo many physical and psychological changes, so the addition of other prenatal stressors like limited resources that disproportionately affect low-income mothers can further negatively impact maternal mental health, birth outcomes, and an infant's cognitive and emotional development. The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of maternal mental health on low-income mothers and children and how mindfulness can be a potential tool of intervention. I carried out a literature review using preliminary outcomes of an ongoing, longitudinal study examining maternal well-being following a mindfulness-based intervention among low-income new mothers with data acquired from the New Moms Connect Lab. Early findings show prenatal mindfulness resulted in lower depression and lower anxiety caused by pregnancy, however its effects were not long-term. Postnatal mindfulness did not yield conclusive results due to lower attendance. Social- Emotional Attunement (SEACAP) resulted in reduced depression in comparison to all three. Overall, mindfulness practices reduced maternal stress more than the control group. Research is still ongoing and more data is still being collected regarding the long term effects of postnatal mindfulness. This research is important as it provides data on the maternal health of low-income mothers who have been grossly underrepresented in previous similar research. These findings also indicate the potential benefits of mindfulness programs geared towards serving low-income communities.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, individuals have had to learn to cope with isolation and adjust to new social protocols. In Washington state, a lockdown mandate was issued between March to May in 2020 in response to a surge in COVID-19 cases. This study aims to analyze how King County residents experienced the lockdown and the impact it had on their daily activities, behaviors, and wellbeing. We hypothesize that loneliness increases as a person is more physically isolated from others and also as age increases. The data for this research was collected through an online survey which included the UCLA Loneliness Scale. An additional 16 questions examined demographics and the dynamics within the household including household size, pets, and romantic relationships and how they relate to the person’s experience of loneliness. The survey was distributed through Qualtrics to undergraduate psychology classes and faculty at Bellevue College and South Seattle College and to the researchers’ social circles via email and social media platforms. Participants were residents of King County during the Washington State COVID lockdown and ranged in age from 18 to 65 years old. We aim to investigate if the lockdown measures taken during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rise in loneliness considering that loneliness has been associated with major public health concerns including mental health problems, chronic physical ailments, and increased likelihood of mortality.

Gentrification is characterized by the influx of wealthier, highly educated individuals into a neighborhood. As gentrification accelerates in cities around the U.S, we are interested in the effects of this neighborhood upheaval on belonging and how geographical context may moderate this relationship. Specifically, how does urbanity affect a person’s perceptions of the visual changes associated with gentrification and how they feel they belong? As gentrification often facilitates increased development and construction, urban residents may be more familiar with these visual changes and feel more belonging. In contrast, suburban and rural residents may feel the opposite. We collected data from 885 U.S. adults using a within-subjects online survey experiment where participants saw Google Street View photos of gentrifying and stable (i.e., not-gentrifying low-income) neighborhoods. We found that rural and suburban participants felt significantly less overall belonging than urban residents. Moreover, there was an interaction effect such that rural and suburban participants felt even less belonging to the gentrifying neighborhood than the stable neighborhood. These findings suggest that rural and suburban residents may be especially psychologically vulnerable to the visual changes associated with gentrification. As gentrification proliferates beyond major metropolitan areas, suburban and rural residents may be at increased risk of social displacement.

Systemic racism is a widespread issue in America that has an adverse impact on the psychological well-being of ethnic minority populations. Although there is significant research on the importance of addressing racism in psychotherapy and adopting culturally humble interventions, limited studies exist on the frequency with which clinicians ask Clients of Color about experiences of race or racism. Thus, this study examines the percentage of community mental health clinicians who report intent to discuss issues of race or racism with Clients of Color. In this study, surveys were distributed to participants (N = 138) from a statewide Cognitive Behavioral Therapy training initiative in Washington state. Clinicians rated their level of agreement with 11 statements describing their intentions of discussing race/racism with clients on a 7-point Likert-type scale. We will employ descriptive statistics to assess the frequency with which clinicians intend to address issues of race or racism with Clients of Color. The existing limitations of this study include the predominant use of self-report questionnaires after receiving CBT+ (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) training. Ultimately, our findings can highlight if clinicians initiate discussions surrounding race or racism with Clients of Color, which can inform researchers if more support is needed in the form of resources or additional training for clinicians to effectively approach discussions of race or racism.

Inequitable work environments can heavily influence women’s professional choices, contributing to a widened gender gap in male-dominated fields. Past work has established that leaders' desire to use power for good produce better business outcomes, but we examine how leaders' use of power may influence gender equity in male-dominated work environments. I hypothesize that encountering a male-leader who is motivated to use power for good reduces women’s gender bias concerns. Women participants recruited through the online platform Prolific (N = 98) completed a survey in which they read leadership and team culture evaluations of two male leaders of male-dominated work teams (order counterbalanced). After reading the evaluations, participants rated how much they would worry about gender bias if they worked for each leader. The evaluations were identical except that in the experimental condition, participants read that 95% of the leader’s employees reported he used power for good compared to 43% in the control condition. I analyzed the data with a dependent samples t-test revealing women had reduced gender bias concerns after reading about the leader who used his power for good compared to the control condition. The results suggest that perceiving that a leader desires to use power for good reduces women’s gender bias concerns in male-dominated work environments. Signaling that the use of power for the good of others is a desirable institutional value may help establish gender equity and reduce climate threats. Future work should examine potential interventions that train leaders to better demonstrate their desire to use power for good of others in order to promote gender equity in male-dominated fields.

Over the course of the COVID-19 Pandemic, researchers have examined how people adjusted to the conditions of social isolation. As a follow-up to those studies, we investigated if – in King County Washington State - there was a correlation between people’s new level of participation in work/school, religious, or recreational activities during the March - May 2020 lockdown (in comparison to pre-pandemic levels) and how lonely they felt during that time. My team surveyed 252 King County Residents (aged 18 - 65 years old) over the internet, asking about their level of participation, whether the participant conducted the activity in-person or virtually, and if the participant has done more or less of this activity before the pandemic. We collected participants through snowball sampling, starting with immediate friends, families, and colleagues. We conducted univariate analyses on our responses to the types of activity and loneliness. Based on previous studies, it was predicted that those who participated in religious and recreational activities would feel significantly less lonely, while those who had engaged in work and school activities would feel significantly lonelier. No significant differences were present in the results except within recreational activity - people who participated at the same level of recreation as they had before the pandemic were significantly less lonely. In comparison, those who participated in recreation at greater or lesser levels during the pandemic. This is important, as it presents that a balanced amount of recreation can alleviate loneliness and its impacts (depression, anxiety, poor mental functioning, decreased motivation, etc.) This study also illustrates that when we can safely move away from social isolation measures, we need to develop and maintain routines and activities that lessen loneliness.

Previous literature has looked at the way in which we perceive women who come forward with claims of sexual harassment and the factors that can influence these perceptions. This study focuses on comparing narrow and broad representations of who is sexually harassed at work and exploring the effects on perceptions of sexual harassment when looking at women who either fit a typical normative or non-normative gendered characteristic description. As part of a bigger study, the goal is to experimentally broaden the representation of women who experience sexual harassment, taking into consideration subgroup identities and individual characteristics. Participants (N = 512) will be recruited online to ostensibly participate in a study on workplace decisions. Participants will then watch a short training video that I am creating on sexual harassment where the representation of women will be varied by changing the interests they portray and their physical descriptions, and afterwards be presented with a brief ambiguous sexual harassment claim. The claim will feature either a prototypical description or a non-prototypical description of a woman, and after reading through it, participants will take a survey that I administer through Qualtrics measuring their perception of sexual harassment, their punishment recommendation, and the psychological harm they believe the target received. Thus, we predict that sexual harassment will be more likely to be perceived in the narrow representation condition when targets are prototypical rather than non-prototypical, but we hope to “turn off” this effect in the broad representation. So far, I have conducted a pilot test of the materials on mTurk (N = 40 participants) to ensure that our manipulation is working as I designed. An interesting pattern arose such that nonprototypical women were more likely to be perceived to be queer (vs. straight). Implications of this pattern and future directions of the project are discussed.

As the democratization of online technology continues to grow, the population of the online world continues to develop rapidly, and the virtual world has evolved to be as expansive as our natural world with its own set of unique governing variables. Social phenomena typically prevalent within physical societies manifests within these online communities; one such phenomenon is social ostracism. Exploration into cyberpsychology, a field specializing in the investigations of technologically interconnected human behavior, points to the online disinhibition effect, a theory posited by cyberpsychologist John Suler, as a key contributor behind the rise of social ostracism within the online world. I hypothesize that the psychological mechanisms behind cancel culture are influenced by certain behavioral factors that motivate social standing within peer groups and numerous technological variables prevalent in online social media that exacerbate such behavior. The research method primarily revolves around a rigorous review of the literature surrounding cancel culture and its roots in societal development. Furthermore, results from open-ended interviews with 15 proponents of cancel culture within social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide insight into the behavioral patterns that underlie cancel culture rallies. I found that sociometric status and mob mentality are salient motivators for online citizens to participate in cancel culture; online users ostracise others to appear more upright in comparison while joining the majority of persecutors to cultivate unity within the group. Additionally, I found that online factors, such as asynchronicity and anonymity, further incentivize combative behavior by lowering one’s inhibition and sense of restraint online. Cancel culture could potentially cultivate a future riddled with arbitrary policing and diminished freedom of expression. Understanding the psychology behind such a phenomenon would result in a deeper awareness of the covert psychological effects that plague netizens and could create a foundation for a more mindful online presence.

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampus (HPC) are critical structures in a network that supports spatial working memory and flexible decision making in rats. The HPC has traditionally been implicated in episodic and spatial memory, while the mPFC has been studied for roles in working memory, response inhibition, outcome evaluation, and implementation of task rules and strategies. Flexible decision making is often tested via reversal learning (RL) paradigms in rats, monkeys, and humans. However, many studies have suggested that the mPFC is not necessary for RL, and fewer studies have shown that the mPFC is crucial for specific types of RL. We elucidate the role of the mPFC in spatial RL by optogenetically disrupting the mPFC during specific task phases, or epochs, of a spatial RL task. We also perform the same epoch-specific optogenetic disruption of the mPFC during a probabilistic reversal learning (PRL) task, which is compared to RL performance data to investigate how probabilistic contingencies recruit the mPFC differentially compared to absolute contingencies. In both experiments we analyze metrics such as choice accuracy, perseverative and regressive errors, and trials per reversal. Our data suggest that RL performance is only impaired when the mPFC is disrupted during the choice epoch of our task, while mPFC disruption during any epoch of the PRL task results in performance deficits. This suggests that the mPFC is involved in decision making processes and maintenance of probabilistic reward contingencies. This study contributes to knowledge about the mPFC in reward-guided decision making and can give insight into how impaired behavioral flexibility is caused by mPFC dysfunction, which is implicated in neurological disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and others.

Workplace diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts are well-intentioned but often too focused on meeting metrics instead of making structural changes that are directly aligned with the commitment to D&I. To examine people’s perception of company training towards D&I efforts, the current study investigates whether knowing a company is dedicated to implementing D&I initiatives influences their perception on the necessity of other systemic interventions. We expose each participant to a company that implements D&I training (diversity training company) and a company that does not (no diversity training company). Then, we measure their perception of each company's need for structural changes. We hypothesize that participants presented with the diverse training company will rate the company’s future diversity efforts as less necessary. The finding of this research provides evidence that the presence of D&I training may have unintended consequences of preventing organizations from making other important systemic changes.

Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak, hate crimes and violence towards minoritized groups such as Black and Asian people have surged. Consequently, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) continue to face several mental health challenges as well as inaccessibility to mental health care. The literature suggests that culturally responsive psychotherapy can improve BIPOC clients’ clinical outcomes. Thus, this study examines the actions community mental health (CMH) clinicians have taken to better serve BIPOC clients. Data came from a Washington State-funded cognitive-behavioral therapy training initiative (CBT+) in 2020 - 2021. CMH clinicians and supervisors attended a virtual CBT training followed by six months of expert consultation and completed pre-training and post-consultation surveys. In the surveys, CMH clinicians reported on the frequency of performing certain actions to better serve their BIPOC clients (e.g., discuss issues of race or racism with BIPOC clients) using a 5-point Likert Scale ranging from 0 (Never) to 5 (Always). We conducted descriptive statistics to summarize clinicians’ responses. Our analyses showed that clinicians most frequently incorporated the following actions when working with BIPOC clients: “consider the client's ethnicity” and “the use of bilingual staff or interpreters for those whose English is not their first language.” On the other hand, clinicians appeared to rarely collaborate with natural community healers, spiritual healers, clergy, etc., as part of their service delivery. Our findings suggest that CMH clinicians have taken several actions to thoughtfully consider and incorporate BIPOC clients’ backgrounds and context into treatment delivery. However, certain CMH clinicians' actions to better serve BIPOC clients occur more frequently than others. Future research should better understand which culturally responsive actions are most helpful in helping BIPOC clients’ experiences in CMH.

 Twelve million US citizens are currently suffering from visual impairment, many of them with late-stage blindness, which is accompanied by a drop in visual acuity, and the inability to recognize faces (CDC, 2022). Currently, few electronic sight restoration devices (SRDs) exist as treatment options for late-stage impairment that are precise in targeting retinal cells. Current SRDs cannot selectively stimulate on and off-center retinal cells – instead, all cells are stimulated regardless of their biologically natural firing pattern. Our research aims to examine whether neural plasticity can aid in overcoming this distortion in sighted individuals, using dichoptic presentation of stimuli that roughly mimics this simultaneous stimulation of on- and off- cells. Specifically, we convolved Fourier filters (F, and it’s contrast reverse complement F′) with images that are contrasted reversed complements of one another (I and I′) to induce a similar coding distortion caused by SRDs. We hypothesized that, through perceptual learning, sighted participants who received training with these distorted stimuli would be able to adapt to these distorted on-and-off cell responses. To test our hypotheses, participants were assigned to one of two groups. While both groups performed an object discrimination task with the distorted visual input, the experimental group did 25 hours of video game (VG) training, while the control group (CG) completed 5 hours of the object discrimination task. Participants in the VG group played a game that is an adaptation of Fruit Ninja, and tested in the discrimination task every 5 hours of video game play. Preliminary results indicate that individuals assigned to the VG group displayed superior performance in the object discrimination task, compared to the control group. Our results indicate that individuals with SRDs may have the potential to learn to decode unnatural visual cell population responses, which could improve their visual perceptions and enhance quality of life.

Cultural stigmatization, financial burden, and low mental health literacy are reasons why Chinese people with mental health issues tend not to seek help from psychotherapists or psychological counselors. I hypothesized that Measurement-based Care (MBC) might provide a possible solution to some of the problems mentioned above by introducing a data-driven approach to mental health treatment. By representing mental health suffering in a quantitative and objective way, I thought this might legitimize mental health treatment, especially by showing the effectiveness of psychological counseling on symptoms. Additionally, I hypothesized that the combination of MBC and psychotherapy might impact Chinese people’s attitudes toward psychological counseling services in China. I recruited two hundred participants, ages 18-65, through an online Chinese survey platform called Wenjuanxing (wjx.cn) from all regions in mainland China. I collected survey responses to questions measuring attitude changes toward psychological counseling before and after learning about MBC. After conducting preliminary analyses, the results indicate that participants were significantly more likely to receive help from mental health counselors providing psychosocial interventions after learning about MBC compared to their attitudes before learning about MBC. This result means that MBC has the potential to facilitate positive attitudes toward psychological counseling in China, helping more Chinese people to accept mental health counseling when they need mental health support. This survey study also built a foundation for future researchers to explore this area further.

Measurement based care (MBC) is an evidence-based approach to psychological care that has been gaining momentum in the field. MBC emphasizes the use of frequent, repeated administration of measures and the consequently collected data in order to inform the course of treatment. This contrasts with traditional care, which relies more heavily upon clinical judgment and only sparse use of measurements. MBC has been shown to provide significant improvements for patients, largely due to increased patient feedback which results in quicker responses in changing treatment plans accordingly. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a data collection strategy where researchers repeatedly remotely administer surveys that ask about participants’ current real-time states, and can provide additional clinical utility to MBC treatment through more contemporaneous data which is less subject to the errors of retrospective recall. Despite EMA’s ability to gather more ecologically valid data, there is a lack of research on how to optimize EMA to reduce concerns of response burden and adherence. This research aims to help clarify this knowledge area by examining how timing and frequency of measures affects participants’ adherence to an EMA procedure. We recruited 215 participants from the University of Washington’s Psychology Subject Pool, and randomly assigned each participant to one of two groups—each group was tasked with answering the same short survey, a modified 5-item version of the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), either three or seven times a day, both over a period of three weeks. We predicted that there would not be a significant difference in adherence rates between the two different sampling frequencies, and that surveys taken earlier in the day would be completed less frequently than those in the evening. Understanding participants’ responses to EMA is critical not only for optimizing future psychological research, but also for improving the use of measures in clinical care.