Research Award Recipients

First-time first-year college students often struggle in their first semesters in college. Many of them will ultimately drop-out or make academic decisions that they regret later in their college career. This study investigated a novel approach to supporting first-time first-year students to make better academic choices for their future by manipulating their sense of future self-continuity. Future self-continuity is the extent to which a person feels connected to a future version of themselves. This study was interested in the potential effects of increasing participants’ sense of future self-continuity on academic outcomes such as grade point average (GPA) and retention. All participants completed pre-intervention measures of self-esteem, academic resilience, and grit. Two randomly assigned groups of participants wrote in detail about themselves on the day of their future commencement ceremony upon graduating from college. The control group wrote about themselves in the present as if they were writing a profile on a networking site. The experimental group wrote a letter to their present self from the perspective of their future self they imagined earlier in the experiment. All participants completed post-intervention measures of affect, future self-continuity, and consideration of future consequences. It was hypothesized that this increased sense of future self-continuity would result in improved academic performance as measured by GPA at the end of their first semester in college, compared to the control condition. Preliminary analysis suggests that there were no differences between groups in future self-continuity. This result is likely due to the small sample size that was collected.

Research has indicated that both an increase in perspective taking and a greater understanding of emotional regulation in young children sets them up for greater success in their future, however not enough research has been done on schools with curriculum implementing these topics. We evaluated whether or not the length of exposure to mindfulness based interventions and social emotional learning techniques had a significant effect on children’s abilities to perspective-take and qualities pertaining to emotional regulation. Fourteen preschool students aged 3-5 who attend the Associated Students Child Development Learning Lab (ASCDL) completed the Three Mountains Task to evaluate their perspective taking skills, and their two teachers filled out the Early Emotion Regulation Behavior Questionnaire based on the students’ attitudes and behaviors in the classroom to evaluate their emotion regulation skills. Unfortunately, we found no significant relationship between length of time spent at the ASCDL and ability to perspective take, or between length of time spent at the ASCDL in relation to the different dimensions of emotional regulation. However elements within the facets of emotional regulation proved to have significant positive and negative correlations between eachother. Students did an outstanding job with their perspective taking abilities, especially considering their age. Correlations between different dimensions of emotional regulation show that it is crucial for teachers to look out for a number of problem behaviors, not only ones that manifest in an outward, direct way.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between acculturation, family functioning, and well-being. The Hmong community was a population of particular interest in this study. The main research question was: what are the pertinent issues that present challenges for the Hmong community? Additionally, based on past research, the study examined issues of the Hmong community related to acculturation and generation gap. In part 1, a qualitative design approach was used. This was done specifically through semi-structured interviews with Hmong Cultural Center Staff of Butte County, California. In part 2, a correlational quantitative design was used. This was done through a Qualtrics survey. The results of part 1 showed that generation gap (e.g., language barriers and unshared cultural practices in families) is indeed a pertinent issue in the Hmong community. The results of part 2 showed that for the Hmong participants, family functioning and acculturation to American culture were significant predictors of well-being. Whereas, for the non-Hmong participants (e.g., Hispanics), family functioning and acculturation to ethnic culture were significant predictors of well-being.

Overall, these findings suggest that the Hmong participants (who were mainly young adults) are highly acculturated to the American culture and that biculturalism of such communities should be researched further. Furthermore, due to this sample consisting of mainly young adults (ages 18-25), future research should gauge for acculturation levels from other age groups in order to have a better understanding of acculturation for this community as a whole.

Sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) face unique healthcare challenges that manifest in limited access to care (Kattari et al., 2015; Morris et al., 2022; Risher et al., 2013). With limited access and/or a fear of seeking care due to discrimination, SGMs face worse overall health outcomes than non-SGM individuals (Institute of Medicine, 2011; Johnson et al., 2008; Zeeman et al., 2018). Health and identity are interconnected on many levels and when SGM patients do not feel comfortable in disclosing integral pieces of their identity with providers, clinicians cannot deliver the most optimal care (Taylor, 1999). This study analyzes to what extent positive and affirming SGM lingual inclusivity and visual imagery that communicate allyship and competence in treating SGM patients affects SGM patient choices to seek care from providers, follow treatment recommendations by those providers, return for subsequent appointments, and their overall assessment of the clinician and clinical environment. A logistic regression analysis revealed that lingual inclusivity – but not visual inclusivity – significantly predicted treatment compliance. In addition, a multiple linear regression analysis revealed that lingual inclusivity – but not visual inclusivity – significantly predicted how long participants delayed their recommended appointment. Finally, we found that patient satisfaction depended on the lingual inclusivity used by the provider, but not visual inclusivity, and these two factors did not interact. Our findings lead us to recommend an increase in SGM-specific training for healthcare practitioners during their formal education.

Delay discounting refers to the tendency for the value of a commodity (e.g., money) to decrease as the delay to its receipt increases. The rate at which a commodity loses its value (i.e., discounting rate) is determined by asking participants to choose repeatedly between “smaller-sooner” and “larger-later” outcomes. In general, smaller-sooner choices are viewed as “impulsive,” whereas larger-later choices are viewed as “self-controlled.” Because exaggerated preference for smaller-sooner outcomes (i.e., higher discounting rates) is commonly associated with impulsive behaviors such as substance abuse, pathological gambling, and sexual risk behavior (Amlung et al., 2017), researchers have sought to identify methods for decreasing discounting rates (i.e., promoting greater larger-later choices, or self-control).

Notably, episodic future thinking (EFT) has been shown to decrease discounting rates (Peters & Büchel, 2010; Stein et al., 2017). One explanation as to why EFT is effective is that by imagining future events in vivid detail, individuals may be more likely to value delayed outcomes in the present when making choices that will benefit their future selves. In a similar way, individuals may construct vivid imagery by recalling past events. The possibility that episodic past thinking (EPT) could achieve the same positive benefit as EFT prompted Daniel and colleagues in 2016 to compare the effects of EFT vs. EPT on delay discounting. In their study, participants who were randomly assigned to engage in EFT or EPT ( n = 27 per group) discounted hypothetical monetary rewards significantly less steeply than participants assigned to a control condition (episodic recent thinking, or ERT). As potentially important as these findings are for the development of episodic thinking treatments, they have yet to be reproduced. Given recent concerns within psychology about failures to reproduce high-profile empirical findings, the present study had two goals. In Experiment 1, we attempted to replicate the procedures of Daniel et al. (2016) as closely as possible with college students. In Experiment 2, we sought to examine the potentially beneficial effects of episodic thinking on delay discounting in a population vulnerable to impulsive choice, namely individuals with DSM-5 Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD; Petry, 2001). Both experiments were reviewed and approved by the Chico State Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Experiment 1 successfully adapted the procedures used by Daniel et al. (2016) into an online survey format with college students. Eighty-one participants were randomly assigned to EFT ( n = 24), EPT ( n = 29), or ERT ( n = 28) conditions. Once assigned to their episodic cue condition, participants were prompted to generate personally relevant episodic cues using instructional sets provided by the authors of Daniel et al. (2016). Next, participants completed two delay discounting tasks: one involving past rewards and one involving future rewards. During the discounting tasks, episodic cues generated earlier in the survey were displayed above the choice alternatives. Although we reproduced Daniel et al.’s (2016) findings that EFT and EPT episodic cues were significantly more salient and arousing relative to ERT episodic cues, we did not reproduce the positive effects of EFT and EPT on delay discounting relative to the ERT control condition.

Experiment 2, which began recruitment during Experiment 1, sought to enroll AUD and non-AUD (control) participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform commonly used by academic researchers to conduct surveys. Inclusion criteria for the AUD group was consistent with criteria from similar research: Individuals (≥18 years old) needed to (1) endorse ≥ 4 DSM-5 criteria for AUD (moderate to severe AUD); and (2) endorse < 2 DSM-5 criteria for other substances (except nicotine and tobacco). To qualify for the non-AUD group, individuals needed to endorse < 2 DSM-5 criteria for all substances (except nicotine and tobacco). Unfortunately, of the 107 individuals who completed the screening questionnaire, only 5 met inclusion criteria for the AUD group and 7 met inclusion criteria for the non-AUD group. Based on the rate of recruitment, we estimated that it would take considerably longer than expected to recruit the desired sample ( N = 180; n = 90 per group). The experiment was therefore discontinued.