Abundant research quantifies the effects of different meditation practices, however little work has been done to investigate the motivations individuals have for starting or continuing their practice. This study investigated individuals' motivations for starting and continuing meditation practice through an online, open-ended survey. Participants were 401 adult, Englishspeaking practitioners from 33 states and 27 countries with any kind of meditation practice. Using grounded theory, seven over-arching themes for practicing meditation were identified. The study supported previous work demonstrating that motivations for practicing meditation move along a continuum of self-regulation to self-exploration to self-liberation over time (Shapiro, 1992). The study also revealed increases in altruistic motivations over time, suggesting that over time motivations for meditating become less self-focused. These results have implications for motivational models of how meditation practices are established and maintained.

This review aims to synthesize the existing literature on parenting practices and their risk factors for adolescent suicide as well as make the connection from these risk factors to parenting styles (neglectful, authoritarian, permissive, authoritative) and parental bonding styles (neglectful, affectionless control, affectionate constraint, optimal). Although leaders in public health and suicidality do not currently recognize parenting practices and styles as risk and protective factors for adolescent suicides, prior research provides evidence for the relationship between increased risk for adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors and parenting factors such as overprotection, control, abundant parent-child conflicts, neglect or rejection, and not taking a suicide attempt seriously. Moreover, past research has also found that deficient parenting styles and parental bonding styles are strongly associated with suicidality in children and adolescents both directly and indirectly due to their relation to other risk factors. This review aims to reignite the conversation about the relationship between parenting practices and adolescent suicidality and bring light to this important subject.

Most research on parents has been focused on the mother. Recent studies however have showed that the father plays a pivotal role in child cognitive and socio-emotional development. The aim of this study was to look for associations between father characteristics, paternal nurturance behaviors and toddler emotional expression. Fathers (N=57) with a toddler between the ages of 1 and 3 wore the EAR for two consecutive days. Research assistants coded the resulting sound files for paternal nurturance behaviors and toddler emotional expressions. As expected, fathers who engaged in more physical play, non-physical play, gave praise or encouragement and playful, silly and goofy behaviors had toddlers that laughed or giggled more. Unexpectedly, fathers who engaged in non-physical play, gave praise or encouragement and showed affection had toddlers who fussed, whined or cried more. Also, contrary to our hypothesis, only one paternal nurturance behavior was associated with father characteristics. Future research should look more closely at the context of these paternal nurturance behaviors and toddler emotional expressions. While this study found significant associations, more research should be done on father-toddler interaction either with the EAR or traditional observational methods.

First-person plural pronoun use (we-talk) by couples may be an implicit marker of communal coping, a process by which partners view a problem or stressor as "ours" rather than "yours" or "mine", and is associated with adaptive relationship functioning and individual health outcomes (Lyons, Mickelson, Sullivan, & Coyne, 1998). The present study examined we-talk in couples undergoing treatment for problematic alcohol use, hypothesizing that greater we-talk during therapy would be associated with successful drinking outcomes for patients. Thirty-three couples with male partners who had problematic alcohol use participated in either couple-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Family Systems Therapy (FST). Transcripts of couples’ speech, derived from a baseline interaction task and two subsequent therapy sessions and analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, provided measures of pronoun use for each partner. Results indicated that greater spouse we-talk at baseline was associated with successful drinking outcomes for patients at therapy termination. Increases in couple we-talk during therapy also predicted successful drinking outcomes, and for couples participating in the CBT, greater we-talk mid-therapy predicted successful outcomes. These findings provide additional evidence for the prognostic significance of couple we-talk and communal coping as a possible mechanism of change in couple-focused interventions.

There is little work done that looks into gender and perceptions of greed. Using information from the first experiment in Anderson, (2014), this thesis looked at the possible role of gender in the formation of perceptions of greed as well as some of the subsequent social reactions. Two hypotheses were formed off of previous work done in the subject area. The first hypothesis is that even with distributive injustice, inference of selfish motive to acquire, and relative deprivation held constant, females will have greater perceptions of greed because males tend to view competition and aggression as normal, whereas females do not. The second hypothesis is that because of the greater perceptions of greed, females will also have greater moral outrage and personal anger. The data that was supposed to be used to find results was lost due to computer failure. Therefore, no conclusions could be found, only hypothetical possibilities.