Abstracts

This study seeks to better understand the spatial epidemiology of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and associated neighborhood and built environment factors. The study is based in Miami-Dade County (MDC), a metropolitan region with a legacy of racial segregation that remains an i...

There has been a significant decrease in American's support for the death penalty over the years. Consequently, we have witnessed more states abolishing the use of the death penalty. According to the data from the General Social Survey (GSS) 57% of Americans aged 65+ were in favor of ...

Traumatic life events may play a role in the etiology of hoarding disorder, a psychiatric condition defined by extreme difficulties discarding belongings and associated clutter. Research has indicated that childhood adversity, defined as life events that present a threat to a child's physical or psy...

Humans may have behavioral adaptations that serve as an early defense against infectious pathogens, helping them to avoid exposure to sickness. While adults detect and avoid cues of sickness in faces, less is known about how these abilities develop in children. This understanding is important becaus...

INTRODUCTION: The State of Florida has an incarceration rate of 870 per 100,00 adult residents (Minton et al., 2021). Post-release this population faces a higher mortality rate due to drug overdose by a factor of 3.5, which does not return to the general population baseline even after nine weeks pos...

According to The Sentencing Project (2020), the United States currently detains about 2 million people within their prisons and jails, being the lead country in the international rates of incarceration. Lobel (2020) defines mass incarceration as the "dramatic expansion of using solitary confinementâ...

The lack of comprehensive and inclusive sexual education in the United States is a significant public health concern that requires a reimagining of health promotion during the age of social media. This necessity bore The Sex Wrap (TSW), a podcast-based sexual health intervention that aims to fill in...

A community's built environment plays a tremendous role in the well-being of its members. Access to grocery stores, affordable healthy food options, or a surplus in cheap fast food can significantly affect the health of the individuals living in that area. The purpose of this study is to examine the...

Preschool experiences have a significant effect on children's language development, however, it is unclear which classroom activities are associated with language abilities and whether this association differs for children with disabilities. Some Classroom activities are highly structured and teache...

Positive affect (PA) is an important construct in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depressive disorders, and therefore an important treatment target to address for youth with such psychopathology and related impairment. Prior studies have yielded mixed results regarding the role that chan...

Eye tracking is a tool that captures where an individual is looking on a screen, which can tell us about various types of perceptual, social, cognitive, and emotional processing. While eye tracking systems are typically designed for adults, they are increasingly used with human and primate infants, ...

Racial and ethnic minority women in the United States are subject to various forms of violent victimization that happen across several social contexts, including interpersonal (e.g., intimate households), community (e.g., where women live and work, local social services), and societal (e.g., justice...

Hispanics are still 2.5 times more likely to become hospitalized and 2.1 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites. Sexual minority stress compounds this risk for Latinx sexual and gender minorities (SGM), but little remains known about the drivers of COVID-19 vaccine uptake in...

The lack of access to accurate and comprehensive sexual health education in the United States continues to be a pressing public health issue. The Sex Wrap (TSW) is a multimedia sexual health podcast and social media presence that educates its followers on sexual health and ancillary themes including...

Intimate partner aggression (IPA) is a multi-faceted phenomenon that ranges from severe forms of intimate partner violence to less severe behaviors, common couple violence (Simpson et al., 2007). Communication conflict, which assesses the intensity and frequency of arguments, is often conceptualized...

Cancer patients are vulnerable to neuroendocrine dysregulation, implicating cancer progression and poorer health outcomes. Resilience through spirituality may promote better adjustment to cancer diagnosis. This study examined the degree to which patients' spirituality is associated with neuroendocri...

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between a set of task rules, while affective flexibility is the ability to switch between emotional and non-emotional aspects of a stimulus.  Although there is research examining both of these types of flexible judgements, few studies have directly...

In adults and children, oxytocin is a neuropeptide positively associated with social engagement. Endogenous peripheral oxytocin can be unobtrusively measured through saliva. However, little is understood about the early development of the endogenous oxytocin system in infancy. Here, we studied wheth...

The Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents (UP-C/A) is effective in treating a variety of psychopathologies in youth; however, this effectiveness has not been examined with an idiographic measure, such as the Top Problems (TPA) assessment. P...

Little is known about the spatial patterns of household water insecurity and their implications for community water interventions. This study analyzes location data of 250 households surveyed in Arua, Uganda, in August-September 2017 to evaluate correlates and geospatial clustering of household wate...

My research examines the relationship between attentional performance, mind wandering, and well-being in undergraduate students across the academic year 2020-2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic.  It is known that while attention is key for academic achievement, it can also be degraded in stressfu...

In the United States, many adolescents do not have access to comprehensive sexual education, and instead, receive abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) education. Given the current social and political climate in the United States, LGBTQ+ youth are becoming more likely to be excluded from sexuality ...