Category: Faculty Partner Research

Ximena Arriaga – Why might women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) become more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior? Women’s interest in casual sex may satisfy relational expectations and connection needs, while avoiding the types of close attachments that previously were violent.

Leanne Nieforth – Equine-facilitated learning and psychotherapy services are traditionally a human-centered activity that leverages anthropomorphizing for the benefit of humans and at the expense of equine welfare. Feminist theories can be used to critically analyze human use of anthropomorphizing in these settings.

Sharon Christ, Kristine Marceau, Trent Mize – When researchers require some statistical expertise or data analysis know-how, The Methodology Center at Purdue (MCAP) is there. A collaboration between the Purdue University College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) and the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), the center consists of four co-directors, 15 core faculty, and more than 100 affiliated faculty researchers.

Patti Thomas – This study adds to the literature on the relationship between social relationships and cognitive function by using social integration theory to examine whether a sense of community belonging at different ages is related to cognitive function in later life.

Sharon Christ – Siblings of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have weaker language skills compared to peers with typical development (TD). However, whether their language-relevant audiovisual skills are also atypical is unknown.

Arielle Borovsky – Recent studies suggest that language users generate and maintain multiple predictions in parallel, especially in tasks that explicitly instruct participants to generate predictions. Here, we investigated the possibility of parallel gradedness of linguistic predictions in a simple reading task, using a new measure—imbalance—that captures the probabilistic difference between multiple sentence completions.

Trent Mize – Decades of research shows that holding and maintaining multiple social roles leads to better mental health and well-being overall, but role-accumulation theory has not proposed or considered whether effects vary at different stages in the life course. Rather, the current theory assumes that social roles’ positive influence on mental health should be similar at all ages.

Leanne Nieforth – Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects nearly 23% of veterans who served after 9/11, creating challenges not just for them but for their families too. A recent study explores how psychiatric service dogs help alleviate these issues and foster resilience among military families. Here’s what the research uncovered.

Sarah Eason – Research shows that parent–child math activities in the home positively relate to children’s math learning.

David Purpura – The home learning environment (HLE) is an important context for fostering early development. Literature supports four subdomains of the HLE: home literacy, numeracy, executive function, and science environments.