A Multiple Goal Perspective on Eating Behavior

Although people frequently pursue multiple goals simultaneously, these goals often conflict with each other. For instance, consumers may have both a healthy eating goal and a goal to have an enjoyable eating experience. In this dissertation, I focus on two sources of enjoyment in eating experiences that may conflict with healthy eating: consuming tasty food (Essay 1) and affiliating with indulging dining companions (Essay 2). In both essays, I examine solutions and strategies that decrease the conflict between healthy eating and these aspects of enjoyment in the eating experience, thereby enabling consumers to resolve such goal conflicts.

Essay 1 focuses on the well-established conflict between having healthy food and having tasty food and introduces a novel product offering (“vice-virtue bundles”) that can help consumers simultaneously address both health and taste goals. Through several experiments, I demonstrate that consumers often choose vice-virtue bundles with small proportions (¼) of vice and that they view such bundles as healthier than but equally tasty as bundles with larger vice proportions, indicating that “healthier” does not always have to equal “less tasty.”

Essay 2 focuses on a conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with indulging dining companions. The first set of experiments provides evidence of this conflict and examine why it arises (Studies 1 to 3). Based on this conflict’s origins, the second set of experiments tests strategies that consumers can use to decrease the conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with an indulging dining companion (Studies 4 and 5), such that they can make healthy food choices while still being liked by an indulging dining companion. Thus, Essay 2 broadens the existing picture of goals that conflict with the healthy eating goal and, together with Essay 1, identifies solutions to such goal conflicts.

Obesity and Overweight among Black American Adolescent Females: The Role of Social Influences in Everyday Dietary Practices

Obesity and overweight disproportionately impact Black American adolescent females—placing them at a lifetime of elevated physical health risks. Despite this burden, the literature that explores the contributors to obesity and overweight among Black American adolescent females remains limited and unclear. This dissertation aims to develop knowledge related to obesity and overweight in Black American adolescent females, by appraising the current understanding of factors that contribute to their obesity and overweight, and explicating the everyday social influences on dietary practices. The primary study conducted for this dissertation used a mixed method, multiple case study design to examine the mother, daughter, and other household contributors to Black American adolescent daughters’ everyday practices of food consumption, acquisition, preparation, and planning. Findings reveal the importance of understanding the complex and dynamic ways mothers and other household members contribute to a holistic view of everyday dietary practices among adolescent daughters. By deeply examining the nuanced ways the multiple cases varied, context-dependent knowledge essential to understanding the complicated health challenge of obesity was produced. Subsequently, recommendations are provided for health providers and scholars to more holistically approach and examine obesity—particularly among populations who are disproportionately affected.

Global Mental Health: Five Areas for Value-Driven Training Innovation.

OBJECTIVE: In the field of global mental health, there is a need for identifying core values and competencies to guide training programs in professional practice as well as in academia. This paper presents the results of interdisciplinary discussions fostered during an annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture to develop recommendations for value-driven innovation in global mental health training. METHODS: Participants (n = 48), who registered for a dedicated workshop on global mental health training advertised in conference proceedings, included both established faculty and current students engaged in learning, practice, and research. They proffered recommendations in five areas of training curriculum: values, competencies, training experiences, resources, and evaluation. RESULTS: Priority values included humility, ethical awareness of power differentials, collaborative action, and "deep accountability" when working in low-resource settings in low- and middle-income countries and high-income countries. Competencies included flexibility and tolerating ambiguity when working across diverse settings, the ability to systematically evaluate personal biases, historical and linguistic proficiency, and evaluation skills across a range of stakeholders. Training experiences included didactics, language training, self-awareness, and supervision in immersive activities related to professional or academic work. Resources included connections with diverse faculty such as social scientists and mentors in addition to medical practitioners, institutional commitment through protected time and funding, and sustainable collaborations with partners in low resource settings. Finally, evaluation skills built upon community-based participatory methods, 360-degree feedback from partners in low-resource settings, and observed structured clinical evaluations (OSCEs) with people of different cultural backgrounds. CONCLUSIONS: Global mental health training, as envisioned in this workshop, exemplifies an ethos of working through power differentials across clinical, professional, and social contexts in order to form longstanding collaborations. If incorporated into the ACGME/ABPN Psychiatry Milestone Project, such recommendations will improve training gained through international experiences as well as the everyday training of mental health professionals, global health practitioners, and social scientists.

The Role of Social Cognition and Person Perception in Economic Social Decision-Making

Social decision-making is often complex, requiring the decision-maker to make social inferences about another person in addition to engaging traditional decision-making processes. However, until recently, much research in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics has examined social decision-making while failing to take into account the importance of the social context and social cognitive processes that are engaged when viewing another person. Using social psychological theory to guide our hypotheses, four research studies investigate the role of social cognition and person perception in guiding economic decisions made in social contexts. The first study (Chapter 2) demonstrates that only specific types of social information engage brain regions implicated in social cognition and hinder learning in social contexts. Study 2 (Chapter 3) extends these findings and examines contexts in which this social information is used to generalize across contexts to form predictions about another person’s behavior. Study 3 (Chapter 4) demonstrates that under certain contexts these social cognitive processes may be withheld in order to more effectively complete the task at hand. Last, Study 4 (Chapter 5) examines how this knowledge of social cognitive processing can be used to change behavior in a prosocial group context. Taken together, these studies add to the growing body of literature examining decision-making in social contexts and highlight the importance of social cognitive processing in guiding these decisions. Although social cognitive processing typically facilitates social interactions, these processes may alter economic decision-making in social contexts.

“Newter”-ing the Nicodemite: Reception of John Calvin’s Quatre sermons (1552) in Sixteenth-Century England

This dissertation examines the publication history of a single work: John Calvin’s 1552 Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin traictans des matières fort utiles pour nostre temps, avec briefve exposition du Pseaume lxxxvii. Overlooked for both its contribution to Calvin’s wider corpus and its surprising popularity in English translation, successive editions of Quatre sermons display how Calvin’s argument against the behavior of so-called “Nicodemites” was adapted to various purposes unrelated to refuting religious dissimulation. The present study contributes to research in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism by highlighting the fruitfulness of focusing on a discrete work and its reception. Borrowing a term (“Newter”) from John Field’s 1579 translation of Quatre sermons, this study’s title adumbrates its argument. English translators capitalized on the intrinsic malleability of a nameless and faceless opponent, the Nicodemite, and the adaptability of Quatre sermons’ genre as a collection of sermons to reshape—or, if you will, disfigure—both Calvin’s original foes and his case against them to advance various new agenda. Yet they were not the first to use the reformer’s sermons this way. They could have learned this from Calvin himself.

My examination of Quatre sermons opens by setting the work in the context of Calvin’s other writings and his political situation (Introduction, chapters one and two). Calvin’s unrelenting literary assault on French Nicodemism over three decades has long been recognized for its consistency and negativity. Yet scholars have tended to neglect how Calvin’s polemic against religious dissimulation could exhibit significant flexibility according to the needs of his context. Whereas Calvin’s preface promises simply to revisit his previous argument against participation in the Mass, his approach to Nicodemism in Quatre sermons seems adapted to accomplish goals beyond decrying false worship, offering a carefully-crafted apology for Calvin’s pastoral authority directed at his political situation. Repeatedly emphasizing God’s purpose to bless his children through the ministry of a rightly-ordered church, Quatre sermons marks a shift in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite rhetoric away from purely negative critique, stressing instead God’s provision of spiritual nurture via political exile. Read in light of Calvin’s 1552 context, two audiences emerge: sermons ostensibly targeting believers in France who hid their faith also appear especially designed to silence Calvin’s foes in Geneva.

The remainder of the study examines the reception of Quatre sermons in the rapidly shifting religious and social contexts of Marian and Elizabethan England, where it appeared in more unique editions than any of Calvin’s writings besides the Institutio and the reformer’s 1542/45 Genevan Catechism. Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism has not been examined for its distinct contribution to the overall English reception of his thought. Five English versions of Quatre sermons appeared between 1553 and 1584—four of these under a Protestant queen, a situation quite different from the French context Calvin addressed. After situating Calvin’s position within the currents of Tudor Protestant anti-Nicodemism (chapter three), I place each of the five translations in its particular context, investigating prefaces, appendices, marginalia, and translation methods to discover how and why individuals used Quatre sermons (chapters four to six). Like Calvin in 1552, those who brought Quatre sermons to English readers were not primarily concerned with Nicodemism. Rather, the malleability of Calvin’s Nicodemite as polemical opponent and the flexibility of Quatre sermons as a sequence of discrete, interrelated parts made it popular with those eager to press Calvin into the service of a variety of diverse goals he could not have imagined, including turning his anti-Nicodemism against fellow members of the English church.