David Disabato

Kent State University | KSU · Department of Psychology

There is continued interest in understanding what leads people to do CDC-recommended COVID-19 prevention behaviors. We tested whether fear and COVID-19 worry would replicate as the primary drivers of six CDC recommend prevention behaviors. We recruited 741 adult participants during the second major peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States...

Popular measures of psychological flexibility (PF), such as the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II) and Brief Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire (BEAQ) have been criticized for questionable psychometric properties. The critiques include poor divergent validity with negative emotionality and disregarding PF's theoretical definition of fle...

Background Individuals who possess the “Looming Cognitive Style” (LCS; Riskind et al. in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79:837–852, 2000) are biased to perceive mental simulations of possible threats as dynamically emergent phenomena that are rapidly growing, approaching, and expanding in negative consequences. The present study aimed...

Background & Purpose Primary prevention of COVID-19 has focused on encouraging compliance with specific behaviors that restrict contagion. This investigation sought to characterize engagement in these behaviors in U.S. adults early during the pandemic and to build explanatory models of the psychological processes that drive them. Methods US adults...

Background: Although preliminary research has explored the possibility of optimal well-being after depression, it is unclear how rates compare to anxiety. Using Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panic Disorder (PD) as exemplars of anxiety, we tested the rates of optimal well-being one decade after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Base...

Background : Although preliminary research has explored the possibility of optimal well-being after depression, it is unclear how rates compare to anxiety. Using Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panic Disorder (PD) as exemplars of anxiety, we tested the rates of optimal well-being one decade after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Bas...

Objectives: The aim of this project was to test the efficacy of a brief and novel online ambulatory intervention aimed at supporting psychological health and well-being for medical personnel and first responders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Interested participants, n=28, actively employed as medical personnel, support staff and emergency...

Although evidence exists for a feedback loop between positive affect and self-care behaviors, it is unclear if findings generalize to the COVID-19 pandemic. A 10-day daily diary was completed by 324 adult participants in the United States during spring 2020 when national stay-at-home orders were in effect. We hypothesized a reciprocal within-person...

Much is known about the types of strategies people use to regulate emotions. Less is known about individual differences that influence emotion regulation strategy selection. In this study, we tested the moderating role of negative emotion differentiation (NED; i.e., the ability to label and describe subtle differences among negative emotions) on th...

Background Individuals who possess the “Looming Cognitive Style” (LCS; Riskind, Williams, Gessner, Chrosniak, & Cortina, 2000) are biased to perceive mental simulations of possible threats as dynamically emergent phenomena that are rapidly growing, approaching, and expanding in negative consequences. The present study aimed to evaluate whether the...

Approximately 15-20% of adult women in the United States have been sexually assaulted. Given the high prevalence of sexual assault, it becomes increasingly important to understand immediate responses to sexual assault. A lack of information prior to sexual assaults contributes to a literature that is unable to showcase the presence and amount of ch...

Several decades of research on well-being has resulted in a plethora of measurement models created by psychological scientists. In this review, we synthesize the measurement of well-being literature and present a hierarchical framework that subsumes many of the existing models. We outline the rationale and empirical evidence behind five hierarchica...

In an earlier paper (Goodman et al., 2018), we found that two models of subjective well-being demonstrated substantial overlap, with correlations between .85-.98. We concluded that these two models do not capture distinct types of well-being – a conclusion consistent with a growing list of studies that have found high correlations between various m...

Psychological flexibility (PF), defined as the ability to pursue valued life aims despite the presence of distress, is a fundamental contributor to health (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). Existing measures of PF have failed to consider the valued goals that give context for why people are willing to manage distress. Using 4 independent samples and 3 f...

At the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception--whole number bias (WNB)--contributed to incorrect beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a novel, five-minute online educational intervention, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to encour...

Curiosity is a fundamental human motivation that influences learning, the acquisition of knowledge, and life fulfillment. Our ability to understand the benefits (and costs) of being a curious person hinges on adequate assessment. Synthesizing decades of prior research, our goal was to improve a well-validated, multi-dimensional measure of curiosity...

Understanding how individuals with varying levels of social anxiety respond to daily positive events is important. Psychological processes that increase positive emotions are being widely used as strategies to not only enhance well-being but also reduce the symptoms and impairment tied to negative emotional dispositions and conditions, including ex...

Curiosity is a fundamental human motive that is beginning to garner closer attention by researchers and practitioners interested in workplace functioning. Recent work suggests that rather than designating someone as possessing curiosity or not, there is benefit in detailing the various elements of curiosity. To date, there is no research on how mul...

Curiosity is a fundamental human motivation that influences learning, the acquisition of knowledge, and life fulfillment. Our ability to understand the benefits (and costs) of being a curious person hinges on adequate assessment. Synthesizing decades of prior research, our goal was to improve a well-validated, multi-dimensional measure of curiosity...

Approximately 15-20% of adult women in the United States have been sexually assaulted. To our knowledge, there are no studies capturing prior functioning and near immediate psychological reactions of sexual assault survivors. In the present study, each night over the course of three weeks, we asked college students to report on their sexual activit...

Understanding how individuals with varying levels of social anxiety respond to daily positive events is important. Psychological processes that increase positive emotions are being widely used as strategies to not only enhance well-being but reduce the symptoms and impairment tied to negative emotional dispositions and conditions, including excessi...

As part of collecting information for the purpose of threat assessment and management regarding a person of concern within an institution of higher education, a threat assessment and management team or another institutional official may request that a campus counseling center conduct a risk assessment of dangerousness-to-others. This study measured...

Can people achieve optimal well-being and thrive after major depression? Contemporary epidemiology dismisses this possibility, viewing depression as a recurrent, burdensome condition with a bleak prognosis. To estimate the prevalence of thriving after depression in United States adults, we used data from the Midlife Development in the United States...

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Following the advent of modern positive psychology, there has been a surge of empirical research on strengths and a call for incorporating strengths into clinical models of psychopathology. In this review, we conceptualize strengths as a subset of personality traits and dissect the criteria used to define strengths. In hopes of improving theoretica...

Curiosity is a fundamental human motive that is beginning to garner closer attention by researchers and practitioners interested in workplace functioning. Recent work suggests that rather than designating someone as possessing curiosity, there is benefit in detailing the various elements of curiosity. To date, there is no research on how multiple d...

A monolithic view of curiosity is insufficient to understand how that quality drives success and fulfillment in work and life. To discover and leverage talent and to form groups that are greater than the sum of their parts, a more nuanced approach is needed.

We address a key issue at the intersection of emotion, psychopathology, and public health—the startling lack of attention to people who experience benign outcomes, and even flourish, after recovering from depression. A rereading of the epidemiological literature suggests that the orthodox view of depression as chronic, recurrent, and lifelong is ov...

Objective: Researchers conceptualize grit as the combination of two facets: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests toward long‐term goals. We tested the reliability of grit facet scores across the globe and examined how differently each grit facet related to well‐being and personality strengths. Method: An international sample of 7,617...

Objectives: This study sought to replicate and extend research on social facilitators of college student's help seeking for psychological problems. Participants: We collected data on 420 ethnically diverse college students at a large public university (September 2008 - May 2010). Methods: Students completed a cross-sectional online survey. Re...

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to test a 1-hour peer suicide gatekeeper training for students from the broad college community in the context of an open pilot trial. Method: Two-hundred and thirty-one college students were recruited university-wide, Mage = 20.7, 65.4% female, and completed a peer suicide prevention gatekeeping t...

Is gratitude developmentally related to improvements in social behavior? This study examined 566 adolescents (51.6% female, M age = 11.95 years at baseline, 68.0% White, 11.0% African-American, 9.9% Asian-American, 1.9% Hispanic, 8.8% ‘Other’) from middle school to high school for 4 years. Controlling for social desirability, age, SES, and gender,...

Multiple informants - compared to single informants - better inform the clinical assessment and the diagnosis of psychopathology. The Operations Triad Model (OTM; De Los Reyes et al. 2013a) provides researchers with a conceptual framework for integrating information from multiple informants into research settings. We simplified this model by: 1) id...

Since the origins of psychology, curiosity has occupied a pivotal position in the study of motivation, emotion, and cognition; and disciplines as far-ranging as biology, economics, robotics, and leadership. Theorists have disagreed about the basic tenets of curiosity; some researchers contend that the rewards arise when resolving ambiguity and unce...

We compared Seligman’s PERMA model of well-being with Diener’s model of subjective well-being (SWB) to determine if the newer PERMA captured a type of well-being unique from the older SWB. Participants were 517 adults who completed self-report measures of SWB, PERMA, and VIA character strengths. Results from four analytic techniques suggest the fac...

Decades of research have shown that positive life events contribute to the remission and recovery of depression; however, it is unclear how positive life events are generated. In this study, we sought to understand if personality strengths could predict positive life events that aid in the alleviation of depression. We tested a longitudinal mediati...

The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) is one of the most widely used measures of criminal thinking. Although the PICTS has adequate psychometric qualities with many general population inmates, the measurement confound of reading ability may decrease its construct validity in low-literacy inmates. To help resolve this confo...

The current study tested the effectiveness of a self-administered, cognitive-behavioral intervention targeting criminal thinking for inmates in segregated housing: Taking a Chance on Change (TCC). Participants included 273 inmates in segregated housing at state correctional institutions. Reductions in criminal thinking, as assessed by the Psycholog...

Progress in clinical science, theory, and practice requires the integration of advances from multiple fields of psychology, but much integration remains to be done. The current article seeks to address the specific gap that exists between basic social psychological theories and the implementation of related therapeutic techniques. We propose severa...

Objective: We examined how personality strengths prospectively predict reactions to negative life events. Method: Participants were 797 community adults from 42 countries. At five points over the course of one year, participants completed a series of questionnaires measuring seven personality strengths (hope, grit, meaning in life, curiosity, gr...

A large international sample was used to test whether hedonia (the experience of positive emotional states and satisfaction of desires) and eudaimonia (the presence of meaning and development of one's potentials) represent 1 overarching well-being construct or 2 related dimensions. A latent correlation of .96 presents negligible evidence for the di...

Men are less grateful than women and less likely to intentionally enhance gratitude via interventions. Yet, little is known if sex differences in gratitude result from biological influences such as prenatal testosterone and estrogen levels – hormones that control the development of sex-specific characteristics. In two studies, we examined how sex a...

Adolescent poverty is associated with increased antisocial and decreased prosocial behaviors. Attenuating these negative effects is relevant for both individual and societal well-being. Research exploring how youth in poverty can escape antisocial behaviors and move toward prosocial behaviors has been limited primarily to risk factors. From a stren...