Jennifer Rosier

• Associate Professor at James Madison University

Introduction In Western cultures, parents often view infant sleep as problematic. Family, friends, and doctors may advise parents to “sleep train” assuming it is safe and effective, without considering its possible side effects, including its impact on breastfeeding. Unfortunately, it may reduce night feeds and result in earlier supplementation or...

The cry-it-out (CIO) method is a sleep training method that encourage parents to let their infants cry at night by themselves for increments of time in order to get them to eventually sleep through the night, on their own. The purpose of this analysis is to explore how the CIO method was constructed as authoritative knowledge to become a normative...

One specific area of communication that has the potential to elicit a wide range of outcomes, such as enhancing a couple's feelings of intimacy, offending one or both partners causing conflict, improving the communication climate within the relationship, or embarrassing the partners involved, is the discussion of sex. The current project theorized...

Decades of research have found support for the notion that the attachment style one develops in infancy continues to impact a person's ability to form, develop, and maintain friendships, family relationships, and romantic partnerships throughout the lifespan. Although one's attachment style is not set in stone (i.e., it can potentially change, espe...

To test a recently proposed dual-process theory of supportive communication outcomes, participants (N = 328) assumed they had experienced a mildly or moderately problematic situation. They then evaluated supportive messages varying in person centeredness, purportedly provided by either an acquaintance or a friend. Participants’ perceived support av...

We report tests of hypotheses derived from a theory of supportive communication outcomes that maintains the effects of supportive messages are moderated by factors influencing the motivation and ability to process these messages. Participants in two studies completed a measure of cognitive complexity, which provided an assessment of processing abil...

This article reports tests of hypotheses derived from a theory of supportive message outcomes that maintains that the effects of supportive messages are moderated by factors influencing the motivation and ability to process these messages. Participants (N = 331) completed measures of attachment style, which provided individual-level assessments of...

Women process information about support situations and messages more extensively than men, but little is known about whether these gender differences reflect underlying differences in processing ability, motivation, or both. Two studies examined information processing by men and women in both relatively less serious and more serious situations. Par...

Five studies examined a self-presentation explanation for comparative optimism. Experiments 1 and 2 laid the foundation for such an account by first showing that people associate a favorable identity-image with the conveyance of an optimistic outlook and that people recognize that an individual may be perceived in a negative light if his or her opt...

We propose a comprehensive explanation for gender differences in responses to supportive communication grounded in a dual-process theory of communication outcomes. Two studies confirmed consistent gender differences in responses by US college students to supportive communication and assessed the mediating effects of an ability factor (cognitive com...

Educational listening research in the last 80 years covers a broad spectrum. Early research investigated the amount of time spent listening. Later studies identified students' comprehension of oral material. Aspects most often researched fall into the following categories: listening elicitation, listening benefits, and listening instruction. Becaus...

This dissertation presents the conceptualization, examination, and evaluation of a sexual coaching skill training program. Using Beebe, Mottet, and Roach's (2004) communication skill training model (i.e. telling, showing, inviting, encouraging, correcting), five modules were developed to teach couples how to enhance their sexual coaching knowledge...