2025 Theses Doctoral

Cognition in Regulatory Flexibility and Adjustment Following Major Life Events: A Three-Study Multi-Method Investigation

Hart, Roland Peter

This dissertation examines the relationships between cognitive control, regulatory flexibility, and adjustment following major life events across three empirical studies. Study 1 is a novel experiment that probes the impact of a numeric cognitive load on one component of emotion regulation repertoire — expressive flexibility — and compares findings between veteran and non-veteran samples.

Study 2 is a cross sectional design that investigates the associations between context sensitivity, or the ability to detect the presence and relative absence of contextual cues relevant to emotion regulation, and components of working memory as measured by a verbally administered digit-span task.

Study 3 is a longitudinal study that explores cognitive reserve as a predictor of post-stroke depression trajectories among a large sample of older adults. Results from these studies suggest that working memory plays a critical role in emotion regulation flexibility and psychological adjustment. Specifically, limiting working memory diminishes the ability to suppress emotional expression (Study 1), the ability to apply semantic knowledge to content held in working memory is positively associated with context sensitivity (Study 2), and greater pre-stroke working memory is associated with resilience to post-stroke depression (Study 3).