Taylor Bolton Proposes Dissertation

man typing on computer in the dark
Taylor Bolton, a student in her third year of the Counseling Psychology Doctoral Program, successfully proposed her dissertation this week. Taylor’s dissertation, “Assessing the effects of psychopathy, sadism, aggression, and boredom proneness on cyber aggression perpetration in emerging adults: Is moral disengagement to blame?” will test a theoretically derived model in which the effects of dark personality traits, aggressiveness, and boredom proneness on cyber aggression will be examined. Moral disengagement will be included as a predicted mediator of these relationships.

Taylor recently completed her master’s project on cyber aggression and is expanding this work into her dissertation. She is one of the first students in the Anger and Traffic Psychology Lab to focus on electronic aggression, and we are very interested to see what her dissertation research will reveal.

Congratulations to Taylor on the successful dissertation proposal!

Article on Driving Anger and Boredom Proneness Makes AAP's Top 20 Most Cited List

I was just informed by Elsevier that a 2005 article we published in Accident Analysis and Prevention was one of the top 20 most cited articles from this journal published between 2005 and 2010. The citation of the article is:

Dahlen, E. R., Martin, R. C., Ragan, K., & Kuhlman, M. M. (2005). Driving anger, sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and boredom proneness in the prediction of unsafe driving. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 37(2), 341-348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2004.10.006

The study examined the role of impulsivity, sensation seeking, boredom proneness, and driving anger as predictors of aggressive and risky driving in a college student sample. In addition to providing further support for the utility of the Driving Anger Scale (DAS; Deffenbacher et al., 1994) in the assessment of unsafe driving behavior, we found that sensation seeking, boredom proneness, and impulsivity resulted in incremental improvements to the predictive model over and above driving anger. Overall, this helps to strengthen the case for using multiple predictors to understand risky and aggressive driving.

It is great to know that others have found this paper useful in their research.