Research

Interests and Publications



Publications

Counseling and Mental Health


McLeroy, A., Chen, Y., & Boxell, O. (2024). Developing an assessment battery to measure police brutality on social media among Black adolescents. International Journal of Social Science Studies, 12(2), 40-57.    


Marquis, A. & Boxell, O. (2022). Understanding schizophrenia: An integral analysis of its etiology and treatment. The Integrative Therapist, 8(3), 5-7.


Boxell, O. & Marquis, A. (2022). An integral analysis of the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia: Integrated pluralism in research and clinical practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 32(4), 453-472.


Boxell, O. (2020). Social context affects mental health stigma. Open Health, 1(1), 29-36.


Guiffrida, D., Boxell, O., Hamell, S., Ponicsan, I., & Akinsete, R. (2018). Supporting Black British university students, part two: Understanding students' experiences with family members. University and College Counselling, 6(4), 4-9. [Download]

 

Guiffrida, D., Boxell, O., Hamell, S., Ponicsan, I., & Akinsete, R. (2018). Supporting Black British university students, part one: Understanding students' experiences with peers and academic staff. University and College Counselling, 6(3), 4-11. [Download]

 

Boxell, O. (2017). On the utility of introducing formal theory to counseling. Philosophical Practice: Journal of the American Philosophical Practitioners' Association, 12(3), 1992-2004. [Download]


General Cognitive Science and Human Development


Boxell, O. & Felser, C. (2017). Sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands in native and non-native sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(3), 494-511.

 

Boxell, O., Felser, C., & Cunnings, I. (2017). Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(5), 554-582.

 

Jessen, A., Festman, J., Boxell, O., & Felser, C. (2017). Native and non-native speakers' brain responses to filled indirect object gaps. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46(5), 1319-1338.

 

Boxell, O. (2016). The place of Universal Grammar in the study of language and mind: A response to Dabrowska (2015). Open Linguistics, 2(1), 352-372. [Download] 

 

Boxell, O. (2014). Lexical fillers permit real-time gap-search in island domains. Journal of Cognitive Science, 15(1), 97-135.

 

Boxell, O. (2014). Processing Filler-Gap Dependencies and Their Constraints During Language Comprehension. Ph.D. thesis, University of Potsdam.

 

Boxell, O. (2012). Discourse-linking and long-distance syntactic dependency formation in real-time. In E. Boone, K. Linke, & M. Schulpen (eds.). Proceedings of ConSOLE, 19, 151-175.

 

Radford, A., Felser, C., & Boxell, O. (2012). Preposition copying and pruning in present day English. English Language and Linguistics, 16(3), 403-426.

Interests

Human beings are capable of advanced thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behaviors unlike that seen in any other species. This may seem like an obvious statement, but if one breaks down the mind into its constituent parts, it becomes clear that intricate algorithmic rule-based systems and real-time processing resources piece together human experience as a whole. Oliver is interested in how the systems of the human brain work, how they generate the abstract information "deep structures" of the mind, how and why psychopathology emerges from these systems, and how such insights allow us to integrate and augment psychometric instruments and counseling interventions.


A separate strand of Oliver's interests concerns how the presence of mental health conditions impact people's lives at the social level, and how awareness of these factors can provide an empirical basis for advocacy efforts.


Oliver's primary research interest areas include the following:


  • formal models of the brain, the abstract “deep structures” it computes as compiled electromagnetic oscillations, and how these account for human development and change processes generally and in psychopathology and counseling interventions;


  • development of integrative principles and augmentative counseling interventions and psychometric instruments using the principles by which neuropsychological "deep structures" are computed;


  • deep structural analyses of existential and socio-cultural constructs and their impact on counseling;


  • the use of the deep structural paradigm to enable the use of new technology in diagnosis and intervention (e.g., computerized reaction-time measures, eye-tracking, electroencephalography, neuroimaging, and invasive and non-invasive neuromodulation approaches) and the use of the deep structural paradigm in the development of neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence.


See Statements page for a full description of the current research program.