Multiple SPIDs in sp_who2, Deadlocks and Parallelism
Answering this question:


  Am I correct in saying this is a result of parallelism?


Yes. Activity Monitor and sp_who2 display one row for each thread (execution context) involved. It is unnecessarily verbose and confusing, but Microsoft have not responded to requests to improve Activity Monitor. It is even less likely that the (technically undocumented sp_who2) will be updated.

Adam Machanic's sp_WhoIsActive is a much better alternative.

There is not enough information in the question to address your other points, but it does seem you might be running with an excessive degree of parallelism, possibly the default of zero (= 24 for your configuration).

Setting max degree of parallelism to 8 might be about right. See MAXDOP setting algorithm for SQL Server for detailed advice.

And, as Dan Guzman said:


  Parallel queries in a pure OLTP workload are often due to inattention to query and index tuning detail. In addition to reducing maxdop and cost threshold, view the execution plans for optimization opportunities.