Digital Commons Network^™

Fighting Depression At Christmas, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Depression is a hard thing to understand and an even harder thing to explain. But you don’t have to ‘get it’ to help your loved ones this holiday season."

Posting about factors that contribute to depression from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/fighting-depression-at-christmas/

“That Sucks?”: An Evaluation Of The Communication Competence And Enacted Social Support Of Response Messages To Depression Disclosures In College-Aged Students, Daniel Vieth

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Recent communication research on depression has focused on which response messages are most effective in providing emotional comfort to depressed individuals during depression dialogues. This study investigates the impact that a confidant’s initial response to a disclosure has on the disclosing individual, a key moment of dialogue for those with depression. It examines the relationship between the communication competence of responses to depression disclosures and how individuals rate those responses’ enacted social support, hypothesizing that the higher the communication competence of a confidant’s response (where competence reflects the effectiveness of interdependent communication), the more enacted social support the discloser will …

Aggregate Demand And Defensive Spending In The United States From The Second World War To The End Of The Twentieth Century, Sam Martin

Student Writing

No abstract provided.

Depression As Sickness Behavior? A Test Of The Host Defense Hypothesis In A High Pathogen Population, Jonathan Stieglitz, Benjamin C. Trumble, Melissa Emery Thompson, Aaron D. Blackwell, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Sadness is an emotion universally recognized across cultures, suggesting it plays an important functional role in regulating human behavior. Numerous adaptive explanations of persistent sadness interfering with daily functioning (hereafter “depression”) have been proposed, but most do not explain frequent bidirectional associations between depression and greater immune activation. Here we test several predictions of the host defense hypothesis, which posits that depression is part of a broader coordinated evolved response to infection or tissue injury (i.e. “sickness behavior”) that promotes energy conservation and reallocation to facilitate immune activation. In a high pathogen population of lean and relatively egalitarian Bolivian foragerhorticulturalists, …

A Slight Hysterical Tendency, Allison Baker

Masters Theses

Sexuality, sculpture, and sadness as sites of female subversion.

A woman's internalized suffering and sadness is deployed as an act of resistance. Women have a long lineage of historically tragic female figures, particularly authors and artists that disrupt the status quo by relishing and thriving and they wallow in their sorrow. Women's collective and overwhelming sadness is both a singular and unified protest against cultural and social systems of oppression. Sad girls are bad girls.

Immersion, Jennifer M. Tremblay

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The focus of this paper is on a body of work created between 2014 and 2015. This series, titled Immersion, deals with the pollution of a local body of water, Blacks Run, and with my own bodily illnesses that occurred during this time period. Using large-scale cyanotypes, video, and large format photography I explore the attitudes that lead to environmental pollution and reference my own struggle with depression and anxiety.

My work examines traditional gendered views of the landscape and female figure, and the intersections and interactions between these two ‘bodies’. By using my illness as a way to …

Depression And Social Functioning : Examining Two Interpersonal Theories, Caroline B. Smith

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to test the specific predictions of two theories of depression and social functioning. One, the Social Navigation Hypothesis, is an adaptationist approach that predicts that depression functions to increase an individual’s ability to analyze and solve problems in their social system. The individual engages in behaviors such as feedback seeking in order to identify potential problems and develop solutions. In contrast, Interpersonal Theory predicts that depression is related to aversive social behaviors that can lead to rejection. Adult American participants (n=155) were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They completed an online survey …

Depression: My Story, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Depressed people are not lazy. They’re not crazy. They’re not freaks, and they don’t need to be avoided. They are no more nor less broken than any of us, in this sinful world. Depressed people are just… people. Here is my story."

Posting about depression from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/depression-my-story/

Attachment-Focused Integrative Reminiscence With Older African Americans: A Randomized Controlled Intervention Study, Myra Sabir, Suk-Young Kang

Myra Sabir

Mirrors, Manipulation, And Me, Anonymous

SURGE

Yesterday I was sick to my stomach. Literally.

I tossed and turned all night, woke up and felt sick, and spent the first two hours of my day in bed trying to calm down while. I was worrying that I was a bad friend, student, and girlfriend. The hardest part was that I was criticizing myself for having these insecurities. It’s tough to get out of that cycle, but it’s what I need to do. [excerpt]

The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers--many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West--collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has …

Acculturative And Psychosocial Predictors Of Academic-Related Outcomes Among Cambodian American High School Students, Khanh Dinh, Traci L. Weinstein, Su Yeoung Kim, Ivy K. Ho

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This study examined the acculturative and psychosocial predictors of academic-related outcomes among Cambodian American high school students from an urban school district in the State of Massachusetts. Student participants (N = 163) completed an anonymous survey that assessed demographic characteristics, acculturative experiences, intergenerational conflict, depression, and academic-related outcomes. The main results indicated that acculturative and psychosocial variables were significant predictors of academic-related outcomes. Specifically, Cambodian and Anglo/White cultural orientations and depression played significant roles across the four dimensions of academic-related outcomes, including grade point average, educational aspirations, beliefs in the utility of education, and psychological sense of school membership. This …

The Only Day I Ever Heard Mother Lose Her Song, Abby Thomas

Scope

No abstract provided.

It's Worse Than We Think: Why It Matters That We Underestimate Depression, Tess Hubbeling

CMC Senior Theses

This paper will examine specific processes involved within the decision-making process of how to allocate limited health care resources. I will start by discussing how in order to compare and differentiate between health states, we have created ranking systems, based on the health state’s impact on people’s quality of life, which health states need more care, and which can be most effectively treated. We evaluate impact on quality of life by assigning quality weights to years of life lived with that health state, which we call quality-adjusted life years, or QALYs.

Next, I will discuss the problems with assigning quality …

A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Psychoeducational Program In Postpartum Support Groups, Marina Pesserl

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Postpartum Depression (PPD) affects 15% of women after childbirth. Its etiology includes psychoneuroimmunologic factors with long-lasting postpartum stressors that lead to allostatic overload. Using mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for PPD has not yet been studied. Addressing this literature gap, the potential benefits of including an 8-week MBSR component based on Beck's theory of PPD at support groups were examined in this phenomenological study based on a sample of 10 women and 2 group facilitators. Purposes of the study included describing the experience of PPD and the MBSR program, identifying the stage of behavioral change of the participants, and describing the …

Internet Use And Depression: The Roles Of Emotional Support And Online Support Groups, Aowen Zhu

All ETDs from UAB

This paper explores the mediating mechanisms between internet use and depression among African Americans and Caribbean Blacks. The hypotheses are that emotional support and online support groups (OSGs) mediate the association between internet use and depression. Data come from the National Survey of American Life conducted between 2001 and 2003 that includes a nationally representative sample of African Americans and Black respondents of Caribbean descent (N=4771). Depression is measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale with 12 questions. Internet use is measured as frequency of use. Emotional support is measured by a scale of 3 questions. OSGs are measured …