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Use Of The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Moca) In A Rural Outreach Program For Military Veterans, Michelle M. Hilgeman, Eugenia M. Boozer, A. Lynn Snow, Rebecca S. Allen, Lori L. Davis

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a free, easily accessible screener ideal for rural areas where resources are limited. We examined administration and scoring by Veteran Community Outreach Health Workers (VCOHWs); compared positive screening rates using two cutoff scores; and examined predictors of education-adjusted scores in N = 168 rural military Veterans from the Alabama Veteran Rural Health Initiative. Accuracy of administration (95 percent) and scoring (68 percent) was calculated and recommendations are offered. Higher than expected rates of positive screens were observed (40 percent using 24/30 cutoff) in this relatively young (M = 55 years) community-dwelling sample. Age, education, …

Full Issue, Mississippi Counseling Association

Journal of Counseling Research and Practice

Volume 5, Issue 1 (2019)

Effect Of D-Cycloserine On Fear Extinction Training In Adults With Social Anxiety Disorder, Stefan G. Hofmann, Santiago Papini, Joseph K. Carpenter, Michael W. Otto, David Rosenfield, Christina D. Dutcher, Sheila Dowd, Mara Lewis, Sara Witcraft, Mark H. Pollack, Jasper A.J. Smits

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2019 Hofmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Preclinical and clinical data have shown that D-cycloserine (DCS), a partial agonist at the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor complex, augments the retention of fear extinction in animals and the therapeutic learning from exposure therapy in humans. However, studies with nonclinical human samples in de novo fear conditioning paradigms have demonstrated minimal to no benefit of DCS. The aim of this study was to …

Patterns Of Treatment For Psychiatric Disorders Among Children And Adolescents In Mississippi Medicaid, John Young, Sujith Ramachandran, Andrew J. Freeman, John P. Bentley, Benjamin F. Banahan

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2019 Young et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The nature of services for psychiatric disorders in public health systems has been understudied, particularly with regard to frequency, duration, and costs. The current study examines patterns of service reception and costs among Medicaid-covered youth newly diagnosed with anxiety, depression, or behavioral disturbance in a large data set of provider billing claims submitted between 2015–2016. Eligibility criteria included: 1) identification of …

Too Much Model, Too Little Data: How A Maximum-Likelihood Fit Of A Psychometric Function May Fail, And How To Detect And Avoid This, Nicolaas Prins

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2019, The Psychonomic Society, Inc. Maximum-likelihood estimation of the parameters of a psychometric function typically occurs through an iterative search for the maximum value in the likelihood function defined across the parameter space. This procedure is subject to failure. First, iterative search procedures may converge on a local, not global, maximum in the likelihood function. The procedure also fails when the likelihood function does not contain a maximum. This is the case when either a step function or a constant function is associated with a higher likelihood than the model can attain with finite parameter values. In such cases …

The Effects Of Social Influence On Time Perception, Phoebe Lavin

Honors Theses

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the time estimate given by a participant is influenced by information they received from a partner. Participants were shown a video followed by several questions including a time estimate about how long a robber in the video was in a museum. Participants also saw answers given by their partners. Participants either saw an overestimate or underestimate given by their partner, or they received no feedback in a control condition. Following a short distraction activity, participants answered the questions again on their own. Results indicated that there was no significant effect …

The Stigmatization Of Concealable And Apparent Intellectual Disabilities, Claire Lundy

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the presence of stigma when responding to people with apparent, visible, intellectual disabilities as compared to individuals with concealable, invisible, intellectual disabilities. Additionally, we aimed to discover if people with higher psychological flexibility would show less bias or stigma towards individuals with unconcealable intellectual disabilities. This study presented 63 participants with four self-report surveys: the Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons survey (ATDP), the Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI), Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSD), and a demographic survey. Vignettes were added to the self-report survey to give participants further exposure to individuals with disabilities. …

The Effects Of Story Creation On Recall Performance, Amelia G. Dewitt

Honors Theses

Prior experiments (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, Thompson, 2008) have demonstrated that considering information with respect to one’s survival improves recall performance relative to other well-known deep processing tasks. In the present experiment, we sought to determine whether creating stories might lead to similarly high levels of recall performance. To determine this, participants were assigned to either a survival, pleasantness, or story creation condition and were asked to consider 20 common nouns with respect to one of those three sets of instructions. After performing one of these tasks, participants were asked to complete a brief distractor task followed by a free recall …

Sarcasm Understanding Across The Lifespan, Kristen Barnett

Honors Theses

Research has identified a developmental progression of sarcasm understanding, stating that children get better at understanding sarcasm as they get older, though adults are still not perfect at reliably detecting sarcasm. This may be related to the cues present (e.g., story context, verbal cues, and facial expressions). Research has primarily focused on verbal cues, specifically exaggerated or “dripping” intonation, in child and adult populations. The literature is lacking in the realm of facial expressions and child populations. This study aimed to add to the literature concerning facial expressions as well as to evaluate sarcasm understanding with more than one cue …

Internalizing Disorders Among Mississippi Public School Students And The Need For Intervention, Madison Varner

Honors Theses

Childhood anxiety disorders traditionally do not garner much attention in academic settings. However, many studies have concluded that approximately 1 in 8 children has an anxiety disorder by age 12, often beginning at earlier ages but going undiagnosed. Further, studies have shown that these disorders strongly affect both behavior (e.g. bullying, school attendance, and social performance) and academic performance (e.g. literacy, mathematical learning). Under several existing pieces of legislature, public schools should already be providing treatment for these disorders; however, due to financial costs and the silent nature of these internalizing disorders, few schools have any provisions for the numerous …

Disaster Exposure And Mental Health Among Puerto Rican Youths After Hurricane Maria, Rosaura Orengo-Aguayo, Regan W. Stewart, Michael A. De Arellano, Joy Lynn Suárez-Kindy, John Young

Faculty and Student Publications

Importance: Quantifying the magnitude of disaster exposure and trauma-related symptoms among youths is critical for deployment of psychological services in underresourced settings. Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, resulting in massive destruction and unprecedented mortality. Objective: To determine the magnitude of disaster exposure and mental health outcomes among Puerto Rican youths after Hurricane Maria. Design, Setting, and Participants: Survey study in which a school-based survey was administered to each public school student at all schools in Puerto Rico between February 1 and June 29, 2018 (5-9 months after Hurricane Maria). Of the 226 808 students …

Regulation During The Second Year: Executive Function And Emotion Regulation Links To Joint Attention, Temperament, And Social Vulnerability In A Latin American Sample, Lucas G. Gago Galvagno, María C. De Grandis, Gonzalo D. Clerici, Alba E. Mustaca, Stephanie E. Miller, Angel M. Elgier

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2019 Gago Galvagno, De Grandis, Clerici, Mustaca, Miller and Elgier. Although a growing body of work has established developing regulatory abilities during the second year of life, more work is needed to better understand factors that influence this emerging control. The purpose of the present study was to examine regulation capacities in executive functions (i.e., EF or cognitive control) and emotion regulation (i.e., ER or control focused on modulating negative and sustaining positive emotions) in a Latin American sample, with a focus on how joint attention, social vulnerability, and temperament contribute to performance. Sixty Latin American dyads of mothers …

The Influence Of Recall Instructions On The Verbal Overshadowing Effect, Melissa Ann Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study investigated the influence of recall instructions on the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). Participants watched a video of a burglar breaking and entering, were asked to recall information about the burglar, and attempted to identify the burglar from a photo lineup. Recall instructions were varied between participants. In Experiment 1, participants in a ‘general recall’ instruction condition were instructed to provide a description of the burglar’s physical appearance. Participants in a ‘face recall’ instruction condition were asked to provide a description of the burglar’s facial features. A control group of participants, the ‘no recall’ instruction condition, were not …

Allodynia And Self-Efficacy In Migraineurs, Ashley N. Polk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Headache disorders are among the most comdisorders of the nervous system, with migraine alone affecting 14% of women and 6% of men worldwide each year. Headache-related self-efficacy, or one’s confidence in preventing and managing headache, is particularly important for prevention and management of headache disorders and predicts response to behavioral and pharmacological treatments. Allodynia, the perception of non-noxious stimuli as painful due to central sensitization, compounds headache-related disability and compromises efficacy of triptans. Therefore, migraineurs with allodynia may perceive headache treatments as less efficacious and thus have reduced perceived headache-related self-efficacy. However, no literature to date has explored the relationship …

Validating Military Culture: The Factor Analysis Of A Military-Related Adaptation Of Acculturation, Mathew A. Tkachuck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of acculturation has a long history, and measures of the construct attempt to assess the degree to which attitudes and behaviors reflect the interaction between different cultures. Berry’s acculturation framework (1997) is arguably the most empirically-supported and well-known model of acculturation. Berry’s model posits that an individual may have difficulty appropriately adapting to a culture different than his or her own depending on how much they are oriented to either culture. Moreover, Searle and Ward (1990) hypothesized that an individual’s acculturation orientation, in addition to how different the dominant and non-dominant cultures are from one another, impacts psychological …

Going To Bat: Assessing Disgust Sensitivity And Related Factors In Behavioral Avoidance, Molly E. Wickenhauser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study used archival data (N = 194) consisting of responses from a battery of questionnaires and data from eight behavioral avoidance tasks (BATs). Correlational analyses demonstrated that disgust sensitivity, anxiety sensitivity, state disgust and anxiety ratings during BATs, and behavioral avoidance on BATs were significantly correlated. Higher disgust sensitivity and behavioral avoidance was also associated with being female. Unexpectedly, emotion dysregulation was not correlated with disgust sensitivity or behavioral avoidance. Next, a series of hierarchical multiple linear regressions indicated that the contamination disgust domain appeared to be the strongest predictor of behavioral avoidance on core- and contamination-related BATs, …

Weight Teasing Among Obese Youth: Social Functioning Outcomes Following A Pediatric Weight Management Intervention, Joseph Mitchell Magness

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of excess weight and obesity among children and adolescents in the United States continues to increase. Aside from the different effects weight has on a person’s physical and psychological well-being, obese youth often experience poorer social functioning than normal weight peers. Weight teasing is among those highlighted social difficulties. Pediatric weight management program interventions have been shown to improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL) across domains for obese youth. However, few studies have examined the impact of weight management interventions on social quality of life for those with a history of weight teasing. The present study aimed to …

Factors Related To Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: Understanding The Contribution Of Disgust, Contamination Fear And Emotion Regulation, Alexandra Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study included 149 students from the University of Mississippi as apart of an archival dataset from a larger lab study. Results from the primary analyses indicate that all variables of interest (i.e. contamination fear, disgust sensitivity, and emotion regulation) were significantly correlated with OC symptoms. However, despite disgust’s associations with OC symptoms, results from regression analysis suggest that neither general disgust nor individual domains of disgust were predictive of contamination-based OC symptoms above and beyond contamination fear. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis emphasize the prominent role that contamination fear has on contamination-based OC symptoms. Further, sex differences …

Reward And Punishment: The Neural Correlates Of Reinforcement Feedback During Motor Learning, Christopher Mark Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

‘By the carrot or the stick’ reward or punishment has been contemplated by instructors to motivate their pupils to learn a new motor skill. The reinforcements of reward and punishment have demonstrated dissociable effects on motor learning with punishment enhancing the learning rate and reward increasing retention of the motor task. However it is still unclear how the brain processes reward and punishment during motor learning. This study sought to investigate the role of reinforcement feedback in cortical neural activity associated with motor learning. A novel visuomotor rotation task was employed with reward punishment or null feedback as the participants …

Moral Agency: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Its Scientific Foundations, Makensey Sanders

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a longstanding discussion of what the criteria are to distinguish science from non-science. In section one of this paper, I will focus on four demarcating criteria of a scientific theory: (1) value neutrality; (2) verifiability; (3) falsifiability; and (4) reproducibility. Keeping these criteria in mind, I will turn to the notion of moral agency (focusing on psychopathy, autism, and personal identity) and the question of whether the current way we conceptualize and research it can be deemed as scientific according to the four criteria.

In section two, I will discuss the role psychopathy and autism play in understanding …

Teaching Kids To Say "Ew!": Parent-Child Disgust Transmission, Brooklee Lightsey Tynes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Disgust is one of the six basic emotions but research suggests it is far more complex. As individuals respond to stimuli in different manners this suggests the emotion and its development may be shaped through learning principles and cultural practices (Rozin Lowery & Ebert 1994). It is imperative to understand how children’s disgust responses are shaped though observation classical and operant conditioning demonstrated by their primary caregivers. The current study examined the transmission of the emotion of disgust from primary caregivers to their children. Participants were 17 children (55.6% female) and one of their parents in Mississippi and Nebraska. The …

An Exploration Of Relationships Between Parenting Stress And Primary Headache Disorders, Yelena Louise Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stress is the most commonly reported trigger for headache and stress affects headache both directly through resulting physiological changes and indirectly through its effects on lifestyle and coping behaviors. However one form of stress that has been neglected within headache is parenting. Parenting stress is defined as the imbalance between parents’ perceptions of available resources and their perceived demands of parenthood. Many variables have been established as predictors of parenting stress (e.g. demographic variables child behavior maternal depression) though fewer studies have examined its effects on health. Given that headache and parenthood share similar demographic distributions and risk factors exploration …

Meaning, Purpose, And Experiential Avoidance As Predictors Of Valued Behavior: An Application Of Ecological Momentary Assessment, Jeffrey Pavlacic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Values-based interventions in therapeutic settings direct behavior with avoidance and escape functions towards valued domains that are intrinsically reinforcing. This “progression” towards valued domains fluctuates on a daily basis, predicting less psychological stress. Contemporary conceptualizations of meaning in life delineate two primary domains: purpose (goal achievement), and significance or presence of meaning (the extent to which a person perceives themselves as “mattering”). These domains have not been simultaneously and systematically investigated in college students, a population at risk for developing maladaptive coping strategies and negative affect attributed to adjustment-related issues (e.g., binge drinking, depression, increased risk for suicidal ideation). College …

Empirical Support For Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (Mtfc): A Critical Review, Jennifer Marie Ladner-Graham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC), initially intended as a treatment for chronic juvenile offenders (adolescents having multiple contacts with the juvenile justice system), was designed as an alternative to placement within group facilities. MTFC allows the adolescent to remain in the community while receiving individual and family-based interventions. These interventions are dedicated to decreasing risk factors associated with offending (e.g., poor parental supervision, association with delinquent peers, poor academic performance) and increasing protective factors (e.g., effective parenting practices, healthy relationships with supportive peers, increased school involvement). MTFC has been utilized to meet the needs of a variety of populations (e.g., …

Doing Hard Things In The Context Of Values: Values Intervention As An Establishing Operation For Approach Behavior In The Presence Of Aversive Stimuli, Emmie Hebert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aversive control is an umbrella term for behavioral contingencies influenced by the removal or avoidance of aversive stimuli. When individuals are engaging in behavior that is under aversive control the behavior becomes relatively insensitive to changes in the environment outside of trying to escape or avoid the aversive stimulation. Teaching individuals to increase behavioral and psychological flexibility around potentially aversive stimuli is a goal of a therapeutic perspective called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT therapists and trainers use values to motivate their clients to engage in meaningful behaviors despite ever-changing and often aversive contexts. The aim of the current …

Gender Roles, Sexual Assertiveness, And Sexual Coercion In Lgbtq Individuals, Lavina Ying Ho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sexual violence is a prominent community issue particularly within the LGBTQ+ community. The present study examined the relationships among gender roles sexual assertiveness and sexual victimization as well as sexual perpetration in a LGBTQ+ population. For most severe form of sexual violence victimization in the past year 17.6% reported having been raped. Moderated logistic regression analyses found that both gender roles and sexual assertiveness independently predicted severity of sexual victimization and perpetration. No interactions were found to predict either sexual victimization or sexual perpetration. Specifically the femininity gender role and lower levels of sexual assertiveness predicted greater likelihood for victim …

Youth Screening Protocol For General Psychopathology, Steven Bishop

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a high prevalence rate of psychopathology among US youth, with at least one in four youth meeting clinical criteria for a mental health condition. Those youths who experience psychopathology tend to demonstrate greater functional impairments and have more adverse outcomes compared to youth who do not have these frequently occurring conditions. It is unfortunate that many of these conditions, along with their deleterious effects, are poorly identified in pediatric settings despite the availability of screening instruments. Most screening instruments, however, assess for domain-specific areas of psychopathology only, and can require substantial time to administer and interpret within the …

Behavioral Similarities And Differences Among Symptoms Of Emetophobia, Disordered Eating, And Disgust, Jennifer Arden Petell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emetophobia, also known as the specific phobia of vomiting (SPOV), is a clinical disorder with severe symptomatology and chronicity. However, there remains a significant lack of knowledge in overall conceptualization and etiological understanding. Recent literature has described this disorder within the context of abnormal eating disorders, despite the essential difference in symptom function between SPOV and disordered eating (Keyes & Veale, 2018; Volpe et al., 2015). Therefore, the present study sought to further the conceptualization and delineation of symptoms of emetophobia and disordered eating, as well as their potential relation with disgust. More specifically, it was hypothesized that symptoms of …

A Brief Acceptance And Commitment Therapy Based Intervention For Distressed Graduate Students, Emily Hannah Katt Jacobson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Graduate students report to experience distress at high rates. Research suggests that self-care behaviors such as sleep exercise and mindfulness practice can helpful for mental health and wellbeing. The current study examined the effectiveness of a brief Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) based intervention on increasing self-care behaviors in distressed graduate students at the University of Mississippi (N=7). The intervention was delivered in three 60-minute individual sessions. The effects of the intervention were examined using a concurrent multiple baseline across participants design. Results indicated that five out of seven participants shoincreases in self-reported self-care behaviors after the start of the …

On The Relationship Between Resilience, Meaning, And Hardiness: A Bi-Factor Exploratory And Confirmatory Analysis, Lauren Weathers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Meaning in life, resilience, and hardiness have been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Some researchers theorize that these constructs share significant overlap. The goal of the current study was to examine how much overlap exists between these concepts. Three thousand and ten participants from a university in the Midwest and a university in the South completed measures of meaning in life, resilience, and hardiness. It was hypothesized that some items from these measures would create a unidimensional model while some items would create multidimensionality. Hypotheses that incorporated both models were important as there is disagreement within the literature with …