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Teaching Level-1 Braille Reading Skills Within A Stimulus Equivalence Paradigm To Children With Progressive Visual Impairments, Karen Ann Toussaint Jan 2009

Teaching Level-1 Braille Reading Skills Within A Stimulus Equivalence Paradigm To Children With Progressive Visual Impairments, Karen Ann Toussaint

LSU Master's Theses

Degenerative visual impairments refer to conditions that result in the progressive loss of vision; several of these conditions have their onset during childhood. Nearly 3% of the school-aged population will experience vision loss that will require specialized support, yet there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate braille-instruction programs. The current study evaluated an instructive procedure for teaching early braille-reading skills with four school-aged children with degenerative visual impairments. Following a series of pretests, braille instruction involved providing a sample braille letter and teaching the selection of the corresponding printed text letter from a comparison array. Concomitant with increases in …


Autonomic Response And Behavioral Performance Of Avid Video Game Players On A Decision-Making Task, Patrick Clinton Lingenfelter Jan 2009

Autonomic Response And Behavioral Performance Of Avid Video Game Players On A Decision-Making Task, Patrick Clinton Lingenfelter

LSU Master's Theses

Avid video gaming is proposed as a term for individuals that play video games for prolonged periods of time. These individuals were predicted to show similar performance on a MineHunter, an analogue to the Iowa Gambling Task, comparable to the performance of pathological gamblers reported in the literature. Comparisons have been made between gamblers and video gamers based on similarities in the interaction level of the activity, as well as similarities in demographics and reported detriments in social and employment areas. The results of the study do not support a comparison. Avid gaming may be a hobby rather than a …


Affective Reactivity Of Speech Disturbances In Schizotypy, Kyle Stuart Minor Jan 2009

Affective Reactivity Of Speech Disturbances In Schizotypy, Kyle Stuart Minor

LSU Master's Theses

Speech disturbances (SD) are a stable, pernicious symptom of schizophrenia that increase when negative emotion and/or arousal are elicited. While considerable research has examined SD in patients with schizophrenia, much less is known about individuals at risk for the disorder, who demonstrate schizophrenia-like, or schizotypic, traits. The present study examined SD and speech reactivity to stress, termed affective reactivity (AR), produced during a laboratory procedure in separate groups of controls and individuals with psychometrically identified schizotypy. This project had two primary aims: 1) to examine SD severity across schizotypy symptoms and 2) to examine how SD varies as a function …


The Efficacy Of Positive Peer Reporting Procedures For Use With Neglected-Status Students In General Education Classrooms, Lisa Libster Jan 2009

The Efficacy Of Positive Peer Reporting Procedures For Use With Neglected-Status Students In General Education Classrooms, Lisa Libster

LSU Master's Theses

Children who are neglected or rejected by their peers may require social skill interventions in order to develop the social competencies needed to establish satisfactory interpersonal relationships. One promising social skill intervention is Positive Peer Reporting, which has been shown to produce increases in positive social interaction and peer acceptance for these groups of children. As most previous investigations were conducted in residential or special education settings, further research is needed to support the use of this intervention in general education settings. Therefore, the present study examined the efficacy of Positive Peer Reporting with two neglected-status children in general education …


Intellectual Ability In Children With Anxiety: A Replication And Exploration Of The Differences, Melissa S. Munson Jan 2009

Intellectual Ability In Children With Anxiety: A Replication And Exploration Of The Differences, Melissa S. Munson

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of anxiety on the intellectual functioning of children. Specifically, the current researchers sought to replicate previous findings that children with higher levels of anxiety have significantly lower scores on tests of intelligence. A second goal was to examine possible reasons for these deficits, including possible deficits in working memory and/or attention. Participants were divided into two groups with high and low anxiety, based on a self-report measure, though none of the children reported clinically problematic anxiety. The participants were 19 children (10 males, 9 females) who were recruited from the …


Comparing Social Skills In Children With Autistic Disorder And Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Mary Elizabeth Shoemaker Jan 2009

Comparing Social Skills In Children With Autistic Disorder And Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Mary Elizabeth Shoemaker

LSU Master's Theses

Although in recent years there has been a large amount of research on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in general, relatively few studies have focused on Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) as a distinct category. As a deficit in social skills is said to be the primary defining feature of ASD, continued research on assessment and treatment of social skills deficits in ASD is warranted. The present study aims to examine the differences in social skills between children diagnosed with Autistic disorder and PDD-NOS using the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills for Youngsters (MESSY). This study extends a previous …


Comorbid Psychopathology In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Intellectual Disabilities, Santino Vincent Lovullo Jan 2009

Comorbid Psychopathology In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Intellectual Disabilities, Santino Vincent Lovullo

LSU Master's Theses

While there has been an abundance of research investigating Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in children, very little emphasis has been placed on ASD in adults, especially in regards to comorbid psychopathology. This is of great concern considering that ASD often co-occurs with intellectual disability (ID), and that both may serve as risk factors for additional psychopathology. While instruments exist that measure comorbid psychopathology in adults with ID, these scales are not targeted to the unique expression of comorbidity in adults with ID and ASD. The Autism Spectrum Disorders-Comorbidity for Adults (ASD-CA) was devised for this reason. This paper begins with …


Supporting Decision Making In A Complex World, Jonathan Tall Jan 2009

Supporting Decision Making In A Complex World, Jonathan Tall

LSU Master's Theses

Recent research has questioned whether explicit thinking is necessary or even useful for complex decision making (Gladwell, 2005; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Newell, Wong, Cheung, & Rakow, in press). The present research approaches this issue by examining how different types of decision support facilitate/hinder performance in a diagnostic medical task. The results from 3 experiments indicate that providing an external memory aid improves performance in complex tasks. Additional support in the form of a coding procedure improved awareness of the magnitude of drug effects, but did not improve detection of negative side effects. The results suggest that while performance is …


Posttraumatic Stress Disorder In Women After Hurricane Katrina: Predictors And Symptom Endorsement, Julia E. Thompson Jan 2009

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder In Women After Hurricane Katrina: Predictors And Symptom Endorsement, Julia E. Thompson

LSU Master's Theses

Hurricane Katrina devastated areas of New Orleans and caused the evacuation of most of the city’s residents. Many people were exposed to dangerous storms and flooding and lost many of their possessions. One of the most common psychological disorders following a disaster is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. This study describes the PTSD symptom endorsement of a sample of women who experienced Hurricane Katrina. In addition, many of these women had previous trauma histories which are also described. Participants included 287 women from New Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge Parish recruited for a larger study on mother’s and children’s psychological functioning …


The Effect Of Stimulus Choice On A Discrimination Task: Pictures Vs. Objects, Kristen Abbondante Jan 2009

The Effect Of Stimulus Choice On A Discrimination Task: Pictures Vs. Objects, Kristen Abbondante

LSU Master's Theses

The effect of the type of stimuli, pictures vs. objects, on discrimination behavior, specifically noun discrimination, was examined with a single-subject multi-element design. A multiple probe across behaviors was used for two participants. The type of stimulus, picture or object, was the alternating treatment. Two autistic children were trained in six noun discrimination tasks utilizing a discrete trial training model counterbalancing the type of stimuli across participants. Generalization of object to pictures and pictures to objects was also examined. Results showed that type of stimuli, picture or object, did not affect treatment. Generalization data was idiosyncratic.


Gender Differences In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Comorbid Psychopathology, Julie Hess Jan 2009

Gender Differences In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Comorbid Psychopathology, Julie Hess

LSU Master's Theses

Abstract Children and adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently exhibit symptoms that are not associated with the core features of ASD. These symptoms may meet criteria for an additional diagnosis; however, accurate assessment of comorbid psychiatric conditions in ASD has been hindered by a lack of measures designed for this specific purpose. The newly constructed assessment measure, Autism Spectrum Disorders-Comorbid for Children (ASD-CC) has been developed specifically for examining comorbid psychiatric disorders in ASD. Therefore, this study set out to assess differences in the endorsement rates of psychiatric symptoms in children and adolescents diagnosed with ASD compared to …


Team Task Interdependence Perceptions: Toward An Integrative Model Of Teamwork, Jared Ledoux Jan 2009

Team Task Interdependence Perceptions: Toward An Integrative Model Of Teamwork, Jared Ledoux

LSU Master's Theses

The present study examines perceptions of task interdependence and workflow at the individual- and team-levels to evaluate the degree to which team perceptions and homogeneity of perceptions predict team communication and performance in a military combat computer simulation. Team members who perceived higher levels of task interdependence and workflow performed better at both the individual and team levels of analysis. These teams also communicated more frequently, although communication was not significantly correlated with performance. The present findings provide support for the examination of task interdependence perceptions as a means to explain team performance and communication.


Factors Affecting The Efficacy Of Feedback Use During Source Monitoring, Stephanie Groft Jan 2009

Factors Affecting The Efficacy Of Feedback Use During Source Monitoring, Stephanie Groft

LSU Master's Theses

The current study considers how individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) affect feedback effectiveness. Participants, selected to have high and low WMC, first watched a video of a crime. Subsequently, a post-test questionnaire was administered concerning events taken from the video and additional information suggested to have occurred in the video. After a 10 minute filler task, participants were given a two-part memory test requiring them to identify the source of the information presented in the test statements. During the training portion of the test, half of the participants received feedback as to the accuracy of their source decisions. …