Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Sexuality Education, Eva Goldfarb, Norman A. Constantine

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Sexuality education comprises the lifelong intentional processes by which people learn about themselves and others as sexual, gendered beings from biological, psychological, and sociocultural perspectives. It takes place through a potentially wide range of programs and activities in schools, community settings, religious centers, as well as informally within families, among peers, and through electronic and other media. Sexuality education for adolescents occurs in the context of the biological, cognitive, and social-emotional developmental progressions and issues of adolescence. Formal sexuality education falls into two main categories: behavior change approaches, which are represented by abstinence-only and abstinence-plus models, and healthy sexual development …

Autism In Kenya: A Social, Educational And Political Perspective, Ariana Riccio

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Autism is a widely misunderstood developmental disability that is generally diagnosed in early childhood and has been the recent subject of much media and medical attention in developed nations worldwide. While there has been a noted improvement in diagnostic and therapeutic options for children and their families in developing nations, the attention placed on disability, particularly on autism, is considered underdeveloped and inadequate. This paper will attempt to address the current framework surrounding autism in the area of Nairobi, Kenya and discuss the social attitudes, diagnostic practices, educational opportunities, and government intervention programs available in the area. Given the lack …

The Referral Process: Rural Primary Care Physicians' Perspectives On Providing Counseling Referrals, Casey N. Tallent

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The advantages to collaborative care between physicians and mental health care providers have been known for many decades. Rural primary care physicians (RPCPs) are the first professionals that most patients contact when they have a mental health concern, particularly in rural communities. It is therefore important to understand the process that occurs when a referral for counseling is made from a RPCP and the subsequent collaboration that occurs. The purpose of this qualitative study was to generate a model that provides a better understanding of the counseling referral process from the perspective of RPCPs in private practice in the Midwest. …

Healing South Africa: The Institute For Healing Of Memories As A Lens For Post-Conflict Trauma Initiatives, Rachael C. Ward

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper investigates how South Africa is attempting to deal with its violent past and present, by way of helping individuals cope with trauma. The Institute for Healing of Memories was examined through a case study and the Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture was also researched. I inquired first, what is most successful about these organizations’ work, and second, whether these successful approaches could be exported to help a larger percentage of traumatized people in South Africa. My research found that the entire Healing of Memory workshop methodology is successful and would need to be exported as …

Lifeskills Training Wellness Program: An Application For Young Adults In Supermarkets, Christopher Williams, Jessica Samuolis, Kenneth W. Griffin, Gilbert J. Botvin

Psychology Faculty Publications

To address the need for workplace substance use prevention programming, National Health Promotion Associates (NHPA) developed the LifeSkills Training Wellness Program (LST-WP) with funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) Young Adults in the Workplace (YIW) grant program. LST-WP adapts and extends the highly effective, school-based LifeSkills Training (LST) model program (Botvin, 1998; Botvin et al., 1995) and provides comprehensive skills training for adolescent and young adult employees in communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, drug resistance, and related life skills. Overall, the program is designed to be highly flexible to meet employee and manager needs across different …

Stretching The Paradigm: Crisis As A Problem In Mental Health Research, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Crisis intervention is an established paradigm of community mental health theory and practice in which the nature and circumstances of crises are assumed to be well understood and the subject of established research findings and theory. Review of existing crisis research literature fails to support such assumptions. There is, in fact, little current evidence available on the nature and circumstances of mental health crises, despite the importance of crisis intervention in contemporary practice. This paper presents descriptive findings of a study of the frequency, duration and severity of mental health crises, based on analysis of more than 500 crisis incidents …

Determinants Of Health Care Use Among Rural, Low-Income Mothers And Children: A Simultaneous Systems Approach To Negative Binomial Regression Modeling, Swetha Valluri

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The determinants of health care use among rural, low-income mothers and their children were assessed using a multi-state, longitudinal data set, Rural Families Speak. The results indicate that rural mothers’ decisions regarding health care utilization for themselves and for their child can be best modeled using a simultaneous systems approach to negative binomial regression. Mothers’ visits to a health care provider increased with higher self-assessed depression scores, increased number of child’s doctor visits, greater numbers of total children in the household, greater numbers of chronic conditions, need for prenatal or post-partum care, development of a new medical condition, and …

Children's Emotional State And False Memory In The Drm Paradigm, Pamela Cornejo

McNair Poster Presentations

Children are called to give testimony for highly emotional during court cases. Research indicates that children in a negative emotional state recall with lesser vividness (Berliner et al. 2003) and are more likely to incorporate false information (Levine, Burgess & Laney, 2008). The present study will examine this further by examining the influence of negative and positive emotional states on recall and recognition in child-normed lists within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. The DRM paradigm is a cognitive task that relies on gist memory for remembrance of the critical lure in semantically associated word lists. It is expected that the eight …

Measuring A Community-Based Mental Health Organization’S Culture And Climate Scores Stability, David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv Unegv Waya) Phd, Eugene Maguin Phd, Catherine N. Dulmus Phd, Bruce C. Nisbet

Brown School Faculty Publications

This project builds on the work of Glisson et al., (2008) and the knowledge learned from community-based mental health organization’s internal structures (e.g., culture and climate), which possibly impede the implantation and adoption of new technologies. The Organizational Social Context (OSC) Model measurement system is guided by a model of social context that composes both organizational and individual level constructs, including individual and shared perceptions that are believed to mediate the impact of the organization on the individual. Although the OSC has been developed and validated over time, the literature does not provide guidance on test-retest reliability of the scale.

Male Anorexia: In The Modern 2011, Barbara Wallen-Adams

McNair Poster Presentations

It has been reported that homosexuality is a risk factor for males with anorexia. However, it is unclear whether it is a specific risk factor for eating pathology or just a common risk factor associated with psychopathology. If social stigmatization of homosexuality can cause general psychological suffering that express itself as a discomfort with sexual orientation, poor self-esteem, depression, and disordered eating, than homosexuality may act as a general risk factor in itself. It can also be interrelated to certain aspects that distinctively increase the risk for males developing anorexia, such as increased identification with the male gender roles (Munen …

Prenatal Maternal Stress Programs Infant Stress Regulation, Elyssia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Feizal Waffarn, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Objective: Prenatal exposure to inappropriate levels of glucocorticoids (GCs) and maternal stress are putative mechanisms for the fetal programming of later health outcomes. The current investigation examined the influence of prenatal maternal cortisol and maternal psychosocial stress on infant physiological and behavioral responses to stress.

Methods: The study sample comprised 116 women and their full term infants. Maternal plasma cortisol and report of stress, anxiety and depression were assessed at 15, 19, 25, 31 and 36 + weeks' gestational age. Infant cortisol and behavioral responses to the painful stress of a heel-stick blood draw were evaluated at 24 hours after …

Orbitofrontal Cortex Provides Cross-Modal Valuation Of Self-Generated Stimuli, William A. Cunningham, Ingrid J. Haas, Ashley S. Waggoner

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Prior research has shown that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays an important role in the representation of the evaluation of stimuli, regardless of stimulus modality. Based on these findings, researchers have proposed that the OFC serves a common currency function, allowing for the direct comparison of different types of perceptual stimuli (e.g. food, drink, money). The present study was designed to extend this research and investigate whether these same regions of OFC that have been identified in previous research are involved in evaluating imagined stimuli. Specifically, we asked participants to draw on prior attitudinal knowledge to generate internal representations of …