Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Health-Related Quality Of Life Of Patients Following Selected Types Of Lumbar Spinal Surgery: A Pilot Study, Karen L. Saban, Sue M. Penckofer, Ida Androwich, Fred B. Bryant

Psychology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Background

Over 500,000 spinal surgeries are performed annually in the United States. Although pain relief and improved health-related quality of life (HRQOL) are expectations following lumbar spinal surgery, there is limited research regarding this experience from the individual's perspective. In addition, no studies have examined the HRQOL of persons who have had this surgery using a comprehensive approach. The intent of this study was to address this deficiency by an assessment of both the individual and environmental factors that impact perceived HRQOL using the Wilson and Cleary Model for Health-Related Quality of Life in persons who have undergone lumbar spinal …

Adolescent Girls' Perception Of Residential Treatment Centers: A Qualitative Study Of How Treatment Works, Tyler Adam Money

Theses and Dissertations

RTCs play an increasingly significant role in the continuum of treatment of emotionally disturbed adolescents. However, outcome research in this area has lagged behind the growth of treatment centers. More specifically, there has been very little investigation of the relative efficacy of the many different aspects of residential treatment, which are referred to as mechanisms of change in other research. The present study attempts to develop a phenomenological understanding of RTC patients' experience of all of the interventions that make up residential treatment. Results suggest that patients view social support, non-therapist staff members, family involvement and family therapy, as most …

Psychometric Properties And Factor Structure Of The Computerized Ptsd Scale -Multimedia Version Among Adult Samples Reporting Trauma, Shawn Thomas Mason

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the psychometric properties of the Computerized PTSD Scale-Multimedia Version (CPS-M: Richard, Mayo, Bohn, Haynes, & lll Kolman, 1997), a self-administered adaptation of the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS: Blake, Weathers, Nagy, Kaloupek, Klauminzer, Charney, & Keane, 1990). The sample included 161 participants from both a veteran's hospital and from a large urban outpatient HMO system who reported a history of trauma. Indices of internal consistency reliability (i.e., inter-item correlations, item-scale correlations, coefficient alpha) and temporal stability fell in satisfactory ranges. To assess convergent and discriminant validity, correlations were calculated between the CPSM and the following instruments: Purdue PTSD …

The Effectiveness Of Musical Stimuli In Spatial Audio Displays: An Empirical Investigation Of The Effects Of Volume And Spatial Processing Detail, Matthew Crisler

All Theses

Audio displays have potential to convey spatial information to users without taxing their visual resources, but have been shown to annoy some users. Musical stimuli have the potential to reduce user annoyance, but their potential to be localized spatially is untested. These experiments tested how well musical stimuli can be localized at different volumes and when using different spatial processing techniques to manipulate the spatial information.
The two experiments presented participants with brief musical stimuli simulating spatial locations between -40¡ and 40¡ from the saggital plane and asked participants to report the perceived direction of the sound. In Experiment 1, …

Radial Outflow In Teleoperation: A Possible Solution For Improving Depth Perception, Joshua Gomer

All Theses

Practical experience has shown that operators of remote robotic systems have difficulty perceiving aspects of remotely operated robots and their environments (e.g. Casper & Murphy, 2003). Operators often find it difficult, for example, to perceive accurately the distances and sizes of remote objects. Past research has demonstrated that employing a moveable camera that provides the operator optical motion allows for the perception of distance in the absence of other information about depth (Dash, 2004). In this experiment a camera was constrained to move only forward and backward, thus adding monocular radial outflow to the video stream. The ability of remote …

The Role Of Inspiration In Scientific Scholarship And Discovery: Views Of Theistic Scientists, Kari Ann O'Grady

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative research study examined the ways those who identify themselves as theistic scientists and scholars experience inspiration, as defined as divine guidance or influence, in their scientific scholarship and discovery. It also explored participants' beliefs about how scientists and scholars can seek and prepare to receive inspiration in their work. Open-ended surveys of 450 participants from the behavioral and natural sciences and from a variety of religious backgrounds were analyzed for content themes in the areas of experiences with inspiration, preparing to receive inspiration, and further thoughts on inspiration in science. The themes extracted indicated that these scientists and …

Personality Predictors Of Motivation To Lead, Tracey Tafero

All Dissertations

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in understanding the relationship between personality traits and leadership. Recent research suggests that some personality variables are related to leadership. However, research has rarely examined the process by which personality may impact leadership. This study explores the relationship between personality and motivation to lead, a proposed intervening variable between personality and leadership. In addition, this study looks at both broad and narrow measures of personality as predictors of motivation to lead. The current study both replicates and extends the findings of Chan & Drasgow (2001). Results reveal that facet-level personality scales …

Examining The Effects Of Fatigue On Decision-Making In Nursing: A Policy-Capturing Approach, Laura Mcclelland

All Dissertations

Some previous research has focused on better understanding factors that influence nurses' decision-making; however, previous research has not used policy-capturing as a methodology to examine the impact of fatigue on registered nurses' decision-making. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether the fatigue of working a 12-hour day shift influenced a sample of registered nurses' decision-making. Participants consisted of 69 registered nurses working a 12-hour day shift from 7 AM to 7 PM at a large southeastern hospital. The participants completed a general questionnaire and a policy-capturing questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of a 12-hour …

Existing Practice And Proposed Changes In Cognitive Assessment Of Utah Students Identified As Deaf And Hard Hearing, Leah Voorhies

Theses and Dissertations

This study presented the past, current, and proposed practice of intelligence testing with a unique population, students identified as deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH). As a basis for describing the cognitive ability of Utah's D/HH students and to improve practice guidelines, 61 D/HH students served by Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind (USDB) were administered the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) standard battery and the Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI) subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV). Based on these data, composite score distributions were described and compared with national standardization samples. Participants' WISC-IV PRI …

Women's Perceptions Of Parents, Peers, Romantic Partner And God As Predictive Of Symptoms Severity Among Women In Treatment For Eating Disorders At An Inpatient Facility, Samuel B. Tobler

Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined whether perceptions of parents, peers, romantic partners and God were predictive of eating disorder symptom severity among women in treatment for eating disorders. The sample included 417 women (ages 12 to 56 years) at an inpatient treatment facility for eating disorders. Participants completed a battery of assessment measures at intake and discharge. Change scores were also computed on all measures. Measures included indices of eating disorder symptomology, parental relationships, peer relationships, romantic partner relationships, and religious well-being. Multiple regression analysis showed perceptions of peers and romantic partner to be significant predictors in all analyses; however perceptions …

Description Of The Trio/Upward Bound Students' Construction Of Vocations Using George Kelly's Rep Test Method, Maraia Sokia Weingarten

Theses and Dissertations

The Information Age is revolutionizing the way we communicate, acquire knowledge, and perform work. Society is shifting from occupations rooted in industrial production to those associated with knowledge and information, requiring the development of new skills for changing occupations and updating old educational methods. Educators need to be aware of economic and social changes and have a vision for how to design career education to respond to those changes. Individuals must also be prepared to learn on their own as careers evolve and change. The training necessary to adapt to the changing career culture needs to be made available to …

Subadditivity And The Unpacking Effect In Political Opinions, Renan Levine

Renan Levine

To explain subadditivity in judgments of probabilities, support theory (Tversky and Koehler 1994) emphasizes the increased availability of information about component events. This paper demonstrates that similar processes occur in responses to public opinion questions. When a broad description of a policy is “unpacked” into more specific component policies, support for the component policies exceeds support for the original, broad policy. This effect is especially strong when one or more of the unpacked policies make information available to the decision-maker that was not accessible when the broad description was provided. This behavior violates Luce’s (1959) axiom of independence of irrelevant …

Neuroimmunoendocrine Pathology And Cognitive Function In Type 2 Diabetes, Krista Wild

Psychology Dissertations

Cognitive impairment among older adults with type 2 diabetes may worsen health outcomes via negative impact on compliance with medical self-care recommendations. Results of several previous studies indicate that cognitive deficits are present in older European American adults with type 2 diabetes under some conditions, particularly related to glucose dysregulation (as evidenced by high glycated hemoglobin, i.e., HbA1c). Despite the fact African Americans are disproportionately affected by diabetes and suffer significantly greater numbers of complications and more severe complications relative to European Americans, no published studies have examined cognitive functioning among older African American adults with type 2 diabetes. Further, …

Organizational Recruitment Web Sites: The Influence Of Web Site Aesthetics On Initial Affective Reactions To The Site And Subsequent Attraction To The Organization, Rebekkah Wills

All Theses

The present study examined the potential relationship between specific characteristics of organizational recruitment web sites and applicant attraction to the organization. Cober, Brown, Keeping, and Levy (2004) proposed a conceptual model that suggests web site aesthetics influence the applicant's attitude toward the web site which in turn influences applicant attraction. The current study provides a partial test of this model by examining web site aesthetics, prior attitudes toward the organization, initial affective reactions to the web site, perceptions of web site usability and post-viewing attitudes toward the site and the organization. Participants (N = 159) included undergraduate students using the …

An Investigation Of The Relationships Among Work Values, Personality Traits, Job Satisfaction, And Career Satisfaction, Shannon Danielle Salyer

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study, the relationships among work values, personality variables, job satisfaction and career satisfaction were investigated. The specific work values assessed in this research included: achievement, autonomy, challenge, creativity, ecology, family, informality, income, leadership, leisure, geographic locale, excitement, work space aesthetics, social responsibility, security, expertise, integrity, power and teamwork. Personality was assessed broadly by using the Big Five personality variables and narrowly, using more specific constructs of personality. An archival data source was used consisting of a sample of 457 employees from various industries. Several research questions were addressed answered including: How are work values related to broad and …

Type I Diabetes Mellitus In Children And Pre-Adolescents: Affective, Behavioral, And Social Correlates, Meredith P. Schwartzman

Doctoral Dissertations

Type I diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is the most common metabolic disorder among children and adolescents (Wysocki, Greco, & Buckloh, 2003) and research has indicated that children with T1DM are more likely to develop clinical depression and anxiety relative to children without T1DM. Building on this literature, the present study utilized a multi-method assessment strategy of self- and parent-reported depression, anxiety, behavioral regulation (i.e. internalizing and externalizing behaviors), social competence, personality, and family dynamics to identify whether preadolescents with T1DM were distinguishable from children without T1DM, and also whether psychosocial differences were evident in the T1DM group as a function of …

Global Vor Gain Adaptation During Near Fixation To Foveal Targets, Jason A. Williams, Bruce Bridgeman, Tadg Woods, Robert Welch

Psychology and Child Development

Long-term rotational vestibulo-ocular (VOR) adaptation occurs during systematic dysmetria between visual and vestibular afferents, adjusting eye-rotation angular velocity to re-establish retinal stability of the visual field. Due to translational motion of the eyes during head rotation, VOR gain is higher when fixating near objects. The current study measures VOR in humans before and after 6min of exposure to a foveal near-target during sinusoidal whole-body rotation at 0.45 Hz. All of six participants showed post-exposure increases in open-loop VOR gain after fixating near targets, demonstrating a mean modulation increase of open-loop VOR gain from 0.86 before adaptation to 1.2 after adaptation. …

Correlation Between Boldness And Body Mass In Natural Populations Of The Poeciliid Brachyrhaphis Episcopi, C. Brown, F. Jones, V. Braithwaite

Sentience Collection

The boldness of individual Brachyrhaphis episcopi, collected from regions of high and low predation, was investigated using two independent assays: (1) the time to emerge from cover and (2) the propensity to leave shoal mates and investigate a novel object. A strong correlation between the two assays was revealed such that fish that emerged from shelter sooner were also more likely to approach a novel object. This is indicative of a boldness personality axis acting across both behavioural contexts. Fish from high-predation areas were bolder than those from low-predation areas and males were bolder than females. A significant correlation between …

Mental Training For Combat Sports, Randy Borum

Randy Borum

No abstract provided.

Impairments In Inhibition Or Cognitive Control In Psychological Disorders, Paula T. Hertel

Psychology Faculty Research

Contributions to this special issue of Applied & Preventive Psychology richly elucidate connections between a variety of psychological disorders and performance in a number of tasks that are used to reason about inhibitory deficits. This commentary calls attention to the different uses of the concept of inhibition - vernacular, neural, operational, and theoretical - and suggests that the term cognitive control avoids claims about dampened memory representations that are difficult to support. Central findings from the reviews are summarized; evidence concerning suppression-induced forgetting is featured and directions to foster application are discussed.

Témoigner : Les Voies De La Connaissance, Catalina Sagarra

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The author analyzes the narrations of Survivors of the genocide of the Tutsi, in 1994. A particular attention is paid to how the witnesses express two affects : guilt and responsibility. Their life stories explore these concepts which help them to carry out a search for Truth, which is deeply linked with the sufferings the horror of the past inflicted to them to the point of being haunted by the past. The Survivors ask themselves an array of questions, not always finding a satisfying answer which could bring them some peace. They address their questioning to different agents, telling them …

Efficacy Of Cognitive Therapy And Pharmacotherapy In Depression: A Meta-Analysis, Daniel B. Michel

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

A meta-analysis comparing the long-term effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy in preventing relapse following treatment discontinuation was performed using published studies of depressed participants. Twenty-three articles met inclusionary criteria and were included in the analyses. Weighted effect sizes and moderators, treatment type, were calculated using statistical analysis software. Initially, fixed effects models were applied to the data, but due to significant between-group heterogeneity that could not be fully explained by treatment type, mixed effect models were used to account for the residual heterogeneity. Results indicated that overall, depressed individuals treated to remission with CBT evidence decreased relapse …

Affective Responses Of Overseas Student Teachers, Michael W. Firmin, Ruth L. Firmin, Brenda B. Mackay

Education Faculty Publications

Universities offering teacher education degrees are finding the world to be significantly smaller than did previous generations. Increasingly, American students are completing their required student teaching in foreign contexts. The present research study used rigorous qualitative methods in order to appraise the affective experiences from a sample of 13 students who completed their student teaching overseas. Results showed, affectively, students experienced a bell-shaped curve phenomenon. Particularly, they underwent stages of excitement when entering the teaching experience, followed by significant dysphoria, and then completed their student teaching with a positive emotional set.

Heritable And Experiential Effects On Boldness In A Tropical Poeciliid, Culum Brown, Fiona Burgess, Victoria Braithwaite

Sentience Collection

Consistent differences in human behaviour are often explained with reference to personality traits. Recent evidence suggests that similar traits are widespread across the entire animal kingdom and that they may have substantial fitness consequences. One of the major components of personality is the shyness–boldness continuum. Little is known about the relative contributions of genes and the environment in the development of boldness in wild animal populations. Here, we bred wild-caught fish (Brachyraphis episcopi) collected from regions of highand low-predation pressure, reared their offspring in the laboratory under varying conditions and tested boldness utilising an open-field paradigm. First-generation laboratory-reared fish showed …

Application Of The Transtheoretical Model Of Change To Saving Behaviors Of College Students, Benjamin Franklin Cummings

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Using the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of change (Prochaska & Di Clemente, 1982) as a guide to analyze financial behavior, college students were asked a variety of questions about their financial situations. Recruited from undergraduate classes at Utah State University, 112 students took the online survey. Surprisingly, 44.4% of participants reported being in the Maintenance stage of the TTM, and 71.2% reported contributing at least monthly to some sort of savings or investment account. In terms of Financial Planning Personality Type (Lown, 2007), 46.3% of respondents were Planners and 23.1% were Savers. Though the study displays limitations, it begs further investigation …

The Relationship Between Childhood Bereavement And Adult Mental Health, Alicia Kimball

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Bereavement, due to the loss of family and friends, affects approximately 3.7 million children per year in the United States. These losses can have lasting effects such as changed dynamics within a family, decreased academic performance, and poor physical and mental health that not only inhibit a child's ability to function normally but if not dealt with sufficiently can persist into adulthood.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if individuals who experienced a loss in childhood exhibit more mental health problems in adulthood than those who did not. A survey was administered to 209 college students requesting …

How Relational Views Influence Adolescents’ Subjective Understanding Of Romantic Relationship Interactions, Justin Dean Smith

Masters Theses

The purpose of the current study is to examine the influence of relational views on adolescents' subjective understanding of interactions in the context of their romantic relationships. Relational view is an attachment system construct comprised of three specific measures of attachment: attachment style, rejection sensitivity and self-silencing. To examine the influence of relational views on individual's subjective understanding, we are employing an innovative multimodal methodology: The video-recall system (Welsh & dickson, 2005). This system assesses adolescent participants' subjective understanding of their feelings and behaviors during a video-taped interaction with their romantic partner as well as trained observers' interpretations of the …

An Investigation Of Relationship Characteristics, Exercise And Physical Activity, Couple And Life Satisfaction, Mark W. St. Martin

Dissertations

Exercise has been shown to be positively related to many different variables including sexual satisfaction, mental health, and physical health. These variables, in turn, have been linked to increased life satisfaction and couple satisfaction. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between exercise and couple satisfaction as well as exercise and life satisfaction. A secondary purpose was to replicate previous findings on the relationships between communication, love, sexual satisfaction, self-esteem, and physical health and couple satisfaction.

A total of 229 undergraduate and graduate students from a large Midwestern university in the United States participated in this …

A Study Of Intake And Assessment In Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Christopher J. Richmond

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to compare clients' assessment of two different counseling intake procedures used by clinicians. This study compared a Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) intake intervention with an intake intervention constructed from the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I). The SCID-I is one of the most widely used diagnostic interviews and reflects a "gold standard" in formulating accurate diagnoses. The SFBTintake intervention developed for this study stands in stark contrast to the SCID-I and its primary objective, evaluation of the problem. SFBT is a strength-based model that maintains a positive and future-oriented focus. …

The Effects Of Acute Nicotine Abstinence On Vigilance And Verbal Memory In Non-Diagnosed Smokers, David W. Ayer

Dissertations

Research has shown a differential prevalence of smoking in the schizophrenic population compared to other psychiatric and non-diagnosed populations. The three most commonly investigated reasons for this differential prevalence in schizophrenics are: the self-medication hypothesis, side effects hypothesis, and sociological hypothesis. The self-medication hypothesis which proposes that schizophrenics smoke at a higher rate to ameliorate cognitive deficits is the most substantiated by the research. Of current interest is the possible role of nicotine in improving performance on vigilance and verbal memory, the two areas shown to be most related to impaired social functioning in schizophrenics. It is difficult to make …