Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Structure Of Consciousness, Lowell Keith Friesen

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the nature and structure of consciousness. Conscious experience is often said to be phenomenally unified, and subjects of consciousness are often self-conscious. I ask whether these features necessarily accompany conscious experience. Is it necessarily the case, for instance, that all of a conscious subject's experiences at a time are phenomenally unified? And is it necessarily the case that subjects of consciousness are self-conscious whenever they are conscious? I argue that the answer to the former is affirmative and the latter negative.

In the first chapter, I set the stage by distinguishing phenomenal unity from other …

Parent Training For Families Of Hyperactive Preschool-Aged Children, Sharonne D. Herbert

Open Access Dissertations

Objective:The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a parenting program designed specifically for hyperactive preschoolers. Method: Participants were 31 preschool-aged children whose parents were randomly assigned to a treatment or waitlist group. Parents who were assigned to the treatment group took part in a 14-week parenting program that involved teaching parenting strategies to manage hyperactive and disruptive behavior as well as emotion socialization strategies to increase children's emotion regulation. Results: The present study's findings were mixed. There were significant changes on a number of measures of child functioning and parent behavior for families who took part in …

Visiting Or Here To Stay? How Framing Multiculturalism In Different Ways Changes Attitudes And Inclusion Of Ethnic Minorities In The United States, Melissa Ann Mcmanus Scircle

Open Access Dissertations

Three experiments explored the way in which different framings of multiculturalism influence White American perceivers’ attitudes towards ethnic minorities and inclusion of them in the national group. Results showed that while participants always preferred Whites to ethnic minorities, the difference in liking was largest when multiculturalism was described as permanent and Whites were present (vs. absent) in that description. In contrast, differences in liking did not vary by the role of Whites when multiculturalism was described as temporary (Studies 1 and 2). Second, Whites were always seen as more American than ethnic minorities, but particularly when Whites were present (vs. …

Modeling The Influence Of Childhood Trauma On Rate Of Symptom Change Among Psychiatric Inpatients, Alessandro T. Piselli

Open Access Dissertations

Clinical wisdom suggests that adults with histories of childhood trauma will have difficulty engaging in psychotherapy. I examined the relationship between early childhood trauma and treatment response in the form of rate of symptom decline among a group of 202 adults recruited into the longitudinal Austen Riggs Center Follow-Along Study. Participants were recruited at admission to the hospital and provided extensive demographic and clinical data at baseline, including retrospective recall of childhood traumatic experiences using the Traumatic Antecedents Interview (TAI) and narrative responses to the Relationship Anecdote Paradigm (RAP) used to generate ratings on the Social Cognition and Object Relations …

New Insights Into Corruption: Paradoxical Effects Of Approach-Orientation For Powerholders, Mindi Sara Rock

Open Access Dissertations

Does power lead to corruption (Kipnis, 1972), and if so, why? Here, a novel mechanism is proposed for understanding the complex relationship between power and corruption by incorporating recent work on morality (Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009). By bridging the power, self-regulation, and morality literatures we proposed that powerful individuals, because of their approach tendencies, are oriented more towards moral prescriptions or “shoulds” and thus focus more on moral acts and moral intentions while minimizing the importance of moral proscriptions (neglect pathway). We proposed an alternative path to corruption for powerholders via moral self-regard. Powerholders, because of their …

Sac Attack: Assessing The Role Of Recollection In The Mirror Effect, Angela M. Pazzaglia

Open Access Dissertations

Low-frequency (LF) words have higher hit rates (HRs) and lower false alarm rates (FARs) than high-frequency (HF) words in recognition memory, a phenomenon termed the mirror effect by Glanzer and Adams (1985). The primary mechanism for producing the mirror effect varies substantially across models of recognition memory, with some models localizing the effects during encoding and others during retrieval. The current experiments contrast two retrieval-stage models, the Source of Activation Confusion (SAC; Reder, Nhouyvanisvong, Schunn, Ayers, Angstadt, & Hiraki, 2000) model and the unequal variance signal detection theory (UVSDT) criterion shift model (e.g., DeCarlo, 2002). The SAC model proposes that …

Newlywed Couples' Marital Satisfaction And Patterns Of Cortisol Reactivity And Recovery As A Response To Differential Marital Power, Mattitiyahu Scott Zimbler

Open Access Dissertations

This study investigated the extent to which gender moderates, and perceptions of fairness mediate, the link between marital power and overall marital satisfaction, as well as cortisol stress trajectories in response to marital distress. Study 1 examined a sample of 213 opposite sex newlywed couples from western Massachusetts, and focused on marital satisfaction as the dependent variable. Findings from the structural equation analysis suggested that perceptions of relationship fairness concerning the division of labor completely mediated the association between marital power and marital satisfaction for wives, but not for husbands. These results also implied an association between wives' perceptions of …

The Devil's In The Details: Abstract Vs. Concrete Construals Of Multiculturalism Have Differential Effects On Attitudes And Behavioral Intentions Toward Ethnic Minority Groups, Kumar Yogeeswaran

Open Access Dissertations

The current research integrates social cognitive theories of psychological construals and information processing with theories of social identity to identify the conditions under which multiculturalism helps versus hinders positive intergroup relations. Three experiments investigated how abstract vs. concrete construals of multiculturalism impact majority group members' attitudes and behavioral intentions toward ethnic minorities in the US. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that construing multiculturalism in abstract terms by highlighting its broad goals reduced majority group members' prejudice toward ethnic minorities by decreasing the extent to which diversity is seen as threatening the national group. However, construing multiculturalism in concrete terms by …

Sleep Disturbances In Alzheimer's Disease And Caregiver Mood: A Diary Study, Anna Maria Katarina Akerstedt

Open Access Dissertations

Sleep disturbances are common in persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Hart et al., 2003) and pose a great strain on their family caregivers (Hope, Keene, Gedling, Fairburn, & Jacoby, 1998) including their emotional functioning (Schulz & Martire, 2004). The current study is the first to examine the impact of daily sleep and mood in persons with AD on their caregiver's sleep and emotional functioning. The study examined sleep and mood across eight days in 40 family caregivers of persons with AD. It was hypothesized that poor sleep in the person with AD person would have a negative impact on caregiver …

Effect Of Color Overlays On Reading Efficiency, Rhonda Morrison

Open Access Dissertations

Reading is a skill that unlocks the doors of learning and success. It is commonly accepted that reading is a foundational skill that plays a major role in a child's academic success. The history of teaching reading includes many theories about the development of reading, the source of reading difficulties, and interventions for remediation. A large body of research has demonstrated that reading difficulties stem from a phonological basis and interventions that target this area are generally beneficial in helping improving reading skills (National Reading Panel, 2000; Shaywitz, 2003; Stanovich, 1986). However, there are some who even with extensive intervention …

Attention To Television In Preschoolers Who Exhibit Adhd Symptoms: An Erp Investigation, Lindsay B. Demers

Open Access Dissertations

Children with ADHD suffer from low and high order attention deficits. Work by E.P. Lorch and colleagues shows that these attention deficits affect televised narrative comprehension. The purpose of this research was to determine the extent to which the televised narrative comprehension deficits are the result of an inability to inhibit processing of irrelevant information. To achieve this, data were collected from 16 healthy adults and 37 preschool age children who varied in their ADHD symptoms. Participants were instructed to attend to one of two simultaneously presented audio tracks from children's television shows. For all participants the video that matched …

The Interaction Between Endogenous Cortisol And Salivary Alpha-Amylase Predicts Implicit Cognitive Bias In Young Women, Donna Ann Kreher

Open Access Dissertations

Both animal and human studies suggest that cognitive bias toward negative information, such as that observed in major depression, may arise through the interaction of cortisol (CORT) and norepinephrine (NE) within the amygdala. To date, there is no published account of the relationship between endogenous NE and CORT levels and cognitive bias. The present study examined salivary CORT and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), an indirect measure of NE, in relation to masked affective priming of words in young female participants. Women with higher salivary CORT showed increased priming to negative word pairs only when sAA was also high; when sAA was …

Understanding Combat Related Psychological Difficulties In Veterans: The Role Of Context-Based Morality, Ramila Shadina Ali Usoof

Open Access Dissertations

In five multi-method studies this dissertation examined how context based morality may explain increased incidence of combat related psychological difficulties among US service personnel. We were particularly interested in the relationship between causing harm to others and moral self-perceptions and related emotional consequences. In studies 1 and 2 we found that our samples of Iraq and Afghan war veterans reported that a soldier would feel increased levels of guilt and shame and negative moral judgments of the self when they return home and reflect on incidents of harm that may have occurred during their deployments. These two studies were supported …

Mastering One's Destiny: Mastery Goals Promote Feeling Challenged In Identity Threatening Achievement Contexts, Jane Gage Stout

Open Access Dissertations

Three experiments integrated insights from achievement goal theory, social identity threat, and stress and coping research, to develop a theory-based strategy individuals can use to navigate social identity threat in high stakes achievement settings. In all experiments women were asked to adopt a mastery goal (focus on learning and building skills) or a performance goal (perform well; avoid errors) before a mock job interview. In Experiment 1, women expected their interviewer to be either sexist (creating identity threatening situation) or not sexist (a non-threatening situation). Women who focused on mastery rather than performance goals felt more challenged and less threatened …

Binary Rocs And Their Implications For The Measurement Of Memory, Chad Dube

Open Access Dissertations

Bröder and Schütz (2009) have argued that the curvature typically observed in recognition memory receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) is a by-product of the ratings task often used to obtain them. According to those authors, ROCs collected by experimentally manipulating response bias are linear and consistent with the assumptions of threshold and multinomial processing tree (MPT) models. Two experiments are reported which are broadly consistent with previous work by Dube and Rotello (under review) in showing that ROCs are curved and consistent with signal detection theory (SDT) regardless of the procedure used to obtain them. These results have implications for how accuracy …

A Multi-Level Investigation Of Teacher Instructional Practices And The Use Of Responsive Classroom, Benjamin George Solomon

Open Access Dissertations

A year-long longitudinal study was conducted to quantify different types of teaching in the beginning of the year, and the effect of those choices on end of year instructional practices and student outcomes. Teacher practices were organized around the fidelity of implementation to the Responsive Classroom (RC) program (Northeast Foundation for Children, 2009). Most notably, a central RC tenant entitled “the first six weeks” was examined. RC is a universal prevention program that previously has been categorized as a Tier I social-behavioral program for students when considered within an RTI model (Elliott, 1999).

Twenty-seven teachers from the New England region …

The Relationship Between Patient Object Relations And The Therapeutic Alliance In A Naturalistic Psychotherapy Sample, Paula Andrea Errazuriz Arellano

Open Access Dissertations

The quality of the patient-therapist relationship, or therapeutic alliance, is widely viewed as an important element of the psychotherapeutic process. Empirically, the therapeutic alliance is a well-established and robust predictor of therapeutic change. With its clear impact on therapeutic success, researchers have increasingly examined factors that contribute to alliance development, including patient psychological characteristics. This study examined the relationship between patients' object relations (i.e., mental representations of self and others) and alliance quality, and whether timing of the alliance rating and the rater perspective (patient vs. therapist) moderated this relationship. Participants were 73 patients and 23 therapists from two outpatient …

Trajectories Of Mental Health And Acculturation Among First Year International Graduate Students From India, Dhara Aniruddha Thakar

Open Access Dissertations

From 2001-2007, students from India have consistently comprised the largest ethnic group of international students on college campuses across the United States (Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange, 2007). Despite a number of studies that have researched the mental health of international students in the U.S., none have done so primarily with Indian graduate students. Theoretical and empirical literature regarding the psychological changes and acculturation patterns that international students undergo after their transition do not explore the possibility of multiple pathways of change. The current study identified four separate mental health trajectories for Indian international graduate students during their …

The Influence Of A Therapist Workshop In Alliance Strategies On Client Engagement: Feasibility And Preliminary Efficacy, Lotte Smith-Hansen

Open Access Dissertations

The client-therapist relationship has long been recognized as an important element in psychotherapy, and research has demonstrated its robust association with positive outcomes. This study examined the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of training therapists in strategies for improving therapeutic relationships with clients. The strategies were compiled from the empirical literature, drawing on the work of Hilsenroth and Cromer (2007), Castonguay (1996), and Safran and Muran (2000). The study employed a manipulated training design that has the benefit of addressing naturalistic effectiveness questions, while adhering to the rigorous scientific standards of controlled efficacy research (Hayes, 2002). Participants were 57 therapists working …

School-Wide Positive Behavior Support: Student Surveys Of Expectations And Safety, Lisa Anne Fisher

Open Access Dissertations

School-Wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) is a plan based on broad assessments of schools and their climate that can be implemented to create classrooms and schools that are focused on community and positive behavior (Horner, Sugai, Todd, & Lewis-Palmer, 2005). SWPBS involves creating and explicitly stating expectations, teaching those expectations, encouraging appropriate behavior, and defining ways to handle inappropriate behavior. Current tools that are suggested for use in conducting an assessment of school climate are: the Best Behavior School Discipline Assessment (BBSDA) also known as the Best Behavior Self-Assessment Survey (BBSAS), the School-Wide Evaluation Tool (SET), the Oregon School Safety …

Paradoxical Consequences Of Prohibitions, Sana Sheikh

Open Access Dissertations

Traditionally, attribution theory argues that strong external controls such as parental punishment undermine moral internalization. In contrast, this project argues that parental punishment does socialize morality, but it socializes moral prohibitions (rather than moral prescriptions) in particular. A strong focus on prohibitions, a proscriptive orientation, has unintended consequences. Study 1 found young adults' accounts of parental restrictiveness to predict their proscriptive orientation such that recalling the degree of how restrictive and punitive one's parents were activated a proscriptive dispositional sensitivity. Study 2 found that restrictive parenting was positively associated with shame. Further, for individuals with highly restrictive parents, temptations positively …

An Examination Of Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis Reactivity As A Partial Mediator Of The Relation Between Trauma And Self-Injurious Behavior, Eileen Katherine Bent

Open Access Dissertations

Past work has linked self-injurious behavior (SIB) to a history of traumatic experiences and to problems regulating affect. While this affect dysregulation is conceptualized as occurring at a biological (as well as a behavioral) level, relatively little is known about the biological mechanisms involved. The current study explored whether reactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis to an interpersonal stressor mediated the relation between trauma and SIB in a sample of 178 18-21 year-old heterosexual dating couples. As predicted, both trauma experience and symptoms positively predicted SIB. While the mediating model was not supported, SIB was associated with an HPA axis …

Intersecting Contexts: An Examination Of Social Class, Gender, Race, And Depressive Symptoms, Amy Claxton

Open Access Dissertations

This study examined whether commonly used social class indicators (occupational prestige, education, and income) had direct or indirect effects on mental health, and whether these relationships varied by gender, race, or family structure. To this end, 597 working-class participants were interviewed in the months before they had a child. Findings indicated that income, and not occupational prestige or education, had a direct effect on mental health, in that it was related to fewer depressive symptoms. Additionally, education and race interacted, such that for People of Color, more education was related to more depressive symptoms. Furthermore, occupational prestige and education, and …

What's In Your Table? The Ecological Influence Of Sensory Table Materials On Preschoolers' Play Behavior, James Donald Morgante

Open Access Dissertations

To achieve multiple learning objectives, the ideal preschool activity center should promote development across all domains, from adaptive to social-communicative. Though early childhood practitioners describe the sensory table as capable of doing so, empirical accounts stand in stark contrast and suggest that it is a non-social functional activity. The intent of the present investigation was to reconcile this distinct dichotomy through the systematic manipulation of four sensory table substances (sand, soil, rocks, and water) and provision sets that differed in realism to determine their effect on preschoolers' free play behavior. Preschoolers' play forms and social participation were observed at the …

Development Of A Brief Rating Scale For The Formative Assessment Of Positive Behaviors, James Cressey

Open Access Dissertations

In order to provide effective social, emotional, and behavioral supports to all students, there is a need for formative assessment tools that can help determine the responsiveness of students to intervention. Schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) is one framework that can provide evidence-based intervention within a 3-tiered model to reach students at all levels of risk. This dissertation begins the process of developing a brief, teacher-completed rating scale, intended to be used with students in grades K-8 for the formative assessment of positive classroom behavior. An item pool of 93 positively worded rating scale items was drawn from or adapted …

Exploring The Relationship Between Factors Of Implementation, Treatment Integrity And Reading Fluency, Kira Henninger

Open Access Dissertations

Treatment integrity has always had a presence in research, but now more than ever must become a priority owing to the changes in Special Education Law. The present study intends to explore the relationship between factors of implementation, treatment integrity of intervention implementation, and reading fluency. Participants included students in grades 2 through 5 and their teachers enrolled in an urban elementary school in the southwest area of the United States. Participants were chosen for possible inclusion on the basis of their fall performance relative to oral reading fluency on a universal screening measure used as part of the district's …

The Effects Of Gosolve Word Problems Math Intervention On Applied Problem Solving Skills Of Low Performing Fifth Grade Students, Jessica Lynn Fede

Open Access Dissertations

This research investigation examined the effects of GO Solve Word Problems math intervention on problem-solving skills of struggling 5th grade students. In a randomized controlled study, 16 5th grade students were given a 12-week intervention of GO Solve, a computer-based program designed to teach schema-based instruction strategies (SBI's) to solve math word problems and 16 control students continued with the standard school-based mathematics curriculum. A subset of items from the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as well as the Group Mathematics Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GMADE) was used to measure student test performance. Examiner-made probes were given to both the …

An Evaluation Of The Process And Outcomes Of Teacher Collaboration In Vocabulary Instruction, Joanne Morgan

Open Access Dissertations

The current case study evaluates a program of professional development aimed at engaging two groups of elementary teachers in communities of practice (CoPs) focused on improving teachers' vocabulary instruction and students' vocabulary learning. The professional development program took place over five months in the 2008-2009 school year. The purpose of the evaluation was to evaluate the merit and worth of the professional development program and identify changes that could be implemented by the primary evaluator in future efforts to develop and refine an effective method for teaching teachers about vocabulary instruction. An explanatory case study design was used to achieve …

Providing Parents With Young Children's Performance Feedback Information: Effects On Vocabulary And Pre-Literacy Development, Amanda Alexandria Nnachetam

Open Access Dissertations

This study examined the effects of performance feedback information on parenting practices that contribute to development of vocabulary and pre-literacy skills. Fifty-one dyads of parents and their pre-school aged children were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups. Group one received full treatment including a workshop and feedback. Group two, designated as the control group, did not receive the feedback portion of the treatment; and group three, designated as a wait list control group, received neither the workshop nor performance feedback. All participating parents were administered a survey of parenting practices that lead to vocabulary and pre-literacy development. Treatment …

Why Is It Difficult To Search For Two Colors At Once? How Eye Movements Can Reveal The Nature Of Representations During Multi-Target Visual Search, Michael John Stroud

Open Access Dissertations

Visual search consists of locating a known target amongst a field of distractors. Often times, observers must search for more than one object at once. Eye movements were monitored in a series of visual search experiments examining search efficiency and how color is represented in order to guide search for multiple targets. The results demonstrated that observers were very color selective when searching for a single color. However, when searching for two colors at once, the degree of similarity between the two target colors had varying effects on fixation patterns. Search for two very similar colors was almost as efficient …