Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Impact Of Cultural Perceptions Of Education On Mental Health Outcomes Among Asian And Asian-American Students, Firzana Syazania

Honors Theses

Many Asian countries are greatly influenced by Confucianism and are labelled Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) countries (Tan & Yates, 2010). Confucianism incorporates teachings of filial piety, respect for elders, emphasis of social values, benevolence, and the importance of education ("Confucius”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021). In CHC countries and other Asian countries like India, bringing honor and pride to one’s family is highly valued. In India, bringing honor to one’s family through obtaining a career with a higher salary could be perceived as a form of duty to one’s family. These values are taught and emphasized at an early age, …

Approachability And Mask-Wearing During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Literature Review, Lindsay Kovach

Honors Theses

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic greatly impacted many aspects of life. Due to the airborne transmission of this respiratory disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a statement in early April of 2020 recommending that people wear face masks as part of an effort to reduce the spread of the virus (CDC, 2020). Mask-wearing presented a plethora of adjustments in many areas of life. In this literature review, we focus on the sociological impacts that mask-wearing had on sociability and approachability during the COVID-19 pandemic. Studying the sociological impact of COVID-19 serves to inform both mental …

Approachability And Mask-Wearing During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Literature Review, Lauren Dehaan

Honors Theses

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic greatly impacted many aspects of life. Due to the airborne transmission of this respiratory disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a statement in early April of 2020 recommending that people wear face masks as part of an effort to reduce the spread of the virus (CDC, 2020). Mask-wearing presented a plethora of adjustments in many areas of life. In this literature review, we focus on the sociological impacts that mask-wearing had on sociability and approachability during the COVID-19 pandemic. Studying the sociological impact of COVID-19 serves to inform both mental …

The Effect Of A Toilet Training Seminar On Classroom Staff's Knowledge Of Evidence-Based Toileting Practices, Madeline Ritter

Honors Theses

Toileting is a critical life skill that may present challenges to individuals with an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD). Extensive research on toilet training has been conducted in clinical, residential, and home settings; however, limited research has been conducted on toilet training in educational settings. Educational settings present unique challenges that other settings may not, which makes research on toilet training in these settings critical (Cagliani et al., 2021). Additionally, research on toileting in educational settings have not evaluated classroom staff’s acceptance of evidence-based toileting strategies. The current study used a pre posttest design to examine the effect of a …

Factors Influencing Alcohol Use During Covid-19 With College Students, Nikki Davis

Honors Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse mental health implications. Young adults have been identified as a particularly high-risk group for increased alcohol use during the pandemic (Capasso et al., 2021). Psychological distress, motives for drinking, experiential avoidance, COVID-19 related fears, and campus connectedness may all be factors related to drinking in college students; however, many of these factors have not been examined during COVID-19. The current study surveyed a sample of full-time, WMU college students (N = 235) who were 18 years old or older (M = 21.13, SD = 3.33). The majority of the sample identified as women (71.9%) …

Covid-19: Coping Strategies Predicting Mental Health Outcomes, Crystal Lim

Honors Theses

The rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths caused are increasing. Studies have been reporting the inclining rate of psychological distress during the pandemic, which calls for attention to how the pandemic has impacted mental health outcomes. Coping strategies are helpful when it comes to predicting mental health outcomes. However, limited studies looked at coping strategies predicting mental health outcomes longitudinally. The study hypothesized that psychological distress would decrease during mid-pandemic and adaptive coping strategies such as active coping, acceptance, positive reframing, instrumental support, emotional support, religion, humor, and planning decrease psychological distress while maladaptive included denial and venting, behavioral disengagements, …

"Incorporating Behavior Analysis To Address Risk Factors For Obesity", Fawzia Khan

Honors Theses

There is a rising prevalence for obesity in the United States. Obesity is associated with health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and other health complications including worsened mental health. Because of this, it is important to look for effective solutions to address risk factors, such as overeating and a sedentary lifestyle, that are associated with obesity. Applied behavior analysis, the application of learning principles to socially significant issues, has potential in addressing factors that lead to obesity. Functional analysis and the antecedent-behavior-consequence (ABC) model can help explain “cause and effect” relationships between environment and behavior and why and how …

A Review Of Remote Work Evaluation Approaches, Rebecca Allen

Honors Theses

With the introduction of the COVID-19 public health crisis, many United States workers were involuntarily placed in remote working conditions. As a result, it is imperative to understand the varying effects of remote working conditions on employee and organizational performance. Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior Management are two specializations within the field of psychology that recognize the need for understanding these conditions. These two fields hold distinctly different theoretical approaches and as such evaluate the effects of remote work in different ways. Understanding the difference between these assessments is essential for identifying where each journal type may fall short in …

Reading A Literary Passage: Anticipation, Emotion, And Comprehension, Jacob Hurwitz

Honors Theses

Trigger warnings (TWs) are statements that provide students a caution that upcoming educational content may be emotionally disturbing. The idea is that TWs allow students to psychologically prepare themselves. However, recent studies suggest TWs may function as threat cues, rather than preparatory cues, eliciting anticipatory anxiety and avoidance. The present study examined the difference between presenting antecedent information to students in the form of a TW versus an alternative, a coping cue, introduced as a Content Notice. In a between-groups design, undergraduate students (N = 113) who received extra credit for study participation were randomized to receive a TW or …

A Comparison Study Of Naming, Kassidi Krzykwa

Honors Theses

Bidirectional naming is the ability to acquire a listener response or tact for a stimulus and then emit the other operant without further training. Incidental naming refers to the ability to emit the listener response and tact for the item without direct reinforcement after just being exposed to the name of the item. The development of naming could allow a child to learn more readily from the natural environment. However, it is unclear if bidirectional naming and incidental naming are two separate skills, or if one is potentially a prerequisite for the other. For this project, procedures outlined by Greer …

Stimulus Fading On Teaching Receptive Identification, Dennis Pomorski

Honors Theses

Many of the skills needed to live happily and independently are not in the repertoires of children diagnosed with autism, and they do not learn these skills through exposure to others (MacDuff, 2001). One of the skills children diagnosed with ASD struggle to develop is receptive identification. There is often a risk of prompt dependence or failure to transfer stimulus control to the desired stimuli when using LTM prompting methods. Children with autism spectrum disorder may require a different approach in developing a receptive language repertoire. The purpose of this study was to teach a child diagnosed with ASD receptive …

Increasing The Echoic Repertoire Of A Child With Autism Using An Imitation And Echoic Sequence, Rose Bridges

Honors Theses

A prerequisite to many things in life is the ability to communicate. Although this may mean many different things, such as verbal language, sign language, written language, and even icons, there must be some form of communication that may be utilized to get needs across. Many young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are non-verbal, however there are also many children with ASD who have the ability to say words but are still not independently speaking. Reinforcing approximations to word sounds has been previously used as an effective way of increasing the child’s verbal repertoire (Shane, 2017). The present study …

Matching-To-Sample Using A Tablet, Karina Salazar-Ponce

Honors Theses

Kids with autism tend to have a difficult time with one-to-one correspondence matching. Matching-to-sample is the process of pairing an identical stimulus to its corresponding stimulus, for example, matching a physical object to its corresponding picture. This is an important skill because it is the first step in teaching individuals with developmental delays visual discrimination skills and generalization of matching. The use of technology is beneficial because it helps with attending in instructional learning. Technology is also becoming more advanced and is being used more in classrooms. The purpose of this study was to teach matching-to-sample using a tablet. There …

Teaching Echoics To A Student With Autism: Video Model Vs Live Model, Dana Waddell

Honors Theses

Learning a language is not always an easy task for all children. Typically, language is a skill that comes naturally very young in a child’s life, but for children with autism, the path to learning language is very different. The first stages of learning language involve many skills, one of which are called “echoic skills,” because the child directly echoes a sound a person elicits. This is fundamental to learning language, especially in children with autism. The field of behavior analysis has conducted great amounts of research on this topic and has found that using technology in therapy sessions can …

Using A Progressive Time Delay To Increase Mands In A Child With Autism, Brielle Babcock

Honors Theses

Mands are a building block for all communication and are therefore important to teach to individuals who do not consistently use mands. Skinner defined a mand as a “verbal operant in which the response is reinforced by a characteristic consequence and is under the control of relevant conditions of deprivation or aversive stimulation” (Hall & Sundberg 1987). By providing individuals with a way to express their desires and needs, individuals display less problem behaviors. A functional form of communication is imperative to typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders alike. The goal of the current study was to …

Establishing Auditory Discrimination And Echoic Stimulus Control With An Auditory Matching Procedure, Matthew Von Holst

Honors Theses

An echoic is a verbal operant which is controlled by a verbal discriminative stimulus and is characterized by the repetition of the verbal behavior of another speaker with point-to-point correspondence between the sound of the stimulus and the response (Skinner, 1957). These echoic responses are very important for children with developmental disorders because their language development is very unpredictable and may not appear at all, potentially causing difficulties in school and problems with social development (Reed, 2005). Teaching language acquisition skills can help offset these problems because it reinforces future echoic responses and helps develop advanced verbal operants such as …

Childhood Trauma And Early Adult Engagement In Deviant Behavior: A Measure Of Experiential Avoidance And Impulsivity Association, Angelene Green

Honors Theses

Childhood trauma (CT) has been associated with early adult behavioral deviance (BD), as maintained by previous research. The current study examined experiential avoidance (EA) and impulsivity (IMP) as mechanisms through which childhood trauma and resulting behavioral deviance are related. Participants for the study included 588 students of Western Michigan University, comprised of both males and females. The participants ranged between the ages of 18 and 35. For data collection, participants completed an online survey through an online platform. Participants were directed to select responses in accordance with the variables of interest. For the purpose of identity preservation, the survey responses …

The Effects Of Attachment Anxiety On Trait Anxiety And Borderline Personality Symptoms Through Specific Pathways Of Emotion Regulation, Jessica Good

Honors Theses

Previous research has shown that deficits in emotion regulation impair coping skills for individuals clinically diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) resembling trait anxiety, as well as those clinically diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD; Herr, Rosenthal, Geiger, & Erikson, 2013; Beeney et al., 2015; Putnam & Silk, 2005; Nielsen et al., 2017; Mennin, Heimberg, Turk, & Fresco, 2002; Marganska, Gallagher, & Miranda, 2013). The current study hypothesized that (a) the specific types of emotion dysregulation measuring lack of clarity and impulsivity would mediate the relationship between attachment anxiety and BPD while the other types do not, and (b) the …

Gender Differences In Adhd, Jillian Vogley

Honors Theses

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a learning disability that is very prevalent in today’s society. A closer look at this disability reveals that there are differences with males and females with regards to how the symptoms manifest. Females have a tendency to exhibit inattention whereas males are often hyperactive, which is much more obvious to others around them. This difference in symptoms has led to a drastic difference in terms of how ADHD is diagnosed and causes it to be underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed in females compared to males. The consequences that this delayed diagnosis may have on females can be severe. …

The Effects Of Qr Code Prompts Posted To A Solar Charging Bench On Website Visibility, Sage Campbell

Honors Theses

This study will investigate the effects of graphic prompts with integrated quick response (QR) codes posted to a solar charging bench. The hypothesis is that posted prompts and the bench itself will increase website traffic and visibility of sustainable actions at Western Michigan University. Website traffic will be monitored using Google Analytics software which will allow for tracking of website visits specifically from scanning the QR code. Thus, data from bench installation and from bench installation with prompts will be compared with baseline data from before installation of the bench and before installation graphic prompts. Data that supports the hypothesis, …

Comparing Prompting Methods For Teaching Receptive Identification, Laurel Jungblut

Honors Theses

Receptive language is the occurrence of an appropriate response to the spoken language of another individual. This is a key element of development, especially in regard to the acquisition of spoken language (Grow & LeBlanc, 2013). While this appropriate responding is a skill generally acquired by typically developing children via interactions with their caregivers, in most situations it must be explicitly taught to children with developmental delays (Charlotte L. Carp, Sean P. Peterson, Amber J. Arkel, & Anna I. Petursdottir, 2012). An absence or delay of this skill will result in a child missing many important learning opportunities, leading to …

Increasing The Frequency Of Tutors' Reinforcement Of Compliance Behaviors, Sruthi Rameshkumar

Honors Theses

Abstract

Compliance behaviors occurring prior to the delivery of an instruction, such as handing over preferred items, making eye contact, and folding hands in the ready position help prepare students for success in discrete-trial training (DTT) interventions. These behaviors are usually taught in early intervention with a continuous reinforcement schedule, but once they are mastered, they are rarely revisited or maintained. Without intermittent reinforcement of these behaviors, they are likely to decrease in frequency and may lead to the use of restrictive or intrusive methods to gain compliance during DTT sessions. The current study used a multiple-baseline across participants design …

The Effects Of Feliway On The Stress Of Cats During Veterinary Examination, Colleen Doonan

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Feliway® during veterinary examination. Feliway® contains a synthetic version of the F3 pheromone, secreted from the cheeks of Felis sylvestris catus when rubbing against objects in the environment. It is presumed to allow cats to establish a home range to feel secure. A double-blind study was conducted to address the limitations of another study that concluded Feliway® is useful for reducing stress experienced by cats during veterinary examination. The current study found that Feliway® is not useful by itself for adequate stress reduction during feline examinations. It was concluded …

Increasing Waiting And Turn-Taking Among Preschool Aged Children With A Verbal-Delay Diagnosis, Alexa Hill

Honors Theses

The goal of this thesis was to create and implement an intervention that used errorless teaching and focused on increasing a sharing and waiting response for a student who had a verbal delay diagnosis. The two students involved in the project were both two-year-olds who attended an early childhood special education (ECSE) classroom with other preschool-aged children who had similar diagnoses. A single-subject simple baseline design was used and involved several phases designed with multiple responses to show the effectiveness of icons to facilitate sharing among two non-verbal students. Each response was prompted (when necessary) and they were all reinforced …

Increasing Vocalization And Echoic Stimulus Control, Logan Wurster

Honors Theses

Deficits in verbal behavior can be harmful to children’s growth and development of other crucial skills and can also increase problem behavior (Eldevik, Eikeseth, Jahr, & Smith, 2006; Charman, Magiati, & Howlin, 2007; Cividini-Motta, 2014). Results from previous research show that vocal imitation training, stimulus-stimulus pairing, rapid motor imitation, and mand-model approaches have been successful in teaching echoic behavior. However, there is little evidence to show that these methods are successful for children who are making little to no verbal responses. (Carroll & Klatts, 2008; Bennett & Yoon, 2000; Greer & Ross, 2003; & Hawkins & Schuster, 2007). The purpose …

Teaching Two Children Diagnosed With Autism To Tolerate Physical Contact, Kelsey Webster

Honors Theses

It was hypothesized that the fading in of a prompt hierarchy coinciding with the delivery of tangibles, edibles, and attention or praise reinforcers would decrease problem behavior and noncompliance in two male children with autism who displayed problem behavior and resistance while being physically prompted. A single-subject research design was used to present the prompt hierarchy across various conditions in a school setting. Both participants initially engaged in problem behavior on 100% of the trials but quickly reduced in intensity of problem behaviors by the end of the intervention. There is no current research conducted on how to decrease problem …

Toilet-Training A Child With Autism In A School Setting, Kristianna Ferrier

Honors Theses

Children with autism and developmental disabilities typically take longer to learn skills. Specific training that requires more repetition to obtain mastery should be used to teach specific tasks (MacDuff, Kratz, & McClannahan, 2001). Toilet training is no exception and must be directly taught to children with Autism. Toilet training is a fundamental skill for independent living and greatly reduces the work load of care givers (Chung, 2007). The child in this study was chosen based on a toilet training readiness checklist. The present study is a combination of the scheduled sitting protocol by Azrin and Foxx (1971) with the omission …

Using Video Modeling To Teach Functional Direction Following, Breanna Burns

Honors Theses

Many children with developmental disabilities have a hard time learning skills, such as following directions, in a small group setting. Video modeling has been shown as an effective way to teach certain skills to children with autism and other developmental disabilities (Nikopoulos & Keenan, 2004; Wu, Cannella-malone, Wheaton et al, 2016). Little research has been done on using video modeling to teach functional directions. Generalizing direction following skills to appropriate contexts is important for children to be successful in the many environments they encounter in a typical school setting. The purpose of this project was to teach functional direction following …

Within-Session Progressive Gestural-Prompt Delay To Teach Receptive Identification, Breanne Stiemsma

Honors Theses

Receptive identification skills are important for any child to learn. Without these skills, various aspects of development can become impaired. There are many ways to teach receptive identification. This project pulled ideas from previous studies on within-session progressive gestural-prompt delays as well as the different methods of teaching receptive identification skills, simple-conditional method and the condition-only method. The student was not acquiring receptive identification skills with the traditional methods used in the classroom. Within-session progressive gestural-prompt delay was used in this project to teach receptive identification of objects. An AB single-subject design was used in this project. The student responded …

Explicit Programming For Icon Rings: Visual-Based Discrimination, Samantha Borowski

Honors Theses

Instructional icons are helpful as basic direction following is the basis for complex skills needed later in life. These instructions should have a good training so that children can get the basic skills and can move on to the complex skills. The goal of the project was to increase the correct responses to instructional icons. Visuals are a good tool for learning because it attaches a picture with the event that is happening or will happen. Children with autism sometimes struggle when they are introduced to a new environment so having a system in place to help make instruction following …