Digital Commons Network^™

Effects Of Supermax On Inmate Mental Health: Phenomenological Experiences Of Knowledgeable Professionals, Lea Michelle Miller

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

It may or may not be true that the conditions and practices associated with supermax sentencing are both creating and exacerbating psychological harm for the inmates who are exposed to them. To date, there is evidence that both supports and refutes the contention that supermax sentencing is psychologically harmful; thus, the literature necessitates additional research into this phenomenon. This qualitative study was conducted to add to the extant body of knowledge relevant to supermax prisons and populations by exploring the lived experiences of professionals who have worked with them. This research was conceptually based in the current understanding of social …

Exploring An Indian K-12 School’S Experience Of Culturally Adapting Multiple Intelligences Theory, Jessica Richmond

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many government-run K-12 schools in India struggle to serve their diverse student bodies in a culturally responsive manner that draws from the nation's rich cultural heritage. Academic programs based on Gardner’s multiple intelligences (MI) theory have been utilized internationally to enhance learning, but the implementation has not been explored in a school curriculum based on Indian culture. The purpose of this qualitative case study, which was grounded in MI and Ladson-Billing’s culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), was to explore the methods and experiences of an Indian K-12 school that culturally adapted MI theory to include yogic principles of the Indian culture. …

A Phenomenological Study Of Executive Coaching For African American Leaders, Barrhonda White

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

African American leaders face inequalities in executive leadership development support such as executive coaching. This phenomenological qualitative study explored the lived experiences of African American leaders that worked with a leadership coach. The intention of the study was to gain insight into factors that led African American leaders to seek assistance from a leadership coach, preferences regarding leadership coach demographics, and goals from coaching. The theoretical foundation for this research was Self-Discrepancy Theory. The study utilized two research questions related to a) the lived experiences of African American leaders that work with, or have worked with, an executive coach, and …

The Interrelationship Between Sensorimotor Deficits And Maladaptive Behavior In The Classroom, L B Marie Filion

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Mainstreaming special education students has created challenges for teachers, resulting in significant lesson time allocated to classroom disruptions related to maladaptive behavior. This correlational study examined the extent to which specific sensorimotor deficits predict maladaptive behavior among special education students (aged 8-12 years) based on archival data of teacher assessments in New Zealand. Piaget’s cognitive and affective development theory was used as the theoretical foundation. Results from standard multiple regression demonstrated that higher levels of sensorimotor deficits (vision, touch, taste and smell, body awareness, balance and motion) predicted high levels of maladaptive behavior (internalizing, externalizing, and overall maladaptive behavior indices); …

Developing A Resource For Arts Educators To Enhance The Social And Emotional Well-Being Of Young People, Leanne Fried, Christine Lovering, Sarah Falconer, Jacinta Francis, Robyn Johnston, Karen Lombardi, Kevin Runions, Karen Forde, Naomi Crosby, Lilly Blue

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background: Mental health concerns prevent positive well-being and are key challenges for Australian children and young people. Arts organisations play a role in enhancing the positive mental health of children and young people. This paper describes the involvement of young people and their parents in the development of a resource for arts organisation’s intentional support of social and emotional well-being. Methods: Six focus groups were conducted with 19 young people who participate in dance, drama, and circus programs, and 17 of their parents. Questions explored how the arts currently, and potentially, support their social and emotional well-being. Results: Three overarching …

Pedagogy Of Belonging: Pausing To Be Human In Higher Education, Narelle Lemon

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Valuing care and self-care in higher education requires a conscious pause and rethinking of how we are together as educators and students. The pandemic caused various complexities, including changes in curriculum delivery, deadlines, and assessment modes, leading to feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and change fatigue, which contributed to the emergence of panicgogy. This paper argues for the need to disrupt this way of being and experiencing the pandemic through valuing humanity and repositioning self-care and care by and for academics to inform their pedagogy. Presented is the narrative and the design story behind Pedagogy of Belonging (PoB), a systems informed …

Psycho-Spiritual Counselling To Enhance Resiliency As Transformative Education: An Auto/Ethnographic Inquiry Of The Interface Between Spirituality And Positive Psychology, Dominic Savio

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis attempts to capture my lived experiences of psychospiritual counselling and to describe how my research journey has shaped me personally and professionally. As a priest engaged in psychospiritual counselling internationally for nearly three decades in diverse settings, I attempt to seek further clarity and make sense of my rich experiences in this research. Therefore, I endeavoured to investigate if and how building resiliency through psychospiritual counselling can be comprehended as transformative education.

Experientially speaking, as a priest and psychospiritual counsellor, I recognised that people leaned on their moral vulnerabilities and were blinded to spirituality as a source of …

What Gives? Leveraging Marketing Knowledge To Increase Consumers’ Charitable Giving, Caitlin Michael

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Marketing plays a central role in nonprofit organizations that compete for the donations of individual consumers to achieve their respective missions. To this end, marketing researchers and practitioners have devoted much attention to the antecedents of charitable giving and ways in which solicitations may be made more effective and efficient. This gives rise to the questions: “What has the field learned?” and, relatedly, “What novel effects have not yet been explored?” Within this dissertation, three essays address these questions through the use of multiple methodologies.

The first essay seeks to outline what the marketing field has learned about consumers’ charitable …

Relational Abstraction In Early Childhood: Three Cultures And Three Trajectories, Alexandra Carstensen, Minju Kim, Gayoung Kim, Meizi Jin, Minjin Kang, Youngon Choi, Caren M. Walker

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a "relational shift," over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task (Carstensen et al., 2019). This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, in which English speakers in the US and Mandarin speakers in China appear at opposite ends of a continuum spanning from a focus on objects (US) to relations (CN). We explore early relational reasoning in a …

People Are Curious About Immoral And Morally Ambiguous Others, Jordan Wylie, Ana Gantman

Publications and Research

Looking to the popularity of superheroes, true crime stories, and anti-heroic characters like Tony Soprano, we investigated whether moral extremity, especially moral badness, piques curiosity. Across five experiments (N = 2429), we examine moral curiosity, testing under what conditions the moral minds of others spark explanation-seeking behavior. In Experiment 1, we find that among the most widely watched Netflix shows in the US over a five-month period, the more immoral the protagonist, the more hours people spent watching. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we find that when given a choice to learn more about morally good, bad, ambiguous, or …

Central Americans At A Crossroads: Asylum Seekers’ Testimonios Of Mental Health After Detention And Family Separation, Corie E. Schwabenland Garcia

Master's Theses

Though Central American asylum seekers are presently hypervisible in the U.S. consciousness, this population continues to be inadequately understood or cared for. Discussion of this population often presents them as a helpless and damaged population, in need of saving, fixing, or shelter -- beyond their trauma, they cease to exist. This qualitative study utilizes first-person testimonio methodology to understand the psychological experiences of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States, the stressors they face, and the mental health support that can and should be provided to them. Their stories speak to a space of sociopolitical precarity in the …

Foreign Language Anxiety: A Review On Theories, Causes, Consequences And Implications For Educators, Padideh Fattahi Marnani, Sophie Cuocci

Journal of English Learner Education

Anxiety has been considered one of the main obstacles in second language learning in instruction-based contexts. During the last few decades, many scholars have tried to shed light on different aspects of this phenomenon. This literature review clarifies previous scholarly works and covers some of the most significant empirical studies conducted in this field. The purpose of this literature review is to review various aspects of foreign language anxiety, its corresponding theoretical frameworks and models, causes, consequences, gender differences, class modalities (face-to-face and online) and lastly, implications for educators. Foreign language anxiety is a significant barrier that hinders the learning …

Effects Of The Form Of Address “You Guys”, Jocelyn Sawyer

Theses and Dissertations

Renewed focus on workplace inclusivity has prompted calls to eliminate the mixed-gender group address “you guys” due to its potential to lower women’s sense of belonging. Our study found that interactions between this address and participant gender affected opinions on gender inequality but did not affect women’s sense of belonging.

Gender Ambiguity In Voice-Based Assistants: Gender Perception And Influences Of Context, Sandra Mooshammer, Katrin Etzrodt

Human-Machine Communication

Recently emerging synthetic acoustically gender-ambiguous voices could contribute to dissolving the still prevailing genderism. Yet, are we indeed perceiving these voices as “unassignable”? Or are we trying to assimilate them into existing genders? To investigate the perceived ambiguity, we conducted an explorative 3 (male, female, ambiguous voice) × 3 (male, female, ambiguous topic) experiment. We found that, although participants perceived the gender-ambiguous voice as ambiguous, they used a profoundly wide range of the scale, indicating tendencies toward a gender. We uncovered a mild dissolve of gender roles. Neither the listener’s gender nor the personal gender stereotypes impacted the perception. However, …

Marital Satisfaction And Attachment Style: The Mediating Role Of Emotional Intelligence And Religious Commitment, Denise Dos Santos Moitinho

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Most couples enter marriage hoping to experience happiness and satisfaction. This study acknowledges that spouses bring their worldviews, personalities, behaviors, and emotions to the marriage relationship, and for this reason, this study investigates the connection between marital satisfaction and attachment style as mediated by emotional intelligence and religious commitment in a sample of heterosexual married Christian individuals living in the United States. This quantitative, non-experimental, survey-based research analyzes data collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk from 530 married individuals to understand the relationship between variables affecting marital satisfaction. Results from Pearson’s correlation analyses show a significant relationship between attachment style subscales …

A Qualitative Study Into Modern Psychoanalytic Joining And Mirroring Through Psychotherapeutic Exchanges, Tricia Shihui Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation intends to address current deficits in knowledge regarding the modern psychoanalytic interventions of joining and mirroring, including substantial definition issues in the literature and the absence of current writings on the psychotherapeutic interventions of joining and mirroring in practice. The focus of the study was on the ever-dynamic landscape between modern analytically-informed practitioners and their clients in psychotherapeutic exchange(s) that the practitioners believed encompassed joining and/or mirroring interventions. Participants were six experienced practitioners who described their clinical work as being informed by modern psychoanalysis and who have engaged or were currently engaging in individual psychotherapy with a client. …

“Envisioning Digital Sanctuaries”: An Exploration Of Virtual Collectives For Nurturing Professional Development Of Women In Technical Domains, Subhasree Sengupta

Dissertations - ALL

Work and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet sociocultural barriers have historically limited access and opportunity for women in multiple contexts, including their professional pursuits. Such sociocultural barriers are particularly pronounced in technical domains and have relegated minoritized voices to the margins. As a result of these barriers, those affected have suffered strife, turmoil, and subjugation. Hence, it is important to investigate how women can subvert such structural limitations and find channels through which they can seek support and guidance to navigate their careers. With the proliferation of modern communication infrastructure, virtual forums of conversation such as Reddit …

Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, And Expertise: Cognitive Sociology And The Quasi-Realism Of Problem-Solving As A Course Of Activity, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

The question facing sociology is whether it is a field or a discipline. If it is a field, then there is no need for theorizing. However, if sociology is a discipline, then problem-solving cannot be disentangled from theorizing without a loss of intelligibility – the inability to explain the social as the concept of the discipline. Through the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity, this chapter presents cognitive sociology as a paradigm appropriate to the concept of the social understood as an ongoing course of activity. In doing so, it is shown how bounded rationality and expertise play …

Contributions Of Semantic And Phonological Working Memory To Narrative Language Independent Of Single Word Production: Evidence From Acute Stroke, Rachel Zahn, Tatiana T Schnur, Randi C Martin

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Neuropsychological case studies have provided evidence that individuals with semantic, but not phonological, working memory (WM) deficits have difficulty producing phrases containing several content words. These findings supported the claim of a phrasal scope of planning at the grammatical formulation stage of production, where semantic WM supports the maintenance of lexical-semantic representations as they are inserted into slots in phrasal constituents. Recent narrative production results for individuals at the acute stage of stroke supported the role for semantic WM in phrasal elaboration while suggesting a role for phonological WM at a subsequent phonological encoding stage in supporting fluent, rapid speech. …

Testing Competing Theories To Develop A Linguistic Assessment On Online Extremist Content, Matthew Dean

Theses and Dissertations

The development of threat assessment protocols has largely neglected a theoretical
foundation, leading to a multitude of protocols with little shared in the way of scientific
foundation. The focus of this study is to test components of two theories – Sternberg’s (2018) FLOTSAM Model and Maynard and Benesch’s (2016) Integrated Model of Dangerous Speech (IMDS) – as potential criteria to use in assessing the seriousness of online threats. This study utilized a dataset of 500 open-source online communications linked to the extremist QAnon movement. An EFA was used to pull an empirical model from the data. Three CFA and SEM …

Spiritual Intelligence And Personality, Jayne Ann Harder, Andrew S. I. D. Lang, Leighanne Locke, J. Bryan Osborne, Aleksandra Turtova, Enrique F. Valderrama-Araya, Stephen R. Wheat, Jan H. R. Wörner

Salubritas: International Journal of Spirit-Empowered Counseling

This study quantifies the relationship between measures of spiritual intelligence and personality traits. A random sample of 240 undergraduate students from a mid-sized private Christian university in the West South-Central United States were administered both the SISRI-24 survey instrument for spiritual intelligence as well as the Pathway U survey for HEXACO personality traits. Statistically significant positive correlations were found between critical existential thinking and openness to experience; personal meaning production and extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; transcendental awareness and extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness; and conscious state expansion and extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness. Statistically significant negative …

Identity, Schemas, And Adaptive Change: Self-Affirmation For Use By Spirit-Empowered Christian Counselors, Angela L. Watson

Salubritas: International Journal of Spirit-Empowered Counseling

Recent dramatic events, coupled with increased connectivity via technology, have led to many shifts in global culture. These shifts have been accompanied by an increased awareness of mental health needs, including those of Christians. Although people may realize they need to make important life changes for their mental and behavioral health, it is not always clear where they should begin. Moreover, when they recognize a need for change, this experience is often perceived as threatening. People’s innate discomfort with uncertainty then requires that they fight both the temptation to avoid the truth about themselves and the practical obstacles that naturally …

Surveilling Threat: The Roles Of Ideology And Threat Perceptions In Support For Islamophobic Policy, Aeleah M. Granger, Kimberly B. Kahn, Joel S. Steele

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

After the attacks on 9/11, Muslims in the United States were the targets of increased surveillance by law enforcement on the basis of their religious identity, often resulting in mistreatment and unjustified imprisonment. The current study examined ideologies that are associated with Islamophobia and support for police surveillance of Muslims, as well as specific types of intergroup threat perceptions that mediate these relationships. Participants (N = 603) completed a survey measuring Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Nationalism, intergroup threat perceptions, Islamophobia, and support for an anti-Muslim police surveillance policy. Results demonstrated that higher levels of SDO, RWA, and …

Differences In Elementary Students’ Self-Regulated Processes For Computer Versus Printed Reading Assignments, Katerina Sergi, Anastasia Elder, Tianlan Wei, Kristin H. Javorsky, Jianzhong Xu

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

The purpose of this study was to investigate metacognitive self-regulated learning (SRL) differences in computer- and paper-based reading assignments across elementary students. Students in two after-school programs in a southeastern U.S. public school district were recruited. The final sample consisted of 48 students in Grades 2–5 who participated in two counterbalanced conditions involving a computer- and a paper-based reading assignment. The study employed a 2 x 4 (condition-by-grade) mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA) and followup tests to examine metacognitive SRL differences between conditions and grades. The results indicate that elementary students used various metacognitive SRL skills across both conditions. The …

Multilingualism And Memory: Investigating Possible Differences In The Abilities Of Monolingual And Multilingual College Students, Clara E. Barned

Honors Projects

This study investigated whether there is a difference in the memories of monolingual and multilingual undergraduate students using simple memorization tasks. There were 46 participants, 30 of which were monolingual (only knew one language) and 16 of which were multilingual (knew two or more languages). There was found to be no significant difference between the performance of the two groups, with the data generating a p-value of 0.557. This study further suggests related avenues of research and ways in which the study could be improved in the future.

Intersectional Identities Of Race And Religion Of African American Muslims And Their Attitudes Toward Seeking Mental Health Services, Cheruba A. Dhanaraj

Dissertations

African American Muslims have overlapping and interconnected identities of race and religion that can be conceptualized by the intersectionality framework to understand the complexities of barriers they face when seeking mental health services. African American Muslims have a higher risk of mental health issues due to systemic racism, racial discrimination, racial trauma, and Islamophobic discrimination. Yet, there is a lack of scholarly research or studies that focus explicitly on African American Muslims' specific mental health needs, barriers, and attitudes related to seeking mental health treatment.

This study sought to fill the gap in knowledge about attitudes toward seeking mental health …

The Stability Of The Speech-To-Song Illusion And Individual Differences, Rodica R. Constantine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Music and language are easily distinguishable for the average listener despite sharing many structural acoustic similarities. The Speech-to-Song illusion can give rise to both musical and linguistic percepts by inducing a perceptual switch after listening to multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance. As such, it has been used as a tool to control for low-level acoustic characteristics previously shown to drive lateralized brain responses regardless of domain-type, helping to disambiguate the contribution of high- versus low-level processes in both music and speech perception. However, there exists a lack of research on how large a role individual differences such as …

The Language Of Recruitment: How Minority Status, Racial Minority Centrality, & Linguistic Cues Impact Applicant Perceptions, Clark Waters

Theses and Dissertations

As color-blindness, the intentional denial of racial differences, continues to occupy corporate policy, expressions and consequences of modern racism in the workplace remain pervasive. Color-blind attitudes can be harmful due to their focus on perceived equality, at the expense of actionable, functional equity. Establishing a culture of racial equity in the workplace requires an understanding of how the language used to discuss race can impact potential applicants’ opinions of the company. To attract a diverse pool of job applicants, the language of recruitment is of particular importance in the current study. Using a vignette-style survey design, a diverse sample of …

Sources Of Top-Down Processing In Recognition Of Repeated Speech In Noise, Liam Gleason

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Prior research has shown that repetition facilitates speech recognition in difficult listening environments, as indicated by more accurate reporting and lower subjective noise ratings. Both effects were found even when sentences were read at encoding, suggesting that the top-down processing involved comes from a modality-general level of representation (Gleason & Francis, 2021). We investigated whether this top-down processing comes from the semantic or lemma level of language representation. Bilingual participants listened to sentences in English and Spanish. At test, these sentences and new sentences were presented auditorily in English with background noise. After listening to each sentence, participants reported the …

Parent Coaching Via Telepractice For Children From Latinx Backgrounds With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Valeria Yllades, J. B. Ganz, Sanikan Wattanawongwan, Claudia Dunn, Lauren M. Pierson

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder from bilingual homes have to learn and discriminate which language to use across settings and different people. Language instruction is complicated by the core deficits in social communication, which is common in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Using a single case, multiple probe design across three parent-child dyads between 3 and 6 years from Spanish speaking backgrounds, the present study examined the effect of telepractice-based parent coaching in a multimodal communication intervention. Culturally responsive approaches were integrated within the coaching model, including targeted interview questions. There was also a 15-item rubric used for identifying criteria …