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Strengthening Cognitive Development In Minority Populations: A Study Of The Beneficial Effects Of Bilingualism, Marisela Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The long-term goal of this research is to better understand and characterize the "bilingual advantage" so that educational and child care institutions begin to recognize and encourage the active use of two languages to strengthen cognitive development in minority populations. The present study is one of the first one to include a very large sample of well-defined "active bilinguals" who, by objective measures, were determined to be bilingual and determined to engage in language switching on a daily basis. Another goal was to manipulate and activate in the laboratory what might be referred to as the "switching benefit." One hundred …

Mental Health And Medication Adherence As A Function Of Early Life Physical And Sexual Trauma In Hiv+ Latino Men Who Have Sex With Men, Carolina Lara

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of the study is to understand sexual risk and medication adherence among Latino HIV+ men who have sex with men (MSM) and who have a history of childhood trauma (CT; which may include unwanted sexual experiences, physical threats, physical harm and /or verbal abuse prior to the age of 16). We sampled 150 Latino adult MSM living with HIV at a clinic in El Paso, Texas that offers comprehensive HIV/AIDS services to those living on the U.S.-Mexico Border. We assessed self-reported histories of childhood abuse and participants' control expectancies not only toward sexual impulsivity, but also more generally. …

Between-Language Repetition Priming In Antonym Generation: Examining Conceptual Encoding And Representation Of Adjectives, Randy Steven Taylor

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Previous research has shown repetition priming effects between languages, suggesting that a bilingual's two languages share conceptual representation. However these studies have been conducted mainly utilizing concrete nouns as stimuli. In the present study, it was hypothesized that adjectives would produce significant between-language repetition priming. The experiment utilized a 4 (encoding task) X 2 (test language) within-subjects design in which participants (N = 64) encoded words in read only, translation English to Spanish and translation Spanish to English conditions and at test performed an antonym generation task in either Spanish or English. The results revealed that participants were significantly faster …

The Relevance Of Sarcasm In Resolving Ambiguous References In Spoken Discourse, Sara Ann Peters

Theses and Dissertations

DISS_para>Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the intended discourse interpretation. The current series of experiments sought to demonstrate that sarcasm could be viewed as beneficial in resolving ambiguity in conversation, by highlighting particular interpretations and thus ease processing, dependent on other available contextual information. Two Visual World studies …

Biases In Children's Cognitive Styles: Investigating Local, Global, And Rule-Based Processing In Autism Spectrum Disorders And Typical Development, Sandra Beatriz Vanegas

Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is classified as a pervasive developmental disorder that presents a triad of impairments across communication, social behavior, and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). To date, many attempts have been made to explain the cognitive profiles of children and adults with ASD. Three prominent theories, Weak Central Coherence (Frith, 1989), Systemizing (Baron-Cohen, 2002), and Executive Dysfunction Theory (Pennington & Ozonoff, 1996), may together provide a plausible explanation for the cognitive biases of individuals with ASD.

Weak Central Coherence (WCC) Theory proposes that individuals with ASD have difficulty learning new information due to a fixation towards local …

Identification Of Specific Learning Disability Profiles: Consideration Of Patterns Across Cognitive, Academic, Socio-Emotional, And Executive Variables, Amanda M. Garrett

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

During recent years, there has been a growing urgency and a heightened demand for increased accountability for all students to demonstrate academic success in school, as required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; 2002). An integral part of helping students to meet success in school includes providing them with a free and appropriate education; this also includes those students who have educational disabilities, through the provision of specially designed instruction and supports. In the past, SLD had been studied as a homogenous classification (Rourke, 1999). However, as more recent research has evolved, it has become clearer that students …

Early Effects Of The Tomatis Listening Method In Children With Attention Deficit, Liliana Sacarin

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study investigated the early effects of the Tomatis Method, hypothesizing improvement in processing speed, phonological awareness, reading efficiency, attention, behavior and brain physiology by the end of Phase 1 of the Tomatis Method. This study documented the effects of the first phase of the Tomatis Method on children with ADD ages 7-13. Of the 25 participants, 15 received solely the Tomatis treatment while 10 served as controls and were stabilized on ADD medication three months prior to and throughout the study. Therefore, this research study compared Tomatis versus non-Tomatis intervention, not ADD medication treatment with Tomatis intervention. The Tomatis …

The Experiences Of Mothers Of Children With Autism In Jamaica: An Exploratory Study Of Their Journey, Angela R. Mann

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs), also referred to as Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs), are characterized by deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication, social interaction, and repetitive or restricted interests and behaviors. To date, much of the literature on ASDs has been conducted from a western perspective, although interest in ASDs from a global perspective has dramatically increased in recent years. Over the last decade, there have been numerous conceptual papers attempting to explain how autism might be experienced in other parts of the world. However, in actuality, little research has been conducted in this area, and further exploration of the experiences …

Embodying Social Practice: Dynamically Co-Constituting Social Agency, Brian W. Dunst

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, …

A Women's Talking Circle: A Narrative Study Of Positive Intergenerational Communication, Pamela Ferris-Olson

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Narrative inquiry was used to understand how women’s experiences with their mothers, grandmothers, and daughters and as mothers, grandmothers, and daughters contribute to their meaning making of communication and connectedness with unrelated women. A purposeful sample of nine women aged 31-69 from a small Midwestern city was studied. Six African American and three white women were chosen for their membership in a group that has regularly engaged in positive intergenerational communication for nearly two years. The women’s narratives of personal communicative experiences within their families and with the other women were recorded and interpreted to gain a deeper understanding of …

Meta-For, Vincent Mario Pignatiello Ii

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

A clinician is entrusted with the difficult task of organizing, integrating, and formulating a vast amount of information provided by a patient in order to conduct therapy. Typically, a theoretical paradigm is employed in this endeavor. This paper constructs a theory of theoretical paradigms—a meta-theory—to understand better how clinicians organize and understand patient information. The theory of theory posits that theoretical paradigms function as complex metaphors developed within a culture. The argument presented here utilizes research from various areas of psychology—including those focusing on cognitive research, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of theory—to develop the meta-theory. The central thesis of this research …

My Journey From Physician To Psychologist: Relational Touch In Psychotherapy, Brita S. Reed

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

A physician's armamentarium includes the presence of the tool of touch which is used not only to diagnose and to heal, but also to reassure patients that they are safe and well cared for in the hands of the physician. The use of touch in the practice of psychology, however, is relatively proscribed. In this essay, I examine how we, as psychologists, can best "hold" our clients without the use of touch. In the first part of this essay, I explore some theoretical considerations on relational touch in psychotherapy. I define relational touch as touch that occurs between people and …

Verbal Response Modes In Action:Microrelationships As The Building Blocks Of Relationship Role Dimensions, Ayesha Shaikh, Lynne M. Knobloch-Fedders, William B. Stiles

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Dimensions of interpersonal relationships, such as attentiveness, directiveness, and presumptuousness, have typically been assessed through impressionistic ratings or by aggregate scores derived from coding of specific (e.g., verbal) behaviors. However, the meanings of these dimensions rest on the interpersonal microrelationships that are actually observed by the raters or coders. In this qualitative study, the way these global relationship qualities were built from microrelationships at the utterance level was examined in passages from one medical interaction. Applications of microrelationships to future communications research are suggested.

Assessing The Readability Of Capital Pattern Jury Instructions, Rachel Small, Judith Platania, Brian L. Cutler

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Data obtained from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003) indicate that 29% of adults have a Basic level of prose literacy. Prose literacy refers to the knowledge and skills needed to comprehend and use information from continuous texts, such as editorials, news stories, and instructional materials. In the current study we examined each state’s capital sentencing instructions for their readability using a highly reliable word-analysis tool. We found that reading levels of sentencing instructions significantly surpassed the reading comprehension abilities of American adults. All but three states’ instructions were above the twelfth grade reading level. In addition, legal principles …

Probabilistic Cue Combination: Less Is More, Daniel Yurovsky, Ty W. Boyer, Linda B. Smith, Chen Yu

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non-normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the dilution effect, predictions made from the combination of two cues of different strengths are less accurate than those made from the stronger cue alone. Here we show that dilution is an adult problem; 11-month-old infants combine strong and weak predictors normatively. These results extend and add support for the less is more hypothesis: limited …

Creating An Sli Performance Profile With Load, Christy Marie Seidel

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this body of work was to gain a clearer understanding of the potential cognitive factors that may contribute to Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This study attempted to simulate a performance profile of SLI in typically developing children within a grammaticality judgment task, featuring structures historically difficult (third person singular –S and auxiliary BE) and easy (plural –S and progressive –ING) for individuals with SLI. Cognitive load was manipulated through the length of the sentences to be judged, and individual differences in phonological short term memory (PSTM) and working memory were measured (WM). For a successful simulation to …

The Effect Of Background Music On Emotional Processing : Evaluation Using A Dot Probe Paradigm, Haans Drieberg

Theses : Honours

Music plays an important role in all of the world's cultures, and background music is an ever-present phenomenon. Despite this, few studies have formally addressed whether background music influences the way people think. The aim of this study was to discover whether the presence of background music can influence cognition. Specifically, the differential effects of music rated as being positive (inducing happy emotions) and negative (inducing anxiety) on a person's allocation of attention was investigated. A dot probe task with positive and negative word pairings, matched for length and frequency was used in order to test the hypotheses that the …

Diversity Among Latino/A College Students And Its Impact On Student Organization Involvement, Enmanuel Mercedes

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Fathers At Birth : Women's Experiences Of Their Partner's Presence During Childbirth, Sarah Dlugosz

Theses : Honours

Childbirth is an ordeal of nature. It is an experience that elicits a range of emotions for the labouring woman; recognition of which has highlighted women’s needs for psychological support during the birth process. Research has shown that a mother’s perception of a positive birth is influenced by how supported she feels throughout her experience. In Australia it is common practice for the labouring woman’s partner to be her main support person; however research into women’s experiences of this phenomenon is scarce. This research aimed to explore the lived experiences of women in this context, asking the question “what meaning …

The Development Of Korean Children’S Abilities To Use Structural Cues For Sentence Comprehension, 연세대학교 심리학과, Minju Kim, Hyun Joo Song

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The present study used a preferential looking paradigm to examine the types of structural cues used by 24- and 21-months-old Korean children when processing the meaning of sentences with a novel verb in Korean. In the first two of the three experiments, participants were shown two videos positioned adjacent to each other, depicting independent or causative behaviors, and were made to listen to sentences with a nominative or accusative case marker. It was found that in Experiment 1, the 24-month-old infants looked at causative rather than independent behaviors for longer in the accusative condition, but not in the nominative condition. …

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …

Language As A Social Reality: The Effects Of The Infantilization Of Women, Chelsae R. Huot

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The current study examined how people’s perceptions can be affected by various terms used to describe women. Participants from a Midwestern university read a script describing 26-year-old Erin either as a “woman,” a “girl,” or “person.” Participants then rated Erin on eighteen different traits (e.g., mature, forceful). They also completed an ambivalent sexism scale and answered three questions about their use and interpretations of the terms “girl” and “woman.” It was predicted that the participants in the “woman” condition would rate Erin as more mature, responsible, warm, understanding, and successful than the participants in the “girl” condition. Also, it was …

Stigma And The Acceptability Of Depression Treatments Among African American Clergy, Connie Gardner

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this cross sectional study was to investigate stigma associated with depression treatments and to approximate its association with treatment acceptability among African American Clergy. There were 109 African American clergy who completed three measures: treatment specific stigma instrument, treatment acceptability instrument, and a demographic questionnaire, anonymously. Three hypotheses were tested using descriptive statistics, Mantel-Haenszel common odds ratio estimate, Pearson correlation coefficient, and ordinal logistic regression. Statistical analysis revealed stigma did increase with the expansion of the social circle; Christian mental health counseling had the highest acceptability rate among clergy not pastoral or lay counseling and there was …

Weight Loss Surgery Maintenance And Psychosocial Development: A Narrative Perspective, Carrie J. L. Hickman

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Bariatric surgery is not the panacea it was once thought to be for weight loss. Due to patient noncompliance issues, many weight loss surgery patients are relapsing and regaining the significant amounts of weight that bariatric surgery had initially helped them to lose. This failure is costly monetarily, psychologically, and medically to both the patient and to society. Using the narratives of 32 post-weight loss surgery patients, this narrative study explored: (a) whether Erikson's psychosocial stages of development occur after weight loss surgery, (b) whether successful patients (defined as those who are able to maintain their weight loss long term) …

Reflective Functioning And Differentiation-Relatedness During Pregnancy And Infant Attachment Outcomes At One Year, Amy Elizabeth Daley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study compared maternal reflective functioning (RF) and differentiation-relatedness (DR) during pregnancy and examined how these processes relate to the quality of mother-infant attachment at one year. The subjects were 35 mother-infant pairs drawn from the control group of a longitudinal treatment study, "Minding the Baby (MTB)," a federally and privately funded home intervention program developed jointly by the Yale School of Nursing and Yale Child Study Center, led by Drs. Lois Sadler and Arietta Slade, and targeting a low socio-economic status area of New Haven, CT. The Pregnancy Interview (Slade, 2003) was administered to the women (ages 14-25 years) …

Meg Coherence Imaging In Dyslexia: Activation Of Working Memory Pathways, Alfred Mansour

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The aims of this dissertation are to 1) review the genetic, neurodevelopmental, structural, and functional brain imaging studies that are the foundations of our understanding of dyslexia and 2) investigate the pattern of activation and functional connectivity of neuronal networks critical in working memory in dyslexics by means of magnetoenchephalographic (MEG) coherence imaging. Dyslexics showed an early onset of activation in the precentral gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus, which differed from controls where activation was initiated in posterior cortical regions (supramarginal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus). Further, dyslexics showed lower normalized amplitudes of activation in the right superior temporal …

The Enduring Impact Of One-Session Exposure Treatment On Selective Processing Bias And Explicit Memory Avoidance In Snake- And Spider-Fearful Participants, Karen Stanley-Kime

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The prevalence of anxiety disorders in the general population makes clarification of variables that contribute to the onset or maintenance of these disorders essential. Two such contributory variables are anxiety-induced selective processing bias and theorized subsequent explicit memory avoidance. The purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of one-session in vivo exposure treatment on selective processing bias and explicit memory avoidance immediately following successful treatment of stimulus-specific anxiety as well as at one-week and one-month follow-up. Participants (N = 60) were assigned to one of three groups: (1) the treatment group, composed of individuals who were fearful …

A Simplified Approach To Quantifying A Child's Bilingual Language Experience, Isabella Beninate

Intersections Fall 2020

There is an increasing need to accurately and efficiently describe a bilingual child's dynamic linguistic experience during audiological evaluations. This report documents an approach at qualitatively capturing linguistic exposure and usage information in a time-efficient manner. A well-known pediatric bilingual survey was administered to 83 parents of bilingual children, obtaining information on the child's exposure (input) to and usage (output) of Spanish and English on an hourly basis (17 time frames) during a typical weekday and weekend. Parents also completed a questionnaire that obtains demographic information of the child and family, parent-rated language proficiency of the child, and a family …

Behavior Based Sales: A Study Of Behavioral Techniques For Sales Performance Improvement, Peder Henrik Seglund

Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of a behavior-based sales training package on sales performance for the sales divisions of two different organizations located in separate cities in the Midwestern United States. The independent variable was a package that included: behavior-based sales training; feedback; and reinforcement. The primary dependent variable was sales performance results, which is a measure of the participants’ closing percentage. Secondary dependent variables included income, participant attendance at sales meetings, participant satisfaction, and changes in knowledge (at site 2 only).

The intervention package was implemented at each site over a course of …

Examining Crime Among College-Aged Christians: Are Christian Religious Beliefs Associated With Low Levels Of Criminal Activity?, Paul Rickert

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this correlational study into crime among college-aged Christians in the United States is to determine if indicating higher levels of Christian spiritual growth is associated with lower levels of criminal behavior. A convenience sample of college aged Christians was given an online survey to measure self-reported criminality measured by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports Part I and Part II and self-reported religious convictions as measured by Bufford et al.'s Christ-like Spiritual Growth Scale. This quantitative study then analyzed data generated from 57 respondents and found that reporting higher rates of Christ-like …