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Understanding Attitude Towards Help Seeking In Predicting Preference For Psychotherapeutic Orientation, Gregory J. Petronzi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This research examined the extent to which people’s dispositional qualities predict their psychotherapy preferences. Additionally, this study examined the extent to which people’s attitude toward seeking professional psychological help would predict their psychotherapy preferences above and beyond their dispositional characteristics.

An online survey was administered to participants (N = 312) for remuneration. Personality traits were measured using the HEXACO-60, attachment styles were measured using the Relationships Questionnaire (RQ) and Experiences in Close Relationships Scale- Short Form (ECR-S), attitude toward help seeking was measured with the Attitude Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale – Short Form (ATSPPHS-SF), and psychotherapy preferences were …

What Makes Us Conscious Is Not What Makes Us Human, Ezequiel Morsella, Erica B. Walker

Animal Sentience

Consistent with the promising proposal of Klein & Barron (K & B), we discuss how what makes us conscious appears to be distinct from and more widespread in the animal kingdom than what distinguishes us from other species. Many of the abilities that do distinguish humans from other species (e.g., syntax and co-articulation in speech production) can be mediated unconsciously. The kind of functional architecture proposed by K & B may engender an “action selection bottleneck” in both humans and nonhuman species. As noted by K & B, this bottleneck is intimately related to conscious processing.

Insect Consciousness: Fine-Tuning The Hypothesis, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg

Animal Sentience

Although we are mostly supportive, we point out the strengths and weaknesses of Klein & Barron’s (2016) hypothesis that insects have the most basic form of consciousness. The strengths are in their application of Bjorn Merker’s vertebrate-derived ideas to arthropods, using their deep knowledge of insect brains. The weaknesses involve the controversial aspects of some of Merker’s ideas. We describe how the latter can be modified to strengthen the authors’ case for insect consciousness.

Symptoms, Contributing Factors, And Screening For Perinatal Mood And Anxiety Disorders In U.S. Latinas: A Literature Review, Jennifer N. S. Massie

Master's Projects and Capstones

This literature review was conducted to gather the published information on the topic of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the Latina population in the United States. Academic databases were searched for articles published between 2005 and 2016. 60 articles were considered, and a final sample of 36 articles and websites was included in this review.

Evidence suggests that Latina women in the perinatal period (pregnant and up to one year postpartum) in the United States of America tend to have a higher risk and incidence of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders than White women, and a higher risk and …

Poverty And Internalizing Symptoms: The Indirect Effect Of Middle Childhood Poverty On Internalizing Symptoms Via An Emotional Response Inhibition Pathway, Christian G. Capistrano, Hannah Bianco, Pilyoung Kim

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Childhood poverty is a pervasive problem that can alter mental health outcomes. Children from impoverished circumstances are more likely than their middle-income counterparts to develop internalizing problems such as depression and anxiety. To date, however, the emotional-cognitive control processes that link childhood poverty and internalizing symptoms remain largely unexplored. Using the Emotion Go/NoGo paradigm, we examined the association between poverty and emotional response inhibition in middle childhood. We further examined the role of emotional response inhibition in the link between middle childhood poverty and internalizing symptoms. Lower income was associated with emotional response inhibition difficulties (indexed by greater false alarm …

Feel Or Perspective?, Mark Rowlands

Animal Sentience

The title of Klein & Barron’s well-argued and thought-provoking target article is, “Insects have the capacity for subjective experience.” However, they also frame their claim using the term “consciousness,” which they seem to take as equivalent to “subjective experience.” This assumed equivalence, I shall argue, is problematic in a way that might vitiate their central argument.

Genetic Risk For Increased Oxidative Stress In The Aging Brain:Implications For White Matter Integrity And Cognition, Lauren Salminen

Dissertations

Oxidative stress is a key mechanism of the aging process that can cause damage to brain white matter and cognitive functions. Allele variations of two polymorphisms (SOD2, CAT -262) have been associated with abnormalities in antioxidant enzyme activity, suggesting a risk for enhanced oxidative damage to brain white matter and cognition among older individuals with these genetic mutations. The present study utilized diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and neuropsychological assessment to compare differences in microstructural white matter integrity and cognitive performance among 96 older adults (age 50-85) with and without genetic risk factors of SOD2 (rs4880) and CAT -262 (rs1001179). Results …

Relationship Satisfaction And Health Outcomes In The Context Of Personality, Janine Galione

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Self-reported dissatisfaction in romantic relationships is a well-documented risk factor for impaired physical health outcomes. Most research has focused on identifying the mechanisms that could potentially explain this link, but it is just as important to explore what type of person is more vulnerable to the quality of romantic relationships. Relationship satisfaction may be more consequential in the context of some personality traits than others. We examined whether each of the five factor traits interacts with self-reported relationship satisfaction to predict three health outcomes over 18 months: major physical health events, health perceptions, and health behaviors. The hypotheses for this …

An Investigation Of The Relationships Between Gay Identity, Perceived Social Support, Gender-Role Conflict, And Parenting Intention In Childless Gay Men, Brian Amorello

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Parenting intention plays a fundamental role in one’s decision to become a parent. Higher levels of parenting intention indicate a higher likelihood of becoming a parent. For gay men, this process can be increasingly complex. There are a substantial number of factors that could play a role in a gay man’s decision to parent. Gay identity might play a role in the parenting intentions of gay men, as it has been found that loosely related constructs such as internalized heterosexism or outness do impact this decision. Perceived social support has been found to have both positive and deleterious effects on …

Age Differences In The Effects Of Semantic Context On Speech Perception: The Role Of Uncertainty., John Ryan Morton

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Recent experiments have shown that semantic context effects on spoken word recognition differ between young and older adults (Rogers, Jacoby & Sommers, 2012; Sommers et. al, in prep). These experiments have shown that older adults provide significantly more incorrect responses than young adults when context predicts a phonological competitor that is semantically more likely than the actual target item. Incorrectly responding with the semantically predicted item rather than the true target item, with high confidence, is referred to as false hearing. The general design used in the studies reported for this dissertation is to compare identification of sentence-final items (presented …

Universal Modes Of Awareness? A “Pre-Reflective” Premise, Uta M. Jürgens

Animal Sentience

Mark Rowlands holds that creatures endowed with pre-reflective awareness may qualify as persons: In pre-reflective awareness, the self and the unity of mental life are implicit in the stream of experience. Rowlands generalizes from an introspective analysis of pre-reflective consciousness in humans to pre-reflective awareness in general. I describe three examples of empirical findings that corroborate the assumption that animal minds have some of the same basic modes of pre-reflective awareness as human minds.

Are Prompts Provided By Electronic Books As Effective For Teaching Preschoolers A Biological Concept As Those Provided By Adults?, Gabrielle Strouse, Patricia Ganea

School of Education Faculty Publications

Research Findings: Prior research indicates that shared book reading is an effective method for teaching biological concepts to young children. Adult questioning during reading enhances children’s comprehension. We investigated whether adult prompting during the reading of an electronic book enhanced children’s understanding of a biological concept. Ninety-one 4-year-olds read about camouflage in 3 conditions. We varied how prompts were provided: (a) read by the book, (b) read by a researcher, or (c) given face to face by the researcher. There was an interaction between children’s initial vocabulary level and condition. Children with low vocabulary scores gave fewer camouflage responses …

What If Klein & Barron Are Right About Insect Sentience?, Bob Fischer

Animal Sentience

If Klein & Barron are right, then insects may well be able to feel pain. If they can, then the standard approach to animal ethics generates some implausible results. Philosophers need to develop alternatives to this framework to avoid them.

Subjective Experience And Moral Standing, Andy Lamey

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron’s analysis focuses on the capacity for any subjective experience at all. It does not seek to demonstrate that insects can experience pleasure and pain in particular. This would be something of which insects have not traditionally been thought capable. If further research were to demonstrate that one or more insect species turn out to be conscious, yet incapable of experiencing pleasure and pain, it would give rise to a philosophical question that ethicists have yet to answer: Would a creature that is conscious, but lacks the capacity to feel pain, have moral standing?

Exposing The “Shadow Side”: Female-Female Competition In Jane Austen’S Emma, Melissa M. Lyman

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many critics have examined the shifting nature of female friendship in Jane Austen’s Emma from cultural and historical angles. However, a comprehensive scientific analysis of female-female alliance and competition in the novel remains incomplete. The Literary Darwinist approach considers the motivations of fictional characters from an evolutionary perspective, focusing primarily on human cognition and behaviors linked to reproductive success, social control, and survival. While overt physical displays of male competition are conspicuous in the actions of the human species and those of their closest primate relatives, female aggression is often brandished psychologically and indirectly, which makes for a much more …

Neural Mechanisms Of Action Switching Moderate The Relationship Between Effortful Control And Aggression, Eric L. Rawls

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Aggression and violence are social behaviors that exact a significant toll on human societies. Individuals with aggressive tendencies display deficits in effortful control, particularly in affectively charged situations. However, not all individuals with poor effortful control are aggressive. This study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to decompose the chronology of cognitive functions underlying the link between effortful control and aggression. Specifically, this study investigates which ERPs moderate the effortful control - aggression association. We examined three successive ERP components (P2, N2 and P3) for stimuli that required effortful control. Results indicated that N2 activation, but not P2 or P3 activation, moderated …

Integrative Approach For Inference Of Gene Regulatory Networks Using Lasso-Based Random Featuring And Application To Psychiatric Disorders, Dongchul Kim, Mingon Kang, Ashis Kumer Biswas, Chunyu Liu, Jean Gao

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background

Inferring gene regulatory networks is one of the most interesting research areas in the systems biology. Many inference methods have been developed by using a variety of computational models and approaches. However, there are two issues to solve. First, depending on the structural or computational model of inference method, the results tend to be inconsistent due to innately different advantages and limitations of the methods. Therefore the combination of dissimilar approaches is demanded as an alternative way in order to overcome the limitations of standalone methods through complementary integration. Second, sparse linear regression that is penalized by the regularization …

Inducing Application Of Interdisciplinary Frameworks: Experiences From The Domains Of Information Literacy And Responsible Conduct Of Research, Anne E. Leonard, Jean E. Hillstrom

Publications and Research

Constructivist frameworks for information literacy and research ethics can be developed and nurtured in the context of an interdisciplinary course. Using the frameworks of two disciplines, students went on an experiential journey in support of ethics foundations through guest lectures and active learning exercises. This study describes the development and content of the responsible conduct of research and information literacy modules and discusses the role of each in an interdisciplinary course. Learning goals for both modules were evaluated by examining student responses in a free-writing exercise at the end of the semester, concluding with a discussion of the structural and …

Spatial Attention To Social Cues Is Not A Monolithic Process, Samuel M. Harding, Ty W. Boyer, Bennett I. Bertenthal

Psychology: Faculty Presentations (2009-2022)

Social stimuli are a highly salient source of information, and seem to possess unique qualities that set them apart from other well-known categories. One characteristic is their ability to elicit spatial orienting, whereby directional stimuli like eyegaze and pointing gestures act as exogenous cues that trigger automatic shifts of attention that are difficult to inhibit. This effect has been extended to non-social stimuli, like arrows, leading to some uncertainty regarding whether spatial orienting is specialized for social cues. Using a standard spatial cueing paradigm, we found evidence that both a pointing hand and arrow are effective cues, but that the …

Is Cortex Necessary?, Sean Allen-Hermanson

Animal Sentience

A key contention of Klein & Barron (2016) is that consciousness does not depend on cortical structures. A critical appraisal suggests they have overestimated the strength of their evidence.

Who Is A Person? Whoever You Want It To Be, Gwen J. Broude

Animal Sentience

Rowlands provides an expanded definition of personhood that preserves the requirement of unity of mental life from the orthodox definition but argues that implicit unity of mind is sufficient for conferring personhood. This allows more or all animals to be considered persons. Implicit unity of mind may be a bridge too far for those who endorse the orthodox account of personhood, and for good reasons. More fundamentally, who gets to decide what personhood entails or that personhood per se matters to such other issues as who receives legal or moral status and consideration? Perhaps we should worry less about definitions …

Are Insects Sentient?, Michael Tye

Animal Sentience

I comment on the methodology used by Klein & Barron for dealing with the question of insect sentience and I briefly make a proposal of my own. Once it is granted that insects are sentient, a further question arises: which insects are subject to which states of sentience? Do insects feel pain, for example? If so, which ones? On the further question, I note, Klein & Barron have nothing to say.

Animal Grieving And Human Mourning, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

King’s How animals grieve beautifully describes several ways in which animals and humans show a similar capacity for grief. Yet this book does not sufficiently emphasise the language-empowered capacity to objectify thinking and sentiments about death, which makes human mourning unique. Here I put this capacity into focus and relate it to the social-normative aspect of human mourning that seems to be missing in other animals.

Insects Join The Consciousness Fray, Bjorn H. Merker

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron's review of recent insect neurobiology helps correct the impression that insect behavior is orchestrated without the benefit of central integrative mechanisms. Given their existence, the authors go on to ask whether these central mechanisms also feature the kind of integrative operations that support sentience, and propose that they do. Along the way they raise a number of conceptual and evidentiary issues of fundamental importance for the neuroscience of consciousness, allowing me to comment favorably on a number of them. I conclude by pointing to ways in which the conception of insect sentience they outline might be tested …

The Effect Of Content-Related And Unrelated Break Activities On Test Results, Ryan Gentek

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have recently explored using brief breaks to maintain performance during prolonged tasks (Ariga and Lleras, 2011). However, research has yet to fully explore the effect of break activity content on the performance of the primary task. The present study sought to explore the differing effects of two break activities that were respectively similar and different in content to the main task. The present researcher compared past studies of task-switching and interruption studies to theories of the vigilance decrement and hypothesized that a brief similar task should result in significantly different main-task performance than the brief dissimilar task. 20 participating …

Insects Have Agency But Probably Not Sentience Because They Lack Social Bonding, J. H. Van Hateren

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron (2016) argue that insects have sentience because of functional similarities between the insect brain and vertebrate midbrain. Based on a recent theory of agency and consciousness, I argue that the functional similarities merely point to an advanced form of agency. Insects presumably lack the capacity for social bonding that may be required for subjective experiencing.

Understand Psychiatric And Neurodegenerative Disorders, Derin J. Cobia

BYU Research Development Office Research Networking Conference

This research will contribute to the advancement of neuropsychology and neuroscience by elucidating the neurobiological underpinnings of psychosis and dementia.

Understanding The Mechanism For Response Selection In Compatibility Tasks: Referential Coding Contrasted With Biological Properties Of The Hands, Nicole M. Murchison

Open Access Dissertations

Several researchers have hypothesized that the hands have unique effects on visual attentional resources and performance in response-selection tasks. This hand-specific processing hypothesis – that biological properties of the hands/palms uniquely affect visual attention and response selection – can be compared to a referential object coding hypothesis – that objects are coded in relation to other salient objects – favored in explanations of many compatibility effects. To test implications of these accounts, and specific effects that the hands (or general referential objects) have on attentional prioritization, I had participants perform three compatibility tasks using the hands or wooden blocks as …

The Neck As A Potential Site For Vestibular Tactile Sensory Substitution, Kelly A. Morrow

All NMU Master's Theses

In order to determine if the neck could be used a site for vestibular-to-tactile sensory substitution, two experiments were performed to take an in-depth look of the tactile sensitivity of the neck and how it responds to vibrotactile stimuli. Experiment 1 explored how participants respond to a vibrotactile neck device, the Arraysense, and how well this device conveys information about a single contact point on the participant’s skin. Results showed that determining the exact point of stimulation is difficult for participants, but they can identify the area of stimulation with ease. Additionally, our results showed that the front of the …

The Effects Of Ketamine Exposure On Nmda Receptor Mediated Synaptic Transmission In The Developing Brain - A Mechanistic Study Of Ketamine-Induced Neuroapoptosis, Saurabh Kokane

Psychology Theses - Archive

Ketamine is a widely used pediatric anesthetic because of its high potency in pediatric patients. Side-effects produced by ketamine anesthesia in adults are also not seen in children after ketamine use. However, several preclinical studies have shown that prolonged or repeated exposure of neonates to ketamine resulted in widespread death of neurons (neuroapoptosis) in almost all areas of the neonatal brain (Brambrink et al, 2012; Hayashi et al, 2002; Ikonomidou et al, 1999; Scallet et al, 2004; Zou et al, 2009a, b). Increasing evidence shows that this neuroapoptosis affects prenatal and neonatal brain adversely, specifically in brain areas involved in …