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Glucocorticoids And “Stress” Are Not Synonymous, Scott Macdougall-Shackleton

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Synopsis

Reference to glucocorticoids as “stress hormones” has been growing in prevalence in the literature, including in comparative and environmental endocrinology. Although glucocorticoids are elevated in response to a variety of stressors in vertebrate animals, the primary functions of glucocorticoids are not responding to stressors and they are only one component of complex suite of physiological and behavioral responses to stressors. Thus, the use of the short-hand phrase “stress hormone” can be misleading. Further, simply measuring glucocorticoids is not equivalent to measuring a stress response, nor is manipulating glucocorticoids equivalent to exposing an animal to a stressor. In this commentary …

Allocation To Groups: Examples Of Lord's Paradox, Daniel B. Wright

Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education Faculty Research

Background Educational and developmental psychologists often examine how groups change over time. Two analytic procedures – analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and the gain score model – each seem well suited for the simplest situation, with just two groups and two time points. They can produce different results, what is known as Lord's paradox. Aims Several factors should influence a researcher's analytic choice. This includes whether the score from the initial time influences how people are assigned to groups. Examples are shown, which will help to explain this to researchers and students, and are of educational relevance. It is shown that …

Need Fulfillment And Happiness In Botswana, Carolyn Moe

Theses and Dissertations

Happiness has been an important aspect of people’s lives spanning centuries and continents; as such, it is a widely researched area. A current prominent theory in happiness research is Needs Theory which has the premise that there are universal human needs and having these needs met would lead to a person’s happiness. Most often, the needs referenced are those presented by Abraham Maslow including needs of physiology, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem, knowing and understanding, aesthetics, self-actualization and transcendence. However, some studies have found that there are individuals who do not fit this theory either through having their …

Character Strengths Of Ninth Grade Students In Accelerated Curricula: A Mixed-Methods Investigation, Hannah L. Gilfix

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students in accelerated curricula tend to have greater stress when compared to students in general education (Suldo, Shaunessy, & Hardesty, 2008). It is important for stakeholders to be able to help these students reach their goals and attain happiness. One potential method to help these students is to attend to their character strengths. People who effectively utilize their character strengths have achieved numerous positive outcomes including greater levels of well-being, self-esteem, and positive affect (Proctor, Malby, & Linley, 2011; Quinlan, Swain, Cameron, & Vella-Brodrick, 2014; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Kashan, & Hurling, 2011). Unfortunately, there is a lack of research on …

Using Meta-Analysis To Assess Affective Outcomes In A Multi-Course Qr Module Intervention, James Friedrich, Kelley D. Strawn

Numeracy

When quantitative reasoning(QR) interventions share a common hypothesis or goal, a promising approach for evaluation involves integrating separate analyses through the use of meta-analysis. This paper reports an assessment of a module-based QR intervention distributed across 20 courses at a single institution. Topics and participating courses were diverse, including arts & humanities, quantitative behavioral sciences, and natural sciences & mathematics groupings, but all addressed the shared affective goals of reducing student QR self-doubt and increasing appreciation for QR value and utility. With a local framework to guide module development, we assess these outcomes using reliable self-report measures in a pre-post …

Understanding The Mechanisms Between Job Stress And Employee Sleep: A Daily Diary Study, Marijana L. Arvan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated how three job stressors, workload, unfinished tasks, and mistreatment from coworkers and supervisors, manifest in sleep impairment. Using the transactional model of stress, allostatic load model, the cognitive activation theory of stress (CATS), and findings from the sleep medicine literature, each job stressor was predicted to have three distinct pathways to sleep quality: an affective path (anger or anxiety), a cognitive path (anticipatory stress or rumination), and a behavioral path (sleep hygiene behaviors). The proposed models argued for two-stage mediation, in which the cognitive and affective strains of job stressors impact sleep quality both directly and …

Ethnic Identity As A Protective Factor In Early Adolescent Youth Depression: An Investigation Of Differences By Race And Gender, Leah Bonilla

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adolescent mental illness is a major concern in the Unites States. The adolescent stage is a critical developmental period of physical and mental changes, thus it is important to understand protective factors associated with positive wellbeing. The current study aimed to explore: (a) the associations among race, gender, ethnic identity, and depressive symptoms among eighth grade adolescents, (b) to what extent are there differences in degree of depressive symptoms among youth based on race and gender, and (c) to what extent a strong sense of ethnic identity serves as a protective factor against the development of depression among youth with …

Longitudinal Measurement Invariance Of The Child Problematic Trait Inventory In Older Chinese Children, Jie Luo, Xuetong Wong, Meng-Cheng Wang, Xintong Zhang, Jiaxin Deng, Chuxian Zhong, Yu Gao, Shi-San Qi

Publications and Research

The Child Problematic Traits Inventory (CPTI) is a newly developed informant-rated instrument to measure psychopathic traits during early childhood. The aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal measurement invariance of the CPTI in a group of Chinese schoolchildren. Mothers of 585 children aged 8 to 12 years (50% girls) completed the CPTI twice with one-year interval. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the CPTI had strict invariance (i.e., equality of factor patterns, loadings, intercepts, and item uniqueness) across time. Furthermore, the internal consistencies for the CPTI subscales were good at both time points and the stability coefficients over time …

Diminished Agency: Psychological Science And The Role Of Choice In Goals And Actions, James Van Slyke, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Prejudice Asymmetry: The Cultural Acceptance Of Sexism, Sophie Kuchynka

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sexism tends to be a culturally accepted form of prejudice. I propose the relatively strong trivialization of societal sexism stems from the unique benefits that men receive from the gender status hierarchy, compared to other types of group-based hierarchies. Three studies examined why people, men in particular, trivialize or justify gender bias in relation to other types of group-based biases. Study 1 was a correlational study that examined whether participants downplay the existence and social harm of gender bias in relation to racial, religious, and sexual orientation bias, moderated by participant gender. Participants reported stronger trivialization and denial of gender …

Suicide Literacy And Laypersons’ Ability To Accurately Recognize Suicide Warning Signs And Risk Factors, Salman Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Suicide is considered a public health crisis in the United States due to the large number of individuals attempting and completing suicide each year. Oftentimes, the first line of defense or “gatekeepers” against suicide is non-mental health professionals. The body of literature on suicide risk assessment has not explored the efficacy of non-mental health professionals’ ability to accurately recognize various levels of suicide risk. This study focused on examining whether non-mental health professionals ability to accurately recognize suicide risk in others is influenced by their level of suicide literacy (knowledge regarding the various aspects of suicide). This study also examined …

Home-Based Cognitive Monitoring: The Role Of Personality And Predictors Of Adherence And Satisfaction, Nasreen A. Sadeq

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the last several decades, a growing awareness of the benefits of regular screening for common health conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases, has paved the way for preventative screenings to become routine in medical settings. Given that cognitive impairment is frequently reported as the number one worry of older adults, home-based cognitive monitoring may be an innovative solution that allows middle aged and older adults to take an active role in monitoring an important aspect of their health. Although several home-based cognitive monitoring programs have been validated for use in clinical and home-based settings, the Cogstate Brief Battery …

Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon, Jeffrey Sundberg

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Falling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise Of Reich’S Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, And Crisis In Reich’S Bio-Energetic Spiritual Psychology, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and even transform a globalizing materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. The later Reich developed a highly original version of a “vitalistic” transpersonal psychology, as his “religion for the children of the future,” which needs …

Late Adolescent Evaluating Responsibility Attributions And Social Distance Preferences Toward Peers With Mental Illnesses, Hannah Jo Turner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

No abstract provided.

Examining Collegiate Students’ Perceptions Of Date Rape And Sexual Assault, Jalen Rhodes

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine how collegiate males and females perceived date rape and sexual assault by looking into their views on sexual scripts, consent, and alcohol in dating situations. Participants consisted of 323 male and female undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes at a mid-south university. All participants were directed to an online questionnaire and were randomly assigned to one of four versions of a vignette where a man and a woman are at a party together. After reading their vignette, all participants answered researcher-created questions pertaining to the behavior of the people in the vignette …

Infant Emotion Regulation With Mothers And Fathers: The Roles Of Infant Temperament And Parent Psychopathology, Ashley Quigley

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The ability to regulate emotions is a key part of infants’ social and emotional development, but this ability may differ due to different factors internal and external to the infant. The current study examined the association between infant temperament and parent psychopathology to predict emotion regulation strategies in a sample of 4-montholds using the diathesis-stress model (Monroe & Simons, 1991). Parent-report questionnaires were used to measure infant temperament (the Infant-Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, IBQ-R; Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) and parental psychopathology (Inventory of Depression and Anxiety, IDAS; Watson et al., 2007). Infants’ use of parent-focused, attentional distraction, and self-soothing strategies were rated …

Preschool Self-Regulation: A Predictor Of School Readiness, Romin Emmanuel Geiger

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Substantial evidence from previous research has supported the idea that greater self-regulation in the form of “cool” self-regulation or executive functioning and “hot” self-regulation or effortful control is associated with higher academic achievement within the preschool years and school readiness in the kindergarten years (Anaya, 2016; Carlson, 2005). However, there are only a few studies that assess the prediction of school readiness through validated cool and hot self-regulation tasks (Carlson, 2005; Krain, Wilson, Arbuckle, Kastellanos, & Wilham, 2006; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & Posner, 2003; Thompson & Giedd, 2000). There also few studies examining to what extent cool and hot-self-regulation tasks …

An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Pro-Anorexia Content On Eating Disorder Development, Skyler Green

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Pro-anorexia content, or content that promotes the development and sustainment of eating disorders, is an important topic that has been understudied in the literature. Previous research has primary examined the content featured on pro-anorexia websites, but few researchers have conducted experimental studies examining the direct impact viewing pro-anorexia content has on individuals struggling with an eating disorder. The current study was an experimental study that exposed participants to three conditions: proanorexia content, pro-recovery content, and a control group. The researcher examined the impact that viewing the three levels of content for 10 minutes had on individuals who met criteria and …

Human-Animal Bonding In Animal-Assisted Interventions In Counseling, Ariann Evans Robino, Virginia Buechener-Maxwell

Faculty Proceedings, Presentations, Speeches and Lectures

Animal-assisted interventionists incorporating an animal into clinical practice must harness the human–animal bond for therapeutic benefit. Therapists have a duty to understand the complex relational processes occurring in this modality (Stewart, Chang, Parker, & Grubbs, 2016). This paper describes the results of a preliminary study exploring the bonding and attachment processes in animal-assisted interventions in counseling (AAI-C).

Macaque Anterior Cingulate Cortex Deactivation Impairs Performance And Alters Lateral Prefrontal Oscillatory Activities In A Rule-Switching Task, Liya Ma, Jason L. Chan, Kevin Johnston, Stephen G. Lomber, Stefan Everling

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2019 Ma et al. In primates, both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) are key regions of the frontoparietal cognitive control network. To study the role of the dACC and its communication with the dlPFC in cognitive control, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) from the dlPFC before and during the reversible deactivation of the dACC, in macaque monkeys engaging in uncued switches between 2 stimulus-response rules, namely prosaccade and antisaccade. Cryogenic dACC deactivation impaired response accuracy during maintenance of—but not the initial switching to—the cognitively demanding antisaccade rule, which coincided with a …

Examining The Effects Of Stress And Age On Neural Reward Processing: Considerations For The Role Of Individual Differences In Autonomic Reactivity, William Mccuddy

Dissertations (1934 -)

Acute stress is unavoidable and may hinder basic reward processing underlying adaptive decision-making. Additionally, older adults may be at an increased risk of poor decision-making after exposure to acute stress due to age-related changes in cognitive and autonomic functioning. The current study assessed the influence of acute stress, autonomic reactivity, and age on a simple behavioral task during fMRI. Specifically, old and young adults completed a basic reward processing paradigm (i.e., where participants received monetary rewards and punishments) after exposure to acute stress (i.e., social evaluative cold pressor) or control procedure between-subjects. In the young group, differential responses for monetary …

A Culturally-Sensitive Exploration Of Adversity And Resilience Among Trinidadians, Christabel Léonce

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Research done by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as abuse, household challenges, and neglect were linked to later health risks in life and overall well-being (CDC, 2019). Adverse experiences occur worldwide in a variety of culturally-specific ways. Research involving youth in Trinidad and Tobago outlines emerging concerns with violence in homes, communities, and schools (Baker-Henningham et al., 2009). Currently, however, there is limited data on adverse experiences and their long-term impact in Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidadians (n = 79), born and lived in Trinidad till 18 years was surveyed, ranging from ages …

Personality Inventory Dsm-5: A Spanish Translation For Hispanics In The United States, Jessica Abigail Carmona

Theses and Dissertations

The Personality Inventory DSM-5 (PID-5) was created to measure personality pathology and help in the development of a dimensional conceptualization of personality disorders (Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol, 2012). It measures five maladaptive personality traits: Negative Affect, Detachment, Antagonism, Disinhibition and Psychoticism. The PID-5 has also garnered significant support for its hierarchical structure, five-factor structure across samples and translations, and its ability to predict variance in internalizing and externalizing disorders (Krueger & Markon, 2014). The current study builds on this literature by translating the PID-5 into Spanish spoken in Latin America and testing the replicability of the five-factor structure, …

Assessing The Functions Of Prescription Stimulant Abuse Among College Students, Matthew J. Dwyer

Theses and Dissertations

Non-medical prescription stimulant use (NMPSU), such as using medications like Ritalin, Adderall, and Concerta without a prescription or at a higher dosage than prescribed, is a rising trend in American adults. Use is most prevalent among college age adults (18-25 years old). Survey research among experienced users has identified several reasons college students are engaging in NMPSU, including enhancement of cognitive, athletic, and social performance, but less is known about how the relative reinforcing value differs based on the reasons of use. Behavioral economic drug purchase tasks have been used to capture reinforcer strength and motivation related to use of …

Exploring Construct Validity And Measurement Invariance Of The Cyberbullying Experiences Survey, Kendall Moore

Theses and Dissertations

Given recent calls for advancing valid instrumentation in the field of cyberaggression, the present study evaluated construct validity and measurement invariance for the Cyberbullying Experiences Survey (CES) in a high school and college student sample. A series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), reliability analyses, and a nomological net evaluation were conducted to address these aims. The data did not provide support for the hypothesized four-factor model for cyberaggression or cybervictimization (i.e., unwanted contact, malice, deception, and public humiliation). Upon implementing suggested and theoretically supported modification indices, support for a four-factor solution for both cyberaggression and cybervictimization was provided.

To subsequently …

Threat Perception Alteration As An Effect Of Use-Of-Force Simulation Training, Ellyse Vandyke

All NMU Master's Theses

Due to the nature of police work police officers are often placed in life threatening situations. To prepare officers for these interactions police academies employ use-of-force simulations to train relevant skills such as situational awareness and judgement. Repeated exposure to threatening situations, such as those in the use-of-force simulations, may alter the threat perception of the participant. Using self-report measures of anxiety (STAI-6 Item) and affect (PANAS), as well as respiration rate data, and short answer self-reports, the present study aims to determine if perception of threat is altered as a result of the use-of-force training, both directly after one …

Evaluating Changes In Error-Monitoring Electrocortcial Responses As An Outcome Of Attention Bias Modification Training, Jeremy Andrzejewski

All NMU Master's Theses

Anxiety disorders are among one of the most debilitating and prevalent mental disorders. Maladaptive anxiety has been associated with enhanced attention bias to threat as well as heightened error-monitoring following an erroneous response. In an effort to reduce an anxious individual’s attention bias to threat, an attention training paradigm known as attention bias modification (ABM) was developed. While ABM training has demonstrated the ability to reduce attention bias and anxiety symptoms, there are inconsistencies in the magnitude of symptom reduction and there is a lack of neuroimaging support in regards to ABM outcome. Therefore, this study evaluated the outcome of …

Discriminative Stimulus Effects Of Putative Antipsychotic Drugs, Alex Lekander

All NMU Master's Theses

This study attempted to further explore the discriminative stimulus properties of antipsychotic drugs, by establishing the typical antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine, and the atypical antipsychotic drug clozapine as discriminative stimulus in two different groups of rats. The rats trained to discriminate chlorpromazine from vehicle failed to do so reliably, however nine of ten rats trained to discriminate 1.25 mg/kg clozapine from vehicle were able to acquire the discrimination in 19.1 sessions. The clozapine cue partially generalized (63.13% drug lever responding [SEM = ± 18.91]) to the antimalarial drug methylene blue at the 7.5 mg/kg dose, but not to the antimalarial quinacrine. …