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Analysis Of A Process-Based Approach To Case Formulation And Treatment With Acceptance And Commitment Therapy, Callum Smith

Dissertations

Process-Based Therapy (PBT) is a novel approach to clinical research and practice. PBT is proposed as an alternative model to classic diagnostic frameworks. It emphasizes conceptualizing psychological problems through adaptive and maladaptive processes of change. The aim of current PBT research is to develop reliable methods of organizing change processes into network models. In network models, change processes are presented in nodes connected by lines and arrows to represent the interacting relationships between those processes for a given individual. The present project aims to evaluate the inter-rater reliability and predictive validity of a novel semi-structured interview method to aid in …

A Qualitative Study Of Immigration Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, And The College Experience Among Mena Immigrant Students, Braa A. Elkhidir

Dissertations

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrant students who are seeking to earn a higher education in the United States have to navigate acculturative stressors and systemic barriers. Prior research has focused primarily on the challenges MENA immigrant students experience without deeply exploring how these students adapt and grow. The focus in this qualitative study was to understand how MENA immigrant college students experience and make meaning of their academic journeys. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore the academic experiences of seven MENA immigrant college students in the United States and assess how acculturative stressors, personal strengths, coping strategies, and …

Love’S Dialects: Proposed Additions In Emotionally Focused Therapy For Intercultural Couples, Nicola Heurich

Dissertations

Intercultural romantic relationships have become an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary society due to globalization, migration, and cross-cultural exchange (Livingston & Brown, 2017). However, these partnerships are also associated with elevated levels of relational distress and higher rates of conflict, separation, and divorce, underscoring the need for culturally responsive approaches in couple therapy (Bustamante et al., 2011; Genç & Su, 2021).

Research on intercultural couples remains limited both within and beyond Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and despite increased recognition of cultural factors, there is still insufficient guidance on navigating differing cultural contexts within a dyad (Linhof & Allan, 2018).

The …

An Evaluation Of Staff Training To Teach Implementation Of Functional Analysis Of Inappropriate Mealtime Behavior, Lauren Marie Lightner

Theses and Dissertations

Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) along with other feeding disorders are prevalent in both neurotypical children along with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities. Children with feeding challenges often exhibit inappropriate mealtime behavior (IMB) to avoid consuming non-preferred foods. It is pertinent to determine the function of IMB in order to create an efficacious treatment; one such assessment is the functional analysis (Iwata et al. 1982/1994). Iwata et al. (2000) taught students how to implement a functional analysis of self-injurious behavior using behavioral skills training. Since the assessment’s development, it has been extended to various …

Before Urgent Fury: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Grenada During The Ford And Carter Administrations, Nicholas Jake Durell

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

When the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, it experienced a military and psychological defeat unlike any in its modern history. Following President Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader who had become Vice President, now assumed the presidency of a deeply fractured nation. As the Cold War persisted, Washington struggled to reassert its superpower status globally while desperately avoiding further foreign entanglements. Consequently, the Ford administration adopted a cautiously detached approach to foreign policy, a strategy vividly illustrated by its posture toward the Eastern Caribbean. This calculated ambivalence, continued by the …

Exploring Discretionary Benefits’ Impact On Michigan Public Sector Employees, Sydnie N. Smith

Master of Public Administration Capstone Papers

Productivity, well-being, and retention are factors that impact organizational success and goal attainment; in the public sector in Michigan, employees are the most valuable asset. This research paper seeks to answer the following question: How does the adoption of unlimited PTO policies shape workforce morale, productivity, and retention in public sector employment? Current research into paid leave policy’s impact on employees is scant, it is further limited in the scope of public sector employees. This paper believes that research is needed to determine the relationship between paid leave benefits and employee productivity, well-being/morale, and retention as it could improve public …

Wisdom In Counseling And Psychotherapy: A Conceptual Model For Practice, Mitchell Waters

Posters

Wisdom is increasingly recognized as an important construct in counseling and psychotherapy, yet its clinical application remains underdeveloped. This article presents an integrative model of wisdom as a dynamic, context-sensitive capacity that coordinates cognitive, affective, temporal, and spiritual processes in response to complex life challenges. The model includes four dimensions: (a) cognitive-affective integration, combining emotion and reason; (b) temporal integration, linking past experiences with future possibilities; (c) intrinsic spirituality, fostering meaning-making and reducing egocentric bias; and (d) regulatory flexibility, enabling adaptive shifts among domains. Implications for therapeutic practice, outcomes, and future research are discussed.

The Memphis Gambling Screen: A Clinical Validation Study Of An Enhanced-Readability Self-Report Measure For Gambling Disorder, Natasha Bourgoin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Precise identification of gambling disorder can be difficult when commonly used screeners vary in clarity and diagnostic accuracy. The Memphis Gambling Screen (MGS) was developed as an enhanced-readability self-report measure to improve item comprehension and strengthen the diagnostic accuracy of DSM-5 gambling disorder. This study evaluates the psychometric properties and diagnostic accuracy of the MGS with a combined sample of individuals seeking treatment for problem gambling or substance use disorder and college students with a recent history of gambling (N = 232). Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the MGS, and another commonly used measure, the Problem Gambling Severity Index …

Race, Sex, And Age Disparities In Homicide Clearance Rates In Tennessee: An Intersectional Approach, Teliyah Cobb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Demographic factors can influence homicide solvability. This study examines the relationship between victim characteristics and homicide clearance rates in Tennessee from 2001 to 2023. Using an intersectional approach, it assesses whether victim characteristics both individually and in combination are related to case solvability. Variables of interest include: (1) victim race, age range, and sex; (2) year the case was reported; (3) crime type; (4) whether the case was cleared; and (5) the circumstances leading to clearance. A total of 11,534 homicide cases from the Tennessee Incident-Based Reporting System were analyzed.

Findings indicate that individual victim characteristics do not significantly predict …

Weathering More Than Storms: Understanding The Mental Health Disparities Of Black Farmers In The Appalachian Region, Aliyah Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black farmers in Appalachia represent a vital and historically marginalized population within one of America’s most economically distressed regions. Black farmers have endured generations of systemic racism, resulting in land loss, economic hardship, and mental stressors. This study examines the intersection of race, agriculture, and behavioral health to illustrate how structural barriers and cultural stigmas shape the mental well-being of Black farmers across Appalachia.

Findings from the analysis will guide the development of a conceptual model based on constructs from the Social-Ecological Model (SEM), Intersectionality Theory, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). This study will use Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) conducted …

Wisdom In Counseling And Psychotherapy: A Conceptual Model For Practice, Mitchell Waters

Papers

Wisdom is increasingly recognized as a critical construct in counseling and psychotherapy, yet it remains conceptually diffuse and underdeveloped for clinical application. This article proposes an integrative conceptual model of wisdom that extends the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) WISE MIND framework by incorporating temporal and self-transcendent dimensions. Wisdom is defined as a dynamic, context-sensitive capacity to coordinate cognitive, affective, temporal, and spiritual processes in response to complex life demands. The model includes four components: (a) cognitive–affective integration, reflecting the synthesis of emotion and reason; (b) temporal integration, involving adaptive coordination of past experiences and future possibilities; (c) self-transcendent orientation, conceptualized …

Remotely Assessing Foundational Skills Of 5–14-Year-Old Children: A Six-Country Psychometric Evaluation Of The Remote Assessment Of Learning (Real), Elizabeth Hentschel, Sascha Hein, Nan Li, Clay Westrope, Julia Taladay, Gillian Valentine, James Leckman, Amira Abdurahman, Fatime Bachir, Farah Darwazeh

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

Approximately 250 million children worldwide are out of school. There is growing consensus for investing in feasible, contextually appropriate, psychometrically tested, remote tools to support quality education in low-resource contexts, including low- and middle-income countries and crisis-affected contexts. Save the Children developed the Remote Assessment of Learning (ReAL) to assess 5–14-year-old children's foundational learning. Children (N = 4,840) were sampled from Cambodia, Mozambique, Niger, the occupied Palestinian territories, the Philippines, and Sudan, with an approximately equal proportion of male and female children within each country. The study assessed inter-rater reliability, factor structure, item slope and difficulty, criterion validity, …

Comparing Online Versus In-Person Administration Of Cognitive Tasks And Evaluating Their Predictive Utility Of Inattention Symptoms And Related Behaviors, Cameron Pothoven

Master's Theses

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with less developed working memory (WM) processes, theorized to be a core contributing factor in the development of ADHD and a predictor of ADHD symptom severity (Alderson et al., 2013; Rapport et al., 2008). Objective measures inclusive of working memory tasks, when used in conjunction with self-report measures, have been previously shown to increase the accuracy of diagnosing ADHD (Marshal et al., 2021. However, given that WM is typically assessed by a trained clinician, it is unclear how accurate and comparable online administration of adapted WM tasks are to their in-person counterparts. …

A Novel Edge-Based Accuracy Assessment Framework For Target Detection From Remotely Sensed Images, Yingfan Zhang, Weiyi Hou, Lyndon Estes, Rui Lu, Shijie Zhu, Aiyin Zhang, Zhou Shi, Su Ye

Geography

Accuracy assessment is critical for evaluating map quality and improving algorithms for target detection in remotely sensed images. Traditional methods for assessing a target-detection task were often performed by estimating the relative pixels of correct and incorrect identifications (e.g., F1 score). However, this approach only considers the pixel-by-pixel agreement and ignores important aspects of positional errors and target object quality. To provide comprehensive diagnostic information, we propose a novel edge-based accuracy assessment framework. This framework firstly applied a newly proposed assessment tool, Dynamic Epsilon-band Accuracy Function (DEAF), which is a linear fitting function from a series of edge accuracies associated …

Nasa Earth Exchange HawaiʻI Downscaled Climate Projections Cmip6 (Nex-Hidcp-Cmip6) Dataset, Bridget Thrasher, Ian Brosnan, Abby Frazier, Kristen Sanflippo, Matthew P. Lucas

Geography

Hawaiʻi’s complex topography, pronounced microclimates, and geographic isolation make coarse-scale global climate model output inadequate for local planning, and high-resolution climate projections tailored to the state have until now been lacking. To address this gap, we introduce the NASA Earth eXchange Hawaiʻi Downscaled Climate Projections CMIP6 (NEX-HIDCP-CMIP6), a new archive of downscaled historical and future climate projections based on output from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) over the State of Hawaiʻi. The dataset covers the years 1950–2100 and includes three variables (maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and precipitation) from five CMIP6 experiments (the historical experiment and the …

Theory-Informed Generative Agents For Human Behavioral Modeling In Disasters, Liming Lu

All Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theory-informed generative-agent framework for modeling human behavioral decisions in disasters. Existing flood and disaster preparedness models often emphasize physical hazards, infrastructure exposure, or statistical correlations, but they struggle to capture the heterogeneous and evolving choices households make. This limitation is especially important for climate-related hazards, where future damage depends not only on changes in rainfall, inundation, and urban development, but also on decentralized protective actions such as house elevation, flood insurance, evacuation, and early preparedness. The dissertation integrates two empirical studies: a flood-risk study in Charleston, South Carolina, and a household disaster-preparedness study across hurricane contexts. …

Speakin’ Southern: A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Lived Experiences Of College Students With A Southern Dialect, Michael J. Farmer

All Dissertations

Southern dialects are often stereotyped, and southern speakers are often negatively perceived.  The prejudice they may face is perpetuated by Standard Language Ideology (SLI) in which linguistic discrimination is intentionally or unintentionally perpetuated through power structures. While scholarship exists regarding southern dialectal speakers facing SLI in settings such as K-12 classrooms, the workforce, and dialectally unique communities, research into southern dialectal college students navigating the power structure of higher education is sparse. What research does exist in this space often utilizes a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to track linguistic variables in light of these experiences. This dissertation, however, …

Essays On Reputation And Feedback System In Digital Markets, Huiyu Yang

All Dissertations

Online review systems play an increasingly important role in reducing information frictions in digital markets. This dissertation studies three aspects of these systems, including sellers' incentives to manipulate reviews, the design of rating systems, and how horizontally differentiated negative reviews affect consumer demand. The first chapter investigates key drivers influencing online sellers' decisions to invest in fake reviews. I first construct a model in which sellers strategically invest in fake reviews to influence consumers, who form beliefs about product quality based on observed reviews. I then empirically test the model's predictions on the main determinants of fake review prevalence using …

Beyond Going Green: A Multilevel Examination Of Sustainability Climate Formation, Meredith Pool

All Dissertations

Going green at the organizational level does not automatically produce a shared sustainability climate among employees. How individual perceptions of organizational sustainability support form, and under what signal conditions they converge, has been theorized but rarely tested experimentally. The present study examined these questions using a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial vignette experiment (N = 332) with full-time employed adults, manipulating organizational sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), team-level sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), and team functional context (operations vs. analytics). Two large main effects emerged. Organizational signal strength produced a large effect on Perceived Organizational Sustainability …

A Socio-Cognitive Process Theory Of Error Response: Evidence From Shot Selection In Basketball, Jordan Britt

All Dissertations

Errors in organizational research have traditionally been conceptualized as static, preventable outcomes as opposed to dynamic events embedded within changing social environments. This dissertation reframes this by conceptualizing post-error response as an ongoing identity-regulation process. Drawing from self-presentation theory and identity control theory (ICT), it was hypothesized that an error’s deviation from expectation and its social context (self, teammate, or opponent error) influence post-error caution. These results were hypothesized to be greater when audience salience and situational importance were higher. Using play-by-play shot selection data from the 2023-2025 NCAA Division I basketball seasons as a natural testing environment, this study …

Can Kinematics Specify Tool Use Affordances?, Tyler Duffrin

All Dissertations

Object properties such as length, shape, and heaviness, as well as affordance-based properties such as strike-with-ability and poke-with-ability, can be perceived via dynamic touch as functions of inertia tensor invariants. The primary question addressed here was whether people can perceive these same power and precision properties for purely virtual objects, which lack dynamic physical forces. The Kinematic Specification of Dynamics (KSD) principle asserts that missing dynamics are lawfully specified by kinematic (visual) motion patterns, such that kinematic information alone may support successful interactions with virtual objects. In three experiments, we investigated (1) whether virtual reality (VR) users could calibrate to …

Equity In Healthcare: Exploring The Viability Of Reparations As A Means To Address Racial Health Inequities, Invest In The Community, And Bestow Reconciliation For African Americans, Alesia A. Smith

All Dissertations

Racial health inequities remain among the most persistent forms of health disparity in the United States, despite decades of policy efforts to eliminate them. African Americans, in particular, continue to experience disproportionately poor health outcomes rooted in generations of institutional racism and in inequities in the social determinants of health, income, wealth, education, housing, and access to care, disparities that the COVID-19 pandemic further exposed and intensified. These enduring, structurally produced harms strengthen the case for reparative investment as a potential intervention.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine whether reparations, framed as a community-based investment in health, …

The Rhetoric Of Flattery: Embodiment And Persuasion In Papal Discourse, Gabrielle Wilkosz

All Dissertations

What makes flattery so persuasive? An analysis of three speeches from contemporary popes, preeminent leaders in the Catholic Church, finds strategic use of compliments, emotional language, and ideas about human dignity. These approaches can persuade world leaders and institutions such as the United Nations and the United States Congress to act morally and responsibly. Flattery can encourage ethical action and reduce the feeling of emergency, creating an enduring, complex dynamic of power that is seen at many levels of narrative.

Aegic Blogposts - Climate Impacts On Grain Production, Ross Kingwell, Nicholas Thorsager, David Stephens, Ian Foster, Imma Farre

Grain and other field crops published reports

The Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre (AEGIC) was an independent, not-for-profit organisation established in 2012 by the Western Australian Government and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). Its core mission was to increase the value and international competitiveness of Australia’s multibillion-dollar export grains industry. AEGIC ceased operation at the end of 2025.

Early in its history between 20 to 30 staff from the former Western Australian Department of Agriculture were seconded to AEGIC. Following the formation of DPIRD, AEGIC continued to receive substantial annual funding support from DPIRD.

This publication is a legacy document containing collated AEGIC blog posts …

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Jison Jiei: Offensive Realism And Imperial Japan's Spiral Toward Regional Hegemony, John William Dodd

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis examines Imperial Japan’s march from the Mukden Incident of 1931 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through the lens of offensive realism. It asks to what extent Japan’s prewar grand strategy can be understood as a bid for regional hegemony, and what that interpretation reveals about the relationship between power politics, international law, and future great-power crises. Rather than treating Japanese expansion as irrational madness or reducing it only to ideology or militarism, this thesis argues that Japanese leaders acted according to a recognizable strategic logic.

Proceeding from theory to historical analysis, this project first situates …

Technique-Level Normalization For Cybersecurity Intelligence: An Empirical Evaluation Of Att&Ck Attribution From Hids Alerts Using Fine-Tuned Transformers And Metadata Re-Ranking, Emad Sherif

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Cybercrime investigations increasingly depend on the ability to interpret large volumes of automated security events. For organizations without dedicated security operations centres, a situation common among small and medium enterprises, the manual translation of raw alerts into structured threat intelligence represents a critical bottleneck that slows investigative triage and limits cross-case comparability. This paper evaluates an automated enrichment pipeline designed to address this bottleneck by mapping security events to standardised adversary behaviour labels drawn from the MITRE ATT&CK framework, supporting both operational response and cybercrime investigation workflows. We compare three pipeline configurations, a general-purpose encoder model, a cybersecurity domain-adapted variant, …

A Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Analysis Of Esg Disclosures, John Barnett Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This dissertation examines whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure sentiment extracted from SEC Form 10-K Item 1A risk disclosures aligns with Bloomberg ESG scores. The study combines SEC textual disclosures, Bloomberg ESG ratings, firm financial data, executive compensation data, and executive gender characteristics. Natural language processing and artificial intelligence methods, including FinBERT, Loughran-McDonald sentiment measures, BART-MNLI zero-shot classification, LLaMA-based ESG scoring, and readability analysis, are used to evaluate ESG-related disclosure signals. Results reveal that SEC 10-K Item 1A risk-factor sentiment and Bloomberg ESG scores represent related but distinct constructs. ESG sentiment in Item 1A is poorly aligned with third-party …

Beyond Beliefs: Factors That Shape Agricultural Plastic End-Of-Life Management Among California Strawberry Growers, Kyle Y. Cahitas

Master's Theses

The practice of using plastics in agriculture is so prevalent it has earned its own name: plasticulture. One key plasticulture tool is polyethylene (PE) mulch film, a thin plastic sheet laid over the field for a single growing season and pulled out before the next. Because PE film is hard to recycle, most of it ends up in a landfill, yet how growers decide what happens to used plastic mulch has rarely been studied. To identify what shapes that decision, this study draws on a survey of California strawberry growers (n = 126). Twenty variables, spanning grower attitudes, farm characteristics, …

Testing P300-Based Biometric Authentication Paradigms, Jordan Razzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bench research suggests that P300 amplitude is greater in response to self-relevant stimuli compared to familiar stimuli. This effect could enable a novel method of biometric authentication based on the self-relevant P300. This dissertation aims to: (1) determine the optimal presentation paradigm for leveraging self-relevance in P300-based biometric authentication, and (2) investigate P300 responses from self-relevant stimuli versus stimuli learned over the course of a week.

Two presentation paradigms were compared – rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and matrix presentation (MP). Participant-specific RSVP and MP classifiers were trained by applying stepwise linear discriminant analysis to data collected during presentations of …