Digital Commons Network^™

Perceived Social Support, Family Relationships, And Health-Related Quality Of Life Among Women With Breast Cancer In Jordan., Hedaya Rateb Hina

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among Jordanian women. Perceived social support (PSS) and family relationships are strongly associated with positive psychosocial outcomes and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This area was widely explored in Western countries, but little attention was devoted to investigate this area in Middle East region. Purpose: to investigate the interrelationships among PSS, family relationships, and HRQoL of women with breast cancer in Jordan using an exploratory cross-sectional design. Method: The contextual model of HRQoL designed by Ashing-Giwa (2005) provided the foundation for this study. A total of 140 women were …

Canvas Course Design And The Effects On Faculty Workload And Stress During Covid-19, Christine Kugelmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

COVID-19 forced all education online during Spring 2020 requiring face-to-face higher education faculty to immediately redesign their courses for an online modality. This dissertation studied faculty who used Canvas as their Learning Management System to investigate how faculty leveraged affordances and navigated constraints of the platform, specifically in Pages and Assignments, when they designed and redesigned their courses; how their pedagogical and Canvas training affected their choices; and the ways in which their experiences affected their workload and stress levels. This study employed a three-phase methodology: a) a Qualtrics survey with open and closed-ended questions; b) 11 faculty were interviewed; …

The Student Movement Volume 106 Issue 9: No Silent Night For These Busy Staffers, Irina Gagiu, Caryn Cruz, Kaela Mcfadden, Brendan Syto, Megan Napod, Scott Moncrieff, Caralynn Chan, Abigail Lee, Lyle Goulbourne, Valerie Akinyi, Wambui Karanja, Isabella Koh, Alyssa Henriquez

The Student Movement v. 106 (2021-2022)

HUMANS

"My Favorite Christmas Memory..." from Our AU Students!, Irina Gagiu

Semester Reflections with Brandon Alvarez, Interviewed by: Caryn Cruz

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Beginning Again: Red (Taylor's Version), Kaela McFadden

Musicians of Andrews University, Brendan Syto with Megan Napod

The Most Reluctant Convert, Reviewed by Scott Moncrieff

NEWS

AU Symphony Orchestra Presents "The Journey"

Cybersecurity on Campus: What to Look Out For and What You Can Do, Abigail Lee

IDEAS

The Complicated Case of Kyle Rittenhouse, Lyle Goulbourne

Why Is Everything Running Out?, Valerie Akinyi

PULSE

Christmas Movies, Wambui Karanja

Easy Dorm Recipes, Izzy Koh

THE LAST WORD

Baby Pigeons …

Electronic Cigarettes’ Health Effects On Young Adults: An Honors Thesis, Miranda Yates

Senior Honors Theses

Hon Lik introduced e-cigarette use in 2003 as a “safe alternative” to smoking cigarettes. Unfortunately, this message has been misinterpreted to mean that e-cigarette use is “harmless”. Recent studies have linked e-cigarette use to adverse health effects involving injury to the heart and lungs. Cigarette smokers using e-cigarettes to quit smoking and reduce second-hand smoke are being exposed to unregulated and potentially harmful chemicals. Teens who may never have considered cigarette smoking have been led to believe that e-cigarette use is safe and non-addictive. However, most e-cigarettes contain nicotine and unsuspecting teens are becoming addicted to this “fun” behavior. This …

Perceptions Of Risk For Covid-19 Among Individuals With Chronic Diseases And Stakeholders In Central Appalachia, Manik Ahuja, Hadii M. Mamudu, Florence M. Weierbach, Karilynn Dowling-Mcclay, David W. Stewart, Manul Awasthi, Timir K. Paul

ETSU Faculty Works

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is rapidly evolving and is a serious public health threat worldwide. Timely and effective control of the pandemic is highly dependent on preventive approaches. Perception of risk is a major determinant of health behavior. The current study explores the association between actual risk and perceived risk for one’s self, family/friends and friends, and community. A questionnaire was administered to participants in Central Appalachia (n = 102). The actual risk was based on the number of chronic conditions of the following conditions: hypertension, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Participants were also queried …

Law And Sampling Theory, Jack Thorlin

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Law involves a fundamental tradeoff, a sampling problem. In science, sampling problems emerge when trying to understand something complicated by considering discrete, manageable subsets of it—samples. When doing that, scientists must compromise between accuracy and resource-expenditure. Perfect accuracy requires infinite resources, such as a perfect digital image with infinite file size. Perfection being unattainable, scientists must decide what level of accuracy is best for any given case. Every kind of law, from parking regulations to criminal to high constitutional theory, is subject to the same dynamic.

Law’s sampling problem is the tradeoff between accurate representation of a community’s moral preferences …

Agatha Christie: A Look Into Criminal Procedure And Gender, Carmella Monico

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

With 2020 being the 100^th year since Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published, it seems fitting to celebrate such an accomplished author with a deeper look into the inner workings of her novels. While she wrote mystery novels that involved many detectives, the two most popular are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This paper will examine these two detectives in regard to the criminal procedure each uses to solve their respective cases. Would her detectives’ work hold up in court then or even today? Additionally, the difference in gender between Poirot and Marple …

Psychosocial Risk Factors And Cardiovascular Disease And Death In A Population-Based Cohort From 21 Low-, Middle-, And High-Income Countries, Ailiana Santosa, Annika Rosengren, Chinthanie Ramasundarahettige, Sumathy Rangarajan, Jephat Chifamba, Scott A. Lear, Paul Poirier, Karen E. Yeates, Rita Yusuf, Romaina Iqbal

Community Health Sciences

Importance: Stress may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Most studies on stress and CVD have been conducted in high-income Western countries, but whether stress is associated with CVD in other settings has been less well studied.
Objective: To investigate the association of a composite measure of psychosocial stress and the development of CVD events and mortality in a large prospective study involving populations from 21 high-, middle-, and low-income countries across 5 continents.
Design, setting, and participants: This population-based cohort study used data from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology study, collected between January 2003 and March 2021. Participants …

Test Transferability Of 3d-Mot Training On Soccer Specific Parameters, Micaela Dusseault

Honors Theses

Objective: The benefits of perceptual-cognitive training in elite level athletes has recently been investigated in multiple sports such as basketball, soccer, and archery, but conclusive evidence proving test transferability of 3D-MOT training is lacking. The purpose of this research is to examine the transferability of perceptual-cognitive training to on-field soccer performance parameters. Participants: NCAA Division I women’s soccer players (n=22) between the ages of 18-25 who were placed into either the experimental group (n=10) or control group (n=12). After baseline testing for both groups to determine visual tracking speed (VTS), the experimental group completed 10 3D-MOT training sessions with NeuroTracker …

Organizational Culture: An Examination Of The Role Of Leadership In Neutralizing The Negative Effects Of Technostress During Operational Shifts, David P. Kirkland

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

COVID-19 created a support problem for public universities across the United States and required that IT departments and professionals alter how they performed in 2020, and perhaps beyond. IT professionals tasked with safeguarding large amounts of data were required to shift to a teleworking posture to continue offering a similar level of service as previously expected. In addition to the technological shift that organizations experienced because of COVID-19, leadership challenges also impacted IT departments across the United States. The rapid shift of operational duties has the propensity to increase technology-related stress, due to employee perception of being successful in their …

Vte And Anticoagulation In Menstruating Women, Ida Micaily, Bethany T. Samuelson Bannow

Department of Medicine Faculty Papers

Women of childbearing potential have a high prevalence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) due to high estrogen states, such as pregnancy and the use of estrogen-containing contraceptives. Abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) affects up to two-thirds of menstruating women on anticoagulation (AC), and can severely impair a woman's quality of life. Rates of heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) and other forms of AUB including inter-menstrual and postmenopausal bleeding are consistently underreported in the original clinical trials utilizing AC. VTE can occur at any time in a woman's life, and the aim of this review article is to discuss the current landscape of literature …

Radio Carbon - Hybrid Documentary Process, Robert Stokes

Theses

Radio Carbon is a documentary made using a methodology for creating conscious digital video projects with a process privileging respect for crew, subject, and environment over the needs of a commercial, or market driven product. The guidelines imposed by this method are fluid, and project-specific in terms of their exact interpretation for each film. This project is meant to demonstrate a production style that allows for work to be made by the participants without a dominating creative force at every stage of production. This is made possible through the introduction of chance operations at several key points along the production …

A Distributed Fmri-Based Signature For The Subjective Experience Of Fear, Feng Zhou, Weihua Zhao, Ziyu Qi, Yayuan Geng, Shuxia Yao, Keith M. Kendrick, Tor D. Wager, Benjamin Becker

Dartmouth Scholarship

The specific neural systems underlying the subjective feeling of fear are debated in affective neuroscience. Here, we combine functional MRI with machine learning to identify and evaluate a sensitive and generalizable neural signature predictive of the momentary self-reported subjective fear experience across discovery (n = 67), validation (n = 20) and generalization (n = 31) cohorts. We systematically demonstrate that accurate fear prediction crucially requires distributed brain systems, with important contributions from cortical (e.g., prefrontal, midcingulate and insular cortices) and subcortical (e.g., thalamus, periaqueductal gray, basal forebrain and amygdala) regions. We further demonstrate that the neural representation of subjective fear …

Entropy-Based Metrics For Predicting Choice Behavior Based On Local Response To Reward, Ethan Trepka, Mehran Spitmaan, Bilal A. Bari, Vincent D. Costa, Jeremiah Y. Cohen, Alireza Soltani

Dartmouth Scholarship

For decades, behavioral scientists have used the matching law to quantify how animals distribute their choices between multiple options in response to reinforcement they receive. More recently, many reinforcement learning (RL) models have been developed to explain choice by integrating reward feedback over time. Despite reasonable success of RL models in capturing choice on a trial-by-trial basis, these models cannot capture variability in matching behavior. To address this, we developed metrics based on information theory and applied them to choice data from dynamic learning tasks in mice and monkeys. We found that a single entropy-based metric can explain 50% and …

High-Level Cognition During Story Listening Is Reflected In High-Order Dynamic Correlations In Neural Activity Patterns, Lucy L.W. Owen, Thomas H. Chang, Jeremy R. Manning

Dartmouth Scholarship

Our thoughts arise from coordinated patterns of interactions between brain structures that change with our ongoing experiences. High-order dynamic correlations in neural activity patterns reflect different subgraphs of the brain’s functional connectome that display homologous lower-level dynamic correlations. Here we test the hypothesis that high-level cognition is reflected in high-order dynamic correlations in brain activity patterns. We develop an approach to estimating high-order dynamic correlations in timeseries data, and we apply the approach to neuroimaging data collected as human participants either listen to a ten-minute story or listen to a temporally scrambled version of the story. We train across-participant pattern …

Exercise Routine Change Is Associated With Prenatal Depression Scores During The Covid-19 Pandemic Among Pregnant Women Across The United States, Theresa E. Gildner, Elise J. Laugier, Zaneta M. Thayer

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected physical and mental health worldwide. Pregnant women already exhibit an elevated risk for depression compared to the general public, a pattern expected to be exacerbated by the pandemic. Certain lifestyle factors, including moderate exercise, may help support mental health during pregnancy, but it is unclear how the pandemic may impact these associations across different locations. Here, we test whether: (i) reported exercise routine alterations during the pandemic are associated with depression scores; and, (ii) the likelihood of reporting pandemic-related exercise changes varies between women living in metro areas and those in non-metro areas. …

White Matter Abnormalities In Adults With Bipolar Disorder Type-Ii And Unipolar Depression, Anna Manelis, Adriane Soehner, Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Skye Satz, Rachel Ragozzino, Mora Lucero, Holly A. Swartz, Mary L. Phillips, Amelia Versace

Dartmouth Scholarship

Discerning distinct neurobiological characteristics of related mood disorders such as bipolar disorder type-II (BD-II) and unipolar depression (UD) is challenging due to overlapping symptoms and patterns of disruption in brain regions. More than 60% of individuals with UD experience subthreshold hypomanic symptoms such as elevated mood, irritability, and increased activity. Previous studies linked bipolar disorder to widespread white matter abnormalities. However, no published work has compared white matter microstructure in individuals with BD-II vs. UD vs. healthy controls (HC), or examined the relationship between spectrum (dimensional) measures of hypomania and white matter microstructure across those individuals. This study aimed to …

A Framework To Identify Structured Behavioral Patterns Within Rodent Spatial Trajectories, Francesco Donnarumma, Roberto Prevete, Domenico Maisto, Simone Fuscone, Emily M. Irvine, Matthijs A.A. Van Der Meer, Caleb Kemere, Giovanni Pezzulo

Dartmouth Scholarship

Animal behavior is highly structured. Yet, structured behavioral patterns—or “statistical ethograms”—are not immediately apparent from the full spatiotemporal data that behavioral scientists usually collect. Here, we introduce a framework to quantitatively characterize rodent behavior during spatial (e.g., maze) navigation, in terms of movement building blocks or motor primitives. The hypothesis that we pursue is that rodent behavior is characterized by a small number of motor primitives, which are combined over time to produce open-ended movements. We assume motor primitives to be organized in terms of two sparsity principles: each movement is controlled using a limited subset of motor primitives (sparse …

Meta-Analysis Of Neural Systems Underlying Placebo Analgesia From Individual Participant Fmri Data, Matthias Zunhammer, Tamás Spisák, Tor D. Wager, Ulrike Bingel, Lauren Atlas, Fabrizio Benedetti, Christian Büchel, Jae Chan Choi, Luana Colloca, Davide Duzzi, Falk Eippert, Dan Mikael Ellingsen, Sigrid Elsenbruch, Stephan Geuter, Ted J. Kaptchuk, Simon S. Kessner, Irving Kirsch, Jian Kong, Claus Lamm, Siri Leknes

Dartmouth Scholarship

The brain systems underlying placebo analgesia are insufficiently understood. Here we performed a systematic, participant-level meta-analysis of experimental functional neuroimaging studies of evoked pain under stimulus-intensity-matched placebo and control conditions, encompassing 603 healthy participants from 20 (out of 28 eligible) studies. We find that placebo vs. control treatments induce small, widespread reductions in pain-related activity, particularly in regions belonging to ventral attention (including mid-insula) and somatomotor networks (including posterior insula). Behavioral placebo analgesia correlates with reduced pain-related activity in these networks and the thalamus, habenula, mid-cingulate, and supplementary motor area. Placebo-associated activity increases occur mainly in frontoparietal regions, with high …

‘I Still Desire To Have A Child’: A Qualitative Analysis Of Intersectional Hiv - And Childlessness-Related Stigma In Rural Southwestern Uganda, Madeline Pratt, Moran Owembabazi, Winnie Muyindike, Angela Kaida, Jeanne M. Marrazzo, David Bangsberg, Mwebesa B. Bwana, Christina Psaros, Janet Turan, Multiple Additional Authors

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study explored the intersecting forms of stigma experienced by HIV-sero different couples with unmet reproductive goals in rural Uganda. The parent mixed-methods study, which included 131 HIV-exposed women with plans for pregnancy, offered comprehensive HIV prevention counselling and care over a nine month period. In-depth interviews were conducted with 37 women and seven male partners to explore care experiences and the use of safer conception strategies. This secondary analysis explored how challenges conceiving informed pregnancy plans and HIV prevention behaviours. The following themes were developed (1) partnership conflicts arise from HIV- and infertility-related forms of stigma, contributing to gender-based …

Empowering Teacher Candidates To Create Social Justice Curriculum Through Civic Engagement Projects, Gayle Y. Thieman

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this research is to examine how participating in a Civic Engagement Project (CEP) led teacher candidates (TCs) to develop and publish race and social justice curriculum. This article describes the CEP, a graduate level social studies methods course assignment for TCs who research community issues, select a class project, collaborate, create and publish resources for educators. This mixed-methods study examines the challenges, benefits and process of the CEP. TCs' reflections, digital curriculum and resources they created, surveys and interviews with TCs after graduation were analyzed through six criteria of anti-racist curriculum, based on Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge …

Testing For Cognitive Deficits After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Using The Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metric And Dual-Task Assessments, Jasmin Mabry

University Honors Theses

Cognitive deficits are common following mTBI. DT gait assessments and seated computerized exams are often used for evaluating those deficits. Little is known about DT gait and neurocognitive performance in a chronic population. We compared people with chronic mTBI and subacute mTBI to healthy controls (HC) on DT gait and neurocognitive performance and explored the relationship of DT gait performance with a traditional neurocognitive (TNC) exam.

Subjects completed a computerized TNC - the ANAM - and a motor-cognitive DT test which assessed both DT motor performance as well as the cognitive task accuracy. The DT test consisted of subjects walking …

The Impact Of The Menstrual Cycle On Female Performance In Athletics, Calli Doan

Senior Honors Theses

Female hormones, key to preparing a woman's body for childbirth, work in a magnificent, cyclical manner. It can be expected that these hormones, with the role of preparing a woman's body to conceive a child and deliver a life safely into the world, would have a large impact on the health of the female, especially when it comes to athletics. Numerous studies conducted to understand the full extent of the effect of reproductive hormones on the female body have shown that these hormones influence not only menstruation, but also various physiological and psychological elements. Such effects can certainly impact athletic …

Maternal Mortality: A Growing Health Inequity In America, Michala Geraty

Senior Honors Theses

The United States (U.S.) is known for its quest for knowledge, innovation, and advancements in all disciplines. However, it has the highest maternal mortality ratio (MMR) among developed nations. The US MMR increased from 12.7 to 17.4 per 100,000 live births between 2007 and 2018. Over 60% of these deaths are preventable, indicating room for improvement. African American or non-Hispanic Black women are disproportionately affected, at over twice the rate of their non-Hispanic White and Hispanic counterparts. The proximal (e.g., individual level) determinants have not been able to fully explain these inequities. Using the socio-ecological model and the social determinants …

The Meaning Of Movement: Using Motion Design To Enrich Words For Deaf And Hard Of Hearing Children, Hannah Elyse Colasurdo

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to address challenging areas of vocabulary for deaf and hard of hearing children by developing an open resource for students, parents, teachers, and content creators that utilizes motion to enhance written words for deaf and hard of hearing children. This research seeks to study the means of nonverbal communication such as body language expression and paralinguistic prosody (i.e., tone, intonation, volume, and pitch) qualities within the framework of graphic design through motion design. Body movement and expression are essential during face-to-face communication, but written language lacks such context clues. Additionally, the hard of hearing may not fully …

Item-Specific And Relational Encoding, But Not Warnings, Are Effective At Reducing The Illusion Of Competence, Emily Cates

Honors Theses

Metamemory, or the ability to understand the capacities of one’s own memory, is an important part of the learning process. One method for assessing metamemory is through the Judgment of Learning (JOL) task in which participants are asked to judge the likelihood of correctly remembering a target word in a cue-target word pair when only presented with a cue word at test. The associative direction of the cue-target pair has been shown to affect the accuracy of JOLs. Unlike forward pairs (e.g., credit-card), in which JOLs accurately predict recall, an illusion of competence has been reported for backward associates (e.g., …

The Efficacy Of A Rapid Rehousing Program Serving Adults Experiencing Homelessness In West Central Texas, Unique Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the dynamics of homelessness and examines one agency (Abilene Hope Haven) that aims to help homeless individuals receive permanent housing. This study explores the characteristics that influence the likelihood of placement in permanent housing within 12 months at Abilene Hope Haven. The different types of supportive housing programs and their roles in helping homeless individuals will be discussed. Secondary data gathered from the Homeless Management Information System were entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences, and then a logistical regression analysis was created to explain the relationships between the different characteristics and permanency placement. A key …

Amplifying The "A" In Steam Education, Grace Floerke

Honors College Theses

This paper discusses the importance of teachers implementing STEAM education in the classroom. Previously, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (abbreviated as STEM) education was used as a tool to prepare students to excel in career fields that are projected to grow in the near future. However, recently the acronym was changed to STEAM to add “the arts” to the original acronym. It is imperative that the arts are seen as an equal to STEM, as they can complement and enhance the goals STEM is trying to reach. Since not all students possess the same interest, ways of learning, or abilities, …

Front Matter, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 120, Issue 3 of Michigan Law Review

Young And Dangerous: The Role Of Youth In Risk Assessment Instruments, Ingrid Yin

Michigan Law Review

States are increasingly adopting risk assessment instruments (RAIs) to help judges determine the appropriate type and length of punishment for an offender. Although this sentencing practice has been met with a wide variety of scholarly criticism, there has been virtually no discussion of how RAIs treat youth as a strong factor contributing to a high risk score. This silence is puzzling. Not only is youth undoubtedly the most powerful risk factor in most RAIs, but youth also holds a special place in the criminal justice system as a “mitigating factor of great weight.” This Comment presents the first in-depth critique …