Digital Commons Network^™

Longitudinal Associations Between Functional Disability, Depression, And Suicide In Middle-Aged And Older Adults, Julie Ann Lutz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Suicide is a significant public health problem among older adults in the United States and around the world. There has been little research to date on longitudinal change in functional disability and depressive symptoms, both of which have been posited to be associated with suicide risk among middle-aged and older adults, and their association with death by suicide. The aims of this study were to 1) characterize longitudinal change in functional disability and depressive symptoms separately; 2) characterize the directional associations between functional disability and depressive symptoms in bivariate models; and 3) determine how different patterns of change among these …

Immersive Rehearsal In A Simulated Environment (Irise), Cassandra Clouse

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Recent advancements in virtual environment (VE) technology and the growth of VE use in treating and training individuals are opening up new possibilities for rehearsal in safe and rich environments. Research has shown that VEs can be used to treat those with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but very little research has been done to suggest good guidelines for creating an effective environment. This research was conducted to help inform the design of systems that let veterans rehearse potentially stressful experiences in a safe environment before having to physically step into that environment. We investigated responses to specific design components …

Antecedents Of Voice: The Moderating Role Of Proactive Personality, Alice Pyclik

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When employees are dissatisfied, they can choose a destructive solution such as quitting, or they can use voice to effect organizational change. A sample of 277 full-time employees in the United States responded to an online survey of voice, ethical leadership, core self-evaluation, proactive personality, affective commitment, and several control variables. Results from simple, multiple, and hierarchical regression analyses indicated that ethical leadership, core self-evaluation, and proactive personality have positive relationships with voice. In addition, ethical leadership facilitates voice through the path of affective commitment. Proactive personality compensates for low levels of affective commitment. Thus, managers can increase voice among …

An Exploratory Study Of The Impact Of Stigma And Acculturation On The Perception Of Mental Illness In The Black Community, Louis Appiah-Kubi

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Mental health stigma serves as a chronic barrier to help-seeking and in some cases exacerbates mental health conditions (SAMHSA, 2013). Researchers and clinicians have tried many different methods to reduce these negative attitudes. A popular and usually successful method is education on what mental illness is, its causes, prognosis, and the availability and effectiveness of treatment. Large scale educational efforts have not been adequate in addressing these issues. Therefore, studies are being tailored to find stereotypes within specific communities so as to come up with matching educational protocols (Corrigan & Penn, 2015). The current study explored attitudes among African Americans …

Stop What You’Re Doing, Right Now! Effects Of Interactive Messages On Careless Responding, Anthony Gibson

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Careless responding (CR) can negatively affect the quality of self-report data and thus the resulting conclusions researchers draw from the data. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether interactive warnings, which alert careless respondents in real time, reduce CR more than traditional, non-interactive warnings. I used a 4 x 4 mixed factorial design to examine these relationships. The between group factor was the type of warning used, which consisted of four levels (i.e., a control, no warning group, a traditional, non-interactive warning, an interactive threatening warning message, and an interactive encouraging message), and the within person factor …

Attitudes On Legal Insanity And The Impact Of Race, Jerie J. Bolin

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Jurors, representatives of the communities from which they are selected, are tasked with the responsibility of reaching a verdict in an impartial, unbiased manner. Previous research has found that bias and negative attitudes impact juror decision-making, despite practices that are in place to dismiss potentially biased jurors, such as voir dire. Studies have found a correlation between racial biases and juror verdicts. Additionally, a correlation has also been found between insanity defense attitudes and a juror’s propensity to favor (or not favor) a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) acquittal. However, there has been limited examination of the impact …

Gauging Human Performance With An Automated Aid In Low Prevalence Conditions, Cara M. Zinn

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When receiving assistance from an automated aid, human operators do not necessarily perform better than without the automated aid. The current work explored the impact of integrating the automated aid with the task information in low prevalence conditions. Specifically, this work compares displays where the automated aid was integrated with task information in general or with more meaningful task information. Subjects performed a speeded judgment task with the assistance of an automated aid, varying in display type, difficulty, and prevalence. Results indicated that there was no effect of display type or prevalence on human temporal performance, and that the effect …

Identifying Diversity Of Thought On Social Media, Beth Bullemer

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This dissertation considers what it means to think differently, using naturalistic verbal evidence. This problem is inspired by a gap within the Wisdom of the Crowd (WoC) literature, but relevant to the study of language processes, mental models, and the vast emerging resource of social media data. I propose a methodological framework to characterize diversity of thought through the quantification of social media data. Four stages of research considered: a) the properties of a sample domain, b) how to identify and select diagnostic content using classification methods, c) how to quantify qualitative content in order to categorize and compare individuals, …

Empirical Support For Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (Mtfc): A Critical Review, Jennifer Marie Ladner-Graham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC), initially intended as a treatment for chronic juvenile offenders (adolescents having multiple contacts with the juvenile justice system), was designed as an alternative to placement within group facilities. MTFC allows the adolescent to remain in the community while receiving individual and family-based interventions. These interventions are dedicated to decreasing risk factors associated with offending (e.g., poor parental supervision, association with delinquent peers, poor academic performance) and increasing protective factors (e.g., effective parenting practices, healthy relationships with supportive peers, increased school involvement). MTFC has been utilized to meet the needs of a variety of populations (e.g., …

Moral Agency: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Its Scientific Foundations, Makensey Sanders

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a longstanding discussion of what the criteria are to distinguish science from non-science. In section one of this paper, I will focus on four demarcating criteria of a scientific theory: (1) value neutrality; (2) verifiability; (3) falsifiability; and (4) reproducibility. Keeping these criteria in mind, I will turn to the notion of moral agency (focusing on psychopathy, autism, and personal identity) and the question of whether the current way we conceptualize and research it can be deemed as scientific according to the four criteria.

In section two, I will discuss the role psychopathy and autism play in understanding …

A Comparative Study Of The Naart And Wrat4 Word Reading Subtest To Estimate Reading Level, Elizabeth B. Campbell

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Clients are often asked to fill out paperwork in medical settings, but varying reading levels can affect the ability to self-report. By screening for literacy level, clinicians can prevent potential patient confusion, frustration, and embarrassment. Clinicians can also avoid problems leading to misdiagnosis and providing materials that patients will not be able to understand or follow. The Wide Range Achievement Test – Fourth Edition (WRAT4) Word Reading subtest provides an estimation of literacy level as well as an estimation of premorbid ability. The North American Adult Reading Test (NAART) only provides an estimation of premorbid abilities, but it is quick …

Misdiagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder: Does Setting Bias And Gender Bias Influence Diagnostic Decision-Making?, Gillian Christina Larue

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Inaccurate diagnoses due to clinician bias may lead to the facilitation of inappropriate mental health treatment and poor prognosis for treating clients presenting concern, as the cause of the disordered behaviors that led to their incarceration are not being addressed. The current study sought to determine whether clinician gender bias and clinician setting bias affects the diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder amongst clients in correctional settings. Determining whether bias affects diagnosis of these disorders amongst clients in correctional settings is important in order to assure clients are receiving appropriate mental health treatment. Incarcerated individuals who receive …

A Situational Judgment Test Of Self-Control And Its Relationship To Academic Performance: Development Of A New Measure, Michael Brady

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Personality has been extensively researched but the literature has not lived up to its potential for application. Personality variables such as self-control can identify qualified applicants, while minimizing adverse impact. I designed two SJT measure of self-control. The first SJT was hypothesized to predict college grade point average. The second SJT was hypothesized to predict counterproductive work behavior. I administered the first SJT to 676 undergraduates. I administered the second SJT to 608 employed people. Most hypotheses were fully supported. Both SJTs had incremental validity over and above self-report personality measures. The results demonstrate the potential of SJTs to measure …

Spatialized Auditory And Vibrotactile Cueing For Dynamic Three-Dimensional Visual Search, Rachel J. Cunio

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The traditional method of maintaining spatial awareness through visual displays can cause visual system overload and lead to performance decrements. This study examined the benefits of spatialized auditory, tactile, and audio-tactile cues for maintaining awareness as a method of enhancing visual search performance. I examined visual search performance in an immersive, dynamic, three-dimensional (360-degree), virtual reality environment with no cues, spatialized auditory cues, degraded spatialized auditory cues, spatialized tactile cues, spatialized audio-tactile cues, and degraded spatialized auditory with tactile cues. Results indicated a significant reduction in visual search time from the no-cue condition when any cues were presented. The tactile …

Neurobehavioral Effects Of Multi-Tasking, Elizabeth Lynn Fox

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The progression of technology and adaptive automation has shown tremendous promise in reducing both physical and mental task demands, while allowing the maintenance or improvement of overall performance. Consequently, a user is able to maintain task performance with relatively more ease and reallocate spare time and energy to additional tasks. Quantifying the resources that one has left is an ongoing, relatively open, research objective for human factors psychologists. Here, we created a standardized, individual-level metric to serve as an estimate of multi-tasking efficiency. We go beyond just rank-order, or categorical labels of suffering from, benefiting from, or adequately maintaining performance …

Learned Helplessness In Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Relationships With Locus Of Control, Self-Efficacy, And Feedback-Seeking Behavior, Nicholas Kovacs

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Researchers have suggested that self-efficacy and feedback-seeking behavior (FSB) are effective in enhancing performance. To improve performance in the workplace, research should focus on how psychologists can enhance these constructs in employees. Though locus of control (LOC) relates to self-efficacy and increased FSB, research has revealed issues in LOC (e.g., failure to predict performance, range restriction, failure to predict behaviors). The current study examined the effects of perceived “lack of control”, learned helplessness, over LOC on both self-efficacy and FSB in two different samples: a student sample (N = 321) and a work sample (N = 794). Learned helplessness accounted …

The Development Of A Lexicon For The Communication Of Action In Cooperative Work, Claire Supriya Shah

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This research expands upon the research conducted by Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) on how individuals collaborate and reach common ground in the domain of objects into the domain of action. Pairs of participants (N = 22) were asked to complete a set of six maneuvers with a remote-control car. Dialogue was transcribed and analyzed for total word count, verb phrase count, number of turns taken, number of errors committed, and selected other linguistic characteristics. Total word count, verb phrase count, number of turns taken, and number of errors committed all significantly decreased over time, either linearly or logarithmically. This research …

Using Eeg To Examine The Top Down Effects On Visual Object Processing, Joseph D. Borders

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Object recognition entails a complex interplay between top-down and bottom-up signals. Yet, limited research has investigated the mechanisms through which top-down processes, such as task context and behavioral goals impact the neural basis of visual object processing. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we studied the temporal dynamics of task and object processing to identify how early the impact of task can be observed. We recorded ERPs from participants as they viewed object images from four categories spanning animacy (Inanimate: roller-skate, motorbike; Animate: cow, butterfly) and size (Large: motorbike, cow; Small: roller-skate, butterfly) dimensions under four task conditions comprising conceptual (naturalness, size) and …

Creating A Well-Situated Human-Autonomy Team: The Effects Of Team Structure, Elizabeth Marie Frost

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Intelligent agent technologies are increasing the potential capacity for systems to behave more autonomously and are enabling more advanced human-autonomy teaming. For instance, future applications of human-autonomy teaming for the command and control of unmanned vehicles are now under consideration. This would involve a shift from a supervisory control approach to a teaming structure. These two approaches, instantiated as the task division and relationship between a human operator and a teammate, were empirically examined. The team’s composition, either human-human or human-autonomy, was also considered. A control station that supports single operator management of multiple simulated unmanned vehicles performing a base …

Mindfulness-Based Meditation And Its Effects On College Students, Jordan Sieja

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Mindfulness-based meditation is a practice that has been proven to have many physiological and psychological health benefits such as positive lifestyle habits, increased mindfulness, decrease in substance use, decrease in stress, better mood states, and enhanced coping strategies. University students undergo many different types of stressors at one time such as financial instability, identity development, academic pressures, parental expectations, and racial/cultural differences (Kadison & Geronimo, 2004). Intense stress when it is not coped with effectively can lead to many different health problems physically and mentally. The current study evaluates the effects of mindfulness meditation with undergraduate students and it was …

Scaffolding Problem-Solving And Instructional Design Processes: Engaging Students In Reflection-In-Action And External Representations In Three Online Courses, Tian Luo, John Baaki, Marius Boboc (Ed.), Selma Koç (Ed.)

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Instructional design is an applied field of study that involves considerations for complex problem solving and authentic learning. Instructional guidance and scaffolding is particularly critical in facilitating online instructional design students, thus helping them succeed. In this chapter, the authors share how they designed and facilitated three instructional activities in three courses to scaffold a student-centered learning environment online. Using a case study approach, the authors describe their design considerations and how the instructor made decisions to incorporate external representations as a unique instructional technique into the three courses. Through student self-reporting, the instructor's formative and summative evaluation, and the …

Vocal Emotion Corpus Data, Logan Kowallis

ScholarsArchive Data

This corpus contains over 50 hours of voice acted readings as part of a dissertation project. These recordings represent one of four emotions or the subject's normal speaking voice. The four emotions acted are: anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. These recordings can be useful for building a simple emotion recognition model. Data were collected from BYU students in 2019. Supporting documents designed for people wanting replicate this project are included in Documents.zip. For more information about these files, read the README file.

All audio files are encoded as 44.1 kHz .wav mono audio. Each subject read the 50-word script multiple …

Further Exploration Of The Relationship Between Worry And Contrast Avoidance, Anna E. Snyder

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The Contrast Avoidance Model of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) proposes that individuals with GAD are sensitive to negative emotional contrasts (i.e., sharp shifts from neutral or positive emotional states to negative emotional states). These individuals prefer to remain in a negative emotional state to avoid these negative contrasts. They stay in this state by worrying. The present study aimed to directly test the Contrast Avoidance Model of GAD by using an experimental manipulation and also to further develop the literature on the relationship between contrast avoidance, worry, and GAD. Results of this study showed mixed support for the model overall; …

Beyond School Engagement: School Adaptation And Its Role In Bolstering Resilience Among Youth Who Have Been Involved With Child Welfare Services, Skyler S. Leonard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objective: Youth involved with the child welfare system are at significant risk of poor school functioning and mental health. Little research has explored how the connection to school impacts known relationships between adversity and youth outcomes. The following project sought to shed light on the role of schools in conferring risk or resilience for youth in contact with the child welfare system, with regard to their mental health. The overall aims of this project were to (1) improve our conceptualization of school adaptation, with particular attention to individual variation along multiple dimensions of school adaptation, (2) examine the relationship of …

"But It's Not Fair!": Effects Of Experimenter Familiarity On Inequity Aversion In Dogs, Kia Radovanovic

Senior Independent Study Theses

Inequity aversion, defined as having a negative reaction to unfair treatment, was considered to be a uniquely human trait for decades but has since been found to exist in a variety of animals, including primates and dogs. Although dogs have been shown to be affected in their decision making based on their familiarity with the humans testing them, this effect had not been previously examined in regard to their responses to inequity aversion. This study aimed to partially replicate the results shown in the first ever study to find inequity aversion in dogs and to further investigate whether their responses …

Analyzing Happiness: Investigation On Happy Moments Using A Bag-Of-Words Approach And Related Ethical Discussions, Riddhiman Adib, Eyad Aldawood, Nathan Lang, Nina Lasswell, Shion Guha

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this research paper, we analyzed what moments and activities make people happy, based on a collection of happy moments. We are focusing on specific happy moments from a collection of text responses that people have shared through the crowd-sourcing platform: Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Using crowd-sourcing to collect our data allows us to advance our understanding of the cause of happiness, by focusing on words and real human experiences. Workers of MTurk were asked to reflect on what makes them happy in a given period and share three specific moments in complete sentences. Through text-based analysis, we will look …

Social Anxiety And Paranoia: A Mixed-Methods Investigation, Sophie Homer

Other Faculty of Health Theses

Social anxiety is highly prevalent and highly debilitating. It is detrimental to educational and occupational progression as well as quality of life for up to 12% of the population. Current research, treatment, and diagnostic criteria maintain that the cause of anxiety in social situations is self-focused fear, usually of personal inadequacy, but social situations invariably involve both the self and other people. This thesis draws upon the paranoia literature to inform arguments about the role of negative perceptions of others in social anxiety. I propound a novel theoretical model of the core fears underlying social anxiety. I argue that anxiety …

Social Media Effects On Millennials' Counterterrorism Type Of Behaviors, Laura C. Domasneanu-Miulescu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Social media is a critical and omnipresent component in Millennials' lives. Using social media can lead to significant social change for societies both online and offline. Social media can be used as a tool to combat domestic and foreign terrorism and to protect our society. Prosocial perceptions and behaviors exhibited on a social media platform can transcend online social culture and produce replicas of those behaviors in the real world. Research in social activism portrayed by Millennials via social media is limited, and research regarding social media use and counterterrorism behaviors of Millennials has not yet been attempted. The current …

A Phenomenological Study Of High-Performance Teachers' Happiness At School And Home, Sarah Abuaqel

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This research study is focused on understanding the phenomenology of happiness of High Performing Teachers (HPT) working in an elementary school located in a Midwest City. The purpose of the study was to understand positive and negative emotions of HPT, through their experiences at work and home. Qualitative methodology through in-depth interviews was employed for this study. Tomkins' affect theory of happiness (ATH), was used to assess and explore positive and negative emotions of participants of the study. In this study a purposeful sample of 11 participants that work in elementary school located in a Midwest City, participated in in-depth, …

Cross-Language Activation And Integration Of Concepts In Text Passages, Karly Meillyn Schleicher

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Learning from text requires the ability to efficiently activate and retrieve relevant concepts from long-term memory and connect these with new information that is being presented in the text. It is assumed that memory representations built from text can be influenced by both surface level information (i.e., word forms), or deeper, conceptual level information. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of surface level features (i.e., language) influence memory representations developed from text. By recruiting Spanish-English bilinguals, the present study investigated how surface level features from a reader's two lexicons influences the activation and integration of …