Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

Impact Of Traditional (Non-Affirming) Black Church Affiliation On Exploration Of Sexual Identity For Black Assigned Female At Birth Lgbq+ Individuals And The Associated Mental Health Risk, Aurielle J. Sutton

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explored the impact of Black traditional church upbringing on the sexual and religious identity development, including the subsequent mental health risk, for Black assigned female at birth (AFAB) LGBQ+ individuals. Studies conducted on Black AFAB LGBQ+ individuals are limited, especially in terms of  assessing their experiences in sexual identity development based on religious upbringings. Studies have overlooked the experience of LGBQ+ Black AFAB individuals navigating sexual orientation development and religious and racial identities. Studies have greatly favored Black gay men and supported health risks such as HIV. In the present study, twelve Black AFAB Queer individuals participated in …

Consecuencias De La Violencia Docente: Recuentos Desde El Campo De La Formación Musical Universitaria En México, Karla M. Reynoso Vargas, Basilio Fernández-Morante

Visions of Research in Music Education

Este es un trabajo independiente, pero complementario al estudio «La violencia docente en la educación musical universitaria: una exploración en el contexto mexicano». Presenta el análisis de la información que se desprende de 53 relatos de víctimas de violencia docente en programas universitarios de música. Incorporamos reflexiones y aportaciones de estudiantes, profesionales y personas que abandonaron sus carreras de música en la República Mexicana, quienes compartieron voluntariamente sus historias. La primera categoría describe las consecuencias de la violencia docente. Por un lado, se observaron efectos interpretados como positivos, entre ellos la activación de la orientación al logro, el sobreesfuerzo y …

A Poetic Call For And A Reflection And Commentary On Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, And Compassion, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Finding a published poem I had written as a teenager, titled “The Heavens Weep.” this article uses that poem as the basis for a commentary that reflects on the state of the world today (2026),  As a commentary, the article uses the poetic and metaphoric words in the poem as a relevant "reality check" for what is still going on today.  In essence, the commentary is about a call for Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, and Compassion, or what I call Archetypal Energies, Higher Vibrational Energies that operate deep within our individual and collective psyches to creatively urge us to "see" …

(Re)Claiming Homeplace: Dance As Embodied Resistance & Healing For Health & Spatial Justice, Preeya G. Kannan

University Honors Theses

This thesis argues that dance functions as both an upstream public health intervention and a form of radical spatial resistance; creating healing, agency, and belonging among historically marginalized communities. Drawing on bell hooks' concept of homeplace, Jasbir Puar's assemblage theory, Nancy Krieger's eco-social theory, and Katherine McKittrick's Black geographies, I position the body as both an ecological and political landscape shaped by histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, displacement, and resilience.

Through this community-based participatory research study, Homeplace, I explore dance as a form of social prescription that centers liberation rather than pathology. Movement is often reduced in public health discourse …

Learning How To Walk Like A Secretary: To Lead Or To Be Led, Timon T. C. Hogenaar

Middle Voices

Commentary

From Worry To Invention: Developing The Lunch Bunch As A Multimodal Expressive Arts Model For Regulation, Collaboration, And Peer Connection In Elementary Schools, Pascale Lauren Mimran-Ugbabe

Expressive Therapies Theses

This thesis documents the development of the Multimodal Expressive Arts Lunch Bunch, a small group intervention for elementary students delivered during the school lunch period at a public elementary school in Boston, Massachusetts. Grounded in multimodal expressive arts therapy, intermodal transfer theory, polyvagal-informed co-regulation, and principles of externalization, the intervention was designed as a low-barrier creative support group accessible regardless of diagnosis, referral status, or family pursuit of clinical services. Two cohorts of teacher-nominated students, one group of fourth-grade girls and one mixed-gender third-grade group, participated in a sequenced arc moving from worry externalization through collaborative invention, prototype construction, and …

Influence Of The Discipline Of Authentic Movement Practice On Interpersonal Relationships, Joy Ruben Welts

Educational Studies Dissertations

This mixed methods study explored how practicing the Discipline of Authentic Movement impacts relationships. This research was conducted to fill in the gaps around attunement and use of the Discipline of Authentic Movement as an intervention to support healthy relationships. Five self-selected adults met on Saturday afternoons for eight weeks to practice the Discipline of Authentic Movement. They completed a pre and post Revised Adult Attachment Scale and reflected weekly on their experience through journaling. Participants reported that it was the structure of the Discipline of Authentic Movement that allowed them to feel more comfortable being themselves with others. The …

Dropping Into The Expressive Art Therapy: A Community Engagement Arts Based Project, Sydney C. Smith, Meg Chang

Expressive Therapies Theses

This community engagement capstone explores how expressive arts practices (EXAP) may complement surf-based programming by supporting reflection, empathy, and meaning-making among participants. Research has demonstrated that surf therapy can promote emotional well-being, resilience, and social connection through embodied engagement with the ocean and supportive community environments. Integrating expressive arts practices within surf-based programs may extend these benefits by providing opportunities for reflection, creative expression, and interpersonal exchange. Grounded in expressive arts therapy (EXAT) theory and arts-based research (ABR) paradigms, this project examines how creative expression can support relational and emotional experiences within surf therapy settings. Using an arts-informed community engagement …

Searching For A Connection Between Intellectual Humility And Decision-Making Ability, Mansi Verma, Kristin Kirchner

Caravel Undergraduate Research Journal

The present study investigated whether there was a relationship between intellectual humility and decision-making. The participants were 32 undergraduate students recruited from the University of South Carolina. Data was collected through self-reported measures of intellectual humility from the participants and their answers to questions testing for decision-making ability in a single survey. Results indicate that there is a correlation between the scores on the Intellectual Humility Scale and CRT scores. Overall, there does appear to be a relationship between intellectual humility and decision-making.

The Mysteries Of Postpartum Ocd: A Systematic Review, Taryn Shaffer

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Background: The research on postpartum mental health is growing, with most focusing on physical and sexual wellness, or well-known mental health symptoms such as psychosis, depression, and stress. However, as the research grows, so does the interest in lesser-known or under-considered postpartum mental health symptoms, including Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The focus of this research can be the exacerbation of already-present OCD symptoms, or the onset of them during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The purpose of this systematic review was to analyze research on OCD in pregnant and postpartum women. Specifically, the review included an analysis of measures used to …

Bergsonian Blend: Subjective Temporality Within Modernist Aesthetics Of Mental Illness, Lydia Victoria Gervais

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Henri Bergson was a modernist French philosopher who wrote extensively on the topic of the lived experience of time, which he called durée, or duration. His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, was developing psychoanalytic theory in a growing field of psychological study, which serves as a prominent ancestor to modern psychiatry and current psychoanalytical literary studies. Fiction writers of the 1900s absorbed the zeitgeist of melded chronology and consciousness, interweaving themes of time and trauma in their works. Utilizing Henri Bergson’s durée as a philosophical framework, I examine the moralization of time-consciousness in connection with mental illness and investigate representations of …

An Ethics Of Listening: The Rupture Of Delusion And The Offer Of A New Freedom, Bret Fimiani

Middle Voices

This paper will focus on the topic of listening as an ‘analytic act’ by the analyst (but also by the analysand) and its relation to ethics and the position of the analyst in the field of psychosis. Is the analyst listening for something in particular? The prospect of listening for something supposes that the analyst holds a specific idea of what distinguishes the ‘structure of the address’ in psychosis (versus neurosis). Typically, we say that the analyst is listening for the unconscious, or for the ‘subject’ (of the unconscious). As we are trying to find our bearings in the field …

Creating An Unconscious: Toward A New Ethic Of Residential Treatment, Daniel Garcia

Middle Voices

What is currently nominated “residential treatment” for serious mental illness (SMI) has a long and varied history. From its earliest version as houses for the unproductive, to confinement of and with the unruly and criminally dangerous, to asylumdom, residential treatment has always sought to protect society from those it perceives as actively trying to revoke it. Consequently, the remedies prescribed in defense of civilization have also ranged from the gruesome to the utopian and the seat of responsibility for maintenance of the social order has vacillated between the family and the church, the local community and the state, the psychiatric …

What Are Elementary Phenomena? An Introduction To A Lacanian Conceptualization, Derek Hook Ph.D.

Middle Voices

What do Lacanians mean when they refer to the notion of elementary phenomena? This idea, crucial to Lacan’s (1993) theorizations of psychosis in Seminar III, refers back to the psychiatric conceptualizations of the late 19th and early 20th century. However, even while citing the influence of others when utilizing the concept, Lacan—characteristically enough— described the concept in his own distinctively psychoanalytic way. The term is particularly important to Lacan in terms of how he thinks about the development of delusions and related psychotic symptoms in relation to the initial onset of psychosis. In this short paper, I aim simply to …

Working With Schizophrenia: Adaptive Work & The Threat Of Despair, Pavan S. Brar

Middle Voices

Commentary

The Wager Of Speech, And The Maneuver Of The Dream In The Clinic Of Psychosis, Christopher Meyer

Middle Voices

Psychoanalysis, especially in the clinic of psychosis and extreme states, requires a wager on the part of the analyst. This wager welcomes the speech of the analysand regarding a censored unconscious. In the clinic of psychosis, the analyst’s reference to the dream in the establishment of the frame of the treatment is a maneuver that creates a working space that reveals the subjective history of the analysand. This history concerns key moments of trauma in which the speaking being found themselves without resort or resource to speech or language to represent their experience. The discourse of the delusion arises in …

Psycho-Pathology And Links Between Neurosis And Psychosis, B. Mason Judy, John Dall'aglio

Middle Voices

Commentary

The Secretary Of Alienation: Metaphor And Metapsychology, Anna Kreienberg

Middle Voices

Commentary

An Interview With Stijn Vanheule, Phd Following His Talk: “The Clinic Of Psychoanalysis In Times Of Capitalism”, Stijn Vanheule

Middle Voices

An interview with Stijn Vanheule

Thinking With The Feet In The Clinic Of Psychosis, Jed Wilson

Middle Voices

In his later work, Lacan makes occasional reference to the idea of “thinking with the feet.” An equivocal formulation, it first seems to suggest that thought and language can be regarded as physical processes—not occurring in some homunculan disembodied brain or mind, but in the real of the body. Equally, it can call to mind the idea of thinking “on” one’s feet, in the manner of adaptive improvisation. Going further, could we not also say that it points to the possibility of setting something in motion (as in walking, dancing, going somewhere—all the things we do with the feet) as …

Post-Traumatic Stress And Post-Traumatic Growth: A Literary Lens On Trauma, Meaning, And Survival, Audrey Gruben

CAFE Symposium 2026

This project examines how literature provides insight into these differing trauma responses by comparing Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Drawing on contemporary psychological frameworks of PTSD and PTG, this analysis argues that psychological distress and growth are not mutually exclusive responses to trauma. Instead, they can coexist along a spectrum shaped by meaning-making, responsibility, avoidance, and engagement with suffering.

Humanity Is Evolving Its Consciousness: The Role Of Archetypal Energies As Guides During An Unfolding Weeding Out And Alignment Process, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels.  Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say.  However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be.  That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the …

Association, Affect, And Material Reading Practices Of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Renee Harris

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

At the end of the eighteenth century, reading practice was shifting from an embodied, affective exercise to a detached cognitive one. This essay examines how debates about truth and knowledge diverged along disciplinary and gender lines during this critical transition. The essay traces the influence of association psychology—particularly the theories of David Hartley and Joseph Priestley—on Romantic-era poets including Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through Feminist Formalist Analysis attuned to affect and cognition, this essay demonstrates how Barbauld's poetic montages challenge the period's scientific discourse. Her "Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study" and two "Hill of …

Exploring Associations Between Mental Disorder And Creativity, David A. Romero Mora

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Mental disorder has been misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history, leading mental health research to be severely behind where it needs to be. Years of misinformation, over-medicalization, negative rhetoric, and stigmatization at the hands of the very same institutions that were believed to care for mental disorder have kept this misunderstanding alive. Further, studies throughout history have failed to look at the nuances of mental health, prioritizing generalizability. This thesis explores the relationship between mental disorder and creative expression, how other factors like cultural discourse and cognitive processes inform this relationship, as well as how analyzing this relationship can provide a …

Pillpetz: A Smarter Way To Encourage Medication Adherence In Children, John H. Begley

CMC Senior Theses

Medication adherence is usually framed as a problem of patient behavior, but this thesis argues that it is equally a problem of design. Children who take daily medication face barriers that adults often do not: developing executive function, dependence on caregivers, shifting school and home routines, privacy concerns, and stigma around being perceived as different. The standard prescription bottle, by contrast, was designed primarily for dispensing efficiency, safety, and accidental ingestion prevention—not for sustained daily use by a developing child.

This thesis proposes PillPetz, a smart pill case and digital companion that uses routine, play, dose confirmation, and caregiver-connected support …

Emotionally Healthy Black Men: Guidelines For Supporting Mental Health Treatment For Black Men In Ohio, Eira Nichell Yates

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study examines the barriers that prevent Black men in Ohio from seeking treatment for depression and other mental health conditions and explores strategies to improve engagement and outcomes. Although depression is the most prevalent mental health disorder in the United States, it remains underdiagnosed and undertreated among Black men, contributing to persistent mental health disparities. The limited body of research addressing help-seeking behaviors within this population necessitated the use of a Delphi methodology to obtain expert consensus on key challenges and promising practices. A panel of subject-matter experts in mental health, social services, and culturally responsive care participated in …

Music Interventions For Critically Ill Patients: Evaluating Effects Of Music On Psychoemotional Symptoms In Critically Ill Patients Receiving Respiratory Support, Allyson Crighton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Critically ill adults receiving respiratory support in intensive care units (ICUs) frequently experience psychoemotional disturbances such as agitation, anxiety, and delirium, which contribute to prolonged ventilation, increased sedative use, and adverse patient outcomes. While pharmacologic management remains standard practice, associated risks including oversedation and delirium highlight the need for safe, complementary interventions. Emerging evidence suggests that music-based interventions may offer a non-invasive, cost-effective strategy to reduce psychological or emotional distress in this vulnerable population. This integrative literature review examined the effects of music interventions, including passive music listening and structured music therapy, on agitation and related psychoemotional outcomes in critically …

Expanding Epilepsy Representation: On Education And Awareness, Aliyah Wise

Honors Projects

The present-day American public education system has evolved to try to teach young students about more cultures and people of different lifestyles. However, despite these reforms to push for an inclusive education system, there is still minimal effort to teach students about disabilities and the people who live with them. As a student living with epilepsy, I have observed a lack of education or conversation about this disability. The purpose of this research project is to ask: How does miseducation on epilepsy contribute to harmful stereotypes and lead to real issues for people living with this disability? How should neurotypical …

The Reception Of Neurodiversity Represented Within Netflix’S Wednesday, Anna Stevens

Graduate Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores how neurodiversity is represented through popular media - particularly Netflix's show Wednesday - and aims to discuss the effects this representation could have in regards to how it's received by the public, as well as those who are neurodiverse.

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff: A Quantitative Pilot Study Of Biblical Christian Spirituality As A Regulator Of Dark Triad Personality Traits, Patricia L. Elston

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A review of the psychological literature on Christianity as a regulator of Dark Triad personality traits over the last 25 years revealed just a handful of quantitative and qualitative studies that relied exclusively upon long-standardized constructs drawn from cultural Christian ideology. Such constructs remain in direct contrast to biblical tenets to opine that Christianity has no important impact upon the development and persistence of highly aversive Dark Triad social attributes. The current quantitative pilot study was conducted in a small sample (n=26) of adult male and female born-again members of an international Evangelical Christian motorcycle ministry whose primary recruitment is …