Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

Thoughts, Feelings, Actions; The Brevity Of Being: A Haiku Method, Scott Medeiros

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The difficulties of delivering clinical services during the pandemic showed that there was a need for interventions that were able to be adapted to virtual sessions. In addition, lack of training and expertise regarding specialized therapies require modern day clinicians to be able to synergize current theory with the reality of the mental health landscape. In this study, 19 individuals participated in a psychoeducation group that taught a therapeutic thought mapping technique that was then adapted towards the creation of a haiku. It was noticed that participants were able to learn a psychological concept, apply it towards their life, create …

Transformative, Noetic, And Transpersonal Experiences During Personal Development Workshops, Helané Wahbeh, Cassandra Vieten, Garret Young, Agnes Cartry-Jacobsen, Dean Radin, Arnaud Delorme

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

The global personal development market was valued at $38.28 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow an additional 5% from 2020 to 2027. Many of these workshops promise to be transformational. This secondary analysis study examined transformative, transpersonal, and noetic aspects of personal development workshops. We found that 74% of post-survey records endorsed that participants experienced a moment of clarity or profound insight during their workshop. In addition, 66% endorsed that participants had experienced at least one noetic experience, and 84% endorsed at least one transpersonal experience. These analyses provide preliminary evidence for the transformational potential of personal development …

Church, Country, Culture: How Three Aspects Of Authoritarianism Predict Support For Donald Trump, Trenton Leslie

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the American bipartisan system, ideologies and beliefs create political views that sort voters between two groups. Political sorting increases polarization based on cultural preferences for an in-group that become ethnocentric views, which develop into ethnocentric cultural politics. I present an augmented concept of authoritarianism in America that encompasses sorting based on aspects of political belief, encapsulating sources of polarization and cultural attachments to political associations.

I develop the argument that authoritarianism is the result of political attachment to identities that feed off one another as individuals identify with an in-group, such as a party platform. My central theory is …

‘Mapping’ Moral Engagement In The Solution-Focused Approach Through Macintyre’S Model Of Practice, Brian K. Jennings

Journal of Solution Focused Practices

I attempt to answer Trish Walsh’s two questions about the ‘maps’ that might exist for moral engagement in the ‘helping’ professions and how these might relate to the Solution-Focused Approach (Walsh, 2010). I seek to do this by exploring the narrative of the emergence of the Solution Focused Approach from the perspective of Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a ‘practice’ (MacIntyre, 1985) with the aim of providing the basis for ‘map’ for moral engagement by Solution-Focused Practitioners. To this end I attempt to interpret the Solution Focused Approach as a MacIntyreian ‘practice’ in which virtues (as ‘human qualities’) emerge out of …

A Qualitative Study On Nurse Facilitators Of Mind-Body Skills Groups, Paula D. Blake-Beckford

Mindfulness Studies Theses

The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), founded by Dr. James Gordon, provides communities with evidence-based Mind-Body Skills Groups (MBSGs) that foster self-care, self-awareness, and self-expression. MBSGs range from 8 to 12-week series on various mind-body practices wherein group members meet, practice, and reflect on the impact of mind-body skills in their lives. Research has demonstrated that participants in MBSGs have positive outcomes. Healthcare professionals (HCPs), especially nurses, gain resiliency from MBSGs. As facilitators of MBSGs, nurses develop essential skills transferable to clinical and educational settings. MBSGs are therapeutic for adult participants with chronic stress. Prior to this thesis, only one …

Where I’M From: Internal Manifestations Among Cambodian Women Using The Expressive Arts A Literature Review, Noeun Chhim

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Chronic mental illness has affected many Cambodian people, but, culturally, Cambodians aren’t accustomed to opening up and discussing their feelings, rather defining mental illness to craziness and seeking help is presumed taboo. Thus, Cambodians are often reluctant to talk about their experiences and/or their related illnesses. Though Cambodians have experienced inconceivable suffering and violence during the Khmer Rouge era, for the purpose of this thesis, I will be discussing the role of Cambodian women and investigate the extent of what they’ve witnessed and experienced. Cambodian women have suffered through many years of trauma and grief, during and after the Khmer …

Toward Holistic Mental Wellness: A Literature Review Of Mindfulness-Based And Focusing-Oriented Art Therapies, Lesley Vernon

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Modern day living, for all its benefits, is synonymous with record levels of stress. The mental health clinician’s role is to assist clients in accessing the skills and tools necessary to reduce and alleviate the symptoms of stress-induced anxiety. Mindfulness is emerging as a potent and effective tool to restore one’s state of well-being. Likewise, engaging in art therapy has been shown to reduce stress and foster resilience. Grounded in humanistic and existential theories, this literature review aimed to assess the impact and effectiveness of two intermodal holistic therapies, specifically mindfulness-based art therapy (MBAT) and focusing-oriented art therapy (FOAT). A …

Epistemic Injustice, Endometriosis And Dance/ Movement Therapy: An Autoethnographic Investigation, Kevana West

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

As the field of dance/ movement therapy evolves to meet the demands of a rapidly changing social landscape, it is imperative that clinicians think critically about the degree to which our work is steeped in oppressive frameworks and ideologies. This investigation uses testimony to explore epistemic injustice as it relates to the author’s experience of living with endometriosis and the pursuit of professional licensure. Considering the limited amount of research on the condition, along with the perceived absence of literature within the field of dance/ movement therapy, further study is warranted. The experimentation phase of this research incorporated the use …

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

How To Survive The Apocalypse: Using Film, Television, And Video Games As Gateways To Self-Analysis, Braeden Raymer

Theses - ALL

This thesis serves as an investigation on the use of film, television, and video games as access points for personal analysis in imagined scenarios. When creating a fictional world, characters' motivations and behaviors are often based on real-life experiences. In the apocalypse genre, understanding how a character might behave in such an extreme circumstance can be difficult to predict, considering few have lived through comparable conditions. To supplement personal experiences and observations, a creator might use other stories as gateways to self-examination. The investigation begins in film, exploring how stories provide a viewer with new experiences that they can then …

Creativity And Spirituality: The Undeniable Connection Between The Two, Elizabeth A. Vesneske

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Exploring the Spiritual Nature of Creativity

As a deeply spiritual person I began to notice that as I developed my spiritual practices and grew deeper in my spirituality my creativity started to flourish. Ironically enough, I had chosen a master’s program that focused solely on creativity. This is something I would later call a synchronicity, where things in your life magically happen to align. My spirituality, something I am so passionate about started to work its way into my graduate studies. Finding the Center for Applied Imagination through Buffalo State College has not only allowed me to strengthen my creativity …

The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh

English (MA) Theses

Medical imaging devices have enabled doctors to render images of the brain without cutting into the body. These images are colloquially called “brain scans.” Through journalism and mass dissemination online, brain scans have become an example of Michael Calvin McGee’s “ideograph,” a language term that subtly takes on outsized political and symbolic meaning to enforce state power. In conversation with theories of new materialism, I situate the brain scan as an ideograph within Jenny Edbauer’s model of rhetorical ecologies. The rhetorical force of the brain scan comes out of a collision between René Descarte’s mind/body dualism, the medical model of …

Dancing With 4e Cognitive Science And Human Science Psychology, Joshua Hall

Middle Voices

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s overemphasis on cognition to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists …

Double Consciousness And Unhealthy Weight Control Behaviors In Young Black And White Adults, Priscillia Ihionkhan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined the previously understudied notion that Black individuals are buffered against being dissatisfied with their bodies and in turn developing unhealthy eating and weight control behaviors. Double consciousness, a racially/ethnically sensitive measure of body dissatisfaction, was tested as a mediator of the relation between ethnic identity and unhealthy eating and weight control behaviors in Black and White adults. It was anticipated that unhealthy weight control behaviors would be more common in Black women compared to White women and that double consciousness would mediate the association between ethnic identity and unhealthy weight control behaviors among Black women, but …

Music And Mental Health: Increasing Awareness And Promoting Wellness, Catherine Sarah Black

Senior Theses

“Music for Mental Health: Increasing Awareness and Promoting Wellness” examines how music might raise mental health awareness and act as a coping resource. Specifically, it 1) argues for the connection between music and mental health, 2) presents a case study of select BTS songs that have been useful in promoting mental health, and 3) describes the efforts of Classical Healing Keys, a non-profit organization designed by the author as a proposal to promote mental health through classical music.

Accountability As A Key Virtue In Mental Health And Human Flourishing, John R. Peteet, Charlotte Vanoyen-Witvliet, C. Stephen Evans

Faculty Publications

We propose that accountability plays an implicit, important, and relatively unexamined role in psychiatry. People generally think of accountability as a relation in which one party is held accountable by another. In this paper, we examine accountability as a virtue, drawing on philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology to examine what it means to welcome being accountable in an excellent way that promotes flourishing. When people manifest accountability as a virtue, they are both responsive to others they owe a response, and they are responsible for their attitudes and actions in light of these relationships. Psychiatric treatment often aims to correct disordered …

Accountability And Autonomy, Motivation, And Psychiatric Treatment, John R. Peteet, Charlotte Vanoyen-Witvliet, C. Stephen Evans

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

When “There Is” A Black: Levinas And Fanon On Ethics, Politics, And Responsibility, Leswin Laubscher

Middle Voices

This paper examines some of the ways in which the Black other, by Frantz Fanon’s articulation, complicates and challenges Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies of ethics and justice. Additionally, it brings Levinas’s notion of the il y a, or “there is,” and Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing” into critical conversation with respect to the body and being of the Black other.

Emannuel Levinas, Fr. William Richardson, And The Return Of The Irresponsible Subject, Robert Manning

Middle Voices

This article revisits the famous encounter between Levinas and William Richardson to discuss the subject's ability to return to itself despite Levinas's arguments to the the contrary in OTB.

Ethics Of Interaction: Levinas And Enactivism On Affectivity, Responsibility, And Signification, Edward A. Lenzo

Middle Voices

In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to connect enactivism with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. This essay is such an attempt. Its major theme is the relationship between affectivity and ethics. My touchstones in enactivist thought are Giovanna Colombetti and Steve Torrances’ “Emotion and Ethics: an (inter-)enactive account” (2009) and the influential concept of participatory sense-making developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). With respect to Levinas, I deploy major insights from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I first show that enactivist thought (thus represented) and Levinas roughly agree on …

Revealing Levinas: Transcending Moral And Aesthetic Distinctions Between Form And Content Through Poetic Gamespersonship, Lori E. Koelsch, Alex Kranjec

Middle Voices

This poem was inspired by the confluence of two communications: An email regarding proposed changes to university workload policies, and a call for papers for a journal’s special issue on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. We used poetic form to reflect figuratively on academic integrity and what counts literally as good Levinas scholarship.

Ethics In The Breakdown: Levinas, Winnicott, And Schizoid Phenomena, Matthew J. Devine

Middle Voices

This article addresses the common concern that Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics amounts to a life-denying, moral masochism. To the contrary, I demonstrate close resonances between Levinas’ project and that of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, for whom the purpose of therapy is to feel alive. In the first section, I trace the Levinasian subject’s coming to be out of the impersonal Il y a. Exploiting the object-relations undertones, I emphasize that the Levinasian subject comes to be as fastened, riveted, or bound to existence, and thereafter seeks to loosen its bond to its existence. In the second section, I discuss Winnicott’s …

King, Levinas And The Interruption Of Love: The Alchemy Of The Fire Fable, Claire S. Lebeau, Kaleb Sinclair

Middle Voices

Levinas begins Totality and Infinity with a haunting allusion from the 19^th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, “though the true life is absent”, we are in the world. This lamentation is a fitting beginning for his exposition of a radical reformulation of an Ethics that precedes all thought, language, or systematic attempts to cast morality as a Truth. Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. presented a lamentation for a dream of a world where the transcendence of race, creed, or classification of any kind could allow children to grow up to be first ethical human beings in relation to one …

In Memoriam: George Kunz (1934-2019) / Levinas Issue Introduction, Claire S. Lebeau

Middle Voices

No abstract provided.

Mathematics For The Masses: Door-To-Door Missionaries Of Math And Twelve-Step Recovery Programs, Daniel S. Helman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Conversion of strangers, or proselytizing, is a feature of a range of groups for religious, organizational and other aims. In twelve-step recovery programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, belief in a higher power is a requirement for working the steps to recovery. People are encouraged to find a higher power of their own understanding. This paper presents a model for using mathematics as a higher power, and shows how recovery works with mathematics in that role instead of a more traditional higher power such as God. A contemplative definition of math is given along with a description of a three-categoried epistemology: …

Using Legos® In Research Facilitation: An Advanced Scripted Research Method, Samuel W. Root

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Transpersonal research methods can help individuals access useful information and material that typically reside out of conscious awareness. The playful activity of LEGO® block-building can be adapted for research purposes and used to overcome research impasses, for example. This paper presents a novel transpersonal LEGO® building process for facilitation in each of the four major phases of research. Readers are provided with a 6-step script that takes between 30 minutes and 1 hour to complete. Steps include: Prepare to Exercise; Set Intentions; Build While Intending Solution; Appreciate/Take In; Project and Actively Imagine; and Reflect and Ease Out. Future studies could …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age. V. Socio-Cultural Bases Of A Globalizing Neo-Shamanism And Its Relation To Climate Crisis: Possibilities, Inevitabilities, Barriers, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Extending this series of papers on a futural spirituality, and considering the numinous as an inherent human capacity for an awe that confers a sense of all-inclusive meaning, communality, and humility, the question arises whether, in the face of a secularization of traditional world religions, globalization of a techno/capitalist economy of perpetual commodification of planet and person, and a widening sense of loss of meaning and higher purpose, some collective re-newal of the sense of the sacred might be possible – or not. While Jung, Toynbee, and Sorokin regarded such a movement as inevitable, bringing forward to the degree possible …

Effects Of Brief Daily Kundalini Yoga Meditation On Self-Esteem, Mood And Emotional Self-Efficacy: A Randomized Comparison Study, Sonia Romero Martinez

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This randomized comparison study measured the impact of brief daily use of two types of kundalini yoga meditation from the Yogi Bhajan lineage on self-esteem, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and positive and negative affect in a non-clinical sample of 46 Spanish-speaking adults residing in Spain. Results of the two meditation types—Kirtan Kriya and Internal Conflict Resolution—are compared. Results showed that both types of meditation had positive impacts on all study variables, though the degree of change and effect size depended on the type of meditation used. Results point to these relevant forms of brief daily meditation as simple and inexpensive tools …

There's A Duwende On My Shelf: The Parapsychological Studies Of Fr. Jaime C. Bulatao, Sj, Carl Lorenz Cervantes

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

In the Filipino transpersonal worldview, the mind is not contained within the brain, and is often projected onto the world as “spirits”. Studying these cultural metaphors may allow for a deeper understanding of the Filipino psyche. Fr. Jaime C. Bulatao, SJ, one of the founders of the Psychological Association of the Philippines, studied the projections of the Filipino psyche as they manifested in paranormal phenomena. Bulatao provides the metaphor of eggs frying in a pan as a framework to understand this: the egg whites fuse despite the yolks being far apart. It is in the dissolution of boundaries that transpersonal …

Exceptional Human Experiences Among Pilgrims On The Camino De Santiago: A Study Of Self-Reported Experiences And Transformative Aftereffects, Miran Lavric, Snezana Brumec, Andrej Naterer

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

The Camino de Santiago pilgrimage is an extraordinary endeavour that tends to trigger exceptional human experiences. Following our previous investigation of this topic, we conducted an online survey of 501 pilgrims in order to assess the frequency of different exceptional experiences (EEs) on the pilgrimage and their transformative aftereffects (TAs) in everyday life afterwards. More than 70% of the respondents reported improvement in terms of self-confidence, personal relationships and letting go of emotional “baggage”. The results show strong correlations between the observed EEs and the (consequent) TAs. We contend that walking the Camino de Santiago often produces exceptional experiences that …