Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Teaching And Assessing Cornhole As A Leisure Activity For Young Adults With Developmental Disabilities, Katarina Rotta

Dissertations

Leisure has long been identified as a crucial component of a healthy lifestyle. One population that displays extremely low levels of leisure activity is people with developmental disabilities, which is concerning because previous research has identified a positive correlation between leisure activity and quality of life among such individuals. The purpose of the present project was to teach and assess cornhole as a leisure activity for seven young adults with developmental disabilities. Study 1 assessed points scored with four versions of cornhole and preference for those versions. Study 2 evaluated a procedure intended to teach participants to keep score. A …

Teaching Children With Autism To Make Independent Requests Using An Echoic-To-Mand Procedure, Michael L. Tomak

Dissertations

Mands are a vital skill for the development of a child’s communicative repertoire and are typically a major focus of early intensive behavior interventions (EIBI). Naturalistic teaching is more efficient than Discrete-Trial Training (DTT) for teaching mands (Jennet, Harris, & Delmolino, 2008); and therefore, the present study used crucial components from naturalistic teaching to teach mands in a discrete-trial format, using an echoic-to-mand procedure. This intervention increased the children’s independent vocal requests. Initially, they learned to mand for items in sight and eventually for those out of sight.

Teaching Receptive Identification To Children Who Were Unsuccessful With A Standard Training Program, Kaylee R. Tomak

Dissertations

This research strongly suggests that essentially all children with the skill of generalized matching can learn receptive identification, even if they have failed to do so, using the standard least-to-most prompting procedure. The effective alternative procedures were antecedent picture prompting (Stone & Malott, 2010), consequence picture prompting (Carp et al., 2012), and receptive-exclusion training (McIlvane et al., 1984). In addition, these procedures generally produced high levels of maintenance, and they also typically produced a high level of generalization to novel stimulus sets. However, no single alternative procedure was more effective or more efficient across all of the children. In this …

Teaching Matching-To-Sample To Low-Performing Children With Autism, Blaire E. Michelin

Dissertations

Matching-to-sample is a basic procedure used in most programs for pre-school children with autism. However, a few children fail to acquire this skill with standard matching-to-sample procedures. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate an alternative method for teaching matching-to-sample to those children when the traditional methods are likely to fail. First, simple discriminations with the matching materials were taught, then the discriminations were made more complex across successive sessions. Initially, all discriminations were taught using bins to separate the comparison stimuli. All three children acquired matching-to-sample, which generalized to matching novel two-dimensional stimuli, not placed in bins.

The Impact Of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Qualitative Analysis Of Healthy `Couples’ Perceptions, Brian C. Doane

Dissertations

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a problem affecting millions of individuals, with a prevalence rate of 28% to 30% for women (Cobia, Sobansky, & Ingram, 2004) and 14% for men (Breire & Elliott, 2003). Because of the psychological trauma associated with CSA and the potential impact on the survivor’s sexuality, a couple’s relationship satisfaction may be reduced and survivors may experience difficulty in maintaining healthy intimate relationships. How CSA impacts an individual has been studied extensively, but its effect on committed couple relationships has received much less attention in the literature. Additionally, very few studies have incorporated the non-abused partner’s …

What Psychotherapists Have To Teach Us About Childhood Developmental Trauma: The Roles Of Attachment Orientation And Coping Strategy, Rebecca Klott

Dissertations

Psychotherapists have been found to have higher rates of childhood developmental trauma when compared to non-clinicians, yet they do not report more distress. The current study added to the literature regarding the experiences of psychotherapists and explored a theoretical model integrating attachment and coping as mediators for the relationship between childhood developmental trauma and psychological distress among psychotherapists.

A total of 130 masters' level psychologists participated in this study. These participants were asked to complete the following measures: The Child Abuse and Trauma Scale (Sanders& Becker-Lausen, 1995), the Ways of Coping-Revised (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Folkman, Lazarus, Denkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & …

Examining The Effectiveness And Efficiency Of Two Delivery Models To Teach Children Abduction Prevention Skills, Kimberly E. Seckinger-Bancroft

Dissertations

Nearly all children receive abduction prevention training. Most traditional education programs increase the learner's knowledge, but often fail to produce concomitant behavior change. Behavioral Skills Training (BST) is a multicomponent, behavior-based training strategy with empirical support demonstrating its effectiveness in teaching children safety skills, behavioral generalization and maintenance over time. BST, however, is restricted by financial, human and time costs and limited resources to implement the training protocol. These factors likely limit widespread adoption of the training model. This study examined the use of computer-based instruction that emphasized active responding and mastery level performance requirements to teach school-aged children abduction …

The Role Of Automatic Reinforcement In Early Speech Acquisition, Barbara E. Esch

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Nicotine And Anatoxin-A Exposures On The Operant Performance Of Rats, Kimberly Ann Jarema

Dissertations

Tolerance has previously been shown to develop to nicotine's effects on operant behavior. This experiment explored whether tolerance would still develop when nicotine administrations were separated by three weeks. Anatoxin-a, a nicotinic-receptor agonist, was also tested and the results were compared to nicotine. Male Long Evans rats performed under a multiple VR30 VI30-sec food-reinforcement schedule. Phase I rats were divided into 6 groups of 8 that received four weekly subcutaneous injections of nicotine (0.0-1.8 mg/kg) and anatoxin-a (0-250 mcg/kg) prior to testing sessions. An ED50 was derived, for each compound, from the VR dose-response curve. Phase II rats were divided …

A Theoretical Integration Of Robert Kegan's Developmental Psychology And Heinz Kohut's Self Psychology, Wilmar Vanderpol

Dissertations

Theory and research about psychological development tends to be dichotomized into two broad approaches that have never been integrated. The one is Piagetian-based cognitive-developmentalism, and the other is Freudian-based psychoanalytic developmentalism. The first predominates in academic research and application and the second in clinical research and therapy. This dissertation is a theoretical integration of the Piagetian-based theory of Robert Kegan with the Freudian-based theory of Heinz Kohut known as self psychology. A rationale for the integration of these two theories is given, along with an overview of each theory with respect to their developmental aspects. Analysis of their respective basic …

Stimulus Overselectivity: An Investigation Of Determinants, Margaret T. Mcglinchey

Dissertations

Stimulus overselectivity refers to a phenomenon in which, after discrimination training with a multiple component stimulus, behavior fails to come under the control of all of the components of the stimulus. After a screening process based on past research, a group of children with specific learning disabilities was categorized into one of two groups: overselective and non-overselective. Both groups were exposed to training and testing for generalization. All children in both groups evidenced "stimulus overselectivity" during these tests for generalization. Generalization training subsequently reduced stimulus overselectivity for all students. There were few differences between the two groups. The results suggest …

The Psychological Aspects Of Loneliness Experienced By College Students, Jerie Kull Wood

Dissertations

Loneliness is a common problem that occurs at various life stages, but is most intense for college students. To clarify and operationalize the concepts of loneliness, several current sociological and psychological approaches to loneliness were critically examined.

The major purposes of this study were to identify the lonely among the student population, the types of loneliness they experience, the behavioral manifestations of that loneliness, and the effectiveness of an intervention method. The Belcher Extended Loneliness Scale as administered to 126 students in a pretest and 203 students in a posttest. The students also answered questions about grade point average and …