Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons^™

Adolescent Bereavement, Leslie Robin, Hatim A. Omar

Pediatrics Faculty Publications

Depending on cognitive and emotional development, an adolescent may grieve very differently than a child or an adult. While mature enough to understand death's irreversibility, adolescents may not fully comprehend the enduring consequences of a loved one's death. As the desire to separate from their families and forge new intimate relationships with peers assumes increasing priority, adolescents can seem egocentric in their reaction to death, a response which often frustrates and perplexes adults. Because volatile behavior is characteristic of adolescence, health providers struggle to differentiate between normal and complicated bereavement. Here we review the commonly-accepted characteristics of normal and complicated …

Visual Efficiency And The Relationship Between Reading And Behaviors Indicating Difficulties In The Classroom In Elementary School-Age Children, Patricia A. Broadbent

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a relationship between visual efficiency, reading levels and behaviors indicating difficulties in the classroom. The sample consisted of thirty–three school-aged children, from four elementary schools. Visual efficiency was measured through a multi-step vision screening process, the Visual Efficiency Rating (VERA) software program. Behaviors indicating difficulties in the classroom were measured using the Behavioral Indicator Checklist, Indicators of Visual Performance Difficulties. This behavior checklist is part of the VERA process and is completed by the classroom teachers. The students’ reading levels were reported by the participating schools. The students were …

Optimism And Planning For Future Care Needs Among Older Adults, Silvia Sörensen, Jameson K. Hirsch, Jeffrey M. Lyness

ETSU Faculty Works

Aging is associated with an increase in need for assistance. Preparation for future care (PFC) is related to improved coping ability as well as better mental and physical health outcomes among older adults. We examined the association of optimism with components of PFC among older adults. We also explored race differences in the relationship between optimism and PFC. In Study 1, multiple regression showed that optimism was positively related to concrete planning. In Study 2, optimism was related to gathering information. An exploratory analysis combining the samples yielded a race interaction: For Whites higher optimism, but for Blacks lower optimism …

Health Behaviors Among College Students: The Influence Of Future Time Perspective And Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction, Preston L. Visser, Jameson K. Hirsch

ETSU Faculty Works

Health behavior change may prevent many fatal diseases, and may be influenced by social and motivational constructs. We assessed the interaction effect of future time perspective and basic psychological need fulfillment on positive and negative health behaviors. Future time perspective was associated with more positive, and less negative, health behaviors. Need fulfillment was associated with only positive health behaviors. In moderation analyses, individuals reporting both high need fulfillment and future perspective reported greater positive health behaviors, and were especially unlikely to smoke. Enhancing future-mindedness and supporting need satisfaction in interventions targeting modifiable health behaviors is encouraged.

Are Antidepressants Effective For Smoking Cessation In African American Smokers Aged 18 And Older?, Jennifer M. Myskowski

PCOM Physician Assistant Studies Student Scholarship

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not antidepressants are effective for smoking cessation in African American smokers aged 18 and older.

STUDY DESIGN: Review of two randomized controlled trials published in 2002 and 2011 and one pilot randomized control trial published in 2011, all English language.

DATA SOURCES: Two randomized, double-blind, controlled trials comparing bupropion to a placebo group and one pilot randomized controlled trial comparing varenicline with adherence support for smoking cessation to the control without adherence support. All articles were found using Medline, PubMed, and OVID.

OUTCOMES MEASURED: …

Is Animal Assisted Therapy With Dogs Effective In Improving Psychosocial Variables Of Mood In Hospital Patients?, Kelsey A. Morris

PCOM Physician Assistant Studies Student Scholarship

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not animal assisted interventions with dogs are effective in improving psychosocial variables of mood in hospital patients.

STUDY DESIGN: Review of two English language randomized control trial published in 2008 and 2007, and one English language clinical trial published in 2009.

DATA SOURCES: Two randomized, controlled trials comparing animal assisted interventions to absent animal interaction, interaction with a human being, engaging in another interactive activity, or no treatment were found using PubMed and Cochrane System Reviews.

OUTCOMES MEASURED: Anxiety was measured by POMS …

Does Supplementation Of N-3 Fatty Acids Containing Dha Throughout Pregnancy And Breastfeeding Improve Child Cognition?, Bianca E. Parenti

PCOM Physician Assistant Studies Student Scholarship

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not the supplementation of N-3 fatty acids containing DHA throughout pregnancy and breastfeeding improve child cognition.

STUDY DESIGN: Review of three double blind randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) published in 2003 and 2011.

DATA SOURCES: Three peer-reviewed RCTs were found using PubMed and Medline. These studies compared DHA supplementation against various placebos.

OUTCOMES MEASURED: enhanced child cognition was assessed via various exams, including the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) and Fagan tests. Significant outcomes were evaluated through the use of SD, Mean …

Does Epigallocatechin Gallate Improve Mood In Heathly Adults?, Bethany J. Wong

PCOM Physician Assistant Studies Student Scholarship

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) improves mood in healthy adults.

STUDY DESIGN: A review of three peer-reviewed journal articles written in the English language published between 2009 and 2012.

DATA SOURCES: Three randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies comparing the effect of EGCG to placebo on mood were found using PubMed and Cochrane databases.

OUTCOMES MEASURED: Outcomes measured in the studies included change in mood. Patient ratings of mood were measured using Mood Visual Analog Scales (Mood VAS), the University of Wales Institute of Science and …

Developing And Selecting Auditory Warnings For A Real-Time Behavioral Intervention, John Belletierre, Suzanne C. Hughes, Sandy Liles, Marie Boman-Davis, Neil E. Klepeis, Elaine Blumberg, Jeff Mills, Vincent Berardi, Saori Obayashi, T. Tracy Allen, Melbourne F. Hovell

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Real-time sensing and computing technologies are increasingly used in the delivery of real-time health behavior interventions. Auditory signals play a critical role in many of these interventions, impacting not only behavioral response but also treatment adherence and participant retention. Yet, few behavioral interventions that employ auditory feedback report the characteristics of sounds used and even fewer design signals specifically for their intervention. This paper describes a four-step process used in developing and selecting auditory warnings for a behavioral trial designed to reduce indoor secondhand smoke exposure. In step one, relevant information was gathered from ergonomic and behavioral science literature to …

Eating Disorder Onset In Young Girls: A Longitudinal Trajectory Analysis, Carolyn M. Pearson

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

To investigate whether there are different patterns of development for binge eating and purging behavior among pre-adolescent and early adolescent girls, I conducted trajectory analyses of those behaviors in 938 girls across eight waves of data from the spring of 5^th grade (the last year of elementary school) through the spring of 9^th grade (the first year of high school). Analyses revealed four separate developmental trajectories for binge eating behavior (labeled none, increasing, decreasing, and high steady) and three separate developmental trajectories for purging behavior (labeled none, dabble, and increasing). Fifth grade scores on risk factors that were …

Big Five Personality Traits, Pathological Personality Traits, And Psychological Dysregulation: Predicting Aggression And Antisocial Behaviors In Detained Adolescents, Katherine S. L. Lau

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study tested the utility of three different models of personality, namely the social and personality model, the pathological personality traits model, and the psychological dysregulation model, in predicting overt aggression, relational aggression, and delinquency in a sample of detained boys (ages 12 to 18; M age = 15.31; SD = 1.16). Results indicated that the three personality approaches demonstrated different unique associations with aggression and delinquency. The psychological dysregulation approach, composed of behavioral dysregulation, emotional dysregulation, and cognitive dysregulation, emerged as the overall best predictor of overt aggression, relational aggression, and delinquency. After controlling for the Big Five personality …

Reimagining My Body, Center For Public Service

SURGE

I stood there, shoulders slouched, elbows locked, hands glued to the side of the toilet. My body convulsing, I told myself, “this is the last time, just one more time and you’ll get back on track tomorrow.” It wasn’t the last time. I had been forcing myself to purge for months at this point, and each time I hated myself for it.

It was something I couldn’t control. It wasn’t out of a need for attention as so commonly thought, but a pure need to be the unreachable level of thin that I thought would make me beautiful. I was …

Predeliberation Activity In Prefrontal Cortex And Striatum And The Prediction Of Subsequent Value Judgment, Uri Maoz, Ueli Rutishauser, Soyoun Kim, Xinying Cai, Christof Koch

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Rational, value-based decision-making mandates selecting the option with highest subjective expected value after appropriate deliberation. We examined activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and striatum of monkeys deciding between smaller, immediate rewards and larger, delayed ones. We previously found neurons that modulated their activity in this task according to the animal's choice, while it deliberated (choice neurons). Here we found neurons whose spiking activities were predictive of the spatial location of the selected target (spatial-bias neurons) or the size of the chosen reward (reward-bias neurons) before the onset of the cue presenting the decision-alternatives, and thus before rational deliberation …

Prenatal Development: Annotated Bibliography, Victoria J. Molfese, Amanda Prokasky, Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, Ibrahim H. Acar, Xiaoqing Tu, Kate Sirota, Brian Keiser

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

For decades, researchers have investigated how events in the prenatal period impact women and their infants. These studies, particularly by researchers in the medical, neuroscience, and behavioral science fields, led to discoveries of important information regarding the prenatal events that were strongly associated with mortality (or death) and morbidity (or incidences of injury, pathology and abnormalities/anomalies, and neurobehavioral sequelae) in the neonatal and infancy periods. Among the many common findings from early research studies, two are particularly noteworthy. First, maternal and fetal risk conditions arising in the prenatal period do not do so in isolation. Sameroff and Chandler characterized this …

Sex Differences In White Matter Development During Adolescence: A Dti Study, Yingying Wang, Chris Adamson, Weihong Yuan, Mekibib Altaye, Anna W. Byars, Scott K. Holland

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty Publications

Adolescence is a complex transitional period in human development, composing physical maturation, cognitive and social behavioral changes. The objective of this study is to investigate sex differences in white matter development and the associations between intelligence and white matter microstructure in the adolescent brain using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS). In a cohort of 16 typically-developing adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, longitudinal DTI data were recorded from each subject at two time points that were one year apart. We used TBSS to analyze the diffusion indices including fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity …

Do Interactions Between Motor And Visual Codes Facilitate Visuospatial Memory?: The Influence Of Action On Memory Performance: When Does It Help You, When Does It Hurt You, Michael Dodd

Discipline-Based Education Research Group Speaker Series

One of the hallmarks of human cognition is that we have a limited number of cognitive resources available and successful performance in the environment requires an appropriate number of these resources to be directed towards one's primary task. As such, it is unsurprising that when attention is divided between two tasks simultaneously, performance on each task suffers relative to if each task was done in isolation. At the same time, however, it has also been shown that when individuals process information in multiple ways (e.g. across more than one modality) that performance is enhanced. In the present talk I will …

Combined Erp/Fmri Evidence For Early Word Recognition Effects In The Posterior Inferior Temporal Gyrus, Joseph Dien, Eric S. Brian, Dennis L. Molfese, Brian T. Gold

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty Publications

Two brain regions with established roles in reading are the posterior middle temporal gyrus and the posterior fusiform gyrus. Lesion studies have also suggested that the region located between them, the posterior inferior temporal gyrus (pITG), plays a central role in word recognition. However, these lesion results could reflect disconnection effects since neuroimaging studies have not reported consistent lexicality effects in pITG. Here we tested whether these reported pITG lesion effects are due to disconnection effects or not using parallel ERP/fMRI studies. We predicted that the Recognition Potential (RP), a left-lateralized ERP negativity that peaks at about 200–250 ms, might …

Transient Measurement Error In A Diverse Population, Sean Potter

Collection of Engaged Learning

The assessment of personality has important implications for clinicians, personality researchers, and the workplace setting. The accurate assessment of personality is therefore crucial to these various fields. However, measurement error has not had the necessary attention it deserves. In particular, the effect of transient measurement error on personality assessment has only begun to be recently studied. Furthermore, only undergraduate samples of relatively homogenous studies have been examined. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of transient error for personality assessment in an older, more diverse population. Participants completed a test-retest study across a time frame (1 week) …

The Flexible Fairness: Equality, Earned Entitlement, And Self-Interest, Chunliang Feng, Yi Luo, Ruolei Gu, Lucas S. Broster, Xueyi Shen, Tengxiang Tian, Yue-Jia Luo, Frank Krueger

Behavioral Science Faculty Publications

The current study explored whether earned entitlement modulated the perception of fairness in three experiments. A preliminary resource earning task was added before players decided how to allocate the resource they jointly earned. Participants' decision in allocation, their responses to equal or unequal offers, whether advantageous or disadvantageous, and subjective ratings of fairness were all assessed in the current study. Behavioral results revealed that participants proposed more generous offers and showed enhanced tolerance to disadvantageous unequal offers from others when they performed worse than their presumed "partners," while the reverse was true in the better-performance condition. The subjective ratings also …

Sensory-Specific Appetition: Postingestive Detection Of Glucose Rapidly Promotes Continued Consumption Of A Recently Encountered Flavor, Kevin P. Myers, Marisa S. Taddeo, Emily K. Richards

Faculty Journal Articles

It is generally thought that macronutrients stimulate intake when sensed in the mouth (e.g., sweet taste) but as food enters the GI tract its effects become inhibitory, triggering satiation processes leading to meal termination. Here we report experiments extending recent work (see [1]) showing that under some circumstances nutrients sensed in the gut produce a positive feedback effect, immediately promoting continued intake. In one experiment, rats with intragastric (IG) catheters were accustomed to consuming novel flavors in saccharin daily while receiving water infused IG (5 ml/15 min). The very first time glucose (16% w/w) was infused IG instead of water, …