Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

The Post-Combat Couple Adjustment Questionnaire: A Preliminary Validation, Valerie Maine

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation presents the results of a psychometric study regarding the preliminary validation of The Post-Combat Couple Adjustment Questionnaire (PCCAQ). This measure was designed to assess post-combat and post-deployment adjustment for male veterans and their female partners. The measure was created using existing literature on veterans, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and couples. The PCCAQ consists of four domains of couple functioning, including: (a) redefining roles, expectations, and division of household responsibilities; (b) managing strong emotions; (c) abandoning emotional constriction and creating intimacy in relationships; and (d) creating a sense of shared meaning surrounding the deployment experience. The PCCAQ was compared …

The Development Of Intimate Partner Relationships Among Men Sexually Abused As Children, Laura Beltran-Medina

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This phenomenological study sought to understand the experience of seven men who came forward to contribute and discuss their intimate partner relationships for what relational intimacy could reveal about themselves, the meaning of intimate partnership, and their understanding of being in intimate relationships. The theoretical assumptions applied to this study are: (a) Childhood sexual abuse interferes with the ability to achieve deeper experiences of idealized love; (b) Negative effects of adult relational attachment are manifested in anxiety related to sexual intimacy, fear of emotional intimacy, and inability to fulfill dependency needs such as trust, love, and security; and (c) There …

Existential Concerns Of Individuals Living With Chronic Mental Illness In Guam, Christina Maria B. Dela Cruz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Individuals living with chronic mental illness experience a host of challenges associated with the symptoms of their illness. In an effort to help restore healthy functioning, mental health treatment for individuals with chronic mental illness thus focuses primarily on symptom reduction and management. Recent research exploring the lived experience of individuals with chronic mental illness suggests that apart from their symptoms, these individuals also encounter existential issues related to the self, relationships with others, temporality, making meaning out of the illness experience, and managing life with the illness. At the same time, however, this research has tended to focus on …

Depression And Hopelessness In Secondary And Higher Education Students, Ali Haydar Şar

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Depression and hopelessness are emotional problems which should be taken into consideration for secondary and higher education students in terms of development and education. In the research, it was tried to determine if depression and hopelessness vary according to education grades, gender and different departments. Beck Depression Scale and Beck Hopelessness Scale were applied to 1050 students in order to collect data in the research. According to obtained results, it was concluded that secondary level students have higher depression and hopelessness scale than higher education students; girls have higher depression levels than boys and boys have higher hopelessness levels than …

Dispositional Mediators Of Burnout Syndrome In A Sample Of Direct Care Staff Employed At Group Homes In A Midwestern State, Cristovao Bartolo Carreira

Wayne State University Dissertations

The current research examined the dispositional characteristics that mediated burnout syndrome in a sample of direct care workers who were employed in group homes for the mentally ill in a Midwestern state. Specifically, the indirect effects that the direct care staff's attachment systems and problem solving ability were examined as they applied to their potential burnout status. Attachment theory, a contemporary psychodynamic theory of personality, was used to provide a context for the study. The researcher studied the interactions between construct subcomponents to address a criticism in the literature stating that only total scores were used to study burnout and …

Stroop Interference In A Delayed Match-To-Sample Task: Evidence For Semantic Competition, Bradley R. Sturz, Marshall Lee Green, Lawrence Locker Jr., Ty W. Boyer

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Discussions of the source of the Stroop interference effect continue to pervade the literature. Semantic competition posits that interference results from competing semantic activation of word and color dimensions of the stimulus prior to response selection. Response competition posits that interference results from competing responses for articulating the word dimension vs. the color dimension at the time of response selection. We embedded Stroop stimuli into a delayed match-to-sample (DMTS) task in an attempt to test semantic and response competition accounts of the interference effect. Participants viewed a sample color word in black or colored fonts that were ongruent or incongruent …

Probabilistic Cue Combination: Less Is More, Daniel Yurovsky, Ty W. Boyer, Linda B. Smith, Chen Yu

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non-normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the dilution effect, predictions made from the combination of two cues of different strengths are less accurate than those made from the stronger cue alone. Here we show that dilution is an adult problem; 11-month-old infants combine strong and weak predictors normatively. These results extend and add support for the less is more hypothesis: limited …

Bcl9 And C9orf5 Are Associated With Negative Symptoms In Schizophrenia: Meta-Analysis Of Two Genome-Wide Association Studies, Chun Xu, Nagesh Aragam, Xia Li, Erika Cynthia Villa, Liang Wang, David Briones, Brenda Bin Su, Michael A. Escamilla, Kesheng Wang

Health & Biomedical Sciences Faculty Publications

Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric condition affecting slightly more than 1% of the population worldwide and it is a multifactorial disorder with a high degree of heritability (80%) based on family and twin studies. Increasing lines of evidence suggest intermediate phenotypes/endophenotypes are more associated with causes of the disease and are less genetically complex than the broader disease spectrum. Negative symptoms in schizophrenia are attractive intermediate phenotypes based on their clinical and treatment response features. Therefore, our objective was to identify genetic variants underlying the negative symptoms of schizophrenia by analyzing two genome-wide association (GWA) data sets consisting …

Examination Of The Impact Of Race-Related Stress And Culture-Specific Coping On Burnout And Compassion Fatigue In Black Nursing Assistants, Marika A. Maris

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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The Association Between Optimism And Serum Antioxidants In The Midlife In The United States Study, Julia K. Boehm, David R. Williams, Eric B. Rimm, Carol Ryff, Laura D. Kubzansky

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Objective Psychological and physical health are often conceptualized as the absence of disease, but less research addresses positive psychological and physical functioning. For example, optimism has been linked with reduced disease risk and biological dysfunction, but very little research has examined associations with markers of healthy biological functioning. Thus, we investigated the association between two indicators of positive health: optimism and serum antioxidants.

Methods The cross-sectional association between optimism and antioxidant concentrations was examined in 982 men and women from the Midlife in the United States study. Primary measures included self-reported optimism (assessed with the revised Life Orientation Test) and …

Relation Between Optimism And Lipids In Midlife, Julia K. Boehm, David R. Williams, Eric B. Rimm, Carol Ryff, Laura D. Kubzansky

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

This research examined optimism’s relationship with total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and triglycerides. The hypothesis that optimism is associated with a healthier lipid profile was tested. Participants were 990 mostly white men and women from the Midlife in the United States study who were on average 55.1 years old. Optimism was assessed by self-report with the Life Orientation Test. A fasting blood sample was used to assess serum lipid levels. Linear and logistic regression models examined the cross-sectional association between optimism and lipids accounting for covariates such as demographic characteristics (e.g., education) and …

Tpm: Cloud-Based Tele Ptsd Monitor Using Multi-Dimensional Information, Roger Xu, Gang Mei, Guangfan Zhang, Pan Gao, Aaron Pepe, Jiang Li, James D. Westwood (Ed.), Susan W. Westwood (Ed.), Li Felländer-Tsai (Ed.), Randy S. Haluck (Ed.), Richard A. Robb (Ed.), Steven Senger (Ed.), Kirby G. Vosburgh (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

An automated system that can remotely and non-intrusively screen individuals at high risk for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and monitor their progress during treatment would be desired by many Veterans Affairs (VAs) as well as other PTSD treatment and research organizations. In this paper, we present an automated, cloud-based Tele-PTSD Monitor (TPM) system based on the fusion of multiple sources of information. The TPM system can be hosted in a cloud environment and accessed through landline or cell phones, or on the Internet through a web portal or mobile application (app).

The Effect Of Visual Wulst Lesions And Trigeminal Nerve Sectioning On The Discrimination Of Magnetic Inclination In The Homing Pigeon (Columba Livia), Merissa Acerbi

Honors Projects

The ability of homing pigeons to return to their loft from unknown places has fascinated scientists for centuries. It is well established that homing pigeons, like migratory birds, posses an innate magnetic inclination compass to determine direction by measuring the angle between the magnetic field vector and the Earth's surface. Recent work has indicated that the avian magnetic compass is light mediated and appears to mediate magnetic information to the brain. This occurs via a visual pathway with processing in the visual Wulst area of the forebrain. There is, however, also evidence from other avian species that magnetic direction may …

It Doesn't Pass The Sell Test: Focusing On "The Facts Of The Individual Case" In Involuntary Medication Inquiries, Susan A. Mcmahon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Criminal defendants who are incompetent to stand trial have a significant liberty interest in refusing the antipsychotic medication that could restore their competency. The Supreme Court cautioned that instances of intrusion upon that right “may be rare,” and, in Sell v. United States, it laid out what it believed to be stringent criteria for when a defendant could be medicated against his will. Yet, since Sell, trial courts have ordered over sixty-three percent of defendants involuntarily medicated. These individuals did not pose a danger to themselves or others, and they were rarely accused of crimes that involved damage …

The Psychology Of Competition: A Social Comparison Perspective, Stephen M. Garcia, Avishalom Tor, Tyrone M. Schiff

Journal Articles

Social comparison—the tendency to self-evaluate by comparing ourselves to others—is an important source of competitive behavior. We propose a new model that distinguishes between individual and situational factors that increase social comparison and thus lead to a range of competitive attitudes and behavior. Individual factors are those that vary from person to person: the relevance of the performance dimension, the similarity of rivals, and their relationship closeness to the individual, as well as the various individual differences variables relating to social comparison more generally. Situational factors, conversely, are those factors on the social comparison landscape that affect similarly situated individuals: …

Understanding Perceptions Of Stalking: The Impact Of Additional Contextual Information Regarding The Breakdown Of Relationships, Simon C. Duff, Adrian J. Scott

Research outputs 2013

Purpose: Perception research has demonstrated that people view stranger stalkers to be more persistentand dangerous than ex-partner stalkers. Although these findings are consistent with the outcome of legal processes where stranger stalkers are more likely to be convicted, they contrast with the findings of national surveys and applied research where ex-partner stalkers represent the most persistent and dangerous relational subtype. The aim of the current study is to further examine the influence of prior relationship on perceptions of stalking by considering the impact of additional contextual information regarding the breakdown of ex-partners’ relationships for the first time.

Design/methodology/approach: In this …

The Influence Of Prior Relationship On Perceptions Of Stalking: A Comparison Of Laypersons, Nonspecialist Police Officers And Specialist Police Officers, Adrian J. Scott, Keri Nixon, Lorraine Sheridan

Research outputs 2013

The current research examined the influence of prior relationship on perceptions of stalking, and compared the perceptions of laypersons, nonspecialist police officers, and specialist police officers. Two studies employed experimental designs where participants were presented with one of three vignettes in which the nature of the prior relationship was manipulated so that the perpetrator and victim were portrayed as strangers, acquaintances, or ex-partners. Participants comprised 101 nonspecialist police officers and 108 laypersons in Study 1, and 49 specialist police officers and 49 nonspecialist police officers in Study 2. Findings indicate that nonspecialist police officers and laypersons shared the common misperception …

Framing And Perceptions Of Stalking: The Influence Of Conduct Severity And The Perpetrator-Target Relationship, Adrian J. Scott, Nikki Rajakaruna, Lorraine P. Sheridan

Research outputs 2013

Research has demonstrated that the way in which questions are presented (i.e. framed) has the capacity to influence responses to subsequent questions. In the context of stalking, perception research has often been framed in terms of whether or not particular behaviours constitute stalking. The current research investigates whether the framing of the opening question (question frame), conduct severity and the perpetrator target relationship influence perceptions of stalking. Two studies employed experimental 3 3 independent factorial designs: one to examine question frame and conduct severity, the other to examine question frame and the perpetrator target relationship. Participants in both studies (total …

The Emotional Intelligence Of A Group Of Critical-Care Nurses In South Africa, Amanda Towell, Elzabe Nel, Ann Muller

Research outputs 2013

Critical-care nurses often look after three or more critically-ill patients during a shift. The workload and emotional stress can lead to disharmony between the nurse’s body, mind and spirit. Nurses with a high emotional intelligence have less emotional exhaustion and psychosomatic symptoms; they enjoy better emotional health; gain more satisfaction from their actions (both at work and at home); and have improved relationships with colleagues at work. The question arises: what is the emotional intelligence of critical-care nurses? A quantitative survey was conducted. The target population was registered nurses working in critical-care units who attended the Critical Care Congress 2009 …

Strengths And Limitations Of Qualitative Approaches To Research In Occupational Health Psychology, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Joseph J. Mazzola

Publications and Research

Like all research methods, qualitative methods have strengths and limitations. This chapter describes seven strengths and five limitations. With an understanding of their strengths and limitations and how to minimize and/or balance them, occupational health psychology (OHP) researchers can benefit from qualitative methods. It is important to understand that qualitative findings do not establish generalizable cause-effect relations. However, qualitative methods can help an OHP researcher develop a theory of causality and derive hypotheses related to the theory and, thus, motivate quantitatively organized research designed to test the hypotheses. The challenge for the OHP researcher is to be mindful of what …