<p> Dissatisfaction caused by work conflicts between members of different generations is possibly rooted in misinterpretations of the millennial generation, those born between 1980 and 2001, especially in relation to the type of supervisory leadership behavior they favor. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine whether there is a statistically significant relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction among millennial workers in an intergenerational workforce. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) questionnaire was selected to measure the five subscales of transformational leadership and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) to measure job satisfaction. A sample of 133 U.S. millennial employees in information technology (IT), healthcare, and sales and marketing selected from LinkedIn groups completed the survey. Two statistical models were developed and findings indicated a significant positive relationship between transformational leadership and its five factors and the job satisfaction of millennials. The five transformational leadership factors were attributed as an explanation of 37.8% of millennials&rsquo; job satisfaction in the first model. The second model of overall transformational leadership score was applied to explain 36.4% of the relationship. The individual consideration component showed the highest score indicating a significant positive relationship with millennial job satisfaction (<i>r</i> = .584; <i>p</i> &lt; .05). As such, the component&rsquo;s contribution to the predictive model was the highest of all transformational leadership factors (<i>R²</i> = .341, <i>F</i>(1, 133) = 15.451, <i>p</i> &lt; .05; <i> B</i> = 5.52), indicating that when leadership behaviors displayed individualized attention, job satisfaction increased. Variables of gender and occupational sector did not correlate significantly with job satisfaction of millennials and therefore were excluded. There was a significant relationship between covariate annual income and job satisfaction of millennials (r = .150; <i> p</i> &lt; .05). Across occupational sectors, job satisfaction did not differ much and millennial males indicated a higher level of satisfaction at work (<i>M</i> = 71.5556; <i>SD</i> = 15.7548) compared to women (<i>M</i> = 66.6582; <i>SD</i> = 18.59479). Recommendations for future research include expanding the study with a full range MLQ questionnaire to capture additional information as well as scrutinizing the mediation of gender and occupational sectors on job satisfaction.</p>

<p> The ability to flexibly control or inhibit unwanted actions is critical for everyday behavior. Lack of this capacity is characteristic of numerous psychiatric diseases including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). My project is designed to study the neural underpinnings of response inhibition and to what extent these mechanisms are disrupted in animals with impaired impulse control. I therefore recorded single neurons from dorsal striatum, orbitofrontal cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex from rats performing a novel rodent variant of the classic "stop signal" task used in clinical settings. This task asks motivated rats to repeatedly produce simple actions to obtain rewards while needing to semi-occasionally inhibit an already initiated response. To take this a step further, I compared normal rats to rats prenatally exposed to nicotine in order to better understand the mechanism underlying inhibitory control. Rats exposed to nicotine before birth show abnormal attention, poor inhibitory control, and brain deficits consistent with impairments seen in humans prenatally exposed to nicotine and those with ADHD.</p><p> I found that dorsal striatum neurons tend to encode the direction of a response and the motor refinement necessary to guide behaviors within the task rather than playing a causal role in response inhibition. However the orbitofrontal cortex, a direct afferent of dorsal striatum, possesses the capacity to inform the striatum of the correct action during response inhibition within the critical time window required to flexibly alter an initiated movement. On the other hand, medial prefrontal cortex functions as a conflict &ldquo;monitor&rdquo; to broadly increase preparedness for flexible response inhibition by aggregating current and past conflict history. Lastly, rat pups exposed to nicotine during gestation exhibit faster movement speeds and reduced capacity for inhibitory behavior. Physiologically, prenatal nicotine exposure manifests in a hypoactive prefrontal cortex, diminished encoding of task parameters, and reduced capacity to maintain conflict information.</p>

<p> Ainsworth and Bowlby&rsquo;s Attachment Theory suggest that young children experience lasting effects of disconnection if separated from their primary caretaker. Foster children are legally removed from their primary caretakers, yet the effects of foster care on later social relationships of foster children is unknown.</p><p> The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the perceptions of adult foster children, ages 18 years and over, who were placed into foster care under 5 years of age. The major challenge was to obtain qualifying participants, first, because this is an invisible population in the American culture and, secondly, these individuals are hesitant to share their stories. The initial population included 5 persons from a local shelter and, using the snowball method, the researcher secured an additional 15 adult foster children that met the criteria.</p><p> Applying the phenomenological approach, these long interviews included 6 questions that addressed the research question: What do adults who have been in foster care placements prior to age 5 and have experienced more than 5 years in foster care placements from age 0-18 perceive are the long-term effects of foster care on their adult social relationships? The interviews occurred throughout Southern California and were taped and lasted 40 minutes to 2 hours, often filled with tears and high emotion. The participants included 3 with prior jail time, 6 who were homeless, 14 who were employed, 10 with an addiction, and 2 who were married. All had obtained a high school degree. All shared repeated unsuccessful friendship or romantic relationships.</p><p> The transcribed interviews were reviewed by 4 trained coders in a doctoral program and produced 8 themes, leading to the 8 conclusions. The primary conclusions are adult foster children express that abandonment is a deep core aspect of their psychological profile (95%); share the mental health issues of low self-esteem, lack of trust, and putting up walls in their social relationships (100%); act out their generational cycles of various addictive behavior relating to abandonment (100%); spirituality helped to stabilize more than half of these adult foster children through challenging times; and those without spiritual connections described the support of mentors in their lives.</p>

This thesis contains a set of empirical investigations, which explore a fundamental issue in human communication, namely the functional significance of iconic hand gestures that accompany speech. Some researchers argue that these iconic gestures function for the speaker to facilitate lexical retrieval from the mental lexicon (e.g. Butterworth and Hadar, 1989; 1997). An alternative theory is that these iconic gestures are to do with the communication of information from a speaker to a listener (e.g. McNeill, 1985; 1992). This important debate forms the basis of the current research. The research reported in this thesis was found to provide little evidence for the lexical access theoretical position but provide important supporting evidence for the argument that iconic gestures are essentially communicative. It has shown convincingly that information about the world out there is encoded into speech and gesture and seems to provide a substantial body of evidence that iconic gestures do indeed convey semantic information to respondents. It has also shown that some iconic gestures are more communicative than others and that the occurrence of these gestures is affected by certain identifiable properties of talk. One of the strengths of the current research is that it is now more precisely known what semantic information is actually received by respondents from gesture and hence this research provides a much better insight into how the linguistic and gestural codes interact in the communication of meaning. The research reported in this thesis suggests that those researchers who neglect iconic gesture in their study of how language is used in eveiyday life are missing a major component of the process of human communication.

<p> In recent years, the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder has increased. Autism is a cognitive impairment that affects the way people socialize and behave. Currently, treatments and services exist mostly for children, even though it is a lifelong disorder and those with it are living longer. Like autism, Alzheimer&rsquo;s affects a person&rsquo;s cognitive abilities, although its onset occurs much later in life. With the increased average lifespan due to technological advances, the number of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer&rsquo;s is expected to grow exponentially. There are many parallels between the two conditions, and research suggests that Autism may act as a buffer against Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease. This systematic literature review aims to better describe the link between autism and Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease, which could further an understanding of each condition individually.</p><p>

<p> The author presents as the ministry problem the dropout rate of Millennials from the church and argues as a partial solution an intentional strategy of mentoring in life fulfillment. It is posited that in addition to experiencing greater life fulfillment through a process of mentoring that is gospel centered although not overtly spiritual, it will naturally create a path to which a participant will likely explore faith in Christ if it does not exist, or have existing faith strengthened. The author created an intervention wherein he recruited 14 Millennials to participate in a 6-month mentoring process focusing on life fulfillment. Then using a mixed methodology approach administered the Life Fulfillment Questionnaire or LF-Q to measure quantitatively the degree to which a participant experienced greater life fulfillment. The author then administered the Life Fulfillment Interview or LF-I to measure qualitatively the degree to which a participant experienced growth in life fulfillment as well as to determine the degree to which a participant experienced greater growth and maturation in his/her spiritual life, confessed faith in Christ, or was more receptive to the claims of Christianity. The two instruments were compared and contrasted to determine areas of agreement or disagreement and to add greater clarity to areas of congruence. The author discovered that Millennials who participate in a mentoring process that focused on life fulfillment and that is gospel centered experienced growth in life fulfillment and that the process had a positive impact in terms of their faith in Jesus Christ. </p><p>

<p> Basal forebrain corticopetal cholinergic neurons are critical for contextual and cued fear memory in the conditioned suppression paradigm, but neural mechanisms that alter these neurons in fear memory remain unknown. Interestingly, basal forebrain cholinergic lesions have no effect on behavioral performance in commonly-studied fear conditioning paradigms like Pavlovian conditioned freezing or fear-potentiated startle, yet impair fear memory in the conditioned suppression paradigm. Many studies conducted have experimented with lesions of cell bodies of corticopetal cholinergic neurons in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), but there is a void in the literature defining which specific projections may be responsible for their discrepant role in different fear memory paradigms. The basal forebrain projects to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a subregion of the medial prefrontal cortex. The ACC is a well-established portion of the fear circuit across all fear conditioning paradigms and has a clear role in decision-making in the conditioned suppression paradigm. Given the role in choice conflict that the ACC plays in operant tasks involved in the conditioned suppression paradigm, it is plausible that it may be a region that allows basal forebrain cholinergic neurons to alter a fear memory in the conditioned suppression paradigm. The goal of this study is to examine the specific roles that basal forebrain cholinergic projections to the ACC play in fear memory, specifically in the conditioned suppression paradigm. These lesions may target specific cholinergic input to the ACC from the NBM in the basal forebrain and this may isolate a specific fear circuit involved in fear memory in the conditioned suppression paradigm. Data have suggested that ACC lesioned animals demonstrate less fear-conditioned suppression over sham animals, but further experiments and cohorts of animals are required. If ACC cholinergic lesions are shown to produce deficits in fear memory in the conditioned suppression paradigm, it may suggest that the presence of the appetitive task, which only occurs in the conditioned suppression paradigm and not in any of the other commonly studied fear paradigms, may be able to elicit changes in functional connectivity to incorporate this projection from the NBM to the ACC to the fear circuit. Discrepancies in fear memory between fear conditioning paradigms demand to be addressed because assumptions about functional connectivity across different paradigms are assumed to be similar in the literature. If the notion of paradigmdependent functional connectivity presented here is true, deductions about this functional connectivity may only be made in the context of one fear paradigm and may not necessarily be applicable across paradigms. In other words, to say that Pavlovian fear conditioning and fear-potentiated startle are indicative of the broad neurobiology of fear memory would only be looking at a fraction of the reality behind how fear circuitry operates. In order to further the literature to propose holistic circuits, molecular processes and constructs that apply to all fear memory regardless of protocol or paradigm, it is necessary to investigate neural involvement across alternative fear paradigms, like conditioned suppression. This study supports the novel idea that neural circuitry that supports fear can expand with new learning tasks or events and therefore, may be more susceptible to change than previously considered, but future studies are required</p><p>

<p> Individuals with co-occurring substance use disorders (SUD) and eating disorders (ED) are at increased risk for poor treatment outcomes. Therefore, proper screening for EDs is essential within SUD treatment facilities. Standard ED screening tools have only been validated on females. Eating disorder symptomology often presents differently in males demonstrating the need for a male specific ED screening tool. This need has been addressed in the preliminary screening tool, Eating Disorder Assessment for Males (EDAM). The purpose of this study is to compare the outcome of two ED screening tools, EAT-26 and EDAM, among males in SUD treatment, specifically to evaluate the level of agreement between the surveys. </p><p> No significant correlation exists between the EDAM&rsquo;s muscle dysmorphia component and EAT-26. Preoccupation with muscularity is a distinct characteristic of ED symptomology among males. The muscle dysmorphia component is a unique element within EDAM, illustrating the need for male specific ED screening tools.</p>

Excitation and inhibition in the nervous system must be carefully balanced. I utilized the zebrafish (Danio rerio) in order to study this balance in the vertebrate motor system. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) can be used effectively for both forward and reverse genetics. My primary interest lies in genes involved in neural network development and function. Forward genetic mutagenesis screens are particularly powerful as they are unbiased. Using this approach we characterized a mutant based on its abnormal motor behavior. However, mutants identified with abnormal motor behavior may have mutations in muscle proteins. We identified a semi-dominant mutation in the atp2a1 gene, which encodes a protein vital for normal muscle function, from a previously completed mutagenesis screen. In order to investigate genes directly involved in neuronal signaling I used a reverse genetics approach to study GABAA receptors. γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a major source of inhibition in the motor system. In order to test the effect of blockade of GABAA receptors, I injected gabazine, a GABAA receptor antagonist, into zebrafish embryos. Injected embryos display an abnormal escape response later in development. To determine the GABAA receptor subunits responsible for the observed phenotype, I utilized RNA in situ hybridization to examine the expression of the &agr; class of GABAA receptor subunits. I found that the gabra5 gene, which encodes the GABAA &agr;5 subunit, was expressed in the hindbrain of larvae. To examine the role of the &agr;5 subunit I designed anti-sense morpholinos to target the start codon of the gabra5 gene. Knockdown of the gabra5 gene caused abnormal behavior in larvae similar to that seen in gabazine injected larvae. I have characterized a novel semi-dominant atp2a1 mutant in zebrafish. This mutant completes a zebrafish model system of the human disease Brody's disease. Turning toward a reverse genetic approach I investigated the expression of several GABAA receptor &agr; subunits. I have characterized the behavior of GABAA &agr;5 subunit knockdown embryos and larvae and begun work to generate a stable knockout line. This line will be useful in exploring the function of the &agr;5 subunit and compounds that interact with it.

No description available.