<p> Cannabinoid signaling is known to modulate behavioral and physiological responses associated with stress, and could be manipulated in the management of stress-aggravated neuropsychiatric disorders. However, there is still a limited understanding of how individual components of this signaling system contribute to stress responsivity. Zebrafish are a genetically tractable vertebrate model that would be particularly useful for studying this interface. Accordingly, we utilized genome editing technology to provide a platform for studying how cannabinoid signaling modifies stress responses in zebrafish. <b>Chapter 1</b> reviews how zebrafish have been leveraged in the field of cannabinoid biology. <b>Chapter 2</b> describes the deployment of transposon technology to develop the SR4G zebrafish stress response reporter line, which is used to show that cannabinoid signaling impacts the transcriptional activity of glucocorticoid receptors. <b>Chapter 3</b> details the deployment of nuclease technology to develop lines with mutations in genes encoding components of the endocannabinoid system, which are used to establish roles for these genes in modulating stress-associated behavior. <b>Chapter 4</b> concludes with a summary of this thesis, and synthesizes content from the preceding chapters in a discussion about potential future research directions. </p><p>

Ph.D. (Education) / The effects of daily abuse and hardship on the streets lead street children to suffer from poor mental health resulting in them choosing ineffective and self-destructive coping strategies that then impacts their physical health and their overall sense of well-being. Facilitation of the mental health of street children subjected to daily threats to their survival is thus crucially needed. In my previous research, I indicated that street children are more vulnerable to impaired psychological health than any other group of children (Moolla, 2007:65-78; Moolla, Myburgh & Poggenpoel, 2008:597). The results of this research further confirmed that street children experience a vast array of negative feelings during their daily survival activities on the street which impact negatively on their mental and physical health. I also found that negative feelings of fear, abandonment, rejection, sadness, loss of trust, disillusionment and a sense of both hopelessness and uncertainty were experienced by all the street children in the study during their daily activities necessary for their survival. As a psycho-educational facilitator, I am equipped with the skills to provide the facilitation of the mental health of street children subjected to daily abuse and hardship on the streets. Psycho-educational facilitators are highly valuable in providing an integrated healthcare-social-psychological approach when working with vulnerable individuals. To date, they are not being utilized to benefit the community and social health services, places of care and institutions catering for the neglected and abused individuals in our society. The development of a model “Facilitating the mental health of street children” is the primary purpose of this research. The problem of street children suffering from challenges to their mental health due to their daily abuse encountered on the streets, made me realise that street children need urgent facilitation of their mental health. The fact that they made a decision to leave a usually abusive home and family environment for the street shows that street children already possess an inner resilience when it comes to self preservation. However, they frequently end up choosing destructive coping strategies which makes it more difficult for them to utilise their inner resources to enhance their lives. Thus, this model focuses on nurturing this inner resilience present in street children in order to facilitate them toward enhanced mental health. Other important aspects of this research are guidelines and recommendations for psycho-educational facilitators or any healthcare professional with regard to how they should implement the model.

The aim of the research was to develop a psychoeducational programme for team coaches to facilitate the mental health of managers. Preventing managerial degeneration has become a corporate priority. Without support and intervention, executives and managers can degenerate personally or derail careerwise at enormous cost to themselves, their companies and the economy. Personal degeneration may include selfneglect, ignoring families, marriages, friends, personal interests and their own physical and mental health as they chase their corporate and career objectives. Business managers are subjected to more pressure than ever to produce results, yet they are often promoted through job specific expertise without the emotional intelligence and worklife balance skills necessary to sustain them. Research has revealed an across the board consensus that coaching is one of the most powerful strategic and tactical weapons open to business today because of its ability to enhance areas of proficiency that are already high and to establish skills that were previously absent or weak. Business coaching provides the gateway to intellectual and emotional support and develops managers, thus avoiding managerial derailment and preparing individuals to meet the increasingly complex requirements of today’s business environment. Business and team coaching is distinct from other types of coaching and calls for additional competencies and expertise as specialisation areas. The coaching industry in Southern Africa is in its infancy and as such there are currently no barriers to entry. There is a lack of descriptive and accepted standards, agreed upon core competencies and accredited team coaching programmes that offer depth in terms of knowledge, skills, values and business acumen. In light of the above challenges the following research question arose: · What should a programme for team coaches consist of in order to facilitate the mental health of managers? A qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual research design was followed including autoethnography as a strategy. The research took place in four phases. Phase 1: A situation analysis was done in order to explore and describe what a programme for team coaches should consist of in order to facilitate the mental health of managers. This involved the identification of key stakeholders. Focus groups and interviews were conducted and individual naïve sketches collected from individuals who were are not available for interviews. A literature control was conducted in order to verify findings. Phase 2: Based on the abovementioned results, the research progressed to phase two, which involved the development of a programme. During this phase a conceptual framework was described that included an approach to the programme. Phase 3: This phase presented a description of the programme as well as guidelines for the implementation of the programme. Phase 4: The programme was evaluated and possible limitations were highlighted. Recommendations regarding possible further research were made. The researcher believes that business and team coaching will continue to thrive and gain increased status as a profession. With an empirically sound programme in place, business and team coaching is set to flourish and managers have a means to manage and maintain optimum mental health. / Prof. Marie Poggenpoel Prof. Chris Myburgh

<p> The rate of youth suffering from untreated emotional and behavioral problems has risen in recent years. Various barriers to treatment utilization of youth and their families have been identified in the literature, including logistical factors (i.e. transportation, lack of child care), financial barriers, as well as system barriers (i.e. limited knowledge of mental health difficulties among parents of young children). Parents/caregivers are often the primary gatekeepers to treatment for children suffering from mental health problems. Additionally, psychoeducational programs have increasingly gained support as an effective evidence-based practice that may bolster treatment utilization among youth. A psychoeducational program for parents of school-aged children was developed to teach empirically-based strategies for managing common childhood problems and to help parents understand when and how to refer to professional services. A mixed methods study was conducted as a means to gain teacher impressions of the program&rsquo;s effectiveness in disseminating evidence-based home strategies that can be used by parents to manage common childhood problems. Qualitative data analysis procedures based on grounded theory were undertaken to code collected data from narrative interviews. Major themes that emerged included importance of parent psychoeducation, need for social skills training, need for effective discipline techniques, preference for modular training, and scheduling with consideration for parental time constraints. Quantitative data analysis revealed that usefulness of behavioral interventions received the highest average rating between <i>very much</i> and <i> extremely</i> (<i>M</i> = 4.67, <i>SD</i> = 0.52) from participants, while knowledge increase post program overview had a medium level impact between somewhat and <i>very much</i> (<i>M</i> = 3.83, <i>SD</i> = 0.98). Limitations, strengths, and recommendations for future directions are discussed.</p><p>

<p> Since publication in 2005, the Young Schema Questionnaire Short-version 3^rd Edition (YSQ-S3) has increased in popularity over the years among psychologists in Europe and the U.S.; yet to date it has not been normed within a U.S. sample. A sample of 148 participants completed eight demographic questions, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder -7 (GAD-7), Patient Health Questionnaire -9 (PHQ-9), and YSQ-S3 via Survey Monkey.</p><p> Participants were classified into clinical and non-clinical groups depending on responses to the GAD-7, PHQ-9, and demographic questions. YSQ-S3 results were analyzed via SPSS 23.0 to conduct descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, and exploratory analyses to test the following hypotheses: (a) There will be significant mean score differences between the clinical and non-clinical participants on each YSQ-S3 schema except entitlement/grandiosity and unrelenting standards/hypercriticalness; and (b) That the clinical sample will have a higher number of schemas active. An additional goal was to produce preliminary cut-off scores for distinguishing pathological from normal scores for the schema-based scales.</p><p> Results indicated significant differences between clinical and non-clinical participants on YSQ-S3 mean scores with moderate to mostly large effect sizes. Due to substantial overlap between the two groups, we were unable to establish cut-off scores for the YSQ-S3 subscales. Regression analyses demonstrated perfect classification for anxious participants for the Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMS) and weaker classification in predicting depression and the comorbidity of anxiety and depression in participants.</p><p> The main limitation to our study was that schemas are commonly conceptualized as a partially unconscious phenomenon; thus the self-report approach of the YSQ-S3 may not readily capture schemas (Bowlby, Ainsworth, Boston, &amp; Rosenbluth, 1956), and we lacked a severe clinical group.</p><p> Results indicated that at least in the present sample the YSQ-S3 was only somewhat able to effectively distinguish the normal group from those with mixed anxiety and depression for individual schemas. Due to overlap between the clinical and normal samples and absence of an established method, we were unable to propose preliminary cutoff scores on the YSQ-S3 subscales, or suggest a difference in EMS quantity between pathological and normal samples.</p><p>

<p> Teen pregnancy has been consistently perceived as a substantial social problem, despite recent declines and some equivocal evidence from longitudinal studies. The evidence for this framing has been gleaned from quantitative studies that demonstrate comparative decline in sociodemographic outcomes for the teens themselves and developmental and behavioral deficits for their children over time. Qualitative inquiry has provided an alternate perspective, one that provides teens with a voice, as their voices had been unheard until the last two decades. There are several areas largely unexplored with teens that have been studied with adult, higher-risk women. These are, first, teens&rsquo; perspective and behavior during the prenatal period, which is vital for infant health and development and provides these young mothers-to-be with an opportunity to explore the meaning of this life-changing transition, how they feel toward their infants, and their future plans. The second is the impact of the interpersonal trauma and other cumulative forms of adversity pregnant teens have often experienced, on these perspectives.</p><p> The current qualitative study examined the perspectives of and behaviors around pregnancy in a sample of inner city pregnant teens receiving supportive home-visiting services from the Nurse-Family Partnership. Using a grounded theory approach, the study inductively explored the prenatal phase, and inquired about developmental (level of stability, quality of attachment, early interpersonal trauma) and current factors (fears and concerns, prenatal health behavior and attachment, mental health, help-seeking, wishes for the future). Twenty-three teens were interviewed over 18 months. Outcomes of this study revealed that teens generally felt very positively about their pregnancies and regarded this event to be a portal to a new and better life, and changed their health behavior and social activities accordingly. Teens also showed a high degree of resilient beliefs and behaviors, a spontaneous finding, maintaining hope and optimism and forming concrete plans for future parenting and stability. They also expressed much concern and fear about the lack of material resources, particularly housing. Mental health problems increased with exposure to trauma and stress. The salient finding here was that as interpersonal trauma exposure accumulated, the more positively teens felt about their pregnancies, the more resilient were their beliefs and behaviors, and the more mental health problems they endorsed. Teens with less exposure to trauma and stress had somewhat less positive views of pregnancy, more family and current support, better relationships with parents, more fears and concerns about their pregnancies, were somewhat less resilient, and had fewer mental health problems. Thus, teens who seem most enthusiastic and prepared are often those who have experienced the greatest amount of trauma and disrupted attachment, both of which may affect parenting capacity. Programmatic and policy responses focused on the need to include teens&rsquo; historical narrative and a tableau of their current support in planning to assist them, rather than instantiating interventions which extend from a dominant discourse about what they need to succeed as parents.</p><p>

Children with chronic physical illness have twice the risk of psychosocial maladjustment as healthy children. One specific aspect of mental functioning is abnormal eating attitudes, hypothesized to be an early stage of an eating disorder. To date, there has been no study of the association of a variety of physical chronic illnesses with a specific psychiatric syndrome in a diagnostically heterogeneous population, comparing chronically ill children with healthy children. This study examined the association between chronic illness and eating attitudes in a population of school children from Western Quebec. A checklist of chronic medical conditions was added to the parent questionnaire in order to determine presence of chronic illness. There were two objectives of this thesis. The first objective was to determine whether chronic illness was associated with eating attitudes in children as measured by the Eating Attitudes Test. The second study objective was to determine whether there was a meaningful group difference in othcr psychometric scores of depression, family functioning and stress between children with a chronic illness and children without a chronic illness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The purpose of the present study was to predict children's posthospitalization behavioural difficulties consequent to day surgery. Temperament characteristics and characteristics of the mother-child relationship were used to predict children's behavioural difficulties at three days, three weeks and two months posthospitalization. The mothers of the 57 subjects rated their child's pre- and posthospitalization behaviour on the Vernon Hospital Questionnaire. The Behavioural Style Questionnaire was used as the temperament measure and the Parenting Stress Index was used to assess the degree of stress within the mother-child relationship. Repeated measures analysis of variance on the Vernon Hospitalization Questionnaire indicated that there were significant differences among children's scores at the pre- and posthospitalization periods. Subsequent analyses indicated significant differences on four of the six subscales of this questionnaire. HMRs were conducted on children's behavioural difficulties with three temperament variables and the total stress variable entered as predictors. The results of these HMRs indicated that mood and total stress predicted behavioural difficulties at pre- and two month posthospitalization, whereas adapt and total stress predicted behavioural difficulties at three days and three weeks posthospitalization. Assessment of the predictive accuracy of the sample regression equations by the jackknife procedure indicated that the regression equations provide accurate predictors. Recommendations are proposed concerning how to identify children at risk for posthospitalization behavioural difficulties.

Il s'agit d'une étude ayant pour but d'examiner les besoins perçus et le niveau de détresse mentale d'aidants naturels primaires (ANP) de patients en attente de pontages aortocoronariens (PAC). Le devis de recherche consiste en un pré-post-test auprès d'un échantillon aléatoire de 19 ANP. L'Inventaire des Besoins des Familles (IBF) et le Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) ont servi à mesurer respectivement les besoins et la détresse mentale auprès de la clientèle cible, les ANP, avant (T1 ) et suivant (T2 ) une session d'information. Les résultats révèlent qu'il existe une différence significative (p = 0,015) à la dimension besoins physiques entre les deux intervalles de temps visés. La corrélation entre les besoins et la santé mentale s'accroît avec le temps. L'âge est corrélée positivement (r = 0,51) avec l'indice de détresse mentale au T1 . Les ANP ayant une scolarité post-secondaire présentent un score plus élevé (p = 0,02) au nombre total de besoins comparativement aux autres.

Caregiver burden has been studied at length in caregivers of many populations of chronically ill people. The other side of the informal caregiving relationship is the recipient's response to aid, especially their perceptions of the burden they pose to their caregiver. This is referred to as self-perceived burden, and has rarely been studied from the patient's point of view. Strong feelings of being a burden may be an important emotional factor influencing adjustment to illness, compliance with physician's orders, utilization of health-care resources and end-of-life decision-making. The current study advances the current understanding of self-perceived burden through the development and preliminary validation of the Self-Perceived Burden Scale. Through the course of this study, we have developed a valuable screening instrument for feelings of being a burden. It is brief, easily self-administered, and reliably identifies individuals in emotional distress due to feelings of being a burden on others. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)