This study examined the relationship between parental negative talk, child aggression, and child assertiveness. Disruptive behaviors, such as aggression, have been studied multiple times, however, there is still more to learn about aggression. Few studies have examined assertive and aggressive behavior together with preschool children. Additionally, parenting is a substantial component of a child’s development and can impact their health and behaviors. One form of parenting is negative parenting. The current study focuses on a concept similar to negative parenting called parental negative talk. Currently, there is a lack of studies that examine parental negative talk. The current study included a twin sample of 290 5-year-old children and their parents from the Southern Illinois Twins/Triplets and Siblings Study (SITSS). The children and their parents participated in a 10-minute interactive puzzle task that was taped and later used to assess parental negative talk and observed child aggression. Additional measures used were personality and behavior assessments. No sex differences were found between parental negative talk, child aggression, and child assertiveness. There were no direct relationships between child aggression and parental negative talk or between parental negative talk and child assertive behavior. However, within family differences between parental behaviors and child behaviors revealed a significant positive correlation between parental negative talk and child aggression. Within a family, there was no relationship found between parental negative talk and child assertive behavior. The results from the current study indicated assertiveness was not significantly heritable. Overall, the results from the present study can assist in augmenting the current parent management training resources.

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This investigation examined the effects of emotion and lateralized presentation of a list of affective words on the learning of that list. This investigation also attempted to assess the separate influences of emotion and arousal on verbal performance. Experiment I was a 2x2 factorial design: two types of pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), negative or neutral and two gender conditions, male and female. Experiment I was used to verify that the IAPS results in an emotional response. Heart rate (HR) and skin conductance level (SCL) were measured during IAPS presentation. Emotion was assessed after IAPS presentation. Results showed the negative IAPS condition elicited significantly greater increases in SCL and decreases in HR, less self-reported of pleasantness and more self-reported activation than the neutral IAPS condition. Women had significantly lower SCL and higher HR than men; men and women did not differ in reported emotion. Experiment I verified that the negative IAPS elicit changes in SCL and negative emotion in men and women. Experiment II was a 2 x 2 x 2 mixed factorial design: two types of IAPS (negative or neutral), two AAVL conditions (positive and neutral AAVL words or negative and neutral AAVL words) and two presentation conditions (AAVL presented to the left ear (LE) or right ear (RE)). The measure of performance on the AAVL was the number of correct responses. HR and SCL were measured during presentation of the IAPS and of the AAVL. In the negative IAPS condition, performance on negative AAVL was significantly better than that for the positive AAVL; for presentation of the AAVL to the RE, performance on the negative AAVL was significantly better than that for the positive and neutral AAVLs. IAPS condition or ear of presentation alone did not significantly impact on AVVL performance or on SCL and HR during the recitation of the AAVL. Evidence showed that the effect of emotion on performance is a function of mood congruent processing and possibly the allocation of hemispheric resources. / Ph. D.

This research posed the question "How does racism in the gay community and homophobia in the Black community restrict gay Black male's life chances and life opportunities?" Previous research has uncovered racist attitudes within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community as well as homophobic attitudes within the Black community. Because of conflicting social identifiers (Is it possible for one to be both homosexual and Black?) and the invisibility of a gay Black voice, it is imperative to deconstruct the relationship between gay Black men and the communities they are a part of. I utilized qualitative in-depth interviewing techniques interviewing 15 Black men aged 18 and older who identified themselves as homosexual. The questions revolved around three primary questions designed to center the researcherâ ¦How do gay Black men describe their lives, How do gay Black men describe what their lives ought to be, and What obstacles do gay Black men see effecting their opportunity to live the lives they feel they ought to be living. The gay Black male research participants disclosed that because of Black stereotypes, gay stereotypes, acceptance with stipulations in the gay community and the black community, racism in the gay community, homophobia in the Black community, and perceptions of blackness and masculinity's affect on gay Black menâ ¦gay Black men live their lives with various restrictions. In other words, gay Black men do not appear to be living their lives the way they feel they ought to be living it. This work is important because a majority of the participants stated they wished to live restriction free lives. They are not able to fully be themselves in their daily lives and often have to assimilate to be accepted. / Master of Science

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is the major cause of enterically transmitted non-A, non-B hepatitis in many developing countries, and is also endemic in many industrialized countries. Due to the lack of an effective cell culture system and a practical animal model, the mechanisms of HEV pathogenesis and replication are poorly understood. It has been speculated that HEV replicates in sites other than the liver. Since HEV is presumably fecal-orally transmitted it is unclear how the virus reaches the liver and extrahepatic replication could be a possible explanation. The recent identification of swine HEV from pigs affords us an opportunity to systematically study HEV replication in a swine model. We experimentally infected specific-pathogen-free (SPF) pigs with two strains of HEV: swine HEV and the US-2 strain of human HEV. Eighteen pigs (group 1) were each inoculated intravenously with swine HEV, nineteen pigs (group 2) with the US-2 strain of human HEV, and seventeen pigs (group 3) as uninoculated controls. To identify the potential extrahepatic sites of HEV replication using the swine model, two pigs from each group were necropsied at 3, 7, 14, 20, 27, and 55 days post inoculation (DPI). Thirteen different types of tissues and organs were collected from each necropsied animal. Reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) was used to detect the presence of positive strand HEV RNA in each tissue collected during necropsy at different DPIs. A negative strand-specific RT-PCR was standardized and used to detect the replicative, negative-strand of HEV RNA from tissues that tested positive for the positive strand RNA. As expected, positive strand HEV RNA was detected in almost every type of tissue at some time point during viremic period between 3 and 27 DPI. Positive-strand HEV RNA was still detectable in some tissues in the absence of serum HEV RNA from both swine and human HEV inoculated pigs. However, replicative, negative strand of HEV RNA was detected primarily in the small intestine, lymph nodes, colon, and liver. Our results demonstrate for the first time that HEV replicates in tissues other than the liver and that the gastrointestinal tract is also the target of virus infection. The data from this study may have important implications for HEV pathogenesis, xenotransplantation, and the development of an in vitro cell culture system for HEV. / Master of Science