There is increasing acknowledgement that problematic interpersonal relationships and negative emotions are key factors in the development and maintenance of various forms of psychopathology. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples centers on changing attachment behaviours as a means to improve distressed relationships by helping partners access underlying emotions and foster positive interactions that promote accessibility and trust. EFT is a highly effective therapeutic approach that encourages the development of adaptive emotion regulation observed in secure attachment. The development and emergence of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provides a unique opportunity to investigate neural adaptations underlying successful psychotherapeutic change. Eighteen distressed couples received an average of 23 sessions of EFT, and the resulting functional and structural differences in the neural processing of threat were investigated before and after therapy using MRI methods. Female participants engaged in a stressful task in which they were confronted with the threat of electric shock, while they held their partner’s hand, a stranger’s hand, or were alone in the scanner. Results offered preliminary evidence that EFT can significantly impact emotional dysregulation, promote attenuation of neural threat by their partner, and result in structural change in a key region of emotion circuitry. Moreover, physiological data demonstrated that following EFT for couples, female partners were effectively soothed by their male partners, as demonstrated by decreased cortisol levels.

Development of genome-wide reagents has allowed systematic analysis of gene function. The experimental accessibility of budding yeast makes it a test-bed for technology development and application of new functional genomic tools and resources that pave the way for comparable efforts in higher eukaryotes. In this Thesis, I describe a two-color GFP-RFP reporter system I developed to assess the consequences of genetic perturbations on a promoter of interest. The dual-reporter system is compatible with the synthetic genetic array methodology, an approach that enables marked genetic elements to be introduced into arrays of yeast mutants via an automated procedure. I use this approach to probe cell cycle-regulation of histone gene transcription by introducing an HTA1 promoter-GFP reporter gene construct into an ordered array of ~4500 yeast deletion mutants. I scored defects in reporter gene expression for each mutant, generating a quantitative analysis of histone promoter activity. The results of my screen motivated a number of follow-up experiments, including chromatin immunoprecipitation, transcript profiling and genome-wide analysis of nucleosome positions, which revealed a previously unappreciated pathway that specifies regions of repressed chromatin in a cell cycle-sensitive manner. A novel aspect of this pathway is that it involves histone chaperones and a chromatin boundary element. Specifically, we discovered that the histone chaperone Rtt106 works with two other chaperones, Asf1 and the HIR complex, to create a repressive chromatin structure at histone promoters which is bound by the protein Yta7. It was clear from previous work that Asf1 and HIR repress transcription at HTA1 and that HIR localizes to and functions through a specific element in histone promoters. However, there was no previous data demonstrating a role for Rtt106 in cell cycle-dependent gene transcription. In sum, I describe a new genomic screen that I used to discover a novel pathway regulating cell cycle-dependent transcription. While I examined histone gene expression as proof-of-principle, my screening system could be applied to virtually any pathway for which a suitable reporter can be devised. I anticipate this methodology will enable yeast researchers to collect quantitative data on hundreds of gene expression pathways.

We used functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and a split ratio paradigm used to investigate the role and nature of prior knowledge in conceptual change in science. Sixteen participants, eight physicists and eight non-physicists were presented with two types of videos, Newtonian (two balls of unequal mass falling at the same rate) and Impetus (two balls of unequal mass, the larger one falling faster), to vary their exposure to plausible and implausible information. Whereas no increased neural activation was found in physicists, non-physicists showed recruitment in the frontopolar areas and DLPFC. Studies implicating these regions in integration and working memory support the notion that prior knowledge held by novices is flexible and context-dependent.

We used functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and a split ratio paradigm used to investigate the role and nature of prior knowledge in conceptual change in science. Sixteen participants, eight physicists and eight non-physicists were presented with two types of videos, Newtonian (two balls of unequal mass falling at the same rate) and Impetus (two balls of unequal mass, the larger one falling faster), to vary their exposure to plausible and implausible information. Whereas no increased neural activation was found in physicists, non-physicists showed recruitment in the frontopolar areas and DLPFC. Studies implicating these regions in integration and working memory support the notion that prior knowledge held by novices is flexible and context-dependent.

Development of genome-wide reagents has allowed systematic analysis of gene function. The experimental accessibility of budding yeast makes it a test-bed for technology development and application of new functional genomic tools and resources that pave the way for comparable efforts in higher eukaryotes. In this Thesis, I describe a two-color GFP-RFP reporter system I developed to assess the consequences of genetic perturbations on a promoter of interest. The dual-reporter system is compatible with the synthetic genetic array methodology, an approach that enables marked genetic elements to be introduced into arrays of yeast mutants via an automated procedure. I use this approach to probe cell cycle-regulation of histone gene transcription by introducing an HTA1 promoter-GFP reporter gene construct into an ordered array of ~4500 yeast deletion mutants. I scored defects in reporter gene expression for each mutant, generating a quantitative analysis of histone promoter activity. The results of my screen motivated a number of follow-up experiments, including chromatin immunoprecipitation, transcript profiling and genome-wide analysis of nucleosome positions, which revealed a previously unappreciated pathway that specifies regions of repressed chromatin in a cell cycle-sensitive manner. A novel aspect of this pathway is that it involves histone chaperones and a chromatin boundary element. Specifically, we discovered that the histone chaperone Rtt106 works with two other chaperones, Asf1 and the HIR complex, to create a repressive chromatin structure at histone promoters which is bound by the protein Yta7. It was clear from previous work that Asf1 and HIR repress transcription at HTA1 and that HIR localizes to and functions through a specific element in histone promoters. However, there was no previous data demonstrating a role for Rtt106 in cell cycle-dependent gene transcription. In sum, I describe a new genomic screen that I used to discover a novel pathway regulating cell cycle-dependent transcription. While I examined histone gene expression as proof-of-principle, my screening system could be applied to virtually any pathway for which a suitable reporter can be devised. I anticipate this methodology will enable yeast researchers to collect quantitative data on hundreds of gene expression pathways.

The first part is a study of an ecological model with one herbivore and $N$ plants. The system has a new type of functional response due to the speculation that the plants compete with each other and have different levels of toxin which inhibit the herbivore's ability to eat up to a certain amount. We first derive the model mathematically and then investigate, both analytically and numerically, the possible dynamics for this model, including the bifurcation and chaos. We also discuss the conditions under which all the species can coexist. The second part is a study in the normal form theory. In particular, we study the relations between the normal forms and the first integrals in analytic vector fields. We are able to generalize one of Poincare's classical results on the nonexistence of first integrals in an autonomous system. Then in the space of 2n-dimensional analytic autonomous systems with exactly n resonances and n functionally independent first integrals, we obtain some results related to the convergence and generic divergence of the normalizations. Lastly we give a new proof of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a planar Hamiltonian system to have an isochronous center.

This study intended to investigate the current status of the functional curriculum for students with mental retardation in noncategorical resource program of junior high schools in Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City. In addition, the perception of admininstrators and teachers toward the implementation of ¡§Basic Competence Test for special education in vocational high school¡¨, as well as the impact on functional curriculum arrangement were explored. A questionnaire was developed to collect the data from resource program administrators and functional curriculum teachers. In-depth interviews were adopted with six participants. The final results were derived from 43 administrators and 119 teachers contributing to this investigation. The major findings of the study were as follows. (1) An average of 2~3 functional curriculum were arranged in accordance with the levels of students¡¦ competencies and the specialties of the teachers. The majority of schools adopted a way of cross-grade teaching and pull-out programs. chools adopted cross-grade grouping method and pull-out programs. (2) Teachers developed courseware based on student¡¦s motor abilities and the cognitive abilities and used grouping teaching method to cope with students¡¦ needs. (3) Both administrators and teachers perceived that fuctional curicclum sceheduling disturbanced them most. (4) The implementation of ¡§Basic Competence Test for special education in vocational high school¡¨highly influenced the functional curriculum arrangement and instruction, particularly on students¡¦ class schedule and instructional goal setting.

Functional data analysis (FDA) is an active field of statistics, in which the primary subjects in the study are curves. My dissertation consists of two innovative applications of functional data analysis in biology. The data that motivated the research broadened the scope of FDA and demanded new methodology. I develop new nonparametric methods to make various estimations, and I focus on developing large sample theories for the proposed estimators. The first project is motivated from a colon carcinogenesis study, the goal of which is to study the function of a protein (p27) in colon cancer development. In this study, a number of colonic crypts (units) were sampled from each rat (subject) at random locations along the colon, and then repeated measurements on the protein expression level were made on each cell (subunit) within the selected crypts. In this problem, measurements within each crypt can be viewed as a function, since the measurements can be indexed by the cell locations. The functions from the same subject are spatially correlated along the colon, and my goal is to estimate this correlation function using nonparametric methods. We use this data set as an motivation and propose a kernel estimator of the correlation function in a more general framework. We develop a pointwise asymptotic normal distribution for the proposed estimator when the number of subjects is fixed and the number of units within each subject goes to infinity. Based on the asymptotic theory, we propose a weighted block bootstrapping method for making inferences about the correlation function, where the weights account for the inhomogeneity of the distribution of the unit locations. Simulation studies are also provided to illustrate the numerical performance of the proposed method. My second project is on a lipoprotein profile data, where the goal is to use lipoprotein profile curves to predict the cholesterol level in human blood. Again, motivated by the data, we consider a more general problem: the functional linear models (Ramsay and Silverman, 1997) with functional predictor and scalar response. There is literature developing different methods for this model; however, there is little theory to support the methods. Therefore, we focus more on the theoretical properties of this model. There are other contemporary theoretical work on methods based on Principal Component Regression. Our work is different in the sense that we base our method on roughness penalty approach and consider a more realistic scenario that the functional predictor is observed only on discrete points. To reduce the difficulty of the theoretical derivations, we restrict the functions with a periodic boundary condition and develop an asymptotic convergence rate for this problem in Chapter III. A more general result based on splines is a future research topic that I give some discussion in Chapter IV.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-110). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-110). Also available on the Internet.