Despite empirical associations with many health-related outcomes and its fundamental place in Alcoholics Anonymous, the scientific study of forgiveness in addiction and recovery has only recently begun. Evidence derives from naturalistic studies and, when used, a short follow-up interval. It is time to expand the empirical study of the salutary forgiveness-alcohol association to include intervention-based research with sufficient follow-up intervals. Understanding the basic and nuanced effect of forgiveness among people with alcohol and other drug problems, though not a panacea, will inform the development of more refined and efficient treatment strategies for individuals struggling with alcoholism and addiction.

Consider n players whose "scores" are independent and identically distributed values {Xi}i=1n from some discrete distribution F. We pay special attention to the cases where (i) F is geometric with parameter p{combining right arrow above}0 and (ii) F is uniform on {1,2,. . . ,N}; the latter case clearly corresponds to the classical occupancy problem. The quantities of interest to us are, first, the U-statistic W which counts the number of "ties" between pairs i, j; second, the univariate statistic Yr, which counts the number of strict r-way ties between contestants, i.e., episodes of the form Xi1=Xi2=. . .=Xir; Xj≠Xi1;j≠i1,i2,. . . ,ir; and, last but not least, the multivariate vector ZAB=(YA, YA+1,. . . ,YB). We provide Poisson approximations for the distributions of W, Yr and ZAB under some general conditions. New results on the joint distribution of cell counts in the occupancy problem are derived as a corollary.

While forgiveness appears to be directly associated with treatment outcomes for alcohol problems, it may have indirect effects through mental health symptoms. We examined multiple dimensions of forgiveness: of self (ForSelf), of others (ForOthers), and by God (ByGod). Both ForSelf and ForOthers were strongly related to mental health at baseline (N = 157), whereas at 6 months, ForSelf was strongly related to mental health (N = 126). Longitudinally, baseline ForOthers predicted 6-month mental health symptoms. Forgiving oneself and others has implications for the mental health of alcoholics entering treatment.

This case reports the implementation of post-care patient interviews to determine whether or not patients received screening and brief intervention (when needed) for alcohol problems.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education In the Department of Educational Psychology of the Faculty of Education University of Zululand, 2009. / The aim of this investigation was to determine educators’ perceptions of the educational distress of children that live in a deprived milieu. An introductory literature review was provided of the characteristics of the child in educational distress. Educational distress surfaces when the quality of the occurring education is intrinsically bad. The child who finds himself within a situation of dysfunctional education thus experiences educational distress. The child’s education is impaired by affective neglect while factors in the social environment, such as a deprived milieu, compound the problem. Educational problems at home or in school affect the child adversely with regard to his meaningful experiences, knowledge, volition and behaviour, which results in a ‘deviate psychic structure.’ The child in educational distress experiences lack of security, an obscured future perspective, affective neglect, rejection and unfavourable comparisons. The life-world of the child in educational distress, which comprises the significant and meaningful physical and psychological environments of the child, was described. Besides the geographical world, the child’s life-world also includes his relationships with the self, other people, objects, ideas and religion. Actions of the child in educational distress, such as ascribing significance to matters, i.e. the formation of meaningful relationships, are of insufficient quality. This gives rise to inadequate actions of hoping, planning, gaining insight in his own life-world of never attaining freedom to be responsible. “The child in educational distress reveals signs of being unloved and left alone, a low self-esteem interpersonal distrust, anxiety and depression. For the purpose of the empirical investigation, a self-structured questionnaire was utilised. An analysis was undertaken of the questionnaires completed by the respondents, namely educators that are employed in schools situated in a deprived milieu. The data was processed, analysed and interpreted by means of descriptive and inferential statistics. In conclusion a summary of the study and findings emanating from the literature and empirical investigation were presented. Based on these findings the following recommendations were made:  To inculcate positive attitudes in children from a deprived milieu. Educators should be helped to develop ways of assisting these children to change their attitudes.  To develop and implement involvement programmes for the parents from a deprived milieu. Parental involvement in the child’s schooling is important for the effective education of the child.

This study examined kindergarten teachers' developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices, and kindergarten teachers' perceived problems of children entering kindergarten. The relationship between kindergarten teachers' beliefs and practices and their perceived problems of children entering kindergarten was studied, as was the relationship between teachers' beliefs and practices and their perception of children's successful kindergarten entry. Participants included kindergarten teachers from eight Utah school districts. Teachers were surveyed using both the Transition Practices, and the Teacher Beliefs and Practices Survey. From these surveys, data were collected on kindergarten teachers' beliefs and practices, and perceptions of problems children may have upon entering kindergarten. Findings indicated that kindergarten teachers reported that most often children have problems due to " lack of academic skill s," "difficulty following directions," and difficulty working independent!/' About half of the children were perceived as having a very successful entry into kindergarten. Of teachers who responded, 72% felt that one fifth or more of their current kindergarten class was not ready for kindergarten upon entry. Overall the kindergarten teachers in this study were considered developmentally appropriate, but teachers' reported developmentally appropriate beliefs were higher than their reported developmentally appropriate practices. The highest reported beliefs consisted of reading daily with children, helping children develop self-esteem, helping children develop social skills, guiding children's behavior in positive ways, and using individualized plans with children who have major behavior problems. The highest reported practices consisted of using music in the classroom, integrating various subjects, allowing children to experiment with writing, using manipulative in the classroom, and not using time-out as a means of discipline. The findings show a trend in which teachers with higher beliefs reported that'1ack of academic skills' was a problem less often than the teachers with lower reported beliefs. Teachers with higher reported practices reported that a"non-academic preschool experience' was a problem for children more often than teachers with lower reported practices. Findings also indicated a trend in which teachers with higher beliefs reported a smaller percentage of children having a"difficult or very difficul!'entry into kindergarten than did teachers who reported lower developmentally appropriate beliefs. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Traditionally , home economics majors and foods and nutrition majors in most colleges and universities have been able to bring their professional theoretical background to a climax with a practical living experience. This has been the policy at Utah State University, fulfilled in Household Administration, Course No. 150. Although the students entering this course are products of different backgrounds and cultural habits, it is assumed that their common home economics background in the University would allow them to manage a home efficiently. For many, however, this living experience requires a substantial adjustment. In some cases this experience of residence in the home management house marks the first break between home and the student.

A survey addressing teacher referral of children with internalizing symptoms was developed and distributed to 883 first- through sixth-grade teachers in the state of Utah. The survey presented vignettes of children exhibiting symptoms of internalizing disorders. Respondents were asked if they would refer the child described in each vignette. The survey also asked respondents for information regarding the number of years they had been teaching, training they had received regarding children's mental health, the types of mental health services available within their schools, and their beliefs regarding types of services schools should provide. Four ANOV As were calculated in analyzing the potential factors influencing teachers' decisions to refer the children in the vignettes. Further, descriptive data were used in illustrating additional information provided by the survey regarding the referral of children with internalizing disorders. Among the factors considered, teacher training was found to be statistically significant. Number of years of experience, teacher beliefs, and number of services available did not reach statistical significance. The majority of teachers supported a variety of school-based mental health services.

Since the early sixteenth century, the bassoon has played a role of varying importance in musical organizations. Early groups used as many as twenty-four bassoons in conjunction with other instruments. Today, it is common to have no more than two or three bassoons in bands and orchestras because other instruments, as they developed, have replaced the bassoon in the instrumentation of such groups. Although the bassoon is not as important numerically as it formerly was, its place in musical organizations is assured because it has expressive colors and tonal qualities which cannot be duplicated by any other instrument. The bassoon is especially important as a bass instrument in small ensembles.

The non-invasive differential diagnosis of breast masses through ultrasound imaging motivates the following class of elastic inverse problems: Given one or more measurements of the displacement field within an elastic material, determine the material property distribution within the material. This thesis is focused on uncertainty quantification in inverse problem solutions, with application to inverse problems in linear and nonlinear elasticity. We consider the inverse nonlinear elasticity problem in the context of Bayesian statistics. We show the well-known result that computing the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimate is consistent with previous optimization formulations of the inverse elasticity problem. We show further that certainty in this estimate may be quantified using concepts from information theory, specifically, information gain as measured by the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence and mutual information. A particular challenge in this context is the computational expense associated with computing these quantities. A key contribution of this work is a novel approach that exploits the mathematical structure of the inverse problem and properties of conjugate gradient method to make these calculations feasible. A focus of this work is estimating the spatial distribution of the elastic nonlinearity of a material. Measurement sensitivity to the nonlinearity is much higher for large (finite) strains than for smaller strains, and so large strains tend to be used for such measurements. Measurements of larger deformations, however, tend to show greater levels of noise. A key finding of this work is that, when identifying nonlinear elastic properties, information gain can be used to characterize a trade-off between larger strains with higher noise levels and smaller strains with lower noise levels. These results can be used to inform experimental design. An approach often used to estimate both linear and nonlinear elastic property distributions is to do so sequentially: Use a small strain deformation to estimate the linear properties, and a large strain deformation to estimate the nonlinearity. A key finding of this work is that accurate characterization of the joint posterior probability distribution over both linear and nonlinear elastic parameters requires that the estimates be performed jointly rather than sequentially. All the methods described above are demonstrated in applications to problems in elasticity for both simulated data as well as clinically measured data (obtained in vivo). In the context of the clinical data, we evaluate repeatability of measurements and parameter reconstructions in a clinical setting.