<p> After over 20 years of multiple studies showing the efficaciousness of evidence-based therapies (EBTs) on trauma survivors, this study continues the initiation of an important direction that research with regards to EBTs on trauma survivors of diverse ethnoracial groups needs to take. The study attempted to show if EBTs are effective in reducing symptoms related to trauma from a real life setting population of trauma survivors from diverse ethnoracial backgrounds. The research also aimed to show if the EBTs in this study are effective within each ethnoracial group. Finally, the research explored if there are EBTs that are more effective on reducing certain trauma related symptoms over others within ethnoracial groups. The findings of this quantitative pre-post design research affirms the direction of previous research that demonstrates EBTs are likely applicable to diverse ethnoracial groups in a real world setting. Results also suggest that EBTs provided by frontline mental health providers in a community based setting are generally effective on numerous trauma symptoms and on the low-income, culturally diverse sample in the current study. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for further research are discussed.</p><p>

<p>Janice, Josephine. Bachelor of Arts, University of Indonesia, Spring 2014; Master of Science, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Summer 2017 Major: Psychology Title of Thesis: Preschoolers? Prosocial Responding to Social Others? Distress Thesis Director: Dr. Hung-Chu Lin Pages in Thesis: 83; Words in Abstract: 199 ABSTRACT The present study examined the effect of familiarity with social partners on preschoolers? prosocial responses to social others? distress and related their responses to dispositional empathy and temperamental inhibition. Sixty-one preschoolers (38 boys, 23 girls, mean age: 44 months) were recruited from local preschools. Preschoolers went through three conditions of simulated distress in different social partners in the same order (the caregiver, an adult stranger, and an infant manikin). Parent-report Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM) and the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (BIQ) were used to measure children?s dispositional empathy and temperamental inhibition. The results indicated that preschoolers? behavioral responses to social others? distress varied by familiarity with social partners, with the greatest amount of time spent in showing caregiver-oriented actions followed by infant-oriented actions. Overall, higher levels of dispositional empathy were related to a greater amount of time spent in response behaviors with a focus on others? well-being. Temperamental inhibition also exhibited predictive values for prosocial behavior, with high inhibition related to less other-oriented behaviors. Together, the present study underscored the social and personality factors that are implicated with individual differences in preschool children?s prosocial responses to social others? distress. Keywords: preschoolers, prosocial behavior, familiarity, social partners, dispositional empathy, temperamental inhibition

School-Wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) is a plan based on broad assessments of schools and their climate that can be implemented to create classrooms and schools that are focused on community and positive behavior (Horner, Sugai, Todd, & Lewis-Palmer, 2005). SWPBS involves creating and explicitly stating expectations, teaching those expectations, encouraging appropriate behavior, and defining ways to handle inappropriate behavior. Current tools that are suggested for use in conducting an assessment of school climate are: the Best Behavior School Discipline Assessment (BBSDA) also known as the Best Behavior Self-Assessment Survey (BBSAS), the School-Wide Evaluation Tool (SET), the Oregon School Safety Survey, and the Effective Behavior Support Self-Assessment (EBS Self Assessment) (Horner, et al., 2005; Sprague & Walker, 2005). All of these indicators and evaluation tools are helpful in planning SWPBS programs as well as assessing the integrity of implementation and changes in behavior patterns; however, they gather limited information from students. Collecting and examining student attitudes and perceptions about their school and safety is an important aspect of the evaluation process. The current study examined information from student surveys concerning the behavioral expectations at school as well as places in the school they felt safe and unsafe. Information gathered from these surveys was used to create an intervention that targeted a specific area identified as being the least safe and most unsafe, the bathroom, in the school to improve students’ sense of safety. Based on the results of student survey information, an intervention was designed and implemented for six weeks. Compared to pre-intervention surveys, the treatment group reported feeling safer in the bathroom after the implementation of the intervention as compared to the control group, which reported no change.

The current research investigates how the perceived emotional responses of a majority of Americans to 9/11 (i.e., collective anger and fear) affect individuals’ support for governmental policies, in particular, military intervention, anti-immigration policy, and restricting civil liberties. Study 1 found that perceived collective anger was associated with support for military intervention and anti-immigration policy, and that those effects of perceived collective anger on policy support were significantly driven by individuals’ own anger. Study 2 showed that experimentally manipulated collective anger (i.e., exposure to the majority’s anger relative to the minority’s anger) had marginal effects on support for anti-immigration policy and restricting civil liberties, and individuals’ own anger mediated the marginal effect of collective anger on support for restricting civil liberties. Participants exposed to either the majority’s or minority’s fear supported anti-immigration policy and restricting civil liberties as strongly as did those exposed to the majority’s anger. Implications and limitations of these findings were discussed.

As item response theory (IRT) has developed and is widely applied, investigating the fit of a parametric model becomes an important part of the measurement process when implementing IRT. The usefulness and successes of IRT applications rely heavily on the extent to which the model reflects the data, so it is necessary to evaluate model-data fit by gathering sufficient evidence before any model application. There is a lack of promising solutions on the detection of model misfit in IRT. In addition, commonly used fit statistics are not satisfactory in that they often do not possess desirable statistical properties and lack a means of examining the magnitude of misfit (e.g., via graphical inspections). In this dissertation, a newly-proposed nonparametric approach, RISE was thoroughly and comprehensively studied. Specifically, the purposes of this study are to (a) examine the promising fit procedure, RISE, (b) compare the statistical properties of RISE with that of the commonly used goodness-of-fit procedures, and (c) investigate how RISE may be used to examine the consequences of model misfit. To reach the above-mentioned goals, both a simulation study and empirical study were conducted. In the simulation study, four factors including ability distribution, sample size, test length and model were varied as the factors which may influence the performance of a fit statistic. The results demonstrated that RISE outperformed G2 and S-X2 in that it controlled Type I error rates and provided adequate power under all conditions. In the empirical study, the three fit statistics were applied to one empirical data and the misfitting items were flagged. RISE and S-X 2 detected reasonable numbers of misfitting items while G 2 detected almost all items when sample size is large. To further demonstrate an advantage of RISE, the residual plot on each misfitting item was shown. Compared to G2 and S-X2, RISE gave a much clearer picture of the location and magnitude of misfit for each misfitting item. Other than statistical properties and graphical displays, the score distribution and test characteristic curve (TCC) were investigated as model misfit consequence. The results indicated that for the given data, there was no practical consequence on classification before and after replacement of misfitting items detected by three fit statistics.

The present studies addressed the issue of whether the phonological mediation of visual word recognition proceeds through an assembled or an addressed representation. In Experiment 1, subjects judged whether pairs of words were semantically related. Both homophone and "false homophone" stimuli were used. The set of "false homophones" consisted of words with the following characteristics: (1) They have neighbors that share its orthographic body but not its pronunciation (B$\underline{\rm EARD}$ - H$\underline{\rm EARD}$ and (2) when an alternate pronunciation of the body is attached to the pronunciation of the onset, another word is produced (e.g., if BEARD were pronounced like HEARD, then the word "bird" would result). Experiment 1 demonstrated that reaction times in a semantic relatedness judgment task were longer to homophones (e.g., SAND - BEECH) and "false homophones" (e.g., ROBIN - BEARD) of a semantic associate than to visually similar controls. Subjects also made more errors to homophone pairs than to visually similar controls. Since the false homophone pairs were related through a phonological representation not specified in the word's lexical entry, it was concluded that the phonological representation responsible for the effect was an assembled representation. In a second experiment, a parafoveal preview paradigm was used in order to determine whether the phonological representation integrated across fixations in reading is an assembled or an addressed representation. As in Experiment 1, subjects made semantic relatedness decisions to the stimulus pairs. In the most interesting condition, it was expected that a "biasing" preview (one that specified the spelling-to-sound correspondence that, when applied to the false homophone, would produce the phonological representation of a word related to the other member of the to-be-judged pair) would increase reaction times to the false homophone targets. The failure to observe the expected "biasing" effect is discussed in terms of the characteristics of a neighborhood based on the onset and following vowel cluster of the preview. While the expected preview effect was not observed, the effect of the target words essentially replicated those of Experiment 1. These results argue that phonological mediation proceeds through an assembled phonological representation.

Two experiments investigated how textual context is used to disambiguate lexically ambiguous words. Previous research had suggested that context did not guide access toward the contextually appropriate meaning but instead selected this meaning from multiple activated meanings at a later stage of processing. The experiments reported here developed and used a new technique to explore the very early stages of word recognition. Eye movements were measured during reading. In both experiments a "prime" word was briefly displayed during the initial part of the fixation on the "target" word. Priming was measured by comparing fixation times on targets preceded by semantically Related versus Unrelated primes. Experiment 1 showed significant priming effects at a 35 ms prime duration but not at 30 or 25 ms prime durations. In Experiment 2, lexically ambiguous words were used as primes to targets in short passages and were presented for 35 ms. The type of preceding context (Consistent vs. Inconsistent), type of ambiguous prime (Biased vs. Balanced), and strength of instantiated meaning (Dominant vs. Subordinate) were varied. Only when the preceding context was Consistent with the Dominant meaning of a Biased ambiguous word were significant priming effects obtained. These results supported a model of lexical access in which context does guide access toward the contextually appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of scene backgrounds on object identification. Previous research with brief presentation of scenes indicated that scene context facilitated object identification. Experiment 1 replicated this finding with longer display durations. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to investigate the time course of background information acquisition using an eye movement paradigm. Although the results from Experiment 2 were inconclusive, Experiment 3 demonstrated that scene background information was acquired on both the first and second fixations on a scene. It was concluded that background information acquired from the first and second fixations facilitates object identification.

Two experiments investigated the effect of a congruent sentence context on processing time for a target word. Subjects eye movements were monitored as they read sentences presented on a Cathode Ray Tube. Processing time on the target word, as measured by first fixation duration and gaze duration was shorter when the target was preceded by a congruent sentence context containing a noun and verb that were only weakly related to the target word than when it was preceded by a context in which either the noun or verb had been replaced by a more neutral word. In addition, the fully congruent contexts were modified to either preserve or disrupt the original syntactic relation between the noun and verb. No difference in processing time on the target was observed when these two conditions were compared to one another. These results replicate findings obtained by Duffy et al. (1989) using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation method to present the sentence contexts and naming time as the dependent measure and demonstrate that these effects generalize to normal silent reading. The observed facilitation for the full congruent contexts exceeded what could be accounted for by summation of activation from the individual lexical items contained in that context. However, there was no evidence that the syntactic relations among the items was critical to this effect. In a second eye movement experiment, lexical and message-level information in the sentence context were manipulated independently to explore potential sources of the facilitation. Evidence of facilitation from the message-level representation of the sentence context was obtained. These results, in conjunction with the previous results from the naming task are interpreted as support for an interactive view of lexical access.

A series of experiments explored the nature of the memory representation of numerical information. Two distributions were presented to each subject as three-digit numbers paired with distribution labels. Three stimulus presentation conditions were used in Experiment 1: a rapid serial presentation as used in Malmi and Samson (1983); a task which requires the subject to retype each stimulus item; and a classification task in which the subject must supply the category name when presented with the stimulus number. In Experiment 1, subjects estimated the averages of the distributions they were presented. In Experiment 2, subjects classified an additional 40 items, chosen to enable discrimination between two classes of models of memory representation. Subjects in Experiment 3 made estimates of the frequency of scores per decade for each distribution. The results strongly favor the category density model (Fried and Holyoak, 1984), a model which assumes that the subject abstracts distributional information and uses a default 'normal' distribution to organize the incoming information. The Nosofsky (1988) exemplar similarity model did not predict subject classification behavior or subject frequency estimation as accurately as the category density model. Reasons for these findings are discussed.