<p> Mass shootings that end in suicide at public venues such as schools have become shockingly frequent. In many cases the attackers have left communications indicating envy and bullying as the source of their rage. With healthcare becoming more universally available and the U.S. Surgeon General&rsquo;s focus on bullying as a national healthcare issue, the mental health community would be remiss in failing to adequately address bullying behavior and its effects at this time. Relational aggression is a particular type of bullying that relies on surreptitious gossip and the willingness of participants to accept roles of victim or bully. Using hermeneutic phenomenology, this thesis creates a depth psychological model for exploring the intrapersonal and interpersonal bully&ndash;victim dynamics in relational aggression through the use of the stories of Cinderella and Arachne. The findings demonstrated how archetypal defenses maintain the bully&ndash;victim dynamic and the difficulties in and importance of perspective taking in its resolution.</p>

This paper puts forth a radical behaviorist approach to legal theory according to which law is a set of behavioral contingencies which control the behavior of individuals according to politically defined goals. Based on the proposition that modern legal systems, because of their inherent contingency and chronic mutability, are irremediably instrumental to politically defined social goals, and on the radical behaviorist fundamental assumption that a science of human behavior is possible, the paper develops what can be called a radical behaviorist perspective on social systems theory. According to this perspective, a social system is neither a collection of individuals nor of individual acts, but a class of interconnected behavioral patterns or cultural practices conditioned and maintained through the same generalized reinforcer, which, in the case of law, is the dichotomy between legal versus illegal. To construct this radical behaviorist perspective on social systems theory, the paper relies on three major theoretical foundations. The first one is a criticism of Skinner’s concept of verbal behavior according to which instead of a special kind of behavior, it is defined as nothing but the human species-specific operant control of the vocal musculature by social reinforcement contingencies. The second one is to propose a more functional alternative to Skinner’s concept of human social behavior as that kind of operant behavior which is conditioned and maintained by other people’s behavior. The third one is a dialogue between radical behaviorism and Luhmann’s social systems theory, whose main purpose is to provide radical behaviorism with a more sophisticated description of modern society which, despite several differences, is also radically anti-individualistic and evolutionary. The final part of the paper is a detailed discussion of how law controls human behavior.

Social support plays an important role in our physical and mental health, and is also recognised as a key factor for the success and well-being of athletes. It would be of significant interest for researchers and practitioners to identify the components of perceived and received social support, support antecedents, and subsequent consequences of support. The first aim of this thesis was to apply a univariate generalisability theory approach to examine the components of perceived and received support. The second aim was to apply a multivariate generalisability theory approach to identify the antecedents and consequences of perceived and received support across different levels of analysis. Four studies were conducted applying either a fully crossed or partially nested design to examine components of social support when athletes rated coaches or their most important support providers within their existing social networks. Further, in Studies 3 and 4, participants also completed a performance task in the presence of support providers. Univariate analyses demonstrated that consistently across all studies the relational and social components accounted for the largest amount of variance in both perceived and received support. These findings suggest that perceivers rated certain providers to be particularly supportive, in comparison to how they rated other providers. Across all studies multivariate analyses revealed that provider personality and social identity related to perceptions of support at the relational and social level. In Studies 1 and 4, coach competency also related to perceptions of support at the relational and social level. When athletes perceived certain providers to exhibit specific personality traits, particularly the trait of agreeableness, felt certain coaches were highly competent, and shared a common identity with providers, those providers were also perceived to be particularly supportive. Studies 3 and 4, however, were unable to identify antecedents of received support at any level of analysis, suggesting that perceived and received support have distinct antecedents. Further, in Studies 3 and 4, perceived and received support had unique relationships with self-confidence and performance across the different components. At the perceiver and trait level, when athletes felt they generally received support from providers, they generally felt more confident. In comparison, at the relational and social level, if athletes perceived certain providers to be particularly supportive, they performed better in their presence. The support received from those providers was also beneficial through enhancing self-confidence and, in turn, performance. The findings from the current thesis significantly further conceptual understanding of perceived and received support by identifying their correlates at the different levels of analysis. The current thesis also offers evidence based recommendations for social support interventions.

<p>Social cognition is a comprehensive term used to describe knowledge and skills that are applied to social situations and skills used to understand others. These skills include emotion perception, problem solving, executive functioning, and self-cognition. This study investigated the effectiveness of specific intervention strategies on social cognitive skills. The intervention strategies included activities for abstract thinking, emotion competence, Theory of Mind (ToM), and self-regulation of behaviors. Currently, little research exists to describe evidence based effective intervention strategies to improve social cognitive skills. The retrospective case study was completed with a female participant who was 11-years, 3 months old at the time of intervention. Data recorded from 20 intervention sessions was analyzed to determine the effectiveness of employed social cognition intervention tasks. Results indicated improvements in abstract thinking during a Mystery Box activity. Additionally, results showed the participant made improvements in her understanding of social cognition through use of social vocabulary and self-monitoring. Findings from the present study concluded that using concrete vocabulary for social concepts can improve an individual?s social communication skills.

<p> Many studies have shown that men and women who inject drugs differ in their risk of contracting HIV, with women being at higher risk. However, the risk factors between women and men are less well understood, and more knowledge about them can inform gender-sensitive prevention and treatment for people who inject drugs (PWIDs). Research synthesis and meta-analysis was implemented on studies conducted with adult injection drug users that made gender comparisons on biological, behavioral, and social- structural risk factors. Fifty-five studies in the research synthesis provided data for inclusion in the meta-analysis. The analysis yielded many significant findings. With regard to biological risk factors women were one and half times or more as likely to engage in vaginal sex (<i>OR</i>=1.60, <i>p</i>=0.000), engage in oral sex (<i>OR</i>=1.59, <i>p</i>=0.001), to experience injecting problems such as difficulty locating a vein (<i> OR</i>=1.71, <i>p</i>=0.000), and STIs (<i>OR</i>=1.66, <i> p</i>=0.001). With regard to behavioral injection risk factors, women were modestly more likely to engage in receptive sharing (<i>OR</i>=1.12, <i> p</i>=0.01), inject more frequently (<i>OR</i>=1.18, <i> p</i>=0.01), and were two and a half times more likely to engage in receptive sharing of injecting equipment with sex partners (<i>OR</i>=2.51, <i> p</i>=0.000) while women were less likely to share equipment with friends (<i>OR</i>=.79, <i>p</i>=.0001). With regard to behavioral, sexual risk factors women were significantly more likely to engage in unprotected sex (<i>OR</i>=1.41, <i>p</i>=0.05), have multiple sex partners (<i>OR</i>=1.72, <i>p</i>=0.01), have steady sex partners as opposed to casual sex partners (<i>OR</i>=1.87, <i> p</i>=0.000), and were nearly four times more likely to engage in survival sex work (<i>OR</i>=3.77, <i>p</i>=0.000). With regard to social-structural risk factors, women were nearly ten times more likely to experience sexual violence (<i>OR</i>=9.6, <i>p</i>=0.000) while women were significantly less likely to experience physical violence that was not sexual (<i>OR</i>=0.60, <i>p</i>=0.000). Women were twice as likely to experience poor health status (<i>OR</i>=2.08, <i> p</i>=0.000). Significant heterogeneity was found among all analyses. Overall, the findings of this study provides evidence that women who inject drugs experience greater HIV risks in all areas than men who inject drugs, suggesting that future harm reduction strategies should be tailored to women&rsquo;s and men&rsquo;s specific risk factors.</p>

Thesis advisor: James Russell / Adults' gender stereotypes of emotion have been investigated with a variety of methods, but those methods do not provide a strong test of the stereotype: The participants were presented only with cues to the gender or to the emotion; or when both cues were available, gender was confounded with poser. This study examined the effects of attributed gender on adults' perception of emotion in facial expressions and stories when presented with clear versus ambiguous cues to both emotion and gender. College students (n = 90) were first asked to label the emotion of either a man (Timothy) or a woman (Sophia) with identical prototypical and “mixed” facial expressions and, separately, to Free Label stories about emotions. The same students were then to choose from a list of ten emotion labels the one that best described the protagonist's emotion for the same stimuli. Results showed that, for ambiguous cues to emotion, participants labeled facial expressions according to gender stereotypes. However, for the stimuli with clear cues to both emotion and gender of the poser, a reverse effect of gender stereotypes was observed for anger, fear, shame, and compassion due to an expectancy violation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Couple and therapist perspectives about the use and process of Reflecting Team practice were analyzed using ethnographic research. A domain analysis was performed on postsession interviews from both couples and therapists, and field notes from each therapist. Seven couples and five therapists were interviewed at least twice over a four month period concerning their perceptions of Reflecting Team practice. Six categories emerged from the analysis: (1) Benefits of a Reflecting Team, (2) Effects of gender, (3) Recommended use, (4) Contraindicated use, (5) Spatial separateness, and (6) Spatial/Process (i.e., sequences of communication between the couple and team members that elicits change). The first four categories described beneficial or contraindicated characteristics of Reflecting Team practice, and the latter two categories described the process of Reflecting Team practice (i.e., steps in how the team was used and implemented). The role of ethnography in Reflecting Team practice and family therapy research is discussed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-07, Section: A, page: 2738. / Major Professor: Thomas E. Smith. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

The purpose of the present study was to develop the causal model that explains how personal and family characteristics influence the well-being of adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs). The causal model was developed based on the Moos model, family systems theory, coping theory, social learning theory, and social support theory. Eighty-four ACOAs were tested in order to examine the fit of the model to the data by path analysis with LISREL VII (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1989). Results of the study showed: (1) that ACOAs who are better able to perceive the availability of social resources tend to have lower emotional status; (2) that ACOAs who are better able to perceive the availability of social resources have a tendency to have better coping skills; (3) that ACOAs who have more appropriate coping skills tend to be better adjusted in life; and (4) that ACOAs who have higher emotional status have a tendency to be better adjusted in life. The finding relating to the negative relationship between the social supports and the ACOAs' emotional status was discussed as well as the practical implications of the study and future directions for research. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-04, Section: B, page: 1927. / Major Professor: Murray Krantz. / Thesis (D.Phil.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

This study examined the relations among the perception of family of origin health and individual psychological and psychosocial characteristics. Specifically, four characteristics were measured: self esteem, spiritual well-being, marital satisfaction, and perception of current family strengths. In addition, this study assessed the ability of self esteem, spiritual well-being, marital satisfaction, and perception of family strengths to be predictive of perception of family of origin health. Finally, this study assessed the ability of self esteem, spiritual well-being, marital satisfaction, and perception of family of origin health to be predictive of family strengths. / Symbolic interaction and General Systems Theory provided the theoretical framework for this research. A survey research design was utilized in which 126 married individuals (63 couples) responded to five survey instruments which included: the Family of Origin Scale, Rosenberg's Self Esteem Scale, the Spiritual Well-Being Scale, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and the Family Strengths Scale. Analyses were conducted using step-wise multiple regressions, Pearson correlations, and t-tests. / Results indicated that self esteem and spiritual well-being can be used together with an accuracy rate of 15% of the known variance in the prediction of perception of family of origin health. Results also indicated that marital satisfaction and spiritual well-being can be used together with an accuracy rate of 28% of the known variance in the prediction of family strengths. / Additional analyses of the main variables (perception of family of origin health, self esteem, spiritual well-being, marital satisfaction, family strengths) for possible gender differences yielded significant differences only for spiritual well-being with females scoring higher than males. Additional analyses also revealed that no significant differences in spiritual well-being existed between females who participate in organized religion and those who do not. / These findings and implications for theory, research, and practice are presented. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: A, page: 4098. / Major Professor: Mary Hicks. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The present study examined African-American male college student's cultural/racial identity and commitment relating to their perceptions of a therapist's credibility and utility. / The research design consisted of three independent variables: (1) Level of cultural/racial identity; (2) Therapist Race (Black and White); and (3) Treatment Approach. / The dependent measure was the Counselor Effective Rating Scale, a 10 item, likert type instrument measuring perceived therapist's credibility and utility. After view a videotape of a "mock" therapy session, it was predicted that participants displaying a high level of cultural/racial identity and commitment would rate the Black and White non-traditional (culture-specific) therapists as more credible than the Black and White traditional (cognitive behavioral) therapists--a partially supported prediction. A non-supported prediction was that participants would be more willing to see a non-traditional versus a traditional therapist. / Regarding credibility, the Black non-traditional therapist was rated the most credible--rather than the White, as predicted. The White traditional therapist was rated as the second most credible, Black traditional therapist third, and the White non-traditional the least. / Regarding utility, the participants reported willingness to see the White traditional therapist, rather than Black, and the White non-traditional White therapist, rather than Black therapist--findings which were not in the predicted directions. Plausible explanations are: group differences in cultural/racial identity, background factors; and expectancy effects. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-12, Section: B, page: 6560. / Major Professor: Charles H. Madsen, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.