Thesis--University of Mysore. / Bibliography: p. [423]-424.

<p> Bullying continues to be a global concern in schools and communities, especially in light of its adverse short- and long-term impacts on youth with respect to both psychiatric and physical health (Espelage &amp; Swearer, 2003; Rodkin, Espelage, &amp; Hanish, 2015; Witted &amp; Dupper, 2005). As a result, numerous programs and resources aimed at preventing bullying and intervening with both victims and perpetrators have been developed. An increased use of computer-mediated communications (CMCs) among adolescents (Patchin, 2013) has lead to the emergence of a new form of bullying called cyberbullying, which involves intentional acts of aggression through online or cellular phone communications. Therefore a need for resources specifically targeting cyberbullying that are accessible and easy-to-use is also needed. </p><p> The current project involved developing a resource in the form of wireframing for a mobile-app, aimed at decreasing cyberbullying among adolescents (ages 12-18 years) by providing them with a reflective learning tool to heighten their awareness of their involvement in cyberbullying, its potential adverse consequences, and to connect them with relevant resources. The project was informed by a review of the literature on physical bullying, cyberbullying (e.g., prevalence, forms, and roles involved), and the efficacy of current prevention/treatment programs and resources. The resulting mobile-app wireframe is presented in the form of a manual and simulation using the JustinMind program (Farrell-Vinary, 2011). The wireframe is comprised of four modules: (1) An Assessment Module to assess user&rsquo;s cyberbullying role (bully, victim, bully/victim) and tailor the mobile-app&rsquo;s content, (2) a Psychoeducation Module providing information on the adverse affects, signs, and symptoms of cyberbullying, (3) a Daily Log Module to monitor online behaviors and increase online awareness, and (4) a Resources Module to provide additional support to other programs, information, and personal contacts. Although the resource is intended primarily for use by teens as a self-help tool, it may be implemented as part of a hybrid approach in conjunction with therapy or school-based programs. </p><p> Following a discussion of strengths, limitations and potential improvements to the current resource, plans for evaluating its efficacy once developed into a functional mobile-app and disseminating it to relevant professionals are described.</p>

<p> Although numerous studies have identified the buffering effects of different coping strategies in stress and health research, few studies have considered the influence of cultural factors such as allocentrism (degree of collectivism). The present study examined whether the collectivistic coping strategies of support (support from racially similar others, support from experienced others, support from family) and avoidance (forbearance, fatalism) were associated with perceived and physiological stress levels, and whether allocentrism influenced this relationship, among a sample of low-income mothers. Results showed that higher use of support from family and lower use of avoidance coping were associated with lower levels of perceived stress and lower morning cortisol. Among women high in allocentrism, those who used support from experienced others had lower levels of perceived stress. These results contribute to our understanding of the role of culture in stress-coping research and how culture influences our physiological stress reactions.</p>

<p> This research project used a causal comparative design to examine differences between intact groups of graduate art therapy students using art as a response to emotions and sharing the art during group supervision. There is scant research on group art therapy supervision thus in this study the variables of curiosity and psychological mindedness were analyzed. Utilizing art making as a tool to understand emotions in response to working with clients therapeutically provides both an implicit, internal focus on the self in relation to others that is then evaluated in an explicit, external context of group supervision, where these emotions are shared. Forty participants completed response art as well as pre- and post-test inventories of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II, subscales of stretching and embracing, and the Balanced Inventory of Psychological Mindedness, subscales of interest and insight. Data were analyzed using Wilcoxon rank sum test and Spearmen&rsquo;s rho correlations. While findings were limited due to the small sample size, nonparametric measures, and confounding variables, findings confirmed that stretching and interest showed significant increases. Students later in their practicum showed an increase in embracing while group size of four or less had greater increases in insight. Insight increased early in the research study and decreased significantly at the end of this present study, suggesting that as students learn they develop a more humble stance of not knowing. Future research would benefit from a qualitative inquiry to identify and understand aspects of creating art in response to clients and sharing it in supervision.</p>

<p> The phenomenon of workplace bullying and sexual harassment amongst first responders for the purpose of this study involves a thorough, comprehensive review of the literature. This examination demonstrates the effects workplace bullying, and sexual harassment has across Emergency Service Organizations [ESOs] and the impact on targets as being severe and pervasive, with negative consequences for the targets and the organizations in which they work. During the exploration of this work, 305 articles were reviewed and then screened through Hermeneutic research methods to net 209 studies in the results. Core themes that emerged support that the phenomenon has severe implications for the psychological health of targets, organizational culture implications and public safety outcomes that are serious, pervasive and have negative consequences for individuals, the organization and the public. Data in this study show that factors that influence workplace bullying and sexual harassment include organizational culture (acceptable) and a &ldquo;rite of passage&rdquo; which creates a groupthink mentality that normalizes and creates a toxic culture ripe for incivility within emergency service organizations. The impact on targets includes severe psychological harm and the depletion of psychological resource that has long-lasting negative mental health implications. Also, data shows that there are public safety implications for workplace bullying, and sexual harassment as targets experience an erosion of professional competence and burnout that can lead to catastrophic consequences regarding critical incidents with clients.</p><p>

<p> The goal of this study was to demonstrate that warmth and attachment are two inherently distinct systems by showing how trust is connected more closely to attachment than warmth. Measures of attachment, interpersonal warmth, and trust were taken from CSULB undergraduates. Participants watched an empathetic video or a non-emotional control video before engaging in the economic investment game. Participants were given the choice to send a whole dollar amount of zero to four to another participant as an indication of their level of trust. It was predicted that there would be no correlation between either trust measures with the measures of empathic response. Although weak correlations were found, results showed interpersonal warmth items did not correlate with trust items and the emotional video did not have an impact on the amount of money sent, supporting the theory that attachment and interpersonal warmth may be separated if one examined trust.</p>

<p> Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the <i>social influence perspective</i>, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the <i>explicit attitudes perspective</i>, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the <i>implicit attitudes perspective</i>, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people&rsquo;s mindset. When an event is encoded in high-level terms (i.e., its consequences), people&rsquo;s judgments reflect their explicit attitudes. When encoded in low-level terms (i.e., its details), however, such attitudes are less accessible, rendering people susceptible to social influence. In the absence of social influence, people with a lower-level mindset form judgments that reflect their relevant implicit attitudes. These hypotheses were tested in the context of an altercation between an African-American and a White male for which responsibility could reasonably be allocated to either party. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a low-level or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants&rsquo; allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.</p>

<p> People who have experienced trauma involving serious threats to physical integrity can react in accordance with various response trajectories, including posttraumatic growth (PTG). PTG is characterized by positive psychological change following trauma that goes beyond a return to pre-trauma functioning as the result of reorganizing one's conceptualization of his or her phenomenological world (Tedeschi &amp; Calhoun, 2004). This study was interested in factors that contribute to PTG from a terror management theory (TMT) perspective. TMT, based on existential philosophy, posits that people defend against the knowledge that everyone must eventually die and the accompanying anxiety by investing in cultural worldviews and deriving self-esteem by adhering to the standards and values prescribed by those worldviews (Solomon et al., 2004). Based on TMT research that suggests that when people are reminded of their mortality they tend to place increased faith in their cultural worldviews (Burke et al., 2010) as well as the assumption that reminders of previous trauma would likely make mortality salient, this study employed a directed content analysis to examine cultural worldview expressions among therapy clients who had experienced trauma. </p><p> Qualitative analysis using the directed coding system created for this study resulted in coding 77 cultural worldviews across the 5 sessions from 5 coding categories: other (explicit) (n=32), other (implicit) (n=20), nationality (n=13), religion (n=8), and ethnicity (n=4). The clients referred to cultural worldviews throughout their sessions, even though only one therapist directly facilitated cultural discussion. Worldview expressions amidst trauma discussions were considered potential contributors to PTG as they served a meaning making function. Also, many worldviews and cultural affiliations referenced were different than those commonly studied in previous TMT research (i.e. referenced cultural affiliations other than religion, ethnicity, nationality, or political affiliation such as gender and age/generation; did not discuss political affiliation). Multiple factors such as differences among clients, contextual factors of the sessions, and therapists' style were considered to potentially have influenced the variance in worldviews expressed. The findings described in this study can contribute to ongoing psychotherapy training and research bridging the gaps among PTG and TMT theory, research and clinical practice with trauma survivors.</p><p></p>

<p> This study examined the relationship of adaptive and pathological (grandiose and vulnerable) expressions of narcissism to attachment style and the capacity for reflective functioning (RF). Narcissism serves a relevant personality construct in clinical theory, social psychology and psychiatry but remains inconsistently defined across these disciplines. Theoretical accounts support the notion that attachment difficulties and maladaptive patterns of mentally representing self and others serve as the substrates for narcissistic pathology but are less pronounced in adaptive narcissism. A multiple regression analysis was conducted in a college student sample of 345 participants applying a cross-sectional, survey design. It was hypothesized that pathological narcissism (grandiose or vulnerable) is associated with higher degrees of attachment-related anxiety and avoidance and lower levels of RF than is adaptive narcissism.</p><p> Results: With respect to convergent validity, measures of adaptive and pathological narcissism exhibited a differential pattern of correlations to general psychopathology, thereby supporting the notion that distinct constructs crystallize within narcissism's heterogeneity. Multiple regression analysis confirmed the two-component structure of pathological narcissism representing narcissistic grandiosity and narcissistic vulnerability. Narcissistic vulnerability significantly predicted higher levels of attachment anxiety, an effect that remained after controlling for narcissistic grandiosity and adaptive narcissism. In contrast, adaptive narcissism significantly predicted lower levels of attachment anxiety. Contrary to expectation, this effect was not observed for avoidant attachment, i.e. pathological narcissism was not found to be a stronger predictor of avoidant attachment than adaptive narcissism. This study further found that pathological narcissism was not a stronger predictor of poor reflective functioning than was adaptive narcissism. In sum, these findings illustrate how overall psychopathology and attachment anxiety vary across the three narcissistic expressions, thereby weakening narcissism's clinical utility as currently defined in the DSM-5. Theoretical and treatment implications are also reviewed.</p>

<p> Given increased evidence related to the importance of fostering life satisfaction in the overall population (Diener &amp; Diener, 1996), as well as recent suggestions regarding the importance of increasing positive academic and social outcomes for children with ADHD (DuPaul, 2007), it is important to gain a clearer understanding of how life satisfaction may be related to symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity. Research on the relationship between life satisfaction and symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity is currently limited to two studies (Gudjonsson et al., 2009; Ogg et al., 2014). The current study investigated the relationship between symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity and reports of global life satisfaction in 399 high school students. This study used the bifactor model to conceptualize ADHD given that this model provided the best fit when compared to other models of ADHD in the current study and given that there is substantial evidence in the current literature to support the use of this model (Martel, von Eye, &amp; Nigg, 2010). Structural equation modeling results demonstrated that the general factor of ADHD was a significant predictor of life satisfaction when students rated ADHD symptoms, and the inattention factor of ADHD was a significant predictor of life satisfaction when teachers rated ADHD symptoms. In addition, because depressive symptoms have been associated with life satisfaction and inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, the current study examined if life satisfaction moderated or mediated the relationship between inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity and depressive symptoms. Results of the present study suggested that life satisfaction serves as a potential but weak moderator in the relationship between general ADHD and depression when symptoms of ADHD were rated by teachers. Results also demonstrated that life satisfaction mediated the relationship between general ADHD symptoms and depressive symptoms when ADHD symptoms were rated by students, and life satisfaction mediated the relationship between inattentive symptoms and depressive symptoms when ADHD symptoms were rated by teachers. </p><p> The current study contributes to existing literature on life satisfaction given that there are currently only two studies, one which was conducted with an adult population and one of which was conducted with a middle school population, specifically examining levels of life satisfaction in individuals with symptoms of ADHD. The results of this study provide additional confirmation of the negative relationship between ADHD symptoms and life satisfaction. Moreover, this study was the first to examine how life satisfaction may play a role in the relationship between symptoms of ADHD and depressive symptoms. This study supports that life satisfaction primarily plays a mediating role in the relationship between ADHD symptoms and depressive symptoms and provides support for further examination of this role in future studies.</p>