Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of a modified form of Meichenbaum's (1985) Stress Inoculation Training (SIT) on the anxiety-induced challenging behavior and coping skills of middle school students with Asperger's Syndrome. Many individuals with Asperger's Syndrome (AS), most often described as a disorder on the autism spectrum, contend with significant anxiety in addition to the other social, sensory, linguistic, and behavioral components of the disorder. This anxiety can frequently lead to high rates of inappropriate and/or aggressive behavior. A single-subject multiple-baseline research design, replicated across three participants was used in this study. This was an AB design with a time-lagged control as the intervention was introduced across the participants. Three middle school students with Asperger's Syndrome participated in this study and all demonstrated a decrease in challenging behavior and an increase in adaptive coping skills during the course of the intervention. Two of the three students maintained these positive changes throughout the follow-up phase of the intervention. These two students continued to show behavioral improvement after the conclusion of the study.

Stress has long been reported to play a prominent role in the onset and course of diabetes mellitus. The present study first reviews the literature addressing the impact of stress on this disease, the physiological mechanisms and pathways the stress response might utilize, and psychotherapeutic tacts taken to date to ameliorate this response. A stress management package was then assembled, comprised of relaxation training, hypnosis, stress inoculation training, and imagery induction.

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The present investigation sought to explore the efficacy of stress inoculation in the management of pain with severely burned adults. Subjects were 16 adult burn patients randomly assigned to either the stress-inoculation or no-treatment comparison group. The focus of the analysis was the amount of change or improvement from pretreatment to posttreatment periods. The stress-inoculation group showed significant improvement on all nine dependent measures, while the no-treatment group improved significantly on only two (physical and emotional self-ratings). The overall comparison of the amount of change between groups revealed that the stress-inoculation group showed significantly greater improvement in pain management than the no-treatment group during this time. It was concluded that stress inoculation, as a flexible treatment package, was efficacious in the management of pain experience of burn patients.

Utilizing a sample of community-residing older adults, this pretest-posttest design evaluated the short term (approximately 1 week) impact on everyday functioning of Stress Inoculation (SI) training, a cognitive-behavioral intervention that is essentially a coping skills enhancement program. The targets of training were anxiety and concern about being able to successfully perform everyday living tasks. The training program was contrasted with a no contact (waiting list) control. In an effort to maximize the practical aspects of this study, the assessment battery included the use of two ecologically valid measures of everyday problem solving skills (one self-rated and one interviewer-rated). Also included were a measure of everyday intelligence widely used in gerontological research, two measures of self-efficacy, a geriatric depression scale, a state-trait anxiety scale, and a self-report measure of failures in perception, memory, and motor function. The results suggest that Stress Inoculation training is an effective intervention for improving everyday competence but that personal perceptions of self-efficacy and the emotional states of anxiety and depression mediate treatment effects. In general, only persons with lower levels of self-efficacy and higher levels of anxiety and/or depression saw improvement in their cognitive performance following SI training.

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No description available.