Female adolescents are increasingly being charged with crimes of violence, and the literature is lacking as to how best to reduce their aggressive tendencies. In the past, girls represented a small portion of all youths involved in criminal justice systems, and studies involving effective treatment options for them were rarely conducted. Aggression Replacement Training® is a 10-week, evidence-based, group treatment intervention designed to advance moral reasoning, improve social skills, and manage angry feelings. Numerous outcome studies of Aggression Replacement Training® with both offending and non-offending male adolescents and with male and female adolescents together have yielded mixed results. The question remains whether or not positive results can be obtained when Aggression Replacement Training® is provided to only female adolescents in a group setting. This quasi-experimental study examined if there were significant decreases in aggressive tendencies and increases in pro-social behaviors among female juvenile offenders in a residential commitment program in the state of Florida who participated in an Aggression Replacement Training® group intervention versus those who did not participate. Due to the exceptionally high degree of exposure to traumatic life events commonly reported by this population, this study also hoped to ascertain whether or not the level of traumatic distress mattered as to the efficacy of the intervention for the girls who participated. The results of repeated measures 2 X 2 (time X group) ANOVA tests indicated no significant mean differences in rule-breaking or aggressive behaviors pre- to posttest between the 30 experimental and 30 comparison group members in this quasi-experimental study, although only a large anticipated effect could have been observed with a sample this size. The degree of trauma (covariate), also, had no significant impact on intervention efficacy for those girls who participated in the Aggression Replacement Training® group treatment. Mean negative behaviors were reduced for all study participants during the 12-week study time frame while in the commitment program, however, and both groups exhibited a mean increase in positive behaviors. Additional studies with larger samples may reveal a clearer picture of the benefits this intervention may provide to girls in juvenile justice commitment settings.

The aims of the study were to uncover the major psychological factors underlying tokophobia, their impacts, and whether there is likely to be a role for psychological counselling to help women and their families. Nine women who indicated that they fear and avoid childbirth despite wanting a baby, volunteered and participated in a semi-structured interview. Six of these interviews were transcribed and analysed using the guidelines provided by Smith, Jarman & Osbourn (1999), from which tables of individual themes were created. For the participants, violation of expectations led to enduring distress, which manifests as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. ‘Loss of control’ and ‘loss of self’ are powerful themes that support existing literature. The theme ‘need of acknowledgment’ adds to the existing literature. As difficulties adapting to changes in lifestyle were expressed, a seven-phase transition model was suggested as a way of explaining and understanding difficulties faced by women with regard to changes in identity and lifestyle. It was concluded that the presentation of ‘secondary tokophobia’ does not fit with the term ‘phobia’. A reclassification of tokophobia was suggested for women who experience fear and avoidance of childbirth following a traumatic birth.

This report will provide an overview of the literature on predictive factors of the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in pediatric medical trauma patients as well as discuss the influence of cognitive development on the validity of such predictive factors. The report will propose that the validity of current predictive factors, including trauma memory, parental influence, and appraisals of the trauma and its sequelae, may alter across child development due to differences in cognitive abilities. In particular, the report proposes examining the following questions for pediatric patients (5 to 17 years of age) who have endured a medical trauma: 1) Are appraisal predictive values of PTSD moderated by age; 2) Is data-driven processing‟s predictive value of PTSD moderated by parental attitude of avoidance. The report additionally outlines hypotheses as well as proposes the methodology and statistics to examine the proposed hypotheses. Limitations as well as the importance of this study are discussed. / text

This study explores how representations of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in videogames inform our present and future. I argue that videogames have the potential to sway a player’s sense of politics and history through image, sound, and interactive capabilities: these games leave what we might call “residue” in a player’s mind, even if he or she is not conscious of those effects. I hope that my analysis, drawing upon player experiences and close readings of two games, will uncover how this residue might reconfigure a player’s sense of Kennedy’s assassination as well as his or her political ideologies and anxieties. I focus on two games released in the past ten years: the low-selling but controversial JFK: Reloaded, released in 2004, and the wildly popular Call of Duty: Black Ops, released in 2010. These games present the narrative in starkly different ways. The former invites players to reenact repeatedly the assassination from the vantage point of Oswald in the Book Depository while the latter presents an alternative history that ultimately positions a fictional character as Kennedy’s assassin. These games, however, invite players to arrive to similar conclusions about the ways that people engage with historical narratives when playing historically-inspired games. In different ways, both Reloaded and Black Ops divorce the player’s engagement with the assassination on a political level, framing Kennedy’s death as a simple act of violence. Players, then, might understand history as driven more by discrete acts of violence than by complex political practices. The two games diverge in how they treat the player’s relationship to official accounts of history as well. Reloaded enables deviation from the prescribed story of Kennedy’s assassination offered by the Warren Commission while Black Ops presents an alternative historical account that highlights the flimsiness of memory when memories are tainted by traumatic experience. Both suggest that the official narrative is faulty. Yet these games at once open a space for a new historical narrative and fail to provide a plausible alternative history. The games ultimately render history itself an uncertain enterprise, fraught with flawed memories and official reconfigurations of how events actually transpired. / text

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the connection between emotional trauma and executive function ability in children and adolescents. Trauma is defined as an overwhelming event that is beyond the realm of what might be an expectable occurrence for the average person. A serious outcome, occurring in around 14% of those children who experience trauma, is the development of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is classified as an anxiety disorder occurring after exposure to a traumatic event, in which symptoms of re-experiencing, avoidance, and arousal are present. In addition to the numerous physical, emotional, and social effects of trauma, neuropsychological and imaging research has confirmed that children’s neuroanatomy and cognitive functioning are often affected. It has been proposed that intrusive thoughts occurring immediately after the trauma event may modify the neural network function, setting the stage for neurobiological dysregulation. One of the most common neural anatomic areas of concern following trauma is the prefrontal cortex, a structure that continues to develop until the third decade of life, and that has been implicated as the home of executive function, an idea conceptualized in a number of ways, but that is most often considered an umbrella term describing essential functions of the mind, such as planning, inhibition, attention, and working memory. The scope of literature addressing the effect of trauma on executive function is minimal. It is the hypothesis of this study that early trauma may disrupt the normal development of the PFC and subsequently result in decreased executive functioning abilities. In order to explore this hypothesis, a set of neuropsychological measures were selected as representative of executive functioning, based on previous research. An initial factor analysis was conducted in order to determine if, as suspected, all subtests chosen load on a common factor of executive function. Multiple linear regression was used to determine whether children who experienced trauma have impaired executive functioning abilities, if there was a significant gender difference, and what, if any, differences there were between children who developed PTSD and children who did not. / text

The events of September 11, 2001 fundamentally changed the world for many in the United States. It was shocking and horrifying -- it was, in a word, traumatic. This trauma took on a new dimension with the release of the horrifying Abu Ghraib "torture photographs" in 2004. Large-scale traumatic events such as September 11 and the Abu Ghraib revelations can impact not only the individual and his or her personal identity, but entire social bodies and its corresponding national identity as well. This study investigates how the American social body psychically dealt with the horror of these national traumas and socially negotiated what it means to "be an American." Specifically, it examines a disparate group of rhetorical artifacts, from articles in mainstream news reports to popular horror films, and looks for emergent patterns to provide insight into the larger whole. This study draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives and employs a method of close reading and frame genre analysis to organize and understand the complex interplay of forces tuned toward a deeper understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of horror in times of social upheaval. It focuses first on the mainstream news organizations reporting of both September 11 and Abu Ghraib to outline the master narrative and counter-narrative that emerged. It then analyzes three sets of films in the popular culture to better understand how the nation attempted to rhetorically constitute an "American Subject" in the wake of a horrifying trauma. The study concludes with an analysis of the different psychical subject positions that may be taken in the rhetorical negotiation of the American Subject and offers an explanation of the rhetorical function of the torture porn horror genre in this time of national trauma. / text

Those who misuse alcohol in the United States do not regularly seek treatment on their own to reduce use and avoid consequences of misuse. Because of the association between alcohol misuse, alcohol-related risk behaviors, and injury; alcohol misuse in the United States has serious societal and individual repercussions. To alleviate these problems, health care professionals; including doctors, nurses, and social workers; have an opportunity to screen injured patients for alcohol misuse and provide brief interventions. Although some brief intervention research has demonstrated reductions in alcohol misuse and other injury-related behaviors, other evidence indicates that brief alcohol interventions are not equally effective for all injured patients. Moreover, screening and brief alcohol interventions are not reimbursed in most states, leaving providers and medical centers uncompensated for providing services. A possible way to address these challenges is to target intervention services to patients who are most likely to make positive changes. Therefore, this dissertation used mixture modeling to identify subclasses of injured patients based on their past injury-related consequences and risks of alcohol misuse in order to describe which subgroups made the greatest reductions in drinking in the year following discharge from a Level-1 trauma center. This dissertation also identified which subclasses of patients made the greatest behavioral improvements for injury-related consequences and risks of alcohol misuse during the year following discharge from the trauma center. Patients with profiles that contained high probabilities of multiple consequences and risks and those with histories of alcohol-related accidents and injuries reported some of the largest improvements in drinking and injury-related consequences and risks following discharge. Those classes that made the fewest changes had profiles that consisted of fighting and taking foolish risks while drinking or that consisted of low probabilities of risks or consequences of alcohol misuse. This dissertation provides tentative evidence for targeting intervention services to injured patients. Further research should verify which subclasses of patients are most likely to reduce alcohol misuse and other alcohol-related risk behaviors in order to more effectively target brief alcohol interventions, increase cost savings, and improve the health and behavioral health outcomes for injured patients who misuse alcohol. / text

Increasing the visibility and societal understanding of archives is an important task given the struggle archives have to show their worth and attract a larger and more diversified group of researchers. Researchers in the field of medicine often already have the visibility that archivists seek and, within that field, those who use archival sources in their investigations may be able to increase their audience’s awareness of archives. Consequently, reaching out to these researchers is an important step in increasing archival consciousness and appreciation. Learning about what they value in archives and how they use them are equally important. For a medical researcher, archives can provide important data for studies. This thesis analyzes key medical research uses of archives over the last forty years. As will be highlighted here, medical researchers have used archival records to study the effects of malnutrition, trauma, and environmental conditions on health. Greater awareness of the contribution of archival materials to medical knowledge and better health care has the potential to change public perceptions of archives. This medical research provides concrete examples of the value of archives to the central contemporary concerns of society. It dispels the conventional view that archives are peripheral to those concerns. Instead, it underscores the importance of archival work and the need to support it. The archival record is fluid. It has different meanings for different people at different times. Archivists must adopt a fluid perspective on value when they seek to increase their visibility and attract new users to their institutions. Records used in medical research may not have been created with that in mind. Thus by re-imagining what the medical record can be, this thesis hopes to contribute to this important process. / October 2015

Unfortunately, one rite of passage of childhood is often serious injury that carries psychological impact along with the obvious physical repercussions. Prior studies have found conflicting results for protective/risk factors, thus this study attempted to explore PTSD in a sample of children ages seven to thirteen years of age with moderate to severe injuries. In this study (N = 32), 31.3% of children experiencing such a sudden injury requiring hospitalization at the University of Kentucky Childrens Hospital demonstrated significant indications of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the injury. Several pre, peri, and post-trauma variables from during the childs hospitalization to the follow-up period four to five weeks later were correlated with this outcome including age, ethnicity, acute stress disorder (ASD) with or without dissociation criteria being met, prior medical experience, parents score on the BSI-18 while the child is still in this hospital, chronic illness status, gender, number of coping strategies reported by the child while in the hospital, the number of negative coping strategies reported, the amount of pain reported, and several follow-up variables (parents BSI-18 score, number of coping strategies reported, number of negative and positive coping strategies reported, injury threat, and total number of impairments reported by the child and by the parent). Negative coping did not significantly change from the in-hospital period to the follow-up period. Surprisingly, the STEPP, a current screener described and supported by some past research, was not successful in identifying these at-risk children; however, a new screening prototype was developed including age, acute stress disorder (ASD), and pain that did successfully predict 80% of those with PTSD and 85% of those without later PTSD. A follow-up screener consisting solely of parental items (parental symptoms on the BSI-18 and parental rating of child impairments) was also created and found to sensitively predict 90% of those children with PTSD. Implications from these findings along with study strengths and weaknesses were highlighted.

Despite the negative psychological, emotional, relational, and physiological impact of traumatic events that often persist into adulthood (Breslau, Davis, Andreski, Peterson, 1991; Briere, 2004), some individuals may also experience posttraumatic growth (PTG) as they struggle to resolve their traumatic experiences. PTG is a process that originates from a cognitive response to cope with traumatic events, and an outcome that yields positive personal changes (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1998). Several factors are linked to the increased likelihood of PTG such as symptom severity, coping resources, and personality characteristics (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). This study examined the contributory roles of life-style themes, coping resources, trauma symptoms, and their interaction on different forms of PTG in a sample of college graduate and undergraduates. Wanting Recognition, Tension Control, Social Support, and trauma symptoms were significantly related to PTG. Significant interaction effects were revealed between Wanting Recognition, Social Support and trauma symptoms. Implications for practice and research are discussed.