<p> This study explored educators&rsquo; perceptions of the impact of exposure to violence on children and their intellectual development. Substitute concepts such as corporal punishment, child maltreatment, and others were considered relevant to formation of an individual&rsquo;s identity. The study also explored the psychological impact of trauma over time, and its effect on an individual&rsquo;s cognitive development, identity formation, and relational development. Various aspects of exposure to violence were examined, as questions arose regarding how these multiple forms of exposure to violence impact an individual&rsquo;s level of functionality. This study utilized a general qualitative approach informed by case study methodologies. </p><p> Four educators who worked with children previously exposed to violence were interviewed. Although both teachers and tutors were solicited, only tutors responded to the invitation to participate; therefore, the results are based upon interviews with four tutors. Four specific themes emerged from the participant interviews, namely: <i>the realities of children exposed to violence, the impact of violence, academic performance</i>, and <i>the role of the tutor</i>. Within some themes, subthemes emerged such as emotional violence, physical violence, limited family support, the impact of violence, resiliency, combativeness, and lack of friendships. A narrative of themes and subthemes was presented. Commensurate with the focus of the research, the predominant theme identified in this research was that of violence and aggression on the part of adults, seen through the prism of the experiences of the children in their care.</p><p>

<p> In speech convergence, people's speech becomes more like the speech they hear. Such convergence behavior has been observed along many domains of linguistic structure and in many different situational contexts. Convergence has been argued to be socially motivated (Communication Accommodation Theory &ndash; Giles et al. 1991), and also to be an unconscious, resource-free process (Interactive Alignment Theory &ndash; Pickering &amp; Garrod 2004). This dissertation presents an alternative approach in which convergence is not a discrete process in itself; rather, convergence behavior is the consequence of episodic storage and recall, moderated by attention. </p><p> The first chapter of this dissertation consists of an elaboration of this approach, called the categorization schema account. In this approach, episodic storage is constrained by the categorization schemata that are currently active, and categories are only active when attention is paid to those categories' defining features. Convergence across disparate domains of linguistic structure is then an empirical pattern that falls out naturally from the assumption that multiple representations of the same input are stored separately and recalled independently. In consequence, speakers may converge to different domains of linguistic structure at different rates, depending on which domains have their attention. </p><p> The two subsequent chapters report the results of a pair of studies designed to examine predictions made by the categorization schema account. A Mechanical Turk experiment, discussed in Chapter 2, failed to find a significant difference between convergence to words and convergence to pseudowords. In a dyadic game task experiment comparing convergence rates across levels of linguistic structure, discussed in Chapter 3, participants exhibited different patterns of convergence to phonetic features on the one hand, and to lexical and syntactic features on the other hand. Additionally, participants who self-reported a greater degree of personal autonomy in this experiment exhibited less convergence behavior across domains. </p><p> Chapter 4 discusses the ramifications of these findings for theories of sound change, and reports the results of an experiment illustrating that accommodation can directly result in the appearance of new variants within an interaction, providing a possible pathway for the actuation of sound change. </p><p>

<p> A web-based usability evaluation was conducted to examine the effects of two text-resizing methods on normal and low vision Internet users&rsquo; online reading experience. Normal or corrected to normal vision (N/CTN; <i> N</i> = 50) and low vision (<i>N</i> = 5) participants completed two blocks of four mock Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) reading tests on the experiment website using fixed width (FW) and text reflow (TR) text-resizing methods. Subjective visual fatigue scores, modified System Usability Scale (SUS) score, time on task, and accuracy were collected as dependent measures for user experience evaluation. Results showed that when FW method was presented in the second block, N/CtN participants&rsquo; visual fatigue continued to increase, along with a significant decrease in time spent on reading tasks. Such effects were not observed in TR method. Results of low vision participants were different from those obtained in lab settings, suggesting that testing environment may have played a role in low vision participants&rsquo; performance. Implications of the current research can be used to guide future web accessibility research in regards to online experiment design and recruitment of participants with visual impairments.</p><p>

<p> People with insomnia overestimate how long it takes to fall asleep and underestimate the total amount of sleep they attain. While memory is normally decreased prior to sleep onset, this decrease is smaller in insomnia. Insomnia generally and the phenomena of underestimation of sleep and greater memory prior to sleep area associated with arousal including cortical, autonomic, and cognitive arousal. The goal of the present study was to simultaneously examine arousal across these domains in relation to memory and accuracy of sleep estimation. </p><p> Forty healthy adults completed baseline measures of sleep, psychopathology, and memory, then maintained a regular sleep schedule for three nights at home before spending a night in the sleep laboratory. On the night of the sleep laboratory study, participants completed measures of cognitive arousal, were allowed to sleep until five minutes of contiguous stage N2 sleep in the third NREM period. They were then awoken and asked to remain awake for fifteen minutes, after which they were allowed to resume sleeping. For the entire duration that they were awake, auditory stimuli (recordings of words) were presented at a rate of one word per 30 seconds. Participants slept until morning, estimated how long they were awake and then completed memory testing, indicating whether they remembered hearing each of the words previously presented along with an equal number of matched distracter words. </p><p> Memory was greatest for words presented early in the awakening, followed by the middle and end of the awakening. High cortical arousal prior to being awoken was associated with better memory, particularly for the early part of the awakening. High autonomic arousal was associated with better memory for the late part of the awakening. Cognitive arousal was not associated with memory. Longer duration of sleep prior to being awoken was associated with better memory for the middle of the awakening. Better memory at baseline was associated with better memory, specifically in the middle of the awakening. Contrary to expectation, memory for the awakening was not associated with accuracy of the perceived length of the awakening. </p><p> The present study found complementary associations between cortical and autonomic arousal and memory for an awakening from sleep. This suggests that decreasing arousal in both domains may reduce the discrepancy between subjective and objective sleep in insomnia. This also suggests the initial magnitude of decrements in cognitive performance after being awoken are related to deeper proximal sleep initially, while speed of improvement in cognitive performance is related to longer prior sleep duration.</p><p>

<p>This study examines sex differences on the baseline Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Test (ImPACT), as well as the relationship between ImPACT measures and sex roles in a high school sample. Previous literature has shown that males tend to outperform females in the scope of reaction time and visuospatial performance. Likewise, females tend to outperform males on cognitive tasks, such as those pertaining to verbal and visual memory. There is limited research regarding sex roles and neurocognitive testing, while the present study examined this relationship. Participants were obtained from E.D. White Catholic High School in Thibodaux, LA. The 57 participants were administered the Bem Sex Role Inventory, as well as the ImPACT baseline neurocognitive assessment. A comparison of the means was analyzed using a t-test, while a Pearson Correlation was used to examine the relationship between sex roles and ImPACT measures. There were no statistically significant results. Coaches, trainers, and test administrators should not make assumptions based on sex or sex roles. The ImPACT system is a tool that has been used for the purpose of diagnosis and management of concussions, and will continue to be the most widely used assessment. Future directions should continue to focus on neurocognitive baseline testing for concussions for athletes at the high school level, being that there is limited research in this area.

<p>ABSTRACT One of the basic tenets of mental health counseling is that assisting a client to change the way he thinks about aspects of the world results in a changed view of the world. When this is examined in therapy, typically the issue at hand is measured (a client may complete the Beck Depression Scale), an intervention with associated techniques is used for some amount of time (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy), and then outcome is measured using the original scale. Of course, if the concern is alleviation of signs and symptoms then a decrease in measured distress is an indicator of a successful intervention. However, despite this success, a number of cognitive questions remain. Due to the fact that it does not necessarily follow that an alleviation of signs and symptoms means that worldview has changed (i.e., a client may have learned additional coping mechanisms), the first question is whether there has there been a change in world view. A second question is what, if anything, about the intervention, resulted in a changed worldview. Kim and Ahn (1992, 1996) developed a methodology for their research which permitted an examination of the impact of manipulations of narratives through the lens of mental health disorders. I investigated how supporting or challenging primary or peripheral features of four mental health disorders impacted the conceptualization of those disorders. Results for the Conceptual Centrality task, a ratings task that focused on supporting or challenging the symptom of interest, revealed that participants used a theory-based approach (compared to a prototype-based approach) for this task. This indicated that people consider the nature of causal chains when rating the centrality or primary and peripheral symptoms. Results for the more complex Causal Centrality Task, in which participants constructed multiple iterations of mental health disorders by identifying symptoms from a list and indicating causal relationships, indicated that constructing individual models, focused on a specific manifestation of a mental health disorder, later influenced general models, focused on the same disorder in general. The addition of a discursive partner revealed that although both partners influenced the later model of the other, they did so differentially. In general, the partner who was more anxious constructed a later model that was smaller (i.e., used fewer unique symptoms) whereas their partner utilized more unique symptoms (in line with construction of a general model). The patterns observed in this research indicate that manipulating mental health narratives does influence conceptualizations of their respective disorders. This research has ramifications for research involving categorization as well as mental health issues.

This dissertation is a first look at English-speaking children’s acquisition of the syntax of the partitive. It presents four experiments that contrast three types of structures and examines how they interact with adjectival modification: the partitive, the pseudopartitive and complex nouns with prepositional adjuncts. The experimentation investigates whether children recognize that the Determiner Phrase (DP) in the partitive is a barrier to adjectival modification. The partitive is contrasted with the pseudopartitive –a minimal pair structure that lacks an internal DP. The data shows that children under the age of six do not distinguish between the partitive and the pseudopartitive. They allow adjectives preceding the partitive to modify the second noun; this is standardly considered licit for the pseudopartitive structure, but not the partitive. This result is evidence that children are under-representing the syntax of the partitive and of DP. Syntactic representations of minimal DP and minimal partitive structures are suggested and it is argued that these structures may persist as an option in the adult grammar.

Previous research using violation-of-expectation paradigms suggests that very young infants have a good understanding of unobserved physical events. Yet toddlers appear to lack this knowledge when confronted with the door task, a visuospatial reasoning task which parallels ones used in the habituation/looking time studies. Many studies have been conducted in an effort to determine why toddlers perform poorly on the door task yet the answer remains unclear. The current study used a correlational approach to investigate door task performance from both psychological (executive function), and neuroscience (prefrontal cortex) perspectives. Children between the ages of 2½–3 years were tested on the standard door task as well as four other tasks. Three of the tasks were believed to activate prefrontal cortex: the three boxes-stationary, a spatial working memory task; the three boxes-scrambled, a non-spatial working memory task; and the three pegs task, an inhibitory control task. The fourth task was a recognition memory task which had been previously linked to the medial temporal lobe. Only a single task, the three pegs task, was found to correlate with door task performance (r = .510, p<.01). Even with age, sex, and performance on the other tasks controlled for, this correlation remained significant (r = .459, p<.05). Furthermore, in a logistic regression the three pegs task was found to be the only significant predictor of door task performance (z = 2.87, p<.01). An examination of the errors children made on the door task revealed that over half (58%) could be classified as inhibitory control errors (children returned to the previously rewarded location or repeatedly searched a favorite door). Taken together these data suggest a possible relationship between inhibitory control ability and successful completion of the door task.

<p> This dissertation focused on advancing the current research on the connection between physical and psychological health. This study focused on two psychotherapy groups that integrate mind-body practices in the form of yoga, meditation, and relaxation. These groups were ongoing and are held once a week for one hour in an urban outpatient mental health clinic. Participants in these groups attended consistently for approximately 1-4 years and experienced a wide-range of trauma and chronic pain symptoms. Because the groups were active and running for several years, this study followed a qualitative research approach to comprehensively capture the participants&rsquo; subjective experience. Understanding the experience of these particular clients could prove to be advantageous to the field of psychology as it will help to elucidate the individual&rsquo;s experience of an integrated mind-body modality for trauma and pain treatment. Using phenomenological interviews, this study explored the subjective experience of individuals in these groups. In-depth interview questions focused on participants&rsquo; reactions to the mind-body interventions for combined physical and psychological symptom relief.</p>

<p> Bilinguals have been found to outperform monolinguals across a variety of cognitive tasks (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, &amp; Luk, 2008). Research regarding the generalizability of the bilingual advantage in driving, however, has not been conclusive (Chong &amp; Strybel, 2015; Telner, Wiesenthal, Bialystok, &amp; York, 2008). This study aimed to investigate differences in monolingual and bilingual performance in a simulated driving task. The Lane Change Test (LCT) was used to assess driving performance in the presence of a peripheral detection task (PDT), delayed digit recall task (2-back task), and visuospatial task (clock task). Results demonstrated that both monolinguals and bilinguals performed equally across all tasks. Completing a cognitive task, however, was found to be detrimental to both driving and the detection of peripheral stimuli. Given the controversial nature of the bilingual advantage, possible explanations for the null results obtained for the two language profiles are discussed.</p>