Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- All Subjects: trauma
Description
Sometimes difficult life events challenge our existing resources in such a way that routinized responses are inadequate to handle the challenge. Some individuals will persist in habitual, automatic behavior, regardless of environmental cues that indicate a mismatch between coping strategy and the demands of the stressor. Other individuals will marshal adaptive resources to construct new courses of action and reconceptualize the problem, associated goals and/or values. A mixed methods approach was used to describe and operationalize cognitive shift, a relatively unexplored construct in existing literature. The study was conducted using secondary data from a parent multi-year cross-sectional study of resilience with eight hundred mid-aged adults from the Phoenix metro area. Semi-structured telephone interviews were analyzed using a purposive sample (n=136) chosen by type of life event. Participants' beliefs, assumptions, and experiences were examined to understand how they shaped adaptation to adversity. An adaptive mechanism, "cognitive shift," was theorized as the transition from automatic coping to effortful cognitive processes aimed at novel resolution of issues. Aims included understanding when and how cognitive shift emerges and manifests. Cognitive shift was scored as a binary variable and triangulated through correlational and logistic regression analyses. Interaction effects revealed that positive personality attributes influence cognitive shift most when people suffered early adversity. This finding indicates that a certain complexity, self-awareness and flexibility of mind may lead to a greater capacity to find meaning in adversity. This work bridges an acknowledged gap in literature and provides new insights into resilience.
ContributorsRivers, Crystal T (Author) / Zautra, Alex (Thesis advisor) / Davis, Mary (Committee member) / Kurpius, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Madness is disruptive. It doesn't play by the rules. Madness is influenced, created, and caused by many different factors; it can be at different times disorienting, debilitating, or a space of radical potential. In this thesis, I argue for the empowering potential of narrative and rewriting identity in the face of painful disruptions. I argue that the way that we conceptualize madness and how we internalize trauma affects how we reconfigure identity as an ongoing process and therefore whether and how we are able to embrace creative, diverse and dynamically empowered futures. I argue against positivist traditions of categorization and concept formation when it comes to madness – whether medical or historic//cultural/social. I first use similar tools to “categorize the categorizers” and later break away from positivist tradition through feminist inquiry, pushing against static, linear, and inactive kind and family conceptual hierarchies with my own experience. I use active feminist frameworks and phenomenological ontologies to argue for a corrective epistemic justice exposing reductive gaps in the literature and highlighting the links between violence/oppression/trauma/agency and mental illness that positivist models minimize. I employ personal experiences of gender-based violence and my own changing and intersectional understanding and experience of depression and mental health as a lens through which different pathways can emerge. I use memoir as method to disturb the binary limitations of madness models, instead offering a conceptualization of madness as fluid, intersectional, changing, and deeply personal: an experience that cannot be reduced and compartmentalized. Finally, I explore the pain of trauma and madness as well as the possibility therein towards action as a way of reclaiming self-agency.
ContributorsTownsley, Rebecca (Author) / Behl, Natasha (Thesis advisor) / Muphy-Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Colbern, Allan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018