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: Neuroscience
Description
The goal of my study is to test the overarching hypothesis that art therapy is effective because it targets emotional dysregulation that often accompanies significant health stressors. By reducing the salience of illness-related stressors, art therapy may improve overall mood and recovery, particularly in patients with cancer. After consulting the primary literature and review papers to develop psychological and neural mechanisms at work in art therapy, I created a hypothetical experimental procedure to test these hypotheses to explain why art therapy is helpful to patients with chronic illness. Studies found that art therapy stimulates activity of multiple brain regions involved in memory retrieval and the arousal of emotions. I hypothesize that patients with chronic illness have a reduced capacity for emotion regulation, or difficulty recognizing, expressing or altering illness-related emotions (Gross & Barrett, 2011). Further I hypothesize that art therapy improves mood and therapeutic outcomes by acting on the emotion-processing regions of the limbic system, and thereby facilitating the healthy expression of emotion, emotional processing, and reappraisal. More mechanistically, I propose art therapy reduces the perception or salience of stressors by reducing amygdala activity leading to decreased activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. The art therapy literature and my hypothesis about its mechanisms of action became the basis of my proposed study. To assess the effectiveness of art therapy in alleviating symptoms of chronic disease, I am specifically targeting patients with cancer who exhibit a lack of emotional regulation. Saliva is collected 3 times a week on the day of intervention: morning after waking, afternoon, and evening. Stress levels are tested using one-hour art therapy sessions over the course of 3 months. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) assesses an individual's perceived stress and feelings in past and present situations, for the control and intervention group. To measure improvement in overall mood, 10 one-hour art sessions are performed on patients over 10 weeks. A one-hour discussion analyzing the participants' artwork follows each art session. The Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) assesses overall mood for the intervention and control groups. I created rationale and predictions based on the intended results of each experiment.
ContributorsAluri, Bineetha C. (Author) / Orchinik, Miles (Thesis director) / Davis, Mary (Committee member) / Essary, Alison (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School for the Science of Health Care Delivery (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a devastating illness that causes the degeneration of both upper and lower motor neurons, leading to eventual muscle atrophy. ALS rapidly progresses into paralysis, with patients typically dying due to respiratory complications within three to five years from the onset of their symptoms. Even after many years of research and drug trials, there is still no cure, and current therapies only succeed in increasing life-span by approximately three months. With such limited options available for patients, there is a pressing need to not only find a cure, but also make new treatments available in order to ameliorate disease symptoms. In a genome-wide association study previously conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), several single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) upstream of a novel gene, FLJ10968, were found to significantly alter risk for ALS. This novel gene acquired the name FGGY after publication of the paper. FGGY exhibits altered levels of protein expression throughout ALS disease progression in human subjects, and detectable protein and mRNA expression changes in a mouse model of ALS. We performed co-immunoprecipitation experiments coupled with mass spectrometry in order to determine which proteins are associated with FGGY. Some of these potential binding partners have been linked to RNA regulation, including regulators of the splicesomal complex such as SMN, Gemin, and hnRNP C. To further validate these findings, we have verified co-localization of these proteins with one another. We hypothesize that FGGY plays an important role in ALS pathogenesis, and we will continue to examine its biological function.
ContributorsTerzic, Barbara (Author) / Jensen, Kendall (Thesis director) / Francisco, Wilson (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05