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
High-grade gliomas are highly aggressive central nervous system (CNS) malignancies with high fatality rates if left untreated. There is currently a lack of reliable diagnostic tools to characterize the diffuse cell populations commonly found in these tumors. Here, we report that electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) can be used in an in vitro system to analyze changes in the impedance contributed by the extracellular matrix (ECM) of two glioblastoma cell lines: GBM 22 and GBM 115. EIS was more effective at resolving differences in impedance from GBM 115 cells than GBM 22 cells, which depended on both cell confluency and frequency. However, differences in impedance were more apparent from the supernatant when the cells were removed in both cell lines. Analysis of the PC12 and either of the GBM cell line co-cultures yielded highly statistically significant differences between all comparisons of cell confluencies and frequency steps. These results illustrate that EIS can be an effective instrument for characterizing the ECM surrounding glioblastoma cells, providing insight into the cellular behavior of these oncogenic cells.
ContributorsPham, Brian (Author) / Sadleir, Rosalind (Thesis director) / Hu, Leland (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2024-05