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.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 80
Description
This study examined the role of substance use in the relationship between the working alliance and outcome symptomatology. In this study, two groups of participants were formed: the at risk for substance abuse (ARSA) group consisted of participants who indicated 'almost always,' 'frequently,' 'sometimes,' or 'rarely' on either of two items on the Outcome Questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2) (i.e., the eye-opener item: "After heavy drinking, I need a drink the next morning to get going" and the annoyed item: "I feel annoyed by people who criticize my drinking (or drug use)"). The non-ARSA group consisted of participants who indicated 'never' on both of the eye-opener and annoyed screening items on the OQ-45.2. Data available from a counselor-training center for a client participant sample (n = 68) was used. As part of the usual counselor training center procedures, clients completed questionnaires after their weekly counseling session. The measures included the Working Alliance Inventory and the OQ-45.2. Results revealed no significant differences between the ARSA and non-ARSA groups in working alliance, total outcome symptomology, or in any of the three subscales of symptomatology. Working alliance was not found to be significant in predicting outcome symptomatology in this sample and no moderation effect of substance use on the relationship between working alliance and outcome symptomatology was found. This study was a start into the exploration of the role of substance use in the relationship between working alliance and outcome symptomatology in individual psychotherapy. Further research should be conducted to better understand substance use populations in individual psychotherapy.
ContributorsHachiya, Laura Y (Author) / Bernstein, Bianca (Thesis advisor) / Tran, Giac-Thao (Committee member) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Previous research indicates that difficulties in emotion regulation and greater dissociation from one's emotions are often observed among trauma survivors. Further, trauma survivors often show greater negative emotions such as anger, and diminished positive emotions such as happiness. Relatively less is known about the relationship between posttraumatic stress symptoms, dissociation, emotion regulation difficulties, and non-trauma related emotional experiences in daily life. This study examined whether greater reports of posttraumatic stress symptoms, difficulties in emotion regulation, and dissociative tendencies were associated with greater intensity of anger and lower intensity of happiness during a relived emotions task (i.e., recalling and describing autobiographical memories evoking specific emotions). Participants were 50 individuals who had experienced a traumatic event and reported a range of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Participants rated how they felt while recalling specific emotional memories, as well as how they remembered feeling at the time of the event. Results showed that dissociative tendencies was the best predictor of greater intensity of anger and, contrary to the hypothesis, dissociative tendencies was predictive of greater happiness intensity as well. These findings are consistent with previous research indicating a paradoxical effect of heightened anger reactivity among individuals with dissociative tendencies. In addition, researchers have argued that individuals with a history of traumatization do not report lower positive emotional experiences. The present findings may suggest the use of dissociation as a mechanism to avoid certain trauma related emotions (e.g, fear and anxiety), in turn creating heightened experiences of other emotions such as anger and happiness.
ContributorsTorres, Dhannia L (Author) / Robinson Kurpius, Sharon (Thesis advisor) / Roberts, Nicole A. (Committee member) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study explored several training variables that may contribute to counseling trainees' multicultural counseling self-efficacy and multicultural case conceptualization ability. Specifically, this study aimed to examine the cognitive processes that contribute to multicultural counseling competence (MCC) outcome variables. Clinical experience, multicultural knowledge, and multicultural awareness are assumed to provide the foundation for the development of these outcome variables. The role of how a counselor trainee utilizes this knowledge and awareness in working with diverse populations has not been explored. Diversity cognitive complexity (DCC) quantifies the process by which a counselor thinks about different elements of diversity in a multidimensional manner. The current study examined the role of DCC on the relationship between training variables of direct clinical experience with diverse populations, multicultural knowledge, and multicultural awareness and the two training outcomes (multicultural counseling self-efficacy and multicultural case conceptualization ability). A total of one hundred and sixty-one graduate trainees participated in the study. A series of hypotheses were tested to examine the impact of DCC on the relationship between MCC predictors (multicultural knowledge, multicultural awareness, and direct contact hours with diverse clinical populations) and two MCC outcomes: multicultural counseling self-efficacy and multicultural case conceptualization ability. Hierarchical regression analyses were utilized to test whether DCC mediated or moderated the relationship between the predictors and the outcome variables. Multicultural knowledge and clinical hours with diverse populations were significant predictors of multicultural counseling self-efficacy. Multicultural awareness was a significant predictor of multicultural case conceptualization ability. Diversity cognitive complexity was not a significantly related to any predictor or outcome variable, thus all hypotheses tested were rejected. The results of the current study support graduate programs emphasizing counselor trainees gaining multicultural knowledge and awareness as well as direct clinical experience with diverse clinical populations in an effort to foster MCC. Although diversity cognitive complexity was not significantly related to the predictor or outcome variables in this study, further research is warranted to determine the validity of the measure used to assess DCC. The findings in this study support the need for further research exploring training variables that contribute to multicultural counseling outcomes.
ContributorsRigali-Oiler, Marybeth (Author) / Robinson Kurpius, Sharon E (Thesis advisor) / Arciniega, Guillermo M (Committee member) / Nakagawa, Kathryn (Committee member) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study examined the relationship that gender in interaction with interpersonal problem type has with outcome in psychotherapy. A sample of 200 individuals, who sought psychotherapy at a counselor training facility, completed the Outcome Questionnaire-45(OQ-45) and the reduced version of the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-32). This study was aimed at examining whether gender (male and female), was related to treatment outcome, and whether this relationship was moderated by two interpersonal distress dimensions: dominance and affiliation. A hierarchical regression analyses was performed and indicated that gender did not predict psychotherapy treatment outcome, and neither dominance nor affiliation were moderators of the relationship between gender and outcome in psychotherapy.
ContributorsHoffmann, Nicole (Author) / Tracey, Terence (Thesis advisor) / Kinnier, Richard (Committee member) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
School bullying is a serious problem for children and adolescents, associated with a multitude of psychological and behavioral problems. Interventions at the individual level have primarily been social skills training for victims of bullying. However, investigators have had mixed results; finding little change in victimization rates. It has been suggested victims of school bullying have the social skills necessary to be effective in a bullying situation; however they experience intense emotional arousal and negative thoughts leading to an inability to use social skills. One intervention that has been getting increasing acknowledgement for its utility in the intervention literature in psychology is mindfulness. However, there has been no research conducted examining the effects of mindfulness meditation on victims of bullying. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop an online intervention for victims of bullying that utilizes the cutting-edge technique of mindfulness and to determine the efficacy of this intervention in the context of bullying victimization. Participants were 32 adolescents ages 11 to 14 identified by their school facilitators as victims of bullying. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to assess the efficacy of the NMT program versus a treatment as usual (TAU) social skills program. Results revealed significant decreases in victimization and increases in mindfulness among both treatment groups from pre-test to follow-up and post-test to follow-up assessments. There were no differences found between the two treatment groups for mean victimization or mindfulness scores. Overall, the NMT program appears to be a promising online intervention for bullied teens. Directions for future research and limitations of this study were also discussed.
ContributorsYabko, Brandon (Author) / Tracey, Terence J. G. (Thesis advisor) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Sebren, Ann (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Believe It! is an animated interactive computer program that delivers cognitive restructuring to adolescent females' irrational career beliefs. It challenges the irrational belief and offers more reasonable alternatives. The current study investigated the potentially differential effects of Asian versus Caucasian animated agents in delivering the treatment to young Chinese American women. The results suggested that the Asian animated agent was not significantly superior to the Caucasian animated agent. Nor was there a significant interaction between level of acculturation and the effects of the animated agents. Ways to modify the Believe It! program for Chinese American users were recommended.
ContributorsZhang, Xue (Author) / Horan, John J (Thesis advisor) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling language in order to enhance expressivity, such as incorporating aggregates and interfaces with ontologies. Also, in order to overcome the grounding bottleneck of computation in ASP, there are increasing interests in integrating ASP with other computing paradigms, such as Constraint Programming (CP) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Due to the non-monotonic nature of the ASP semantics, such enhancements turned out to be non-trivial and the existing extensions are not fully satisfactory. We observe that one main reason for the difficulties rooted in the propositional semantics of ASP, which is limited in handling first-order constructs (such as aggregates and ontologies) and functions (such as constraint variables in CP and SMT) in natural ways. This dissertation presents a unifying view on these extensions by viewing them as instances of formulas with generalized quantifiers and intensional functions. We extend the first-order stable model semantics by by Ferraris, Lee, and Lifschitz to allow generalized quantifiers, which cover aggregate, DL-atoms, constraints and SMT theory atoms as special cases. Using this unifying framework, we study and relate different extensions of ASP. We also present a tight integration of ASP with SMT, based on which we enhance action language C+ to handle reasoning about continuous changes. Our framework yields a systematic approach to study and extend non-monotonic languages.
ContributorsMeng, Yunsong (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Generativity was first described by Erikson (1963) as an adult's concern for and commitment to promoting the welfare and development of future generations. Generativity is juxtaposed by stagnation in Erikson's stage of midlife (35-65 years old). The developmental hurdle faced at this point in the developmental cycle is whether a person will produce something of real value, both in the present and impacting future generations. Generative adults seek to give something back to society, generally behaving in a way to make the world a better place for others with no personal gain attached. The goal of the current study was to assess differences in levels of generativity at the final stage of adult life, and the potential functions that generativity can serve individuals. Results suggest that lowly generative individuals in older adult life tend to experience doubts about the impact they have had on the world and the lack of legacy they are leaving behind. Themes of highly generative participants included having felt they lived a purposeful and meaningful life, along with feeling fortunate and lucky in their lives. Also highly generative participants seemed to feel confident in the legacy they will leave behind after death. Results are discussed in light of the theories and findings of Erikson and McAdams.
ContributorsHauser, David (Author) / Kinnier, Richard T. (Thesis advisor) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Arciniega, Guillermo M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) mechanisms have been attracting a lot of interest from the research community in recent times. This is especially because of the flexibility and extensibility it provides by using attributes assigned to subjects as the basis for access control. ABAC enables an administrator of a server to enforce access policies on the data, services and other such resources fairly easily. It also accommodates new policies and changes to existing policies gracefully, thereby making it a potentially good mechanism for implementing access control in large systems, particularly in today's age of Cloud Computing. However management of the attributes in ABAC environment is an area that has been little touched upon. Having a mechanism to allow multiple ABAC based systems to share data and resources can go a long way in making ABAC scalable. At the same time each system should be able to specify their own attribute sets independently. In the research presented in this document a new mechanism is proposed that would enable users to share resources and data in a cloud environment using ABAC techniques in a distributed manner. The focus is mainly on decentralizing the access policy specifications for the shared data so that each data owner can specify the access policy independent of others. The concept of ontologies and semantic web is introduced in the ABAC paradigm that would help in giving a scalable structure to the attributes and also allow systems having different sets of attributes to communicate and share resources.
ContributorsPrabhu Verleker, Ashwin Narayan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis addresses the ever increasing threat of botnets in the smartphone domain and focuses on the Android platform and the botnets using Online Social Networks (OSNs) as Command and Control (C&C;) medium. With any botnet, C&C; is one of the components on which the survival of botnet depends. Individual bots use the C&C; channel to receive commands and send the data. This thesis develops active host based approach for identifying the presence of bot based on the anomalies in the usage patterns of the user before and after the bot is installed on the user smartphone and alerting the user to the presence of the bot. A profile is constructed for each user based on the regular web usage patterns (achieved by intercepting the http(s) traffic) and implementing machine learning techniques to continuously learn the user's behavior and changes in the behavior and all the while looking for any anomalies in the user behavior above a threshold which will cause the user to be notified of the anomalous traffic. A prototype bot which uses OSN s as C&C; channel is constructed and used for testing. Users are given smartphones(Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus) running Application proxy which intercepts http(s) traffic and relay it to a server which uses the traffic and constructs the model for a particular user and look for any signs of anomalies. This approach lays the groundwork for the future host-based counter measures for smartphone botnets using OSN s as C&C; channel.
ContributorsKilari, Vishnu Teja (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013