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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- Creators: Essary, Alison
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
To address the need for a patient decision aid for refractive eye surgery, EyeChoose, a web-based tool, was developed. The tool provides patient education, assists in selection of a specific surgical modality, generates customized recommendations, and links patients to local surgeons, explicitly targeting the population of college students. I conducted a focus group interview for the needs assessment. I designed a scoring algorithm to provide a customized recommendation of surgical modalities based on a patient’s medical history and personal preferences. I completed a prototype implementation of the tool. Initial data from a validation study indicated that the system achieved 99.18% accuracy in its recommendation of a surgical modality. An evaluation of usefulness and usability, conducted via survey and focus group, also illustrated highly positive responses. Fourteen of sixteen statements in the survey received more than 80% of positive responses. I further examined the two statements that received less than 80% of positive responses to determine whether the responses varied by race, ethnicity, sex, and medical history. The focus group liked the application and found it useful for their needs. Their responses clarified features of the application that users liked/found beneficial and features that users did not like/did not find beneficial. These recommendations will be integrated into the tool as the next step. Future research is required to implement the tool in naturalistic settings and to examine the generalizability of the findings to other populations.
ContributorsSubbaraman, Bhavani (Author) / Wang, Dongwen (Thesis director) / Patel, Vimla (Committee member) / Essary, Alison (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor)
Created2022-05