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Psychological therapy is the process of understanding, treating, and maintaining a healthy psyche. Psychological therapy comes in many shapes and sizes. Different methods of therapy include but are not limited to cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, group therapy, and humanistic therapy. Most of these major therapeutic options fall under the umbrella of “talk therapy”. Although talk therapy is effective, practicing talk therapy exclusively limits not only the capabilities of therapy, but also potential clientele who would benefit from alternatives to talk therapy. Because each psyche is as unique and individual as fingerprints, each person seeking therapy should be able to create a personalized therapy program. Generating unique combinations of various therapy methods that are catered specifically to the client is a way to achieve this lofty goal. This research intends to better understand whether this proposal of combining various therapeutic techniques and methods in order to achieve individualized therapy programs will increase the effectiveness of the therapy being administered. In this meta analysis, the focus will be on animal therapy and poetry therapy used in conjunction theoretically as an example of potential applications for various combinations in conjunctive therapy. Conjunctive therapy is the main idea being piloted in this thesis and is a new form of therapy that involved the usage of two therapeutic techniques together while maintaining and equal prevalence and importance between them.
In this study I present and analyze the cases of nine participants who attended an after-school care program at a homeless shelter for families in the southwestern United States. Participants were 8 to 12 years old and represented diverse ethnicities and genders. Data were gathered over a period of two to eight months, depending on participant, via interviews, music and art making, and observations. Research questions in this study included: What are the relationships, as experienced in, through, and around music, in the lives of children experiencing homelessness; and, What do music experiences tell us about the lives of children experiencing homelessness?
Some children experienced fractured music relationships and could not continue to engage with music in comparison to their lives before homelessness. Some children continued to make music regularly before and during their shelter stay. A few children discovered new connections through music interactions at the shelter and hoped to engage with music in new ways in their new homes. Multiple children faced barriers to music making in their respective school music programs. Children preferred to engage in music consistent with current popular culture, accessed through the radio, smart phone, and computer. Use of hands-on activities that fostered active engagement engendered the most participation and connection to music.
Recommendations include examination of current procedures and practices to ensure alignment with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Act federal mandate, development of a supportive environment to foster social and emotional growth, facilitating communication with parents, and the inclusion of music from the child’s background in the classroom repertoire. Performance and interactive music opportunities can mitigate the effects of homelessness and restore a sense of dignity, relationship, and autonomy. All stakeholders in the wellbeing of children should include conversations about student experience of homelessness in current dialogue on educational policy and practice.
Social curiosity, a desire to learn about others, may play an important role in socio-cognitive development in early childhood. However, we poorly understand whether and how social curiosity is elicited. In this study, we examined the malleability of social curiosity in young children by developing a “Social Uncertainty Paradigm.” Children aged 5 to 8 (30 collected, target N = 105) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Social Curiosity (SC), General Curiosity (GC), or No Curiosity (NC)) and introduced two learning objectives: the new person (Sam) and new object (Apple House). Participants had 10 chances to gather information about either Sam and the Apple House. In SC, participants obtained 4 times more facts about Sam than the Apple House. The reverse was true for GC. To maximize uncertainty (a lack of information), the experimenter remarked about the difference in the amount of information they gathered. In NC, participants obtained the same amount of facts about Sam the Apple House. Next, participants’ social curiosity were measured with two tasks: Choice Task measuring their preference for learning between Sam and the Apple House and Rating Task measuring the degree to which they want to learn more about both Sam and the Apple House (5-point Likert scale). Preliminary results suggest that creating uncertainty in social information elicits social curiosity and is associated with more active information seeking behaviors to fill the knowledge gap. The current study will provide practical information that could be used for creating social curiosity-promoting environments.
Through a research essay, I broke down the psychological reactions viewers experience in the horror genre through a Freudian framework. Utilizing this research, I wrote the first act of a screenplay and a summary of the remaining acts.