Matching Items (21)
Description
A theme in the life experiences of ethnic minority adolescents is the perception of discrimination and its concomitant challenges. Although existing literature has examined the perception of discrimination in adolescents, little research has examined how the cultural and familial setting may heighten or alleviate the impact of perceived discrimination on psychological outcomes in Latino youth. The current study investigated how traditional cultural values and parent-adolescent relationships prospectively interact with perceptions of group based discrimination to influence Latino adolescent mental health, adjustment, and risky behaviors. Data used from the Parents and Youth Study included 194 Mexican American (MA) adolescents. Adolescents reported on their perceptions of group discrimination, endorsement of traditional Mexican cultural values, and parent-child relationships in the 7th grade (Time 1). The study also used indices of externalizing (mother report), internalizing, substance use and risky sexual behavior (adolescent report) in 10th grade (Time 2). The findings demonstrated that traditional Mexican cultural values, particularly familism, moderated the relationship between perceived group discrimination and adolescent sexual behavior. Additionally, a better overall relationship with mother and father buffered the detrimental effects of perceived group discrimination on risky sexual behavior. The current work discusses future directions of how the context of culture and family may shape an adolescent's response to perceived discrimination and the well-being of minorities.
ContributorsDiaz, Priscila (Author) / Saenz, Delia S. (Thesis advisor) / Kwan, Virginia S.Y. (Committee member) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / Geiser, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The purpose of this thesis study was to evaluate the nature of social anxiety in clinic-referred African American children versus their Caucasian counterparts. In particular, social anxiety symptom endorsement along the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory Scale for Children (SPAI-C; Beidel, Turner, & Morris, 1995) was examined in a sample of 107 African American and 364 Caucasian children (ages 7- to 17-years old) referred for anxiety. To evaluate symptom endorsement, simple descriptive analyses were conducted whereas measurement invariance tests were examined using confirmatory factor analyses. For the most commonly endorsed items, African American and Caucasian children shared seven of the top 10 most commonly identified social anxiety symptoms. Similar social fears across ethnicity focused on "assertiveness in situations perceived to be difficult" and ""speaking to large groups of peers they do not know." Findings also showed that African American children were more likely to report symptoms of "shaking when in social situations" than Caucasian children, and Caucasian children were more likely to report symptoms of "embarrassment when in front of adults" compared to African American children, but this was also on the basis of two items. When it came to the five factors of the SPAI-C, results showed measurement invariance across African American and Caucasian children. Overall, there were more similarities than differences between African American and Caucasian children in social anxiety symptoms based on the SPAI-C. Findings from this thesis study shed light on how to best accurately identify social anxiety among African American children compared to Caucasians, a contribution that can potentially impact assessment, treatment planning, and program response evaluation.
ContributorsWynne, Henry (Author) / Pina, Armando (Thesis advisor) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / Millsap, Roger (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Family plays an important yet understudied role in the development of psychopathology during childhood, particularly for children at developmental risk. Indeed, much of the research on families has actually concentrated more on risk processes in individual family members or within-family subsystems. In general, important and complex associations have been found among family-related constructs such as marital conflict, parent-child relationships, parental depression, and parenting stress, which have in turn been found to contribute to the emergence of children's behavioral problems. Research has begun to emerge that certain family system constructs, such as cohesion, organization, and control may influence children's development, but this research has been limited by a focus on parent-reports of family functioning, rather than utilizing observational methods. With notable exceptions, there is almost no observational research examining families of children at developmental risk. This study examined the longitudinal relations among family risk and family system constructs, as well as how family systems constructs mediated the relations between family risk and child outcome. Further, the study examined how developmental risk moderated these relations. The sample followed 242 families of children with and without developmental risk across the transition-to-school period. Family risk factors were assessed at 5 years, using parental reports of symptomatology, parenting stress, and marital adjustment, and observational assessments of the parent-child relationship. Family system constructs (cohesion, warmth, conflict, organization, control) were measured at age 6 using structured observations of the entire family playing a board game. Child behavior problems and social competence were assessed at age 7. Results indicated that families of children with developmental delays did not differ from families of typically developing children on the majority of family system attributes. Cohesion and organization mediated the relations between specific family risk factors and social competence for all families. For families of typically developing children only, higher levels of control were associated with more behavior problems and less social competence. These findings underscore the importance of family-level assessment in understanding the development of psychopathology. Important family effects on children's social competence were found, although the pathways among family risk and family systems attributes are complex.
ContributorsGerstein, Emily Davis (Author) / Crnic, Keith A (Thesis advisor) / Aiken, Leona (Committee member) / Bradley, Robert (Committee member) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Although discrimination is implicated in ethnic health disparities, social support may buffer against its negative effects on health. This study investigated whether prenatal maternal discrimination and social support would predict postpartum cortisol in low-income Hispanic women and infants. Among infants whose mothers reported high discrimination, low maternal social support was associated with high infant cortisol (ß= -0.293, p= 0.03). This provides evidence for the social buffering hypothesis.
ContributorsJewell, Shannon Linda (Author) / Luecken, Linda (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Family influences are known predictors of adolescent health and well-being trajectories, yet little research has investigated how adolescents’ orientation to family may be associated with their physiological stress responses. Influenced by the strength-based approach to culture, this study evaluated 418 Hispanic adolescents' familism values and perceived life stress in family, school, and peer domains to investigate prospective associations with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress responses to the Group Public Speaking Task for Adolescents (GPST-A). Prior growth-mixture modeling on this sample revealed a five-class solution of cortisol responding to the GPST-A that was used here as the dependent variable: one class showed a more pronounced pattern of reactivity, potentially indicative of hyper-responsivity to the stress task; two classes showed evidence of a low to moderate cortisol response, potentially indicative of an adaptive physiological response to the challenge; and two classes showed patterns of non-responsivity, potentially indicative of hypo-responsivity. Results demonstrate that the role of familism is nuanced in the context of stressors, potentially offering both promotive and risk-amplifying effects for the physiological stress response system. This study offered several novel findings in the relation between cultural factors, salient stressors of adolescence, and HPA activity.
ContributorsSmola, Xochitl Arlene (Author) / Gonzales, Nancy (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Doane, Leah (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
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
Implementation challenges associated with low community effectiveness rates include low levels of client responsiveness to the intervention, less than ideal intervention fidelity, and low levels of provider quality of intervention delivery. The literature is mixed on how group leader fidelity/quality of delivery are associated with client responsiveness, and research on adolescents and ethnoracially diverse clients is particularly lacking. The current study examined group leader fidelity and quality of delivery as predictors of adolescent in-session group responsiveness to the first session of the Bridges intervention which is a universal, family-based, substance use prevention program delivered in Title I middle schools. Participants consisted of 325 adolescents across 30 intervention groups. Three separate observational coding teams coded group leader fidelity, group leader quality of delivery, and adolescent in-session group responsiveness to the program. Overall percentage of fidelity met was calculated. Next, two confirmatory factor analysis models were conducted on the responsiveness and quality of delivery data of session 1, and factor scores were extracted. Hierarchical linear regression was then conducted to predict adolescent responsiveness with group leader fidelity in step 1 and group leader quality of delivery in step 2. There were no significant associations between predictor variables and adolescent in-session group responsiveness. Findings suggest that group leader implementation constructs do not appear to account for a significant amount of the variance in adolescent group responsiveness during the first session. Future research should examine other variables that are relevant in influencing adolescent program engagement with larger sample sizes.
ContributorsKuckertz, Mary J (Author) / Gonzales, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Mauricio, Anne (Committee member) / Anderson, Samantha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This study aimed to utilize multiple informant reports to examine whether effortful control (EC) varies across the home and school context among ethnically diverse adolescents attending middle schools in low-income communities and how patterns of variation across context are differentiated by measures of academic functioning and risky behavior. 763 adolescents (50.2% male; Mage = 12 years), their primary caregivers, and two teachers completed measures of adolescents’ EC. Adolescents reported on aspects of academic functioning and risky behavior. Archival data on grade point average (GPA) were collected from schools and adolescents completed the Go/No-Go computer task. Latent profile analysis revealed three reporting patterns: Equal at Home and School (EHS; 43%), Higher at Home and Lower at School (HHLS; 35%), and Lower at Home and Higher at School (LHHS; 22%). Relative to EHS adolescents, HHLS adolescents were less likely to have greater levels of self-reported EC and LHHS adolescents were more likely to have greater self-reported levels of EC. Regarding academic functioning, compared to the EHS adolescents, HHLS adolescents were less likely to have a higher and LHHS adolescents were more likely to have a higher accuracy rate on the Go/No-Go task and have a higher GPA. Compared to HHLS adolescents, LHHS adolescents were more likely to have a higher accuracy rate and a higher GPA. Further, compared to EHS adolescents, HHLS adolescents were more likely to have higher levels of externalizing behavior and the LHHS adolescents were less likely to have higher levels of externalizing behavior. Compared to HHLS adolescents, LHHS adolescents were less likely to have higher levels of externalizing behavior. This study highlights the importance of considering context in the study of EC and the potential use of multiple informants to identify meaningful variation across contexts. In addition, findings from this study can help inform decision-making in prevention and intervention efforts in support of academic outcomes for marginalized youth.
ContributorsPerez, Vanesa Marie (Author) / Gonzales, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Tein, Jenn-Yun (Committee member) / Lemery-Chalfant, Kathryn (Committee member) / De Los Reyes, Andres (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Dual language use is thought to afford certain cognitive advantages to bilingual children and may function as an additional resource to help low-income Mexican-American children achieve academically. Emotion regulation and executive functioning (e.g., inhibition) have been found to be particularly important in studies investigating pathways to early academic achievement. Understanding how we can capitalize on children’s bilingual abilities to strengthen their executive functioning and emotion regulation, or to offset problems in these domains, may be important to promote better educational outcomes and inform policy. Thus, the current study investigated the relation between emerging bilingualism, inhibition, emotion regulation, and academic achievement across early childhood in sample of 322 low-income, Mexican-American children. Data were collected in a laboratory space at child ages 36-, 54-, and 72-months. Bilingualism was indexed as the interaction of Spanish and English vocabulary, and a mediated moderation model was examined. Results provided further evidence that inhibition positively predicts academic achievement during early childhood. Greater Spanish language vocabulary indirectly predicted academic achievement while controlling for English language vocabulary, suggesting that children from immigrant families may benefit from maintaining their Spanish language abilities as they begin to immerse themselves in an English-speaking classroom. Advancing our understanding of the development of self-regulatory abilities within bilingual, immigrant populations could have significant implications for educational policy.
ContributorsWinstone, Laura K (Author) / Crnic, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / Benitez, Viridiana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
There is a need to reinvent evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for pediatric anxiety problems to better address the demands of real-word service delivery settings and achieve public health impact. The time- and resource-intensive nature of most EBIs for youth anxiety has frequently been noted as a barrier to the utilization of EBIs in community settings, leading to increased attention towards exploring the viability of briefer, more accessible protocols. Principally, this research reports between-group effect sizes from brief-interventions targeting pediatric anxiety and classifies each as well-established, probably efficacious, possibly efficacious, experimental, or questionable. brief interventions yielded an overall mean effect size of 0.19 on pediatric anxiety outcomes from pre to post. Effect sizes varied significantly by level of intervention: Pre to post-intervention effects were strongest for brief-treatments (0.35), followed by brief-targeted prevention (0.22), and weakest for brief-universal prevention (0.09). No participant or other intervention characteristic emerged as significant moderators of effect sizes. In terms of standard of evidence, one brief intervention is well-established, and five are probably efficacious, with most drawing on cognitive and behavioral change procedures and/or family systems models. At this juncture, the minimal intervention needed for clinical change in pediatric anxiety points to in-vivo exposures for specific phobias (~3 hours), cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) with social skills training (~3 hours), and CBT based parent training (~6 hours, eight digital modules with clinician support). This research concludes with a discussion on limitations to available brief EBIs, practice guidelines, and future research needed to capitalize on the viability of briefer protocols in enhancing access to, and impact of, evidence-based care in the real-world.
ContributorsStoll, Ryan (Author) / Pina, Armando A. (Thesis advisor) / Gonzales, Nancy (Committee member) / MacKinnon, David (Committee member) / Perez, Marisol (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019