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Everything You Need to Know About Autism

Description

This research paper covers many topics related to autism, including causes, treatment, DSM changes, and more. It is a review of current literature and journals and aims to give the audience a better understanding of the disorders and to discuss the changes in diagnostic criteria and prevalence of ASD.

ContributorsPeters, Emily Morgan (Author) / Stenhoff, Donald (Thesis director) / Hahs, Adam (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

Adverse Side Effects of Pharmacological Agents for Pediatric Anxiety Disorders: A Critical Review

Description

Pediatric anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and while pharmacological intervention seems to be an effective treatment, the validity of reported adverse side effects remains unclear. Objective: To analyze the nature of evidence regarding adverse side effects in the pharmacological treatment of pediatric anxiety disorders. Approach: A search using Google Scholar,…

Pediatric anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and while pharmacological intervention seems to be an effective treatment, the validity of reported adverse side effects remains unclear. Objective: To analyze the nature of evidence regarding adverse side effects in the pharmacological treatment of pediatric anxiety disorders. Approach: A search using Google Scholar, PubMed, and PsychInfo was conducted for meta-analyses of pharmacological treatment of pediatric anxiety disorders as well as randomized controlled trials. The focus was on adverse events. Results and Conclusion: Reportings of a limited number of adverse events were found among resources available to clinician and patient informed sources to inform pharmacological treatment of pediatric anxiety disorders. Only a small fraction of adverse side effects were found in the research literature. This finding raises concerns about making informed decisions to treat pediatric anxiety disorders with pharmacotherapy.

ContributorsMartin, Mark (Co-author) / Reyes, Trevin (Co-author) / Whooley, Max (Co-author) / Pina, Armando (Thesis director) / Benoit, Renee (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

Unearth: Fostering Adolescent Immigrants Toward Belonging Through Self-Awareness, Multicultural Identification, and Journaling

Description

The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts…

The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts that are age-appropriate for adolescents and that serve as avenues for self-exploration. The project ultimately engages a focus group discussion to understand the usability and accessibility of the intervention.

ContributorsNawrocki, Andrea Elizabeth (Co-author) / Dizon, Arni (Co-author) / Pina, Armando (Thesis director) / Benoit, Renee (Committee member) / Causadias, Jose (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

Unearth: Fostering Adolescent Immigrants Toward Belonging Through Self-Awareness, Multicultural Identification, and Journaling

Description

The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts…

The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts that are age-appropriate for adolescents and that serve as avenues for self-exploration. The project ultimately engages a focus group discussion to understand the usability and accessibility of the intervention.

ContributorsDizon, Arni Elyz (Co-author) / Nawrocki, Andie (Co-author) / Pina, Armando (Thesis director) / Benoit, Renee (Committee member) / Causadias, Jose (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

Project Aquaphobia

Description

Reduce your fear of water with a virtual reality game!

ContributorsFeng, Kiera (Author) / Johnson-Glenberg, Mina (Thesis director) / Pina, Armando (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)

Created2023-05

Adaptive mHealth interventions for improving youth responsiveness and clinical outcomes

Description

Mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) hold tremendous potential for addressing chronic health conditions. Smartphones are now the most popular form of computing, and the ubiquitous “always with us, always on” nature of mobile technology makes them amenable to interventions aimed and managing chronic disease. Several challenges exist, however, such as…

Mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) hold tremendous potential for addressing chronic health conditions. Smartphones are now the most popular form of computing, and the ubiquitous “always with us, always on” nature of mobile technology makes them amenable to interventions aimed and managing chronic disease. Several challenges exist, however, such as the difficulty in determining mHealth effects due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the challenges presented to existing methods of evaluation, and the ability to ensure end users consistently use the technology in order to achieve the desired effects. The latter challenge is in adherence, defined as the extent to which a patient conducts the activities defined in a clinical protocol (i.e. an intervention plan). Further, higher levels of adherence should lead to greater effects of the intervention (the greater fidelity to the protocol, the more benefit one should receive from the protocol). mHealth has limitations in these areas; the ability to have patients sustainably adhere to a protocol, and the ability to drive intervention effect sizes. My research considers personalized interventions, a new approach of study in the mHealth community, as a potential remedy to these limitations. Specifically, in the context of a pediatric preventative anxiety protocol, I introduce algorithms to drive greater levels of adherence and greater effect sizes by incorporating per-patient (personalized) information. These algorithms have been implemented within an existing mHealth app for middle school that has been successfully deployed in a school in the Phoenix Arizona metropolitan area. The number of users is small (n=3) so a case-by-case analysis of app usage is presented. In addition simulated user behaviors based on models of adherence and effects sizes over time are presented as a means to demonstrate the potential impact of personalized deployments on a larger scale.

ContributorsSingal, Vishakha (Author) / Gary, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Pina, Armando (Committee member) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)

Created2019

Is the Click the Trick? The Efficacy of Clickers and Other Reinforcement Methods in Training Naïve Dogs to Perform New Tasks

Description

A handheld metal noisemaker known as a “clicker” is widely used to train new behaviors in dogs; however, evidence for the superior efficacy of clickers as opposed to providing solely primary reinforcement or other secondary reinforcers in the acquisition of novel behavior in dogs is almost entirely anecdotal. Three experiments…

A handheld metal noisemaker known as a “clicker” is widely used to train new behaviors in dogs; however, evidence for the superior efficacy of clickers as opposed to providing solely primary reinforcement or other secondary reinforcers in the acquisition of novel behavior in dogs is almost entirely anecdotal. Three experiments were conducted to determine under what circumstances a clicker may result in acquisition of a novel behavior more rapidly or to a higher level compared to other readily available reinforcement methods. In Experiment 1, three groups of 30 dogs each were trained to emit a novel sit and stay behavior of increasing duration with either the delivery of food alone, a verbal stimulus paired with food, or a clicker with food. The group that received only a primary reinforcer reached a significantly higher criterion of training success than the group trained with a verbal secondary reinforcer. Performance of the group experiencing a clicker secondary reinforcer was intermediate between the other two groups, but not significantly different from either. In Experiment 2, three different groups of 25 dogs each were shaped to emit a nose targeting behavior and then perform that behavior at increasing distances from the experimenter using the same three methods of positive reinforcement as in Experiment 1. No statistically significant differences between the groups were found. In Experiment 3, three groups of 30 dogs each were shaped to emit a nose-targeting behavior upon an array of wooden blocks with task difficulty increasing throughout testing using the same three methods of positive reinforcement as previously. No statistically significant differences between the groups were found. Overall, the findings suggest that both clickers and other forms of positive reinforcement can be used successfully in training a dog to perform a novel behavior, but that no positive reinforcement method has significantly greater efficacy than any other.

ContributorsGilchrist, Rachel (Author) / Wynne, Clive (Thesis advisor) / Hahs, Adam (Committee member) / Anderson, Samantha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)

Created2020

Does Non-Response Bias Compromise the External Validity of a Sample of College Students of Divorce?

Description

It is possible that voluntary studies on the effects of divorce fail to capture the perspectives of offspring who may be deterred from volunteering by their negative experiences of the divorce of their parents. This issue of non-response bias would cause researchers to gather unrepresentative samples that ultimately create an…

It is possible that voluntary studies on the effects of divorce fail to capture the perspectives of offspring who may be deterred from volunteering by their negative experiences of the divorce of their parents. This issue of non-response bias would cause researchers to gather unrepresentative samples that ultimately create an unrepresentative picture on the effects of divorce. The problem of non-response bias may also be a possible explanation for why research shows that small differences in psychological problems exist between children of divorce and children from intact families. This study sought to identify if non-response bias compromises the external validity of a sample of college students of divorce. To answer this question we conducted this study through the use of the introductory psychology pre screening study that is administered every semester to introductory psychology students at Arizona State University. We surveyed undergraduate introductory psychology students, all of whom completed a required prescreen survey for research credit. The students who indicated they were from divorced families, or whose parents were “never married and not still together”, were invited to participate in a follow up study to “to understand young adults’ perspectives on their parents’ divorce”. The students who responded to our invitation were compared to the students who did not volunteer in terms of their prescreen data. Volunteers did not differ from non-volunteers on seven out of the ten dependent measures. Volunteers differed from non-volunteers in terms of their closeness to their fathers, in terms of the parents conflict they experienced during the two years before and the two years after their parents permanently separated. Volunteers were more likely to be closer to their fathers and more likely to have experienced more parent conflict than non-volunteers. We are unaware of any studies on the subject of divorce that have had a similar opportunity to address the issue of non-response bias and its effects on the external validity of a college sample of divorce. This study should be replicated to determine the reliability of the results.

ContributorsRussell, Megan Magdalena (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Doane, Leah (Committee member) / Pina, Armando (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2020-05

Assessing social anxiety in African American and Caucasian children: : an initial examination

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…

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

Assessment of Anxiety Symptoms in School Children: A Cross-Sex and Ethnic Examination

Description

We evaluated the cross-sex and -ethnic (Hispanic/Latino, non-Hispanic White) measurement invariance of anxiety symptoms based on the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) as well as SCAS anxiety symptoms’ correspondence with scores on the 5-item Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) and teacher ratings of child anxiety. Based on…

We evaluated the cross-sex and -ethnic (Hispanic/Latino, non-Hispanic White) measurement invariance of anxiety symptoms based on the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) as well as SCAS anxiety symptoms’ correspondence with scores on the 5-item Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) and teacher ratings of child anxiety. Based on data corresponding to 702 children (M age = 9.65, SD = 0.70; 51.9 % girls; 55 % Hispanic/Latino), findings showed some sex and ethnic variations in SCAS measured anxiety at the item and scale levels. Moreover, SCAS correspondence to the 5-item SCARED was found across ethnicity and sex. SCAS correspondence to teacher ratings was found for non-Hispanic White boys and non-Hispanic White girls, marginally in Hispanic/Latino boys, and poorly in Hispanic/Latino girls.

ContributorsHolly, Lindsay (Author) / Little, Michelle (Author) / Pina, Armando (Author) / Caterino, Linda (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)

Created2015-02-01