18525 research outputs found
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What in the World is Wrong With You? Rethinking Depression and Suicide Among 18-25-year-old SailorsR SPIRITUAL HEALTH
No full textDivinity School Doctor of Ministry in Integrative Chaplaincy Final ProjectsIn 2021, Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, U.S. Public Health Service Surgeon General, published a health advisory calling attention to the urgent public health crisis of degraded mental health among youth. The U.S. Navy is seeing this unprecedented challenge in increased depression and suicide among 18-25-year-old Sailors. This paper looks at the problem of increased depression and suicide-related behavior among 18–25-year-old Sailors, known as Generation Z. It explores the problem and identifies several key demographic and societal factors. It offers a spiritual and pastoral analysis of key drivers of depression and suicide among Generation Z. Finally, it recommends a care response model that integrates spiritual and evidence-based practices to support the recovery of one's divine narrative and spiritual health. This paper argues that spiritual connection with God is the foundation for human flourishing, and an integrated approach to care is the best model to help develop that connection
Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning
No full textGraph-structured data is ubiquitous in real-world applications (e.g., social networks, infrastructure, biomedical) and Graph Machine Learning (GML) has become a prominent method for handling such data. However, despite GML’s remarkable achievements, its reliance on node features makes it susceptible to conventional data quality issues, and the additional consideration of graph topology adds novel complexity. Inspired by these challenges, my research in this dissertation focuses on data-quality-aware graph machine learning, systematically examining issues related to topology, imbalance, bias, and limited data issues in graph data. This includes proposing data/model-centric solutions to handle them and applying my proposed data issue solutions for real-world applications, such as de-noising unrelated interactions in personalization learning for recommender systems, overcoming the inherent class-imbalance issue in computer-aided drug discovery, mitigating hallucination bias in multi-document question answering, and boosting limited training data for graph generations. Lastly, to further advance the field of data quality-aware GML, I have outlined multiple future directions to make data quality-aware GML more inclusive, intelligent, and trustworthy
The Use of Spirituality in Fostering Resilience Among Young Adults at Harding University
No full textDivinity School Doctor of Ministry in Integrative Chaplaincy Final ProjectsThis project explores the use of spirituality in fostering resilience among Generation Z college students. Eighteen to twenty-nine -year-old brains, are more suspectable to mental illness and increased use of negative coping mechanisms. The use of spirituality as a positive coping mechanism can increase resilience and promote better mental health outcomes in young adult populations. The project begins with a social analysis of Generation Z and their current mental health trends. The focus is narrowed to Generation Z students attending Harding University, a conservative Christian school in Searcy, Arkansas. The project explores spirituality as distinct from religion, provides a biblical exegesis on suffering, trauma, stress, and offers a framework for the use spirituality as a tool to foster resilience. For strategic implementation, the author suggests the appointment of a university chaplain, integrative group therapy sessions, and integrative seminars be offered to Generation Z students on the campus of Harding Universit
Safety, Sense of Belonging, and Organizational Culture experienced by Black Male Leaders at Education Nonprofits
No full textThis mixed-methods study aims to investigate the experiences of Black Male senior leaders at educational nonprofits, focusing on safety, sense of belonging, and organizational culture. This quality improvement project is conducted under the auspices of the National Association for African Americans in Human Resources (NAAAHR). Conducted by Kevin Beckford and Aaron Massey (Vanderbilt, Ed.D), this improvement project draws from the perspectives provided by 73 Black male senior leaders via survey, 20 in-depth interviews with Black male senior leaders of education nonprofits, and 5 in-depth interviews with Expert practitioners who support Black male senior leaders. This study aims to provide insight into the following question: How are safety, sense of belonging, and organizational culture experienced by Black male senior leaders in educational nonprofits? Subsequent questions of interest include the following:This mixed-methods study aims to investigate the experiences of Black Male senior leaders at educational nonprofits, focusing on safety, sense of belonging, and organizational culture. This quality improvement project is conducted under the auspices of the National Association for African Americans in Human Resources (NAAAHR). Conducted by Kevin Beckford and Aaron Massey (Vanderbilt, Ed.D), this improvement project draws from the perspectives provided by 73 Black male senior leaders via survey, 20 in-depth interviews with Black male senior leaders of education nonprofits, and 5 in-depth interviews with Expert practitioners who support Black male senior leaders. This study aims to provide insight into the following question: How are safety, sense of belonging, and organizational culture experienced by Black male senior leaders in educational nonprofits? Subsequent questions of interest include the following:
1. What supports, resources, and strategies do Black male senior leaders utilize around safety, sense of belonging, and effectiveness while serving in leadership at an education nonprofit?
2. How do Black male senior leaders understand and experience institutions and systems in the education nonprofit space?
3. How can Human Resource professionals and individuals serving in a leadership support capacity (e.g. Chiefs of Staff) support African American males leading education nonprofits?
The study focuses on Black men who are currently (or have previously) served in leadership roles, specifically as CEOs, Executive Directors, Executive Partners, and/ or Co-Founders of educational nonprofit organizations.Peabody College of Education and Human DevelopmentDepartment of Leadership Policy and Organization
The First Year is the Steepest: An Exploration of Variables Affecting Teacher Retention in an Urban Teacher Preparation Program
No full textLeadership and Learning in Organizations capstone projectWe partnered with a teacher preparation program (TPP) whose program model begins with a one-year teacher residency. Unfortunately, since 2020, nearly 24% of TPP educators have failed to complete their residency year. We sought to identify the most salient factors within TPP’s program that contribute to resident retention, identify factors that are disproportionately relevant to Black educators, and develop suggestions related to how the TPP residency year can be reimagined to improve resident retention without compromising program rigor. We utilized Ryan and Deci’s Self Determination Theory as a conceptual framework to guide our work and collected data by: exploring TPP’s business intelligence dashboards, surveying current TPP educators, interviewing TPP staff, and interviewing TPP educators who recently completed their residency year.
We found that TPP educators who have developed strong intrinsic motivation, whose basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and connection) are met, and who see themselves operating in alignment with TPP’s mission are more likely to persevere in the program. We further found that the recent and disproportionate trend, where Black TPP educators have lower retention, is driven primarily by a higher dismissal rate amongst Black educators. When only considering voluntary resignation, we found that the ability to bring your authentic self to the workplace is particularly important to Black TPP educators. We offered TPP ten recommendations pertaining to its organization structure, program administration, resident experience, and future evaluation initiatives
Investigating the Relationship Between Childhood Depressive Symptoms and Prosocial Behavior with Guilt and Anhedonia as Moderating Factors
No full textProsocial behavior is defined as any voluntary social behavior performed to benefit
others. While many studies have found that prosocial behavior protects against depressive
symptoms and negative emotions, few have examined what variables may moderate the
relationship between depressive symptoms and prosocial behavior. Guilt and anhedonia, two
symptoms common in depressive disorders, may be especially relevant to prosocial behaviors,
with guilt possibly leading to greater prosocial behaviors and anhedonia leading to less prosocial
behaviors. However, the moderating effects of guilt and anhedonia have not yet been tested. The
purpose of the current study is to investigate the relationship between childhood depressive
symptoms and prosocial behavior, while examining guilt and anhedonia as moderating factors.
We hypothesize that that greater levels of anhedonia will be associated with less prosocial
behavior and greater symptoms of guilt will predict greater prosocial behavior in the relationship
between depression and prosocial behavior. Using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development
(ABCD) Study dataset of over 11,000 children, we analyzed these factors and found that
anhedonia moderates the relationship between depression and prosocial behavior while guilt
does not. Specifically, lower levels of anhedonia showed a more pronounced decline in
prosociality as depression increased. These results have major implications for recognizing and
treating childhood depressive symptomatology and disorders. PI: Dr. Antonia Kaczkurkin, PSY 4999Prosocial behavior is defined as any voluntary social behavior performed to benefit
others. While many studies have found that prosocial behavior protects against depressive
symptoms and negative emotions, few have examined what variables may moderate the
relationship between depressive symptoms and prosocial behavior. Guilt and anhedonia, two
symptoms common in depressive disorders, may be especially relevant to prosocial behaviors,
with guilt possibly leading to greater prosocial behaviors and anhedonia leading to less prosocial
behaviors. However, the moderating effects of guilt and anhedonia have not yet been tested. The
purpose of the current study is to investigate the relationship between childhood depressive
symptoms and prosocial behavior, while examining guilt and anhedonia as moderating factors.
We hypothesize that that greater levels of anhedonia will be associated with less prosocial
behavior and greater symptoms of guilt will predict greater prosocial behavior in the relationship
between depression and prosocial behavior. Using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development
(ABCD) Study dataset of over 11,000 children, we analyzed these factors and found that
anhedonia moderates the relationship between depression and prosocial behavior while guilt
does not. Specifically, lower levels of anhedonia showed a more pronounced decline in
prosociality as depression increased. These results have major implications for recognizing and
treating childhood depressive symptomatology and disorders. PI: Dr. Antonia Kaczkurkin, PSY 4999Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological Science
The Genetic Architecture of Diabetic Retinopathy
No full textThe goal of this dissertation was to utilize techniques to understand the genetic architecture of diabetic retinopathy with three aims: 1) develop a phenotyping algorithm to identify diabetic retinopathy cases in electronic health records (EHR), 2) examine the associations between genetic variants and diabetic retinopathy, and 3) validate results from genetic predictors of diabetic retinopathy. By developing algorithms to identify individuals with diabetes, with and without diabetic retinopathy, we show the potential of leveraging existing EHR systems to advance our understanding of etiology of diabetic retinopathy. We demonstrate the EHR-based algorithms to be portable and accurate across separate EHR systems and this represents a vast improvement over existing high-throughput method such as PheWAS. We used summary statistics from a previous GWAS along with results from the MVP, BioVU, UKBB, and the MGBB to evaluate genetic associations with diabetic retinopathy. We identified nine novel loci, localizing to MFSD4A, TENM2, GRHL2, TCF7L2, FBXW8, COL4A2, SLC16A3, TMPRSS6, and G6PD, that either increase or decrease risk for diabetic retinopathy. Additionally, there was a high genetic correlation between African- and European-ancestry meta-analyses, even though some loci only appeared in a single ancestry. Validation of our findings raise several practical and clinical implications for management of diabetes. Given the common occurrence of G6PD deficiency and its impact on diabetic complications, screening African Americans with diabetes for this deficiency may be of high priority. If screening African Americans for this variant is cost-prohibitive, then concurrently checking blood glucose levels along with HbA1c could be another strategy. Our estimates suggest that with comprehensive genetic screening of African Americans and subsequent standard-of-care treatment, possibly aimed at glucose rather than HbA1c targets, ~12% of diabetic retinopathy cases could be avoided in U.S. African Americans alone. Based on the evidence from this study, we suggest that implementation of this screening would mitigate disparity of prevalence and severity for other diabetes sequelae among African American
Changes in Child Engagement as Parent-Child Dyads Participate in Parent Mediated Music Intervention
No full textPSY-PC 4999-01 Honors Thesis
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Miriam Lense PhDNaturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs) are a promising intervention to support social behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Schreibman et al., 2015). NDBIs can be administered as parent-mediated NDBIs, incorporating the parent into the therapy. Music can also be included because of characteristics such as its predictable nature, to possibly support social interactions among autistic children. Parent-mediated music NDBIs combine NDBI strategies, parent-coaching, and music, but there is a lack of research on this novel intervention (Liu et al., 2021; Nevill et al., 2018). Through this single-case design study, we investigate the impact of Parent-Mediated Music Intervention (PMMI) on four young autistic children by observing changes in the children’s engagement states before and after a 12-week intervention. Parents were informed to record 10 minutes of a play session with their child in a setting and with toys that represent a typical play session. The 10 minute free-play sessions were split into 5 second intervals. Each interval was coded using an engagement scheme adapted from Adamson et al. (2004), Bottema-Beutel et al. (2014), and Ingersoll et al., (2017). Visual analysis, the primary method of this study, found that three out of four children increased in their social engagement and decreased in their object engagement during follow-up compared to baseline. The one child who did not display changes in engagement did exhibit improvements in the quality of social engagement at follow-up compared to baseline. In addition, it was found that an increase in the parents’ usage of NDBI-aligned strategies predicted increases in the children’s social engagement. This study provides promising results for the feasibility of PMMI for both the parents and the children. Future research could determine if the results of this study generalize to a standardized set of toys and compare PMMI to a non-musical intervention to isolate the impact of music on parents and children in intervention settings.Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological Science
Jaco Hamman on Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence
No full textIn this podcast, Chris Benda, religious studies and theology librarian at Vanderbilt Divinity Library, interviews Professor Jaco Hamman about his book Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence: Care and the Algorithms that Guide Our Lives
Data Quality-Aware Graph Machine Learning
No full textGraph-structured data is ubiquitous in real-world applications (e.g., social networks, infrastructure, biomedical) and Graph Machine Learning (GML) has become a prominent method for handling such data. However, despite GML’s remarkable achievements, its reliance on node features makes it susceptible to conventional data quality issues, and the additional consideration of graph topology adds novel complexity. Inspired by these challenges, my research in this dissertation focuses on data-quality-aware graph machine learning, systematically examining issues related to topology, imbalance, bias, and limited data issues in graph data. This includes proposing data/model-centric solutions to handle them and applying my proposed data issue solutions for real-world applications, such as de-noising unrelated interactions in personalization learning for recommender systems, overcoming the inherent class-imbalance issue in computer-aided drug discovery, mitigating hallucination bias in multi-document question answering, and boosting limited training data for graph generations. Lastly, to further advance the field of data quality-aware GML, I have outlined multiple future directions to make data quality-aware GML more inclusive, intelligent, and trustworthy