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Expanding Anatomy Academy in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area: A Service Learning Project to Improve Childhood Health through Supplemental Educational Sessions
No full textChildhood obesity is a growing epidemic in the United States, with approximately 18.5% of US children presenting with obesity. High levels of obesity are less common in higher income communities, but increasingly more prevalent in lower income communities. Currently in Clark County, Nevada, more specifically in lower socioeconomic communities and Title I schools within the Las Vegas area, there is an opportunity to educate students about the components of a healthier lifestyle to provide children with the tools to improve their health. Anatomy Academy (AA) is an eight-week health education program that was created to teach fourth and fifth grade students about the various structures and functions of the human body, as well as the importance of living a healthy lifestyle in order to address the obesity epidemic. This service-learning project aimed to expand the reach of the Anatomy Academy program to more schools in the Las Vegas area in an effort to educate more underserved students about anatomy, physiology, and healthy lifestyle choices. Secondary aims included teaching fourth and fifth grade students about anatomy, physiology, and the components of a healthy lifestyle, as well as providing opportunities for professional growth to the physical therapy (PT) students administering the program. This service learning project delivered the program in two Title I elementary schools near University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), facilitated by UNLV PT student mentors and undergraduate kinesiology volunteers. Weekly sessions focused on seven body systems and included interactive activities designed to foster physical activity and engagement, with guidance provided by student mentors to enhance learning and ensure a seamless delivery of material. The program successfully expanded from two classrooms to five total classrooms over the course of three semesters. Additionally, student physical therapists reported personal and professional growth, which was measured through their application of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) core values throughout the program, as highlighted in post-program reflections. While no conclusions on the effectiveness of the AA program can be made from this service-learning project, the program provided valuable benefits for all stakeholders involved. Therefore, efforts should continue to be made to expand AA further, in subsequent years, to additional classrooms and schools in the Las Vegas Valley
Vegas Reborn: An Ethnographic Exploration of Female Fans of The National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights
No full textThis dissertation examines the experiences of female fans of the Vegas Golden Knights (VGK), emphasizing how they construct their identities, navigate gendered expectations, and engage with fan communities. As a National Hockey League (NHL) expansion team in a non-traditional hockey market, the VGK offers a unique opportunity to understand how sports fandom develops and fosters collective identity in a newly emerging market. This qualitative, multi-method approach includes ethnographic participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and netnographic analysis of online fan communities. The findings of this research reveal that female fans actively challenge gendered stereotypes and resist the “puck bunny” label, asserting their legitimacy within a traditionally masculine sports culture. Digital spaces provide a supportive environment for women to establish authority and reshape dominant narratives about female sports fandom. By examining the intersections of gender, sports, and cultural identity, this research contributes to broader discussions in cultural sociology, gender studies, and the sociology of sport. The findings highlight that female fans are not passive spectators but active participants in shaping sports culture, community identity, and the evolving landscape of hockey fandom
How Returning to Work And Sense of Belonging Influence Acquired Brain Injury Survivors: A Descriptive Case Study
No full textPurpose. This capstone project explored the experiences of an individual with acquired brain injury (ABI) returning to work (RTW), highlighting their sense of belonging (SoB) in the workplace. While literature emphasizes SoB\u27s importance for mental health and quality of life, its impact on workplace reintegration for ABI individuals is underexplored. This project intended to address the gap in understanding ABI individuals\u27 workplace belonging, potentially enhancing OT practices and outcomes for reintegration.Methods. A descriptive single case study approach using a qualitative phenomenology methodology, including semi-structured interviews and site observations, was used to gather insights from an individual who has re-entered the workforce post-injury. Results: The participant’s experience revealed key factors affecting RTW and SoB after ABI. Identified successful RTW facilitators included access to rehabilitation services, adaptive workplace accommodations, personal resilience, and opportunities for engagement. Barriers involved unclear job responsibilities, physical limitations, and insufficient stimulating tasks. A strong SoB, supported by coworkers and an inclusive culture, is vital for long-term job retention. These findings advocate future research addressing social and structural aspects in vocational rehabilitation and OT practice. Conclusion: Findings from this capstone project suggest that development of SoB is vital in sustaining long-term employment for individuals with ABI. Future studies should continue to explore SoB, using diverse methodologies and broader participant samples to strengthen evidence-based practice
Perceived Personalization of Luxury Hotel Brands: An Empirical Examination Using Structural Equation Modeling and Machine Learning
No full textThis study explores the outcomes of perceived personalization in the context of luxury hotels through the theoretical lenses of Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Theory, Personalization-Privacy Paradox Theory, and Privacy Calculus Theory. The study incorporates multiple latent constructs, such as brand engagement, brand experience, self-brand connection, consumer-brand identification, privacy concerns, behavioral loyalty intentions, and willingness to disclose information, to understand how perceived personalization influences customer perceptions and behaviors. Understanding both data (e.g., willingness to disclose information) and marketing (e.g., behavioral loyalty intentions) constructs is crucial in the era of data-driven marketing, as it helps address the complexities of personalization.A sample of 476 U.S. luxury hotel consumers was collected using a Qualtrics panel. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) (i.e., explanation) and Machine Learning (ML) using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values (i.e., prediction) were integrated for comprehensive analysis. The measurement model revealed the need to establish two second-order constructs, “brand engagement experience” (combining brand engagement and brand experience) and “brand identification connection” (combining self-brand connection and consumer-brand identification), to better represent the underlying relationships. The structural model revealed that perceived personalization positively influences brand engagement experience and brand identification connection. Brand engagement experience partially mediated the relationship between perceived personalization and behavioral loyalty intentions, while brand identification connection fully mediated the relationship between perceived personalization and willingness to disclose personal information. Privacy concerns did not significantly moderate the relationship between personalization and the brand-related constructs. Additionally, brand engagement experience did not significantly lead to willingness to disclose information, and brand identification connection did not significantly lead to behavioral loyalty intentions. The performance of six ML models was compared for each outcome variable. Deep neural network was the best method for predicting willingness to disclose information, and k-nearest neighbors was the best for predicting behavioral loyalty intentions. A comparative analysis between the SEM direct effects and the SHAP mean scores for the top-performing ML models demonstrated convergence for willingness to disclose information but divergence for behavioral loyalty intentions. These findings offer theoretical, practical, and methodological insights within the context of luxury hotel personalization
The Speech-To-Song Illusion Across Development and the Effects of High-Level Expectations
No full textThe typical listener can readily categorize auditory stimuli as either speech or song even though these structures share many acoustic similarities. These musical and linguistic categories may nevertheless take time to develop as children acquire language- and music-specific knowledge. In the Speech-to-Song (STS) illusion, multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance can give rise to a perceptual switch wherein the stimulus begins to sound song-like to the listener. While the STS illusion has been well-researched in adult listeners, it had yet to be investigated in children. In our study, we examined whether children experience the STS illusion by presenting participants across age groups (4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8 – 11, 18+ years) with speech excerpts known to elicit the STS illusion and asking them to rate the degree to which each of 10 consecutive repetitions sounds song-like. We also asked whether they would better detect pitch changes to stimuli that violate versus conform to Western key structure, an advantage that has been observed in prior work with adults which implicates a role for musical schematic knowledge in the STS illusion. Participants robustly experienced the STS illusion similarly at all ages. Younger children required more repetitions than adults to experience the STS illusion, and unlike for adults, it remains unclear whether they recruited Western musical knowledge on our pitch detect task. Individual differences in performance on musical and linguistic perceptual tasks did not correlate with STS measures, suggesting that the repetition-induced musical processing mode characteristic of the STS illusion may reflect a more general auditory phenomenon that is less dependent on explicit musical and linguistic skills. Overall, our findings suggest that the ability to experience distinct, domain-specific modes of listening for speech and song are present early in development, but the nature of this experience may change with age as music-specific processing mechanisms develop and become more refined by listening experience
Hospital Patient and Family Advisory Councils: A Mixed-Methods Study
No full textHospital Patient and Family Advisory Councils (PFACs) are a key strategy in advancing patient-centeredness, heralded by the Institute of Medicine as a goal to improve healthcare quality. Although PFACs have been around since the early 1980s, they exist in only 54% of U.S. hospitals. This three-article mixed-methods dissertation reveals new empirical and primary research about PFAC characteristics, answering the question of what factors contribute to an effective PFAC. The three articles cover (1) a literature review of 143 articles about hospital PFACs around the world, which has been published by the Journal of Patient Experience, (2) a qualitative study of 20 interviews with U.S. hospitals about their PFAC qualities and practices, which has been conditionally accepted by the Journal of Patient Experience pending revisions, and (3) a quantitative, validated survey of 60 questions with 203 respondents working in U.S. hospitals. The scoping review highlighted a dearth of evidence proving the value of PFACs, with scant data on project metrics and outcomes, despite endorsements from major institutions. The exploratory qualitative study, grounded in partnership theory, uncovered the need for broad organizational commitment, systematic evaluation to ensure sustainability, and the need for training employees who work with PFACs. Building on the literature and the qualitative studies, the quantitative research aimed to identify the key predictors of PFAC effectiveness in a 60-question survey answered by 203 people who worked in U.S. hospitals. The results revealed that leadership support was significantly associated with increased meeting content, stronger measurement practices, and more frequent decision making and involvement with policies and procedures. PFACs, focused on conditions or patient types rather than general PFACs, scored higher on multiple factors, including meeting content, measurement practices, level of engagement, and coaching and training members. This groundbreaking study provides evidence-based research to guide hospital leaders in launching a PFAC or strengthening an existing on
Investigating Information Extraction and Language Models in Medical Domain Text Processing
No full textThis dissertation demonstrates that carefully adapted language-model pipelines can transform unstructured clinical-trial and pharmacological prose into reliable, low-latency structured data. Four interconnected studies support this claim.Tri-AL platform. An open-source dashboard ingests all 440 k+ ClinicalTrials.gov records—including every historical revision—into a normalized schema and parses the 20 GB XML archive over 10x faster than a BeautifulSoup baseline, while exposing hooks for demographic analytics and supporting integration of user-defined modules. Clinical trial summarization. An encoder–decoder model is trained on 57k description–summary pairs to condense clinical trials into a few sentences. ROUGE evaluation shows a 20% improvement over the baseline, while graph-based evaluation indicates the model preserves 71% of critical biomedical entities, yielding concise yet informative summaries suitable for evidence scans. MoA classification. A collection of models—including traditional classifiers (decision trees, random forests, XGBoost) and contrastively fine-tuned masked-language-model variants—achieves a macro F1 of 97%, effectively handling class imbalance and drug-class sparsity while also providing interpretable insights. Scalable medical NER pipeline. A dynamic and scalable pipeline is introduced for training lightweight Named Entity Recognition (NER) models adaptable to different entity types. Knowledge distillation compresses the large teacher model into a 110M-parameter student that retains 70% of gold-label accuracy (F1=0.61) while running 1000x faster and consuming just 6% of the memory. Collectively, these contributions provide scalable tools and empirical evidence that domain-specific NLP methods can be integrated to accelerate trial discovery, enhance drug-development analytics, and support data-driven clinical decision-making
Error Processing in Psychopathy: An Analysis of Event Related Brain Potentials and Post-Error Task Behavior
No full textPerformance monitoring and error processing are crucial for learning from mistakes, adjusting responses, and adapting to the environment. Individuals with psychopathy present with failures in performance monitoring, particularly a failure to learn from experience, and error processing deficits have been reported in this population. Error processing literature has investigated its underlying mechanisms via two prongs, namely behavioral measures and electroencephalography (EEG) indicators. Behaviorally, error processing literature has focused on post-error slowing (PES) and post-error accuracy (PEA). Meanwhile, EEG research has identified two components of error-related brain potentials (ERPs) in error processing: error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe). This study investigated error processing in psychopathy, via a letter-shock task and assessing for both behavioral (i.e., PES and PEA) and psychophysiological (i.e., ERN and Pe) measures. While we predicted error processing deficits associated with impulsive-antisocial traits, instead we found error processing improvements associated with interpersonal-affective traits, with higher PEA and enhanced ERN amplitudes. Overall, our findings add to the literature on successful psychopathy, a controversial yet commonly-cited concept, defined as the display of core psychopathic traits while still able to achieve and maintain success
Internalized Weight Stigma as a Mediator Between Past Weight Stigma and Current Healthcare Avoidance/Comfort in Seeking Medical Care
No full textResearch has found that medical providers such as physicians, nurses, and medical support staff may contribute to externalized weight stigma directed toward youth (Garcia et al., 2016; Gorlick et al., 2021). Individuals who have encountered weight stigmatization may internalize those experiences, leading to psychological, physical, and behavioral changes that reduce their quality of life (Palad et al., 2019; Romano et al., 2023; Tanas et al., 2022; Zancu & Diaconu-Gherasim, 2023). However, little is known about how historical externalized weight stigma from medical providers relates to future healthcare access behaviors. This study examined whether internalized weight stigma mediated two relationships: First, childhood and adolescent weight stigma from healthcare providers and healthcare avoidance in adulthood, and second, childhood and adolescent weight stigma from healthcare providers and comfort in seeking medical care in adulthood. The initial sample consisted of 543 students, with a final sample size of 488 (Mage = 20.00 years, SD = 4.47) from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas student subject pool. Participants completed measures assessing demographics, past and current experiences of weight stigma in healthcare settings, internalization of weight stigma, healthcare avoidance, and comfort in seeking medical care. Over half of the sample (56.26%) reported experienced weight stigma from their medical providers during childhood or adolescence, whereas approximately one-third (28.85%) reported experiencing it within the past year as an adult. Results showed that childhood and adolescent weight stigma was significantly associated with both greater healthcare avoidance (B = 0.29, SE = 0.10, p = .003, 95% CI [0.10, 0.49]) and lower comfort in seeking medical care (B = -1.45, SE = 0.49, p = .003, OR = 0.24, 95% CI for OR [0.09, 0.62]) in adulthood. These relationships were fully mediated by internalized weight stigma. These findings suggest that children and adolescents who internalized experienced weight stigma from medical providers were more likely to avoid medical care and felt less comfortable seeking it as adults. These results demonstrate the need for greater medical provider education, weight-neutral practices, and stigma-reducing policies aimed at decreasing internalized weight stigma and, in turn, reducing healthcare avoidance and improving comfort in seeking medical care. Additionally, early supportive interventions for individuals who have already experienced weight-related stigma in the healthcare settings may be critical in mitigating the internalization of weight stigma and its long-term effects on healthcare engagement
Correlation Between ATNR Retention and Sensory Processing Difficulties in a Pediatric Occupational Therapy Population
No full textThis study aimed to examine the correlation between retained Asymmetric Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR) and sensory processing difficulties in children. A review of the literature available contributed to understanding the relationship between these; however, the limited research indicated a need for further examination to provide practitioners with evidence-based research for comprehensive care and improved occupational performance in children. A small correlational study was conducted using the snowball method with convenience sampling. The study yielded six participants from an occupational therapy outpatient clinic, A Clubhouse for Kids. Caregivers completed the Sensory Profile 2 in hard copy to assess their child\u27s sensory needs, while ATNR was evaluated using Schilder\u27s Test of ATNR. The results demonstrated that there was a strong correlation between a retained ATNR and sensory processing difficulties exists (Rs=+1). Due to the various limitations, including a small sample size from the same clinic, the generalizability of the study may be limited. Despite this, the results provide evidence that it may be beneficial for practitioners to test for ATNR when working with this population. In addition, it gives occupational therapists and other professionals who work with this population evidence that targeting reflex integration in their interventions may be beneficial to improve the child’s outcomes due to the potential impact the retained reflex has on sensory processing