751 research outputs found
The Life and Afterlives of Patrick Francis Healy, S.J.
No full textabstract: This dissertation centers on the life of Patrick Francis Healy, the son of an enslaved woman and an Irish slaveholder. Born in 1834, Healy became a Jesuit priest in 1864 and the president of Georgetown University in 1874, seven decades before Georgetown admitted its first African American student. In the twentieth century, historical investigations of race and American Catholicism cast Healy and his family in a new light. Today, the Healys are upheld in some circles as African American Catholic icons. Patrick Healy is now remembered as the first African American Jesuit and Catholic university president, as well as the first African American to receive a doctorate. This dissertation pursues both the life of Patrick Healy as well as what I call his “afterlives,” or the ways in which he has been remembered since the 1950s, when Albert S. Foley, S.J. discovered that the Healys’ mother was enslaved and refashioned them from white Irish Americans to white-passing African Americans. How and why did Patrick Francis Healy understand and comport himself as a white, upper-class Catholic? How and why have others sought to construct him as African American in the years since his ancestry was made widely known? How has Georgetown incorporated Healy’s legacy, in the context of its and other universities’ coming-to-terms with their dealings with slavery more broadly? I pursue these questions through archival sources (primarily Healy’s diaries and letters) at Georgetown University and College of the Holy Cross, as well as secondary literature on passing, subjectivity, and hagiography.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 202
Shifting inequalities? Patterns of exclusion and inclusion in emerging forms of political participation
No full textPrevious research has found a steady increase in the number of people involved in emerging forms of civic engagements such as Internet campaigns, protests, political consumerism, and alternative lifestyle communities. Verba et al. (1995) have established that various forms of political participation in the United States follow a pattern of structural inequality, based on income, education, gender and civic skills. The growing popularity of emerging action repertoires forces us to re-evaluate the claims of this literature. Do these patterns of inequality persist for the emerging action repertoires across advanced industrialized democracies, or are they becoming even stronger, as Theda Skocpol (2003, 2004) argues? The results of this cross-national analysis with longitudinal comparisons suggest that gender inequalities in emerging political action repertoires have substantially declined since the 1970s, whereas other forms of inequality have persisted. However, contrary to the more pessimistic claims about a "participation paradox", there is no evidence that inequality based on socio-economic status has substantially increased since the 1970s. --
Decentering: Creation of a proxy measure and relationship with cognitive tasks
No full textDecentering refers to an ability to notice day-to-day stressful mental experiences (negative thoughts, feelings and memories) and psychologically ‘step back’ from them to observe them from an objective self-perspective, without perseverating on the themes they represent (Bennett et al. 2021; Bernstein et al. 2015). Decentering has the capacity to dampen the impact and distress associated with psychological stressors that can otherwise increase mental ill health in vulnerable individuals. Importantly, the strengthening of decentering-related abilities has been flagged as a core component of psychological interventions that treat and prevent anxiety and depression (Bennett et al., 2021).
Few studies (if any) have investigated whether adolescents are proficient at decentering. A clear barrier has been the absence of child and adolescent friendly measures of decentering-related abilities. Even less research attention is given to the impact of psychological decentering on cognitive performance in emotional contexts. Investigating the impact of decentering on cognitive performance is essential to elucidate the mechanisms by which it might impact mental health. Understanding the relationship between decentering and day-to-day emotional fluctuations, simulated in these tasks, may also allow the enhancement of current mental health interventions.
To address these research gaps, we will conduct a secondary analysis of a dataset that contains information about mental health and affective cognitive control in a large community sample of adolescents (the MYRIAD Theme 1A dataset; N = 553, %female = 31.28%, age = M 14.37 SD 1.77). Data were originally collected from 2017 until 2018 as part of a broader investigation into the efficacy of school-based mindfulness training.
This project investigates emotional and cognitive correlates of decentering in a pre-existing dataset
Navigating the workplace: Autoethnographic and descriptive research in organizational and health communication contexts
No full textThis thesis is comprised of two research projects that address the importance of effective communication in work-related settings. The first study autoethnographically navigates my experiences as a Black woman in the workplace. I specifically illuminate professional and personal injustices that I have faced through the years in the form of workplace microaggressions and discriminatory actions as informative for both marginalized and privileged individuals as they participate in the workplace. In the second study (co-authored with Drs. Margaret Bennett Brown and Amy Heuman), we examine pre-nursing students’ perceived communication skills following a course focused on Communication in Nursing. This descriptive research confirms reliability of measures used to assess self-efficacy, perspective taking, empathy, and cultural competency as a means of evaluating students’ perceived communication competencies aligned with such variables at the completion of a communication-centered course for pre-nursing students. Both research projects provide insights into the central role that communication plays in productive workplace interaction.Restricted to TTU community only. To view, login with your eRaider (top right). Others may request the author grant access exception by clicking on the PDF link to the left
Voices of inheritance : aspects of British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s
No full textDuring the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted
category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie
within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of
heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature
established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in
British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with
inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to
what is passed on from the past and endures in the present.
The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and
constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts
begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and
moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently
conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then
situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates
concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined
British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent
and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My
corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited
pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing
publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions
from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources
which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s
Perceptual and conceptual similarities facilitate the generalisation of instructed fear
No full textBackground and objectives: Learned fear can generalize to neutral events due their perceptual and conceptual similarity with threat relevant stimuli. This study simultaneously examined these forms of generalization to model the expansion of fear in anxiety disorders.
Methods: First, artificial categories involving sounds, nonsense words and animal-like objects were established. Next, the words from one category were paired with threatening information while the words from the other category were paired with safety information. Lastly, we examined if fear generalized to (i) the conceptually related animal-like objects and (ii) other animal likeobjects that were perceptually similar. This was measured using behavioural avoidance, US expectancy ratings and self-reported stimulus valence.
Results: Animal-like objects conceptually connected to the aversive words evoked heightened fear. Perceptual variants of these animal-like objects also elicit fear.
Limitations: Future research would benefit from the use of online-US expectancy ratings and physiological measures of fear.
Conclusions: Investigating the role of both perceptual and conceptual fear generalization is important to better understand the etiology of anxiety disorders symptoms.sponsorship: Marc Bennett is a doctoral student who is supported by the Flemish Research Council (FWO) under grant number G.0518.11 (awarded to Dirk Hermans and Frank Baeyens). We acknowledge the financial support from KU Leuven Centre for Excellence Grant PF/10/005 to Dirk Hermans. Yannick Boddez received additional support from an Interuniversity Attraction poles grant of the Belgian Science Policy Office (P7/33). We also thank Demi Beugnier for her assistance during data collection.status: Publishe
Age related differences in learning with the useful field of view
No full textSource type: Electronic(1
Understanding New Media’s Relationship with Sexual and Mental Health Among Young Adults
No full textThis thesis aims to look at multiple research methodologies used in the field of Communication to explore the relationship between new media and health for young adults in the contemporary media landscape. The first paper focuses on how the Netflix series Sex Education is a source of sex-related information for college-going young adults and if the viewership has any effect on sex-positive attitudes. The second paper is a critical autoethnography where I examine the hegemony and neoliberal discourse present in organizational settings, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and how digital identities looked at information and power and made sense in digital spaces like Zoom and Slack as a “resource” of the organization.Embargo status: Restricted until 06/2174. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link to the left
Investigating the neuro-cognitive dynamics of decentering training and its impact on emotional reactivity: A Longitudinal and multimodal assessment.
No full textWoorden schieten tekort: Generalisatie van vrees en vermijding als een functie van conceptuele relaties
No full textAnxiety disorders are not just characterized by intense fear and avoidance; these responses also become widespread and can be ‘called out’ by a litany of previously neutral events. This overgeneralization of fear substantially contributes to the debilitating nature of anxiety. Therefore, our objective was to better understand the learning mechanisms underlying this clinical phenomenon. In particular, we sought to explain complex cases in which seemingly arbitrary events evoke fear and avoidance. For example, an individual who survives a traumatic car accident might later experience fear when confronted with symbols of driving (e.g. the sound of keys) and eventually avoid other modes of transport (e.g. trains or boats). This is known as category-level fear generalization.
Derived relational responding is one learning mechanism that is likely to be involved in category-level generalization. This is the ability to spontaneously respond to one stimulus in terms of another, which is physically dissimilar and not immediately present. Using laboratory procedures from the field of learning psychology (e.g. the matching-to-sample task), we could establish artificial stimulus categories wherein participants derive conceptual relations between novel stimuli, e.g. stimulus equivalence categories. Then using standard conditioning protocols, we could examine the impact of derived stimulus relations on fear generalization.
Section 1 investigated the impact of fundamental concepts of similarity on fear generalization. First, we conducted an experimental study that illustrated how perceptual and conceptual similarities concurrently facilitate fear generalization (Chapter 2). Second, we considered the possibility that category-level generalization could be involved in other anxiety-related, health complaints. In an experimental study, previously neutral arm-movements evoked heightened fear by virtue of their conceptual similarity to other aversively conditioned stimuli (Chapter 3). This finding might highlight a novel pathway for the emergence of pain-related fear in chronic pain disorders.
Section 2 expanded the scope of inquiry. Here, the impact of more complex types of derived stimulus relations on fear generalization were investigated. We replicated and extended upon the findings of previous experimental research and demonstrated that conceptual opposition can actually hamper fear generalization (Chapters 4 & 5). Attempts were also made to isolate environmental and individual traits that promote category-level generalization. However, the results were not so straightforward (Chapter 5). As a final objective, we also attempted to determine whether stimuli in derived opposition with an aversively conditioned stimulus could act as safety signals actively inhibit fear (Chapter 6).
As a final objective, Section 3 explored whether the category-level generalization of learned fear could be attenuated. That is, we examined whether it is possible to manipulate the likelihood of conceptual relations affecting emotional responses. Across two experimental studies, we demonstrated that the generalization of fear-relevant behaviors could be disrupted by the introduction of novel contexts (Chapter 7). This was predicated on participants initially learning to make alternative responses to the originally conditioned stimulus across novel context. The potential connection between this experimental protocol and the clinical technique known as ‘cognitive defusion’ is also considered.
Six experimental chapters are couched between a general introduction and a general discussion. In the general introduction, the background for this dissertation is outlined and the reader is introduced to the key definitions, themes, objectives and goals. The final discussion then provides a coherent overview of the principles findings, some more general conclusions and suggestions for future research.status: Publishe
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