The study explored whether certain factors might be used to distinguish between people with cancer who do or do not want detailed information about their disease progress, do or do not want to be informed if their disease is no longer considered curable, and who do or do not want an estimation of life expectancy if their disease is no longer considered curable. The factors included whether an individual has an internal versus external locus of control, uses an active coping strategy or a planning coping strategy, the level of spirituality, and age. Participants consisted of 51 people with cancer from a cancer center in the state of Washington. Results indicated that 98% wanted detailed information about their disease progress, 94% wanted to be informed if their disease was no longer considered curable, and 78% wanted an estimation of life expectancy if their disease was no longer considered curable. Due to the majority of the participants endorsing the need for prognostic information none of the factors (e.g. coping strategies, locus of control, spirituality) were able to predict the information needs of the patients with cancer. Clinical implications of this study suggest that physicians have an ongoing, open dialogue with their …

Approximately 20% of children experience serious mental health problems severe enough to meet diagnosis criteria, and less than one third of these children receive the services they need. Identifying effective school-based counseling interventions provides a viable and accessible solution, especially for families with financial barriers. This randomized, controlled outcome study examined the effectiveness of Adlerian play therapy (AdPT) compared to reading mentoring (RM) with 58 kindergarten through third grade students who qualified with clinical levels of disruptive behavior in the classroom. Participants were identified as 48% Latino, 33% European American, and 19% African American. Approximately four-fifths of participants were male. Children were randomly assigned to AdPT (experimental group) or RM (active control group) for 16 sessions of treatment. Children in both groups participated in twice weekly, individual, 30-minute interventions that took place in their schools. Results from a two (group) by two (repeated measures) split plot ANOVA indicated that, compared to the RM group over time, the AdPT group demonstrated statistically significant improvement on (a) disruptive behaviors in the classroom, as directly observed by objective raters and as reported by teachers, and (b) stress in the teacher-child relationship, as reported by teachers. Teachers and observers were blinded to children's treatment …

Resilience implies the concept of buoyancy. Specifically, it denotes an individual's capacity to persevere and even do well in the face of adversity. Service-learning is pedagogy often used to enable students to apply classroom learning in a real world context. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of service-learning upon college student resilience. The study utilized a convenience sample of undergraduate students (N = 172) across three disciplines including counseling, social work and kinesiology. In a pre-post test design, the CD-RISC was employed to measure resilience of the experimental and control groups. Factor analysis of the CD-RISC was also conducted in order to explore interrelationship of the variables among the data. One undergraduate sample (N = 210) was used to conduct the EFA before determining a best fit factor structure for this study's population. A repeated measures analysis of variance was employed to detect any differences between pre-post test groups. No statistical significance was found across pre and post-test among the two groups (p=.49, η2=.00). However significant results were found between the experimental and control groups (p=.00, η2 =.09). Examination of mean score differences among demographic variable yielded interesting findings across the three disciplines as well as …

This thesis seeks to understand how political awareness affects what information one uses to indicate their approval or disapproval of Congress and its members. More concisely, do more and less aware individuals rely on the same pieces of political information to mold their opinions of Congress? The second question of concern is what role does media consumption play in informing survey respondents about Congress. Third, I consider how survey respondents use cues like the condition of the economy and presidential job performance to help formulate their opinion of Congress Finally, by applying the Congressional approval literature to incumbent level approval, I seek to advance the theory and literature on what motivates the approval of incumbents.

The dissertation is a philosophical approach to politicizing place and space, or environments broadly construed, that is motivated by three questions. How can geography be employed to analyze the spatialities of environmental justice? How do spatial concepts inform understandings of environmentalism? And, how can geography help overcome social/political philosophy's redistribution-recognition debate in a way that accounts for the multiscalar dimensions of environmental justice? Accordingly, the dissertation's objective is threefold. First, I develop a critical geography framework that explores the spatialities of environmental injustices as they pertain to economic marginalization across spaces of inequitable distribution, cultural subordination in places of misrecognition, and political exclusion from public places of deliberation and policy. Place and space are relationally constituted by intricate networks of social relations, cultural practices, socioecological flows, and political-economic processes, and I contend that urban and natural environments are best represented as "places-in-space." Second, I argue that spatial frameworks and environmental discourses interlock because conceptualizations of place and space affect how environments are perceived, serve as framing devices to identify environmental issues, and entail different solutions to problems. In the midst of demonstrating how the racialization of place upholds inequitable distributions of pollution burdens, I introduce notions of "social location" and …

This paper presents methods and results of county-level population estimation using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images of Denton County and Collin County in Texas. Landsat TM images acquired in March 2000 were classified into residential and non-residential classes using maximum likelihood classification and knowledge-based classification methods. Accuracy assessment results from the classified image produced using knowledge-based classification and traditional supervised classification (maximum likelihood classification) methods suggest that knowledge-based classification is more effective than traditional supervised classification methods. Furthermore, using randomly selected samples of census block groups, ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models were created for total population estimation. The overall accuracy of the models is over 96% at the county level. The results also suggest that underestimation normally occurs in block groups with high population density, whereas overestimation occurs in block groups with low population density.

The current work is an intellectual history of how blood permeated early modern Spaniards' conceptions of morality and purity. This paper examines Spanish intellectuals' references to blood in their medical, theological, demonological, and historical works. Through these excerpts, this thesis demonstrates how this language of blood played a role in buttressing the church's conception of good morals. This, in turn, will show that blood was used as a way to persecute Jews and Muslims, and ultimately define the early modern Spanish identity.

Northern bobwhite populations have declined concurrent with global warming. The focal period of this study was the 12-d pre-incubation period, when bobwhite eggs remain in the nest without the thermal protection of the incubating parent. This study first established the storage and thermal limits of bobwhite eggs, then investigated how global warming may impact oviparous embryos and how bobwhite embryos react to acute and chronic doses of simulated drought temperatures during pre-incubation. First, the maximum storage limit of bobwhite eggs was determined by storing eggs ≤21 d and measuring hatching success and pH of egg albumen and yolk. Hatching success of stored eggs declined after 14 d, when yolk and albumen pH reached levels detrimental to embryonic development. Secondly, thermal limits were determined by exposing bobwhite eggs to hyperthermic temperatures (38-52 °C). Bobwhite embryos survived 50 °C for 1 h, 49 °C for 3 h and 46 °C for 6 h. Results indicate an adaptation to the naturally occurring temperature extremes that can occur in the bobwhite's southern range during pre-incubation. Subsequently, bobwhite eggs were exposed to either low constant (LC), low fluctuating (LF), high constant (HC), or high fluctuating (HF) temperatures during pre-incubation to determine if the nature of …

Approximately 2-11% of adolescents report chronic insomnia. The study used an archival data set from ADDHealth that assessed adolescent health and health-related behaviors. Adolescents (N = 4102) provided data at baseline (Time 1) and at 1-year follow-up (Time 2). Participants were excluded if no ethnicity, gender, or insomnia data were given at Time 1 or 2. Females were more likely to report insomnia than males at Times 1 and 2. In addition, adolescents with remitted insomnia were significantly younger than adolescents without insomnia at Times 1 and 2. Analyses found a prevalence of 9.6%, a remittance of 6.2%, an incidence of 4.4%, and a chronicity of 2.9%. At Time 1 and 2, AWI were significantly more likely to have depression, suicidal behaviors, and behavioral problems in school than AWOI. At Time 2, incidence and chronic insomnia increased the risk of depression, suicidal behaviors and behavioral problems in school. Risk and protective factors analyses indicated psychological counseling was associated with both remitted and chronic insomnia and depression was associated with incidence insomnia.

The purposes of this dissertation were to determine the constitutional rights of parents to shield their children from exposure to parts of the public school curriculum that the parents find objectionable on religious, moral, or other grounds and to determine the statutory rights of parents to remove, or opt-out, their children from objectionable parts or all of the public school curriculum as set forth in the statutes of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many pivotal federal court cases dealing with parent rights and curricular issues, including Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), Vandiver v. Hardin County Board of Education (1987), Brown v. Hot, Sexy, & Safer Productions, Inc. (1995), Leebaert v. Harrington (2003), and Parker v. Hurley (2008) were surveyed using legal research methods. Specific types of curriculum opt-outs (e.g., sex education, comprehensive health programs, HIV/AIDS instruction) granted by each state were ascertained. States' statutes and regulations were categorized as non-existent, restrictive, or permissive based on the scope and breadth of each state's curriculum opt-out statute or regulation. A long list of federal court rulings have provided public schools the right to teach what school boards and administrators determine is appropriate. Parents did not have …

Extracting information from a stack of data is a tedious task and the scenario is no different in proteomics. Volumes of research papers are published about study of various proteins in several species, their interactions with other proteins and identification of protein(s) as possible biomarker in causing diseases. It is a challenging task for biologists to keep track of these developments manually by reading through the literatures. Several tools have been developed by computer linguists to assist identification, extraction and hypotheses generation of proteins and protein-protein interactions from biomedical publications and protein databases. However, they are confronted with the challenges of term variation, term ambiguity, access only to abstracts and inconsistencies in time-consuming manual curation of protein and protein-protein interaction repositories. This work attempts to attenuate the challenges by extracting protein-protein interactions in humans and elicit possible interactions using associative rule mining on full text, abstracts and captions from figures available from publicly available biomedical literature databases. Two such databases are used in our study: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and PubMed Central (PMC). A corpus is built using articles based on search terms. A dataset of more than 38,000 protein-protein interactions from the Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) …

College students participating in dyads played a game designed as an analog of early hunters whose survival, as a dyad and ultimately individually, depend on rabbits they hunt. Dyadic fitness was defined as both participants being able to hunt and it was measured by the proportion of trials in a condition that both participants hunted. The effects of scarcity (alternating rich and poor conditions) on dyadic fitness were examined in two experiments. First experiment results did not show a difference in dyadic fitness as a function of the independent variable. The second experiment increased the number of hunting seasons and also the discrepancy between scarcity in rich and poor seasons. Second experiment results show that dyads start fit in rich seasons and become increasingly fit in poor seasons. External variables could not be ruled out; therefore, additional experiments still need to be carried out to clarify results.

The Concerto for Trombone, written in 1763 by Georg Christoph Wagenseil, is a piece in 2 movements for alto trombone and chamber orchestra. The orchestration consists of 2 parts for violin, 1 part for viola, cello and string bass, 2 French horn parts and 2 parts for flute. It is the first concerto form solo work for the alto trombone and was written during a time when wide use of this instrument had been diminished from centuries past. The Concerto for Trombone helped mark the beginning of a time when the musical expressiveness of the trombone began to be noticed in chamber genres where such attention had been lacking in previous decades. Chapter 2 examines the life and musical background of the composer. Chapter 3 discusses the history surrounding the possible origin of the Concerto and its performance history. Chapter 4 provides analytical insights into the construction and format of the piece. Chapter 5 details the creation of an urtext edition of the Concerto. Chapter 6 concludes this document with a performer's guide to the work based on the urtext edition of the solo trombone part to create the performance edition. This performance edition of the work includes historically informed …

Previous research, as well as theory, has supported the existence of a relationship between death anxiety and loneliness in older adults but a causal examination has not been possible until now. A hypothesized model was developed which states that loneliness will lead to death anxiety mediated by cultural worldview. Longitudinal data was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling in order to more fully explore this potentially causal relationship. The primary model was supported suggesting that loneliness can lead to death anxiety as mediated by cultural worldview. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Podcasts covering essential first-semester general chemistry laboratory techniques and central concepts that aid in experimental design or data processing were prepared and made available for students to access on an as-needed basis on iPhones- or iPod touches-. Research focused in three areas: the extent of podcast usage, the numbers and types of interactions between instructors and research teams, and student performance on graded assignments. Data analysis indicates that the podcast treatment research teams accessed a podcast 2.86 times on average during each week that podcasts were available. Comparison of interaction data for the lecture treatment research teams and podcast treatment research teams reveals that interactions with instructors were statistically significantly fewer for teams that had podcast access rather than a pre‐laboratory lecture. The implication of the results is that student research teams were able to gather laboratory information more effectively when it was presented in an on-demand podcast format. Finally, statistical analysis of data on student performance on graded assignments indicates no significant differences between outcome measures for the treatment groups when compared as cohorts. The only statistically significant difference is between students judged to be highly motivated; for this sub‐group the students in the podcast treatment group earned a …

Positive psychology has led a movement that concentrates on positive characteristics. The current study examined the relationship between positive emotions, negative emotions, flourishing, languishing, and cardiovascular functioning. The study uses guided imagery to help participants recall a negative emotional event and positive emotional event in a counterbalanced order. The reverse order allowed us to examine the differential contributions of stress buffering versus facilitated recovery effects to higher levels of heart rate variability (HRV). The study also examined the relationship between mental health categories and known cardiovascular disease risk. Univariate analysis of variance revealed that positive emotions can serve as a stress buffer and dampen cardiovascular responses to a negative event. Also, analysis revealed a trend for the prediction that positive emotions can facilitate cardiovascular recovery following a negative event. Exploratory analysis did not reveal differences between a facilitated recovery group and a buffering group for cardiovascular measures. Future studies should include tighter control to help compare the differential influences of stress facilitation and stress buffering on cardiovascular functioning. The results from the study indicate that it is still too early to tell whether mental health buffers those individuals from developing CVD, and to answer whether languishing increases the risk of …

This study analyzed the expressive writing of college students. Twenty-two ADHD students and 22 controls were asked to write a story based on a picture story and a personal challenge. The texts were compared based on several qualitative and quantitative parameters. The results show that students in both groups presented similar text quality. Out of six qualitative parameters only one was statistically different between the two groups: ADHD students performed worse in adequacy, but only in the picture task. Students writings were also investigated using corpus based analysis. This analysis showed that ADHD students used less unusually frequent words in the picture story but more in the challenge task. Taken together the findings indicate no significant difference in expressive writing between ADHD and non ADHD college students. An explanation to this result is that college students with ADHD may have passed the filter of prior education.

This quantitative study examined the correlation between how college level music students rated their teachers on the Fowler/O'Gorman Mentor Functions Questionnaire and how they perceived two aspects of their private music lessons: 1) to what extent they perceived their relationship with their teachers as positive, and 2) to what extent they perceived their teachers as good. The respondents for this study were 295 undergraduate and graduate music majors studying at 5 private universities or music schools. Positive correlations were found between the scores on the Mentor Functions Questionnaire (MFQ) and good teachers and positive lesson experiences. No correlation was found between the existence of gender congruity or the lack of gender congruity and the mean score on the MFQ. Respondents reported differences among their teachers' behaviors (p < .05): Role Modeling and Coaching behavior were perceived at significantly higher levels than the other six mentoring behaviors, whereas Friendship and Advocacy behavior was found at significantly lower levels. The behaviors of Personal and Emotional Guidance, Career Development Facilitation, Strategies and Systems Advice, and Learning Facilitation were found at levels closer to the mean. When role modeling and coaching behavior are present, students perceive teachers as good and lessons as positive. It …

Given the centrality of body dissatisfaction in the manifestation of health risk behaviors (e.g., eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia) and psychological distress in men, the ability to measure it accurately is essential. Across two studies, the psychometric properties and factor structure of a new measure of male body satisfaction were established. The Body Parts Satisfaction Scale for Men (BPSS-M) was found to have three scores: full body muscularity and leanness (18 items), upper body (12 items), and legs (4 items). All three scores were internally and temporally reliable, and support was found for the convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity of the scores. The BPSS-M represents an advance in the measurement of male body image, providing researchers and clinicians with a versatile and valid way to assess this important construct.

The internationalization of distance learning in special education is at a pivotal point in expansion. Even with concerted efforts through traditional means to increase the supply of special educators, shortages persist; therefore, teacher preparation programs are turning to online education. This dissertation study was a formative program evaluation of a bilingual, two-course sequence within a web-based special education master's program offered at the University of North Texas (UNT), in Denton, Texas, and at the Universidad Casa Grande (UCG) in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The research design was based on the unfolding model of program evaluation, and it included mixed-methods of data collection. The model focused attention on (1) scientific evidence, (2) cost-benefit differential, (3) underlying values, and, (4) unintended consequences. Data came from archived documents as well as six semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and survey data from 23 student participants. The findings for the general-orientation course, Special Education Programs and Practices, revealed mixed results concerning multicultural awareness on the part of student participants. However, it seemed to have influenced their lesson design and made a difference in other areas. Some multicultural awareness concepts frequented the discussion board. The specialized course, Assistive Technology, which had more frequent communication between UNT and UCG on …

This study examined stepparents' privacy boundary management when engaging in communicative interactions with stepchildren. I utilized Petronio's communication privacy management theory to investigate stepparents' motivations of disclosing or concealing from stepchildren as well as how stepparents' gender influences such motivations. Moreover, present research also explored types of privacy dilemma within stepfamily households from stepparent perspectives. Fifteen stepfathers and 15 stepmothers received in-depth interviews about their self-disclosing and concealment experiences with stepchildren. I identified confidant dilemma and accidental dilemma in stepfamily households from stepparents' perspectives, as well as stepparents' gender differences in self-disclosing and concealing motivations. Findings also suggest that stepparents reveal and conceal from stepchildren out of same motivations: establishing good relationships, viewing stepchildren as own children, helping stepchildren with problems resulting from the divorce and viewing stepchildren as "others." The result also indicates that stepparents experienced dialectical tensions between closedness and openness during the decision of revealing or concealing from stepchildren.

This presentation discusses strategies for quality control during the post-digitization phase.

This presentation discusses the University of North Texas Libraries' Digital Projects Unit workflows, how they overcame challenges, and how the use of established models and standards helped them find solutions to the workflow. It presents the editing system created for the Digital Projects Unit, the organizational structure for each object, and identifiers.