Flow, Creativity and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Creatively Supporting Development and Pro-Social Behavior in Children with ASD

This literature review is an analysis of the literature exploring the use of expressive arts modalities with children living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with a focus on emotional regulation and behavior modification. Historically, Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) has been the standard in terms of behavior modification for this population, but current research and qualitative inquiries suggested that members of this population need more support in emotional regulation and communication than ABA is able to provide. Using an intermodal arts-based method developmentally promotes social and communication abilities in children with ASD. Further, channeling stereotypic behaviors into creative flow can regulate, communicate, and increase self-worth. As evidenced by studies incorporating the healing and occupational benefits of each modality, this capstone thesis organized and chronicled the developmental aspects of each modality, as well as their own interrelatedness. This was done by framing the work under the Expressive Therapies Continuum and exploring the healing properties of creativity. By allowing individuals living with ASD to create their own form of communication using multiple artistic modalities, it is believed that maladaptive behaviors could decrease, due to a child’s own realization that they are better understood. This could lead to better emotional regulation, efficacy in communication, and stronger socialization. The framework could also benefit clinicians in developing more concise and client-centered treatment plans, that meet both the client’s needs as well as the freedom to incorporate the client’s personal interests

The Female Hand: The Making of Western Medicine for Women in China, 1880s–1920s

This dissertation explores the transmission of Western medicine for women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. It starts from the fundamental presupposition that one cannot reach a proper understanding of the medical knowledge available at the time without investigating the practical experience of doctors, medical students, and their female patients. Focusing on the practice of Western and Chinese missionary practitioners (male and female), including the hospital buildings they erected, the texts they translated, the ways they manipulated their senses in diagnosis and treatment, and the medical appliances they employed for surgery and delivery, I reconstruct these people’s daily-life experiences, while reassessing the broad issues of professionalization and gender, colonial medicine, translation, knowledge making, and interactions between the human body and inanimate materials in a cross-cultural context. This dissertation first highlights daily life’s contributions to the history of professionalization by examining the on-the-ground, material circumstances of women doctors’ work at the Hackett Medical Complex in the southeast treaty-port city of Canton (Guangzhou). The physical conditions of the missionary hospital and its built environment embodied the multi-layered process through which the concrete elements of Western medicine were circulated, applied, and localized in China’s pluralistic medical landscape. Foregrounding Western missionary physicians and their Chinese students as practitioners who were practicing and learning medicine in a specific medical setting, I argue that the professionalization of medicine for women was not defined through a set of abstract theoretical criteria but was rather embedded in concrete daily practice, in observing, diagnosing, and treating patients. Drawing evidence from translated medical treatises and manuals, I demonstrate in the second part of the dissertation (Chapter Two) how craft-based, material-centered medical knowledge from the West was disseminated in China via the vehicle of words. Missionary doctors integrated the topic of manual skills into their medical discourse and, hence, could monopolize the realm of pragmatic knowledge generated exclusively from the hospital setting. Here, I underline the role that text played in mobilizing female healing techniques. By doing so, I show how Western-trained physician-translators derived their authority not only as practitioners of women’s reproductive health but also as interpreters of female bodies. Whereas published words served as a powerful vehicle in spreading speculative ideas, it was not the only channel through which Western medical knowledge was transmitted and acquired. Rather, an account of doctor–patient encounters at the Hackett Medical Complex clarifies the non-discursive modes of knowledge exchange that prioritized the interactions of skills, body, and instruments in translating technical know-how. As I show in this dissertation’s third part (Chapters Three and Four), missionaries created their new norms of medical practice by placing touching and handling at the center of diagnostic practice. Moreover, the apprenticeship approach and potential linguistic barrier between the missionary teachers and their Chinese students meant that a large body of knowledge passed from one to the other more by observation and imitation than by the study of books. Whereas most scholars in this field have characterized the Chinese encounter with Western science as a translation practice relying on texts, I broaden this assessment by exploring a gendered mode of knowing that emphasizes the role of clinical practice and sensory experience. My fundamental aim in this dissertation is to foreground knowledge transmission and the nature of the women doctors’ work at the level of practice, which was based mostly on their experiences and bodily labor. By focusing this history of profession-in-the-making in the multifarious exchanges between China and the West, I demonstrate how the “expertise” in women’s medicine was generated by doing—that is, by the technical dimension of the social practice of medicine

The Effects of Tai Chi Lower Extremity Movements on Balance, Functional Mobility, Ankle Proprioception, and Muscle Strength in Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to determine the comparative effectiveness of Tai Chi LEM (TC LEM) and the 8-form Tai Chi (8-form TC), relative to a stretching control group in improving balance, functional mobility, ankle proprioception, and ankle and hip muscle strength among older adults. Ninety participants (79.2 ± 6.2 years) were recruited from assisted living facilities. All participants were randomly assigned into TC LEM group (n = 29), 8-form TC group (n = 30) and stretching control group (n = 31), where they received TC LEM training, 8-form TC training, and stretching training for 16 weeks, respectively. Berg Balance Scale (BBS), Timed Up & Go (TUG) test, center of pressure (COP) measurements in quiet stance, ankle proprioception and ankle/hip strength torque were collected during pretest and posttest sessions. Non-inferiority tests were conducted to compare the change scores on the BBS and TUG test between the 2 intervention groups, respectively. Two-way ANOVAs with repeated measures were conducted to compare all the measurements before and after training among 3 groups. The upper limit of the 95% confidence interval (CI) of differences of change score of BBS (-1.0 – 1.3 points) between TC LEM group and 8-form TC group was within equivalence margins (1.8 points), while the upper limit of the 95% CI of differences of change score of TUG test (0.2 – 2.2 s) exceeded the equivalence margin (0.7 s). Significant improvements were found in BBS (P = 0.009), TUG test (P = 0.001), root mean square amplitude of COP displacement in anterior-posterior/medial-lateral directions (P = 0.001; P = 0.001), average speed of COP movement in anterior-posterior/medial-lateral directions (P = 0.001; P = 0.001), ankle proprioception (P = 0.001), ankle strength (P = 0.001; P = 0.032) and hip strength (P = 0.001) after training in the intervention groups compared to the stretching control group.TC LEM can improve balance, functional mobility, ankle proprioception, and ankle/hip muscle strength in older adults, and may have similar to better effects as the 8-form TC on improving balance and functional mobility in this age group.Doctor of Philosoph

2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium: Full Program

Full program with schedule and abstracts for the 2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2013 Summer

Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Summer 2013

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2013 Summer

Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Summer 2013

Olivet Nazarene University Annual Catalog 2023-24

https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/acaff_catalog/1095/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2016 Fall

Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Fall 2016

Music, mind and health : how community change, diagnosis, and neuro-rehabilitation can be targeted during creative tasks.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [127]-145).As a culture, we have the capacity to lead creative lives. Part of that capacity lies in how something like music can touch on just about every aspect of human thinking and experience. If music is such a pervasive phenomenon, what does it mean for the way we consider our lives in health? There are three problems with connecting the richness of music to scientifically valid clinical interventions. First, it is unclear how to provide access to something as seemingly complex as music to a diverse group of subjects with various cognitive and physical deficits. Second, it is necessary to quantify what takes place in music interactions so that causality can be attributed to what is unique to the music experience compared to motivation or attention. Finally, one must provide the structure to facilitate clinical change without losing the communicative and expressive power of music. This thesis will demonstrate how new music technologies are the ideal interfaces to address the issues of scale, assessment, and structured intervention that plague the ability to introduce creative work into healthcare environments. Additionally, we describe the first neural interface for multisensory-based physical rehabilitation, with implications for new interventions in diverse settings. This thesis demonstrates the design and implementation of devices that structure music interaction from the neural basis of rehabilitation. At the conclusion of this research, it is possible to envision an area where users are empowered during scientifically based creative tasks to compose neurological change.by Adam Boulanger.Ph.D

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data