Perfectly Alone (and Anxious): A Test of the Perfectionism Social Disconnection Model in Adolescents

Perfectionism contributes to psychopathology in youth. Yet, little research has examined the pathways that may explicate why perfectionism is a risk factor for poorer outcomes, particularly among youth. Consequently, in this program of research I examined associations between trait dimensions of perfectionism (i.e., perfectionistic strivings and concerns) and anxiety within the framework of the Perfectionism Social Disconnection Model (PSDM). In Study 1, I tested whether perfectionistic strivings and concerns (as measured by the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised; Slaney et al., 2001) were related to adolescent-reported and mother-reported anxiety via social disconnection in a high-risk sample of adolescents. Social disconnection was assessed as a latent variable comprised of three indicators: relational victimization, school connectedness, and parental acceptance. Overall, results indicated that perfectionistic concerns were related to higher levels of adolescent-reported anxiety and that social disconnection emerged as an explanatory pathway linking higher levels of perfectionistic concerns to higher levels of adolescent-reported anxiety. In Study 2, I tested whether perfectionistic strivings and concerns (as measured by the Child and Adolescent Perfectionism Scale; Flett et al., 2001) were related to adolescent-reported anxiety in a community sample of adolescents via social disconnection. For Study 2, I used a more comprehensive latent variable for social disconnection that was comprised of four indicators: relational victimization, school connectedness, parental acceptance, and subjective loneliness. Replicating the findings from Study 1, social disconnection again emerged as an explanatory pathway linking higher levels of perfectionistic concerns to higher levels of adolescent-reported anxiety. These findings support the PSDM in youth, raise important questions about the link between perfectionism and social functioning, and have implications for prevention and intervention development

Improving Economy and Efficiency in Federal Contracting

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Degeneracy between mass and spin in black-hole-binary waveforms

We explore the degeneracy between mass and spin in gravitational waveforms emitted by black-hole binary coalescences. We focus on spin-aligned waveforms and obtain our results using phenomenological models that were tuned to numerical-relativity simulations. A degeneracy is known for low-mass binaries (particularly neutron-star binaries), where gravitational-wave detectors are sensitive to only the inspiral phase, and the waveform can be modelled by post-Newtonian theory. Here, we consider black-hole binaries, where detectors will also be sensitive to the merger and ringdown, and demonstrate that the degeneracy persists across a broad mass range. At low masses, the degeneracy is between mass ratio and total spin, with chirp mass accurately determined. At higher masses, the degeneracy persists but is not so clearly characterised by constant chirp mass as the merger and ringdown become more significant. We consider the importance of this degeneracy both for performing searches (including searches where only non-spinning templates are used) and in parameter extraction from observed systems. We compare observational capabilities between the early (~2015) and final (2018 onwards) versions of the Advanced LIGO detector.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Non-viral transfection efficiencies for the advancement of CAR-T therapy.

Leukemias are the most common form of childhood cancer making up 30% of total pediatric oncological cases, and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) makes up a significant portion (12%) of the total pediatric cancer diagnoses. In 2017, the FDA approved a successful immunotherapy called CAR-T therapy for the treatment of pediatric B-cell ALL. This therapy includes a CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) that is loaded into the T-cell and expressed. Currently, the loading of the CAR utilizes viral transduction, but consistency issues lead to adverse symptoms in the patients. Better methods of transduction/transfection are being studied in order to improve these consistency concerns. In this thesis, the efficiency of sonoporation as a non-viral method of transfection was assessed. Fluorescein was loaded as a fluorescent model molecule for beginning understanding of the sonoporation efficiency. It was found that by using sonoporation over electroporation for the uptake of fluorescein, the efficiency is improved by 34%. When sonoporation was used for the transfection of GFP plasmid, the same increase was not proven. This leads to the conclusion that without further optimization, sonoporation is successful at loading small molecule such as fluorescein but not those as large as plasmids. With optimization, sonoporation could eventually be used as a non-viral method to transfect T-cells with CARs for CAR-T therapy and the treatment of ALL in both children and adults

Representations of health and wellness in children\u27s literature

The term health is multifaceted. Health can refer to one’s physical, spiritual, or mental state, among other things. The goal of this study was to determine how educators can use children’s literature to support students being introduced to healthy habits regarding these aspects at a young age, through children’s literature. A content analysis was conducted over a selection of 16 children’s literature texts. It was organized by thematic categories matching the aforementioned facets of health and assessed through a Likert scale. This analysis resulted in the development of a website intended to serve as a tool for teachers to implement literacy-integrated health education in the classroom. Major themes that were found in this study were the seemingly higher number of books available in physical health than compared to books available in spiritual and mental health, the lack of diversity within the books selected, and the need for nonfiction books regarding mental and spiritual health. The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze children’s literature that addresses aspects of health and wellness. It is important to teach health literacy through children’s literature to ensure better prolonged health benefits across the spectrum—physical, mental, spiritual, etc

Brains Without Money: Poverty as Disabling

The United States has long treated poverty and disability as separate legal and social categories, a division grounded in widespread assumptions about the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In the case of disability, individuals generally are not thought to be morally responsible for their disadvantage, whereas in the case of poverty, individuals are assumed to be at fault for their disadvantage and are therefore less deserving of aid. This Article argues that recent advances in brain and behavioral science undermine the factual basis for those assumptions. Poverty inhibits brain development during childhood and, later in life, adversely affects cognitive capacities that are key to decision-making and long-term planning. The science of scarcity is complex and ongoing, but its most basic finding is quickly approaching consensus: poverty’s effects in the brain can be disabling. This Article argues that understanding poverty as disabling has potentially significant implications for policy and doctrine. Viewing poverty as disabling would provide support for poverty programs with less sludge and more money: proposals such as universal basic income, negative income tax, child grants, and greatly simplified benefits determinations. It also reanimates insertion of social welfare concerns into the dominant civil rights framework for disability policy, and it could resolve longstanding tensions between disjointed federal disability laws. In addition, brain and behavioral science may support litigation strategies to compel accessibility to existing systems and potentially help promote a new public understanding of the causes of poverty. The Article concludes by considering the potential (and significant) downsides of using the lens of science in service of policy: backlash, misunderstanding, and the fragility of relying on nascent science to support fundamentally normative policy goals. One necessary mitigation strategy involves the careful translation of science, including its limitations and residual uncertainties, into legal scholarship, an approach this Article attempts to both articulate and model