Alcohol Use and Emotion Dysregulation in Adolescence

Underage drinking is a serious public health concern with magnified physical and psychological risks for adolescents. Consequences can include impaired judgement, increased risk for alcohol problems later in life, increased risk of physical and sexual assault, interference with brain development, injuries, and death (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2021). In a 2019 survey, 29% of high school students reported drinking alcohol in the past 30 days (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Given the high rates of use and adverse effects associated with adolescent substance use, research on risk factors related to alcohol use among this age group is critical. Previous research suggests that emotion dysregulation is one factor linked to substance use (Gross, 2014). However, a majority of these studies included adult or college populations with very few studies examining the connection between emotion dysregulation and alcohol use in adolescence. Moreover, most studies utilized cross-sectional designs. The present study aimed to longitudinally examine the links between emotion dysregulation and alcohol use among adolescents by assessing the role of emotion dysregulation and its subscales in adolescent alcohol use and problems over time. Participants were 695 high school students, with 309 students having completed Time 2 data collection. Results indicated that adolescents with more emotion regulation difficulties were more likely to endorse greater baseline alcohol use and problems. However, greater emotion regulation difficulties did not significantly predict future alcohol use and problems six months later. Concerning the emotion dysregulation subscales, results indicated that adolescents who reported greater impulse control difficulties at baseline were more likely to endorse greater baseline alcohol use and problems, and that adolescents who reported low emotional awareness at baseline were more likely to endorse greater alcohol use and problems at the six-month follow-up. These findings can be used to better inform substance use prevention and intervention efforts in high schools. Future research should examine if emotion dysregulation plays a role in other substance use behaviors commonly endorsed by high school students, such as cannabis use and simultaneous use of alcohol and cannabis

Age Differences in Attentional Capture Effects of Emotional Faces

Sustained attention is necessary to accurately complete cognitive tasks. However, sustained attention can often be disrupted by distracting information. When distractors contain emotional content, past research suggests that they might attract attention. The rapid detection of emotional information is important in everyday life because emotion often emerges in social interaction, including unpleasant interactions where others might pose a threat. The attentional capture effects of emotional faces were explored by inserting them into a visual search task that included differing levels of perceptual load. Twenty-five younger adults and twenty older adults identified target letters in standard trials containing distracting elements, but also identified target letters in attentional capture trials in which images of neutral, angry, and happy facial expressions were added to naturally attract one’s attention. Response times and accuracies were measured. In both age groups, incompatible distractors that competed with the response to the target reduced accuracy relative to neutral distractors or distractors that were compatible with the response to the target. This pattern emerged both when the display was sparse and when it contained many distractors. Additionally, response times were influenced by the perceptual load on the display, with larger set sizes leading to longer response times. Attention capture effects emerged for both age groups such that participants responded faster on trials with face distractors than those with letters, suggesting that faces potentiated attentional deployment instead of disrupting it. Interestingly, under high perceptual loads, more positive face distractors were associated with higher accuracy for older adults which is partly consistent with an age-related positivity effect

The Relationship between Teacher Training Institutions and Student Performance

This study intends to contribute to the literature by seeking evidence of a relationship between teacher characteristics and their high school students’ academic success in college. In this study, average college success is defined by six outcomes. The outcomes consist of the average first-year college GPA, average hours completed, percentage of students returning for a second year, percent of students receiving a GPA above a 3.0, percent of students completing 30 plus hours in their first year, and the average college math GPA. The analysis uses aggregated data at the school level from both the 2013 Kentucky High School Feedback Reports and the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core Data set. There are two research questions that this study attempts to address. First, the research attempts to assess whether a high school’s concentration of teachers from particular Kentucky training programs has a significant effect on the average college success of the high school’s graduates. The second research question seeks to evaluate whether or not variability among teacher training institutions in a high school will have an impact on the average high school students’ college success. The study found that few teacher training institutions mattered in the regression equations, but Alice Lloyd was notably significant in many cases. Additionally, college readiness, financial variables, and high schools located in Appalachia were control variables that were consistently significant in the models. Lastly, the study found that if there is a decrease in teacher training share (meaning an increase in the diversity of teacher training programs represented in the school) then there will be an increase in the dependent variables indicating successful college performance

“Pythagoras or Charlatan”: Mystery-making in Gurdjieff’s 1924 Demonstrations

G.I. Gurdjieff, founder of the esoteric movement known as “The Fourth Way,” has long confounded his observers, pupils, and scholars of his life and work. This paper explores how Gurdjieff’s performative ambiguity in public self-presentations has contributed to the sense of mystery surrounding his identity and motivations as a spiritual teacher. To examine Gurdjieff’s performativity in the context of one of its most formative historical cases, my work considers his often-overlooked visit to America in 1924, when he and twenty-three of his pupils arrived from France to perform “demonstrations” of sacred dances, music, and “tricks, half-tricks, and real supernatural phenomena” for audiences in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Revisiting primary sources from the 1924 tour alongside historical studies on religion, Orientalism, popular science, and stage magic in early twentieth-century America provides evidence to suggest that Gurdjieff’s mysterious persona was a product of his own self-fashioning, an identity that he developed as a means of inviting skepticism and debate. This analysis suggests we may reconceive Gurdjieff’s public performativity as ritualized mystery-making, constituting a provocative invitation to engage in Fourth Way praxis

Religious Dynamics of Secrecy in Cold War American Life

“Religious Dynamics of Secrecy in Cold War American Life,” explores the role religion has played in conceptualizations, imaginations, and rituals of secrecy in twentieth-century American history. I examine these articulations of secrecy and religion in two case studies from the 1950s and mid-1970s, which highlight how Americans have recruited the language and conceptual schema of religion to convey the gravity and internal logic of secrecy, as well as to negotiate the limits of its acceptability in American democracy. In so doing, I demonstrate how secrecy is not only a matter for religion, but also a matter of religion. My first case study addresses the entanglement of secrecy and religion in Cold War constructions of “brainwashing.” I take as my starting point the influential representation of brainwashing found in Richard Condon’s classic 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate. I then trace the history of this icon of Cold War popular culture to its origins in the U.S. intelligence community following the scandalous false confessions of bacteriological warfare issued by American POWs in the Korean War. In addition to traditional historical analysis, I aim to shed new light on the relevance of religion in early Cold War American culture and politics by redeploying the ancient politico-religious category of maleficium as a framework to highlight brainwashing’s early associations with diabolical magic, secret influence, and perceived transgressions of normative gender roles and sexuality. Through these historical and cultural analyses, I situate the history of brainwashing at the nexus of Cold War religion and politics, illuminating the religious significance of fears and fantasies of secret influence in the spheres of domestic life and foreign policy. My second case study examines debates surrounding the expanding national security state through close attention to the 1971-1973 Pentagon Papers trial, in which co-defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were indicted on espionage charges for conspiring to leak classified documents pertaining to the Vietnam War. Here, I focus on material manifestations of “sacred” national secrets, from official prohibitions against their disclosure to the spectacle of their presentation throughout the course of the trial. In this case, I build on a courtroom reporter’s reflection on the striking significance of an otherwise everyday object—namely, a cardboard box. This, of course, was no ordinary box, but rather a vessel containing the TOP-SECRET documents known colloquially as the “Pentagon Papers.” This reporter’s description rendered this ordinary cardboard box an emblem with religious significance: a “totem of the age of information.” Using this courtroom description as an entry point into a wider analysis of Cold War religion and politics, I demonstrate the analytical import of ascriptions of sacred value to classified information. This material analysis of religion provides a new avenue for re-examining the sacred significance attributed to state secrets, bringing into focus the socio-cultural meanings underpinning and shaping the politics of secrecy in American history. In my concluding epilogue, I address the legacy of these Cold War developments in contemporary American politics in view of recent speculations surrounding the impending rise of a “New Cold War.” As this study will demonstrate, exploring the origins and historical transformations of these Cold War entanglements of secrecy, religion, and politics can provide a new lens onto current manifestations of these entanglements in the press headlines and cultural debates shaping American society today

Analysis Algorithm for Sky Type and Ice Halo Recognition in All-Sky Images

Halo displays, in particular the 22∘ halo, have been captured in long time series of images obtained from total sky imagers (TSIs) at various Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) sites. Halo displays form if smooth-faced hexagonal ice crystals are present in the optical path. We describe an image analysis algorithm for long time series of TSI images which scores images with respect to the presence of 22∘ halos. Each image is assigned an ice halo score (IHS) for 22∘ halos, as well as a photographic sky type (PST), which differentiates cirrostratus (PST-CS), partially cloudy (PST-PCL), cloudy (PST-CLD), or clear (PST-CLR) within a near-solar image analysis area. The color-resolved radial brightness behavior of the near-solar region is used to define the discriminant properties used to classify photographic sky type and assign an ice halo score. The scoring is based on the tools of multivariate Gaussian analysis applied to a standardized sun-centered image produced from the raw TSI image, following a series of calibrations, rotation, and coordinate transformation. The algorithm is trained based on a training set for each class of images. We present test results on halo observations and photographic sky type for the first 4 months of the year 2018, for TSI images obtained at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) ARM site. A detailed comparison of visual and algorithm scores for the month of March 2018 shows that the algorithm is about 90 % reliable in discriminating the four photographic sky types and identifies 86 % of all visual halos correctly. Numerous instances of halo appearances were identified for the period January through April 2018, with persistence times between 5 and 220 min. Varying by month, we found that between 9 % and 22 % of cirrostratus skies exhibited a full or partial 22∘ halo

African American Urban Female Students' Perceptions of Social Factors Impacting Their Academic Achievement in One Public School District

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of social factors affecting the academic achievement of secondary African American urban (AAU) female students in an urban school district. This study determined whether the AAU females in this study perceived the social factors in the literature review to impact their academic achievement, the relationship between those social factors and academic achievement, and the differences in academic achievement by socioeconomic status. One hundred fifty-eight (158) AAU female students from three high schools in one urban district located in southeast Texas participated in this study. A self-generated 51-item questionnaire (Students' Perceptions of Social Factors Affecting Academic Achievement in Urban Schools) was used to collect data for this study. There were three major results in the study. First, there were not any significant factors impacting the academic achievement of AAU females; secondly, AAU females did not perceive any social factors as significantly affecting their academic achievement; and finally, there were not any statistical differences between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Specifically, the results did not reveal a difference between AAU 12th grade female students on free and reduced lunch and those not on free and reduced lunch in terms of academic performance

Rural Redemption: A Model to Help Understand the Perspectives of Rural Americans Related to Vaccine Science

Rural communities are vital to the foundation of American agriculture and are currently disproportionately affected by health and environmental challenges that will require broad scientific solutions. Cooperative Extension professionals and agricultural communicators are increasingly tasked with communicating about the science surrounding these topics and need effective tools for determining strategic communication tactics to influence personal behaviors. The purpose of this study was to understand the role of community-based social marketing (CBSM) concepts and trust in science on rural Americans’ intentions and attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine. A hypothesized model was developed that included concepts of CBSM, trust in science, intentions, and attitudes all related to the COVID-19 vaccine. Results showed that CBSM principles had significant explanatory power for predicting intentions to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. CBSM and trust in science were also significant predictors of rural Americans attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine. Implications for this study reveal a need for future research and practice related to communicating about science and vaccines to rural Americans while building community-based principles for increasing trust and advancing perceptions of science. Future research should determine the impact of CBSM and trust in science on the end-state behavior of receiving the vaccine. Additionally, Extension professionals and agricultural communicators should prioritize CBSM concepts when developing programming and messages related to health behaviors

Effect of Glucogenic Feed Additive on Reproductive Performance in Young Postpartum Range Cows

Performance of young March-Calving range cows receiving a protein supplement with the addition of either monensin or propionate salt were compared to evaluate the effect of feed additive on overall production in the postpartum stage. cow body weight and body condition were not impacted by postpartum supplementation throughout the study. Calf body weights were not impacted by type of feed additive at birth, weaning, or 205-d. Twenty-four-hour milk production was not impacted by the type of feed additive. Conception rates for cows receiving postpartum supplementation containing propionate salt were greater than cows receiving monsensin. This implies that the addition of propionate salt when supplementing young range cows in the postpartum period can increase pregnancy rate resulting in an increase in marginal revenue compared to cows fed monensin

Does Gambling-Focused Treatment Affect Mental Health and Quality of Life? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract: Cognitive-behavioral (CB) techniques have received substantial empirical support for reducing gambling disorder symptoms and behavior. What has not been established is whether gambling-focused treatment reduces psychological problems and improves quality of life. Individuals experiencing gambling-related harms report that sustained recovery involves changing both gambling behaviors and psychological problems and building a meaningful life. The current systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to examine the effect of CB techniques targeting gambling harms on nontargeted outcomes such as psychological problems and quality of life. Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic article search was conducted to locate published studies of randomized controlled trials of CB techniques targeting gambling harms and reporting nontargeted outcomes. Random effects meta-analysis was used to quantify the effect of CB techniques on nontargeted outcomes. Ten studies representing 797 participants were included. Eight studies reported the effect of CB techniques on anxiety, 8 on depression, 3 on substance use, and 7 on quality of life. CB techniques significantly reduced anxiety (g = -0.44), depression (g = -0.35), gambling frequency (g = -0.30), and gambling intensity (g = -0.36) at posttreatment, but not substance use. CB techniques also significantly improved quality of life (g = 0.39) at posttreatment. Implications: The targeted reduction of gambling harms may serve as a mechanism of change for reducing psychological problems and improving quality of life. Future studies should employ longitudinal designs to understand the associations between gambling reductions and changes in nontargeted recovery outcomes over time