ABSTRACT Lauren Hamilton: Evaluation of the Sexuality & Relationships Psycho-education Program for Adolescents with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities and their Parents

The purpose of this DNP project is to evaluate an existing psycho-education program about sexuality and relationships for adolescents with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities and their parents. The clinical problem at the heart of this project is the need to address adolescent psychosexual development in the IDD population. This problem is based on the understanding that sexuality and relationships have an extensive impact on long-term holistic health and individuals with IDD confront unique challenges. Failure to satisfy psychosexual developmental needs results in increased risks and problems in the IDD population. Comprehensive sexuality education equips adolescents and their parents with the knowledge and skills to build the foundation for health and positive experiences in these areas of life. The Context, Input, Process, Product model guides the program evaluation & the alignment of DNP project goals. DNP project participants included the Sexuality & Relationships program director and co-facilitators. The program evaluation consisted of two outcome measures: an online survey and semi-structured interview, both conducted after the spring 2018 program series.Doctor of Nursing Practic

Disability as a Social Construction: Investigating How Autism is Represented in the Mainstream Media

This paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the representation of autism within a small sample of mainstream newspaper articles. The paper concludes that media, as a communicative tool, has enormous cultural power whereby the portrayal of Autism as a disability is predicated on notions of normality and underpinned by ableist ideology. Such promotion of normalcy and disability in general can serve to generate and sustain disabling barriers and oppression. This hegemonic practice therefore produces a replicative process that is detrimental to the production of social justice and equality within contemporary society and culture

Conservation of exon scrambling in human and mouse

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Biology, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-23).Exon scrambling is a phenomenon in which the exons of an mRNA transcript are spliced in an order inconsistent with that of the genome. In this thesis, I present a computational analysis of scrambled exons in human and mouse. RNA-seq data was mapped to the genome and all unaligned reads were subsequently mapped to a database of all possible exon-exon junctions. Eight conserved genes were found to undergo scrambled splicing in both species. In several cases, not only the gene was conserved, but the particular exons involved were conserved as well. Reading frame was preserved in just over half of the events, indicating that although some transcripts may be translated into protein, some may be non-functional or may play a regulatory role. The introns flanking scrambled exons were significantly longer than average, providing clues to the mechanism for this abnormal splicing pattern. The results of this study demonstrate that presence of scrambled transcripts in the cell is infrequent, but can be conserved over tens of millions of years of evolution, suggesting it has a biological function.by Monica L. Hamilton.S.M

The Social Modulation of Imitation Fidelity in School-Age Children

Children copy the actions of others with high fidelity, even when they are not causally relevant. This copying of visibly unnecessary actions is termed overimitation. Many competing theories propose mechanisms for overimitation behaviour. The present study examines these theories by studying the social factors that lead children to overimitate actions. Ninety-four children aged 5- to 8-years each completed five trials of an overimitation task. Each trial provided the opportunity to overimitate an action on familiar objects with minimal causal reasoning demands. Social cues (live or video demonstration) and eye contact from the demonstrator were manipulated. After the imitation, children's ratings of action rationality were collected. Substantial overimitation was seen which increased with age. In older children, overimitation was higher when watching a live demonstrator and when eye contact was absent. Actions rated as irrational were more likely to be imitated than those rated as rational. Children overimitated actions on familiar objects even when they rated those actions as irrational, suggesting that failure of causal reasoning cannot be driving overimitation. Our data support social explanations of overimitation and show that the influence of social factors increases with age over the 5- to 8-year-old age range

The effect of perturbation warning on attention switching abilities during dual-task performance in young and older adults

This study examined whether providing an auditory warning would facilitate attention switching abilities in older adults during dual-tasking. Fifteen young and 16 older adults performed a tracking task while recovering their balance from a support surface translation. For half of the trials, an auditory warning was presented to inform participants of the upcoming translation. Performance was quantified through electromyographic (EMG) recordings of the lower limb muscles, while the ability to switch attention between tasks was determined by tracking task error. Providing warning of an upcoming loss of balance resulted in both young and older adults increasing their leg EMG activity by 10-165% (p<0.05) in preparation for the upcoming translation. However, no differences in the timing of attention switching were observed with or without the warning (p=0.424). Together, these findings suggest that providing a perturbation warning has minimal benefits in improving attention switching abilities for balance recovery in healthy older adults

Disability as a Social Construction

This paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the representation of autism within a small sample of mainstream newspaper articles. The paper concludes that media, as a communicative tool, has enormous cultural power whereby the portrayal of Autism as a disability is predicated on notions of normality and underpinned by ableist ideology. Such promotion of normalcy and disability in general can serve to generate and sustain disabling barriers and oppression. This hegemonic practice therefore produces a replicative process that is detrimental to the production of social justice and equality within contemporary society and culture

ADHD symptoms, stress, and resilience in college students

Prior research has suggested that as the number of ADHD symptoms increase, there is also an increase in stress that the individual experiences. Prior research has also claimed that individuals with high levels of ADHD symptoms may be less resilient than others. Few prior studies have investigated the interrelationships among ADHD symptoms, stress, and resilience. The current research aimed to determine whether the number of ADHD symptoms predict stress levels and whether resilience mediates this relationship. As prior research has observed sex differences in ADHD symptoms and resilience, the present research also examined whether sex moderated the mediation. In a survey, we assessed ADHD symptoms, perceived stress, and resilience for 558 college students (175 males, 383 females). The results indicated that each of the four subcomponents of resilience (social skills, social support, goal efficacy, planning and prioritizing behaviors) mediated the relationship between ADHD symptoms and stress. There was no evidence that these relationships differed for men and women, as analyses testing whether participants sex moderated these mediation relationships revealed no significant results. These results add insight into individual differences in the experience of stress in college students. Implications for increasing resilience in college students and lowering stress for college students are discussed

Lineage tracing of Foxd1-expressing embryonic progenitors to assess the role of divergent embryonic lineages on adult dermal fibroblast function

Recent studies have highlighted the functional diversity of dermal fibroblast populations in health and disease, with part of this diversity linked to fibroblast lineage and embryonic origin. Fibroblasts derived from foxd1-expressing progenitors contribute to the myofibroblast populations present in lung and kidney fibrosis in mice but have not been investigated in the context of dermal wound repair. Using a Cre/Lox system to genetically track populations derived from foxd1-expressing progenitors, lineage-positive fibroblasts were identified as a subset of the dermal fibroblast population. During development, lineage-positive cells were most abundant within the dorsal embryonic tissues, contributing to the developing dermal fibroblast population, and remaining in this niche into adulthood. In adult mice, assessment of fibrosis-related gene expression in lineage-positive and lineage-negative populations isolated from wounded and unwounded dorsal skin was performed, identifying an enrichment of transcripts associated with matrix synthesis and remodeling in the lineage-positive populations. Using a novel excisional wound model, ventral skin healed with a greatly reduced frequency of foxd1 lineage-positive cells. This work supports that the embryonic origin of fibroblasts is an important predictor of fibroblast function, but also highlights that within disparate regions, fibroblasts of different lineages likely undergo convergent differentiation contributing to phenotypic similarities

An Analysis of Gender Pay Disparity in the Nonprofit Sector: An Outcome of Labor Motivation or Gendered Jobs?

Although pay differences between men and women with comparable characteristics are generally smaller in the nonprofit than in the for-profit sector, gender pay gaps in the nonprofit sector vary widely across industries. In some industries, gender pay gaps are as large as in the for-profit sector, but in others, women make more than comparably qualified men. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling on the combined 2001-2006 American Community Surveys, we test nonprofit labor motivation theories against a gendered-job hypothesis to explain this variation. We find that gender pay gaps in the nonprofit sector are smaller in industries where nonprofits outnumber for-profits and where higher proportions of female-dominated occupations exist