Woman of War: Scoring to Captain Marvel

Woman of War is a final project that sought to reflect my challenges, dreams, as well as establishing a sense of who I am as a composer. As an indecisive individual whom grew from two different cultures, (American and Chinese) I wanted to find a piece that truly identifies who I was. The project is a reflection of what I have learned from Berklee College of Music in mixture with my childhood dreams of being able to write for Superheroes in the near future. This thesis explains my entire process from inspiration, to theme, and finally to screen. In addition, I included an analysis on the similarities between my source of inspiration, how the music reflects through film, and an layered orchestration analysis.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-scoring/1127/thumbnail.jp

Motivation and Effort in Individuals with Social Anhedonia

The current study sought to better understand differences in motivation and effort in individuals with social anhedonia. Social anhedonia is a core negative symptom and one of the strongest predictors for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Because current research examining motivation and effort deficits has focused on self-report questionnaires and behavioral tasks, little is known about possible underlying mechanisms of social anhedonia. Thus, the current study examined effortful decision making (monetary reward task) and physiological measures of effort mobilization (cardiovascular reactivity) and investigated whether findings were specific to social anhedonia or were shared with positive symptoms of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (e.g., perceptual aberrations and magical ideation, together referred to as `PerMag') and healthy controls. Results indicated that elevated social anhedonia was related to more effortful decision making in the context of uncertain probability of reward, but there were no group differences with respect to physiological measures of effort

Mental Illness Prevention: Exploring Effective Coping Strategies for School-Aged Children

Anxiety Disorders are the most prevalent mental illnesses in Western society, affecting the population in multiple ways. Onset for many anxiety disorders is as early as childhood or adolescence. The earlier the onset, the more chronic or severe it may be; it is important to focus on preventing anxiety disorders before they are developed. Research has shown that adaptive coping strategies can work as a mediator between stress and mental health. The current study explored effective coping strategies for young children in the general population, in an effort to further expand our knowledge about coping in children, and increase the applicability of these coping strategies in real-world settings. Children between five and ten years of age participated in training sessions where one of three types of coping strategies was taught using a therapeutic board game: relaxation, positive self-talk, and coping behaviors. Children’s coping abilities were assessed using the Self Report Coping Scale (SRCS) before and after the training sessions occurred. Results revealed that the majority of children used coping behavior types of strategies prior to being trained on new adaptive coping methods, and adopted coping behavior strategies more easily than relaxation or self-talk techniques. Comparisons of the SRCS scores after the training sessions to the SRCS assessment conducted prior to the training revealed that males and females were influenced differently by participation in the training: females increased, and males decreased the likelihood of using certain coping strategies. Future research is needed to continue exploring how gender, and type of coping strategy taught, influence the likelihood that children will adopt new adaptive coping strategies. This vital information will help educators, therapists, and parents to prevent or decrease anxiety in young children

Finding predominant word senses in untagged text

In word sense disambiguation (WSD), the heuristic of choosing the most common sense is extremely powerful because the distribution of the senses of a word is often skewed. The problem with using the predominant, or first sense heuristic, aside from the fact that it does not take surrounding context into account, is that it assumes some quantity of handtagged data. Whilst there are a few hand-tagged corpora available for some languages, one would expect the frequency distribution of the senses of words, particularly topical words, to depend on the genre and domain of the text under consideration. We present work on the use of a thesaurus acquired from raw textual corpora and the WordNet similarity package to find predominant noun senses automatically. The acquired predominant senses give a precision of 64% on the nouns of the SENSEVAL- 2 English all-words task. This is a very promising result given that our method does not require any hand-tagged text, such as SemCor. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method discovers appropriate predominant senses for words from two domainspecific corpora

An exploratory investigation of the appreciation of humor and hostile wit among adolescents with emphasis on psychoanalytic conceptualization.

EducationDoctor of Education (Ed.D.

Contracting for Coordination of Behavioral Health Services in Privatized Child Welfare and Medicaid Managed Care

This study examined coordination between privatized child welfare initiatives and Medicaid managed care systems for the delivery of behavioral health care services for children and families in the child welfare system. Specific objectives: 1) to assess how states expectations as embodied in their contract documents are actually happening during program implementation; and 2) to identify promising approaches for delivery of coordinated behavioral health care services and contracting that can be shared with other stakeholders. The goal was to highlight the real world experiences and lessons learned that others may draw upon when designing and implementing similar contracts for systems of care

Using Healthcare Data in Embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials among People Living with Dementia and Their Caregivers: State of the Art

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156003/1/jgs16617_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156003/2/jgs16617.pd

Under Pressure: Employee Work Stress, Supervisory Mentoring Support, and Employee Career Success

Despite consistent findings that stressed employees benefit from social support, these employees do not always have access to such support. We propose and test a conceptual model suggesting employee work stress will negatively affect supervisory career and psychosocial mentoring support. Drawing from social exchange theory, we predict this will indirectly affect employee career success (lower career satisfaction and promotability ratings, fewer promotions), and that the relationship between employee work stress and lower supervisory mentoring support can be explained by lower levels of work engagement experienced by, and attributed to, stressed employees. We tested our model across three studies. In Study 1, we collected four waves of multisource field data (254 employees, 127 managers, and company records) at a large postal organization in the United Kingdom (UK). Employee work stress was negatively related to supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring support, and indirectly affected career satisfaction and manager promotability ratings of employees via supervisor career mentoring support. Cross-lagged panel analyses in a supplemental study additionally supported the proposed directionality of relationships. Study 2 included data across three waves from employees in Hong Kong (n = 137) and showed that employee work stress had indirect effects on supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring via lower employee engagement. In Study 3, using data from supervisors in the UK (n = 240) we showed that supervisor perceived employee stress had indirect effects on their provision of supervisor career and psychosocial mentoring support via lower perceived employee engagement

Estimating rainfall and water balance over the Okavango River Basin for hydrological applications

A historical database for use in rainfall-runoff modeling of the Okavango River Basin in Southwest Africa is presented. The work has relevance for similar data-sparse regions. The parameters of main concern are rainfall and catchment water balance which are key variables for subsequent studies of the hydrological impacts of development and climate change. Rainfall estimates are based on a combination of in-situ gauges and satellite sources. Rain gauge measurements are most extensive from 1955 to 1972, after which they are drastically reduced due to the Angolan civil war. The sensitivity of the rainfall fields to spatial interpolation techniques and the density of gauges was evaluated. Satellite based rainfall estimates for the basin are developed for the period from 1991 onwards, based on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) data sets. The consistency between the gauges and satellite estimates was considered. A methodology was developed to allow calibration of the rainfall-runoff hydrological model against rain gauge data from 1960-1972, with the prerequisite that the model should be driven by satellite derived rainfall products for the 1990s onwards. With the rain gauge data, addition of a single rainfall station (Longa) in regions where stations earlier were lacking was more important than the chosen interpolation method. Comparison of satellite and gauge rainfall outside the basin indicated that the satellite overestimates rainfall by 20%. A non-linear correction was derived used by fitting the rainfall frequency characteristics to those of the historical rainfall data. This satellite rainfall dataset was found satisfactory when using the Pitman rainfall-runoff model (Hughes et al., this issue). Intensive monitoring in the region is recommended to increase accuracy of the comprehensive satellite rainfall estimate calibration procedur