Effectiveness of a Faith-placed Cardiovascular Health Promotion Intervention for Rural Adults

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality in the US. Further, rural US adults experience disproportionately high CVD prevalence and mortality compared to non-rural. Cardiovascular risk-reduction interventions for rural adults have shown short-term effectiveness, but long-term maintenance of outcomes remains a challenge. Faith organizations offer promise as collaborative partners for translating evidence-based interventions to reduce CVD. Methods: We adapted and implemented a collaborative, faith-placed, CVD risk-reduction intervention in rural Illinois. We used a quasi-experimental, pre-post design to compare changes in dietary and physical activity among participants. Intervention components included Heart Smart for Women (HSFW), an evidence-based program implemented weekly for 12 weeks followed by Heart Smart Maintenance (HSM), implemented monthly for two years. Participants engaged in HSFW only, HSM only, or both. We used regression and generalized estimating equations models to examine changes in outcomes after one year. Results: Among participants who completed both baseline and one-year surveys (n = 131), HSFW+HSM participants had significantly higher vegetable consumption (p = .007) and combined fruit/vegetable consumption (p = .01) compared to the HSM-only group at one year. We found no differences in physical activity. Conclusion: Improving and maintaining CVD-risk behaviors is a persistent challenge in rural populations. Advancing research to improve our understanding of effective translation of CVD risk-reduction interventions in rural populations is critical

The Association between Treatment Components and Mental Health Outcomes Among Young Children Exposed to Violence

Background: When treating violence-exposed children, clinicians often modify psychotherapy protocols or use only a subset of treatment components (e.g., a clinical technique, strategy). However, there is little evidence of the effectiveness of individual treatment components. Our study aimed to determine: i) the best fitting factor structure of individual treatment components; ii) the association of child characteristics (i.e., demographics, treatment dosage, environmental risk factors) with mental health outcomes (i.e., post-treatment internalizing and externalizing symptoms); and iii) the association of individual treatment factors (i.e., sets of treatment components) with mental health outcomes. Methods: A sample of 459 violence-exposed children aged 1.5–5 years was examined. Principal component analyses were conducted to factor-analyze 22 child treatment components and 18 caregiver treatment components, respectively. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between child and caregiver treatment factors and outcomes. Results: Children who received grief work showed significant improvement in externalizing symptoms. Children of caregivers who received parent training, attachment skills building, psychoeducation about domestic violence, safety planning, and anger management training showed significantly less externalizing symptom improvement. Gender, race/ethnicity, and treatment dosage were also associated with outcomes. Conclusion: This is the first study to examine treatment components in a sample of young children exposed to violence with a standardized quantitative measure. Our findings suggest that acknowledging children’s loss and sorrow expressed through externalizing behavior and helping them process bereavement may help alleviate their symptoms. Clinical recommendations are discussed

Children and adults : indirect attitude measurement

Includes bibliographical references (pages [87]-95).Social information processing (SIP) models of abusive parenting typically describe the cognitive activities that occur prior to, and potentially contribute to, physical child abuse. Controlled processes and automatic processes impact how different aspects of information processing combine to influence parent behavior. Automatic processes place few demands on attention and contribute to short response latencies. The activation of automatic processes without the intervention of controlled processing may account for the instantaneous, explosive physical discipline sometimes present in abusive parenting. High-risk and physically abusive, compared to nonabusive, parents are thought to either engage in more automatic processing of child-related information, or engage in similar automatic processing with less interference from controlled processing to inhibit aggressive responding. Differences between high-risk and nonabusive parents in automatic processing may involve a variety of knowledge structures. For example, some research suggests that high-risk, relative to low-risk, parents differ in the level of accessibility of automatically activated, semantically-related negative schemata. However, differences in automatically activated evaluative schemata (e.g., attitudes about children) have not yet been examined. Although research examining automatic activation of evaluative knowledge structures has not yet been examined in the child abuse literature, the concept of automatic activation of evaluative knowledge structures has been examined in studies of racial prejudice. The present study used a sequential priming procedure paired with a lexical task in which parents were instructed to make evaluative decisions about the connotation of target words to implicitly measure automatically activated attitudes toward children and adults in parents at high risk, non-risk, and low risk for physically abusive parenting behavior. Results demonstrated that parallel valence between the prime and the target facilitated response. Furthermore, the results suggested that regardless of child abuse potential, child faces, relative to adult faces, facilitated responses to negative target words. The present study replicated previous findings reported in the social cognition literature and extended previous findings reported in the child maltreatment literature. Risk status appears to moderate response latency to semantic child-related schema; however, risk status did not moderate response latency to evaluative child-related schema. Instead, facilitation to negative adjectives was significantly greater when preceded by child faces, relative to adult faces. Faces of children, relative to faces of adults, appear to activate negative information structures that facilitate evaluative decisions of negative stimuli. Therefore, risk status may moderate negative (e.g., hostile, difficult) information structures of a conceptual nature, but not negative information structures of an attitudinal nature.Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy

Cognition and parenting : belief in corporal punishment and evaluations of child transgressions in a college sample

Includes bibliographical references (pages [92]-100).M.A. (Master of Arts

The effect of homogeneity of shape on comparative judgments of relative magnitude

Figures : leaves [23]-[27]Thesis (B.S.) in Psychology--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [28]-[29])U of I OnlyTheses restricted to UIUC community onl