College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item The Portrayal of Anger and Anger Management in Children's Picture Books(2024) Hernandez, Ilcia; Teglasi, Hedwig; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through a comprehensive analysis of a sample of 80 children’s picture books, this study highlights the importance of embedding language to describe anger experiences and elements of social information processing (SIP) within stories to enhance young children’s understanding of anger arousal within themselves and others, as well as of anger management strategies. This study identified anger-eliciting situations, physiological and behavioral reactions, coping strategies proposed by helpers or the main character, along with other themes related to emotion socialization within the books. The current study identifies gaps in the portrayal of SIP mechanisms within stories, which underscores a need to emphasize the role of emotion dysregulation and of SIP biases during interpersonal conflicts as it is critical to foster regulation, reappraisal, and problem-solving skills among readers. The depiction of anger arousal and its escalation, predominantly through illustrations, is explored, along with implications for emotion understanding and cultural considerations of emotion expression. Picture book stories convey beliefs and values about anger by normalizing the emotion while promoting constructive regulation and expression through addressing the arousal in the body, delaying reactive responses, and using cognitive coping strategies. Overall, the current study has implications for caregivers and clinicians, in that becoming aware of how anger experiences are portrayed in picture books can aid in book selection based on a match with an individual child’s experiences and temperament to maximize its use as a tool for social-emotional learning and anger management in young children.Item SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL ALIGNMENT DURING NATURALISTIC CONVERSATIONS AMONGST AFRICAN AMERICAN PARENTS OF 4-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN FROM PROFESSIONAL- AND WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES(2023) Ogbonna, Chidinma; Bernstein Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Parents play an important role when it comes to child language development. This study examines differences in lexical and syntactic alignment, in child-directed speech (CDS), between African American mothers and fathers from the professional- and working-class. The Hall (1984) corpus from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 1991) was used to analyze syntactic and lexical alignment in African American professional- and working-class parent-child dyads (children aged 4;6). We investigated the proportion of overlapping nouns shared between mother-child and father-child dyads, as well as differences between parent-child syntactic complexity scores (i.e., Mean Length of Utterance-words (MLU-w), and Verbs per Utterance (Verbs/utt). Results revealed there to be no significant differences regarding lexical and syntactic alignment between the professional- and working-class families; however, fathers were found to produce a significantly higher average proportion of overlapping nouns compared to mothers.Item THE EFFECTS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ON BYSTANDER BEHAVIOR AND OUTCOMES: THE BULLYING LITERATURE PROJECT(2019) Scott, Arianna Lakeisha Lashley; Wang, Cixin; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional approaches to bullying intervention focus on the bully-victim dyad. However, research indicates that bullying is a group phenomenon and often occurs in the presence of peer witnesses. Bystanders are uniquely situated to either deter or facilitate the social power play that can underlie bullying behavior. Specifically, individuals who bully others may be motivated by a desire to gain (or maintain) high status among their peers. Bystander-based bullying interventions are able to exploit this by directly targeting social components that reward and maintain bullying behavior, such as peer support of bullying, thereby disrupting the social feedback cycle involved in perpetration. However, bystander-based bullying interventions for elementary students pose a unique set of challenges in terms of fostering the awareness of bullying, social thinking, and cognitive-emotional skills that are necessary for positive bystander action. Children’s literature is a promising medium to facilitate elementary-aged students’ access to social-emotional knowledge, skills, and behavioral change. This study sought to add to the theoretical research base of bystander behavior using a majority-Hispanic sample to investigate the relationships between several theoretically-linked bystander-related variables and determine predictors of positive bystander behavior. Secondly, this study investigated the effectiveness of a literature-based, bystander-targeted, bullying intervention (the Bullying Literature Project) on children’s bystander behavior, attitudes towards bullying, prosocial behaviors, peer friendships, and victimization. Finally, potential moderators of the intervention on bystander behavior were investigated. Results revealed differences across grade and gender for select variables of interest, identified anti-bullying attitudes and victimization as significant predictors of positive bystander behavior, and identified a small, negative correlation between peer friendship and victimization, among other significant correlations. Main results revealed the Bullying Literature Project increased positive bystander behavior (small effect size) and teacher-rated prosocial behavior (large effect size), compared to the wait-list-control group, in a subset of the dataset. No moderation effects involving gender, peer friendship, or anti-bullying attitudes were found. Discussion and future directions of bystander-based bullying interventions are reviewed.Item PRESCHOOLERS' WORD LEARNING DURING SHARED STORYBOOK READING INTERACTIONS AND CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY INTERVENTION(2014) O'Fallon, Maura Kathleen; Newman, Rochelle; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous research shows that shared storybook reading interactions can function as effective speech and language interventions for young children, helping to improve a variety of skills--including word learning. This study sought to investigate the potential benefits of elaboration of new words during a single storybook reading with preschoolers. Children were read a storybook containing novel words that were either elaborated with a definition, repeated twice, or only said once. Their word learning for these novel words was then evaluated, and compared across levels of elaboration. Results showed that preschoolers could successfully learn new words during a single storybook reading interaction with an adult. Further analyses found that their learning was most robust when words were repeated twice, rather than elaborated or only said once. These results support the use of storybook reading with children during language interventions, and highlight the importance of repeated exposure to novel material.Item An Experimental Study Of Mentoring Practices In An America Reads Program: Measures of Intervention Fidelity And Implementation(2013) Nelson, Janaiha Faith; Gottfredson, Gary D; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The America Reads (AR) program at the University of Maryland serves approximately 350 local elementary school students per semester, and trains undergraduate tutors to teach reading using techniques drawn from Reading Recovery methods. Previous research implies that the implementation of interventions should be evaluated prior to gauging their effectiveness. The present study assessed aspects of program implementation for America Reads at the University of Maryland. In addition, it examined the efficacy of a self-monitoring and corrective feedback procedure for improving level of implementation. AR tutors were randomly assigned to the experimental self-monitoring and feedback procedure or to usual and customary monitoring to assess the effects on mentor implementation. Controlling for school assignment, the effect of this self-monitoring and feedback procedure on mentors' self-reported level of implementation was not significant in the small sample of mentors. Descriptive results including information about the effectiveness and utility of existing procedures for monitoring program implementation, and tutor training have a number of implications for strengthening the Maryland realization of AR; they have implications for the use of monitoring and feedback in the design of similar educational service programs.Item TOWARDS A BETTTER UNDERSTANDING OF FOREST CHANGE PROCESSES IN THE CONTIGUOUS U.S.(2012) Schleeweis, Karen; Goward, Samuel N.; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Estimates of forest canopy areal extent, configuration and change have been developed from satellite based imagery and ground based inventories to improve understanding of forest dynamics and how they interact with other earth systems across many scales. The number of these types of studies has grown in recent years. Yet, few have assessed the multiple change processes underlying observed forest canopy dynamics across large spatio-temporal extents. To support these types of assessments, a more detailed and integrated understanding of the geographic patterns of the multiple forest change processes across the contiguous US (CONUS) is needed. This study examined a novel data set from the North American Forest dynamics (NAFD) project that provides a dense temporal record (1984-2005) of forest canopy history across the U.S., United States Forest Service (USFS) ground inventory data, and ancillary geospatial data sets on forest change processes (wind, insect, fire, harvest and conversion to suburban/urban land uses) across the CONUS to develop a more robust understanding of the implications of the shifting dynamics of forest change processes and our ability to measure their effect on forest canopy dynamics. A geodatabase of forest change processes was created to support synoptic and specific quantitative analysis of change processes support through space and time. Using the geodatabase, patterns of forest canopy losses from NAFD and USFS data and the underlying causal process were analyzed across multiple scales. This research has shown that the overlap of multiple disturbance processes leads to complex patterns across the nation's forested landscape that can only be fully understood in relation to forest canopy losses at fine scales. Regional statistics confounded the direction and magnitude of forest canopy loss from multiple change processes operating on the landscape. Data gaps and uncertainty associated with process data prevent a full quantitative analysis of the proportion of forest area affected by each forest change process considered here. Fine scale data were critical for interpreting the highly variable NAFD canopy change observations and their ability to capture the continuously changing spatial and temporal characteristics of forest change processes across the CONUS.