An emerging literature base suggests that symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) persist beyond adolescence and are associated with unique psychosocial impairment for adult populations. The purpose of this study is to examine the clinical characteristics of ODD symptoms in a young adult population. Three-hundred and five young adult…

Substance use disorders are considered externalizing disorders, defined by anti-social and impulsive behavior, as opposed to internalizing disorders, defined by anxious and depressive thinking; however, that strict binary is increasingly untenable. In this dissertation, I evaluate the co-development of internalizing and externalizing symptoms…

Computer programming is a difficult undertaking for novices, requiring a lot of patience and persistence. Hence, in a programming class, students experience an array of emotions that may promote or thwart their performance and learning. For instance, frustration may reduce students' motivation to learn programming. In extreme cases, continued…

Teaching and learning online was extensively adopted in English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education program, as well in education of all levels in China with the advancement of the internet, multimedia information processing, cloud computing, and other information technologies since 1994. However, online education has remained more of a…

The Empowering Children with Hope and Opportunity (ECHO) program has collected data for 20 years. The ECHO staff has fallen short in using this data to clearly demonstrate any impacts and to engage in continuous improvement of the ECHO organization. Thus, the purpose of the current research project is to demonstrate how effective the counseling,…

Early childhood adversity, particularly poverty, can be a source of chronic stress that contributes to emotion dysregulation at the start of formal schooling. Children's reactivity to novel challenges in the classroom is associated with externalizing behavior and subsequent difficulties developing academic and social emotional skills (Blair &…

In this dissertation I investigate 1. What it is like to teach English language arts while grieving a death and 2. How the relational work of teaching influences teachers' engagement with English language arts curriculum while they are grieving a death. In order to understand experiences of grieving a death while teaching English language arts, I…

Mental health issues affect learning and performance in profound ways. Schools tend to lack a comprehensive approach to address the needs of students with anxiety, due to the limited training staff receive in mental health identification and support. As teachers work to address barriers to learning, schools must develop a system to fully address…

Recent studies posit that deficits in emotion regulation may lead to increased negative emotional experience in schizophrenia. While individuals with schizophrenia evidence a number of abnormalities in emotion regulation, it is unclear whether these deficits are discrete or related; furthermore, the mechanisms underlying these deficits are not…

Youth violence in both the juvenile justice system and in juveniles with intellectual disabilities is a significant and costly problem in the United States. An increasingly large number of youth with intellectual disabilities are being placed in secure juvenile justice facilities without specialized resources. In addition, these facilities are…

Mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) provide a way for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to self-manage challenging behaviors, which may ameliorate the need for more intensive individual interventions in schools. Using a concurrent multiple baseline design, our study examined whether Meditation on the Soles of the Feet (SoF), a brief MBP,…

There has been a significant rise in mental health needs in adolescents, and the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disturbed everyday life, causing an increase in anxiety and social isolation amongst adolescents throughout the world (CDC, 2017; Yale Child Study Center, 2020). Effective Tier 1 social-emotional universal interventions to foster…

For children and adolescents, developing key social-emotional skills is beneficial to how they grow and learn in their environment. The objective of this study was to evaluate the overall social-emotional skills of African American students in a general education setting using a social-emotional learning program, Strong Kids. This study…

College students have been facing a variety of challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. The pandemic generated fear and led to a spectrum of psychological consequences (Liu et al., 2020) ranging from increased anxiety and depression to behavioral changes such as difficulty sleeping. The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis presents an imperative…

Over 35% of multiracial college students fail to earn a degree, which can have significant economic and health costs over their lifespan. This study aimed to better understand college and psychological adjustment among multiracial college students of Hispanic/Latinx and White non-Hispanic descent by examining students' racial identities and use of…