2018 Symposium Individual Abstracts – Morning Session

2018 Symposium Individual Abstracts – Morning Session INMATE PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT Presenter Acquaviva, Brittany Graduate, Criminal Justice Sciences Mentor Prof. Jessie Krienert Authorship Brittany L. Acquaviva Acquaviva With the lack of research surrounding the perceptions of sexual assault among inmates within sexual assault literature, this study aims to bridge the gap and add new insight on the acceptance of rape culture and rape myths among inmates. Utilizing a thematic content analysis, this project compares and contrasts existing rape myths that convicted homicide, sex offender, robbery, and non-violent inmates exercise. With prison culture being heavily rooted in the thoughts and beliefs of inmates, results indicate most rape myth's that were present run parallel with rape myths that exist in the general public's acceptance of rape culture. SPONTANEOUS IMITATION AND JOINT ATTENTION IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM Presenter Anselmo, Shannon Graduate, Psychology Mentor Prof. Karla Doepke Authorship Claire Karlen; Shannon Anselmo Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), by definition, have persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts. Researchers have attempted to delineate the underlying causes of these difficulties. One line of research suggests that delays in the development of joint attention (sharing enjoyment with others) and imitation (copying what others do) may contribute to these broader social skills deficits, specifically impacting children's abilities to spontaneously engage with others and play. Furthermore, children with ASD tend to prefer non-social stimuli rather than social stimuli. That is, children with ASD may develop joint attention toward an object more quickly than with a person. Previous literature has theorized that children's joint attention skills must develop prior to the development of imitation skills; although research investigating the relationship between these two skills with children with autism has been mixed. This study examined the developmental relationship among joint attention and spontaneous imitation using both social and non-social stimuli. Participants included children between the ages of three and twelve years with a diagnosis of autism. Joint attention was measured through the Early Social Communication Scales-Abridged (ESCS), an observational measure of joint attention tasks such as gaze following. Imitation was measured by the Spontaneous Imitation Battery which includes ten trials of both object (e.g., pushing a car) and motor imitation (e.g. clapping hands) tasks. The social and non-social stimuli preferences were measured through a structured preference assessment. It is hypothesized that children with ASD will follow a similar joint attention and imitation progression to typically developing children. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that imitation with non-social stimuli will be easier for children with ASD than imitation with social stimuli. QUANTUM MECHANICAL STUDIES OF SINGLET AND TRIPLET CHLORINE-, BROMINE-, AND IODINE-CONTAINING FLUOROCARBENES Presenter Arledge, Taylor Graduate, Chemistry Mentor Prof. Jean Standard Authorship Taylor Arledge; Jean Standard Halofluorocarbons, commonly used as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, and in manufacturing, contribute to atmospheric ozone degradation. A key product of the breakdown of halofluorocarbons in the atmosphere are halofluorocarbenes. Because of the need to better understand these species, high-level quantum mechanical calculations have been performed for the singlet and triplet states of chlorofluoro-, bromofluoro-, and fluoroiodocarbene. Equilibrium geometries and harmonic vibrational frequencies were calculated using the CCSD(T) level of theory with the all-atom aug-cc-pVQZ basis set for C, F, Cl, and Br atoms. For iodine, the aug-cc-pVQZ-PP basis set with the corresponding effective core potential was employed. The equilibrium bond angles for the singlet states ranged from 106.8° to 107.6° and the triplet state angles ranged from 123.2° to 125.0°. A complete basis set extrapolation was performed for the CFX geometries and energies using CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVXZ(X=D,T,Q,5) and fit to a Schwartz-4 extrapolation for the geometries. Core The singlet-triplet gaps (corrected for vibrational zero-point energies) for FCCl, FCBr, and FCI were determined to be 34.6, 32.4, 27.1 kcal/mol, respectively. The Core-Valence and relativistic corrections for the singlet-triplet gaps were also determined. Potential energy surfaces also have been generated for the singlet and triplet halofluorocarbenes via single point energy calculations at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVQZ level on a two-dimensional grid involving variations in the F-C-X (X=Cl, Br, I) bond angle and C-X bond distance, with the C-F bond distance held fixed at its equilibrium value. To obtain the two-dimensional grid, the C-X bond distance was varied from 1.2 Å to 5.5 Å and the F-C-X angle was varied from 75 to 180 degrees. The potential energy surfaces will be employed to investigate the pathway to dissociation of the FCX molecules along the C-X bond coordinate as well as to compute vibrational eigenvalues and eigen functions for energy levels up tothe dissociation limit. NOVA READING PROGRAM: INCREASING ENGLISH LEARNING CHILDREN'S READING SKILLS Presenter AuBuchon, Stephanie Graduate, Psychology Mentor Prof. Gary Cates Authorship Stephanie AuBuchon; Gary Cates Illinois State University's School Psychology Department was asked to consult with the coordinators of the local NOVA Reading Program. This program was started to provide reading lessons to English Learning children, while their parents were receiving English lessons. There were weekly sessions that last two hours for the duration of the school year. The children would engage in craft activities that related to the theme of the book that was read that night. While doing crafts, the children reviewed 2-3 letters' phonemes and graphemes. Through the crafts, lessons, and group reading, the children worked on their phonemes, graphemes, phonics, and fluency. The main focus of NOVA Reading Program was having the parents become more involved in their children's reading. Therefore, for 30 minutes a session the parents read with their child to help them increase their literacy skills. The parents were encouraged to read with their children throughout the week and record how much time they spent reading together. During each session, the graduate clinician would administer either an AIMSweb probe or a book checklist. The two AIMSweb probes used were the letter naming fluency and the reading curriculum-based measure. Depending on the child's age and reading skills, they were give the probe that was most appropriate for their current skill level. However, the children under three years old were administered a book checklist assessment. This consisted of the child being handed a book, and the graduate clinician taking qualitative data on what the child did with the book, like open it, point to picture or words, etc. The graduate clinician then recorded the data for each week to progress monitor the children's reading skills. Also, data was collected on the children's attendance and number of minutes read throughout the week. The progress monitoring and attendance data were analyzed using percent of improvement and rate of growth. The results were used to help the NOVA Reading Program's coordinators understand how effective their program was at increasing English Learning children's reading skills, which will help them secure funds for next year. IS THE ABUSE POTENTIAL OF PSYCHOSTIMULANTS RELATED TO ACTIVATION OF DOPAMINE TRANSIENTS? Presenter Avula, Swathi Graduate, Biological Sciences Mentor Prof. Paul Garris Authorship Swathi Avula; Paul Garris Extensive research has been directed at identifying the mechanism of action of drugs with high abuse potential. The dominant hypothesis generated by this work is that all drugs of abuse act directly or indirectly on dopamine neurons and increase brain dopamine levels. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in motor control, motivation, and cognition and has been associated with the neuropathologies of Parkinson' disease, addiction, and schizophrenia. More recent work has refined this hypothesis to postulate that drugs of abuse activate dopamine transients. These phasic dopamine signals, occurring on a sub-second to second temporal scale, are elicited by natural rewards and their predictive cues, and drive reward learning. In the new hypothesis, abused drugs are thought to hijack the reward-learning pathway by hyperactivating dopamine transients. However, whether all abused drugs activate dopamine transients is not known, and some drugs demonstrated to exhibit low or mixed abuse potential have been shown to activate these phasic dopamine signals. Thus, the relationship between abuse potential and dopamine transients is not established. The objective of this research is to compare the effects of two psychostimulants thought to exhibit different levels of abuse potential on dopamine transients. The prediction is that the psychostimulant with high abuse potential, methylphenidate (Ritalin®), will activate dopamine transients, whereas the psychostimulant with low or mixed abuse potential, modafinil (Provigil®) will not activate dopamine transients or activates these phasic dopamine signals to a lesser extent. Dopamine transients will be measured in the striatum of rats, a brain region implicated in reward learning, using the microsensor

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