Changing Gears – Page 4 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Changing Gears

Whole Health Educational Resource Development and Evaluation for Veterans and VA Staff

The Veterans Association (VA) is one of the largest integrative healthcare systems in the country. Its success in patient outcomes is contributed to the widespread practice of Whole Health in the VA system. Whole Health is known as “Personalized, Proactive, Patient-driven Care” and it focuses on several areas of health and well-being while empowering the patient to take an active role in their healthcare alongside providers. The impact of Whole Health and use of its techniques and practices among veterans and patients who receive this healthcare is not widely known. This study aims to assess how many skills and practices from the Whole Health system are being used and applied by patients (Veterans) in their everyday lives. Specifically, questions are designed to reflect practices from the 8 modalities of Whole Health. To conduct our test, we created an online survey using Qualtrics and distributed it among colleagues, students, patients, and veterans in association with the VA Ann Arbor. We collected basic demographic information including sex, age range, and Veteran status and asked a series of questions designed to assess the practice of mindfulness and other techniques among respondents and also to assess how much of the Whole Health practice they have experienced. At the time of publication of this abstract, the data has been collected and preliminary analysis is in process. Specific, detailed, and final results will be available at the time of the Symposium presentation.

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Examining the co-seasonality of historical respiratory infections

Scarlet fever and diphtheria are two historical infectious disease in 20th century. It has been shown that the occurrence of influenza outbreak has seasonal pattern.The occurrence of Scarlet fever and diphtheria also have this characteristics. We want to fins such pattern based on the data gained from each states of the United States from 1928-1951 for scarlet fever and 1928-1948 for diphtheria. Though one is bacterium while the other is virus, researchers found there is link between them. In order to understand these two pathogens better, we plot many different kinds of graphs of these two separately and together, weekly and yearly in R, based on the weekly data of number of infected people in the United States. We will also plot some wavelets and cross-wavelets to find the co-seasonality within states and between disease. The expected result will be that some patterns between these two pathogens that deserve further research and study do exist. Though these two are historical infectious disease, studying these two pathogens may provide us with more information on the potential link between them and many other disease, which will benefit other disease study or even help find potential method to forecast other diseases forecast and take them under control.

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Demographic Impacts of Covid-19 in the US and Europe

The Covid-19 pandemic has had disproportionate impacts across the globe. When comparing the impact of the pandemic on different nations, researchers rely on metrics such as national excess mortality which often fail to capture demographic differences between populations. This study aims to construct a comparative framework of excess mortality in the US and select European countries which accounts for age and sex. In this context, excess mortality is the difference between the observed number of deaths during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic from the expected number of deaths based on historical data. To construct this framework, monthly mortality data from 2015-2019 segregated by age and sex was analyzed from the US and EU. This data was used to estimate the mortality of specific age and sex cohorts by country, which was compared to the observed monthly mortality of those cohorts in 2020. When compared to the reported deaths attributed to Covid-19, a robust and nuanced comparison of the relative impacts of Covid-19 in the US and EU is possible.

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The Effect of Disaster-induced Displacement on Social Behaviour: The Case of Hurricane Harvey

Natural disasters have deleterious effects on public health and individual behaviors and are not uniform between different groups of individuals. Hurricane Harvey, which brought unprecedented levels of flooding, property damage, and displacement to the greater Houston area in late summer 2017, allows us to study pre- and post disaster behaviors of affected individuals. Specifically, we use tweeting patterns as a measure to see how people react to the disaster. In order to compare pre- and post-displacement behavior, we use a variety of measures to capture social and political engagement, starting with tweeting frequency. We expect that individuals subject to physical displacement will demonstrate abnormalities in their tweeting behavior, and that these effects differ across ethnic groups, with visible minorities most substantially affected.

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Why Fight? The Causes and Consequences of Joining a Tyrant’s Army

What role does military service have in the behavior of oppressed minority groups after wars? Current knowledge states combat experience empowers veterans’ organizational skills and ability to engage in collective action. However, there is little information that further elaborates how wartime skills and abilities are utilized by individuals and groups once the conflict ends. Furthermore, it is unknown if there is a significant difference in post-war behavior in members of elite groups and members of minority groups and how such a difference contributes to the stability of an authoritarian regime. This study uses 19th and 20th century data from official Russian records to explain how military service impacted the behavior of minority groups towards the state after World War I. We use records of the Russian Imperial Army during World War I, the Red Guard during the Russian Civil War, and the 1897 Russian Census in analyses at the individual and community levels. We use the Imperial Army and the Red Guard datasets in a Bayesian Nonparametric Spatial Regression Discontinuity design at district borders to empircally identify the post-war behavior of World War I veterans. The 1897 Census dataset is used to establish district borders and other aspects of the Russian nation and state at the time. Early results suggest soldiers belonging to disenfranchised minority groups were more likely to oppose the Tsar and align with the Red Guard. Additionally, inhabitants of districts with high percentages of oppressed minority groups were more likely to align with the Red Guard. The overall results suggest military service among disenfranchised groups is crucial for engaging in significant resistance to oppressive regimes

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Understanding Graduate Student Perspectives of Mental Health

Mental health challenges are rising in higher education across the United States. We investigate doctoral students’ experiences concerning mental health in academia and their perceptions of university responses to wellbeing concerns. Through 30 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in all levels of the PhD, we find that while participants are aware of wellbeing resources offered by the university, their perceptions suggest the short-term nature of counseling is not fit for graduate students’ needs. Although participants from all backgrounds reported feeling anxiety and impostor syndrome on account of their academic experiences, such problems are exacerbated for members of minoritized groups, many of whom do not see themselves reflected in role models or the canon of literature in their field. We identify tensions among expectations of knowledge construction and faculty advising. Our findings have implications for stronger institutional relationships with external counselors, increased peer group support, and effective communication about doctoral expectations.

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Audio to Phone Transcription — Illustration with Mandarin

Generally, linguists’ first step in analyzing any language is to transcribe audio files into written representation. This is an extremely time-consuming process because the committed time to audio length ratio for an experienced linguist is about 100:1, which slows down the analysis of language tremendously. In addition, despite many advances in language technology, there does not exist such a tool with which any audio file in any language could be converted into transcribed phones automatically. Our research project focuses on developing a method to convert audio files of speech to transcribed phones (consonants and vowels), without prior knowledge of the target language.

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Computed tomography reconstruction of fossil vertebrates

In our research project we are studying CT examination of ancient vertebrates. Understanding morphology can illuminate the possible relationships between ancient fish vertebrates and the niches they inhabited. The fish species that will be examined for this are lungfishes, which are often described as “living fossils.” A “living fossil” is a broadly applied term but can be generally understood as an organism exhibiting a close resemblance to its older relatives found in the fossil record. This project utilizes 3D reconstructions of fossil sarcopterygian fishes to enhance our understanding of their place in the phylogenetic tree. We acquired fossils from various universities and museums across the country, and segmented out their lower jaws using the program Materialize by Mimics. By doing this our work will be turned into 3D models in the program Blender. These 3D models will then be used to “landmark” or flag important differences between the jaw structure in both the same and different species. Based on Landmark data we can better understand their place in the phylogenetic tree and the relationship between morphology, diversity, and the environmental niches of these fishes.

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Social comparison and self-esteem: A vicious cycle

Why are some people exasperated by social comparisons while others find comparisons negligible? Past research has identified self-esteem as a key individual difference coloring the experience of social comparison. This research reveals that social comparison and low self-esteem share a vicious, circular relationship: people with low self-esteem are more inclined to compare themselves to others, and upward comparisons tend to lower people’s self-esteem (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999; Hoffman et al., 1954; Tesser, 1989; Wood et al., 1985). Yet, it remains unclear what psychological processes perpetuate this process; why do people with low self-esteem engage in social comparison? We propose that people with low self-esteem have both less motivation to regulate their emotions and a smaller toolkit for regulation (Gross, 2015). Accordingly, people with low self-esteem may be more likely to enter environments where comparisons are likely (e.g, social media), fixate on available comparisons, and perceive comparisons as meaningful. We report two studies examining how emotion regulation processes shape the experience of social comparison among people with low self-esteem. Study 1 examines whether emotion regulation capacity and regulatory flexibility mediate the relationship between social comparison orientation and self-esteem. Study 2 employs an experimental design to test whether one can mitigate or nullify the negative relationship between social comparison and self-esteem via a brief reappraisal exercise. This research will shed light on how best to intervene in the cycle that perpetuates low self-esteem.

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Career and Educational Concerns Over Time

History serves us in many ways as a society. It allows researchers to peel back decades and peer into what could have never been seen without careful documenting and archiving. The Center for the Education of Women is home to a wealth of information dating from 1964 until now that paints a picture of the life’s women led at a time when education was not as welcoming or as accessible as it is now. The first and foremost goal of this project was to dust off all of the old files and give them new life in a database that was designed to lend ease of access to future researchers. As one can probably imagine, this task was a lot easier said then done. Sifting through decades worth of counseling records, scholarship applications, and many other types of documents was a tedious and time-consuming task that required a concise plan of attack and well-designed spreadsheets. But, through plenty of hard work and determination our team was able to preserve history for many years to come.

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