Aging African American Women and the Impact of Positive Psychological Factors on Quality of Life

Aging African-American women are disproportionately affected by negative health outcomes and mortality. Life stress has strong associations with these health outcomes. The purpose of this research was to understand how aging African American women manage stress. Specifically, the effects of coping, optimism, resilience, and religiousness as it relates to quality of life were examined. This cross-sectional exploratory study used a self-administered questionnaire and examined quality of life in 182 African-American women who were 65 years of age or older living in senior residential centers in Baltimore using convenience sampling. The age range for these women was 65 to 94 years with a mean of 71.8 years (SD = 5.6). The majority (53.1%) of participants completed high school, with 23 percent (N = 42) obtaining college degrees and 19 percent (N = 35) holding advanced degrees. Nearly 58 percent of participants were widowed and 81 percent were retired. In addition to demographics, the questionnaire included the following reliable and valid survey instruments: The Brief Cope Scale (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989), Optimism Questionnaire (Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994), Resilience Survey (Wagnild & Young, 1987), Religiousness Assessment (Koenig, 1997), and Quality of Life Questionnaire (Cummins, 1996). Results revealed that the positive psychological factors examined were positively associated with and significant predictors of quality of life. The bivariate correlations indicated that of the six coping dimensions measured in this study, planning (r=.68) was the most positively associated with quality of life. Optimism (r=.33), resilience (=.48), and religiousness (r=.30) were also significantly correlated with quality of life. In the linear regression model, again the coping dimension of planning was the best predictor of quality of life (beta = .75, p <.001). Optimism (beta = .31, p <.001), resilience (beta = .34, p, .001) and religiousness (beta = .17, p <.01) were also significant predictors of quality of life. It appears as if positive psychology plays an important role in improving quality of life among aging African-American women.

FROM THE AETHIOPICA TO THE RENAISSANCE: RECOVERING A STAGE TRADITION OF POSITIVE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICANS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

This dissertation looks at the connection between Heliodorus's fifth-century prose romance, An Aethiopian History, certain Renaissance texts, and how these texts helped influence an alternate representation of Africans in the early modern world. Through their portrayals of Africans, early modern English playwrights frequently give the impression that Africans, especially black Africans, were people without accomplishments, without culture. Previously, however, this was not the case. Africans were depicted with dignity, as a tradition existed for this kind of representation--and Renaissance Europe had long been acquainted with the achievements of Africans, dating back to antiquity. As the source of several lost plays, the Aethiopica is instrumental in dramatizing Africans favorably, especially on the early modern stage, and helped shape a stage tradition that runs alongside the stereotyping of Africans. This Heliodoran tradition can be seen in works of Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Shakespeare, and others in the motifs of crosscultural and transracial romance, male and female chastity, racial metamorphosis, lost or abandoned babies, wandering heroes, and bold heroines. In Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty, I establish a connection between these two masques and Heliodorus's Aethiopica and argue for a Heliodoran stage tradition implicit in both masques through the conceit of blanching. In The English Moore, I explore how Richard Brome uses the Heliodoran and Jonsonian materials to create a negative quality of blackness that participates in the dramatic tradition of the degenerate African on the English Renaissance stage. With Othello, I contend that it is a drama that can be seen in the Heliodoran tradition by stressing certain motifs found in the play that derives from the Aethiopica. Reading Othello this way provides us with a more layered and historicized interpretation of Shakespeare's protagonists. Othello's nationality and faith make his exalted position in Venice and the Venetian army credible and logical. His nobility and heroic status become more sharply defined, giving us a fuller understanding of the emphasis he places on chastity--both for himself and for Desdemona. Instead of a traditional, compliant, and submissive Desdemona, a courageous, resourceful, witty, and pure heroine emerges--one who lives by the dictates of her conscience than by the constraints of societal norms. Recovering the tradition of positive portrayal of Africans that originated from the Aethiopica necessitated an examination of eleven plays that I contend helped to frame the dramatic tradition under investigation. Six of these plays are continental dramas, and five are English. Although three of the English plays are lost and the other two are seventeenth-century dramas, their titles and names of their protagonists, like those of the six extant continental plays, share the names of Heliodorus's hero and heroine, making an exploration of the continental plays imperative to facilitate their use as paradigms in reconstructing the three lost English plays. These continental dramas show that plays whose titles derive from the Aethiopica itself or reflect the names of its major characters follow Heliodorus's text closely, enabling an investigation of the Heliodoran tradition on the early modern English stage. Recovering the Heliodoran tradition adds to the exploration of racial politics and the understanding of the dramatic tradition that constrained and enabled Renaissance playwrights' representation of race and gender.

Why Does Employment Discrimination Persist against People with Mental Illness? Effects of Negative Stereotypes, Power, and Differential Discrimination

Mental illness affects a sizable minority of Americans at any given time, yet many people with mental illness (hereafter PWMI) remain unemployed or underemployed relative to the general population. Research has suggested that part of the reason for this is discrimination toward PWMI. This research investigated mechanisms that affect employment discrimination against PWMI. Drawing from theories on stigma and power, three studies assessed 1) the stereotyping of workers with mental illness as unfit for workplace success, 2) the impact of positive information on countering these negative stereotypes, and whether negatively-stereotyped conditions elicited discrimination; and 3) the effects of power on mental illness stigma components. I made a series of predictions related to theories on the Stereotype Content Model, illness attribution, the contact hypothesis, gender and mental health, and power. Studies tested predictions using, 1) an online vignette survey measuring attitudes, 2) an online survey measuring responses to fictitious applications for a middle management position, and 3) a laboratory experiment in which some participants were primed to feel powerful and some were not. Results of Study 1 demonstrated that PWMI were routinely stigmatized as incompetent, dangerous, and lacking valued employment attributes, relative to a control condition. This was especially evident for workers presented as having PTSD from wartime service and workers with schizophrenia, and when the worker was a woman. Study 2 showed that, although both war-related PTSD and schizophrenia evoke negative stereotypes, only schizophrenia evoked hiring discrimination. Finally, Study 3 found no effect of being primed to feel powerful on stigmatizing attitudes toward a person with symptoms of schizophrenia. Taken together, findings suggest that employment discrimination towards PWMI is driven by negative stereotypes; but, stereotypes might not lead to actual hiring discrimination for some labeled individuals.

POSITIVE FILTERED P_N METHOD FOR LINEAR TRANSPORT EQUATIONS AND THE ASSOCIATED OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

We propose a positive, accurate moment closure for linear kinetic transport equations based on a filtered spherical harmonic (FP_N) expansion in the angular variable. The FP_N moment equations are accurate approximations to linear kinetic equations, but they are known to suffer from the occurrence of unphysical, negative particle concentrations. The new positive filtered P_N (FP_N+) closure is developed to address this issue. The FP_N+ closure approximates the kinetic distribution by a spherical harmonic expansion that is non-negative on a finite, predetermined set of quadrature points. With an appropriate numerical PDE solver, the FP_N+ closure generates particle concentrations that are guaranteed to be non-negative. Under an additional, mild regularity assumption, we prove that as the moment order tends to infinity, the FP_N+ approximation converges, in the L2 sense, at the same rate as the FP_N approximation; numerical tests suggest that this assumption may not be necessary. By numerical experiments on the challenging line source benchmark problem, we confirm that the FP_N+ method indeed produces accurate and non-negative solutions. To apply the FP_N+ closure on problems at large temporal-spatial scales, we develop a positive asymptotic preserving (AP) numerical PDE solver. We prove that the propose AP scheme maintains stability and accuracy with standard mesh sizes at large temporal-spatial scales, while, for generic numerical schemes, excessive refinements on temporal-spatial meshes are required. We also show that the proposed scheme preserves positivity of the particle concentration, under some time step restriction. Numerical results confirm that the proposed AP scheme is capable for solving linear transport equations at large temporal-spatial scales, for which a generic scheme could fail. Constrained optimization problems are involved in the formulation of the FP_N+ closure to enforce non-negativity of the FP_N+ approximation on the set of quadrature points. These optimization problems can be written as strictly convex quadratic programs (CQPs) with a large number of inequality constraints. To efficiently solve the CQPs, we propose a constraint-reduced variant of a Mehrotra-predictor-corrector algorithm, with a novel constraint selection rule. We prove that, under appropriate assumptions, the proposed optimization algorithm converges globally to the solution at a locally q-quadratic rate. We test the algorithm on randomly generated problems, and the numerical results indicate that the combination of the proposed algorithm and the constraint selection rule outperforms other compared constraint-reduced algorithms, especially for problems with many more inequality constraints than variables.