Monthly Archives: February 2019

Congratulations to Velinka! Her paper, “Youth perceptions of intergenerational discordance and immigrant well-being” was selected as the second place winner of the Kresge Library’s Frank Lepkowski Undergraduate Research in Writing Award!

Also, she recently successfully defended her senior’s thesis. Velinka’s presentation was an update of her honors independent study. She is interested in exploring youth perceptions of acculturation, the process of adapting to a new culture, and individual factors between immigrant youth and their parents after coming to the United States. Velinka has taken a mixed methods approach, using qualitative and quantitative methods, to examine youth-perceived parent-child gaps in acculturation and emotion processing. She is interested in exploring how those gaps affect immigrant youth with varying outcomes, such as acculturative stress, somatic symptoms, depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms, as well as post-traumatic growth (PTG). Findings will contribute to the expanded Acculturation Gap-Distress Model and help clarify the effects of adapting to a new culture at differing rates. This will help provide information for people of all ages who may struggle with acculturating, as well as educators, clinicians and physicians who may assist those individuals. Wonderful job Velinka, and good luck with further research!

Congrats to first-year masters student, Olivia, on her successful proposal presentation, which has been approved by the committee. Recently, Olivia presented an overview of her masters thesis proposal titled Pushing Through The Hard Times: Does Growth After Trauma Enhance Creativity in Children. Olivia is interested in analyzing a new topic of creativities’ impacts on children’s abilities to move past trauma’s and experience posttraumatic growth (PTG). She is also interested in seeing if there are environmental and personality factors that play a role in the relationship. Stemming from the Kilmer’s Model, which suggests that creativity plays a indirect role in the push towards growth, Olivia will be looking at direct correlations between PTG and its impact on creativity. As there are only two major studies that examine the relationship between creativity and PTG, both with adult populations, Olivia plans to gather data that will show the need for fostering and encouraging creativity among children and support her prediction that PTG can spark creativity among those who experience it. We are very excited about Olivia’s work and wish her the best of luck!

She presented two studies at the 4th Annual OU Graduate Student Research Conference on March 15th, 2019.

To start off the new year, Dr. Taku has started a YouTube page! In her first video post, she defines posttraumatic growth (PTG).

Moving forward, she plans to elaborate on various topics related to PTG and our research. Some of these topics include: what we have found so far by using the PTGI-X, how PTG may be different from resiliency, how we define PTG and illusory growth in our research, how PTG is related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and much more!

You can access her first video by clicking the picture below or under our new tab titled Video in the Menu bar at the top right corner. You can also stay up-to-date with her videos by subscribing to her YouTube page, under “Kanako Taku”. We hope you enjoy it!

Second year undergraduate lab member, Alex, recently presented an outline for a manuscript that he, Velinka, and Dr. Taku are writing. This is Alex’s second manuscript. He is principal investigator of an ongoing study titled, Survey About Images of Psychosomatic Disorder or Posttraumatic Growth.He began the presentation by providing  an overview of a previous manuscript that was focused on individual differences in attitudes and perceptions towards posttraumatic growth (PTG) and illusory growth.  Findings from that part of the study showed that, overall, participants can distinguish between the two different growth types: PTG and illusory growth. They also tend to relate more to narratives reflecting PTG rather than illusory growth. The second manuscript addresses how relatability to a trauma narrative may affect PTG. Specifically, it addressed whether being able to relate to the type of trauma would elucidate a stronger relationship between relatability and self-reported PTG. Alex suggests that the results will provide great insight for social support groups and intervention where the focus is on sharing stories and traumatic events with groups to foster personal growth. Moving forward, Alex plans to further decipher which aspects of the stories are most relatable and potentially try to replicate the study using different trauma narratives. Future studies will then clarify whether relatability to different traumatic events brings about different self-reports of PTG. Great job, Alex, and good luck with future research!