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- Johansson, Fred
(författare)
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Aspects of the aetiology of mental health problems among university students
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Mental disorders are among the leading causes of years lost due to disability in young people globally. Students are no exception, both mental disorders and mental health problems are common among university students with dramatic increases reported in recent years. The aetiology of mental disorders and mental health problems is generally assumed to be multicausal, with factors at different levels contributing to their development. Given the complexity of the causal network underlying mental health problems, it has been argued that a clear causal framework is needed when studying the aetiology of mental health problems. This thesis aimed to investigate some aspects of the potential aetiology of mental health problems among university students. Specifically, it focuses on four exposures at the psychosocial level presented in four studies: 1) the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, 2) poor sleep quality, 3) procrastination and 4) sexual harassment and sexual violence. In addition to the discussion provided in each respective paper, this thesis discusses limitations and possible interpretations of our results from a modern causal inference perspective.The four studies of this thesis are based on The Sustainable University Life (SUN) cohort. The SUN cohort followed 4262 university students from eight universities in and around Stockholm, Sweden, with web-surveys at five time-points over one year.In Study I, we aimed to determine the mean trajectories of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms among university students in Stockholm before and during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, we included a subsample of 1836 university students that entered the SUN cohort before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and were followed during the months before the pandemic, during the first wave of the pandemic and in the summer, months following the first wave of the pandemic. We found that mean depression, anxiety, and stress symptom levels were largely stable during the first wave compared to the months before the pandemic and decreased slightly during the following summer months. Our results indicate that mean levels of mental health symptoms did not change much during the early phase of the pandemic compared to before the pandemic.In Study II, we aimed to determine whether sleep quality statistically interacts cross-sectionally with loneliness, risky alcohol use, perfectionistic concerns and/or physical inactivity in relation to depressive symptoms in university students. We conducted a cross-sectional study using baseline-data from all 4262 participants in the SUN cohort. We found that while all factors were associated with depressive symptoms, only perfectionistic concerns interacted with sleep quality in its relation to depression. This interaction was quite weak and explainedonly a small proportion of the variance in depressive symptoms. Overall, we did not find support for our hypothesis that poor sleep quality could interact with several different potential risk factors for depressive symptoms.In Study III, we aimed to evaluate the associations between procrastination and sixteen subsequent health outcomes (including mental health symptoms, disabling pain, lifestyle behaviours and psychosocial health factors), measured 9 months later, among university students. We used data from all participants responding to the first follow-up in the SUN cohort (n=3525) and found that procrastination was related to several subsequent health outcomes, including symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, while controlling for multiple potential confounders. Although we cannot rule out non-causal explanations for these associations, the results indicate that procrastination could have an effect on health outcomes among students, but that it is likely to be rather small for any specific health outcome.In Study IV, we investigated the impact of recent exposure to different forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence; 1) unwanted sexual attention, 2) offensive sexual remarks, 3) presentation or distribution of sexist material, 4) uncomfortable touching, 5) being offered benefits for sex and 6) sex against ones will, along with a wide definition of sexual harassment: sexual harassment (wide subjective definition) on levels of depression and anxiety symptoms three, six and nine months later, for women and men, respectively. We conducted a cohort study using data from all women and men responding to the first follow-up in the SUNcohort (n= 3503). Our results showed that women recently exposed to 1) sexual harassment (wide definition), 2) unwanted sexual attention and 3) sex against ones will showed higher subsequent levels of depression and/or anxiety symptoms. The general trend was that all exposures were related to higher symptom levels at three months, but that this difference between exposed and unexposed diminished over time, although these trends are uncertain with wide confidence intervals. The exception was exposure to sex against ones will, where exposed showed elevated symptom levels throughout the follow-up period. For men, the estimates were uncertain overall, and we refrain from interpreting these results. Our results indicate that recent exposure to different forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence may impact later depression and anxiety symptoms among women, and that there could be differences in the strength and long-term impact on mental health between different forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Again, we cannot, with certainty rule out non-causal reasons for these associations.Interpreting any of these results as causal effects rests on multiple assumptions, which are discussed in the thesis. Determination of causal effects preferably relies on triangulation of results from different studies with different methodology. Overall, however, I believe that this thesis has strengthened the evidence that procrastination and sexual harassment and sexual violence may be causes of mental health problems among university students. An equally important finding, is that mental health seemed rather stable during COVID-19 pandemic, indicating that the pandemic may not have caused increased mental health problems on the group level.
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| 2. |
- Augstein, Frauke
(författare)
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Mechanisms of plant root xylem developmental plasticity in response to water deficiency and salt
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Plants may be exposed to a variety of different environmental conditions including water deficiency and salt, both affecting the uptake of water into the plant. Water is taken up from the soil by the roots and distributed throughout the plant via the water conducting tissue, the xylem. Plants are remarkably plastic and have evolved different mechanisms to sense the environment and adjust their development accordingly. However, how xylem development may respond to water availability is not clear. In this thesis, I show how water deficiency and salt affect xylem development and how the observed phenotypic alterations are regulated on a molecular level. We found that upon water deficiency additional protoxylem strands were formed along with an early differentiation of the inner metaxylem. These phenotypes were regulated both by non-cell autonomous and cell autonomous signaling via the hormone abscisic acid (ABA). The expression of microRNA165 was induced by ABA signaling in the endodermis leading to downregulation of homeo domain leucine zipper class III (HD-ZIP III) transcription factors in the stele. This caused a shift in xylem identity from meta- to protoxylem and the formation of additional protoxylem strands. At the same time, cell autonomous ABA signaling upregulated several VASCULAR RELATED NAC DOMAIN (VND) transcription factors including VND7, which promoted the shift in xylem identity as well as VND2 and VND3, which promoted early differentiation of the inner metaxylem. In contrast, during an initial phase of salt stress, we observed the formation of protoxylem gaps specifically in response to ionic stress and distinct from ABA-signaling. We identified that protoxylem gaps were caused by lowered levels and signaling of the growth regulator gibberellin (GA). Downstream of GA-signaling, protoxylem gap formation upon salt was controlled by genes involved in secondary cell wall formation including the xylem master regulator VND6 and factors involved in cell wall modification. Salt tolerance assays suggested that protoxylem gaps may contribute to salt tolerance and the phenotypes that we observed upon water deficiency have been suggested to confer drought tolerance. We observed similar effects on xylem developmental plasticity in response to water deficiency and salt in various different dicot species indicating an evolutionary conservation. Thus, xylem development is of high relevance for breeding programs to generate plant varieties better adapted to a changing climate.
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| 3. |
- Cox Eriksson, Christine, 1956-
(författare)
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Children's Vocabulary Development : The role of parental input, vocabulary composition and early communicative skills
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to examine the early vocabulary development of a sample of Swedish children in relation to parental input and early communicative skills. Three studies are situated in an overall description of early language development in children. The data analyzed in the thesis was collected within a larger project at Stockholm University (SPRINT- “Effects of enhanced parental input on young children’s vocabulary development and subsequent literacy development” [VR 2008-5094]).Data analysis was based on parental report via SECDI, the Swedish version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, and audio recordings. One study examined parental verbal interaction characteristics in three groups of children with varying vocabulary size at 18 months. The stability of vocabulary development at 18 and 24 months was investigated in a larger study, with focus on children’s vocabulary composition and grammatical abilities. The third study examined interrelations among early gestures, receptive and productive vocabulary, and grammar measured with M3L, i.e. three longest utterances, from 12 to 30 months.Overall results of the thesis highlight the importance of early language development. Variability in different characteristics in parental input is associated with variability in child vocabulary size. Children with large early vocabularies exhibit the most stability in vocabulary composition and the earliest grammatical development. Children’s vocabulary composition may reflect individual stylistic variation. Use of early gestures is associated differentially with receptive and productive vocabulary.Results of the thesis have implications for parents, child- and healthcare personnel, as well as researchers and educational practitioners. The results underscore the importance of high quality in adult-child interaction, with rich input fine-tuned to children’s developmental levels and age, together with high awareness of early language development.
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| 4. |
- Sundberg, Ann-Kari, 1962-
(författare)
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Le poids de la tradition : La gestion professorale de l'altérité linguistique et culturelle en classe de FLE
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of the present study is to investigate how teachers deal with linguistic and cultural otherness in the French foreign language classroom at upper secondary school level in Sweden. The foreign language classroom is seen as a cultural meeting place where images of otherness are natural elements. In this respect, otherness should be regarded as one cultural aspect among others implying human as well as language phenomena. Analyzing the way in which the teachers in the study mediate this otherness to their students is expected to contribute to the pedagogical debate on intercultural understanding in language teaching and learning. The study is based on empirical data consisting of video recorded observations in three different classrooms. One class (class A) is treated as primary data where two activities are especially focused, namely working with texts and working with grammar. The verbal interaction from these activities has been transcribed and analyzed qualitatively. The first step of analysis concerns the learning aims which are transmitted to the students in the teacher’s introduction to the two activities. The second step deals with the teacher’s procedures to involve the students in the construction of knowledge which focuses on linguistic and cultural otherness. Finally, a comparative perspective is adopted. On the one hand, the two different activities are compared with each other, while on the other hand, the findings from class A are compared with class B and C. From a dialogical point of view, the way in which the classroom setting and the teachers’ acting can favour intercultural understanding is discussed. The results of the analyses highlight the fact that teachers seem to pay more attention to linguistic otherness than to cultural otherness. Furthermore, the study shows that the foreign language classroom has a dialogical potential when it comes to human relations and discourse. More attention could be paid to these aspects of teaching in order to pave the way for better intercultural understanding. The teachers in the present study seem to favour dialogical relationships in the classroom and neglect discursive issues in the situation. Our conclusion is that the way in which teachers deal with otherness is tradition-bound. Texts, for instance, even those with an obvious intercultural content, are treated as pre-texts for studying linguistic phenomena. Cultural phenomena, when dealt with, are limited to a product paradigm and are transmitted without reflection and with no apparent awareness of any intercultural understanding.
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| 9. |
- Hirsh, Åsa, et al.
(författare)
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Reviews of teaching methods : which fundamental issues are identified?
- 2022
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Ingår i: Education Inquiry. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 2000-4508. ; 13:1, s. 1-20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this study is to discern and discuss issues with relevance to the tension between contextuality and generalisation, which recurrently are identified over time in research reviews of teaching methods. The 75 most cited reviews on teaching methods listed in the Web of Science from 1980 to 2017 were analysed. Since our interest is the claims made in each article about the teaching method under study, the analysis concerned the abstract, results, discussion, conclusion, and implication parts of each review. Three main issues, cutting across the reviews over time, were identified: 1) the abundance of moderating factors, 2) the need for highly qualified teachers, and 3) the research-practice gap. It is argued that the three issues reflect tensions in original research. The implications of these findings are discussed in the article. One main conclusion is that such issues ought to be more explicitly attended to and elaborated in both primary and secondary level research. The importance of viewing validity as a multidimensional concept, including internal, external, and ecological aspects, is underlined. Further, ideas from realistic reviewing are used to discuss a contextually bound approach to causality.
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| 10. |
- Kuusk, Sandra
(författare)
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Control of Pistil Development in Arabidopsis thaliana by a Novel Class of Regulatory Genes
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The pistil, or the gynoecium, is the female reproductive organ of the angiosperm flower and its ontogeny has been studied in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The mature Arabidopsis gynoecium consists of a basal ovary that contains the ovules, a short style and an apical stigma that serves as the site of pollen adherence and germination. This thesis describes the identification and functional characterisation of genes with roles in the regulation of Arabidopsis gynoecium development. Mutant analyses and sequence similarity database searches led to the identification of a small Arabidopsis gene family, denoted the SHI gene family, the ten members of which encode proteins with zinc finger-like motifs. This class of genes is novel and appears to be unique to plants.Double, triple and quadruple mutant analyses revealed that at least six of the SHI-related genes, STY1, STY2, SHI, SRS4, SRS5, and LRP1, redundantly contribute to the formation of stylar and stigmatic tissues in developing gynoecia. Several of the genes appear also to influence carpel fusion and vascular patterning in the gynoecium. Gynoecia of transgenic plants that express STY1 or STY2 constitutively develop ectopic style cells, confirming a role for the genes in the promotion of style formation. STY1, STY2, SHI and SRS5 are expressed in the apical parts of the developing gynoecium and, hence, likely act cell autonomously. As judged from mutant and overexpression analyses, the SHI-related genes appear also to regulate leaf development. Possibly, SHI family members act in concert with the plant growth hormones gibberellin and auxin.
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