Mariya
Thomas
Sponsor: Lisa Oakes, Ph.D. Psychology Early engagement in spatial play has been associated with the development of spatial skills. During play, parents direct children's attention towards tasks and objects through their words and actions. Although parents clearly hold an important role in children's play experiences, little is known about how the content of parents' verbal input shapes infants' engagement during play. The current study investigates the effect of parental praise utterances on infants' engagement with objects during parent- child spatial play. Our sample consisted of 57 parent-child dyads with 14-month-old infants and 52 parent-child dyads with 20- month-old infants. Each dyad was instructed to play as they normally would for up to six minutes using a six-piece zoo animal puzzle with removable pieces. We transcribed parents' speech and categorized utterances as either containing praise or not. Additionally, as a proxy for engagement, we coded infants' touch behaviors which were defined as any form of physical contact to the different puzzle pieces. We hypothesize that children whose parents use more praise utterances will engage in object-directed touch more frequently than will infants whose parents use fewer praise utterances. These findings will help us understand how parents can better support children's object exploration and engagement during joint spatial play. Nutritional Needs of Cardiac Rehabilitation Patients and How They Impact Caregiving Roles, Relationships, and Responsibilities: A Qualitative Study of Clinician Perspectives in Cardiac Rehabilitation
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Authors:
Mariya Thomas
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Interventions to support family caregivers are well-studied in conditions like dementia, but few evidence-based interventions exist to support caregivers of persons with cardiovascular disease. As part of an intervention development study, we explored how nutrition functions as a caregiving challenge in cardiac rehabilitation, where nutrition is a key aspect of patient recovery. This study's goal is to examine how nutrition-related caregiving challenges and stressors are described by cardiac rehabilitation clinicians, and how these intersect with caregiving roles and relationship dynamics. We conducted a secondary thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with cardiac rehabilitation clinicians (n=7). Five major themes emerged across interviews: (1) Caregivers play a major role in patients' ability to follow dietary recommendations, (2) Matching patients' dietary needs with family preferences is a major source of strain, (3) Caregivers sometimes struggle with patients' reluctance to eat healthy foods, (4) Time pressures alongside other caregiving tasks make preparing healthy meals difficult, and (5) Caregivers' own nutrition can be impacted by high-intensity caregiving. Overall, nutrition emerged as a relational caregiving challenge and a part of broader caregiving issues. Our findings suggest that caregiver-support interventions in cardiac rehabilitation should address nutrition-related challenges and the relational contexts in which dietary adherence occurs. Sex Differences in the Single Nuclei Hippocampal Endothelial Cells Transcriptomic Response to Type 2 Diabetes Sophia Thomas
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UC Davis / School Of Nursing / 2026
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Mariya Thomas