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University of Regina Institutional Repository

The mission of the oURspace digital repository is to share and preserve the scholarly, creative, and cultural work produced at the University of Regina.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Recent Submissions

Access status: Open Access ,
Investigating the acceptability of a daily symptom report among individuals with severe premenstrual symptoms
(Faculty of Science, University of Regina, 2026-04-22) Tauqeer, Aamina; Gordon, Jennifer
Premenstrual disorders (PMDs) are a severe, cyclical mental health condition characterized by dysphoric mood in the week preceding menstruation, with diagnosis requiring prospective tracking due to the low validity of retrospective reports. To help clarify symptom patterns, our team has created a report template providing a visual and written summary of daily symptom patterns, assessed over two menstrual cycles, to individuals with suspected PMDD. This study assessed participant impressions and recommended improvements. Participants (N = 57) aged 18 to 45 years who reported severe premenstrual symptoms and regular menstrual cycles were enrolled. Participants completed daily symptom ratings using the Daily Record of Severity of Problems (DRSP) and continuously wore an Oura ring or used ovulation strip tests to identify ovulation timing. Following data collection, participants received their individualized report and were asked a series of questions about the degree to which the report was clear, validating, and useful. Findings indicate that participants generally found the reports validating (M =7.12, SD = 2.73) and useful (M = 7.26, SD = 2.23), for clarifying symptom patterns. Participants who met PMDD diagnostic criteria reported greater perceived usefulness and engaged more extensively with the reports compared to those who did not meet criteria (W = 240, p = 0.007). Though areas for improvement were identified to further improve clarity of results and recommended next steps, findings generally suggest that this symptom report may be clinically useful in those with suspected PMD.
Access status: Open Access ,
Shielding the self: how self-compassion protects against self-criticism
(Faculty of Arts, University of Regina, 2026-04) Slobodzian, Anna Alexandra; Sharpe, Donald
Self-critical rumination is triggered by shame, intensifies after failure, sustains physiological stress responses, and amplifies both shame and stress. Self-compassion reduces self-critical rumination, thereby ameliorating feelings of shame and stress. However, to date few studies have examined whether brief self-compassionate or self-critically ruminative writing tasks immediately prior to failure influence subsequent shame and stress. 141 psychology students were recruited from the University of Regina Psychology Department Participant Pool and randomly assigned to one of three writing task conditions: (1) induced self-compassion, (2) induced self-critical rumination, or (3) control. Participants were asked to complete an impossible task, then the Self-Critical Rumination Scale (SCRS), the State Self-Compassion Scale – Long Form (SSCS-L), the Experiential Shame Scale (ESS), the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire: Self-Criticism (DEQ-SC), and the Short Stress State Questionnaire (SSSQ). It was hypothesized that those participants receiving self-compassion inductions would report lower levels of self-critical rumination, shame and stress, and that those participants receiving the self-critical rumination induction would have higher levels of these outcomes. The single session writing task did not influence participants’ shame and stress, but manipulation checks confirmed that self-compassionate writing altered internal self-kindness and self-criticism. After completing the self-compassionate writing task, participants experienced increased feelings of self-kindness and decreased feelings of self-criticism. A possible reason for this discrepancy between the measurable outcomes and the manipulation check may lie in the single administration and short duration of the writing task. Differences between participants were found for gender, mental health diagnoses, and self-reported distress.
Access status: Open Access ,
Predicting performance through the attention style questionnaire and neurotracker
(Faculty of Arts, University of Regina, 2026-04-25) Derow, Abigail; Dorsch, Kim
Individuals are constantly required to focus on tasks and select what information in each task is most relevant at a given time. Often referred in academia as selective attention, this ability to focus on tasks and relevant information becomes increasingly difficult as additional information simultaneously comes into an individual’s awareness from the external environment surrounding and the internal environment within the individual. Deciding what information to draw one’s attention to is driven by either a top-down or bottom-up process. Both processes exist within four dimensions - each process has an external and internal orientation-, and the majority of individuals will have a dimension they tend to enable, an attention style. An individual’s attention style can be measured by using the Attention Style Questionnaire (ASQ) developed by Van Calster et al. (2018). Attention styles can be indicative of whether an individual becomes easily distracted and whether they are more distracted by internal or external stimuli. Thus, this experimental study examined an individual’s attention style, measured by the ASQ, and their performance on the NeuroTracker® task, a three-dimensional multiple object tracking, in two different environments (distracting and non-distracting one). It was expected that those who are more distracted by external stimuli will have discrepancies between environments, whereas those who are not affected by external stimuli would have similar scores between both environments. This study will be the one of the first to use the ASQ experimentally and aims to ascertain whether a participant’s ASQ score will reliably predict their performance on tasks.
Access status: Open Access ,
Children’s understanding of memory confidence
(Faculty of Science, University of Regina, 2026-04) Gette, Amber L.; Bruer, Kaila C.
Children are frequently called to provide eyewitness testimony (Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health & Pantell, 2017), and legal decision-makers often rely on children’s reported memory confidence when evaluating their reliability (Fawcett & Winstanley, 2018). Despite this reliance, relatively little is known about how children understand and communicate that confidence. Although adults’ confidence can sometimes predict accuracy (Wixted et al., 2015), children tend to demonstrate overconfidence (Keast et al., 2007), raising questions about whether they fully understand what it means to be “confident” or “sure.” The present study examined how children conceptualize memory confidence and how they prefer to report it. One hundred children aged 6–11 ( M age = 8.61; 42% female, 58% male) were interviewed using open-ended and forced-choice questions to examine their understanding of memory confidence and sureness , the language they use to express certainty, and their preferred reporting method (i.e., numeric, pictorial, or analogy-based). Results revealed clear developmental differences in children’s understanding of certainty, with older children (ages 9-11) more often providing definitions that directly connected memory confidence to accuracy than younger children (ages 6-8). Children generally conceptualized confidence and sureness similarly, although subtle distinctions emerged. Age differences also appeared in reporting preferences, with older children preferring numeric confidence scales, while younger children more often preferred visual formats. Overall, these results suggest that children’s understanding of memory confidence becomes more refined with age and that the certainty terms examined in this thesis have overlapping but distinct meanings during development.
Access status: Open Access ,
In Our Voices
(2025) Matthews, Elise; Gelech, Jan; Ogle, Whitney; Neufeld, Kate
This book invites us to listen to stories and teachings from Indigenous voices that honour the gifts of people living with disabilities, their families, and their communities.