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Psychology

Theses/Dissertations

Gender

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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The Influence Of Victim Gender And Emotional Expression In Victim Impact Statements On Legal Judgments And Punishment Decisions, Hannah Chimowitz Jul 2021

The Influence Of Victim Gender And Emotional Expression In Victim Impact Statements On Legal Judgments And Punishment Decisions, Hannah Chimowitz

Masters Theses

Victim impact statements (VISs) are written or oral statements detailing the effects a crime has had on a victim. While the practice of having victims present VISs at sentencing hearings has generated much debate for over 25 years, the effects of this practice on victims, defendants, and legal decision-makers remain poorly understood. Prior research suggests that a victim’s emotional expression can affect how victims are perceived, and the legal judgments made in response to their statements. The current research considers how the effects of victims’ emotional displays on sentencing decisions might be conditioned by victim gender. Using audio-recorded VIS stimuli, …


Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron Jul 2018

Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants’ perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12- and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct ‘kinds’ or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., ‘human face’). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-of-expectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive …


Newlywed Couples' Marital Satisfaction And Patterns Of Cortisol Reactivity And Recovery As A Response To Differential Marital Power, Mattitiyahu Scott Zimbler May 2012

Newlywed Couples' Marital Satisfaction And Patterns Of Cortisol Reactivity And Recovery As A Response To Differential Marital Power, Mattitiyahu Scott Zimbler

Open Access Dissertations

This study investigated the extent to which gender moderates, and perceptions of fairness mediate, the link between marital power and overall marital satisfaction, as well as cortisol stress trajectories in response to marital distress. Study 1 examined a sample of 213 opposite sex newlywed couples from western Massachusetts, and focused on marital satisfaction as the dependent variable. Findings from the structural equation analysis suggested that perceptions of relationship fairness concerning the division of labor completely mediated the association between marital power and marital satisfaction for wives, but not for husbands. These results also implied an association between wives' perceptions of …


Intersecting Contexts: An Examination Of Social Class, Gender, Race, And Depressive Symptoms, Amy Claxton Sep 2010

Intersecting Contexts: An Examination Of Social Class, Gender, Race, And Depressive Symptoms, Amy Claxton

Open Access Dissertations

This study examined whether commonly used social class indicators (occupational prestige, education, and income) had direct or indirect effects on mental health, and whether these relationships varied by gender, race, or family structure. To this end, 597 working-class participants were interviewed in the months before they had a child. Findings indicated that income, and not occupational prestige or education, had a direct effect on mental health, in that it was related to fewer depressive symptoms. Additionally, education and race interacted, such that for People of Color, more education was related to more depressive symptoms. Furthermore, occupational prestige and education, and …