Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond Black And White Spatial Imaginaries: A Case Study Of The Model Cities Area In St. Louis, Missouri, Clark Randall

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building on, and departing from, George Lipsitz’ theory of white and Black spatial imaginaries, this article analyzes how race-based spatial imaginaries took form in the urban planning politics of 1960’s St. Louis. Specifically, the era of Model Cities funding from 1966-1972 is evaluated as a case study of competing spatial imaginaries for the cities’ future involving the majority Black neighborhoods of the near north side and the preexisting white planning establishment. A part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, Model Cities sought to usher in a new framework for citizen planning, putting residents and their local knowledge at the head …

Temporal Order Memory In Naturalistic Events Is Influenced By Semantic Knowledge And Hierarchical Event Structure, Yining Ding

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As people go through everyday life, they segment their continuous sensory experience into distinct events, and the event structure being perceived during encoding has important implication on how event dynamics is later reconstructed from long-term memory. Previous studies using discrete pictorial stimuli showed that people are sometimes better at remembering the temporal order of items occurring within the same perceptual context than items spanning across a perceptual boundary, but that the opposite can also occur if contextual cues are available during retrieval. However, given that these paradigms only tested the episodic memory of arbitrary temporal associations, it is unclear if …

“It's More Than A Book Club”: Counterspaces And Bibliotherapic Wellness Among Black Undergraduate Women, Khrystal Johnson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) face heightened vulnerability to general and race-related stressors, necessitating the identification of culturally responsive and alternative care approaches to complement traditional talk therapy and clinical assessment, given the associated adverse academic and psychological outcomes. The current study explores the utility of a Black women-focused book club as an inclusive and identity-affirming space for Black women attending an elite and private PWI. Additionally, we consider how this bibliotherapic and group-based approach offered a critical counterspace for participants. Over the course of a four-month semester, two Black women co-facilitators held a monthly book club series …

The Domain Specificity And Conscious Awareness Of Learned Memory Biases, Gizem Filiz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The False Positive Feedback (FPF) manipulation encourages certain recognition errors by inducing either liberal (lax) or conservative (strict) recognition memory decision biases. FPF manipulation involves trial-by-trial probabilistic positive feedback for commission or omission errors while the other stimulus class always received fully correct feedback during testing. We investigated whether these learned biases are restricted to the stimulus class triggering FPF, or whether they instead spread to an intermixed class receiving valid feedback, by selectively delivering FPF to words or pictures. A spreading bias would suggest that subjects learn to be liberal or conservative in interpreting recognition evidence in general during …

Cardiovascular Risk As A Mediator Of Associations Between Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor With Longitudinal Brain And Cognitive Trajectories In Older Adults, Jennifer Shearon

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior work has shown that higher levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are associated with better brain health and cognitive function. There is also evidence that BDNF is present in cardiovascular tissue and that it may be beneficial for cardiovascular function. This is evidenced by higher BDNF being associated with lower incidence of coronary heart disease and mortality, and with lower incidence of cardiovascular risk factors. The goal of the current study was to investigate the relationship between BDNF and cardiovascular function, and to assess whether there is a mediating or moderating role of cardiovascular health in the relationship between …

Characterizing The Relationship Between Accented Speech Intelligibility And Listening Effort, Mel Mallard

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unfamiliar accents can make speech communication difficult, both by reducing speech intelligibility and by increasing the effort listeners must put forth to understand speech. However, these two constructs, while related, are independent: for example, two 100% intelligible utterances may require different amounts of effort to accurately process. To better characterize the relationship between intelligibility and effort, this study presents speakers of four intelligibility levels (one natively-accented English speaker, and three Mandarin-accented English speakers) within a dual-task paradigm (featuring a vibrotactile secondary task) to measure listening effort. We found a negative nonlinear relationship between intelligibility and effort, with the steepest slope …

Consistent Across Situations? A Person Specific Approach To Examining A Long-Standing Paradox., Muchen Xi

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bem and Allen (1974) address the person situation debate by proposing that there are some people behave more consistently, which can be better “explained” try personality traits, than others who are more influenced by situations. However, with failures to directly replicate Bem and Allen’s study, the existence of individual difference in cross situation consistency of behaviors remaining unclear. The current study addressed open questions that arose from the personality consistency debate by employing Mixed Effect Location Scale Model (MELSM) in an intensive longitudinal study. We found 1) there are individual difference in the overall behavioral consistency across situations; 2) there …

A Mega-Study Of Stereotypes And Attitudes Toward Nationality Groups In The United States, Ayse Selin Toprakkiran

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The culture and demographics of the United States have been greatly influenced by numerous immigrant nationality groups, which continue to play a vital role in society. To understand how nationality groups are perceived in the United States, we asked residents to report stereotypes and attitudes toward 28 nationality groups and 6 racial/ethnic groups (N = 7,050). Our findings showed various patterns across 15 stereotypes, grouped under warmth, status, Americanness, and political orientation dimensions. Warmth-related stereotypes and attitudes varied widely across groups and did not follow a discernible pattern. Status-related stereotypes of Asian Americans and East Asian nationality groups were consistently …

Grasping Type Affects Configural Encoding In Visual Working Memory, Shinhae Ahn

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has shown that different grasping actions selectively influence the processing of simple visual features based on their relevance to the specific action. However, it remains uncertain if this interaction extends to abstract and higher-order information, such as global configuration extracted from an array of visual objects. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of different grasping types on the processing of configural shape information in visual working memory (VWM). In Experiment 1, participants engaged in a VWM change detection task while adopting either power- or precision-grasping postures. The availability of configural shape information was manipulated through the …

Predictive Looking And Predictive Looking Errors In Everyday Activities, Sophie Su

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People spontaneously segment continuous streams of experiences into distinct episodes. Prediction errors are theorized to drive segmentation. However, existing studies exploring the relationship between prediction error and event segmentation lack a continuous measure of prediction error during naturalistic perception and often fail to distinguish between prediction error and prediction uncertainty. Do moment-by-moment fluctuation of prediction errors, not prediction uncertainty during naturalistic event perception correlate positively with segmentation probabilities? To tackle this question, we harnessed the predictive nature of eye movements and introduced a predictive looking model. In this model, individuals’ prior gaze patterns act as predictors for critical features in …

Virtue-Driven Leadership: Powering Excellence In Organizations, Joseph Scherrer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I seek to answer the question “What makes a good leader?” I approach this question systematically, starting in Chapter 1 by asking “What is Leadership?” In attempting to formulate a response, I find that the concept is slipperier than it first appears and difficult to pin down. All the same, I construct a thematic, contextually pertinent definition that provides reasonable precision for the purposes of this study. In Chapter 2, I present a representative survey of the social-scientific academic literature in order to establish the prospect that a philosophy of virtuous leadership can be empirically validated in …

Projecting, Persuading, & Protecting: A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Adult Children’S Predictions Of Parents’ Quality-Of-Life Valuations In Serious Illness States, Jessica Hahne

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Older adults often face complex serious illness decisions and involve their adult children as shared or surrogate decision makers. However, previous research asking family members to predict older adults’ treatment preferences in serious illness situations typically shows poor concordance with older adults’ actual preferences. In the current mixed methods analysis, we surveyed older adults (n = 38) on their health state valuations in five serious illness scenarios. Two of their adult children (n = 76) predicted their parent’s preferences. Families also participated in a semi-structured conversation to discuss their preferences and predictions. Quantitative analyses showed that parents’ average valuations were …

Emotion Regulation Flexibility: Investigating Perseverative Thinking As A Novel Context, Beatris Garcia

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emotion regulation (ER) flexibility is a rapidly evolving field within affective science. Current advances have identified context sensitivity as a leading method for measuring ER flexibility, largely focusing on affectivity and situational control as markers of context. In this study, we propose an innovative approach to expand the list of contextual features tied to ER flexibility by using a framework based on Perseverative Thinking (PT). We examined seven PT dimensions, including pleasantness, repetitiveness, self-focus, other-focus, certainty, controllability, and temporal orientation, along with six ER strategies: reappraisal, acceptance, problem solving, expressive suppression, distraction, and cognitive avoidance. Once a day over the …

How Prefixation, Onset Length, And Coda Length Determine Lexical Stress Assignment When Reading Aloud, Kayla Hensley

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lexical stress, or which syllable is emphasized in a multisyllabic word, can provide important cues for speech segmentation, lexical class, and reading acquisition. Despite this, much of the literature on reading has focused on single syllable words, neglecting the role that stress can play. In this project, I examine the role of prefixation, onset and coda length in assigning stress in disyllabic words when reading aloud. Study 1 is a corpus analysis of English words with grade level information to replicate the model developed by Treiman et al. 2020 and check for age differences. There were no significant differences on …

Discounting Of Delayed And Probabilistic Outcomes Across The Adult Lifespan, Haoran Wan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intertemporal and risky decision-making predicts many problem behaviors that also decline with age, raising the question: Do intertemporal and risky decisions change with age? Despite the theoretical and empirical importance, the literature under both rubrics reveals inconsistent findings. Some studies suggest that these inconsistencies may be due to the presence of unassessed demographic differences. The present study examined age differences, evaluating the role of demographic variables in intertemporal and risky choice of gains and losses using the discounting framework. Four experiments were conducted, each with one of the four types of discounting: discounting of delayed gains, discounting of delayed losses, …

Between-Task Transfer Of Learned Control Settings: How Far Can It Go?, Merve Ileri Tayar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Learning-guided control refers to adjustments of cognitive control settings (i.e., relatively focused vs. relaxed) based on learned associations between predictive cues (e.g., stimulus features) and the likelihood of conflict. We investigated the transfer of learned control settings beyond the conditions under which they were learned to examine the flexibility and automaticity of these control settings. In Experiment 1, participants experienced an item-specific proportion congruence (ISPC) manipulation in a training phase in which target color in a Flanker task was biased (mostly congruent or mostly incongruent). Then, in a subsequent transfer phase, they performed a color-word Stroop task in which the …

“Safe People And Safe Spaces:” Filipino American Identity Formation In Response To Local Social Contexts, Cilka Mayumi Hijara

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The identity formation of Filipino Americans has captured scholarly interest due to their unique characteristics and identity attachments. Studies of children of Filipino immigrants are largely focused on individuals from diverse areas and do not explore whether different social environments influence a diversity of identity perspectives. Using data from interviews with 40 children of Filipino immigrants from across the U.S., I examine whether and how their understandings of their identities are shaped by setting. I find that participants’ local contexts, particularly local racial/ethnic demographics during childhood, shape their perceptions of their identities relative to other groups and prevailing categorization schemes. …

Opportunistic Exploration: Humans Consider Not Just Whether, But Also When, To Sample Unfamiliar Options, Jack Dolgin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Big or small, many decisions incorporate the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation—whether to take advantage of what we know to be good, or to take a chance on something new. Recent research suggests we make this choice via a combination of stochasticity and directedness, and that the directedness involves prioritizing lesser seen options. Through a series of multi-armed bandit experiments, we extend this conceptualization of directed exploration to incorporate opportunistic choice in dynamic decision contexts. Participants chose between two bandits and, unlike in prior work, did not explore undersampled bandits more when more future trials remained, even though there was …

A Phenome-Wide Association Study (Phewas) Of Late Onset Alzheimer Disease Genetic Risk In Children Of European Ancestry At Middle Childhood: Results From The Abcd Study®, Aaron Gorelik

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Genetic risk for Late Onset Alzheimer Disease (AD) has been associated with lower cognition and smaller hippocampal volume in healthy young adults. However, whether these and other associations are present during childhood remains unclear. Using data from 5,556 genomically-confirmed European ancestry youth who completed the baseline session of the ongoing the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development^SM Study (ABCD Study^®), our phenome-wide association study estimating associations between four indices of genetic risk for late-onset AD (i.e., AD polygenic risk scores (PRS), APOE rs429358 genotype, AD PRS with the APOE region removed (AD_PRS-APOE), and an interaction between AD …

Social Anxiety And Romantic Conflict: Examining Prospective Interpersonal Dynamics, Julia Levitan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with impairment in close relationship functioning, including romantic relationships. Although interpersonal theories point to dimensions of dominance and warmth as relevant factors, the momentary interpersonal dynamics that may be contributing to relationship problems remain poorly understood. In the present study, I aimed to examine contemporaneous and prospective associations between dominance and warmth in individuals with (n = 30) and without (n = 29) SAD and their romantic partners during a 10-minute conflict task. Using the Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) system and multilevel dynamic structural equation modeling (ML-DSEM), I found that …

The Transformation Of Congressional Policy Making In A Partisan Era, Patrick Rickert

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the transformation of Congressional politics away from traditional practices and the consequences of those changes. In the House of Representatives, I consider this with respect to the party and chamber rule changes introduced by the new Republican majority after the 1994 election, while in the Senate I use the lens of paired voting to evaluate how the Senate has evolved. The first chapter discusses the literature on party government and theorizes how parties have used committees to achieve their goals. Chapters 2 and 3 center how Speaker Newt Gingrich used rule changes to alter the relationship between …

Brain Structure Correlates Of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Traits, Allison Moreau

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) is the most common personality disorder, yet much remains unknown about its etiology. Although neural contributions to many other psychiatric disorders have been extensively studied, few existing studies have examined neural correlates of OCPD. Furthermore, all have had insufficient sample sizes to produce reliable results. Large samples are needed to reliably detect the expected small brain-behavior relationships. However, large neuroimaging studies often do not assess for personality disorders, although many assess for normative personality. The present study employed a Five-Factor Model of personality disorders, which conceptualizes personality disorders as maladaptive extremes of normative personality traits, to …

Three Models Of Border Stability And Integrity, Afiq Bin Oslan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border policies have gained a surge of interest from politicians, policymakers, citizens and voters in all corners of the globe in the current millennium. In turn, academia too has turned its interest into systematically studying this increasingly salient political phenomenon. At this stage, however, this topic of study remains theoretically under-founded. The primary objective of this dissertation then is to make several theoretical contributions towards the study of border politics. To this end, my dissertation studies the causes and consequences of state decisions (or non-decisions) to secure their borders from social, political and economic perspectives. I approach this problem primarily …

Conceptual Understanding Of Skin Color Inheritance Among Immigrant Children And Adults, Fateme Mohseni

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research on White American children and adults' perception of skin color inheritance found that they expect inheritable properties like skin color to have a greater range of possible outcomes compared to deterministic events like mixing two paints (Schwarzlose et al., 2021). However, it is unclear whether this generalizes to other populations. To address this gap, two studies explored this question with a non-White immigrant population of children and adults. To test individuals' skin color biases, in Study 1 children and adults from immigrant populations in the U.S. were asked to predict a biracial baby's skin color (a socially relevant …

Transdiagnostic Predictors Of Everyday Functioning: Examining The Relationships Of Depression And Reinforcement Learning, Nada Dalloul

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Background and Hypothesis. Identifying the factors contributing to functional deficits in psychotic disorders is essential to developing effective interventions. To address gaps in the literature, the current study had several goals: examine whether there are differential relationships across domains of neurocognition and function, assess whether reinforcement learning is related to function, identify how and if predictors of function are transdiagnostic, determine whether depression and positive symptoms contribute to function, and to further explore whether the modality of assessing function impacts the observed relationships.

Study Design. We examined the neurocognitive and symptomatic predictors of individual functional domains across three measures …

Adapting Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Ro-Dbt) For Adolescents: Preliminary Testing Of Mechanisms Of Change, Molly Fennig

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Background: Overcontrol is a phenotype characterized by inflexibility, perfectionism, and a need for control or structure, which increases risk for disorders such as anorexia nervosa, social anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Given high comorbidity and limited efficacy of current treatments for these disorders, Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy for adolescents (RO DBT-A) attempts to improve outcomes by targeting overcontrol as a transdiagnostic mechanism. This study aimed to test preliminary efficacy of telehealth-delivered RO DBT-A in targeting overcontrol as a mechanism of psychopathology in a heterogeneous clinical sample.

Method: Participants were female adolescents (ages 13-21; 83% white; 80% non-Hispanic/Latino) who presented with …

"They Can Murder Us Today And It Wouldn’T Be A Novelty” U.S. Expulsion Policies And The Violent Structure Of The U.S. Enforcement Matrix, Cinthia Romo Alba

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the United States implemented two migrant expulsion policies: The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a policy which forces migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings, and Title 42, a policy that expelled migrants back to Mexico under the guise that it was a preventative measure for spreading COVID-19. I ask: What are the experiences of asylum seekers subjected to expulsion policies, and what do their experiences tell us about the structure of the U.S. Border Enforcement System? Relying on six months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Matamoros camp …

Testing Of A Novel Combined Eating-Disorder And Weight-Loss Online Guided-Self Help Intervention For Young Adults With A Binge-Type Eating Disorder And Overweight Or Obesity, Grace Elise Monterubio

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Binge-type eating disorders (EDs) and obesity-related health concerns are two serious medical issues, though study of their treatment has largely remained separate. This study implemented an online, guided self-help ED intervention that concurrently offered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based tools to improve ED symptoms, while also teaching energy-density food principles of behavioral weight loss (BWL), for individuals with clinical/sub-clinical binge-type EDs with comorbid overweight/obesity. The study aimed to examine change in weight, change in ED symptoms, and program engagement between a combined intervention (CBT + BWL) and an ED-only intervention. Participants in the combined intervention group received weekly session content pertaining …

Cultivating Life: Skill, Sovereignty, And The Nature Of Knowledge, Bradley Jones

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the cultivation of knowledge, nature, and farmers in U.S. alternative agriculture. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Hudson Valley of New York and Central Appalachia, I trace the movement of knowledge across prominent training guides, educational workshops, and apprenticeship programs designed to train the next generation of sustainable farmers. I argue that the knowledge communities of alternative agriculture (strive to) transmit not only technical capacity—the ability to productively farm sustainability—but also holistic ways of understanding the natural world and the human place in it. In doing so practitioners of alternative agriculture gain autonomy from the political-economic and …

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation In Current And Remitted Major Depressive Disorder: An Experience Sampling Study, Yunjing Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) have difficulties regulating emotion on their own. As people also turn to others for help with emotion regulation (i.e., interpersonal emotion regulation [IER]), we examined whether these difficulties extend to IER in current and remitted MDD. We generally expected individuals with current MDD (and remitted MDD to a lesser extent) to utilize IER in distinct ways compared to those with no history of psychiatric disorders (i.e., controls) due to differences in emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal functioning. Using experience sampling, adults with current MDD (n=48), remitted MDD (n=80), and controls (n=87) reported on how frequently …