Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

Using Retrieval Practice, Variability, And Spacing To Facilitate Understanding Of Complex Information, Rachel Peirce

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Combining the learning strategies of retrieval practice and variability has been shown to be effective in student learning (Butler et al., 2017; Pan & Rickard, 2018), but the temporal structuring of these learning strategies (i.e., massing versus spacing of practice) may benefit or hinder learning. Study 1 investigated whether the benefits of variable retrieval practice relative to repeated retrieval practice that occurs with massed practice extends to spaced practice. Participants watched geology videos that contained a total of 12 concepts, and then either answered three questions or read three study points about each concept. Each of the three questions and …

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 …

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 …

A Review Of Recent Gene Expression-Based And Dna Methylation-Based Mathematical Cell Type Deconvolution Methods, Chenxiao Tian

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, many cell type deconvolution methods based on DNA methylation data and gene expression data have been developed. Both of these two methods have its special advantages and disadvantages, e.g., DNA methylation-based methods’ data source is usually more stable than gene expression and DNA methylation is easier to measure in FFPE tissues or formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded, while some gene-expression data like scRNA-seq data usually has high cost and complexity. On the other hand, gene expression-based deconvolution methods currently have many more available methods than DNA methylation-based deconvolution methods, which leads to DNA methylation-based methods in many cases can learn …

Plutarch On Marriage For Its Own Sake: What Makes Marriage Good And What Marriage Is Good For In The Coniugalia Praecepta, Patrick Andrews

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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 …

Music And Mind Games: Disability And Genre In The Psychonauts Series, Sophia Wetzel

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The cult-classic video game Psychonauts (2005) and its acclaimed sequel Psychonauts 2 (2021) are known for their depiction of mental illness and trauma. However, the depictions in each game reinforce different disability narratives: the first a “cure” narrative and the second an “accommodation” narrative (Mitchell & Snyder 2000; Howe 2016). Each level occurs within the mind of a different character, allowing the player to interact with manifestations of the character’s cognitive disability, such as fighting enemies called “Panic Attacks” or sorting their “Emotional Baggage.” The scoring for each level reflects the respective character by drawing from existing musical genres to …

Reflecting On Resilience: A Large-Scale Qualitative Study Of Adolescents' Experiences Of Resilience During Covid-19, Maegan Ruiz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Resilience is a dynamic process of positive adaptation when faced with significant adversity. The extensive and protracted disruptions to adolescents' academic and social engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic created unique challenges, which have included concerns about academic/work habits, social connections, physical health, and mental health (Scott et al., 2020). In what ways did adolescents operationalize resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic? And, what can that tell us about how we should conceptualize resilience generally? At the end of the first full school year of the pandemic in April 2021, we asked a diverse group of 2,171 high schoolers an open-ended question: …

Uvrd1 Helicase Of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis That Can Be Activated By Multiple Unique Mechanisms, Ankita Chadda

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) causes tuberculosis disease in humans and is one of the leading causes of death worldwide due to infectious agents. During infection, Mtb is exposed to reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen intermediates from the host immune response that causes DNA damage. UvrD-like helicases are involved in DNA repair and use energy from ATP hydrolysis to translocate on single stranded DNA (ssDNA) or unwind double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to remove the damaged DNA strand. Previous studies on UvrD-like helicases have shown that they exist in a monomer-dimer equilibrium and unwind only as dimers in the absence of accessory …

Biotic Interactions And The Maintenance Of Biodiversity Across A Tropical Elevational Gradient, David Henderson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A major goal of community ecology is to elucidate the processes that create patterns of biodiversity. Specifically, the discipline focuses on the processes that influence community assembly, diversity gradients, and/or species coexistence. Coexistence mechanisms have been traditionally thought of in terms of resource competition, whereby species are able to coexist by having different niche requirements, both biotic and abiotic, that maximize their fitness. Much of the previous work in this arena focused on the abiotic factors that influence species coexistence. However, many of the seminal ideas about the forces that drive abundance and coexistence patterns hypothesized that it was differences …

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 …

The Vices Of Virtues: Making Room For Moral Testimony In The Life Of The Virtuous Person, Maria Waggoner

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation sheds light on new and unacknowledged difficulties that we face in striving to be (more) virtuous. By making use of empirical literature from moral, affective, and perceptual learning, I explore the potential cognitive and psychological relationships between having a virtue in one context and the tendency to exhibit vices in another. I do this by showing how morally good behavioral habits can also lead to morally inappropriate actions, when a virtuous moral perceptual system can give rise to moral illusions, and when our basic evaluative affective responses differ in their degree of sensitivity, leading to having some virtues …

Characterization Of Subcellular Functional Domains In The Vesicular Glutamate Transporter 3-Expressing Retinal Amacrine Cell Using Correlative Light And Electron Microscopy, Karl Friedrichsen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following work seeks to better understand how neurons process multiple streams of information within the branches of their dendritic arbors. We use correlated light and electron microscopy to capture both live subcellular calcium responses and detailed morphology and synaptic connectivity in a unique retinal amacrine cell in order to directly study the relationship between structure and function. The vesicular glutamate transporter 3-expressing amacrine cell (VG3) selectively integrates and segregates visual information within its arbor branches and provides multiple target neuron types with appropriate excitatory or inhibitory synaptic inputs. By reconstructing VG3 arbor branches, synapses, and connected cell types, we …

Modeling Variability In Personality Development: Quantifying, Explaining, And Examining The Predictive Utility Of Person-Specific Variance Around Personality Trajectories, Amanda Jo Wright

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Decades’ worth of research has identified replicable, average patterns of normative personality development across the lifespan. Underlying these findings lie a few assumptions, however, and work seeking to provide incremental knowledge seems to have yet offered a clear path forward. This impasse in progress, in conjunction with studies highlighting the complexity of personality, would suggest these assumptions are perhaps untenable. The current study uses five longitudinal datasets (N = 128,345) to examine personality development using mixed effects location scale models. This permits there to be individual differences in within-person residual variability, or sigma, around trajectories – thereby testing if standard …

Cardiovascular Sars-Cov-2 Tropism And Immunopathology, Oleksandr Dmytrenko

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by SARS-CoV-2, a member of beta-coronaviridae family. This single-stranded RNA virus is transmitted through a respiratory route, binds to a host receptor ACE2 and enters lung pneumocytes, causing fulminant pulmonary disease in a subset of patients. In addition to pulmonary disease, SARS-CoV-2 can also lead to extrapulmonary manifestations, affecting brain, kidneys, blood vessels and heart. Cardiac complications are common in COVID-19 patients with both mild and severe clinical courses. However, it remains unclear which cardiac cell types are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and what the consequences of their infection are. In this work, I identified …

The Evolution Of Transposable Elements As Cis-Regulatory Elements In Mammals, Alan Y. Du

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile genetic elements that make up a large proportion of mammalian genomes. Although TEs are highly prevalent genomic sequences, they have been understudied as they were once labeled as “junk DNA.” Despite their initial status as simple genomic parasites, recent studies have implicated TEs as cis-regulatory elements, supplying promoters, enhancers, and boundary elements. Functional testing of regulatory activity, however, remains a significant bottleneck. Nonetheless, due to their repetitive nature, TEs provide a unique model to examine the evolution of cis-regulatory elements, which has traditionally been difficult to study due to lack of homology at the sequence …

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 …

Context Dependence, Cheating, And Long-Term Conflict In Social Interactions, Trey Scott

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social interactions are widespread in nature and can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. Interactions are often categorized by who is benefited or harmed by the symbiosis. For example, if both sides benefit, the interaction is cooperative. If one side benefits at the expense of the other, it is an antagonism. The kind of interaction can have important evolutionary implications, but interactions rarely fit neatly into these interaction categories. Instead, interactions often involve elements of cooperation and conflict. My dissertation explores the consequences of interactions and how they can involve both cooperation and conflict using a range of experimental, genomic, …

Non-Adjacent Anti Cyclobutane Pyrimidine Dimers As Intrinsic Probes Of Non-B Form Secondary Structures Of Dna, Natalia Eugenia Gutierrez Bayona

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

G-quadruplexes are four-stranded structures of DNA composed of G-quartets that have been proposed to play an extremely important role in replication, transcription, and translation. It has, however, been extremely difficult to unequivocally demonstrate that G-quadruplexes form in living cells due to the lack of probes that would allow for their unambiguous detection and location without disrupting the DNA or the cellular environment. To circumvent these problems, it was proposed that DNA itself could be used as an intrinsic photoprobe for certain classes of G-quadruplex structures and other non-B DNA conformations in vivo. Recently, we discovered that UVB irradiation of human …

Putting Attentional Control On The Map: An Investigation Of Meaningful Boundaries And Context-Specific Control, Jackson Stuart Colvett

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People can learn and adopt relaxed or focused control settings based on the likelihood of conflict at specific inducer locations, then flexibly retrieve those control settings at nearby unbiased diagnostic locations. Importantly, people can learn that multiple distinct contexts predict conflict, such as specific locations or regions of space (e.g., all locations in the upper left). In realistic visual scenes, meaningful boundaries that demarcate objects or areas of space serve as an important signal that the area inside the boundary is distinct from the area outside the boundary. Recent research (Colvett & Bugg, 2022) indicated a role for meaningful boundaries …

How Can One Be Happy? Conteuses’ Lessons On Proper Conduct And Mentality In The Court Society Of Louis Xiv, Zhiyuan Meng

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“How can one be happy?” is an age-old question that has been asked countless times throughout history. The answer, however, varies considerably according to when and where the question is asked. In seventeenth-century French court society, marked by patriarchal and monarchical domination, the key to happiness depends heavily upon the individual’s gender and social position. This dissertation examines three cross-dressed heroines in fairy tales written by first-generation French storytellers at the end of the seventeenth century. Their adventures as male chevaliers are conducive to the evaluation of advice for an audience of both genders from aristocratic and high bourgeois backgrounds …