Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring The Relationship Between Anger, Aggression, And Perpetrator Substance Use In The Commission Of Sexual Offenses, Dominique Rivera

Student Theses

This study examined the potential association between perpetrator substance use, anger, and aggressive behavior in the commission of sexual crimes. The sample included 246 adult males convicted of rape (n = 54) or child molestation (n = 192). Descriptive statistics revealed that 64.6% of the individuals in this sample (n = 159) were intoxicated at the time of the offense. Results showed that perpetrators who used substances at the time of the offense were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior toward the victim (e.g., weapon use, verbal abuse) than those who did not. Offenders with higher pervasive anger scores were …

Are Giant Pandas (Ailuropoda Melanoleuca) Averse To Inequity?, Miranda R. Trapani

Theses and Dissertations

Inequity aversion, a negative response to situations of unequal reward distribution, is a cognitive trait usually seen in social species. This capacity is thought to regulate cooperative relationships in intelligent, cognitively flexible animals. Giant pandas are a unique case in that wild populations are characterized as nonsocial, however captive populations are socially housed until sexual maturity. This allows for the study of a nonsocial species in a social context and thus the assessment of socio-cognitive flexibility across evolutionarily distant taxa. Here, we assessed whether the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) displays inequity aversion by testing ten juveniles living at …

Variation In Personality Among Semi-Wild Myanmar Timber Elephants, Sateesh Venkatesh

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines two personality traits: exploration and neophobia, which could influence human-elephant conflicts. Thirty-one semi-wild elephants were tested over two trials using a custom novel puzzle tube containing three tasks and three rewards. Our studies show that elephants do vary significantly between individuals in both exploration and neophobia.

Corporations And The American Polity, Patrick Labossiere

Student Theses and Dissertations

Research on corporate communications’ effects on politics presents an acknowledgement of a relationship between the two topics, leaving a void in the explanation and examination of this topic. The void presents an opening to introduce a conceptual process for how corporations are able to craft communications to influence the American Polity, the democratic social organization within the United States. This research begins with a historical review of how corporations gain prominence in American society, capturing the ability to participate in the democratic social organization of the polity. A qualitative analysis of several conceptual frameworks serves as data, to establish an …

Reopening America's Schools During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Protecting Asian Students From Stigma And Discrimination, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted a rise in stigma and discrimination against people of Asian descent in many areas in the world, including the United States1. Anti-Asian hate incidents, which have ranged from verbal attacks, refusal of service to physical assault, continue to transpire in the U.S., and they put psychological and physical well-being of Asian children at increased risk. Discussions toward reopening of U.S. schools thus far, however, seem to have exclusively included the infection-related concerns and pedagogical consequences of continued disruptions in face-to-face instructions. Hence, educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders need to have plans in place …

Childhood Maltreatment And Lead Levels In Middle Adulthood: A Prospective Examination Of The Roles Of Individual Socio-Economic And Neighborhood Characteristics, Anthony Carpi, Valentina Nikulina, Xuechen Li, Cathy Spatz Widom

Publications and Research

Background Lead is a common environmental hazard because of its past use as an additive to gasoline and household paint. Some evidence suggests that children with histories of child abuse and neglect are at elevated risk for residence in communities and households with less desirable characteristics and high levels of exposure to environmental hazards and toxins.

Objectives To understand whether childhood maltreatment leads to higher levels of household dust lead and blood lead in adulthood and the extent to which characteristics of a person’s physical environment or individual level socio-economic status (SES) (based on unemployment, poverty, and receipt of public …

Gender Differences In Moral Influences On Adolescents’ Eyewitness Identification, Toni Spring, Herbert D. Saltzstein, Leeann Siegel

Publications and Research

In this study, 232 (89 11- to-12-year-olds, 71 13- to-14-year-olds; 72 15- to-16-year-olds) students recruited from grades 6th–11th in an urban public high school participated in a study of eyewitness identification. The focus of this study was on the effects of age, gender and moral orientation on decisional bias and, as a secondary outcome, on accuracy (using signal detection analysis). The primary purpose of this and previous studies in this series is to uncover implicit moral decision-making in decisional bias. In this study the perpetrator, the bystanders and the foil were all females. Prior to completing the eyewitness identification task, …

Mental Health Literacy In A Diverse Sample Of Undergraduate Students: Demographic, Psychological, And Academic Correlates, Rona Miles, Laura Rabin, Anjali Krishnan, Evan Grandoit, Kamil Kloskowski

Publications and Research

Background: Investigating variables associated with mental health literacy in the college-age population takes us one step closer to providing intervention for this vulnerable group, where growing rates of psychological disorders are a serious public concern. This study adds to the existing literature by incorporating, within a single model, multi-faceted variables (demographic, psychological, and academic) that contribute to mental health literacy in demographically and ethnically diverse college students.

Methods: Participants were undergraduate students enrolled at nine different colleges that are part of a large, urban, public university system. A total of 1213 respondents (62.0% female, 73.3% non-white) completed an in- person …

Editorial: Everyday Beliefs About Emotion: Their Role In Subjective Experience, Emotion As An Interpersonal Process, And Emotion Theory, Manuel F. Gonzalez, Eric A. Walle, Yochi Cohen-Charash, Stephanie A. Shields

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Accessibility Compliance And Assessments For Gateway Websites In Life Sciences: Toward Inclusive Design, Noreen Y. Whysel, Shari Thurow, Bev Corwin

Publications and Research

One main purpose of information architecture and site navigation is to enhance the effectiveness of user interfaces (UIs) by supporting and enabling task completion, accessibility, and sustainability. This is of particular importance for science gateways given the complexity of information on portal sites.

We examined the accessibility of 50 randomly selected gateway websites in the Life Sciences category in the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) catalog, using both manual and automated methodologies. None of these sites produced an accessible website as per W3C, WCAG 2.1, and Section 508 standards. The most common accessibility success in these websites was URL structure, …

Discriminating Global Orientation Of Two Element Sets, Aytaç Karabay, Daniel D. Kurylo

Publications and Research

Perceived global organization of visual patterns is based upon the aggregate contribution of constituent components. Patterns constructed from multiple sources cooperate or compete for global organization. An investigation was made here of interactions between two interspersed element sets on global orientation. It was hypothesized that each set would operate as an integrated unit, and contribute independently to global orientation. Participants viewed a 10 x 10 array of Gabor patches, and indicated the predominant orientation of the array. In Experiment 1 all elements were rotated. Rotation up to 23° had little effect, whereas greater rotation produced a progressive shift on global …

Depression And Anxiety During The Covid-19 Pandemic In An Urban, Low-Income Public University Sample, Sasha Rudenstine, Kat Mcneal, Talia Schulder, Catherine K. Ettman, Michelle Hernandez, Kseniia Gvozdieva, Sandro Galea

Publications and Research

Mental health disparities in the aftermath of national disasters and the protective role of socioeconomic status are both well documented. We assessed the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms among underresourced public university students during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Between April 8, 2020, and May 2, 2020, adult students (N = 1,821) across the CUNY system completed an online survey examining COVID-19–related stressors and mental health and sociodemographic factors. Using multivariable logistical regression to assess the association between COVID-19–related stressors and depression and anxiety symptoms, we found a high prevalence and severity of depression and anxiety …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Psy 2100 (Statistics For Social Science), Adam Shavit

Open Educational Resources

You will learn to summarize, make sense of, and base decisions on real life data. You will learn to read and create verbal and graphical summaries from measurements, for example from randomized experiments and correlational surveys. You will also learn to estimate your confidence in a pattern of results. This will be applied to inferring from limited observations to more general phenomenon, and to compare differences between groups. We will also learn to describe and quantify co-variation between measurements. In addition, you will get experience in conducting statistical analyses using software, working on real datasets from psychological experiments.

Applied Statistics, Alina Shevorykin

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Issues In Counseling, Shaakira Haywood

Open Educational Resources

Course Description: Multicultural Issues in Counseling is intended to provide an introduction to the role of political and sociocultural factors in the provision of appropriate, effective and ethical counseling. This is a theoretical, practical and experiential course that will focus on expanding awareness of your own cultural values and biases; developing critical thinking and awareness of differing experiences and worldviews; and increasing their sensitivity to how sociocultural identities influence prospective clients. The focus of the course is on the individual as a racial-cultural being who brings to their daily life a range of social group memberships which can serve as …

Experimental Psychology, Bianca Vidal

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for Experimental Psychology Course

Ethics Activity, Bianca Vidal

Open Educational Resources

Apply critical thinking to the research scenarios and act ethically based on APA Principles in the conduct of research with humans.

The Occupational Depression Inventory: A New Tool For Clinicians And Epidemiologists, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Background: Depressive symptoms induced by insurmountable job stress and sick leave for mental health reasons have become a focal concern among occupational health specialists. The present study introduces the Occupational Depression Inventory (ODI), a measure designed to quantify the severity of work-attributed depressive symptoms and establish provisional diagnoses of job-ascribed depression. The ODI comprises nine symptom items and a subsidiary question assessing turnover intention. Methods: A total of 2254 employed individuals were recruited in the U.S., New Zealand, and France. We examined the psychometric and structural properties of the ODI as well as the nomological network of work-attributed depressive symptoms. …

When Pandemic Hits: Exercise Frequency And Subjective Well-Being During Covid-19 Pandemic, Ralf Brand, Sinika Timme, Sanaz Nosrat

Publications and Research

The governmental lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced people to change their behavior in many ways including changes in exercise. We used the brief window of global lockdown in the months of March/April/May 2020 as an opportunity to investigate the effects of externally imposed restrictions on exercise-related routines and related changes in subjective well-being. Statistical analyses are based on data from 13,696 respondents in 18 countries using a cross-sectional online survey. A mixed effects modeling approach was used to analyze data. We tested whether exercise frequency before and during the pandemic would influence mood during the pandemic. Additionally, …

Impacts Of Mental Health First Aid On Mental Health Literacy And Stigma, Junseon Hwang

Student Theses

Mental Health First Aid has been developed to train the general public to give initial support to those in mental health crisis and development. The effectiveness of Mental Health First Aid has been questioned due to its relatively short history of the course. Mental Health First Aid was recently widely-disseminated in New York City as part of the ThriveNYC initiative. While most studies were supportive of the training, there has been no study that specifically examines New York residents. We recruited 328 New York residents who self-reported whether or not they have participated in Mental Health First Aid via Amazon …

Legislation, Linguistics, And Location: Exploring Attitudes On Unauthorized Immigration, David A. Caicedo, Vivienne Badaan

Publications and Research

Contemporary discourse on domestic immigration policy varies widely based on political affiliation, linguistics, and regional differences. This experimental study aimed to concurrently investigate three social psychological bases of attitudes towards unauthorized immigrants in the United States: political ideology, social labels, and social context. Participants were 744 adults, recruited from “New York Community College” (“NYCC”/urban) and “New Jersey Community College” (“NJCC”/suburban), who were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: “illegal” vs. “undocumented”. Participants completed a scale measuring their attitudes towards unauthorized immigrants with the embedded label manipulation, followed by the General System Justification scale, and culminating with demographic items. …

State And Trait Rumination Effects On Overt Attention To Reminders Of Errors In A Challenging General Knowledge Retrieval Task, Ronald C. Whiteman, Jennifer A. Mangels

Publications and Research

Rumination is a recurrent and repetitive manner of thinking that can be triggered by blockage of personally relevant goals, creating a temporary state of abstract and evaluative self-focus. Particularly when focused on passive “brooding” over one’s problems and feelings, however, rumination can increase negative affect, interfere with problem-solving, and, through a negative feedback cycle, become a chronic trait-like style of responding to personal challenges, particularly in women. Given the pervasiveness of rumination and its potential impact on cognitive processes and emotional states, the present study asks how it impacts attention to feedback that either reminds individuals of goal-state discrepancies (reminders …

Memory Bias Toward Emotional Information In Burnout And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Eric Laurent, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Lucas M. Bietti, Eric Mayor

Publications and Research

A sample of 1015 educational staff members, exhibiting various levels of burnout and depressive symptoms, underwent a memory test involving incident encoding of positive and negative words and a free recall task. Burnout and depression were each found to be associated with increased recall of negative items and decreased recall of positive items. Results remained statistically significant when controlling for history of depressive disorders. Burnout and depression were not related to mistakes in the reported words, or to the overall number of recalled words. This study suggests that burnout and depression overlap in terms of memory biases toward emotional information.

Development And Validation Of A Multidimensional Scale For Measuring Public Confidence In The Criminal Justice System, Jimin Pyo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two studies were conducted with an aim of developing multidimensional measures of public confidence that are conceptually integrated, psychometrically sound, and useful in predicting individuals’ law related behaviors. Study 1 involves two-phased construction of scale in which a preliminary inventory was generated (Phase 1) and then finalized after evaluating psychometric properties based on 304 US adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (Phase 2). As a result, six multidimensional scales were constructed respectively for measuring efficiency-, finality-, fairness-, strictness-, accuracy-, and transparency-oriented confidence. Despite more complexity of factor structures than originally expected, results of psychometric evaluation six scales of confidence …

Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms Of Adverse Trauma Outcomes In Emerging Adulthood, Olena Kleshchova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Exposure to traumatic stress and adversity during the formative years of development can have adverse effects on mental health, neuroendocrine stress system function, and the brain, that persist into adulthood. One candidate mechanism that might confer vulnerability to enduring adverse outcomes of early life trauma is disruption of normal brain maturation. As the brain matures, functional interactions among brain regions change until the functional brain architecture (i.e., the functional connectome) reaches a mature state in adulthood. Given that different neural circuits have distinct developmental trajectories and sensitive periods, traumatic stress at a given point in development might have …

Attachment, Exploration, And Internalized Homonegativity, Gregory J. Gagnon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Internalized homonegativity (IH; a.k.a. internalized homophobia), has been implicated in health disparities between lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons (LGBs) and their heterosexual peers. Yet, little available research has explored factors that may increase or decrease IH.

Objective: This dissertation investigates relations between child and adult attachment and IH. It further examines the mediating and moderating roles of exploration and mentalization, respectively, in the attachment–IH relation.

Method: One hundred fifty cisgender LGB adults participated in two waves of an online survey. The first assessed recalled child–maternal and child–paternal attachment and current attachment to the romantic partner. The second, conducted two …

Prep Use And Barriers To Use Among Adult And Young Sexual Minority Men In The United States, Thomas Whitfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was approved for all individuals 13 years of age and older in May 2018. However, research pertaining to uptake has mostly focused on adult sexual minority men (SMM), leaving out many barriers and facilitators that may exist for those under 18 years of age. Two of the most important precursors leading to PrEP uptake identified in prior research are the perception of self as a PrEP candidate and having intentions to begin PrEP. Developmental and dual processing theories suggest that individuals who are younger make behavioral decisions differently from those who are older. Developmental theories suggest that, …

Affect, Behavior And (Dys)Regulation: Integrating Youth's Projective Tests And Self-Reports, Laurel Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Past and current research indicates that unconscious processes (e.g., outside the realm of conscious awareness) contribute to aspects of adaptation and development, such as emotion regulation, adaptability, interpersonal flexibility and overall identity formation. Further, unconscious processes including: Defense Mechanisms (DMs), Affect Maturity (AM) and Object Relations (OR), can be operationalized and scored using valid and reliable psychodynamic instruments (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Method), with theoretical and empirical links to underlying emotion regulation processes. Currently however, emotional dysregulation and its sequelae (e.g.,depression and ADHD symptoms) are most often assessed based on one’s conscious awareness, using standardized self-report measures or structured clinical interviews. …

Do Criminal And Successful (Non-Institutionalized) Psychopaths Differ On Internal, Environmental, And Contextual Characteristics?, Ahmed E. Enaitalla

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by shallow emotions, particularly social emotions such as guilt, remorse, and empathy, as well as an arrogant and impulsive interpersonal style that involves the manipulation and domination of others. Despite the long history of theory and research on psychopathy, there continues to be a disagreement as to whether antisocial tendencies and criminal behaviors are an inherent part of the construct or are one possible byproduct of the aforementioned traits. In an attempt to resolve this disagreement, some researchers have shifted their efforts towards the study of psychopaths who reside beyond the walls of prisons …

Taking It To Heart: Trauma And Cardiovascular Risk In Court-Involved People Of Color, Tanya Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research supports that racial disparities in health persist in the United States, with cardiovascular risk and cardiovascular disease remaining particularly high in low-income, communities of color (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013; Winkleby, Jatulis, Frank, & Fortmann, 1992). Public health literature often focuses on sociodemographic variables when assessing for health disparities without considering trauma or forensic populations. This dissertation provides an overview of literature that examines cardiovascular disease and its relationship to trauma, particularly in low-income, communities of color, and forensic populations. Although the dissertation culminates in providing results for an investigation …