Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Thalamic Shape Abnormalities Differentially Relate To Cognitive Performance In Early-Onset And Adult-Onset Schizophrenia, Derin J. Cobia, Chaz Rich, Matthew J. Smith, Pedro Engel Gonzalez, Will Cronenwett, John G. Csernansky, Lei Wang

Faculty Publications

Early-onset schizophrenia (EOS) shares many biological and clinical features with adult-onset schizophrenia (AOS), but may represent a unique subgroup with greater susceptibility for disease onset and worsened symptomatology and progression, which could potentially derive from exaggerated neurodevelopmental abnormalities. Neurobiological explanations of schizophrenia have emphasized the involvement of deep-brain structures, particularly alterations of the thalamus, which have been linked to core features of the disorder. The aim of this study was to compare thalamic shape abnormalities between EOS and AOS subjects and determine whether unique behavioral profiles related to these differences. It was hypothesized abnormal thalamic shape would be observed in …

Maternal Depression Moderated By Family Resources When Children Have Developmental Disabilities., Timothy B. Smith, Terisa P. Gabrielsen

Faculty Publications

Children with developmental disabilities require extensive parental involvement in intervention, but parents with depression may be less able to intervene effectively. We examined prevalence of depression symptoms and predictors among 131 mothers of children with disabilities enrolled in early childhood special education. Participants completed several self-report measures of depression and child and family functioning. Children were directly evaluated using the Battelle Developmental Inventory. One year later, 68 mothers repeated self-report measures. Participants (30%) reported elevated depression symptoms across time. Depression scores were correlated with parental stress and family resources. An interaction between higher maternal depression and higher child functioning with …

Keynote Address: Curating The History Of Covid-19, Jeremy Myntti

Faculty Publications

Many libraries and archives have a mission to document local or regional history and current events. Rapid response collecting during a crisis has become increasingly necessary in recent years in order to curate content during an event rather than after the event has concluded. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, libraries across the world recognized the importance of documenting contemporary history for the current and future study of the pandemic. Many projects were created to document different aspects of the pandemic, each with a slightly different focus based on types of content, populations, or regions. This talk will …

“Truth Is The Only Ground”: How Journalism Contributes To Good Government, Edward L. Carter

Faculty Publications

Now, after twenty years of teaching journalism as a college professor and fifteen years of periodically representing journalists as a lawyer, I believe the viability of our system of government at local, state, and national levels depends more than ever on good journalism. But amid rapid and unsettling social and technological change, journalism and government are degenerating. Journalists and public officials need to do better, and I believe informed community members should influence reforms and innovations while insisting on adherence to core values. Doing so will require community members to set aside some selfish interests and ask the same of …

Ethnic Differences In Lbms Structure, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

This poster reports on structural correlations between low back vowel merger/position and front lax vowel lowering/retraction (Low-Back-Merger Shift or LBMS). Based on analyses of word list recordings from two groups of Utah teens (Pacific Islanders and Euro Americans), I argue that the position of BOT affects the front vowels in the two ethnic groups differently: while the F1 of EA front vowels is inversely correlated with BOT F1, PI front vowels appear to be more sensitive to BOT F2. These results highlight the structural complexity of LBMS and the importance of recruiting ethnically diverse groups of participants for such studies.

Postseptic Cognitive Impairment And Expression Of Apoe In Peripheral Blood: The Cognition After Sepsis (Cass) Observational Pilot Study, Samuel M. Brown, Sarah J. Beesley, Chris Stubben, Emily L. Wilson, Angela P. Presson, Colin Grissom, Colin Maguire, Matthew T. Rondina, Ramona O. Hopkins

Faculty Publications

Background: Cognitive impairment after sepsis is an important clinical problem. Determinants of postseptic cognitive impairment are not well understood. We thus undertook a systems biology approach to exploring a possible role for apolipoprotein E (APOE) in postseptic cognitive impairment.

Design: Prospective, observational cohort. Setting: Intermountain Medical Center, a tertiary referral center in Utah.

Patients/Participants: Patients with sepsis admitted to study intensive care units. Interventions: None.

Methods: We obtained peripheral blood for deep sequencing of RNA and followed up survivors at 6 months with a battery of cognitive instruments. We defined cognitive impairment based on the 6-month Hayling test of executive …

Book Review Of Early Farming And Warfare In Northwest Mexico (Robert Jarratt Hard And John R. Roney), Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Like many archaeologists working in northern Mexico and the US Southwest, I have eagerly anticipated this volume and its reporting of the Early Agricultural (Middle-Late Archaic) occupation in northwestern Chihuahua. Primarily, it documents the research conducted by the coauthors over several years at sites known as cerros de trincheras, or terraced hills. These were massive construction projects resulting in habitational terraces built by early maize farmers who began to settle in the Casas Grandes River Valley and surrounding areas more than 3,000 years ago.

Megaliths And Monumental Architecture At Coal Bed Village, An Ancestral Pueblo Site In Southeastern Utah, James R. Allison, Fumi Arakawa, Marion Forest, Katie K. Richards, David T. Yoder

Faculty Publications

Worldwide, megaliths are a common form of monumental architecture in Neolithic and later societies. Archaeologists in western Europe, and other parts of the world where megalithic monuments occur, have often discussed the meanings of megalithic features as well as their associations with ritual, territoriality, and social organization. In the Pueblo Southwest, most monumental architecture takes the form of large, unusually tall buildings (“great houses”), oversized ritual architecture (“great kivas”), or landscape features (roads and berms), all of which are most commonly associated with the Chaco system. Ancestral Pueblo people also occasionally built with ostentatiously large rocks, but megalithic features and …

Hinterlands To Cities: The Archaeology Of Northwest Mexico And Its Vecinos, Matthew C. Pailes, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Tis approachable book is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of …

Sr. Ciencia And El Mago: A Legacy Of Archaeological Discovery And Lifelong Learning, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

As partners in the pursuit of archaeological discovery, Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen developed an enduring professional relationship that resulted in productive careers marked by multiple field projects and numerous scholarly publications. While engaged in academic archaeology, they also fostered a new generation of archaeologists along the way. An integral part of their pedagogy was carried out in the field where students worked alongside Mike and Paul, learning not only how to carry out an archaeological project from beginning to end, but also how to collaborate in a field of study that has become increasingly interdisciplinary. This paper presents my …

Macroarchaeology, Epistomology, And The Quality Of The Archaeological Record, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

Perrault (2019) combines a critique of current archaeological practice with a call to re-center research on questions of culture history as well as “macroarchaeology”, or the search for large-scale patterns of human behavior and cultural development. His arguments for what archaeologists should do (and stop doing) are driven by the way the quality of the archaeological record underdetermines the answers to questions that archaeologists often seek to answer. There is much to like in Perrault’s arguments, but there also are some problematic aspects. I agree that something like Perrault’s macroarchaeology should receive greater focus within the discipline, and that archaeologists …

Final Thoughts And Observations, James R. Allison, Heidi Roberts, Jerry D. Spangler

Faculty Publications

This chapter addresses three topics inspired by the discoveries made during Jackson Flat’s archaeological investigations. The first topic examines the implications of the discovery of early maize agriculture in the Far Western region. Our data suggest that the Far Western Basketmaker tradition developed on a trajectory separate from the Western Basketmaker groups associated with the White Dog Phase in the Four Corners region.

Reading Rate Gain In A Second Language: The Effect Of Unassisted Repeated Reading And Intensity On Word-Level Reading Measures, Grant Eckstein, Krista Rich, Ethan Lynn

Faculty Publications

Repeated reading is a popular intervention used to help struggling readers by exposing them to the same text multiple times. While the approach has been effective in L1 and some EFL settings, little research has explored its effectiveness compared against a control group or among ESL learners. Our study examined reading rate gains using words per minute and four eye-tracking measures with 46 mid-intermediate ESL learners grouped into three 14-week treatment groups: a control group that read 26 text passages (about two per week) just once through, another that read the same passages twice in each sitting, and a third …

Fremont Smoke Mixtures: Botanical Analyses Of Pipes From Wolf Village, Goshen, Utah, Michael T. Searcy, Hannah Stefffensen, Scott Ure

Faculty Publications

Over several field seasons, ceramic and stone pipes were recovered from the Fremont site of Wolf Village (AD 1000-1100). Nine of the more complete pipes included residue and burned dottle that were analyzed for macrobotanical and microbotanical remains. Three were subjected to FTIR. These analyses represent the first Fremont pipes ever analyzed for botanical remains, and the results reported in this paper provide conclusions regarding possible smoke mixtures used by the Fremont. Contents of the pipes included remains of tobacco, plants from the Amaranthaceae family, maize fragments, grasses, and various fuel woods.

Redating Paquimé And The Convento Site Sixty Years After The Joint Casas Grandes Expedition In Northwestern Mexico, Samuel Jensen, Michael T. Searcy, Meradeth Snow

Faculty Publications

Debates continue regarding the rise of the Late Prehistoric (post-AD 1200) city of Paquimé in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. Unfortunately, the established chronology of the site was flawed due to incorrect interpretations of dendrochronological samples that lacked cutting dates (i.e., outer rings). While Dean and Ravesloot (1993) were able to determine this mistake through a reanalysis of the original chronological sequence, no attempts have been made to revise the chronology using new dates. This poster reports the results of new radiocarbon dates analyzed from samples of human remains found at Paquimé during the Joint Casas Grandes Expedition from 1958 to 1961. …

A Reanalysis Of Population Dynamics In The Casas Grandes Region Of Northern Mexico Using Mitochondrial Dna, Meradeth Snow, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

The Casas Grades region in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, is ideally situated to explore the notion of contact between the Southwest/Northwest and Mesoamerica, as it lies geographically in the borderlands where traditions of both culture areas were practiced. In order to explain these ties, past researchers have suggested the flourishing Casas Grandes population in the thirteenth century AD was caused by migrants from Mesoamerica, as first suggested by Di Peso in his pochteca hypothesis. Others, such as Lekson and his Chaco Meridian hypothesis, suggest migration from the north. Mitochondrial genetic data from earlier and later time periods provides the ability to …

Signals From On High And The Power Of Growth Mindset: A Natural Field Experiment In Attracting Minorities To High-Profile Position, Jeffrey A. Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, Christina Rott, Olga B. Stoddard

Faculty Publications

We conduct a large-scale natural field experiment with a Fortune 500 company to test several approaches to attract minorities to high-profile positions. 5,000 prospective applicants were randomized into treatments varying a portion of recruiting materials. We find that self-selection at two early-career stages exhibits a substantial race gap. Importantly, we show that this gap can be strongly influenced by several treatments, with some increasing application rates by minorities by 40 percent and others being particularly effective for minority women. The heterogeneities we find by gender, race, and career stage shed light on the underlying drivers of self-selection barriers among minorities.

Strength In Numbers: A Field Experiment In Gender, Influence, And Group Dynamics, Olga B. Stoddard, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Jessica Preece

Faculty Publications

Policy interventions to increase women’s presence in the workforce and leadership positions vary in their intensity, with some including a lone or token woman and others setting higher quotas. However, little is known about how the resulting group gender compositions influence individuals’ experiences and broader workplace dynamics. In this paper, we investigate whether token women are disadvantaged compared to women on majority-women mixed-gender teams. We conducted a multi-year field experiment with a top-10 undergraduate accounting program that randomized the gender composition of semester-long teams. Using laboratory, survey, and administrative data, we find that even after accounting for their proportion of …

The Last Nephite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This paper leverages the insights of modern scholars on the scribal schools of the ancient near east to identify and track the Nephite scribal school across the ten centuries of the Nephite dispensation. Mormon tells us his abridgment only includes a hundredth part of the Nephite history available to him on the Large Plates of Nephi. That being the case, it is especially impressive that his abridgment tracks the responsibility for maintaining and preserving the Nephite record and other sacred objects—the responsibility of the scribes—across that millennium without gaps. Mormon and his son Moroni were themselves trained scribes who could …

A Brief History Of Writing From The Perspective Of Restoration Scripture, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This paper brings together selected insights of modern epigraphers who study the languages and texts of the ancient near east to illuminate how we should understand the composition and history of central texts in the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

A Strategy For Correcting Errors In Automated Formant Extraction, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Sociophonetic vowel analysis relies heavily on measurements of resonant frequencies, particularly of the first and second formants. Automated formant estimation using linear predictive coding (LPC) algorithms in software like Praat greatly increases efficiency compared to hand measurements and allows researchers to analyze more data than was possible before this technological advancement. However, many authors have noted LPC analysis is prone to certain types of errors (e.g., Di Paolo, Yaeger-Dror, & Wassink, 2011; Harrison, 2013; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006; Strelluf, 2019; Styler, 2017). In one common error, which I call “faulty low F2” (FLF2), LPC identifies a spectral peak between …

Development And Validation Of Subject Librarian Consultation Competencies, Holt Zaugg

Faculty Publications

This study seeks to identify and validate competencies which subject librarians may use in their consultations with students. For the purposes of this study, subject librarians are defined as any library employee who has one-on-one consultations with students. It may include liaison librarians, curators, and others within an academic library. Using a literature review, we identified 22 competencies that may be used to guide subject librarian consultations. Validation efforts included reviews and ratings by subject librarians and students. The article also indicates limitations, future steps, and potential uses of these competencies.

Sexual Dimorphism In Titi Monkeys’ Digit (2d:4d) Ratio Is Associated With Maternal Urinary Sex Hormones During Pregnancy, Alexander Baxter, Elizabeth K. Wood, Lynea R. Witczak, Karen L. Bales, James Dee Higley

Faculty Publications

The second-to-fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio is a sexually-dimorphic biomarker for prenatal sex hormone exposure. We investigated whether titi monkeys (Plecturocebus cupreus) exhibit sexually-dimorphic 2D:4D ratio, and whether variation in 2D:4D ratio correlates with maternal testosterone and estrogen levels during early pregnancy. Subjects were 61 adult titi monkeys (32 males, 29 females). For 26 subjects, maternal urine samples were collected approximately 15–20 weeks before birth and assayed for testosterone and estrone conjugate (E1C). Titi monkeys exhibited a human-like pattern of sexual dimorphism in right-hand 2D:4D ratio, with females exhibiting higher 2D:4D ratio than males (β = −0.29, p = .023). For …

Vowel Pronunciation As An Ethnic Marker: Pacific Islander Teens In Utah, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Despite the growing numbers and visibility of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) in the U.S., these Americans are generally overlooked in the research on language variation. American dialectology tends to focus on speakers of European descent, and most research on minority ethno-racial groups has concentrated on larger demographic groups, such as African American and Latinx American groups. This combination of research deficits limits our understanding of linguistic variation and the social forces that influence it. In addition, it may reinforce stereotypes of “ethnolects” as nonstandard and wholly separate from regional and stylistic influence. (See Eckert, 2008.) Many of …

Agency: What Does It Mean To Be A Human Being?, Richard N. Williams, Edwin E. Gantt, Lane Fischer

Faculty Publications

This paper will look at the results of what has been termed “the crisis of modernism” and the related rise of postmodern perspectives in the 19th and 20th centuries. It concentrates on what is arguably the chief casualty of this crisis – human agency – and the social science that has developed out of the crisis. We argue that modern and postmodern social science ultimately obviate human agency in the understanding of what it means to be a human being. Attention is given to the contemporary intellectual world and the way in which it has been deeply informed by neo-Hegelian …

Financial Behaviors, Financial Satisfaction, And Goal Attainment Among College-Educated Young Adults: A Mediating Analysis With Latent Change Scores, Xiaomin Li, Melissa Curran, Joyce Serido, Ashley B. Lebaron, Soyeon Shim, Nan Zhou

Faculty Publications

The aim of the study is to investigate how 2,084 U.S. college-educated young adults (61.9% female, and 69.5% non-Hispanic White) navigated the goal attainment process during the transition to adulthood. Using four-wave data collected across eight years, we examined how financial behaviors (self-regulating behaviors) predicted both depressive symptoms (affective goal attainment evaluations) and financial obstacles to goal attainment (cognitive goal attainment evaluations) via financial satisfaction (resources). Given the variability in developmental trajectories (i.e., initial levels and rates of over-time changes) among young adults, we conducted an exploratory mediational analysis with Latent Change Scores. The results revealed indirect-only mediation patterns, and …

Lehi's Dream: Nephi's Blueprint, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This essay harnesses the late twentieth-century discovery of Hebrew rhetoric by Bible scholars to identify Lehi’s dream as the foundation of the carefully constructed unity in Nephi’s writings and to identify previously unrecognized elements of that dream that are distributed throughout his final work. All the teachings and prophecies in First and Second Nephi are shown to derive from that dream/vision. Further, the entirety of Nephi’s writings in the small plates are shown to be a tightly designed rhetorical production that establishes the centrality of Christ’s identity, mission, and teachings for current and future generations of Lehi’s descendants and ultimately …

Modern Archaeology And The Brass Plates, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

Contemporary Palestinian archaeology has produced two major threats to traditional interpretations of the history of ancient Israel. Scientific discomfort with the exodus story as an explanation for the sudden population expansion in southern Palestine at the beginning of the Iron Age (c.1200 BCE) has led to a wide variety of theories about how these Israelites could have been drawn from existing populations in the general area. And a glaring mismatch between the biblical glorification of David and Solomon’s “empire” and disparagement of the northern kingdom combined with the archaeological finding that the cities of the northern kingdom were far larger …

An Everlasting Witness: Ancient Writings On Metal, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

After reviewing and updating the best studies of writing on metals in the ancient world, the paper examines scholarly and scriptural texts that explain what writing on metal meant to ancient scribes. Finally, the paper turns to what writing on metal meant to the Nephites.

Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This paper brings contemporary ANE scholarship in several fields together to construct an updated starting point for interpretation of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. It assembles findings from studies of ancient scribal culture, historical linguistics and epigraphy, Hebrew rhetoric, and the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, together with the traditions of ancient Israel to construct a contextualized perspective for understanding Lehi, Nephi, and their scribal training as they would have been understood by their contemporaries. Lehi and Nephi are shown to be the beneficiaries of the most advanced scribal training available in 7th century …