Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mobile Cognitive Training For The Cognitive Symptoms Of Depression In Young Adults: A Double-Blind, Randomized Pilot Study With Active Control, Alice Grinberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Depression is associated with a broad range of cognitive symptoms, including reduced attention, verbal learning and memory, executive functioning (EF), and processing speed (PS). Computerized cognitive training (CCT) has been shown to ameliorate the cognitive symptoms of depression. Younger adults, in particular, are understood to benefit more from CCT than older adults due to their greater capacity for neuroplasticity. However, several issues remain unclear about the effectiveness of CCT: (1) whether the benefits of CCT are driven by the specific content or by non-specific factors, such as engagement, motivation, novelty, and expectancy, which have been inadequately controlled in prior …

Stalking And Attachment Theory: Causes And Management, Zoe Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stalking is an issue that has drawn increasing attention over the past four decades. Approximately 6 million Americans report being the victims of stalking each year. The psychological and physical effects of stalking can be severe, ranging from anxiety and depression to physical harm and even death. With the rise of technology and social media, cyberstalking has become an additional problem in recent years. It is vital to understand the root causes of stalking behavior from a psychological perspective in order to create appropriate management and treatment plans. The current research investigates the role of attachment theory in stalking. Within …

The Cognitive Thalamus: Source Analysis Of Scene Working Memory Delay Activity, Bernard A. Gomes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working Memory represents a limited-capacity store for maintaining information and manipulating the store's contents over a short period for the guidance of goal-directed behavior. Working Memory is an essential component of executive functions that are intricately associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC has been implicated in maintaining task-related information online for brief periods in the absence of relevant information. This active maintenance phase is called the delay period that occurs between encoding and retrieval of the stimulus. Previous studies have attempted to understand the relationship between working memory and the PFC, especially during the delay or maintenance phase …

Visualizing Tedx Events: Ten Years Of “Ideas Worth Spreading”, Antonios Liamis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have always been fascinated by how ideas are spread. Often, ideas are chosen to serve an immediate purpose, and there is an expectation that the choice will matter only insofar as it serves to achieve the desired goal. However, once an idea takes off, it becomes sufficient in itself to disseminate its message. When I first heard about the rubric “Ideas Worth Spreading” in connection with Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conferences, I had an emotional response because I was always trying to get involved in those three categories. My fascination with the question of what makes some ideas …

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 …

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …

A Comparison Of Strain, Social Learning, Control, And Trauma Theories Of Crime, Nicole Trauffer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The field of criminology has been dominated by Strain, Control and Social Learning Theories, among others. More recently, research and theory has focused on the role of trauma as a predictor of criminal behavior, especially for women. However, little research has empirically compared these theories to one another. The current study examined these four major theories to determine which best explains non-violent and violent criminal behaviors. Race and sex differences were examined. The data is from a large prospective cohort design study of individuals with documented histories of physical and sexual abuse and neglect and a control group of children …

Mitigating Gender Bias In Neural Machine Translation Using Counterfactual Data, Alan Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the ability of researchers to develop effective machine translation systems. In particular, the application of modern neural architectures, such as the Transformer, has achieved state-of-the-art BLEU scores in many translation tasks. However, it has been found that even state-of-the-art neural machine translation models can suffer from certain implicit biases, such as gender bias (Lu et al., 2019). In response to this issue, researchers have proposed various potential solutions: some have proposed approaches that inject missing gender information into models, while others have attempted modifying the training data itself. We focus on mitigating …

Exploring Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Plea Bargain Decisions, Melanie Close

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to an economic model of plea bargaining, defendants’ plea decisions are based on their estimated trial prospects (i.e. likelihood of conviction and severity of sentence). However, information communicated during interrogations may provide defendants with misinformation about trial prospects, thus biasing their subsequent plea decisions. Furthermore, the model fails to address why innocent individuals plead guilty less often than guilty individuals even when trial prospects are identical. I investigated whether Reid-style interrogation techniques increase the likelihood of a guilty plea by inflating suspects’ estimates of the severity of the outcomes should they go to trial. I also examined whether anxiety …

Precarious Empowerments: Sexual Labor In The Coffee Shops Of Santiago, Chile, Pilar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Precarious Empowerments analyzes sexual labor in ‘tinted cafes,’ spaces hidden from public view where women dance for their male clients and clandestinely perform sexual services. Drawing from an embodied ethnographic account of the everyday lives of five coffee shops that fit into the lower status ‘tinted cafes’ where sexual labor is common, this thesis examines sex workers’ experiences at the intersection of class, racial, and gender hierarchies. From an intersectional perspective, my study examines how inequalities based on class, gender, race, nationality, and body capital are reproduced and contested by sex workers. Based on the multiple facets of the precariousness …

Dietary Development And Nutritional Ontogeny In Gorilla Beringei : A Multi-Layered, -Omics Approach, Emma C. Cancelliere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In species who consume folivorous diets, immature individuals must contend with the challenges of extracting nutrients from fibrous foods before dietary adaptations and strategies are fully developed. Additionally, immatures have distinct nutritional needs to support their stage-specific metabolic and biophysiological requirements. To meet these stage-specific needs, while constrained by underdeveloped feeding strategies and digestive capacities, immatures may adopt distinct diets better suited to their specific developmental context. However, where dietary modification is constrained by low dietary diversity or landscape homogeneity, it is unclear how immature individuals compensate through alternative strategies. In turn, little is known about the nutritional and life …

Thrown Off Course: School Suspension And Its Consequences For Students’ Educational Trajectories And Outcomes, Celina Cuevas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: The literature on exclusionary school discipline has repeatedly documented disparities in its use and its relationship to various negative outcomes, causing the use of suspensions to become a pressing concern in the United States. The goal of this dissertation is to add this body of literature by being the first to examine the educational trajectories youth take after first being suspended, and how the effect of school punishment on trajectories may be more severe for subgroups of students disproportionately affected by school discipline and often underserved in school settings.

Methods: New York City Department of Education data is used …

Analysis Of Newspaper Coverage Of Psilocybin From January 1, 1989 To December 31, 2019, Dax Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psilocybin is a chemical compound that has received a lot of attention from medical researchers in recent years. However, this research is not merely a medical issue but a social and political one as well. In the 1960s, psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds were widely ingested outside of clinical settings. This alarmed some of the American public, resulting in severe legal restrictions on psilocybin use and research.

Today, many psilocybin advocates hope that it will avoid the negative public sentiment of the 1960s. To help gauge public sentiment about other psychoactive compounds, some studies have examined newspaper coverage, but there …

The Temporal Dynamics Of Ensemble Perception, Michael L. Epstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The striking disparity between the subjective richness of experience and the considerable limitations of perceptual processing has emerged as an essential, enduring question in both vision science and philosophy of mind. A potential solution to this issue is ensemble perception: the ability for the visual system to compute the statistical summaries of object groups, effectively compressing an otherwise overwhelming amount of information. Previous work has supported that ensemble statistics can be perceived quickly and accurately for a wide range of object features. This has motivated models of ensemble perception as an early process in vision, providing an initial sense of …

360º Video And Language Documentation: Towards A Corpus Of Kanien'kéha (Mohawk), Joseph Pentangelo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Robust documentation is a major goal of documentary linguistics. Recognizing spoken language as a multimodal phenomenon, researchers working in this field broadly agree that video is an improvement over audio-only recording. At the same time, video is limited by the format’s frame, which permits only a relatively small portion of the visual field to be recorded at any given time. This results in much data being lost, as the documenter must decide where to aim their camera, necessarily leaving out more than they record.

In this dissertation, I apply 360º video to language documentation for the first time. 360º video, …

A Defense And Expansion Of The Theory Of Capitalist Ground Rent: Speculation, Securitization, And Struggles Over Land And Housing, Francesca Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why are the rents so high? Who is responsible for homelessness, for urban and rural displacement? How can these problems be combatted?

Recent literature addressing these questions has pointed to gentrification and the financialization of land and housing, faulted financialized landlords, hedge funds, and the irredeemable logic of finance, and pointed to the importance of land and housing regulation to prevent displacement.

However, theories of displacement—in both land and housing, on both urban and rural terrain—suffer from a lack of an underlying theory of the logic, tendencies, and limits of ground rent extraction in capitalism.

This dissertation develops a theory …

Wrongful Conviction Documentaries: Influences Of Crime Media Exposure On Mock Juror Decision-Making, Patricia Y. Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychology and law researchers have urged colleagues to collaborate with the makers of popular media, such as documentary filmmakers, in efforts to educate the general public about wrongful convictions (Kassin, 2017; Wells et al., 2000). Recently, programs depicting wrongful convictions, such as Making a Murderer (Demos & Ricciardi, 2015) and When They See Us (DuVernay, 2019) have garnered substantial viewership. Research on general and case-specific pretrial publicity (Daftary-Kapur et al., 2014; Kovera, 2002) and the effects of crime media (Baskin & Sommers, 2010; Schweitzer & Saks, 2007) demonstrate that although consuming crime-related media and being exposed to information about a …

Tones In Shupamem Reduplication, Magdalena Markowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents an analysis of reduplication in Shupamem, an Eastern Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. In this language nouns, verbs, and adjectives undergo full segmental reduplication. At the suprasegmental level, on the other hand, tones of the reduplicants are not entirely faithful to their bases. The tonal asymmetry of the reduplicted phrase also relies on the grammatical function of that phrase within a clause, as well as on the neighboring grammatical words, such as tense particles. This morphological process gives also an insight to an underlying tonal representations in Shupamem. Nominal reduplication, in particular, provides a proof of the …

A Re-Evaluation Of The Hyper-Selectivity Perspective: The Case Of Second-Generation Filipinos, Brenda B. Gambol Gavigan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou (2015) argue that the upward mobility of one racial group --- Asian Americans --- in the U.S. can be explained by its “hyper-selectivity”: the Immigration Act of 1965 brought in Asian migrants who are more highly educated than their compatriots back home and the average American. These middle-class immigrants bring with them a success frame based on exceptional achievement and generate ethnic capital (i.e. resources and information available in the community) that ultimately benefits all members of an ethnic group, including the second-generation. In addition, the educational leaps of the second-generation have altered racial …

Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …

Self-Determination In Transportation: The Route To Social Inclusion For People With Disabilities, Jessica Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People with disabilities encounter many challenges with transportation but are not usually considered in research about travel behavior and well-being. Research on transportation challenges is often disability-specific even though different access needs can complement or conflict with each other. I argue that disability should be centered in the study of travel and well-being because it magnifies problems that may also frustrate people who do not currently consider themselves disabled. The goal of the dissertation was to identify how basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence apply to the context of transportation and identify ways to measure fulfillment and frustration …

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil? On The Interpersonal Effects Of Boredom Expression, Manuel F. Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored how people react to employees who express boredom at work. I consider boredom expression as a social signal that the current situation does not adequately stimulate the expresser. The expression may then propel others to help stimulate the expresser, depending partly on others’ initial appraisals and reactions to the expression, and on the surrounding context. In Study 1, using qualitative surveys, I uncovered various affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to employees who expressed boredom. In Study 2, using experimental vignettes, I manipulated the emotion expressed by a “subordinate” (boredom, enthusiasm, or no emotion) and the manager’s beliefs about …

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 …

“The Gifts Of Enemies”: The Acteal Massacre, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas And Mexico’S Ejército Zapatista De Liberación Nacional And Humanitarian And Development Aid During The Low-Intensity War, 1997–1999, Maria R. Hart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about a faction of the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas who, as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), were housed at the INI IDP camp in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in 1997-99 after the Acteal massacre on December 22, 1997. This faction is of interest because they protested the remaining members of Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (Civil Society The Bees) social movement at Acteal and the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, often better-known as the Zapatistas), because the movement required them to reject governmental humanitarian aid and development programs or lose their membership in the social …

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 …

Intra-Familial Microaggressions, Object Relations, And Racial Identity Formation In Multiracial Individuals, Ashley Danies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The concept of the self in relation to others is referred to in psychoanalytic theory as one’s ‘object-relations’ (Kernberg, 1984). One of the earliest object-relationships is between baby and caretaker(s), through which the baby develops a sense of their own identity (Mahler, 1967; Sandler & Sandler, 1978). Multiracial individuals, or those whose families fall in two or more different racial/ethnic groups, report racial microaggressions from within their own families (Nadal, Sriken, Davidoff, Wong, & McLean, 2013). Notably, Multiracial individuals who have one White parent and one non-White parent face a greater possibility of rejection from one or both sides of …

The Effects Of Eighth Years Of Compulsory Schooling Enforcement In Turkey, Muhammed Tumay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that cover Education, Labor and Health Economics.

Chapter 1. Impacts of Compulsory Schooling Reform on Higher Education and Intergenerational Educational Mobility: we estimate the effects of an exogenous increase in mandatory schooling (5 years to 8 years of schooling), as a result of a change in compulsory schooling law, on higher education, potential intergenerational educational mobility, and labor market outcomes among women in Turkey. Our empirical strategy addresses a well-known identification problem where women’s years of schooling are endogenous to individual characteristics. The Law took effect in 1997, whereby girls born before January …

Making Muslim Americans: Parenting Practices, Parochial Schools, And The Transmission Of Faith Across Generations In Metropolitan Detroit, Rebecca Karam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At present, it is estimated that there are 3.45 million Muslims living in the United States, the vast majority of whom are immigrants and the children of immigrants. While religion has typically been found to foster assimilation among immigrant newcomers, Islamophobia is rampant and threatens to challenge this process. This dissertation project intervenes in this empirical puzzle by asking the following research questions: How do we explain the conscious attempt by second generation Muslim parents to foster a distinctly Muslim and American identity among their third-generation children? More specifically, how have the parenting decisions of upper-middle class, second-generation Muslim Americans …

Legitimizing Violence At The European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations At Sea And The Vulnerable Other, Michela Demelas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis highlights a temporal and spatial gap in the feminist literature about migrants' journeys throughout the Mediterranean, and investigates the gendered dynamics acting upon the encounter between the European border and racialized bodies at sea. The Mediterranean sea’s material features allow Europe to approach migration as a humanitarian crisis coming from outside, which discharges its responsibility for the deaths. Yet, essentialistic views represent the feminized Other as vulnerable and needing to be saved from the male Other and the sea. Such views shape the Western narratives around concrete rescue procedures and border authorities behaviors. The encounter between the border …

Inspirations For Awake: Expressions Of Trauma Through Fiction And Autoethnographic Literature, Sophia Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Awake is a novella based on true events in my own life. This capstone project addresses my own experiences with intimate partner violence. While it is inspired by my life, I chose to write a fictional narrative rather than a strictly biographical piece of nonfiction. Instead, this novella illustrates a few of the traumas that I went through from within the lens of a fictional narrative. This enabled me to tell about my experiences by crafting my memories into a story, without the pressure of submitting an accounting of them. Writing Awake has been helpful to me in that it …