Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Phenomenon Of Amoralism: An Investigation Of The Cognitive And Emotive Roots, Andrei G. Zavaliy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An amoralist is defined as a person who rejects the claims of moral reasons to special authority, and systematically acts without regard to the generally accepted moral standards. A psychopath can be seen as a paradigm case of an extreme amoralist, although the less severe cases of selective amoralists are considered. The research into the typical behavioral pattern, motivational structure, and the value system of psychopaths can shed light on at least three aspects related to the analysis of the moral agency. First, it can help elucidating the emotive and cognitive conditions necessary for moral performance. Secondly, it can provide …

Employee Ownership And Participation Effects On Firm Outcomes, Brent Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hundreds of firms in the U.S. are majority-owned by their employees through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). This study measures whether employee ownership makes a difference in firm outcomes, looking also at effects of worker participation in management-type decisions. Theorists have suggested that the rarity of employee ownership is prima facie evidence that such firms could not be as efficient as traditional firms. But institutional and financing constraints may be a more realistic explanation for their rarity, and it is important for policy purposes to investigate efficiency objectively.

The author compares sales per employee for a panel of over 300 …

Essays On Dynamics Of Financial Markets, Esin Cakan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this study, the effects of different macroeconomic news on stock markets and different stock market co-movements are investigated. Impacts of good and bad macroeconomic news announcement surprises on the mean and conditional volatility of U.S. daily equity and Treasury bond market returns during economic recessions and expansions are examined. By jointly modeling returns and volatilities using a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models, it is found that surprise in unemployment news has no impact on stock returns during business cycles. On the other hand, the results indicate a significantly positive relation between the short term (long term) bond prices …

Predicting Within-Source Agreement In Multisource Feedback Ratings: An Examination Of Characteristics Of The Rater Group And The Focal Manager, Christine Schrader Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Multisource feedback (MSF) involves gathering information about a manager's effectiveness from his or her boss, peers, and subordinates. Researchers typically average MSF ratings within rating sources (e.g., peers or subordinates), which assumes that agreement within rating sources is relatively high. However, there is little prior MSF research that has addressed the issue of within-source agreement, and the extant studies have often used inappropriate statistical techniques such as reliability indices. Moreover, this research often focuses on assessing the mean level of agreement or reliability within rating sources but has ignored the variability surrounding these indices. The purpose of the present study …

Turning Space Into Place In The Sprawling “New City”: Shrinking Space, Visions Of Place, Homeowners In Conflict, Lael Leslie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Was there a "real place" to be found in the sprawling "new city" landscape? This interview study considers the categories of sprawl as a placeless, apolitical space, and of the suburban white middle class, to explore how "place" is variously understood by homeowners confronting rapid spatial reconfiguration. The interviewees are residents of a municipality located in one of New Jersey's "growth corridors." Emphasis is on homeowners' experiences, and on what they view as problems related to rapid growth.

Given the long settlement history of this northeastern seaboard region, this study finds that relations among homeowners had changed over time in …

The Impact Of A Home-Based Intervention Program On Maternal Reflective Functioning In First-Time Mothers, Maia Rebecca Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study investigates the impact of "Minding the Baby," a home-based intervention program, on maternal reflective functioning (RF). It was hypothesized that the reflective capacity of mothers who received the MTB intervention would increase over the course of the study, and that this increase would be reflected in the quality of their responses to clinical interviews administered before and after birth. The guiding premise of the intervention was that helping mothers develop a reflective stance would enable them to become more regulating, sensitive, and autonomy-promoting caregivers and thus positively affect a range of developmental outcomes in their infants.

The …

L1 Acquisition Of Japanese Particles: A Corpus-Based Study, Mari Fujimoto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comprehensive examination of L1 Japanese particle acquisition using two sets of corpora of naturalistic speech, JCHAT, longitudinal speech data of three Japanese children and the mothers (Miyata 2004a, b, and c, and MacWhinney 2000), and CHJ, adult-to-adult telephone conversation. The analysis reveals that despite differences in their language environment, all three children complete particle acquisition around MLU (m) 3.00 regardless of differences in the threshold of particle use. Further, none of the three children mimicked their mother's frequency of particle use, even as they all conform to a particular sequence of particle acquisition. The first set …