Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Chesapeake Governance Study: Report Of 2021 Decision Maker Interview Results, D.G. Webster

Dartmouth Scholarship

This report describes the aggregate results from a series of interviews conducted with decision makers involved in governance of the Chesapeake Watershed. Interviews began in June and ended in December of 2021. Information collected will be combined with other data to create and then test a computer model to predict likely policy changes under a range of future scenarios. It is part of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation called Modeling the Dynamics of Human and Estuarine Systems with Regulatory Feedbacks (Award #2009248). Using the Chesapeake Bay as an example, this project will combine the policy model …

Government Royalties On Sales Of Pharmaceutical And Other Biomedical Products Developed With Substantial Public Funding: Illustrated With The Technology Transfer Of The Drug-Eluting Coronary Stent, Robert S. Danziger, John T. Scott

Dartmouth Scholarship

This study develops a detailed description of the successful technology transfer of an invention—the drug-eluting coronary stent—originating in intramural research within the National Institutes of Health. The history of the commercialization of the invention is used to illustrate a new policy, proposed and explained in this study, for the payment to the government of royalties on the sales of biomedical products developed with substantial public funding provided through indirect as well as direct funding avenues. The proposed policy addresses concerns about the high prices that taxpayers as consumers pay for biomedical products that were developed with funding from the taxpayers …

Detecting Receptivity For Mhealth Interventions In The Natural Environment, Varun Mishra, Florian Künzler, Jan-Niklas Kramer, Elgar Fleisch, Tobias Kowatsch, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) is an emerging technique with great potential to support health behavior by providing the right type and amount of support at the right time. A crucial aspect of JITAIs is properly timing the delivery of interventions, to ensure that a user is receptive and ready to process and use the support provided. Some prior works have explored the association of context and some user-specific traits on receptivity, and have built post-study machine-learning models to detect receptivity. For effective intervention delivery, however, a JITAI system needs to make in-the-moment decisions about a user's receptivity. To this end, …

When Do Drivers Interact With In-Vehicle Well-Being Interventions? An Exploratory Analysis Of A Longitudinal Study On Public Roads, Kevin Koch, Varun Mishra, Shu Liu, Thomas Berger, Elgar Fleisch, David Kotz, Felix Wortmann

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recent developments of novel in-vehicle interventions show the potential to transform the otherwise routine and mundane task of commuting into opportunities to improve the drivers' health and well-being. Prior research has explored the effectiveness of various in-vehicle interventions and has identified moments in which drivers could be interruptible to interventions. All the previous studies, however, were conducted in either simulated or constrained real-world driving scenarios on a pre-determined route. In this paper, we take a step forward and evaluate when drivers interact with in-vehicle interventions in unconstrained free-living conditions.

To this end, we conducted a two-month longitudinal study with 10 …

A Comparison Of Neural Decoding Methods And Population Coding Across Thalamo-Cortical Head Direction Cells, Zishen Xu, Wei Wu, Shawn S. Winter, Max L. Mehlman, William N. Butler, Christine M. Simmons, Ryan E. Harvey, Laura E. Berkowitz, Yang Chen, Jeffrey S. Taube, Aaron A. Wilber, Benjamin J. Clark

Dartmouth Scholarship

Head direction (HD) cells, which fire action potentials whenever an animal points its head in a particular direction, are thought to subserve the animal’s sense of spatial orientation. HD cells are found prominently in several thalamo-cortical regions including anterior thalamic nuclei, postsubiculum, medial entorhinal cortex, parasubiculum, and the parietal cortex. While a number of methods in neural decoding have been developed to assess the dynamics of spatial signals within thalamo-cortical regions, studies conducting a quantitative comparison of machine learning and statistical model-based decoding methods on HD cell activity are currently lacking. Here, we compare statistical model-based and machine learning approaches …

Middle-Aged Death And Taxes In The Usa: Association Of State Tax Burden And Expenditures In 2005 With Survival From 2006 To 2015., Todd A. Mackenzie, Jason Houle, Steven Jiang, Tracy Onega

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background

Longevity in the United States ranks below most other Western nations despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any other country. Across the world, mortality has been declining, but in the USA the trend toward improvement has stalled in some middle-aged demographic groups. Cross-national studies suggest that social welfare is positively associated with longevity. The United States has less government sponsored welfare, education and healthcare than almost all other Western nations, but the level of this social welfare commitment varies across the states. In this study we examined the association of state tax burden and state government expenditures …

Witchcraft In The Press, Norman Miller

Dartmouth Scholarship

Between 1960 and 2010, Professor Miller collected about 720 newspaper reports on witchcraft in East Africa from local sources. Reports for Malawi and Zambia were dropped from this analysis to establish a collection of 521 reports for Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. This database has yet to be fully analyzed, and is made available here for further research and publication in the understanding of witchcraft violence. The data may be sorted by date, country, press source, or by major topic using the Excel spreadsheet referenced below. Instructors in such organizations as police academies and NGOs concerned with violence against women may …

Afterlives Of Indigenous Archives, Ivy Schweitzer, Gordon Henry Jr

Dartmouth Scholarship

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of …

Metaanalysis Of The Relationship Between Violent Video Game Play And Physical Aggression Over Time, Anna T. Prescott, James Sargent, Jay G. Hull

Dartmouth Scholarship

To clarify and quantify the influence of video game violence (VGV) on aggressive behavior, we conducted a metaanalysis of all prospective studies to date that assessed the relation between exposure to VGV and subsequent overt physical aggression. The search strategy identified 24 studies with over 17,000 participants and time lags ranging from 3 months to 4 years. The samples comprised various nationalities and ethnicities with mean ages from 9 to 19 years. For each study we obtained the standardized regression coefficient for the prospective effect of VGV on subsequent aggression, controlling for baseline aggression. VGV was related to aggression using …

Orecchio: Extending Body-Language Through Actuated Static And Dynamic Auricular Postures, Da-Yuan Huang, Teddy Seyed, Jun Gong, Zhihao Yao, Yuchen Jiao, Xiang Anthony Chen, Xing-Dong Yang

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, we propose using the auricle – the visible part of the ear – as a means of expressive output to extend body language to convey emotional states. With an initial exploratory study, we provide an initial set of dynamic and static auricular postures. Using these results, we examined the relationship between emotions and auricular postures, noting that dynamic postures involving stretching the top helix in fast (e.g., 2Hz) and slow speeds (1Hz) conveyed intense and mild pleasantness while static postures involving bending the side or top helix towards the center of the ear were associated with intense …

Small-Scale Forestry And Carbon Offset Markets: An Empirical Study Of Vermont Current Use Forest Landowner Willingness To Accept Carbon Credit Programs, Alisa E. White, David A. Lutz, Richard B. Howarth, José R. Soto

Dartmouth Scholarship

This study investigates the preferences of small forest landowners regarding forest carbon credit programs while documenting characteristics of potentially successful frameworks. We designed hypothetical carbon credit programs with aggregated carbon offset projects and requirements of existing voluntary and compliance protocols in mind. We administered a mail survey to 992 forest landowners in Vermont’s Current Use Program utilizing best-worst choice, a novel preference elicitation technique, to elicit their preferences about these programs. We found that small forest landowners see revenue as the most important factor in a carbon credit program and the duration of the program as the least important factor. …

Spatial Heterogeneity In The Abundance And Fecundity Of Arctic Mosquitoes, Lauren E. Culler, Matthew P. Ayres, Ross A. Virginia

Dartmouth Scholarship

The abundance of mosquitoes is strongly influenced by biotic and abiotic factors that act on the immature (aquatic) and adult (terrestrial) life stages. Rapid changes in land use and climate, which impact aquatic and terrestrial mosquito habitat, necessitate studying the ecological mechanisms, and their interplay with the changing environment, that affect mosquito abundance. These data are crucial for anticipating how environmental change will impact their roles as pests, disease vectors, and in food webs. We studied a population of Arctic mosquitoes (Aedes nigripes, Diptera: Culicidae) in western Greenland, a region experiencing rapid environmental change, to quantify spatial variation …

A Nearly Complete Foot From Dikika, Ethiopia And Its Implications For The Ontogeny And Function Of Australopithecus Afarensis, Jeremy Desilva, Corey M. Gill, Thomas C. Prang, Miriam A. Bredella, Zeresenay Alemseged

Dartmouth Scholarship

The functional and evolutionary implications of primitive retentions in early hominin feet have been under debate since the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis. Ontogeny can provide insight into adult phenotypes, but juvenile early hominin foot fossils are exceptionally rare. We analyze a nearly complete, 3.32-million-year-old juvenile foot of A. afarensis (DIK-1-1f). We show that juvenile A. afarensis individuals already had many of the bipedal features found in adult specimens. However, they also had medial cuneiform traits associated with increased hallucal mobility and a more gracile calcaneal tuber, which is unexpected on the basis of known adult morphologies. Selection for traits …

A Nearly Complete Foot From Dikika, Ethiopia And Its Implications For The Ontogeny And Function Of Australopithecus Afarensis, Jeremy M. Desilva, Corey M. Gill, Thomas C. Prang, Miriam A. Bredella, Zeresenay Alemseged

Dartmouth Scholarship

The functional and evolutionary implications of primitive retentions in early hominin feet have been under debate since the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis. Ontogeny can provide insight into adult phenotypes, but juvenile early hominin foot fossils are exceptionally rare. We analyze a nearly complete, 3.32-million-year-old juvenile foot of A. afarensis (DIK-1-1f). We show that juvenile A. afarensis individuals already had many of the bipedal features found in adult specimens. However, they also had medial cuneiform traits associated with increased hallucal mobility and a more gracile calcaneal tuber, which is unexpected on the basis of known adult morphologies. Selection for traits …

Propensity To Patent And Firm Size For Small R&D-Intensive Firms, Albert N. Link, John T. Scott

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Schumpeterian hypothesis about the effect of firm size on research and development (R&D) output is studied for a sample of R&D projects for R&D-intensive firms that are small but have substantial variance in their sizes. Across the distribution of firm sizes, the elasticity of patenting with respect to R&D ranged from 0.41 to 0.55, with the elasticities being largest for intermediate levels of firm size and also varying directly with the extent to which the projects are Schumpeterian in the cost or value senses. The paper’s findings at the R&D project level are compared with the literature’s findings at …

Satellite Imagery-Based Monitoring Of Archaeological Site Damage In The Syrian Civil War, Jesse Casana, Elise Jakoby Laugier

Dartmouth Scholarship

Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the rich archaeological heritage of Syria and northern Iraq has faced severe threats, including looting, combat-related damage, and intentional demolition of monuments. However, the inaccessibility of the conflict zone to archaeologists or cultural heritage specialists has made it difficult to produce accurate damage assessments, impeding efforts to develop mitigation strategies and policies. This paper presents results of a project, undertaken in collaboration with the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and the US Department of State, to monitor damage to archaeological sites in Syria, northern Iraq, and southern Turkey using …

Explaining Opposition To Refugee Resettlement: The Role Of Nimbyism And Perceived Threats, Jeremy Ferwerda, D. J. Flynn, Yusaku Horiuchi

Dartmouth Scholarship

One week after President Donald Trump signed a controversial executive order to reduce the influx of refugees to the United States, we conducted a survey experiment to understand American citizens ’ attitudes toward refugee resettlement. Specifically, we evaluated whether citizens consider the geographic context of the resettlement program (that is, local versus national) and the degree to which they are swayed by media frames that increasingly associate refugees with terrorist thre ats. Our findings highlight a collective action problem: Participants are consistently less supportive of resettlement within their own communities than resettlement elsewhere in the country. This pattern holds across …

Building Student Capacity To Lead Sustainability Transitions In The Food System Through Farm-Based Authentic Research Modules In Sustainability Sciences (Farms), Selena Ahmed, Alexandra Sclafani, Estephanie Aquino, Shashwat Kala, Louise Barias, Jaime Eeg

Dartmouth Scholarship

Undergraduate courses provide valuable opportunities to train and empower students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to advance society in more sustainable directions. This article emphasizes the value of bridging primary scientific research with undergraduate education through the presentation of an integrated experiential learning and primary research model called Farm-based Authentic Research Modules in Sustainability Sciences (FARMS). FARMS are collaboratively designed with agricultural stakeholders through a community needs assessment on pressing food system issues and opportunities with the objective for faculty and students to jointly identify evidence-based management solutions. We illustrate the implementation of FARMS in an undergraduate course in …

Social Saliency Of The Cue Slows Attention Shifts, Vassiki Chauhan, Matteo Visconti Di Oleggio Castello, Alireza Soltani, Maria I. Gobbini

Dartmouth Scholarship

Eye gaze is a powerful cue that indicates where another person's attention is directed in the environment. Seeing another person's eye gaze shift spontaneously and reflexively elicits a shift of one's own attention to the same region in space. Here, we investigated whether reallocation of attention in the direction of eye gaze is modulated by personal familiarity with faces. On the one hand, the eye gaze of a close friend should be more effective in redirecting our attention as compared to the eye gaze of a stranger. On the other hand, the social relevance of a familiar face might itself …

Reconstructing Grassland Fire History Using Sedimentary Charcoal: Considering Count, Size And Shape, Berangere A. Leys, Julie L. Commerford, Kendra K. Mclauchlan

Dartmouth Scholarship

Fire is a key Earth system process, with 80% of annual fire activity taking place in grassland areas. However, past fire regimes in grassland systems have been difficult to quantify due to challenges in interpreting the charcoal signal in depositional environments. To improve reconstructions of grassland fire regimes, it is essential to assess two key traits: (1) charcoal count, and (2) charcoal shape. In this study, we quantified the number of charcoal pieces in 51 sediment samples of ponds in the Great Plains and tested its relevance as a proxy for the fire regime by examining 13 potential factors influencing …

Quantitative Criticism Of Literary Relationships, Joseph P. Dexter, Theodore Katz, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Tathagata Dasgupta, Ajay Kannan, James Brofos, Jorge A. Bonilla Lopez, Lea Schroeder

Dartmouth Scholarship

Authors often convey meaning by referring to or imitating prior works of literature, a process that creates complex networks of literary relationships (“intertextuality”) and contributes to cultural evolution. In this paper, we use techniques from stylometry and machine learning to address subjective literary critical questions about Latin literature, a corpus marked by an extraordinary concentration of intertextuality. Our work, which we term “quantitative criticism,” focuses on case studies involving two influential Roman authors, the playwright Seneca and the historian Livy. We find that four plays related to but distinct from Seneca’s main writings are differentiated from the rest of the …

The Limits Of Partisan Prejudice, Yphtach Lelkes, Sean J. Westwood

Dartmouth Scholarship

Partisanship increasingly factors into the behavior of Americans in both political and nonpolitical situations, yet the bounds of partisan prejudice are largely unknown. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the limits of partisan prejudice using a series of five studies situated within a typology of prejudice. We find that partisan prejudice predicts suppression of hostile rhetoric toward one’s own party, avoidance of members of the opposition, and a desire for preferential treatment for one’s own party. While these behaviors may cause incidental or indirect harm to the opposition, we find that even the most affectively polarized—those with the strongest disdain …

Hunter-Gatherer Residential Mobility And The Marginal Value Of Rainforest Patches, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Thomas S. Kraft, Nathaniel J. Dominy, Kirk M. Endicott

Dartmouth Scholarship

The residential mobility patterns of modern hunter-gatherers broadly reflect local resource availability, but the proximate ecological and social forces that determine the timing of camp movements are poorly known. We tested the hypothesis that the timing of such moves maximizes foraging efficiency as hunter-gatherers move across the landscape. The marginal value theorem predicts when a group should depart a camp and its associated foraging area and move to another based on declining marginal return rates. This influential model has yet to be directly applied in a population of hunter-gatherers, primarily because the shape of gain curves (cumulative resource acquisition through …

Scape Goats, Silver Bullets, And Other Pitfalls In The Path To Sustainability, D. G. Webster

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper draws from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin to highlight some of the most likely pitfalls on the political road to a sustainable planet. Through the literary device of dreams that can change the world, Le Guin explores how the individual’s egoistic desire to save humanity can be twisted by the limitations of our psyche and our society, turning an already uncomfortable future Earth into a devastated planet. It is a stinging critique of answers handed down from above, and a call to action for those of us who just get by here below. Her story …

Optimizing Virtual Reality For All Users Through Gaze-Contingent And Adaptive Focus Displays, Nitish Padmanaban, Robert Konrad, Tal Stramer, Emily Cooper, Gordon Wetzstein

Dartmouth Scholarship

From the desktop to the laptop to the mobile device, personal computing platforms evolve over time. Moving forward, wearable computing is widely expected to be integral to consumer electronics and beyond. The primary interface between a wearable computer and a user is often a near-eye display. However, current generation near-eye displays suffer from multiple limitations: they are unable to provide fully natural visual cues and comfortable viewing experiences for all users. At their core, many of the issues with near-eye displays are caused by limitations in conventional optics. Current displays cannot reproduce the changes in focus that accompany natural vision, …

Road Ecology: Shifting Gears Toward Evolutionary Perspectives, Steven P. Brady, Jonathan L. Richardson

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recent advances in understanding the often rapid pace of evolution are reshaping our view of organisms and their capacity to cope with environmental change. Though evolutionary perspectives have gained traction in many fields of conservation, road ecology is not among them. This is surprising because roads are pervasive landscape features that generate intense natural selection. The biological outcomes from these selection pressures – whether adaptive or maladaptive – can have profound consequences for population persistence. We argue that studying evolutionary responses is critical to accurately understand the impacts of roads. Toward that end, we describe the basic tenets and relevance …

Neighborhood Environment And Falls Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults, Emily Nicklett, Matthew Lohman, Matthew Smith

Dartmouth Scholarship

Falls present a major challenge to active aging, but the relationship between neighborhood factors and falls is poorly understood. This study examined the relationship between fall events and neighborhood factors, including neighborhood social cohesion (sense of belonging, trust, friendliness, and helpfulness) and physical environment (vandalism/graffiti, rubbish, vacant/deserted houses, and perceived safety walking home at night).

Social Determinants Of Conspiratorial Ideation, Joseph Digrazia

Dartmouth Scholarship

Scholars have recently become increasingly interested in understanding the prevalence and persistence of conspiratorial beliefs among the public as recent research has shown such beliefs to be both widespread and to have deleterious effects on the political process. This article seeks to develop a sociological understanding of the structural conditions that are associated with conspiratorial belief. Using aggregate Google search data to measure public interest in two popular political conspiracy theories, the findings indicate that social conditions associated with threat and insecurity, including unemployment, changes in partisan control of government, and demographic changes, are associated with increased conspiratorial ideation.

Re-Thinking Anxiety: Using Inoculation Messages To Reduce And Reinterpret Public Speaking Fears, Ben Jackson, Josh Compton, Ashleigh L. Thornton, James A. Dimmock

Dartmouth Scholarship

Inoculation theory offers a framework for protecting individuals against challenges to an existing attitude, belief, or state. Despite the prevalence and damaging effects of public speaking anxiety, inoculation strategies have yet to be used to help individuals remain calm before and during public speaking. We aimed to test the effectiveness of an inoculation message for reducing the onset of public speaking anxiety, and helping presenters interpret their speech-related anxiety more positively. Participants (M_age = 20.14, SD = 2.72) received either an inoculation (n = 102) or control (n = 128) message prior to engaging a public …

Re-Thinking Anxiety: Using Inoculation Messages To Reduce And Reinterpret Public Speaking Fears, Ben Jackson, Josh Compton, Ashleigh L. Thornton, James A. Dimmock

Dartmouth Scholarship

Inoculation theory offers a framework for protecting individuals against challenges to an existing attitude, belief, or state. Despite the prevalence and damaging effects of public speaking anxiety, inoculation strategies have yet to be used to help individuals remain calm before and during public speaking. We aimed to test the effectiveness of an inoculation message for reducing the onset of public speaking anxiety, and helping presenters interpret their speech-related anxiety more positively. Participants (M_age = 20.14, SD = 2.72) received either an inoculation (n = 102) or control (n = 128) message prior to engaging a public …