Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Characterizing Complex Affective Processing Across Age And In Relation To Social Anxiety Symptoms, M. Catalina Camacho

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Humans require a shared understanding of others’ emotions for adaptive social functioning. For instance, if someone tells a joke and another person laughs, we assume the laughing person was happy because we have a shared concept for such positive interactions. Children develop and refine these concepts as they grow up, but the underlying neural processing that supports this development is unknown. Identifying the neurodevelopment underlying emotion processing could provide important insight to emotional disorders. For example, social anxiety is associated differences in the detection and interpretation of negative or neutral emotional cues, but the underlying neurodevelopment of this behavior is …

Testing Of A Novel Combined Eating-Disorder And Weight-Loss Online Guided-Self Help Intervention For Young Adults With A Binge-Type Eating Disorder And Overweight Or Obesity, Grace Elise Monterubio

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Binge-type eating disorders (EDs) and obesity-related health concerns are two serious medical issues, though study of their treatment has largely remained separate. This study implemented an online, guided self-help ED intervention that concurrently offered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based tools to improve ED symptoms, while also teaching energy-density food principles of behavioral weight loss (BWL), for individuals with clinical/sub-clinical binge-type EDs with comorbid overweight/obesity. The study aimed to examine change in weight, change in ED symptoms, and program engagement between a combined intervention (CBT + BWL) and an ED-only intervention. Participants in the combined intervention group received weekly session content pertaining …

Essays In Microeconomics, Lintao Ye

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation has four chapters. The first chapter studies the testable implications of stable weighted (hedonic) coalitions. The second chapter explores an extension of Bayesian persuasion where the receiver can acquire additional information after receiving information from the sender. The third chapter studies observable implications when a decision-maker endogenously forms consideration sets. The last chapter examines weighted network formation where agents have social status concerns. Omitted proofs in each chapter are presented in the last section of each chapter.

In the first chapter, we study the testable implications of a stable profile of weighted coalitions. We then apply our result …

Laywoman Of Right Faith: The Religious Writings Of Wang Peihua (1767-1792), Meijie Shen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONLaywoman of Right Faith: The Religious Writings of Wang Peihua (1767-1792) by Meijie Shen Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Language and Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2022 Professor Beata Grant, Chair

This dissertation is a case study of an eighteenth-century Buddhist laywoman named Wang Peihua (1767-1792) from the affluent Jiangnan area of imperial China. This period saw the flourishing of women’s education and writings, thanks to which we have collections left behind by them that document their own lives and in their own voice, which enabled us to explore their religious experience. As women started to …

An Online Vignette Study To Examine The Outcomes Of A Preclinical Alzheimer Disease Diagnosis, Matthew John Wynn

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As Alzheimer disease research forges ahead, and new potential treatments are developed, a conceptualization is emerging of a presymptomatic disease stage. This stage, known as preclinical Alzheimer disease, is characterized by the buildup of amyloid beta and tau proteins in the brain to abnormal levels in a cognitively normal person. There are unknown potential risks and benefits of communicating biological marker risk information for Alzheimer disease using the preclinical Alzheimer disease diagnostic label. The current study uses a vignette methodology to measure older adults’ understanding of risk information when presented with information regarding their risk for developing Alzheimer dementia. Participants …

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation In Current And Remitted Major Depressive Disorder: An Experience Sampling Study, Yunjing Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) have difficulties regulating emotion on their own. As people also turn to others for help with emotion regulation (i.e., interpersonal emotion regulation [IER]), we examined whether these difficulties extend to IER in current and remitted MDD. We generally expected individuals with current MDD (and remitted MDD to a lesser extent) to utilize IER in distinct ways compared to those with no history of psychiatric disorders (i.e., controls) due to differences in emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal functioning. Using experience sampling, adults with current MDD (n=48), remitted MDD (n=80), and controls (n=87) reported on how frequently …

Politics During And After Democratic Backsliding, Benjamin Rieth Schneider

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Why do voters support backsliding incumbents? Under what conditions are voters more permissive to backsliding? In recent years, scholars have been interested in what leads to voters to support backsliding incumbents where we should expect them to be sanctioned and generally these answers have been focused on partisanship and polarization. I build on this literature by arguing that societal threat reduces the negative evaluation of backsliding actions and highlights the need for competent leaders to protect against future crisis. I develop an original formal model that considers the different strategies available to backsliding incumbents and shows that societal threat benefits …

A Hybrid Model Of Event Comprehension Predicts Human Activity At Human Scale, Tan Nguyen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To act effectively, humans store event schemas and use them to predict the near future. How are schemas learned and represented in memory, and used in online comprehension? One means to answer these questions is modeling event comprehension. What are, then, computational principles of event comprehension? We proposed three candidate properties: 1) abstract representation of visual features, 2) predictive mechanism and prediction error as feedback, and 3) contextual cues to guide prediction, and adapted a computational model embodying these properties. The model learned to predict activity dynamics from one pass through an 18-hour corpus of naturalistic human activity. Evaluated on …

Construction And Use Of Cognitive Maps In Model-Based Control, Ata Karagoz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When making decisions, we sometimes rely on habit and at other times plan towards goals. Planning requires the construction and use of an internal representation of the environment, a cognitive map. How are these maps constructed, and how do they guide goal-directed decisions? We coupled a sequential decision-making task with a behavioral representational similarity analysis approach to examine how relationships between choice options change when people build a cognitive map of the task structure. We found that participants who encoded stronger higher-order relationships among choice options showed increased planning and better performance. These higher-order relationships were more strongly encoded among …

Dei Without Equity: Lab Coat Culture And Persistent Racism In Bioengineering Laboratories, Janet Canady

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From biased algorithms to discriminatory devices to medical racism, it is clear that biomedical products are created in ways that reproduce racial disparities in access and use. Yet the most common solutions recommended by biomedical research institutions emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that research has already proven ineffective and sometimes harmful. In fact, labs rarely scrutinize whether and how their research products reflect racial bias, assumptions, or ideals. In this paper, I shift the focus to consider how bioengineering laboratories function as a site in which racial processes contribute to product outcomes. I ask, what are the racial dynamics …

Narratives Close The Gap: The Limited Role Of Temporal Distance In Binding Events Into Coherent Memories, Angelique Delarazan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Temporal information has been identified as a powerful influence on memory retrieval. Much of this arise from studies that tend to focus on associations between items. In contrast, real-life experiences consist of discrete events that encompass more than mere associations. While events can be remembered based on temporal proximity, events that are farther apart in time can also be linked together by forming a coherent narrative. Given that daily experiences are multifaceted, it is unclear to what extent prior work generalizes to real-world memories. Here, we sought to determine the influence of temporal features and narrative coherence on memory for …

A Personalized Intervention To Increase Regulatory Capacity For Anti-Racist Action, Jennifer Frances Beatty

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many White Americans are motivated to be anti-racist but fall short. Often, they become defensive when confronted with their involvement in perpetuating racism. To address this, we designed an experiment to test a personalized, social modeling intervention that targets obstacles to responding constructively to being confronted about racism. In our multi-faceted intervention, participants learned from videos of role models who effectively managed a confrontation after doing something racist. After each video, participants wrote personalized reflections applying what they learned. In a registered sample of 391 White Americans, the intervention increased the personal acknowledgment of racial bias, changed relevant bias-related beliefs …

Who Has My Back? Perceptions Of Anti-Racist And Anti-Sexist Allyship Are Predicted By Race, Gender, And Past Behavior, R. Grace Drake

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After facing racial or gender discrimination, people often seek support or allyship from others. However, who will provide effective support or allyship is often uncertain. To understand how people of color and women navigate this uncertainty, in two studies we randomly assigned participants to read a series of vignettes about potential allies. In each vignette, a person was described as either Black, Asian, Hispanic, or White and either a man or woman. Participants also sometimes learned that the person had a history of allyship behavior. Participants were then asked to envision that someone made a racist (Study 1) or sexist …

Essays On Market Structure, Business Cycles And Monetary Economics, Ke Chao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What contributes to the persistence of economic recessions? How should policy respond to economic crises? The dissertation sheds some new light upon these questions in three chapters. The first chapter explores how market concentration affects business cycles. I build a model featuring the dynamic strategic competition between a forward-looking large firm and a continuum of heterogeneous entrepreneurs who are financially constrained. In the model, the elasticity of demand and the optimal markup of the large firm are determined by the degree of concentration and dynamic strategic considerations. I show that the effect of concentration depends on how the shock alters …

Development And Deference To Legal Doctrine At The Us Supreme Court, Jbrandon Duck-Mayr

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How do judicial institutions and the choices judges make affect how the law develops? And how does existing law in turn affect judges' decisions? In this dissertation, I address important aspects of both of these fundamental questions of judicial politics. First I explore why courts create inconsistent legal doctrine. Because judges cannot describe how the rules they craft will apply to every conceivable factual variation in cases, they must describe them more abstractly. I use a social choice theoretic model to show that absent unrealistic restrictions on judges' preferences, decision making on collegial courts in this context can result in …

Gender-Targeted Policies, Women's Empowerment, And Intrahousehold Inequality, Andrea Maria Flores

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing number of development policies increasingly target women as beneficiaries or grant protections to women under the premise that monetary resources in the hands of mothers are more likely to be spent on children's human capital than monetary resources in the hands of fathers. This dissertation explores how observed household responses to these policies can be effectively attributed to their impact on households' decision-making structure. The first two chapters empirically and theoretically explore whether the 2002 urban expansion of Mexico's Progresa/Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program was effective at simultaneously empowering mothers and increasing household investments in children's human capital. …

Essays On Decision Theory, Edward Honda

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides three chapters on decision theory. The main purpose is to consider how economists can rationalize or explain the choices that are being made by decision makers in the economy. For example, when we observe certain substitution patterns among products in a market, we may be interested in questions like why such a pattern arises or what such behavior may tell us about substitution patterns among other similar products. Therefore, all of the chapters focus on writing mathematical models that can help explain the choice behaviors we may observe.The first two chapters focus mainly on what is sometimes …

Cripping Utopia: Revolutionary Psychocorporealities In Cuba And The Diaspora, Charlotte Emily Merrigan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a utopian, anti-imperialist project, Cuba’s 1959 Revolution consolidated idealized performances of revolutionary citizenship, in the process regulating ideal forms of embodiment and/or cognition and narrowing the parameters of what good health and productive social reform meant. “Cripping Utopia” therefore challenges the putative able-bodiedness and able-mindedness of the archetypal revolutionary citizen. Throughout the project, I translate and adapt concepts from the historically Anglo-centric field of Critical Disability Studies to the context of the Cuban revolutionary process, from 1959 to the early 2000s. Unlike capitalist or neoliberal societies that make disability into a reason for exclusion or a source of profit, …

Protecting Native Motherhood: A Longitudinal Investigation Of Interpersonal Violence Among Alaska Native Women, Autumn Asher

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alaska Native mothers and their children are continually impacted by present day disparities resulting from decades of historical oppression. Indigenous women face a substantially greater risk for experiencing violence during pregnancy. Further, Alaska Native children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system, including both overrepresentation in out of home care, and underrepresented in preventative and restorative services in comparison to the general population. The present work utilizes data from the Alaska Longitudinal Child Abuse and Neglect Linkage Project (ALCANLink) which follows children of Alaska mothers originally sampled in the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS). The ALCANLink is a …

Choice And Opportunity: Examining Housing Relocation And Organizational Partnerships Within Federal Mixed-Income Community Development Initiatives, Andrew Scott Foell

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, residential segregation by race and class has resulted in the creation and growth of geographic areas of concentrated poverty, or the concentration of mostly poor families of color into extremely poor neighborhoods. Due to the durability of concentrated poverty, along with the numerous adverse effects of living in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated poverty, deconcentrating poverty has been a prominent focus of urban poverty policy and housing and community development practice. Mixed-income development initiatives have emerged as promising strategies that focus on assisting low-income families living in distressed public housing while simultaneously investing in housing and neighborhood …

Household Behavior And Taxation: A Focus On The Labor Market, Mariana Odio Zuniga

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The decision-making process within the household is a significant component to be taken into consideration for policy design in both developed and developing economies. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on understanding how joint-household behavior and taxation impact the labor market and intergenerational mobility. To this end, Chapters 1 and 2, focus on how joint-household behavior and taxation impact the formal-informal sector composition in Brazil. Meanwhile, Chapter 3 analyses the role of taxation, child expenditures, and family structure on intergenerational mobility of educational outcomes.

Among the most significant challenges of the labor market in developing countries is reducing high informality rates, which …

The Resilience Of Agro-Pastoral Communities In High Altitude Central Tibet: Zooarchaeological And Stable Isotope Investigations At Bangga, 3000–2200 Bp, Zhengwei Zhang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Our understanding of the development of high-altitude adaptations worldwide has been enriched by recent anthropological research. Study of life on the Tibetan Plateau—dubbed “the Roof of the World”—has highlighted specific challenges of seasonal availability of food and extreme weather systems. Recent archaeological studies have revealed that pastoralism has a long history of resilience on the extreme high altitude Tibetan Plateau. However, specific risks to early flocks on the Tibetan Plateau and ways that herders managed their animals to mitigate these have not been well explored. Dated to 3000–2200 Cal BP, the archaeological settlement of Bangga represents one of the earliest …

Not Like Other Girls: Feminist Modernisms, Domestic Labor, And The Trouble With Conventional Women, Ana Elizabeth Quiring

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates the centrality of conventional womanhood to feminist literary history. As women gained access to voting rights, universities, and professions in the early years of the twentieth century, some writers sought to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned, domestic women in order to fashion themselves as uniquely modern. Not like Other Girls argues that this gesture of contradistinction has formed a core component of the feminist modernist ethos, both for early century writers and their scholarly reception. In response to this rift between the modern and the conventional, the dissertation gives an account of conventionality’s presence in modern feminist life. …

The Role Of Affect And Exercise Goals In Physical Activity Engagement In Younger And Older Adults, Marta Stojanovic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite potential benefits of physical activity engagement for older adults, individuals over the age of 65 were more likely to report physical inactivity compared to younger and middle-aged adults. It is extremely important to understand factors influencing regular engagement in physical activity in older adults, particularly the role of affective response and exercise goals which have been greatly overlooked. Mixed findings have been reported in terms of age differences in affective response to daily physical activity while exercise goals in younger and older adults have not been thoroughly compared. Hence, the goal of this project was to determine age differences …

Effects Of A Patient Question Prompt List On Outpatient Palliative Care Appointments, Meghan Mcdarby

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Question prompt lists (QPLs) promote patient and care partner participation during medical appointments. The current study evaluated use of a 25-question QPL during initial outpatient palliative care appointments. I applied tenets of Social Cognitive Theory to investigate the relation between appointment participation, state anxiety, and perceived self-efficacy in the context of a QPL intervention. Participants were patients and care partners attending the patient’s first outpatient palliative care appointment at an academic hospital. Participants were randomly assigned to receive the QPL before the appointment (n = 29 appointments) or to receive usual care (n = 30 appointments). Audio recordings of appointments …

Representations Of The Cuban Revolution In The American Gaze: The Case Of African-American Activists, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For more than six decades, the Cuban Revolution has been the object of representation by foreign authors―historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and also poets and writers. After the triumph of Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, his revolution captured the imagination of U.S. intellectuals and activists. Many of them traveled to Cuba to become witnesses of the radical transformations that were taking place there. In my dissertation, I suggest that visiting Cuba was important for them to authenticate their views. Writing from Castro’s Cuba lent legitimacy to their narratives, with which they hoped to influence U.S. public opinion.My focus is …

Law And Decisions In Corporations, Xinyu Hou

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of corporate laws and bankruptcy laws on decisions in corporationsfrom a theoretical perspective. Chapter 1 studies the impact of liability rules on firms’ choices of care (affecting the frequency of tort damages) and scale (level of output) at the extensive and intensive margins. Chapter 2 focuses on gambling using derivatives, made more available by recent changes in the bankruptcy law granting repos and other derivatives “superpriority,” which is exemption from the automatic stay and clawback in bankruptcy.

Limited liability is a birth right given by law to corporations, LLCs, and to differing extents specialforms of …

Essays On The Higher Education Market And Financial Aid Policies, Yuan Huang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the dissertation is to study the role of market structure and education policy on the efficiency and distribution outcomes in the U.S. college market. Through economic modeling and empirical analysis, I aim to assess the effectiveness of existing and potential education policies in enhancing human capital while ensuring equity in access to high-quality education.

The dissertation consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, I study the effects of college market power and Federal financial subsidy on the market equilibrium outcomes and the distribution of economic surplus, using a structural model that incorporates heterogeneous students' demand for …

The Effect Of Social Primes On The Perception Of Native- And Nonnative-Accented Speech, Drew J. Mclaughlin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Listeners use more than just acoustic information when processing speech. Social information, such as a speaker’s race/ethnicity, can also affect listeners’ understanding of the speech signal. In some cases, these social primes can facilitate perception, while in others they may inhibit perception. Indeed, a picture of an East Asian face has been shown to facilitate the perception of Mandarin Chinese-accented English but interfere with the perception of American-accented English. The present dissertation builds on this line of inquiry, addressing novel topics including the generalizability and specificity of social priming effects, their relationship with implicit racial/ethnic associations, and their role in …

Three Essays On Local Government: Responsiveness, Transparency, And Discriminatory Ordinances, Bryant James Moy

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores democratic governance at the local level: responsiveness, transparency, and the emergence of discriminatory policies. First, in Chapter 1, I consider whether citizens in overlapping governing units are represented by their elected officials. In other words, given a patchwork system of overlapping local institutions, can residents direct public policy? To answer this question, I implement a framework that takes into account multiple overlapping governing institutions: cities, counties, school districts, and special districts. In doing so, I create a novel measure of local ideological preferences that varies dynamically. I find that both cross-sectional and dynamic responsiveness exists at the …