Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Intergenerational Transmission Of Mentalization: How Parental Reflective Function On The Parent Development Interview Relates To Child Mentalization On The Thematic Apperception Test, Kira Boesch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mentalization is defined as the metacognitive ability to think about one’s own and other’s thoughts and feelings, with the goal of comprehending behavior (Benbassat & Priel, 2012). Mentalization is associated with secure attachment, and is both directly and indirectly linked to multiple social and emotional outcomes. This study looked at the correlation between parent and child mentalization as a means of exploring the impact of parent reflectiveness on children’s’ mentalization capacities.

Methods: This study utilized archival data collected at The Psychological Center, a community mental health clinic at the City College of New York. The sample consisted of 15 parent-child …

Time-Series And Cross-Section Variation Of Bond Risk Premia, Niloofar Sahebalzamany

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A long-term bond that is sold before its maturity has an uncertain excess return over the certain return from a shorter-term risk-free bond maturing at the time of sale. There is strong evidence that this excess return is predictable and that the predicted excess return, or risk premium, is time varying. Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) use five forward rates to predict excess returns on one to five-year maturity bonds. I extend and improve their approach in multiple aspects. Firstly, the data set for the US market is expanded in two dimensions: cross-section and time series. In the cross-section dimension, one- …

Stereotype Threat And Racial Disparities At The Front End Of The Criminal Justice System, Megan J. O'Toole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

To avoid initial contact with a racially disparate criminal justice system, Black men in the US must be hyperaware of how others perceive them in public. These efforts may be futile, though, as decades of stereotype threat research suggests that the targets of well-known stereotypes often become so overwhelmed with trying to deflect them that they underperform in relevant situations. Through a series of three online experiments, this research examines whether stereotype threat applies to Black men’s experiences at the front end of the criminal justice system. Results reveal that references to the criminal justice system lead Blacks but not …

Critical Paradigm Theory: A Deconstruction Of The Dominant Discourse Shaping Public Education In America, Kevin Froner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to deconstruct the dominant discourses shaping public education in America. To understand the ontological and genealogical roots of public education, the researcher developed a framework referred to as Critical Paradigm Theory (CPT) to examine the current education paradigm. Longitudinal data was collected from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) with an analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Additional analysis was performed applying critical paradigm theory to a …

Oil Pollution On The High Seas: The Establishment Of An International Regime To Deal With Public International Law And Private Law Issues And The Role Of Non-State Actors In Their Resolution Prior To And At The 1969 International Legal Conference On Marine Pollution Damage (“Brussels Conference”), Milton Ottensoser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On March 18, 1967, the Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker flying the flag of Liberia and carrying thirty million gallons of crude oil, smashed onto rocks off the coast of the United Kingdom. The oil spill metastasized into an environmental catastrophe, and this event became the first major environmental disaster of the electronic media age. As a direct result of the Torrey Canyon catastrophe, two treaties were signed in November 1969, at a conference in Brussels sponsored by the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), a United Nations Specialized Agency. The first treaty (the public law treaty) dealt with the right …

Syntactic Processing And Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming In Heritage Spanish Speakers And Late Bilinguals: Effects Of Exposure To L2 English On Processing Illicit Structures In L1 Spanish, Ian Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages—apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms—can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English—a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish—could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish …

Dietary Curcumin Promotes Resilience To Chronic Social Defeat Stress In A Highly Susceptible Mouse Strain, Antonio V. Aubry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic exposure to stress is a risk factor for the development of major depression and post traumatic stress disorder in humans and induces depressive- and anxiety-like phenotypes in rodents. However, there are few pharmacological interventions available that effectively treat maladaptive responses to chronic stress in the clinical setting. One therapeutic agent that has recently shown promise in treating psychiatric disorders is curcumin, a yellow-pigmented polyphenol compound found in the turmeric plant. Curcumin has been shown to prevent the development of stressed-induced depressive-like behavior in rodents and reduce symptoms of depression in clinically diagnosed patients. In this dissertation, I investigated whether …

Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography Of An Indian Resource Frontier, Madhuri Karak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work analyzes resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in India’s bauxite-rich, densely forested Niyamgiri Hills. Nestled in the southwestern corner of Odisha state, the region is marginal to both colonial and postcolonial orders, an inaccessible resource frontier. I discuss how Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities threatened with displacement by bauxite mining – two of India’s 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups – draw on historically oppositional subjectivities to re-envision relations of power between the state, the market and the commons.

Over the past decade, new forms of sociality borne out of Niyamgiri’s anti-mining social movement …

The Role Of Self-Disclosure In Improving Workplace Cross-Race Mentoring Outcomes, Christine R. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the racial diversity of the workforce is increasing, minority employees still do not appear to be advancing professionally at the same rates as White employees. There are many explanations for why minority employees do not experience the same rates of advancement as White employees. One key developmental relationship that can aid in increasing the opportunities for minority employees to advance and grow in an organization is the mentoring relationship. However, given the lack of diversity in the upper levels of organizational hierarchies, minorities are more likely to have a White mentor than they are to have a minority mentor. …

A Narrative Approach To Investigating The Contextual Nature Of Adolescent Self-Regulation, Kelly Conover

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Self-regulation has been identified as important for academic achievement, positive mental health, and social success (Steinberg, 2014, Mischel, 2014). This inquiry begins with self-regulation defined traditionally as “modulation of thoughts, emotions and behaviors working in conjunction, with deliberate or automated use of specific mechanisms and skills" (Karoly, 1993, pg. 25) and extends beyond that and similar definitions to a definition that adds “as enacted in relationships and situations with culturally-relevant media.” The need for such an expansion urgently accounts for the fact that young people are living in high-risk settings, where trauma, violence and economic difficulty are implicated not only …

Adults’ Perceptions Of Children With Mental Illness Labels Who Tell Truths And Lies, Jessica Lynn Mccurdy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined whether children’s truth- and lie-telling is perceived differently by adults when the children have mental illness labels (MIL). Participants (N= 432) read a vignette and watched a video from each of four veracity/motivation (i.e., prosocial truth, antisocial truth, prosocial lie, antisocial lie) and child label (i.e., control, ADHD, depression, asthma) conditions. After each video/vignette combination, participants rated their impressions of and responses towards the child. Participants also completed measures of their implicit and explicit attitudes towards mental illness. The results indicated participants had more negative perceptions of children they rated higher on dangerousness and lower …

The Effects Of Pyramidal Training On Staff Acquisition Of Five Behavior Analytic Procedures, Lindsay M. Maffei-Almodovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Direct care staff members serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are often required to implement several behavior analytic procedures with only limited training soon after being hired. Pyramidal training is an effective model for disseminating applied behavior analytic skills to employees that treat individuals with developmental disabilities. This study used a multiple probes design across teachers and a delayed multiple baseline design across teaching assistants to evaluate the effects of video models, role play and feedback on teachers’ accuracy in implementing behavioral skills training and on teaching assistants’ accuracy in implementing five applied behavior analytic procedures (i.e. stimulus-stimulus pairing, …

"But The Heart Stays Turkish": Identifications Of Immigrants And Boundaries Of Belonging In America, Zeynep Selen Bayhan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the symbolic boundary-making processes of first-generation Turkish immigrants in New York and New Jersey, where Islam has been tainted with negative meanings and symbols. By focusing on the characteristics, salience and endurance of ethno-national, religious and gender boundaries that immigrants perceive and experience in the U.S., it examines the possibilities of social inclusion and assimilation/integration of immigrants into the mainstream society. The dissertation addresses following research questions: What sort of symbols and markers, as well as narratives do immigrants use in order to construct boundaries regarding American society? How do Turkish immigrants, in the aftermath of …

Digesting Democracy: A Theoretical Analysis Of American Food Regimes, Angela R. Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This analysis will explore the theoretical underpinnings of the neoliberal food regime in relation to American democracy, and how an alternative food regime of food sovereignty may help to expand American democracy. The latter regime has an integrative approach to promote democracy through realigning the food system with collective decisions at its base instead of distancing the people from food and providing the opportunity for a self-ruling demos to collectively govern. Food sovereignty with its processes of participation, community responsibility, and self-determinism may challenge the current American democracy by using the framework of food regime theory. In the conclusion of …

A Preliminary Program Evaluation Of A Narrative Therapy Intervention For Persons Incarcerated For Violent Crime, Brooke C. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Longtermers Project is a fifteen-session group therapy intervention that has been run in three prisons in New York state, two men’s facilities and one women’s, since 2010. The Coming to Terms curriculum, designed specifically for work with this population by Kathy Boudin and her partners at the Osborne Association, a non-profit organization that provides assistance to formerly and currently incarcerated persons in New York state, asks participants to think, write, and speak about their lives in general and particularly about the incident crime for which they were incarcerated. Now that the program has run for several years and a …

Assessing The Outcomes Of A Jail-Based Substance Abuse Treatment Program: A Quasi-Experimental Approach, Laura Lutgen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jails and the needs of their populations are often overlooked despite their nearly 11 million annual admissions. More than 700,000 inmates are housed in jail on any given day in the United States, most of whom are non-violent and not yet convicted of a crime. This large population also reflects a high-need, heavily drug-involved population with nearly 70% of all jail inmates having a diagnosable substance use disorder. These high-need individuals are likely to continue cycling in and out of jail without treatment especially as they often return to the people, places, and things that are conducive to their use. …

“Are They Supposed To Be Heugin?": Negotiating Race, Nation, And Representation In Korean Musical Theatre, Ji Hyon Yuh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines contemporary Korean musical theatre as a form of popular culture that has served an important role in reflecting and establishing personal and national identity in Korea, especially as it intersects with the global and local manifestations of race and racial ideologies. I argue that musical theatre has served an important political and economic role, since its beginning as a cultural weapon in the height of the Cold War to more contemporary examples in which Korean musicals serve as a tool to brand Korea as an advanced nation in the world. To make a case for this relationship …

Cross-Race Effect Of African-Americans And Caucasians, Bianca Vidal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Studies have shown that eyewitnesses are less accurate when the accused and foils (i.e., non-suspects in a lineup) are of a different race from the eyewitness than when of the same race. This has been termed the Cross-Race Effect (CRE). To study the CRE in eyewitness identifications, this experiment used a 4x2x2 between-subjects design with 492 participants. Participants watched a film act in which an African-American (AA) or Caucasian (C) either stole or recovered a cell phone. Afterwards they had to identify the person as well as answer a series of questions. There were 4 perpetrators for each race (4 …

Rumination And Rebound From Failure: Investigating How Trait And State Forms Of Ruminative Thought Influence Attention To Errors And The Ability To Correct Them In A Challenging Academic Environment, Ronald C. Whiteman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rumination is a recurrent and repetitive manner of thinking that can be triggered by blockage of personally-relevant goals, creating a temporary state of abstract and evaluative self-focus that can also become a chronic trait-like style of responding to personal challenges. Despite claims that rumination helps down-regulate unwanted emotion, cope with problems, and lead to goal attainment, it often increases negative affect, interferes with problem solving, and exacerbates goal-state discrepancies, particularly for women. Given the pervasiveness of rumination and its potential impact on cognitive processes and emotional states, one important yet untested question is how it might impact individuals’ ability to …

The Social Construction Of Protest: Print Media Coverage Of The 2004 Republican National Convention And The 2011 Occupy Wall Street Protests In New York City, Kirsten Christiansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Majoritarian democracies are founded on the idea that the governance of society will reflect the needs and desires of the majority of the people and that all citizens are given a voice. Public protest activity is one of the ways in which social movement organizations as claims-makers can reach an audience to attempt to convince a majority to effect social change. The mainstream news media can disseminate information about protest messages and activity beyond the local. However, the mainstream news media filters information in its own way, influenced in part because of traditional news routines but also potentially by the …

Brentwood, New York 11717: A Multimedia Ethnographic Study On An Immigrant Town, Ashley Mungo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brentwood, New York is a working-class town of about 60,000 situated forty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. As of the 2010 Census, 68.5 percent of residents are Latino or Hispanic, with 10.7 percent of the overall population living below the federal poverty level. Less than ten percent of the population has obtained a bachelors degree or higher. Street violence, gangs, and overall crime are frequently addressed at community meetings, igniting a fierce debate on immigration within the town that has reached national media, with critics arguing that the exponentially increasing Latino migrant population has caused this crisis.

The …

The Threats Of Sea Level Rise: An Eco-Geopolitical Visual Analysis, Jorge L. Nowell-Enriquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This eco-geopolitical research produces information about the sea level rising, and the analyst explains and projects global effects, and further problems and consequences of the phenomena in a five-minute-long video clip.

The focus is coastlines floods as a consequence of the sea level rising produced by glaciers melting. The floods will affect regions where over a billion persons are living, mainly coastal cities. Therefore, the sea level rising will produce or ease gradual destruction and sudden catastrophes. Moreover, these catastrophes will spur mass migration that might change the lives of a billion persons by 2045.

What’S Your Story? Assessing Childhood Maltreatment Using The Thematic Apperception Test In An Adult Inpatient Population., Thachell C. Tanis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a robust evidence that childhood maltreatment contributes to the development of adult psychopathology (Brown & Anderson, 1991; Johnson, Cohen, Brown, Smailes, & Bernstein 1999; Johnson, Smailes, Cohen, Brown, & Bernstein, 2000; Ruggiero et al., 1999). However, the identification of childhood maltreatment remains a methodological problem that results in inconsistencies in the reported incidence and psychological sequelae of maltreatment. A primary method for identifying histories of childhood maltreatment among adults is retrospective self-report measures which are susceptible to multiple biases (Briere, 1992; Cicchetti & Rizley, 1981; Shaffer, Huston, & Egeland, 2008). This present study suggests that childhood maltreatment can …

Gender And Terrorism: A Homeland Security Perspective, Diana Rosa Rodriguez-Spahia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While scholars have been studying the growing trend of female terrorists for several years, their research has not permeated politics or the media to help inform our Homeland Security policies. The findings from this body of research indicate that there is hesitance on behalf of the public (especially politicians and law enforcement) to acknowledge that women can be terrorists due to deeply engrained gender norms and expectations about gender roles. Terrorist groups are exploiting this unwillingness by recruiting more women to perpetrate terrorist acts (Lele, 2014; Bloom, 2011). Against the backdrop of the changes in gender norms and expectations that …

Opportunities And Limits For Mayoral–Public Employee Union Collaborations: The Case Of The De Blasio Administration In New York City, 2013–2017, Elizabeth C. Eisenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation sheds light on how the relations between public employees’ unions and the de Blasio administration shape the design and implementation of local policies in areas of particular concern to public workers. It asks how public sector labor-management relations and public sector employee unions’ political influence affect this mayoral administration’s efforts at policy innovation and administrative practice. In particular, how, if at all, do public employee unions shape the administration’s decisions about the balance between providing public services directly versus contracting them out to nongovernmental organizations? How do these relations affect the direction of institutional reform? This project does …

Parents Frame Childhood For The World To See In Digital Media Postings, Aysenur Benevento

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the wellbeing of children being at the center of contemporary media discourse (Livingstone & Bovill, 2013), developmental studies are ever more challenged to understand both children’s and adults’ behavior in online spaces. Parents and children are involved in the human development process in complementary ways (Johansson, 2010; Uprichards, 2008) while using media platforms. As the development and use of innovative media technology are accelerating at a fast pace, theory and methods for analyzing uses of digital media for human development have lagged behind. This study examines adults’ postings of photos of their children on social media and offers a …

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …

We Refugees, Again, Aaron Linas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dramatic shifts in climate have generated a new form of global displacement. These ‘climate migrants’ challenge the notion of state sovereignty by introducing a new paradigm for global responsibility. I seek to address this emerging demand of sovereignty by outlining the normative mechanisms of state institutions when encountering displaced persons. The extreme cases of disappearing island nations creates stateless population incompatible with standard liberal values of humanitarianism and border security. My claim is that current normative institutions and principles of assistance to migrating people are insufficient to manage the international crisis of climate change. To be able to aid migrants …

Educational Attainment Of Immigrant Students In The United States: Generational Struggle Towards Success, Robin Das

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Known as the land of opportunities, United States has always been a key attraction to outside world as the place where people can live up to their potential dreams. People migrate from far lands to settle down and find the missing link that was absent in their native country. Among numerous reasons, financial inefficiency and social and political insecurity at homeland, new immigration policies in the US, expectation of a better socio-economic lifestyle and a secure and prosperous future for their children are some key reasons why immigrants move out of their motherland and travel to America. They hope and …

The Patterns And Prosecutions Of Media Leakers, Julia M. Lipkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines the cases of government employees who are responsible for the disclosure of confidential information to the press, known as media leakers. I claim that the government and media leaker engage in a series of patterned responses, which leads to both the disclosure of information, and prosecution of the leaker. More specifically, I demonstrate how the government’s executive branch manages a game of leaks, in which ‘illegitimate’ leakers are separated from elite officials who also leak, but are often spared from prosecution because they are considered ‘legitimate’ players of the game. Although the boundaries surrounding ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ …