Digital Commons Network^™

Youth Bystander Intentions To Intervene In Peer Intimate Partner Violence: The Co-Influence Of Perceived Perpetrator Race And Perceived Culpability, Nana Amoh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, bystander intervention programs that focus on addressing violence have notably become more popular and prevalent on college campuses. Bystander intervention programs serve to help college students identify and intervene in emergency situations like intimate partner violence. Despite advances in the bystander intervention literature, there is a dearth of research that has examined bystander intentions to intervene in situations of intimate partner violence among youth who have witnessed violence between peers. This study examined bystander intentions to intervene among young adults who witnessed peer male-to-female physical intimate partner violence and whether intentions to intervene varied depending on perpetrator …

Treatment, Diagnostic, Demographic, And Historical Factors Affecting Mental Health Diversion Outcomes, Amanda L. Reed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The deinstitutionalization movement, which began in the 1950s and culminated in the closure of most psychological institutions by the 1980s, promised to usher in a new era of community mental health (Torrey et al., 2010). While the movement, which began largely due to advances in psychological treatment and the exposure of widespread abuses in asylums, was well-intentioned, it ultimately created new problems for people experiencing mental illness. Many of the programs designed to handle the influx of newly-released patients were never fully funded or well-received (Human Rights Watch, 2003). The criminal justice landscape also changed dramatically around the same time, …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Laxman Timilsina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

Chapter 1: Immigration Policy Shocks and Infant Health

This paper evaluates the effect of positive and negative immigration policy shocks on infant health outcomes in the U.S. I examine changes in mean birth weight and the incidence of low birth weight (LBW) at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level around two major institutional shocks: The 1986 Immigration Reform Act (IRCA), which favored immigrants, and the increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrests at the start of 2017 which might have put immigrants at greater risk of apprehension. It uses a triple …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

An Assessment Of Undergraduate Students’ Research Literacy, Milushka M. Elbulok-Charcape

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research literacy refers to the knowledge and application of statistics and research methods knowledge. Research literacy is important because it enables individuals to become autonomous lifelong learners and informed research consumers. Compared to other types of literacies (e.g., informational, statistical, scientific, etc.), research literacy in the social sciences has received limited attention in psychological theory and research. As a result, assessments of research literacy have notable limitations. Some assessments place undue emphasis on content knowledge of statistics and research methods neglecting the application of knowledge, others present items in a de-contextualized manner, exploring conceptions or attitudes toward research itself rather …

Pilot Study Of The Effects Of Mobile Based Resonant Frequency Breathing On Cognitive Performance In Healthy Young Adults With Elevated Stress, Daniel Saldana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: Prior research has shown a bidirectional relationship between breathing, emotions, behavior, and cognitive functions thought to be mediated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Studies have shown that deep or diaphragmatic breathing interventions are associated with improved affect and decreased stress levels, but little attention has been paid to the effects of breathing training on cognition. The few studies that have looked at this have shown improved attention, memory, and executive functioning as a result of breathing interventions. While suggestive of positive benefits, these studies used control groups that are either inactive or inappropriate for determining their respective mechanisms …

The Quartet’S Death: Embodiment, Performativity, And Physicality In Heinz Holliger’S 1973 String Quartet, Vicente Alexim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, many composers have explored and expanded the ways in which performers are asked to interact with their musical instruments. Often referred to as “extended techniques,” these modes of playing frequently produce sounds of indefinite pitch, or which fall outside equal temperament, and the works that employ them rely on the physicality of these techniques in order to create additional layers of meaning. The concrete parameters involved in making use of such resources can sometimes take precedence over or drive other more abstract compositional materials such as precise pitch and rhythm, but their influence …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

Does Exposure To Interviewer Feedback Bias Observer Perceptions Of The Suspect? A Test Of Two Pathways To A Feedback Effect, Aria Amrom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Confronting suspects with feedback, such as “We know you are lying, you need to tell us the truth,” during an interrogation is a common tactic used by police. Can this feedback influence the perceptions of factfinders who later observe video recordings of these sessions? Amrom et al. (2020) proposed two pathways through which feedback might affect observers: a direct feedback pathway by which observers infer the suspect’s credibility from the interviewer’s feedback, and an indirect misattribution pathway by which observers infer credibility from the suspect’s feedback-induced change in demeanor. Given the increasing frequency with which interrogations are video recorded for …

The Association Of Demographics, Social And Personal/Family Characteristics With Treatment Utilization Among Young Adults With Opioid Use Disorder In The United States, Marva L. Frederick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background

Opioid use disorder is a life-threatening medical condition and an ongoing public health problem in the United States. Treatment is necessary to combat opioid use disorder and to minimize the health-associated problems. Opioid use disorder is treatable with life-extending medications. Studies that examined treatment utilization among young adults with opioid use disorder in the United States was scarce. This study investigated the characteristics posited in the Andersen Behavioral Model of health utilization which may be associated with treatment utilization, among young adults with opioid use disorder in the United States. The urgency posed by the continuing opioid crisis in …

The Effect Of Psilocybin On Personality, Ravital Labua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As classic psychedelics are increasingly legalized and reintroduced into the psychotherapeutic frame, a deeper understanding of their effect on personality and overall wellbeing - as well as their clinical contraindications and potential pitfalls - will prove essential. As a result, this study represents a preliminary investigation into the effect of psilocybin exposure on a range of personality constructs.

Methods: Data was collected through a collaboration with The Psychedelic Society, an organization that legally administers psilocybin truffles in the Netherlands to self-selecting retreat attendees who have been screened for mental health disorders in accordance with Johnson et al.’s (2008) widely accepted …

The Psychological Allure Of Alford: Why Innocents Plead Guilty, Johanna Hellgren

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Alford plea allows defendants to maintain their innocence while accepting a plea. Although this plea is more prevalent than jury trials, it is largely unknown to both lay people and researchers (Redlich & Özdoğru, 2009). Legal scholars have argued that the Alford plea may present an undue influence on innocent defendants who may not otherwise accept a plea, while other assert that the Alford plea is a beneficial alternative for defendants who want to preserve their reputation (Ronis, 2009; Ward, 2004). However, no research to date has explored either of these assumptions.

The goals of the current research were …

Dream City: Post-Millennials And Millennials Navigate School, Work, And Housing In New York City, Omar Montana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the experiences of the “Post-Millennial” (those born after 1996) and “Millennial” (those born between 1981 - 1996) generations, as they pursue their dreams of studying, working and living in New York City. According to Karl Mannheim’s (1923) classic formulation, a “generation” can be perceived as a particular type of social location typified by common “patterns of experience and thought”. Through seventy-five in-depth interviews, the qualitative data revealed a social location characterized by a common pattern of “time is money” – as the German theorist Georg Simmel (1903) postulated more than a century ago – and stress as …

Living In Permanent Transience: An Ethnography Of Contemporary Alexandria, Alexandra K. Schindler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of two distinct groups — Syrian refugees fleeing war and heading for Europe and young Egyptian artists and intellectuals living in post-revolution Alexandria, Egypt. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this project shows how the experience of living in permanent transience is a condition of both groups struggling to make Alexandria feel like home. The recent influx of Syrian refugees into Alexandria has had a significant impact on this Mediterranean coastal city, as it has become both the scene of emergent social and economic relations, and a crucial …

Childhood Adhd, Impulsivity, And Alcohol-Related Impairment Among Diverse College Students, Mariely Hernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aims: We examined (1) if students with high childhood ADHD symptoms, and at high risk for alcohol use disorder (AUD) reported greater alcohol-related impairment (ARI) than their low childhood ADHD peers who had comparable rates of alcohol use; and (2) whether alcohol-related problems were more severe for those with high childhood ADHD and high AUD risk when their trait impulsivity was high.

Method: 18-to 25-year-old (N=81), racially/ethnically diverse, college students completed a two-part study. An online survey assessed childhood ADHD symptoms (Wender Utah Rating Scale) and past-year alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test). Laboratory assessment comprised neuropsychological and self-report …

A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Psychological Outcomes Of Mobile Guided Resonant Frequency Breathing In Young Adults With Elevated Stress During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Al Amira Safa Shehab

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Deep breathing practices have shown promise in reducing stress, anxiety, and depression in different populations, including young adults. Specifically, resonant frequency breathing can exert an impact on stress response systems through the vagus nerve and the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This may induce reductions in stress and improvement in emotion regulation. Young adults, including college students, tend to be at a higher risk for psychological distress, as they face several psychosocial challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed new and unique stressors that resulted in higher levels of stress and emotional symptoms and it has been shown that this may have placed …

Teaching For Transformation: Developing Agency And Solidarity Consciousness In A Critical-Transdisciplinary, Garden-Based Urban Environmental Studies Program, Pieranna Pieroni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on “Community Roots,” an instantiation of urban, garden-based environmental education that employs a “critical-transdisciplinary” design framework and pedagogies. The “crit-trans” construct, articulated by the Urban Environmental Studies Research Coven (Strong et. al., 2016) is offered as both a generative approach to liberatory (environmental) pedagogies with applications across the curriculum and as a form of resistance to neoliberal logics shaping educational (and other) settings. After situating Community Roots in its socio-environmental, institutional, historical and theoretical contexts, a detailed description of the course’s instantiation of crit-trans pedagogy is offered. Additionally, reflections of 14 youth and adult participants are analyzed, …

Demobilizing And Reintegrating Ex-Combatants: Explaining Success And Failure On The National And Subnational Levels, Sally Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) is the largest intervention in nearly all the United Nation ongoing large-scale peacekeeping missions and is tasked with restoring public security, law, and order after conflict. A well-planned and flexible reintegration process is known to restore social capital and promote the viability of long-term peace locally, nationally, and internationally. War-torn countries run the risk of returning to war if former combatants are not provided with vocational skills, placed into employment, and reintegrated successfully. Through analyzing DDR programs on the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, this dissertation is an attempt at finding determinants for a successful DDR …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Instrumentalizing The Past: The Politics Of Holocaust Memory In Contemporary Poland, Jonathan Zisook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates Poland’s politics of Holocaust memory from the contentious Jedwabne debate in the early 2000s through the present and shows how the history of the Holocaust has been both distorted and exploited in contemporary Polish politics and culture. It pays special attention to the most recent period of Law and Justice Party rule (2015-2020) and considers the varying ways that the government has constructed its approach to the past by asserting a “policy on history” (polityka historyczna) in state-sponsored research, the educational system, legislation, museum narratives, and more. In so doing, this work argues that the …

Informed Consent: Foundations And Applications, Joanna Smolenski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its advent in the 20th century, informed consent has become a cornerstone of ethical healthcare, and obtaining it a core obligation in medical contexts. In my dissertation, I aim to examine the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent and identify what values it is taken to protect. I will suggest that the fundamental motivation behind informed consent rests in something I’ll call bodily self-sovereignty, which I argue involves a coupling of two groups of values: autonomy and non-domination on the one hand, and self-ownership and personal integrity on the other. I will then go on to consider two 'case …

Health-Illness Transition Experiences Among Patients With Pancreatic Cancer, Jessica Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers and is associated with a poor prognosis measured in terms of months and with significant palliative care needs, including psychological distress. Self-management describes a patient’s ability to manage the sequelae of serious illness, which can have an impact on quality of life and psychological health. One of the fundamental self-management skills is the management of transitions. A transition is a change in life situation or status that causes a shift in a patient’s identity, role, behavior, or interpersonal relationships. Patients with cancer experience multiple, often overlapping transitions that can influence …

Remarkably Ordinary, An Oral History:
 Examining The Micro Effects Of Family Reunification On The Lee Siblings And Their Spouses, Carol Joo Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Family reunification accounts for a majority of entry mechanisms by which current Korean immigrants arrived in the U.S. The peak Korean immigration period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s saw a dwindling of skill-based immigration and a rapid increase of immigrants who arrived through family preferences as a direct result of the Immigration Act of 1965. Despite there being ample studies and aggregate data on the post-1965 immigrants from Korea, not enough micro-level research has been conducted on the ways in which the family reunification provisions affected individuals, their brothers and sisters, and the inter-family dynamic both prior and …

The Grid Elegies, Pamela A. Kallimanis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Immigrants are a key component in New York City’s pandemic. Historically, New York is a city of immigrants and their children. In the latter part of the 20th Century, more immigrants arrived due to changes in migration policy. There was also an increased outmigration through second and third generations, which mirrors an economic trajectory seen in previous points in history, mainly in the 1970s. At that time, there was the lure of government policies – from federal mortgage agencies that graded white suburban areas as safer areas for banks to make loans than racially mixed urban areas, to road construction …

Barriers And Bridges To Intimacy: A Constellation Of Same-Sex Female Couples’ Experiences, Struggles And Strengths, Jenna K. Bennett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intimacy is central to romantic relationships, however, this aspect of experience has been largely unstudied in female couples. Further, few studies have looked at how minority stress and internalized homophobia impact these women’s experiences of intimacy. With a sample of 19 women, through self-report measures and a semi-structured interview, experiences of intimacy, the factors that impact intimacy, barriers to intimacy, and how couples bridge these barriers were explored. Quantitative analysis revealed an association between internalized homophobia and relationship satisfaction. Qualitative thematic analysis indicated that this group of women had a robust range of explicit and implicit experiences of intimacy. Further, …

Drawing The Line: Second-Graders Negotiate, Articulate, And Resist Colorism In Their Homes, Schools, And Communities In A Delhi School, Jyoti Gupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

DuBois’ “problem of the color line” has persisted in the 21st century, and “dark children” continue to face discrimination and are disproportionately impacted in school systems. Renewed interest in origin stories and practices of colorism in Black and other communities of color in the United States and an emerging global colorism frame point to shared experiences of children of color in the public school system. Researchers have suggested that colorism experiences are comparable across ethnic groups in the United States and, arguably, in India, where Islamophobia and casteism intersect with colorism, and manifest in discriminatory practices in schools. Using participatory …

Effects Of Prenatal Cannabis Exposure On Offspring Emotional Development And Stress Response, Alexandra Pritchett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While cannabis may be used by women during pregnancy, its effects on their offsprings’ developing stress response system are still largely unknown. The binding sites for the active chemicals in cannabis are operational at early time points in fetal development and are expressed in key limbic brain structures. The body’s natural endocannabinoid system serves as an important regulator of the stress response. Longitudinal studies have associated prenatal exposure with increased fearfulness and mood disturbances in offspring, but, despite the growing evidence of emotional dysfunction, there remains a critical gap in knowledge explaining how early prenatal exposure may lead to future …

Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In November 1991, a group of queer teenagers gathered to rally at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Two years later, the state passed the first law in the nation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the state's schools. The November rally was the first public expression of what became the safe schools movement, which went on over the following decade to transform the landscape in public education for LGBTQ students. A notable feature of the rally was the staging by the youth of a mass performative act of queer suicide. This paper uses Foucauldian concepts …

Contributions Of Reward Identity And Time Prediction Errors To Pavlovian Learning, Daniel B. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some models of associative learning attempt to explain effects such as blocking and unblocking as reflecting a prediction error (PE): Associative strength, and thereby learning, are said to be greater when the unconditioned stimulus (US) received following a cue deviates from one’s expectations. Some models of PE-motivated behavior and PE-relevant brain activity represent the US as a single quantitative variable for outcome value, and that learning therefore only occurs when outcome value differs from expectations. There is growing evidence to suggest that changes in other dimensions of reward, such as identity and timing, also contribute to learning. In Experiment 1, …