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The Debiasing Of Judgmental Errors Associated With Anxiety., Bret Gavin Bentz

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

It was the goal of the current study to investigate one debiasing technique and its ability to reduce judgmental errors. In addition, a rival hypothesis of demand characteristics was examined as a possible explanation of any findings of the reduction of judgmental errors. Participants were randomly assigned to either a control group or a debiasing group and asked to rate the likelihood of several hypothetical events in a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (Gender x Anxiety Group x Treatment Group x Repeated Measure) repeated measures experimental design. Level of anxiety responsiveness was measured to arrange subjects into a …

Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study, focusing on select novels by women writers of the African diaspora, discovers a surprising commonality among works with obvious geographical, cultural and linguistic differences---an affirmation of the philosophical essence of the Vodun religion as an antidote to Western spiritual and cultural moribundity. Each of the novels---Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow---alludes to the Vodun pantheon, ancestor veneration and/or rituals in order to valorize the holistic Vodun worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things and the fluidity of boundaries between …

Organizational Cognitive Complexity: Determinants And Consequences., Stern Parker Neill

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Marketing strategy formation is a complex process. Strategic decision-making involves participation by multiple organizational members with diverse and sometimes conflicting viewpoints. Beyond the cognitive capacity of individual decision-makers, marketing strategy develops through an emergent process that engages the collective efforts and interpretive capabilities of various representatives of the organization. This study examines the relationships among organizational context, processes, and outcomes. Specifically, organizations are examined as cognitive units stimulated by perceived environmental turbulence, team functional diversity, and an open-minded culture. These factors enhance cognitive complexity, which is the organization's capacity to perceive its environment in a multidimensional way. With greater cognitive …

Personal Factors Affecting Sales Performance: Modeling The Effects Of Experience, Competitiveness, Self -Efficacy, Effort, And Creativity., Guangping Wang

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Sales performance represents an important ongoing research stream to both academicians and practitioners. It is widely recognized that personal/individual factors affect how salespeople perform. Despite the numerous studies, the search for the most powerful determinants of salesperson performance has largely been unsuccessful (Churchill et al. 1985). This dissertation makes another attempt to understand the effects of select personal factors on salespeople's performance. In particular, a neglected personal factor, salesperson creativity, is introduced as a direct predictor of performance. Based on the social psychological research on creativity and the in-depth personal interviews with sales managers in various industries, the author defines …

Third -Party Organization Endorsement Of Products: An Advertising Cue Affecting Consumer Pre-Purchase Evaluation Of Goods And Services., Dwane Hal Dean

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Observation of advertising in current use suggests that a new type of ad is emerging as a product positioning tool. The new ad features third-party organization (TPO) product endorsement as one of the elements of the ad (e.g. "Car of the Year" award by Motor Trend magazine, and "4-star" mutual fund rating from Morningstar). Marketers appear to be using favorable TPO statements about their products to enact their positioning strategy. This dissertation proposed that TPO endorsements are perceived by consumers as extrinsic quality cues, similar to the established quality cues of brand, price, retailer reputation, and warranty. This proposition was …

The Influence Of Gender -Related Beliefs On Students Motor Skill Learning., Donald Gregory Scott Belcher

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of beliefs about gender appropriateness and conceptions of ability on perceived and actual competence and patterns of behavior during practice of a sex typed masculine task, the hockey wrist shot. Sixty-eight undergraduate females formed four homogeneous treatment conditions based on their beliefs about gender appropriateness and conceptions of ability: Masculine Innate (MI), Masculine Acquired (MA), Neutral Innate (NI), and Neutral Acquired (NA). Four teachers taught across all of the treatment conditions for a total of 16 learning groups. Each of the learning episodes reinforced the gender appropriateness and conception of …

The Function Of Speech (Verbal Mediation) On Corresponding Academic And Social Behavior., Kimberly Jo Callicott

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The role of language in self-control has been of interest to researchers across continents and time. This study attempted to isolate the functional role of language in relationship to subsequent academic and task engaged behaviors with four students aged 10--14. The students were diagnosed with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders had normal intelligence and were receiving their education at an alternative placement facility. The study used a single subject design and exposed the subjects to conditions of self-declaratory speech (SDS), SDS and reinforcement for correspondence, a return to baseline, SDS and reinforcement for correspondence, and SDS with delayed reinforcement. Results of …

Interaction Between Cognitive Styles And Assessment Approaches., Mehtap Cakan

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The present study investigated the interaction of cognitive style and assessment format (multiple-choice (MC) and performance-based assessments (PBA)) in second language proficiency. The participants consisted of 258 eighth-grade students. The second language achievement of the students was assessed by the Eighth Grade Proficiency/Credit Exam: French I. The cognitive style of the students was assessed by the Group Embedded Figures Test. The study also examined study habits and attitudes of field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) students toward the two assessment formats. The study utilized a sequential mixed-model design, consisting of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Phase I consisted of a quantitative …

A Narrative Study Of Selected Introductory College Biology Students' Struggles To Gain An Understanding Of Scale And Measurement., Juliana Guillory Hinton

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Case studies, developed with criteria from Yin's Case Study Research: Design and Methods (1994), probed single mental constructs of four introductory college biology students who were recent high school graduates. Data sources included autobiographical essays, interviews, coconstructed concept maps (Wandersee & Abrams, 1993), a videotape questionnaire, and graphics. A multisensory microscopy experiment provided the setting for the construction of shared meanings by the participants. Concept maps were used then to explore the existing cognitive framework of the participants. This research affirmed the value of supporting graphic organizers for understanding science (Good & Berger, 1998; Hyerle, 1996; Trowbridge & Wandersee, 1998). …

Female High School Biology Students' Biofilm -Focused Learning: The Contributions Of Three Instructional Strategies To Patterns In Understanding And Motivation., Jo Dale Hill Ales

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This exploratory study examined three instructional strategies used with female high school biology students. The relative contributions of the strategies to student understanding of microbiology and motivation in science were analyzed. The science education community targeted underachievement in science by implementing changes in content and practices (NRC, 1996). Research suggested that teachers facilitate learnirig environments based on human constructivism (Mintzes, Wandersee, & Novak, 1997) that is rooted in meaningful learning theory (Ausubel, Novak & Hanesian, 1978). Teachers were advised to use both visual and verbal instructional strategies (Paivio, 1983) and encourage students to construct understandings by connecting new experiences to …

The Rhetoric Of The Benign Scapegoat: President Reagan And The Federal Government., Stephen Wayne Braden

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Ronald Reagan deservedly attained the moniker "The Great Communicator" due to his rhetorical prowess. This dissertation addresses an aspect, governmental scapegoating, of Reagan's rhetorical strategy. Traditional scapegoating theory claims that the scapegoat is either killed or driven from the community. However, I claim that Reagan profited by making a unique use of the scapegoat, one that was benign, the government remained essentially unscathed. The means to analyze Reagan's discourse is Kenneth Burke's cycle of guilt, victimage, redemption and rebirth. Ten speeches of President Reagan are analyzed: both of his Inaugural Addresses, his Economic Recovery Speech, and his seven State of …

Understanding The Biological Concept "Bird": A Kindergarten Case Study., Dilek Buchholz

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study of 14 students in a metropolitan public school in the Deep South was to find out, during a period of three months, what these kindergarten-aged children knew about birds, whether this knowledge represented current scientific thought, if such science instruction meaningfully affected their prior knowledge, and if so, what the factors during instruction that seemed to influence their understanding of the concept of bird were. The research was conducted in three phases; preinstruction interviews, instruction, and postinstruction interviews. The theoretical framework for this research was based on the Human Constructivism theory of …

Workplace Whining: Antecedents And Process Of Noninstrumental Complaining., Anita Konieczka Heck

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a conceptual scheme that advances understanding of workplace whining. It reports an investigation into eight theoretically relevant antecedents to workplace whining, classified into four categories (i.e., dispositional, attitudinal, relational, behavioral). Additionally, it explores the role of organization-based self-esteem in mediating the link between each antecedent and workplace whining. Kowalski's (1996) theory of complaining and self-esteem theory (Coopersmith, 1967, Epstein, 1973; Jones, 1973; Leary & Downs, 1995, Mruk, 1995; Pierce et al., 1989) provided the primary theoretical underpinnings for a series of hypothesized relationships. Data on 471 schoolteachers and their immediate supervisors from …

The Relationship Of Daily Stress And Health In Adolescents: Development Of The Daily Stress Inventory For Adolescents (Dsi -A)., John Michael Huete

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Daily stress has been documented to play a significant role in symptom exacerbation of chronic illnesses in adults, such as coronary heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and chronic headaches. Mediating daily stress may be effective in not only decreasing problem symptoms in chronic illness, but also decreasing unnecessary and costly primary and tertiary health care services. While the effects of daily stress have been well researched and documented with adult populations, adolescent populations have been afforded only minimal research attention. Given that the period of adolescence is a time when persons are first experiencing the stresses of adult life, understanding the …

African-American Garden Culture: A Study Of Tradition And Translation, Sally Akers Joachim

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Many studies have been done on cultural gardening practices and their resulting forms: a Japanese meditation garden or the Italian use of water elements are two examples. This research revolved around the assumption that African-Americans have distinct ways of expressing their ethnic history, values, and traditions in their built environments. Studies have been conducted in rural areas with African-American subject gardeners; this study investigates the urban and suburban yards and gardens of African-Americans in San Antonio, Texas to leam how cultural heritage affects the design or arrangement of personal space in the city, and to identify physical elements that could …

Seeking Causal Explanations In Social Epidemiology, Jay S. Kaufman, Richard S. Cooper

Faculty Publications

Social factors are associated with a wide variety of health outcomes. Social epidemiology has successfully used the traditional methods of surveillance and description to establish consistent relations between social factors and health status. Epidemiology as an etiologic science, however, has been largely ineffective in moving toward causal explanations for these observed patterns. Using the counterfactual approach to causal inference, the authors describe several fundamental problems that often arise when researchers seek to infer explanatory mechanisms from data on social factors. Contrasts that form standard causal effect estimates require implicit unobserved (counterfactual) quantities, because observational data provide only one exposure state …

Annotations, Cwbr_Editor

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Capital Struggles: Montgomery Survived The War With Surprising Ease, Herman Hattaway

Civil War Book Review

Montgomery, Alabama -- the first capital of the Confederate States of America, as well as the capital of the state -- is an interesting example of a fairly major Southern city during the American Civil War. The populace was about evenly divided racially: half white and half black. There were 8,8....

Feather In Their Caps: Two Celebrated Units Were Forged In The Cauldron Of Battle, Noel Fisher

Civil War Book Review

The fascination with Civil War soldiering continues to run wide and deep in American society. Evidence for this fact can be found in the popularity of Civil War films, television shows, histories, novels, and games, and by the numbers of Americans who spend their free time recreating Civil War battl....

Dark Phoenix: The Representation Of Black Woman In Je Suis Martiniquais By Mayotte Capecia And Mon Examen De Blanc By Jacqueline Manicom, Sybil Shevron Jackson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Black women writers in the French West Indies were conspicuously absent from the literary canon during the negritude movement in the 1940's. Mayotte Capecia was one of the few who managed to write during this time. Capecia was criticized severely for her novel Je suis Martiniquais by Frantz Fanon and accused of betraying her race because of the inter-racial love affair between her heroine and a French soldier. Jacqueline Manicom, her literary descendant who wrote Mon Examen de Blanc in 1972, was ostracized from the medical profession for her political beliefs concerning women's rights.

This dissertation examines images and representation …

Erratum: Lizards Took Express Train To Polynesia (Nature (1999) 397 (13- 114), C. Austin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mechanisms Of First Language Forgetting., Ludmila Isurin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The present research explored the processes and mechanisms of first language forgetting from linguistic and psychological perspectives. Two studies, one---a case study, another---a controlled experimental study, yielded evidence on L1 loss. The case study involved a 9 year old Russian girl who was adopted by an American family, brought to the US and completely taken out of a Russian-speaking environment. Over the course of one year, changes in L1 morphology, syntax, and vocabulary were investigated using various tasks, e.g. picture description, picture naming, story telling. Data on L1 retention, L2 acquisition, and reaction time were gathered. The results of the …

An Examination Of The Spaced-Retrieval Technique: A Method To Improve Memory In Older Adults With Probable Alzheimer's Disease., Shannon S. Simmons-D'Gerolamo

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In this study, we used the spaced-retrieval technique as a mnemonic device for those persons with cognitive deficits such as probable Alzheimer's Disease. Three main goals of this research were to gain insight into the long-term effectiveness of the spaced-retrieval technique, examine ways to enhance the overall effectiveness of the spaced-retrieval technique, and adapt spaced-retrieval for applied use in real-world settings. Results indicated that participants did not show savings-in-relearning over a two year follow-up span, but did show it over a one year and six month span. Results provided modest evidence of the effects of exposure to the target-item orientation …

Hellenism And The Independent Theatre Movement In America., Eric Wiley

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation considers influences of the Greek tradition on the rise of the independent theatres in America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. These influences are of two major kinds, those present in the earlier European independent theatre movement, dating back to 1877, with the creation of the Theâtre Libre in Paris, and those found in the American cultural tradition in general. The American branch of the independent theatre movement harbored from its inception a confluence of both these Hellenist strains, as seen in the work of figures such as Maurice Browne, leader of the Chicago Little Theatre, …

Effects Of Repeated Restraint Stress On Tissue Metabolism In Rats., Jun Zhou

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

It has been reported that repeated restraint stress (RS), 3 hours/day for 3 days, in rats caused sustained weight loss and a temporary drop in daily food intake with no subsequent compensatory overeating during the post stress period. The hypothesis tested in the present study is that RS causes peripheral tissue metabolism changes which account for the abnormal regulation of body weight and food intake during the post stress period. Adult male Sprague Dawley rats were assigned to control, pair fed (PF) or RS groups. One day after the end of RS, midbrain urocortin mRNA was at control levels in …

Evaluation Of A Continuous Performance Test., Sandi Louise Spera

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Continuous performance tests are frequently used to measure attention and impulsivity in children and adults. These instruments are particularly popular for assessing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The ecological validity of continuous performance tests has not yet been established as acceptable (Barkley, 1991). Additionally, questions remain regarding the diagnostic utility of these instruments. This study examined the ecological validity and diagnostic utility of the Conners' Continuous Performance Test (CPT; Conners, 1995). Specifically, the relationship between CPT scores and behavior in a classroom setting was investigated. The ability of the Conners' Continuous Performance Test to discriminate between children who meet DSM-IV criteria …

The Effect Of *Modeling And Tempo Gradations As Practice Techniques On The Performance Of High School Instrumentalists., Paul Thomas Henley

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of modeling conditions and tempo gradations as practice techniques on the performance of high school instrumentalists. Specifically, the independent variables of this study were model versus no model; and steady increase of tempo versus performance speed tempo versus alternating (slower and faster) tempos. Subjects (N = 60) were high school wind instrumentalists from the Midwest and the South. Subjects sight-read an etude, practiced the same etude six times using one of six distinct practice conditions, which were combinations of the two independent variables, and performed a posttest on the same …

Design Of Work-Rest Schedules For Vdt Operators., Rana Balci

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The number of musculoskeletal and psychological discomforts is increasing as a result of continuing growth of VDT work. Although ergonomic improvements in workstation design can be applied, an effective work-rest schedule is an economical way to reduce these problems. The objective of this research was to determine an effective work-rest schedule for VDT operators. In addition to a discomfort questionnaire, performance and electromyography measurements from trapezius and flexor carpi radialis were used. Three different work-rest schedules were applied: 60-minute work/10-minute rest, 30-minute work/5-minute rest, and for the third schedule, the subjects received four breaks from VDT work each hour additional …

How Does Undergraduate College Biology Students' Level Of Understanding, In Regard To The Role Of The Seed Plant Root System, Relate To Their Level Of Understanding Of Photosynthesis?, James Gicheha Njeng'ere

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This research study investigated how undergraduate college biology students' level of understanding of the role of the seed plant root system relates to their level of understanding of photosynthesis. This research was conducted with 65 undergraduate non-majors biology who had completed 1 year of biology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. A root probe instrument was developed from some scientifically acceptable propositional statements about the root system, the process of photosynthesis, as well as the holistic nature of the tree. These were derived from research reviews of the science education and the arboriculture …

Effectiveness Of Web-Based Virtual Learning Environments In Business Education: Focusing On Basic Skills Training For Information Technology., Rami Mahmoud Ahmad

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Calls for transforming the learning industries and revolutionizing business education are being answered by a proliferation of virtual learning environments, capitalizing on ever-growing and universal Internet-related technologies. This dissertation describes research investigating the effectiveness of web-based virtual environments by comparing traditional and information technology enhanced learning environments. A conceptual framework is proposed contrasting the effectiveness of these two environments across two learning models---the objectivist and the constructivist. Although technology may serve as a moderator that enhances the implementation of certain features of a learning model, there is a consensus that the learning model---not the technology---is the primary cause of learning. …