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The Role Of Dopamine In Motivational And Receptive Aspects Of Female Mouse Sexual Behavior, Amber Bradshaw Hodges

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A pacing paradigm investigated the modulatory role of monoamines in the mesolimbic dopamine system on copulatory behavior in female mice. Specifically whether there is a distinction between the neural regulatory mechanisms of pacing behavior and receptive behavior was determined. Pacing measures motivational and rewarding components of copulation by the female's contacts and withdrawals from the male, while receptivity is the willingness to engage in copulations and is measured by the number of sexual stimulations received. A pacing paradigm was established and female mice were observed to pace in a similar manner, but at a lesser rate, than female rats.

Dopamine …

International Regime, Domestic Politics And Telecommunications Technology: Jamaica In The Information Age, Judith A. Duncker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In September of 1988, the government of Jamaica heralded its official entry into the information industry with the establishment of the US{dollar}2 million Jamaica Digiport International facility. The significance of this announcement was surpassed only by the state's decision to close the domestic telecommunications sector to competition as the global satellite regime and the global market embarked on its own course of liberalization. This decision spelt victory for one of two contending factions. On the one hand was Jamaica Promotions (Jampro), Jamaica's economic development agency, which attempted to liberalize the sector's use of satellite technology with the operation of the …

"Optimal” Inflation Under Dollarization, Kazutaka Kurasawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper analyzes the effects of dollarization, where a country (C) uses money produced by another country (M). We derive a general formula to determine the "optimal" rate of inflation, which maximizes M's welfare but does not take into account any loss to C. We show how this inflation varies with relative income size and output growth. Estimates of the "optimal" inflation rate are made for some countries. We also analyze a contract, under which M shares a fraction of total potential seignorage with C to induce M to inflate at a rate which leads to no seigniorage accruing to …

Play For Mortal Stakes: Funerals As Modernist Acts Of Fiction, Janine Marie Utell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ritualization of death in British literature of the interwar period and its implication for narrative and genre. The authors under consideration include poets of the Great War (Robert Graves, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, the Sitwells), and later writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, Ivy Compton-Bumett, and James Joyce. Using the methodology of ritual studies, an interdisciplinary approach combining the perspectives of religion, anthropology, and literary criticism, I examine how these texts create a fictive space in which death can be ritualized and how this process …

Identifying The First Person, Roblin Roy Meeks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wide agreement exists that self-ascriptions that one would express with the first-person pronoun differ in kind from those one would express with other self-designating expressions such as proper names and definite descriptions. At least some first-person self-ascriptions, many argue, are nonaccidental—that is, they involve no self-identification, and hence in making them one cannot accidentally misidentify the subject of the ascription. I examine the support for this claim throughout the literature, paying particular attention to Sydney Shoemaker's proposal that self-ascriptions are nonaccidental in virtue of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. According to Shoemaker, such immunity …

Art Or Propaganda: A Historical And Critical Analysis Of African-American Approaches To Dramatic Theory, 1900–1965, Henry D. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation surveys African American approaches to dramatic theory from 1900 to 1965, demonstrating that in the period the issue dominating the field was a great debate that defined black drama as art on the one hand and as propaganda on the other. In an African American cultural history replete with covert and overt struggles for social and political equality, the art or propaganda question necessarily reached a magnitude and importance found in no other area of twentieth-century dramatic theory. The comprehensiveness of the debate that interrogated this question and its historical and cultural depth has largely gone untreated. Moreover, …

Economic Convergence — The German 1990 Economic And Monetary Union, Mary Louise Costanza Lo Re

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Clothes Talk: Youth Modernities And Commodity Consumption In Dakar, Senegal, Suzanne Scheld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on twelve months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this thesis examines how in the context of contemporary globalization, increased volumes of luxury commodities shape the modern consciousness of individuals in a developing African city. This project specifically examines this phenomenon through a study of youth clothing consumption. Dakar is a consumer society with particular consumer dynamics. In addition to class, patron-clientage and kinship are central to understanding contemporary patterns of consumption in Dakar. Clothing is a commodity that has been radically altered by urbanization and the globalization of manufacturing processes and advertising. …

Renaissance And Reformation: From Private Morals To Public Policy In Alonso De Ercilla’S "La Araucana" And Edmund Spenser’S "The Faerie Oueene", Cyrus Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the significance for Ercilla and Spenser of humanism, Neoplatonism, Petrarchism, and cortegiania, competing discourses with distinct identities within the competing ideologies of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both authors draw on a shared heritage of the translatio studii and, in particular, on imagery arising from epic poetry's underlying tension between epos and eros. Ercilla's use of this material fuels a renovatio of classical epic based on the poet's participation in the events he describes. Spenser's utilization of these motifs constitutes a transformatio impelled by reformed religion, which raises the stakes from the potential for shame or …

On String Topology Of Three Manifolds, Hossein Abbaspour

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation we establish a connection between some aspects of the string topology of three dimensional manifolds and their topology and geometry using the theory of the prime decomposition and characteristic surfaces.

Women's Envy In The Workplace: Contexts And Consequences, Para Ambardar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a paucity of literature on women's subjective experience of being envious or being envied in the contemporary workplace. Yet envy, wanting what another possesses, is believed to thrive in a competitive interpersonal milieu, much like the modern workplace, where employees vie for limited organizational resources and rewards. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand envy's role in the workplace and move from an abstract, context-free conceptualization of workplace envy to one that is more differentiated and context-bound. Eighteen women were interviewed for this qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews. Results were analyzed using both psychoanalytic and social psychological …

Implicit Prosody In Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment In Croatian, Nenad Lovric

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages.

(1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC].

In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and …

For "The Boys In Blue": The Art Galleries Of The Sanitary Fairs, Evdokia Savidou-Terrono

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beginning in 1863 and continuing until 1865, the Sanitary Fairs held in Northern cities, to raise money for Union soldiers were the most significant fundraisers of the Civil War. The fairs combined the local with the global, and enticed visitors with relics of the colonial past, interesting artifacts of Native American culture, souvenirs from far away lands, and fascinating technological inventions. For the majority of the fairs however, the art exhibitions were without doubt the most significant, complex and politically charged exhibits, and they are the focus of this paper.

Visitors to the art galleries were attracted by their educational …

Charles M. Kurtz (1855-1909): Aspects And Issues Of A Cosmopolitan Career, Arleen Pancza Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Charles M. Kurtz, the first director of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, spent most of his life executing his personal motto, Amorem Arti Promovere, "To Promote the Love of the Arts." During his lifetime he worked as a journalist, the editor and publisher of the National Academy of Design's Academy Notes, the administrator of several circulating exhibitions and the director of the Art Department of the regional Southern Exposition in Louisville and the Annual St. Louis Exposition. He also served as the Assistant Director of Fine Arts for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the St. …

The City Encomium In Medieval And Humanist Spain, Jeffrey Stephen Ruth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation narrates the history of city encomia in Spain from the genre's roots in the eighth-century De laude Spanie of Isidore through the humanist laudes urbium of ca. 1455 to 1506. Preliminary context for the Spanish tradition is provided in a survey of classical and medieval theoretical writings for the praise of place. The major European city encomia from those periods are also presented.

Ancient authors tended to write about Iberia as a unit—Hispania—rather than to focus on its regions or cities. Hence the establishment of the early laus Hispaniae tradition in passages of Pliny, Solinus, Claudian, and Pacatus. …

Urban Youth Reimagine Trauma: Making Meaning Of Experiences With Chronic Community Violence Through The Arts, Stephanie Urso Spina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of participation in the "Creating Original Opera" (COO) program was investigated among two consecutive (1999 and 2000) cohorts of eighth grade inner-city students living in a context of chronic community violence. Four research questions were posed: (1) What are these students' experiences of violence? (2) What strategies, if any, do they employ to cope with violent events? (3) What, if any, of the above change over the duration of the project? (4) How might those changes relate (or not) to participation in the opera program?

Data collection included a series of three semi-structured interviews with randomly chosen students …

Vigilance Or Tolerance?: Ambivalence And Attitude Accessibility In Response To Terrorist Threats, Julie Tison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explored the cognitive processes underlying the Response Amplification Effect (RAE), which is ambivalent people's tendency to judge the object of their ambivalence (typically, a stigmatized other) more extremely than a comparable control target. Being in a state of ambivalence is known to be uncomfortable. This discomfort may be dealt with by implementing changes in the accessibility level of attitudinal elements. It is suggested that cognitions compatible with the side of the ambivalence made salient by the current situation will be super-activated and that incompatible elements will be sub-activated, thus leading to amplified reactions congruent with the current context. …

No Relief: The Politics Of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 And 1973-2002, Stephen Pimpare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Relief compares the national repeal of AFDC in 1996 with the widespread campaigns against municipal poor relief that occurred throughout the United States some one hundred years earlier. In both eras businesses and the governments that depended upon them, threatened by growing labor power, civil unrest and the rising costs of poor relief, launched an attack against poor people and the limited benefits available to them. They did not do so directly but under cover of the Charity Organization Societies of the Gilded Age and conservative think tanks of the late twentieth century—"neutral" reform organizations that obscured the class-based …

Speech Perception And Lexical Effects In Specific Language Impairment: The Effects Of Vowel Duration And Word Knowledge On Perception Of Final Alveolar Stop Voicing, Frances L.V. Scheffler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception of temporal speech cues, lexical knowledge, and their interactions were examined in children (6;0-9;6) with specific language impairment (SLI). An identification task was used to test four 12-step speech continua: word-word (FEET—FEED), nonword-nonword (ZEST—ZEED), word-nonword (CHEAT—CHEED) and nonword-word (REAT—READ). The stimuli were naturally recorded and digitally edited. The vowel steady state, which varied in duration from 110 to 350 milliseconds in 20-millisecond steps, was the acoustic cue to the voicing characteristic of the final consonant in each stimulus. The analyses revealed that both the TLD and SLI groups used vowel duration as a perceptual cue. For the word-word …

Art To Educate: A History Of Public Art In The New York City Public Schools, 1890–1976, Michele Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Art to Educate" chronicles a history of public art in the New York City public schools from the beginning until the passage of the City's Percent-for-Art Law in 1982. Its purpose is twofold: to bring to light public artworks in school buildings that are typically ignored in discussions of public art and to create a historical framework for understanding this collection.

To contextualize this collection, "Art to Educate" links public art in schools to school architecture and the Board of Education's school construction programs over the last century; to a consideration of educational theory and viewpoints in art education; and …

Crime Legends In Old And New Media, Pamela Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the contemporary meanings and persistence of the "crime legend." A case study approach was used: three crime legends with a considerable history of public debunking were chosen. These cases were: the market in snuff films, the theft of vital organs for black-market transplant, and the abduction of children from theme park restrooms. Current versions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists were collected. Discussions in Internet newsgroups were examined and twenty regular newsgroup participants were interviewed. The public newsgroup communication environment is such that salience is established by the interlocutors themselves, rather than by the …

The Police Officer As Survivor: The Psychological Impact Of Exposure To Death In Contemporary Urban Policing, Vincent E. Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All human encounters with death, whether they involve a casual contact with the death of another person or the realistic threat of one's own demise, have important psychological consequences that result in new modes of adaptation, thought and feeling. In the course of their duties, contemporary urban police officers frequently encounter the deaths of others and some participate in mortal combat situations that credibly threaten their own lives. The psychological dimensions of police officers' professional exposures to the deaths of others are to a large extent shaped by the specific duties and responsibilities prescribed by their formal task environment, while …

Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals, And The Mass-Marketing Of Amusement, 1895-1915, Andrew L. Erdman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States, from roughly the 1890s through World War I. In fact, it can reasonably be called the first truly mass form of entertainment in the United States, and perhaps the world. This dissertation examines how vaudeville grew as the first national, large-scale form of amusement in America. It attempts to locate the rise of this first form of mass entertainment within an era when powerful businessmen in many industries were beginning to market products and services to a national market as well.

Furthermore, this dissertation examines some of the …

Mothers Of Sexually Abused Children And The Concept Of Collusion, Patricia A. Joyce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study reports the perspectives of clinical social workers on the mothers of sexually abused children whom they saw for treatment. The subjects were 15 masters-level social workers in an urban child treatment program. The study used qualitative methods based on grounded theory to examine professionals' social constructions of mothers of sexually abused children. The child's disclosure of incest provided the study's conceptual focus, since historically professionals constructed the "collusive mother," even though prior empirical research never supported maternal collusion or culpability for incest.

Respondents were interviewed for approximately one hour using a semi-structured interview guide; nearly one hundred hours …

Private 'I'S: Investigating Men's Experiences With Pornographies, Michael Charles Putnam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This presentation of original research on men's experiences with pornography draws on various theoretical approaches, including the social construction of gender and sexualities, pro-feminist men's studies, queer theory, and cultural studies. The research consists of lengthy, qualitative interviews with 64 pornography fans in the New York metropolitan area. The purpose of the study was to describe men's experiences with pornography and to test the hypothesis that the current literature on pornography does not represent their experience. The impetus for this argument is that there is a vast literature on pornography, but no data on the experiences of bisexual, gay, and …

The Emergence Of Dialogic Identities: Transforming Heteroglossia In The Marquesas, F.P., Kathleen C. Riley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Te 'Enana 'the people' of the Marquesas, French Polynesia, have been engaged for some time in the dialogic negotiation of their heteroglossic identity. Based on an ethnographic study of language socialization in the Marquesas, this dissertation examines how communicative forms are acquired within a changing socio-cultural matrix, as well as on how cultural habits and beliefs are produced and reproduced via verbal interaction.

My first two months of fieldwork were spent in Tahiti (the capital of French Polynesia), living and studying the language use and cultural patterns of an 'enana family. Subsequently, I spent ten months in a village in …

Clinical Process Related To Outcome In Psychodynamic Psychotherapy For Panic Disorder, Cara F. Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study identified psychotherapeutic processes that relate meaningfully to psychotherapeutic outcome for patients with panic disorder undergoing Panic-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy ([PFPP]; Milrod, Busch, Cooper, & Shapiro, 1997). Subjects were 21 patients who participated in an open clinical trial of PFPP (Milrod et al., in press; Milrod et al., 2000). Patients received 24 sessions over approximately 12 weeks. Each patient was diagnostically screened by an independent evaluator and completed a battery of outcome assessments at baseline, termination and 6-month follow up.

The present study utilized two process measures: the Interactive Process Assessment ([IPA]; Klein, Milrod, Busch, 1999), developed specifically to identify …

The Influence Of Family And Community Ties On The Demand For Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, Kenneth Allen Knapp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reverse mortgages are loans against home equity that do not have to be repaid until the borrower moves, sells the home, or dies. The loans generally are available only to older homeowners, usually aged 62 or over. This paper explores whether demand for reverse mortgages is influenced by the strength of area’s family and community ties. One type of reverse mortgage is analyzed: the FHA-insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM). Several researchers have estimated the potential demand for reverse mortgages. To my knowledge, this is the first study of how actual demand may be determined, and of how it may …

L1 Lexical, Morphological And Morphosyntactic Attrition In Greek-English Bilinguals, Linda Ann Pelc

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated first language attrition in Greek-English bilinguals. Three areas of attrition were identified and tested in grammaticality judgment tasks. They include the lexical, morpholexical and morphosyntactic domains of Greek. Rejection of Greek grammatical sentences and acceptance of English grammatical sentences characterize the attrited state of these bilinguals.

The first area of attrition involves metaphorical senses of perno, 'take,' and spazo, 'break.' These verbs were chosen for this study because of the wide range of senses or meanings associated with them. As predicted, metaphorical senses were found to be vulnerable to attrition.

Another form of lexical attrition comprises opaque …

Painted Slang: The Caricatural Aspects Of French Painting, 1850–1880, Melina V. Kervandjian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A complicated relationship between painting and caricature emerged in France in the 1850s and 1860s when writers like Baudelaire and Champfleury, who were known for their work on painting and painters, produced a number of texts focusing on caricature and caricaturists. Such writings legitimized imagery previously relegated to the realm of "low art" by declaring caricature integral to the aesthetic discourses of the nineteenth century.

The legitimization of caricature also involved a concurrent effort by artists like Honore Daumier, Gustave Courbet, and Paul Cezanne, who incorporated caricatural elements within their painted works. Rather than adopting the traditional strategy of marginalizing …