Digital Commons Network^™

Intimate Partner Violence Among Expectant Adolescent Couples: Psychological And Relational Predictors And Sexual Risk, Jessica Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is prevalent and tends to be bilateral in adolescent relationships. Expectant adolescent couples are at even higher risk. Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM), this study sought to: (1) describe the patterns of physical/sexual and psychological IPV victimization of women and men in expectant adolescent couples from pregnancy through twelve months postpartum; (2) examine the associations between psychosocial and relational factors during pregnancy and postpartum IPV; and (3) investigate the relationship between IPV victimization and later sexual risk across the perinatal period.

METHODS: Data were collected from pregnant adolescents and their male partners (N=296) recruited …

Novel Biobehavioral Methods For Assessing The Anxiety-Related Attention Bias, Samantha Denefrio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anxiety disorders will affect an estimated one in three Americans, significantly impacting emotional health and quality of life. High personal and economic costs make research on the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of anxiety a crucial public health goal. Selective and exaggerated attention towards threat, termed attention bias (AB), has been identified as a core behavioral and neurocognitive mechanism in anxiety. A novel treatment, attention bias modification training (ABMT), targets AB and aims to ameliorate anxiety. Rarely acknowledged, however, are the challenges in the conceptualization and measurement of AB. First, associations between anxiety and AB in anxious populations have been increasingly …

Quantum Uncertainty Reduction (Qur) Theory Of Attended Access And Phenomenal Consciousness, Anatoly V. Nichvoloda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I defend a theory of perceptual consciousness titled “Quantum Uncertainty Reduction” (QUR[1]) Theory of Attended Access and Phenomenal Consciousness.” Consciousness is widely perceived as a phenomenon that poses a special explanatory problem for science. The problem arises in the apparent rift between an immediate first-person acquaintance with consciousness and our lack of ability to provide an objective/scientific third-person characterization of consciousness.

I begin by reviewing philosophical ideas of Ned Block, David Chalmers and Jesse Prinz whose characterizations of consciousness provide a conceptual framework that the proposed theory aims to satisfy. Block and Chalmers argue that …

A Meta-Analysis Of Information Processing Measures Of Intelligence, Performance, And Group Score Differences, Elliott C. Larson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intelligence is one of the most studied constructs in industrial-organizational (I-O) and educational psychology. Findings from numerous studies and meta-analyses have consistently demonstrated the power of intelligence measures to predict performance across a wide range of domains. This research has been fruitful and provides strong evidence for the utility of intelligence measures in organizations and schools. However, while intelligence measures have been developed and applied for over a century, most research in I-O psychology has relied on operationalizations of intelligence that focus on a person’s knowledge. Meta-theories of intelligence propose that intelligence can simultaneously be conceptualized as a person’s ability …

A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Connectionism is an approach to neural-networks-based cognitive modeling that encompasses the recent deep learning movement in artificial intelligence. It came of age in the 1980s, with its roots in cybernetics and earlier attempts to model the brain as a system of simple parallel processors. Connectionist models center on statistical inference within neural networks with empirically learnable parameters, which can be represented as graphical models. More recent approaches focus on learning and inference within hierarchical generative models. Contra influential and ongoing critiques, I argue in this dissertation that the connectionist approach to cognitive science possesses in principle (and, as is becoming …

The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity in the Literature and Culture of 19^th- and 20^th-Century New York City,explores the relationship between transformations in urban planning and domestic ideology through American literature. Specifically, I take up Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton as two authors with distinctly ambivalent relationships to the hetero-normative nuclear family and the ways New York’s built environment shaped and controlled the nation’s gender and sexual politics. My reading bridges a critical gap between studies of culture and its literary expressions on the one hand, and of architectural design and the urban environment …

Identity Shifts Among Cis- And Trans- Females Who Sell Sex On The Streets Of New York City, Amalia S. Paladino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Deviant Identity Shift (DIS) Model that is introduced in this dissertation provides a framework for making sense of how sex workers come to understand their own place in the world, including the experiences of violence that often accompany their lives, and it shifts our attention away from static models that focus on unidimensional or even multidimensional factors that impact the lives of sex workers, to a far more dynamic view of the evolution of their distinctive forms of cultural identity. A series of themes emerge from the life histories of 18 cis- and 15- trans women between the ages …

Recognition By Flickering Components: The Effect Of Temporal Modulation On Image Recognition, Alla Chavarga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A primary goal of vision is to identify objects rapidly and efficiently. Successful object and scene recognition results from the integration of both feed-forward and feedback processes that correspond a two-dimensional retinal image to a representation of its content stored in memory (Bar, 2003). One general organizing principle may be that the visual system analyzes images and scenes according to their spatial components in a coarse- (low spatial frequency) to-fine (high spatial frequency) sequence (Bullier, 2001; Hegde, 2008). An individual’s sensitivity to these spatial components is described by contrast sensitivity function (CSF), which indicates the minimum contrast required for the …

The Ability Of Polynomial And Piecewise Regression Models To Fit Polynomial, Piecewise, And Hybrid Functional Forms, A. Zapata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present simulation study evaluated and compared the performance of piecewise regression to one of the more recognizable methods utilized to model nonlinear relationships within the confines of OLS, polynomial regression. This investigation examined (a) the comparative performance of piecewise and polynomial regression under various experimental conditions (e.g., fitting datasets with different underlying structure, different sample sizes, and varying number slope change-points), and (b) their utility and ease for empirically identifying the point(s) where a regression line changes trajectory. The research design, which followed a mixed factorial design, included four independent variables: sample size, underlying data-generating model type, type of …

Police Officers And College Education: The Association Of Police Officer College Education And The Level Of Force Used By A Police Officer In Gaining Compliance In Arrest Situations, John Vespucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this study was to research the association between a police officer’s college education and the level of force a police officer uses to gain compliance when making an arrest. There is a strong agreement in existing literature that the college education of a police officer has positive effects upon police officer skill sets including the use of force. However, this study seeks to update existing literature as most studies are over a decade old, which is problematic due to the fact that they are outdated and may not represent the challenges in contemporary policing. This study collected …

The Effects Of A Voice Treatment On Facial Emotional Expression In Parkinson's Disease: Expressivity, Experience, And Gender, Elizabeth M. Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) suffer from decreased ability to express emotion through facial expression, in what has been termed “masked facies” or hypomimia. Facial emotional expression is necessary for the accurate communication of needs, to obtain or maintain empathy from care-givers, and to be perceived by others in a way that matches the way that one feels. The current study provides a review of the deficits seen in Parkinson’s disease, an overview of the neurobehavioral disparity of spontaneous versus posed facial expression of emotion, and factors that influence the perception of emotion, such as gender and clinical variables. The …

The Fragmented Mind: Working Memory Cannot Implement Consciousness, Javier Gomez-Lavin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both philosophy and the sciences of the mind there is a shared commitment to the idea that there is a center—the seat of consciousness, the source of deliberation and reflection, and the core of personal identity—in the mind. My dissertation challenges this deeply entrenched view. I review the empirical literature on working memory, psychology’s best candidate for the workspace of the mind, and argue that it is not a natural kind and cannot inform these central cognitive processes. This deflationary view directly imperils many naturalistic theories of consciousness that rely on working memory, which are reviewed in this project. …

Threat-Related Attentional Bias In Relation To Anxiety And Depressive Symptoms In The General Population: The Potential Role Of Sex Effects, Beril Yaffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heightened sensitivity to relevant environmental stimuli (attentional bias) has been observed in relation to clinical and non-clinical anxiety and depression symptoms. While depression symptoms are associated with sensitivity to disorder and self-relevant words, hypervigilance to threatening stimuli is observed in relation to anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, attentional bias has been shown to play an important role in the development and maintenance of depressive and anxiety disorders. Accordingly, a large body of literature has examined threat-related attentional bias in relation to symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, several methodological inconsistencies exist across studies, including variability in definitions of threat, lack of consideration …

Haunted Stories, Haunted Selves: Ghosts In Latin American Jewish Literature, Charlotte Gartenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study approaches haunting in Latin American Jewish Literature from the 1990s through the 2010s as it appears in works by and featuring the descendants of Jewish immigrants. In these decades, this trope is frequently invoked as both a literary metaphor and a critical lens. It arises from and activates a number of themes common in trauma studies and in postmodernism, such as loss, the transmission of memory, our relationships to the past, the rupturing of traditional realities and questions of what can be known and represented. It is particularly prevalent amongst those who pen and protagonize the works examined …

Delivering Justice: Food Delivery Cyclists In New York City, Do J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In New York City (NYC), food delivery cyclists ride the streets all day and night long to provide convenient, affordable, hot food to New Yorkers. These working cyclists are often Latino or Asian male immigrants who are situated within intersectional and interlocking systems of global migration and capital flows, intense time pressures by restaurants and customers, precarious tip-based livelihoods, an e-bike ban and broken windows policing, and unsafe streets designed for drivers. I approach this research through participatory action research (PAR) and han, an indigenous Korean word that describes collective transgenerational traumas that are rooted in systems and structures …

African American Performers In Stalin’S Soviet Union: Between Political Promise And Racial Propaganda, Christopher E. Silsby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first half of the twentieth century, a significant number of African Americans left the United States for the promise of racial and economic equality in the supposedly class-less society of a post-Revolution Soviet Union. This dissertation uses a series of interrelated case studies to contextualize the theatrical work of Paul Robeson, jazz dancer Henry Scott, actor Wayland Rudd, and the 1955-56 international tour of Porgy and Bess within the overlapping social, political, and aesthetic landscapes of African American and Soviet performance in Moscow during the rise and height of Stalinism.

Starting with an overview of race in the …

Dear Son Of Memory: Milton's Engagement With Shakespeare, Bradley Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dear Son of Memory establishes new lines of inquiry into Milton’s engagement with Shakespeare, exploring explicit verbal allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in Milton’s works, as well as echoes of characters, scenes, and themes. It argues that Milton viewed Shakespeare sympathetically, rather than as a rival and it therefore revises the legacy of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” model, which still dominates scholarship in Milton studies today. More specifically, this project offers evidence from Milton’s early poems to show that Milton regarded Shakespeare as a fellow vatic poet and a friendly influence who helped him to dramatize the two central tenets …

Experimental Philosophy And Feminist Epistemology: Conflicts And Complements, Amanda Huminski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent turn toward experimental philosophy, particularly in ethics and epistemology, might appear to be supported by feminist epistemology, insofar as experimental philosophy signifies a break from the tradition of primarily white, middle-class men attempting to draw universal claims from within the limits of their own experience and research. However, the relationship between the two is not so straightforward, and an analysis of their connection bears on broader questions concerning intuitions, philosophical methodology, and epistemic standards more generally. This dissertation project aims to 1) examine the conception of intuitions that appears to underpin many projects in experimental philosophy, 2) levy …

A Functional Neuroimaging Study Of Self-Regulatory Control In Adults With Gambling And Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Nidhi Parashar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: Recent findings suggest phenomenological similarities across gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The key similarity between the disorders is the failure to inhibit or control a repetitive behavior (or urges to engage in a behavior) and intrusive thoughts. Our current understanding of the neural pathophysiological mechanisms linking gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders is limited. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine the functioning of frontostriatal brain regions that support self-regulatory control in adults with gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Methods: The study compared functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen level dependent response in 19 adults with pathological gambling (PG), …

Testing The Efficacy Of Interventions To Decrease Racial Bias In Jury Selection, Karima Modjadidi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite legal restrictions, attorneys continue to use peremptory challenges to strike minorities from juries (Clark, Boccaccini, Caillouet, & Chaplin, 2007; Equal Justice Initiative, 2010; Gabbidon, Kowal, Jordan, Roberts, & Vincenzi, 2008). The current protection against racially motivated peremptory challenges provided by Batson v. Kentucky (1986) has not been effective in reducing racial discrimination during voir dire and social scientists have yet to identify a suitable procedure for reducing the bias. The present research examined if methods used in reducing discrimination in industrial and organizational psychology can have a similar impact in a legal setting. Participants viewed venirepersons who varied in …

The Relationship Between Parenting And Child Trauma: An Intergenerational Investigation, Miriam A. Dreyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the intergenerational transmission of trauma by investigating the relationship between parental trauma and child trauma exposure by considering parenting variables including emotion regulation, aggression, monitoring, and punitiveness as potential mechanisms of transmission. Though ample research exists which suggests that experiences of trauma are passed down from one generation to the next, this intergenerational transmission is not inevitable, and the mechanisms of transmission need to be better understood. Parenting is a crucial construct to examine given that it shapes interactions between two generations and represents a forum for intervention.

The study was a secondary analysis of a selection …

The Inter-Subject Correlation Of Eeg In Response To Naturalistic Stimuli, Samantha S. Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Inter-subject correlation is a measure of the similarity of the brain activity of a group of people as they respond to the same naturalistic stimulus, typically a story or video, meant to simulate a real world experience. This thesis tests the hypothesis that the correlation of the brain responses of a group of people is indicative of stimulus engagement. The rationale is that the content of the stimulus drives brain activity in a consistent manner, while internal thoughts are divergent and result in uncorrelated activity. The inter-subject correlation (ISC) of neural responses have previously been assessed with fMRI, EEG, and …

The Unemployment Rate For Post-9/11 Veterans: A Multivariate Statistical Evaluation Of American Community Survey Data, 2003–2015, M. Celada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research has two objectives: to develop the case for examining Post-9/11 veteran unemployment through the prism of race and gender and to analyze Post-9/11 veteran unemployment, 2003-2015, through this demographic lens. First, it critically considers how entrenched normative assumptions and statistical methodologies for veteran unemployment analyses, largely irrespective of race, gender, and skill-biased technological change, impede the development of an alternate theoretical frame and analytical method to assess Post-9/11 veteran labor outcomes. As a result, scant information exists on the labor force outcomes of Post-9/11 veterans. Secondly, it conducts an intersectional methodological multivariate analysis of unemployment outcomes for Black, …

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 …

Infodynamics: A Naturalistic Psychosemantics, Daniel E. Weissglass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When we think, we typically think ‘about’ something, a peculiar property of mental states often called ‘intentionality’. My dissertation is a collection of papers addressing key questions about the nature of intentionality. These questions demand answers because intentionality is poorly understood, yet fundamental to the way we talk and think about the mind in both folk and scientific contexts. The role of intentionality in the theory of mind is, in fact, so pronounced that it is regularly proposed as a candidate positive criterion of mentality, a so-called ‘mark of the mental’. While it is unclear whether intentionality does in fact …

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 …

Underlying Contribution Of Executive Functioning To Cognition And Academic Achievement In Individuals With Dystrophinopathy, Robert Fee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dystrophinopathy is a genetic disorder that results in the lack of or abnormal expression of the protein dystrophin. It is a disorder that alters cell structure and function, impacts the developing brain and brain function, presents with multi-domain cognitive deficits, and influences both mood and behavior. Cognitive impairments appear to be more localized to specific areas of functioning rather than a global deficit; however, deficits have been identified across multiple cognitive domains including language and aspects of executive functioning. A careful examination of the cognitive phenotype and its association to mutations affecting CNS isoforms is necessary to clarify the neuropsychological …

The Distant Early Warning Line: Geographies, Infrastructures, And Environments Of Warning, Jordan Steingard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was a Cold War era project aimed at providing advanced warning of incoming Soviet attack via the northern periphery of Canada and the United States. The Line was comprised of radar stations across the 69th parallel, spanning from Western Alaska to Baffin Island, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Academic institutions and research labs, private corporations, and military entities collaborated to develop the DEW Line.

The domes used to shield the radar from the extreme terrain were designed by architectural icon Buckminster Fuller, who was elaborating upon a symbolic language of security …

Recognizing The Twentieth-Century Love Story, Angela Francis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recognizing the Twentieth-Century Love Story investigates an alternative framework through which we can understand the form and function of love stories in the twentieth century. While the love story has previously been understood in terms of a requirement that the lover renunciate passion in order to enjoy a positive narrative outcome, I suggest that some love narratives instead center mutual and “accurate-enough” recognition as a requirement of the desired happily ever after. In addition to requiring that the characters “know themselves,” such recognition goes beyond framing the loved other as an independent subject by also recognizing the beloved in ways …

Education Through Social And Cultural Transmission, George F. Trivino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, low-income Latino immigrant students of all ages struggle to find equal educational opportunities due to structural social, economic and cultural barriers. Educational inequality in American urban areas remains as a consequence of socioeconomic constructed structural barriers and strong social and cultural disconnections between the educational system and underrepresented low-income minority social groups. Social, cultural and educational disconnections and inequalities can be challenged by creating third spaces to encourage the development of marginalized students' voices for participation and discourse, as well as creating cooperation and collaboration between educators and learners. Educational institutions have not been able to …