Digital Commons Network^™

Semantic Attention: Effects Of Modality, Lexicality And Semantic Content, David Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the discovery of the Stroop Effect in 1935 questions about the role of language vs. non-lexical stimuli in selective attention remain. Early researchers attributed the powerful distracting influence shown in the Stroop task, naming the color in which a spelled word is printed when incongruent with the color name the word spells, to an automaticity of language that gives it privileged access to meaning, but many others since have shown various ways to reduce or even reverse this distracting effect of an incongruent word. This study addresses this by using EEG to record neural activity along with reaction time …

The Behavioral Effects Divorce Can Have On Children, Wanda M. Williams-Owens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to a statistical study (Cherlin et al. 1991) 40% of children who live in the United States will experience parental divorce before they reach the age of 18. Consequently, many children are affected by the process of divorce and its finalization. When my daughter was just nine years old, she asked incredulously why my husband and I were the only married couple in our neighborhood? After twenty-two years of marriage, I realized long-term marriages in my community are not conventional. When parents’ divorce, children often face the loss of one parent's constant presence and economic stability; as a result, …

Activation And Habituation Of The Cingulate Cortex During Emotion Processing In Healthy Controls, Borderline, And Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Emily Balevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Disturbances in emotional functioning are central features of the clinical profiles of both borderline and schizotypal personality disorder (BPD and SPD, respectively). BPD is characterized by a high sensitivity to emotional stimuli and unusually strong and long-lasting reactions, indicative of impaired habituation to emotional stimuli (Linehan, 1993). Previous research suggests that SPD patients demonstrate limbic hyper-reactivity to unpleasant stimuli, at least initially, but intact habituation to repeated presentation of unpleasant stimuli (Hazlett et al., 2012). The cingulate cortex supports various aspects of emotion processing and regulation, and abnormalities of this region have been related to emotion dysfunction in SPD and …

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

The Impact Of Spirituality And Trauma On Appraisals Of Psychotic-Like Experiences, Kathleen Isaac

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: A substantial portion of the general population (2.5% to 31.4% internationally) reports psychotic-like experiences, which are paranormal, psychic or bizarre perceptual experiences such as voice hearing, or holding strong beliefs (i.e. superstitions) that are neither experienced as pathological nor indicative of a psychotic disorder. Cognitive models of psychosis suggest that the cognitive appraisal (i.e. personal interpretation) of the experience may help distinguish non-clinical psychotic-like experiences from clinical psychotic symptoms. This dissertation attempted to add to cognitive models by assessing whether cultural and personal factors such as spirituality and trauma inform the appraisals of anomalous experiences. This study used a …

A Playful Context Enhances Bilingual And Monolingual Preschoolers’ Mastery Motivation And Private Speech, Jeremy Sawyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s private speech (audible self-talk) has been studied primarily as a cognitive tool for thinking, planning and self-regulation. This study investigated whether private speech may also function as a tool for motivation. Vygotskian and self-determination theory suggest that children can develop to become agentic and inspired, or conversely disengaged and alienated, based largely on their social conditions of development. Thus, it is important to investigate children’s motivational processes in social and educational contexts that are central to child development. U.S. preschool enrollment is expanding, accompanied by a decline in play-based pedagogy and growth of didactic, teacher-centered approaches. To illuminate the …

Narrating The Future: Understanding How Student Narratives Relate To Outcomes In Community College, Tanzina Ahmed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Community colleges are an increasingly important entry point into higher education for adults in the United States (21^st-Century Commission, 2012). Students often hold diverse opinions on and engage in complex meaning-making around the community college institution (Daiute & Kreniske, 2016; Deil-Amen, 2016). Furthermore, students’ varied interpretations of community college might influence and predict their academic performance. To investigate that assumption, this study asked 104 students to write about community college within three genres (i.e. types) of narratives that afford different author-purpose-audience opportunities for meaning-making. In the Letters genre, students wrote a letter to a close partner about their …

Parallels Of Love And Hate Defined By Attachments, Nicole Spann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The assertion, “It’s a thin line between love and hate,” is often referenced to express the relative ease of a sole emotion morphing from one extreme to next. Both love and hate generate the same physiological fluctuations which include, but are not limited to, a racing pulse, sweaty palms, releasing of hormones, and some degree of excitability. While physiologically the responses are the same, psychologically and philosophically they are considered opposites. In the sphere of psychology, it is going from what is considered normal behavior or a normal response to abnormal behavior or an abnormal response (McKay, 2016). For this …

Making Sense Of Missing Sessions: Attendance Patterns In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder And Substance Use Disorder Treatments, Margaret Rauen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examined the diverse ways individuals with co-occurring Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use Disorders (PTSD-SUD) attend treatment. The study was a secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial for PTSD-SUD (Ruglass et al., 2017), in which participants meeting criteria for both PTSD and SUD (N=82) were randomized to either Concurrent Treatment of PTSD and SUD using Prolonged Exposure (COPE: n=39) or Relapse Prevention Therapy (RPT: n=43). Latent class growth analysis (Muthén & Muthén, 2000) revealed three distinct classes of attendance as the model of best fit. Diagnostic, but not demographic, variables were significantly associated with treatment attendance …

Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unity is enchanting. That is, it is an enchanting idea that although reality seems to be fragmented in various ways, this apparent fragmentation belies a fundamental unity. This dissertation is an attempt at theoretically capturing such unity via the theoretical unification of causation and grounding. And this unification supports another: the unification of reality’s causal structure and reality’s hierarchical structure.

To propose a unification of causation and grounding, I employ a common conception of grounding on which grounding is understood as a dependence relation. On this conception, if the Xs ground the Ys, then the existence of …

A Sentiment Analysis Of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models, Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Robin Lakoff started the conversation around language and gender with her 1975 essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” extensive work has been done on analyzing sociolinguistics associated with gender. While much work has been done on the differences between how men and women use language, there is less research to be found on language about women as opposed to language about men. In this work, I build a word embedding model from a corpus of Wikipedia film summaries and use this model to create lists of words associated with men and words associated with women. I then use sentiment analysis …

Mechanisms Of Navigation In Fiddler Crabs: An Analysis Of Allocentric And Egocentric Contributions, Stephen G. Volz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Navigation in biological systems is a complex task-set that involves learning processes and may include constructing representations of features of their environment. Across the animal kingdom, different learning mechanisms have evolved to similar spatial problems. The extent to which mechanisms are conserved across taxa are an important research area that can guide our understanding of the cognitive dimensions of navigation. Recent studies of mammals, birds, and arthropods has found that these animals often attend to multiple forms of sensory cues, and to either integrate the solutions generated by these cues, or at times prefer one form of cue over another. …

Uncovering What Readers Know: Understanding Readers’ Online And Offline Processes For Identifying Story Elements, Esther Hellmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

School-age children are frequently asked to read and summarize narrative texts. However, despite the frequency that summarizing tasks are assigned, teachers infrequently provide instruction on summarizing narratives. In addition, researchers have failed to empirically investigate a summarizing technique specifically designed for narratives. In Study 1, thirty typically developing fourth grade students read passages at lower and upper levels of difficulty and produced summaries of the passages. The treatment participants received four, thirty-minute intervention sessions on using story grammar to summarize the narratives. Results found that story grammar is an effective method for summarizing narratives, and that text difficulty impacts summarizing …

Choteo Cubano: Humor As A Critical Tool In Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater, Rebecca L. Salois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the incorporation of choteo in specific Cuban theater texts written during three distinct periods in twentieth-century Cuban history, all of which coincide with specific moments of social, political, and/or economic unrest or transition. Choteo in the theater has served as a tool to demonstrate discontent and frustration with authority figures in various contexts. As that need has altered over time, so too has the approach that playwrights have taken to speak out about these issues. I suggest that by responding to changing circumstances with choteo, confronting a difficult situation is more palatable to audiences or readers than …

The Financial Crisis And White-Collar Crime: An Examination Of Brokerage-Failure And Its Link To Ponzi Schemes, Marie Springer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of federal level Ponzi schemes, the perpetrators of the schemes and the relationship to the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010. The Ponzi schemes have been classified into two overall types of frauds, those that are intentional frauds those that are accidental frauds. The Accidental frauds are schemes that develop when a legitimate business fails, they fall into two specific typologies: Brokerage-failure; Business-failure. The intentional schemes are a variety of typologies such as False-brokerages, intentional confidence schemes, affinity frauds and cybercurrency frauds. The data quantifies characteristics of the schemes and …

Examining School Leadership In New York City Community Schools, Stacey Campo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The community school model is rooted in John Dewey’s (1902) conceptualization of the public school as a hub for the community. The model has recently been identified as part of New York City’s school turnaround strategy and continues to gain prominence nationally, because of this, it is essential to identify the key components of an excelling leadership partnership. This dissertation describes findings and recommendations from interviews with principals and community school directors in ten New York City community schools. These interviews were triangulated with analysis of the New York City school environment survey utilizing both faculty and parent responses. This …

The Varieties Of Tone Presence: On The Meanings Of Musical Tone In Twentieth-Century Music, Aaron Harcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about tone presence, or how musical tone shows up for experience in twentieth-century music. In exploring the subject of tone presence, I rethink notions of “pitch structure” in post-tonal theory and offer an alternative that focuses on the question of what it is to be a musical interval for experience, drawing on a wide range of research from social theory, semiotics, theories of emotion, African American studies, literary theory, usage-based linguistics, post-colonial theory, and phenomenology. I begin by offering a critique of three basic assumptions that constrain understandings of what we mean by pitch structure in post-tonal …

Synthesis And Evaluation Of Tetrahydroprotoberberines As Dopamine Receptor Ligands, Satishkumar V. Gadhiya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine (DA) receptors belong to the G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) family, divided in to two groups based on their high homology transmembrane domains; D1-like DA receptors (D1, D5) and D2-like DA receptors (D2-D4). DA receptor specific ligands have been exploited as a means for studying the prognosis and curing several CNS disorders. Though several efforts have been devoted to discover selective and potent DA receptor ligands, complete selectivity within the DA receptor subtypes remains a challenge.

Tetrahydroprotoberberines (THPBs) are a group of naturally occurring tetracyclic alkaloids that belong to the tetrahydroisoquinoline family. A wide range of biological activities are associated …

Who Posts Selfies And Why?: Personality, Attachment Style, And Mentalization As Predictors Of Selfie Posting On Social Media, Nancy Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the phenomenon of selfie posting on social media and its relationship to narcissism, the Dark Triad, impulsivity, attachment style, rejection sensitivity, and reflective functioning. The sample was made up of 499 participants who completed an online survey consisting of personality measures and open- and closed-ended questions about selfie posting behavior. Data were analyzed using a negative binomial regression model.

Results: The study found that individuals with high levels of the Dark Triad trait of psychopathy post more selfies on social media than do individuals with low levels of the trait. The Dark Triad trait of narcissism was …

Decomposing Time Effect On Valuation And Choice, Yan Meng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intertemporal choice, defined as tradeoffs consumers make between the costs of waiting and the benefits of larger reward size, is an important and ubiquitous effect in marketing. Individuals’ perception of time has been shown to impact intertemporal choice. Event markers are demarcations that cut time duration into intervals and make time discrete rather than continuous. Event markers impact individuals’ decision making, such that a large number of event markers make individuals perceive the future to be far away. Therefore, when faced with an intertemporal choice, they take a Small-Sooner (SS) reward rather than waiting for a Large-Later (LL) reward. The …

Women In The Workplace: The Impact Of Earning Potential Empowerment And The Work-Life Balance, Alysha-Beth Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gender inequalities may be observed in different fields. When women choose to pursue career growth, they need to be ready to encounter significant challenges to find the balance between their professional and personal lives. This thesis discusses the hypothesis that modern US women occupying executive positions in the field of finance may achieve a work-life balance if certain internal and external factors are taken into consideration and evaluating the situation when women can or cannot achieve a work-life balance. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of earning potential in women’s careers as a factor in navigating …

Parental Influence On Second Generation Chinese-American Youth’S Career Choice And Development, Yingli Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A large body of literature supports the claim that the role of parents in shaping Asian-American youth's career development is significant (Leong & Serafica, 1995; Leong & Hardin, 2002; Yuan, 2012; Sandhu, 2017; Qin, 2011). When considering the family impact on Asian-Americans’ vocational choices, researchers should examine the phenomena through culturally specific lens so that variables that are more cultural relevant are captured. This is a pilot study with the goal to provide a preliminary understanding of the ways in which first-generation Chinese immigrant parents influence the choice and development of a career to their second-generation young adult children. In …

Aberrant Salience And Probabilistic Reasoning In Distressing Attenuated Positive Psychotic Symptoms: An Examination Of A Two Factor Model, Huw Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theoretical psychological models of positive psychotic symptoms have increasingly emphasized the interaction of multiple cognitive factors. Research into delusions in particular has focused on the interaction of two factors; a perceptual anomaly that gives rise to a need for explanation, and a bias toward premature acceptance of a hypothesis. Recently this two factor approach has been applied to positive psychotic symptoms more broadly. Two candidate factors have received extensive theoretical and empirical interest. The aberrant salience hypothesis posits that salience regulation, mediated by dopamine, goes awry in psychosis, giving rise to a generalized sense of undue significance that is applied …

The Long-Term Consequences Of Child Abuse And Neglect In Men, Robert A. Beattey Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research indicates that the annual incidence of child maltreatment is around 10% and that more than one-quarter of children have, at least indirectly, experienced some form of violence. Prospective studies find that in high-income countries, like the United States, there are moderate correlations between childhood maltreatment and low educational achievement, low skilled employment, depression, suicide attempts, and alcohol problems, as well as strong correlations with obesity, behavior problems in childhood and adolescence, and criminal behavior. Despite the high costs of child abuse and neglect—both direct and indirect—and decades of research and public health, justice, and social service investment in prevention …

An Examination Of The Needham Question: Why Didn't China Have A Scientific Revolution Considering Its Early Scientific Accomplishments?, Rebecca L. Olerich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Joseph Needham (1900–1995) formulated several important queries about science and technology in China. Known as Needham’s “Grand Question” or “Puzzle,” he asked why modern science developed in Europe rather than in China, despite China’s advanced technology, and examined the inhibiting factors in Chinese civilization that prevented the rise of modern science by the seventeenth century. The question itself has prompted a variety of answers, all of which are partial. In this thesis, some of the complex social, cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the Scientific Revolution in Europe will be discussed, as well as some of the key …

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

Education Is Transformation: The Impact Of Attitudes, Robert Decaul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What truly informs success? Is it one’s education, career type, and socioeconomic status? I believe that more than ever before these three criteria appear to define our understanding of what success is. However, the development and transformation of education in the United States, which is marred by racism, has historically disadvantaged segments of our population especially in cities with a predominantly black population. New Orleans being a perfect example. Hurricane Katrina put the spotlight on education in New Orleans as the storm’s devastation of the city exposed the myriad of problems education was facing. This thesis is an exploration of …

Vim Parat: Patterns Of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, And Sororophobia In Ovid, Melissa Marturano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the importance of understanding the depiction of sexualized violence and rape in the Roman poet Ovid’s extensive corpus through the modern feminist concepts of victim-blaming (blaming victims of sexual abuse for their own abuse) and sororophobia (female figures participating in misogyny). It explores sexualized violence and rape in Ovid long-form, examines the discernible patterns that emerge and the deviations from them as he depicts that violence throughout his texts, and more importantly, introduces victim-blaming and sororophobia into an analysis of these patterns. Despite the fact that previous scholars have done substantial analyses of the patterns of …

The Effects Of Social Power Bases Within Varying Organizational Cultures, Ayanna Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on social power in the context of organizational culture and how this relationship impacts outcomes of follower compliance and trust. Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or a course of events (Handgraaf, et al., 2008). There are six different types of social power, including informational, referent, legitimate, coercive, rewarding, and expert (Fontaine & Beerman, 1977). Each type of social power may lead to varying psychological outcomes, such as compliance, satisfaction, and agreement. To date, the empirical literature has not fully addressed the issue of whether one type of power is more …

Dreams And The Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity To Mourning, Julie Ackerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation concerns the history of psychoanalytic thinking about dreams. It is about both the psychic function of dreams and their theoretical function, or the function that they have served within psychoanalytic discourse. It begins with a consideration of the significance of the dream in classical thinking, where it was conceptualized as a psychic emergence in the context of maternal absence. It traces the way in which the rise of object relational paradigms led to the reconceptualization of the dream in relation to the presence of the maternal mind rather than the absence of the maternal body. It describes how …