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The Relationship Between Maternal Depression And Negative Outcomes In Children: Parenting Deficits' Impact On Children's Emotional Regulation And Behavioral Expression, Gabrielle Francesca Cione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examined the relationships between maternal depression, parenting practices and children's emotional and behavioral expressions. The study was a secondary analysis of a previous cross-sectional and cross-generational study (Maternal aggression, self-regulation and adverse child outcomes, DA 08963) funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) that examined the pathways between maternal impairments (crack/cocaine use disorder, general psychopathology, and self-regulation deficits), child-rearing deficits (parenting deficits, child neglect, child physical/ sexual abuse), and adverse child outcomes (substance abuse, aggressive/ delinquent behaviors, and child self-regulation deficits).

The population for the current study was chosen because children of depressed mothers in …

Intimate Relationships: Reality And Normativity, Jason V. Altilio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Close interpersonal relationships are a part of everyone's life at some point. For most people these relationships are actually prominent parts of their everyday lives. As such, it is important to figure out whether and how they fit into different normative theories of ethics. Relationships like those that exist as romantic couples, close friendships, and parent-child relationships share certain features with other close interpersonal relationships that I define as 'intimate relationships' in this dissertation. Intimate relationships are those that exist between people when they wish one another well, act for one another, do so mutually, treat one another as ends …

Development Of A Naturalistic Observational Parenting Practice Assessment Tool For Externalizing Behavior Research, Thailyn L. Alonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Externalizing behavior problems have severe clinical implications. In fact, they have been found to be the primary basis for mental health referrals in early childhood. Findings from research on the etiology and development of externalizing behavior problems indicate these in addition to having significant effects throughout the life span effects also extend across multiple generations. Family and child development research consistently finds that one of the most significant modifiable factors in the prevention and treatment of externalizing behavior problems in early childhood is parenting practices. Unfortunately, much of the extant literature is limited by parenting measures that are prone to …

Exploring The Effects Of Strain On Cross-National Lethal Violence: An Integrated Model, Catrin Andersson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lethal violence is a global problem. In 2012, the United Nations documented 437,000 homicides worldwide (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2014b), and in 2012, the World Health Organization reported that there were 800,000 suicides internationally (World Health Organization, 2015c). There is a large body of research on violence in the social sciences. Although suicide and homicide are often studied separately, they have been said to share many of the same correlates, such as inequality and divorce (e.g., inequality and divorce; Nivette, 2011; Stack, 2000). There is a need to integrate theories drawn from different disciplines to better understand …

A Long-Term Follow-Up Of Crossover Youth: Young Adult Outcomes For Maltreated Youth In The Juvenile Justice System, Carly Lyn Baetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crossover youth, those with histories of childhood maltreatment and delinquency, may be at high risk for negative outcomes compared to other youth. However, very little is known about the long-term outcomes for this population. This dissertation compared four groups: youth with histories of child maltreatment and juvenile arrest (n = 180), youth with a history of maltreatment only (n = 428), youth with a history of juvenile arrest only (n = 91), and youth with no history of maltreatment or juvenile arrest (n = 496), on a range of outcomes, including mental health, education, employment, and criminal behavior. Data from …

The Insanity Defense, Public Anger, And The Potential Impact On Attributions Of Responsibility And Punishment, Chioma Ajoku

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research indicates that the general public perceives the insanity defense negatively and inaccurately despite the infrequency with which it is pled and the realities often surrounding those who plead the defense. The negative and inaccurate perception of the insanity defense, combined with the potentially increased punitive judgments the defense elicits, suggests that emotion may play a role in perception of the insanity defense. In particular, the psychological literature on anger may contain answers to reactions toward the insanity defense. The current research explored the role of anger on punitive judgments toward a defendant pleading not guilty by reason of insanity …

The Role Of Dependence In Alcohol Reinforcement: Neurobehavioral Mechanisms, Michal Atzram

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The motivation to consume alcohol is complex, though physiological dependence has long been implicated in alcohol reinforcement and alcoholism. The research presented here was conducted to examine the role of alcohol dependence on voluntary alcohol consumption and preference, the validity of the Lieber-DeCarli (LD) liquid diet as a procedure to induce dependence, and the effect of alcohol administration on dopamine and endocannabinoids. While the LD diet has been used extensively to induce alcohol toxicity and teratogenic effects, there has not been research that has examined its use in the development of dependence and alcohol reinforcement. This research utilized varying periods …

Toward An Argumentation-Based Dialogue Framework For Human-Robot Collaboration, Mohammad Quamrul Azhar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Successful human-robot collaboration with a common goal requires peer interaction in which humans and robots cooperate and complement each other's expertise. Formal human-robot dialogue in which there is peer interaction is still in its infancy, though. My research recognizes three aspects of human-robot collaboration that call for dialogue: responding to discovery, pre-empting failure, and recovering from failure. In these scenarios the partners need the ability to challenge, persuade, exchange and expand beliefs about a joint action in order to collaborate through dialogue.

My research identifies three argumentation-based dialogues: a persuasion dialogue to resolve disagreement, an information-seeking dialogue to expand individual …

The Sensitive Psychopath: Assessing Construct Overlap Between Secondary Psychopathy And Borderline Personality Disorder, Trevor H. Barese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The literature suggests substantial overlap between secondary psychopathy and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The current study evaluates the degree of construct overlap between BPD and secondary psychopathy within a sample of offenders mandated to treatment in the community. Diagnostic overlap and associations with clinically relevant correlates were assessed to estimate the degree of convergence between the two disorders and divergence from primary psychopathy. The goal of this study was to evaluate the pragmatic utility of maintaining discrete diagnostic categories for secondary psychopathy and BPD rather than identifying secondary psychopaths as offenders with BPD. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis …

Trauma, Mental Health, And Substance Use Among Homeless Families: The Importance Of Shelter Environment, Nisha Nicole Beharie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Homelessness is at historical levels in the United States and New York City has not been immune to this nationwide trend. Homeless populations are not only increasing in number but are remaining in the shelter for longer periods of time. Homelessness, itself has been shown to have negative consequences on mental health and physical health, but its effects are particularly significant for families with children who have greater needs and who are more susceptible to negative experiences at early ages that can have lifelong impact. Despite this recent data there has been very little to no research on the potential …

Developmental Coordination Disorder: The Relationship Between Gait And Attention With Possible Implications For Early Identification And Intervention, Yocheved Bensinger-Brody

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this research was to evaluate how increased levels of challenge to attentional capacity would affect the motor planning and coordination in the gait of children at risk of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) across developmental ages. The study incorporated a dual task paradigm requiring both motor and attention performance, with the primary hypothesis that children who are at risk of DCD across different ages (3- to 8 yrs.-of-age) would demonstrate an alteration in their motor strategies if they were simultaneously engaging in an attention task. A secondary hypothesis of this study was that there is an underlying deficit …

Effects Of Reproductive Experiences On Age-Related Neural And Behavioral Changes In Female Rats, Saranna Belgrave

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The experiences of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and postnatal care, are associated with neural and behavioral changes. Female rats undergoing multiple bouts of motherhood (multiparous) have been shown in some, but not all studies, to have a dampened HPA axis stress response, changes in some hormone levels and better performance on spatial memory tasks compared to age matched females who have not given birth (nulliparous). Moreover, some of these changes extend into old age, approximately 24 months old. Thus, parous rats provide a unique, physiological model in which to investigate neural and hormonal factors that may contribute to cognitive decline and …

Reconsidering Organicism In Milton Babbitt's Music And Thought, Zachary Bernstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes two related but distinct claims. The first explores the influence of organicism, particularly in the hierarchical formulation developed by Heinrich Schenker, on Milton Babbitt's thought. This influence is shown to inform Babbitt's writings on a range of issues, guiding his analyses, his view of music cognition, and his understanding of the tonal and twelve-tone systems, including his own compositional twelve-tone techniques. Analysis of Babbitt's compositions, however, reveals several complications with the organicist model: there are a number of pieces and situations that conflict with the expectations of hierarchical organicism. As a result, this dissertation advocates for a …

American Dreamer: First-Time Homeownership And The Affective Geographies Of Dwelling, Stephen Boatright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research examines the experiences novice homebuyers in New York City and Oakland, CA have during the home search and decision-making processes. Using a mixed-method approach that combines ethnography with critical discourse analysis and non-representational theory, this work examines the ideology of homeownership as well as the tensions that stem from its emotional affordances. It addresses a lacuna in the housing literature regarding the turbulent everyday emotional tensions that buyers confront as they navigate the highly professionalized real estate industry. Homeownership is lauded for being a relatively low-risk tool for highly leveraged investment; however, using data drawn from a series …

Exploring Antecedents, Performance Outcomes And Psychological Processes Of Multi-Device Use, Chi-Wen Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given the widespread use of multiple devices (such as desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets) in performing a task, systematic, theoretic, and empirical studies pertaining to motivations regarding, performance outcomes, and attitudes toward multi-device use have become essential. Despite the increasing importance of multi-device use, research remains scarce regarding this topic.

To comprehensively understand the issues of multi-device use, this dissertation comprises three complementary studies, each of which focuses on a different aspect of multi-device use: Given the availability of multiple devices, what are the motivations behind multi-device use as opposed to the use of only one device to complete a …

Wh-Question Processing In Children With Cochlear Implants, Zarabeth Waldman Deluca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have exhibited difficulty accurately answering and producing wh-questions. The syntactic construction of wh-questions include syntactic movement, whereby the wh-question phrase that replaces the subject or object noun is fronted to the beginning of the sentence. This leaves a syntactic gap at the subject or object's original location, to be filled by the listener during immediate language processing. One view is that this syntactic gap is resolved by retaining that filler concept in working memory (WM), until it can be reintegrated into the wh-question. However, the CI population is also notable for WM deficits, which may …

Essays In The Theory And Practice Of The Suzuki Method, Kara Eubanks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation speaks to an audience of string pedagogues inside and outside the Suzuki community to offer a richer understanding of how the Suzuki Method fits into American educational and string-pedagogical practice.

The first chapter presents a history of the Suzuki Method and the current global state of Suzuki theory and practice. This introductory chapter frames the two chapters that follow; it provides the background information necessary to understand them. The second and third chapters each address an aspect of the Suzuki Method that is widely misunderstood by the string-pedagogy community, including the Suzuki community itself. While chapters 2 and …

Prosodic Boundary Effects On Syntactic Disambiguation In Children With Cochlear Implants, And In Normal Hearing Adults And Children, Talita Maria Fortunato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theoretical Framework: Manipulations of prosodic structure influence how listeners interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. However, the interface between prosody and syntax has received very little attention in languages other than English. Furthermore, many children with cochlear implants (CI) have deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, these deficits have been attributed only to syntax, leaving prosody a neglected area, despite its clear deficit on this population and the role it plays in sentence comprehension. Purposes: Experiment 1 investigates prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese while experiment 2 investigates these effects in Brazilian Portuguese speaking children with …

Three Potential Mediators Of The Effects Of Child Abuse And Neglect On Smoking In Middle Adulthood, Miriam Ghirmay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of the current study was fourfold: (1) to determine whether individuals with histories of child abuse and neglect have higher rates of current cigarette smoking in middle adulthood compared with matched controls; (2) to examine whether individuals with histories of abuse and/or neglect are at increased risk for higher rates of current psychopathology (anxiety or depression), negative coping, and past year traumas and victimization experiences in adulthood compared with matched controls; (3) to determine whether current psychopathology, negative coping, and past year traumas and victimization experiences mediate the relationship between child maltreatment and current smoking; and (4) to …

Effectiveness Of A Partial Read-Aloud Test Accommodation To Assess Reading Comprehension In Students With A Reading Disability, Michelle Marie Giusto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored the potential effectiveness of a partial read-aloud accommodation on the reading comprehension scores of third grade students classified as poor decoders. Past research has explored the use of an accommodation in which the test items are read aloud to students. These studies have demonstrated that reading an entire test aloud results in gains for both students with reading disabilities and their peers reading on grade level, thus invalidating this procedure as an appropriate test accommodation. To be appropriate, a test accommodation must benefit only the students with reading disabilities, not their grade level peers. Previous research has …

Eye Tracking And Performance Evaluation: Automatic Detection Of User Outcomes, Allen V.R. Harper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While evaluating user task performance with eye tracking has been examined within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), previous research has generally utilized eye tracking to understand how users perform a task. This dissertation defines a new paradigm by which eye-tracking research can be used in HCI: to predict whether users will be successful at a task, using a pattern classification model trained on their eye-tracking data.

This dissertation describes the experimental framework and it demonstrates (through laboratory experiments and machine-learning modeling) the feasibility and limits of predicting user outcomes based solely on eye movement patterns. Utilizing an online learning …

Dangerous Spaces: The Structural Context Of Violence Against Foreign Nationals In South Africa, Alexandra Hiropoulos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since South Africa's heralded democratic transition in the mid-1990s, ongoing patterns of violence specifically targeting people on the basis of their race and nationality have been observed throughout the country. This dissertation study examines the spatial nature of violent incidents against foreign nationals in the Republic of South Africa and the effect of structural conditions on the occurrence of anti-foreigner violence.

While international migration has been historically accompanied by resentment and ill-treatment of migrants worldwide, this phenomenon is inadequately studied in developing countries such as South Africa. Since nationwide riots targeting foreign nationals in townships in 2008, there has been …

View From The Front Gate: A Comparative Study Of Nyc Schools From A College Admissions Perspective, Sharon Hardy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study evaluated patterns of college applications from NYC Schools to CUNY. Specifically, a cohort of former large high schools that were reorganized into small schools of choice (SSCs) under the City's Children First education plan were studied. Coupled with the assessments of college admissions directors, the study concluded that despite an increase in applications, the outcomes of student academic quality and college preparation from a college admissions perspective were mixed.

Women Are Like Silk And Men Are Like Gold: A Cross-Country Comparison Of Institutional Responses To Honor Violence, Alana Michele Henninger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past decade, a specific form of interpersonal violence known as honor violence has drawn international attention because it has been increasingly reported in immigrant communities in western countries. There are currently no specific institutional responses to honor violence in the United States, but the growing media coverage of honor-related crimes has led interest groups to call for new legislation and institutional responses specific to honor violence. The global debate on the codification of honor violence hinges on the discussion of whether honor violence is a cultural crime that deserves special consideration, or whether such codification encourages discriminatory responses …

The Three-Quarter House: A Product Of The Neoliberal City, Paulette Soltani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thousands of the most impoverished New Yorkers have found shelter in the unlicensed, unregulated, for-profit housing market known as the three-quarter house industry. The houses -- scattered throughout the city -- shelter individuals coming from a host of difficult circumstances: people who are formerly incarcerated, chronically homeless, and struggling with drug and alcohol dependency, unemployment, mental health conditions, and medical issues. Once there, residents are faced with rampant violations of their rights, dangerous physical housing conditions, and obstructions to recovery and reintegration. Through a historical lens, this paper argues that decades of neoliberal policies helped develop the three-quarter house industry …

Essays In Health Economics Of Cigarette Consumption, Yan Song

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1, the primary focus of this essay is to use a long time series of state cross sections for the 1955-2009 time period in the United States in order to predict cigarette consumption. This essay updates estimates of the rational addiction model of cigarette consumption obtained by Gary Becker, Michael Grossman, and Kevin Murphy in their seminal 1994 American Economic Review paper. By using two types of prices, the cigarette price and the cigarette tax, and employing a cigarette demand function, I verify that smoking is a rationally addictive form of behavior. This is based on the theory that …

Learning Functional Prepositions, John Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In first language acquisition, what does it mean for a grammatical category to have been acquired, and what are the mechanisms by which children learn functional categories in general? In the context of prepositions (Ps), if the lexical/functional divide cuts through the P category, as has been suggested in the theoretical literature, then constructivist accounts of language acquisition would predict that children develop adult-like competence with the more abstract units, functional Ps, at a slower rate compared to their acquisition of lexical Ps. Nativists instead assume that the features of functional P are made available by Universal Grammar (UG), and …

Beauty Practices Among Latinas: The Impact Of Acculturation, Skin Color And Sex Roles, Angelica Flores

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to explore if and how Latinas use of beauty products (cosmetics) was influenced by their degree of acculturation to U.S. American culture, their phenotype (skin color and facial features) and sex role orientation. While beauty practices are often regarded as trivial, they are important because they reflect women's internalization of societal values and speak to the importance placed on impression management. Although it can be easily observed that people go to great lengths to decorate their exteriors in order to manage others perceptions of them, very few studies look at variables that influence these behaviors. Also, while …

Persons As Self-Consciously Concerned Beings, Benjamin Abelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an analysis of the concept of a person. According to this analysis, persons are beings capable of being responsible for their actions, which requires possession of the capacities for self-consciousness, in the sense of critical awareness of one's first-order desires and beliefs and concern, meaning emotional investment in the satisfaction of one's desires and truth of one's beliefs. The persistence of a person over time requires uninterrupted maintenance of those capacities. This view is in conflict with the more popular account of persistence in terms of the continuity of distinctive psychological states. Furthermore, this account of personhood …

Maternal Substance Use Disorder, Difficult Temperament And Child Psychopathology: Examining A Biopsychosocial Model For The Intergenerational Transmission Of Vulnerability, Wendy Carolina Franco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Substance abuse is a significant issue that affects the lives of adults and children in our society. Children of substance abusing parents are at greater risk for poor psychosocial adjustment and psychopathology. The present study drew on biopsychosocial and epigenetic approaches to study vulnerability and resilience in children. The aim was to advance the understanding of child psychopathology and of intergenerational effects of maternal substance use disorder (SUD) by examining the independent and combined contributions of risk factors for child psychopathology in children of mothers with SUD. Employing a "goodness of fit model," which posits that adverse child outcomes …