Digital Commons Network^™

Guilty Stereotypes: The Social Psychology Of Race And Suspicion In Police Interviews And Interrogations, Sara C. Appleby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over 300 people have been exonerated by post conviction DNA testing, unequivocally proving their innocence. Nearly 70% of these post conviction DNA exonerees are members of minority groups, and approximately 69% of those convicted as a result of false confessions are racial/ethnic minorities (www.innocenceproject.org). To date, there is little research on the role of race in police interviews and interrogations. The present research had two goals. First, we examined Black and White participants' experiences during a mock crime interview. Second, using the interviews from Study 1, we evaluated the role suspect race plays in police officers' veracity judgments. Using a …

"I Shall Not Fear:" Secure Attachment To G-D As A Buffer Against Anxiety, Peryl Agishtein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Religion has a long and mixed history in the field of psychology. Historically, some leading figures in the field viewed religion as a source of neuroses and poor mental health; others saw a more positive spiritual resource. Recently, empirical data on religion and mental health has proliferated. There is now consensus that religion is associated with lower depression. However, the link between religion and anxiety is less clear-cut. This paper proposes that a) religion can have exacerbating or alleviating effects on anxiety depending on which aspect of religion is being studied and b) the primary religious variable that affects anxiety …

Identifying Risk And Protective Factors Associated With The Relationship Between Developmental Delays And Behavior Problems In An Urban Sample Of Preschool Children, Jaclyn Weber Babcock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine how child-specific variables, such as the type and/or level of developmental delay, and family variables, such as family functioning, parenting stress, and parenting self-esteem, relate to the behavior problems in an urban sample of minority preschool children with developmental delays. Participants were 72 parents of preschool children between the ages of 3 - 5 years currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Queens, NY or Jersey City, NJ. Parents in the sample were classified into two groups, parents of "Typically Developing" preschoolers (n = 20) and parents of preschoolers who were considered to have …

Street Code Adherence, Callous-Unemotional Traits And The Capacity Of Violent Offending Versus Non-Offending Urban Youth To Mentalize About Disrespect Murder, Zoe A. Berko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

National statistics are not available on the proportion of violent juvenile offenses driven by the experience of being disrespected. However, the New York Police Department estimates that about 40% of the city's shootings involve members of violent crews of 12 to 20 year olds with most of this gun violence driven by incidents of disrespect. Mentalization, defined as the ability to envision mental states (i.e., feelings, beliefs and intentions) in oneself and others, is viewed as underlying affect regulation, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the experience of self-agency, all of which are implicated in interpersonal violence (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, …

Impact Of Ethnic Conflict On Development: A Case Study Of Guyana, Visnoonand Bisram

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study presents an alternative framework, from the dominant political and economic theories, for explaining the feeble and relatively slow pace of development of an ethnically divided, resource rich country.

The study, using primary and secondary sources, empirical evidence, and interpretive analysis, examines the emergence and role of racial conflict and its stifling impact on national development in Guyana, which represents an extreme case of a society plagued by racial division. Organizations including labor unions and political parties, as well as occupations and aspects of the economy, among other social constructs, are all racially divided. Utilizing an inter-disciplinary (sociology, political …

The Philosophical Side Of Contemporary Art Forms, Kristina Bodetti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to show that contemporary art forms, specifically popular music, film and comics/graphic novels, are capable of, and do in many cases work as philosophical pieces. I believe that an analysis of these mediums will reveal instances in which the works of art explicate established philosophical theories, expand upon them, and in some cases invent new theories.

Each new medium of art gets examined by philosophy in its turn and its merits as a unique art form are debated. From these arguments it is possible to extrapolate the ways in which these works can become …

The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …

Use Of The Modified Emotional Stroop Task To Detect Suicide Risk In College Students, Yeunjoo Chung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is a challenge to detect those who are at potential risk for suicide because the base rate of suicidal behaviors in non-clinical samples is low. The aim of the present study was to investigate the concurrent and predictive validity of the emotional Stroop task (EST) as a behavioral marker for suicidal behaviors in a college population. Eight hundred and twenty students were asked to perform the EST and to respond to suicide-related self-report measures and were followed up with18 months later. The results indicated that participants with past suicide attempts had longer response latencies to the word "suicide" as …

Tonic And Phasic Inhibitory Mechanisms Mediating Sensorimotor Decision-Making In The Goldfish Auditory Startle Circuit, Paul C.P. Curtin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work describes related studies of cellular and synaptic signaling mechanisms involved in the balance of excitation and inhibition in the goldfish auditory startle circuit. The general purpose of these experiments was to identify novel mechanisms that contribute to action selection at different stages of the motor control hierarchy. The methods applied to achieve this goal tested the effects of selective antagonists for target receptor systems on sound-evoked excitation and inhibition of startle.

Chapter 2 describes a study of a poorly-understood serotonergic mechanism, the 5-HT_5A receptor, that was not previously functionally characterized in native tissues or associated with neural …

Child Abductors Who Have Killed Their Victims: A Theoretical Approach To Spatial Analysis, Tonya M. Desa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the intense and prolonged public attention received when a child is abducted and killed, there are major gaps in the academic literature. One of the gaps pertains to the distances traveled by the offender between key crime locations. The overall aim of this study was to provide information concerning typical travel distances of offenders. This project utilized an archival data set compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The database constructed for this project consisted of 72 victims who were abducted and murdered by 68 offenders. The date range for these …

More Than Objects: Understanding Female Slaves In Barbados In The Early Modern Period, Phoebe Martine Downes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will focus on representations of African women in the British colony of Barbados in the early modern era, using travelers' accounts, planters' records and the writings of abolition-minded reformers. The topic is significant because most scholars have focused on British colonial life during the nineteenth century, examining the planter class or the region's colonial commodities.

The period from 1600 to 1700 was an era of beginnings in the British colonial world, with England establishing its first Caribbean colonies and experimenting with different economic strategies to gain wealth. This period was also significant due to the emergence of slavery …

The Contributions Of Earl "Bud" Powell To The Modern Jazz Style, David Joseph Demotta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an analytical study of pianist and composer Bud Powell's contributions to modern jazz (a.k.a. bebop or "bop"), focusing especially on the rhythmic and harmonic implications of Powell's improvisations. The analysis is informed by a series of interviews with professional jazz musicians and is supported by original notated transcriptions of Powell recordings. The aim of this project is to present a cogent technical and theoretical account of Powell's musical style that is grounded in the values of the contemporary jazz community and reflects that community's continued passion for and engagement with Powell.

Chapter One, "Contemporary Pianists and Bud Powell's …

The Theoretical And Psychological Foundations Of Care In Environmental Ethics, Rachel Fedock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate the phenomenon of care, provide some of the theoretical and psychological framework for the ethics of care, and apply this framework to environmental issues. The neglected dimensions of care I explore are: the emotions of care, care as a virtue, and the caring person, respectively, while constructing possible conceptions of in what each dimension consists. I argue for the necessity of sympathy and concern within the ethics of care, while arguing against the necessity of empathy. Next, I explore the virtue of care as an ideal, where emotions, desires, reasoning, motive, duty and action all play an important …

Neural Mechanisms Underlying The Perception Of Three-Dimensional Shape From Texture: Adaptation And Aftereffects, Carole Filangieri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Input into the visual system is two-dimensional (2D) and yet we effortlessly perceive the world around us as three-dimensional (3D). How we are able to accurately extract 3D shape information from the 2D representations that fall on the retina remains largely unknown. Although much research has been conducted that investigates higher levels of form processing (i.e. face recognition), less is known about the mechanisms that underlie the perception of simple 3D shape. Previous studies in our lab have shown that our ability to perceive 3D shape from texture cues relies on the visibility of orientation flows -- patterns that run …

Held And Dropped: A Study Of Metaphor And Subjective Experience In A Psychoanalytic Treatment, Alison Michele Ferst

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores particular patterns of change that might unfold over the course of an intensive psychoanalytic treatment by mapping the forms of change that might take place in terms of a patient's subjective experience and the meaning that the patient attributes to it as reflected in the effort to express that experience in figurative language (i.e., metaphors). The data set was treatment session transcripts provided by P. A. Dewald over a period of 2 years and is partitioned by Dewald into three sequential phases.

Figurative language in general and metaphor in particular consists of essential forms of representation of …

Refugees And Relief: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee And European Jews In Cuba And Shanghai 1938-1943, Zhava Litvac Glaser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditionally, pre-modern Jewish communities sensed an obligation to bind together to provide aid to Jews who found themselves in catastrophic situations; however, with the advent of modernity and the dissolution of Jewish communal authority, the fragmentation of Jewish communities, and the unprecedented stresses of the Holocaust, communal dynamics grew far more complex. The Jews of Cuba and Shanghai were two small and relatively remote communities overwhelmed by Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. At their request, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee stepped in and provided both the funding and leadership that both of these locations so desperately needed.

The Jewish …

Pennsylvania Academic Career/Technical Training Alliance Initiative: Engaging Youth In School And Work, Marna Goodman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research offers a feasibility study on the effectiveness of the Pennsylvania Academic Career Technical Training Alliance (PACTT) at engaging youth in school and work upon return to the community. The sample included adjudicated youth from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania committed to PACTT-affiliated residential facilities and who discharged between July1, 2011 and June 31, 2012. An overview of the PACTT Initiative, with specific attention to its core elements, is presented and examined in the context of Ecological Systems Theory. Secondary data was analyzed using logistic regression to measure the overall impact of the five PACTT elements, dosage of PACTT elements, and …

An Assessment Of The Therapeutic Fib: The Ethical And Emotional Role Of Therapeutic Lying In The Caregiving Of Alzheimer's Disease Patients By Non-Medical Caregivers, Dina Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study qualitatively assesses the various aspects of the use of the therapeutic lie in care giving for Alzheimer's Disease patients while examining the ethics of lying associated in and out of the medical setting. The objectives of this study are to: gain an understanding of the role therapeutic lying plays in the care given by non-medical caregivers through a series of focus groups and interviews; examine the moral and emotional issues related to the use of this practice with a focus on non-medical caregivers; gather knowledge of the use of therapeutic lying in order to improve care for Alzheimer's …

Designing Instruction For Recovering Alcoholics: The Role Of Executive Function And Levels Of Guidance In Learning From Visually Complex Simulations, Jeffrey Gutkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the design of visually complex science simulations. Building upon an earlier study by Homer and Plass (2014), the current research determines under which circumstances adult learners, and alcoholics in recovery, would perform better from while learning with different levels of guidance. It was predicted that alcoholic adults in recovery would have impaired Executive Function (EF) as compared to controls selected from the general population and that EF would affect learning. An experiment investigated whether levels of EF predict learning from simulations that offered higher or lower levels of instructional guidance. Participants were 76 adults, half of …

Mobilizing The Collective: Helhesten And The Danish Avant-Garde, 1934-1946, Kerry Greaves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the avant-garde Danish artists' collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), which was active from 1941 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and undertook cultural resistance during the war. The main claim of this study is that Helhesten was an original and fully established avant-garde before the artists formed the more internationally focused Cobra group, and that the collective's development of sophisticated socio-political engagement and new kinds of countercultural strategies prefigured those of postwar art groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International. The group and its eponymous journal involved the Danish modernists Asger Jorn, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, …

Courage To Speak, Fortitude To Listen: A Model For The Study Of First-Person Ld Narratives, Charles Christian Haitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Learning disabled (LD) is both a politically and socially contentious term. In the eyes of the public, the label is synonymous with special education (SE). SE's vision of LD remains the dominant discourse of deficit-based understanding of human differences. This has resulted in its adherence to segregated services for many students that often result in additional behavior problems exacerbating their struggles to learn in school. A lack of student representation in school affairs is exemplified in the absence of LD pupils' voices in the decision-making that frames how they are viewed by others. This absence of voice also influences how …

Explorations Of Perceived Product Efficacy, Veronika Ilyuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has largely treated perceived product efficacy as a one-dimensional construct. This research uniquely demonstrates that perceived product efficacy is comprised of several dimensions and focuses on one previously unexplored dimension that has significant implications for consumption frequency: perceived duration of product efficacy. The current research shows that consumers make biased duration judgments of product efficacy: consumers make shorter (vs. longer) duration judgments when they perceive a concurrent task to be relatively difficult (vs. easy). The effect of perceived task difficulty on duration judgments of product efficacy is (1) established with energy-enhancing products and medication, (2) shown to be …

Effecting Moral Change: Lessons From The First Emancipation, Howard Landis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The First Emancipation was a grassroots movement that resulted in slavery being mostly eliminated in the North by 1830. Without this movement, it is unlikely that slavery would have been banned in the United States by 1865. The First Emancipation is not only a fascinating but little known part of our nation's history, but can also be used as a case study to illustrate how firmly entrenched, but immoral practices can be changed over time. The First Emancipation began with four immigrants stating their opposition to slavery in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. At this time, slavery was well entrenched, and …

`We Are All Stories In The End, I Want Mine To Be A Good One': College Students' Work-Family Expectations And The Role Of Educational Experiences, Chandra D. Mason

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While researchers have long been interested in the experiences of people who combine paid work with non-work roles (e.g., spouse, parent, eldercare provider), relatively little attention has been given to the expectations that people hold prior to occupying these roles, such as the amount of role conflict or fulfillment anticipated as a result of participating in both work and non-work roles. Even less is known about the factors that shape these expectations. For college students, these factors may include experiences of a college education (e.g., coursework that addresses gender roles, interacting with successful role models), yet, ironically, few studies have …

The Effect Of Orthographic Mapping, Context, And Word Class On Sight Word Learning For Native And Nonnative English-Speakers, Katharine Pace Miles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated three questions: 1.) Does training in orthographic mapping better support flashcard reading over a control group, 2.) Does providing meaning clarifications during flashcard reading better support learning over not providing meanings, 3.) Does grammatical word class affect word learning, and 4.) Do these manipulations affect word learning differently in native and nonnative speakers? Additionally, this study investigated whether literacy and language skills predict the reading of words presented in isolation. Native (n = 40) and nonnative (n = 41) English-speaking kindergarten students' were randomly assigned to either the orthographic mapping or control condition prior to flashcard word …

Physiological And Subjective Aspects Of Positive Mood In Relation To Executive Functioning: The Potential Moderating Role Of Personality, Luz Helena Ospina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Positive affect has been demonstrated to improve aspects of cognition. However, recent studies reveal that positive affect may hinder the same cognitive processes, such as executive functioning, memory and creativity. These discrepant findings may be due to differing levels of physiological arousal, a component of the circumplex model of affect, which has been largely ignored in affective research. For example, one recent study suggests that positive valence coupled with varying levels of physiological arousal (i.e., low, moderate, and high) may differentially affect performance on tasks of verbal fluency and memory. Furthermore, one other explanation for these inconsistent findings may relate …

Intergroup Contact And Evaluations Of Interracial Exclusion In Offline And Online Settings Among Adolescents And Young Adults, Henry C. Park

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is considerable research with adult samples documenting the benefits of intergroup contact, such as improved intergroup attitudes and prejudice reduction. However, developmental psychologists have only recently begun to consider the relationship between intergroup contact and evaluations of interracial exclusion in minority and majority youth. There has also been extensive research studying the social effects of the internet and its ability to influence wide audiences, but little research on the impact of online interactions on intergroup relations. The present study addresses this limitation. Using social media and various online forums to recruit and survey participants about their views of interracial …

It-Enabled Coordination In Electronic Markets: An Experimental Investigation Of The Effects Of Social Communication On Group Buyers, Alexander Pelaez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coordination, and the mechanisms by which coordination occurs, represents a significant area of study for economic research, and information technology. Technology enhances communication in both speed and quantity of information and when aligned with appropriate tasks can improve decision-making and task performance. Examining the effect of technology based coordination mechanisms on market platforms provides insight into outcomes as represented by buyer surplus and task completion as well as behaviors, such as network structure and emotional attitudes in economic experiments. Drawing on theory from economics and information systems, larger buyer groups should be able to obtain better prices and extract higher …

Risk Factors And Costs Influencing Hospitalizations Due To Heat-Related Illnesses: Patterns Of Hospitalization, Michael T. Schmeltz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this dissertation was to identify individual and environmental risk factors, investigate outcomes and hospital resource use, including costs, and document the pattern of heat-related illness hospitalizations in the United States. The main data source for the study population was the 2001-2010 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS). The study population for heat-related illnesses (HRIs) consists of patients in the NIS with at least one diagnosis of a heat-related illness (ICD-9 codes 992.0 - 992.9) from 2001 to 2010. Outcome analysis included a study population of patients who had primary or secondary diagnoses of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, nephritic …

The Finales Of Robert Shumann's Piano Sonatas And Fantasie, Emiko Sato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation sets out to examine the finales of Robert Schumann's Piano Sonatas (opp. 11, 14, 22 [original finale]), and Fantasie (op. 17), with an especial focus on their form, which can be broadly categorized as parallel form. The introduction examines historical criticisms of Schumann's large-scale works, pointing out some of the idiosyncratic features found in Schumann's finales. Each chapter will present a comprehensive analysis of one of the finales. I make use of color diagrams in the formal analyses, which expeditiously and efficiently elucidate the repeating patterns of thematic and transitional materials; they also visually reflect the actual …