Digital Commons Network^™

Israeli, Palestinian And Egyptian Explanations Of Political Actions In The Middle East, Bethamie Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated how people affiliated with different parties in an international conflict understand their own actions and the actions of their adversaries. Using data gathered in the Middle East in 1982, the study examined the explanations offered by 1336 Israeli Jews, Palestinians (living in Israel) and Egyptians to three political events in the Middle East: 'Israeli Air Force conducts a raid on Beirut,' 'Palestinians attack a bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway,' and 'A peace treaty is announced between Israel and Egypt.'

The study, an exploratory analysis, was carried out in a sequence of stages. First, the analysis involved …

Ives On His Own Terms: An Explication, A Theory Of Pitch Organization, And A New Critical Edition For The "3-Page Sonata", Carol Kitzes Baron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ives's musical vision is tied to the expression of programmatic content. He believed that all music is program music. The first part of this study, "An Explication," shows how the extramusical dimensions are articulated in the formal design of the music. The formal, motivic, textural, and tonal techniques relate to the program. The program for the 3-Page Sonata is found in three literary sources: a note Ives pinned to his copy of the first edition, the marginal notes on the composing score, and "Memo 5" from Ives's Memos, which contains a parody of the writing of the critic W. J. …

Revolutions Off Off Broadway, 1959-1969: A Critical Study Of Changes In Structure, Character, Language, And Theme In Experimental Drama In New York City, Alexis Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze and categorize the approaches to structure, character, language, and theme that make the dramaturgy of certain playwrights writing for the Off Broadway theatre during the 1960s revolutionary in contrast to the dramaturgy of the majority of American playwrights of the 1950s. The playwrights under discussion include George Birimisa, Kenneth Bernard, Kenneth Brown, Rosalyn Drexler, Grant Duay, Tom Eyen, Maria Irene Fornes, Paul Foster, John Guare, A. R. Gurney, Jr., William M. Hoffman, Kenneth Koch, Charles Ludlam, Murray Mednick, Joel Oppenheimer, Rochelle Owens, Tom Sankey, Sam Shepard, David Starkweather, Ronald Tavel, Megan Terry, …

The Impact Of Presentence Investigations On Plea Bargained Dispositions In Kings County Supreme Court, Joseph G. Enright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the presentence function of probation from an historical and empirical perspective which argues that the purported diminution of the role of the presentence report (PSR) in the sentencing process–as a result of sentence bargaining–is more reflective of a prevailing disenchantment with the rehabilitative ideal than any thoroughly considered, reliable validation of the PSR's dispensibility. It is demonstrated, through a review of the literature, that poorly conceived, polemically biased empirical research has helped to perpetuate the notion that these reports have little value. A survey of studies and inquiries conducted in New York over the past twenty years …

Precursors Of Creativity: Metaphor, Symbolic Play And Categorization In Early Childhood, Jay A. Seitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Four and 6-year-olds were presented with seven different types of metaphorical relationships in both pictures and words. The core task consisted of a metaphor comprehension task of identical triads (target, nonliteral match, literal match) comprising perceptual/color, perceptual/shape, physiognomic, cross-modal, collectional, psychophysical and taxonomic matches. Children matched items based either on nonliteral similarity or literal contiguity. A series of symbolic play tasks were given to half the subjects at each age group and were hypothesized to facilitate the comprehension of metaphor because of an underlying structural similarity common to systems of reference invoked in both the act of metaphor comprehension and …

The Experience Of Public Art In Urban Settings, Roberta Degnore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The sine qua non for an artwork in the urban realm is neither its judged "goodness" nor the ability of audiences to perceive it "correctly," but is the total experience the work contributes to as part of the fabric of interlocking meanings that places have in people's lives.

In urban settings, the physical attributes and private intentionality of a work do not stand alone. As carefully as an artist installs his/her pieces in a gallery, the same concern for their working together and with their total environment must be applied to artworks in complex public settings, where choice to be …

Working At Home And Being At Home: The Interaction Of Microcomputers And The Social Life Of Households, Jamie Horwitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Not until the recent upsurge of interest in microcomputers and home work has attention been devoted to the household as a setting for technical learning and invention, or organizational and independent work. Drawing upon theoretical implications of research on industrial technology and the household, this study contributes to the development of an empirical basis for understanding the first ten years of microcomputer use at home.

The environmental approach to this psychological study includes two stages. In the first, a survey and content analysis of over 400 articles in mainstream periodicals and national newspapers revealed that since 1976 the representation of …

Viewers' Perceptions Of Gender Roles On Television, Susan Barbara Prager

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops and applies a method for studying viewers' perceptions of gender roles on television. Two hypotheses–selective perception and oversocialization–were tested. In contrast to other studies which rely on subjects' long-term memories, subjects were shown a tape of One Day at a Time, a popular television show, immediately prior to responding to a questionnaire on the show. Subjects were also asked for demographic data and administered the Demplewolff Sex Role Attitude Test. T-Tests and correlations were done, using groups formed around the sex role attitudes of the subjects (as measured by the Demplewolff Sex Role Attitude Test), as …

Working At Home And Being At Home: The Interaction Of Microcomputers And The Social Life Of Households, Jamie L. Horwitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Not until the recent upsurge of interest in microcomputers and home work has attention been devoted to the household as a setting for technical learning and invention, or organizational and independent work. Drawing upon theoretical implications of research on industrial technology and the household, this study contributes to the development of an empirical basis for understanding the first ten years of microcomputer use at home.

The environmental approach to this psychological study includes two stages. In the first, a survey and content analysis of over 400 articles in mainstream periodicals and national newspapers revealed that since 1976 the representation of …

Analyzing Country Risk: Estimating The Probability Of External Debt Repudiation In The Post-Oil-Embargo Decade, Thomas Joseph Webster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of logit analysis as a tool for assessing the likelihood that a sovereign risk cannot, or will not, adhere to the terms of its foreign debt obligations as a result of adverse political, social, economic, or financial disruptions. The discussion is divided into two parts. Part one is devoted to a review of the topic of assessing the likelihood of debt servicing difficulties by borrower nations by first tracing the growth of international bank lending activities by U.S. commercial banks, followed by a general discussion of the international debt crisis and a brief survey of …

Gertrude Kasebier: Her Photographic Career, 1894-1929, Barbara L. Michaels

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The photographer Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) is best known for her affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession. However, as this study shows, she also conducted a successful career as a studio portraitist in New York, and contributed to popular illustrated magazines.

Chapters are devoted to Mrs. Kasebier's professional development, including her education at Pratt Institute, her successes in photographic publications and exhibitions, and her friendships with such photographers and artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, F. Holland Day, Baron Adolf de Meyer, Robert Demachy, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Auguste Rodin. Her portraits of Rodin and his studio are analyzed.

Her …

The Utilization Of Communicational Cues By One- And Two-Year-Old Children, Rhianon Allen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relationships between three models for describing pragmatic response to utterances were surveyed and the application of these models to young children's response patterns evaluated. Of particular interest was how children might discriminate action-directive and information-testing usage of language.

In order to empirically test the validity of these models, sixteen one- and two-year-old children were visited in their homes. Each child participated in two video recorded play sessions with an experimenter, during which he or she was asked complex What-questions that could take either informational or action responses. Gestural accompaniments and preceding discourse were systematically varied in Experiment I. Each …

Christopher Caudwell And His Critics: A Study Of Caudwell's Philosophy Of Art And The Critical Response, Thomas Riggins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the philosophy of art of the British Marxist, Christopher Caudwell. It begins with a general discussion of the intellectual environment of Caudwell's day–i.e., the 1920s and 30s in Europe and especially in England. It then procedes to a presentation of Caudwell's basic philosophical position with major emphasis on his work Illusion and Reality. This is followed by a review of the critical assessment Caudwell's ideas evoked and a number of detractors and supporters are discussed. Special attention is then placed on a review of the aesthetic theory of Socialist Realism and Caudwell's relation to it. …

Capgras' Syndrome, Robert J. Berson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Capgras' Syndrome, the delusion of doubles, is a rare delusional phenomenon in which a person believes that identical doubles have replaced significant people in his life and/or that there exist identical doubles of himself. These delusional doubles are almost always believed to be malevolent. The delusion occurs in a variety of psychotic states, usually schizophrenia. It occurs in both women and men in a wide age range. This dissertation reviews early French reports by Capgras and his associates as well as over 100 cases reported in English. Previous efforts to explain the Syndrome have stressed both organic and psychodynamic factors. …

Neighborhood Change In New York City: A Case Study Of Park Slope, 1850 - 1980, Timothy James O'Hanlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a case study about social and economic changes in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Since the 1960's communities in New York City have been undergoing the process of deterioration and abandonment, or alternatively, the conversion of homes and warehouses for upper income families in high rent districts. In Park Slope both of these trends have been occurring. This study aims through an examination of a single community to provide both a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the process of neighborhood change in New York City.

This research describes the pattern of change in Park Slope within the context of the …

A Path Model For Black And White Educational Achievement, David George Null

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research is an attempt to further develop intergenerational research in educational achievement by refining the "Wisconsin Model of Socioeconomic Achievement." The data source was the 1972 wave of the "Panel Study of Income Dynamics" (popularly known as the "5,000 Families") collected by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. This data, which contained families originally sampled and "spin-off" families that were created by the establishment of a new family by a member of a sample family, was reprogrammed so that the parental characteristics were linked with those of their offspring. The subsample was of all spin-off male …

The Effect Of Methodological And Personal Factors On Attitude-Behavior Consistency, Neil H. Firtle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The theoretical conceptualization of attitude presented in this dissertation assumed that attitude serves as a precursor of behavior. In order to validate the attitudinal construct, empirical research must provide evidence that a consistent relationship exists between attitude measured at a given point in time, and behavior measured at a later point in time than the professed attitude. Previous research has generally failed to support the consistency of the attitude-behavior relationship. The inconsistency in this relationship has been attributed to the contamination of several types of factors (i.e., methodological, personal and situational).

In this dissertation it was argued that the relationship …

Rules Of Order: Or So To Speak, Arthur Emanuel Blank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How members of a social unit acquire their shared knowledge about the social world was approached in Sherif's (1935, 1936) writings on norm formation and in the phenomenological descriptions of Schutz (1971, 1973) and Berger and Luckmann (1967). Both traditions presume that shared understandings originate in face-to-face encounters, but they diverge in that the phenomenologists argue that talk, and the construction of "typifications," plays a prominent role in the acquisition of shared knowledge. For the phenomenologists, a "typification" enables members to categorize behavior as a known event and permits individuals to consider disparate behaviors as belonging to the same class …

The Early Development Of Quantitative Cognition: Correspondences And One-Way Functions, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This investigation was designed to examine the development of the child's capacity to make numerical and quantitative comparisons. It was hypothesized that the nature of the child's understanding of correspondences and one-way functions informs his capacity to compare arrays of decals and quantities of liquid. The relation of Piagetian operative level to the child's capacity to use crystallized skills, or solution aids (Cattell, 1963; Horn, 1968), in comparing arrays was also investigated.

A total of 171 children who ranged in age from four to seven years were administered numerical and liquid comparison tasks. The numerical tasks included paired arrays of …

Mother And Infant At Play: Reciprocity In Gazing Behavior, Goldie Alfasi-Siffert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twenty mothers and their 3-month-old male infants were studied in an attempt to isolate and describe some of the motivational components that contribute to infant gaze. Infants were videotaped in two conditions: playing with mother and playing with a female stranger. The videotapes were then analyzed on a second-by-second basis with respect to infant gaze and a variety of maternal/stranger behaviors. Results show that infants spend more time gazing at the stranger than at mother and that looks at the stranger are of much longer duration. In addition, high levels of infant gaze tend to be associated with facial and …

Minority Group Blame-Orientation And Reactions To Social Protest, David W. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Modes Of Representation, The Epistemic Subject And Developmental Word Association Phenomena, Ellen M. Gerschitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study was devised to investigate the developmental syntagmaticparadigmatic word association shift. In syntagmatic associations the stimulus and associative response are of different grammatical form classes and appear to be grammatically continuous, as response may follow stimulus in an utterance (e.g. cat-meows). These are the predominant responses of children before the ages of six to eight. Older children and adults shift to making paradigmatic associations in which stimulus and response are from the same form class and may be substituted for one another in an utterance (e.g. cat-dog). This shift was explained in terms of underlying symbolic mediational processes and …

Theatre And Drama And The Nazi Concentration Camps, Alvin Goldfarb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Theatre and Drama and the Nazi Concentration Camps” analyzes the use of the camps in post-war dramatic literature and in post-war theatrical production. In the Introduction, the history and functions of the internment centers in the Third Reich are discussed. A brief history of actual theatrical activities in the concentration camps is also presented. In the first chapter, entitled “Dramas Set Inside the Concentration Camps,” a number of plays whose dramatic actions are set in the Nazi internment centers are analyzed. These include Charlotte Delbo's Qui Rapportera Ces Paroles?, James Schevill's Cathedral of Ice, Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy …

The Effect Of Anxiety On Direction Of Attention And Short-Term Memory, Charles B. Kreitzberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of anxiety on rehearsal in short-term memory. It was hypothesized that anxiety arousal would result in attentional alternation between task-relevant rehearsal and task-irrelevant personalized thinking. Because atten­tional focus becomes increasingly unitary at high levels of arousal, it was anticipated that the alternation resulting from anxiety would interfere with rehearsal of task-relevant information in short-term memory.

One hundred-fifty subjects were randomly assigned to a high-stress (testlike) or low-stress (neutral) condition. They were shown to-be- recalled strings consisting of seven consonants of low associability. Following a 1.5 second exposure to a given …

Santana: Middle Class Families In Sao Paulo, Brazil, Elizabeth Riggs Hansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Forebrain Ablations On Some Behaviors In Xenopus Laevis, Lawrence Paul Kunstadt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to further elucidate the hypothesis that the telencephalon of ectothermic vertebrates functions primarily as a non-specific arousal mechanism, facilitating lower brain areas, (the Arousal Hypothesis) the South African clawed frog, Xenoous laevis, was studied in four behavioral situations before and after telencephalon ablation, olfactory bulb ablation or sham surgery. Particular attention was paid to measurements of the temporal aspects of the behaviors studied.

The behaviors studied were:

1. Habituation to an acoustic-vibratory stimulus

2. The optomotor response

3. Escape from shallow water

4. Feeding behavior

In the habituation experiment no changes were found in the number of …

Montemayor's "Diana": A Translation And Introduction, Roseanna M. Mueller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Jorge de Montemayor's Los siete libros de la Diana (1559) was one of the more popular Renaissance pastoral romances. This Spanish pastoral romance written by a Castilianized Portuguese had many continuations. It influenced other pastoral works in England, and enjoyed a wide readership throughout Europe, as its many editions and translations witness. The Diana is a transitional work and an example of what writers of prose fiction were striving for in the middle of the 16th century. The Diana retained elements of the chivalric romance, integrated Petrarchan influences that had hitherto been reserved for the lyric, adhered to Neoplatonic love …

The Pursuit Of Virtue: A Study Of Order In "La Nouvelle Heloise", Jeanne Thomas Fuchs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Favorability Of Person Perception As A Function Of Perceiver And Target Person Personality Style, Alfred D. Kornfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

[no abstract provided]

Effects Of Instructions And Stimulus Representation On Selective Learning In Children, Adele E. Gottfried

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Selective learning patterns of children were investigated using incidental learning methodology. Since incidental, in contrast to intentional learning occurs in the absence of instructions which prepare the subject for later retention tests, a subject has relatively more freedom to choose to attend to and learn only a portion of the presented information (thus exercising selectivity). Previous research suggested that selectivity seemed to increase or decrease with development in relation to different incidental learning paradigms. For studies in which incidental stimuli were presented without a concurrent intentional task (Type 1) incidental learning increased with age indicating decreased selectivity. For studies in …