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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Monitoring Mammals At Multiple Scales: Case Studies From Carnivore Communities, Kadambari Devarajan Oct 2021

Monitoring Mammals At Multiple Scales: Case Studies From Carnivore Communities, Kadambari Devarajan

Doctoral Dissertations

Carnivores are distributed widely and threatened by habitat loss, poaching, climate change, and disease. They are considered integral to ecosystem function through their direct and indirect interactions with species at different trophic levels. Given the importance of carnivores, it is of high conservation priority to understand the processes driving carnivore assemblages in different systems. It is thus essential to determine the abiotic and biotic drivers of carnivore community composition at different spatial scales and address the following questions: (i) What factors influence carnivore community composition and diversity? (ii) How do the factors influencing carnivore communities vary across spatial and temporal …


Diversity And Evolution Of Human Eccrine Sweat Gland Density, Andrew W. Best Oct 2021

Diversity And Evolution Of Human Eccrine Sweat Gland Density, Andrew W. Best

Doctoral Dissertations

Human eccrine density is highly derived. However, little is known about contemporary variation in this trait, what shapes it, and how it influences heat dissipation. This project explores 3 questions: 1) Is variation in functional eccrine density (FED) explained by childhood climate? 2) Is this variation patterned by geographic ancestry? 3) Is variation in FED associated with differences in heat dissipation capacity? We measured FED and sweat production in 6 body areas via pharmacological stimulation and impressions of sweating skin in 72 participants. Childhood climate variables were taken from the WorldClim database and geographic ancestry was estimated with 23andMe tests. …


Social Context Influences On Behavior Of Carolina Chickadees, Brittany A. Coppinger May 2021

Social Context Influences On Behavior Of Carolina Chickadees, Brittany A. Coppinger

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation assesses fundamental social factors that drive variation in calling and other behaviors of experimental flocks of Carolina chickadees. Specifically, I tested how group member familiarity and group composition affected individual behavior. In addition, I performed a direct experimental test of the Social Complexity Hypothesis for Communicative Complexity, which states that groups that are more socially complex will communicate with greater signal complexity than groups that are less social complex. I consider complexity to be a combination of three factors: the number of parts in a system, the variation among the parts, and the variation in the way those …


Using A Cognitive Behavioral Approach In Individual Counseling With Patients Undergoing Bariatric Surgery, Nina Marie Ditommaso May 2021

Using A Cognitive Behavioral Approach In Individual Counseling With Patients Undergoing Bariatric Surgery, Nina Marie Ditommaso

Doctoral Dissertations

Morbid obesity is linked to physical and psychological well-being. Bariatric surgery has shown tremendous success with rapid weight loss in the patient population with morbid obesity. These patients experience issues with weight regain post-surgery, which can be linked to psychological and social factors. Despite this, mental health counseling is rarely offered in bariatric surgery programs. The primary investigator used a six-session Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) approach in individual counseling with patients following bariatric surgery. The primary investigator used a single case research design to treat four participants. The primary investigator measured the effectiveness of a six-session CBT treatment, assessing for …


Mental Fatigue: Examining Cognitive Performance And Driving Behavior In Young Adults, Abigail F. Helm Apr 2021

Mental Fatigue: Examining Cognitive Performance And Driving Behavior In Young Adults, Abigail F. Helm

Doctoral Dissertations

Mental fatigue causes an increase in task-based EEG theta and alpha power and a decrease in performance (for a review, see Tran et al., 2020). However, little is known about the emergence of mental fatigue in resting state EEG recordings and whether the progression of mental fatigue over time is influenced by individual differences. The current dissertation examined the utility of resting state EEG as a measure of mental fatigue by testing whether EEG power changed in young adults over the course of a cognitively demanding battery of tasks. The current dissertation also tested how this measure of mental fatigue …