Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

State And Trait Rumination Effects On Overt Attention To Reminders Of Errors In A Challenging General Knowledge Retrieval Task, Ronald C. Whiteman, Jennifer A. Mangels

Publications and Research

Rumination is a recurrent and repetitive manner of thinking that can be triggered by blockage of personally relevant goals, creating a temporary state of abstract and evaluative self-focus. Particularly when focused on passive “brooding” over one’s problems and feelings, however, rumination can increase negative affect, interfere with problem-solving, and, through a negative feedback cycle, become a chronic trait-like style of responding to personal challenges, particularly in women. Given the pervasiveness of rumination and its potential impact on cognitive processes and emotional states, the present study asks how it impacts attention to feedback that either reminds individuals of goal-state discrepancies (reminders …

Ny Food 20/20: Vision, Research, And Recommendations During Covid-19 And Beyond, The Hunter College Nyc Food Policy Center, The Laurie M. Tisch Center For Food, Education & Policy, The Cuny Urban Food Policy Institute

Publications and Research

The public health and economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic to the New York City (NYC) food system have been tremendous. In the six months since March 2020, when the pandemic reached NYC’s 5 boroughs, the number of food-insecure individuals has nearly doubled from 1.2 million to 2 million;1 diet quality for many individuals has decreased;2 the local food workforce has lost more than two-thirds of its workers;3 and more than 1,000 NYC restaurants and food retail outlets have closed,4 some never to re-open.

Too often the impacts of a crisis such as COVID-19 are not measured until long after …

Unprotected On The Job: How Exclusion From Safety And Health Laws Harms California Domestic Workers, Isaac Jabola-Carolus

Publications and Research

Since its creation in 1973, California’s Occupational Safety and Health Act has excluded an entire class of workers—those employed in private households as nannies, housecleaners, home health aides, and home attendants. This report documents the human cost of their exclusion at a time when COVID-19 and ecological disaster compound typical workplace hazards. Based on a recent survey of over 700 domestic workers across the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas, the report offers a large-scale snapshot of safety and health challenges faced by this workforce. Findings demonstrate that job-related injuries, illness, and violence are common; that employers rarely provide …

The Quest For Greener Pastures: Evaluating The Livelihoods Impacts Of Providing Vegetation Condition Maps To Pastoralists In Eastern Africa, Elia Machado, Helene Purcell, Andrew M. Simons, Stephanie Swinehart

Publications and Research

The survival of millions of pastoral households in Eastern Africa has become increasingly at risk. Due to mounting socioeconomic and climatic stressors, pastoral households are faced with making migration decisions under increasing uncertainty about resource availability and limited coping strategies. We assess the potential of providing vegetation condition maps to support the migration decision of pastoralists in Ethiopia and Tanzania and the effect of map usage on their herd condition and size. The maps were generated from remotely sensed data using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as a proxy for vegetation condition and overlain with pastoralists’ preferred grazing areas. …

Correspondencias Sumergidas: Latinoamericanismo, Performance Y Archivo En Manuel Ugarte, Fernando Degiovanni

Publications and Research

A partir de la gira de conferencias emprendida por el escritor argentino Manuel Ugarte entre 1911 y 1913, este artículo explora la reconversión del latinoamericanismo de discurso espiritualista y literario a práctica performática y espectacular, articulada por un intelectual militante para una multitud que ve y oye. En particular, estudia el rol que Ugarte otorga al telegrama, producto de las tecnologías de comunicación por cable submarino, en la organización de colectivos estudiantiles y obreros, destinados a reconstituir desde el activismo la idea misma de América Latina. El destino de un continente (1923), libro en el que Ugarte narra la gira, …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …

Self-Determination In Transportation: The Route To Social Inclusion For People With Disabilities, Jessica Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People with disabilities encounter many challenges with transportation but are not usually considered in research about travel behavior and well-being. Research on transportation challenges is often disability-specific even though different access needs can complement or conflict with each other. I argue that disability should be centered in the study of travel and well-being because it magnifies problems that may also frustrate people who do not currently consider themselves disabled. The goal of the dissertation was to identify how basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence apply to the context of transportation and identify ways to measure fulfillment and frustration …

#Fired: Survivor Reactions To Facebook Firing In Organizations, Rachel Omansky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Facebook firing (i.e. employee termination due to social media activity) is a novel type of termination that has developed in recent decades. Though Facebook firing is becoming increasingly common, almost no research has been conducted on this practice. Using a multi-step, multi-method approach, this dissertation attempted to better define the construct and examine its implications for inciting negative reactions from surviving employees, or those employed with the terminated employee at the time of termination, who knew or knew of the employee but were uninvolved in the incident. Study 1 details an effort to identify Facebook firing’s characteristics through a case …

Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …

Is The South (Still) America’S Sacrifice Zone? A Regional Analysis Of Toxic Emissions, 1987–2017, Tanesha A. Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The southern United States has been labeled a “sacrifice zone” for the rest of the nation's toxic waste. In the early days of the environmental justice movement, researchers found that the south contained a disproportionate number of toxic sites, including garbage dumps, landfills, and waste incinerators. These initial studies used different data sources and methodologies, but arrived at the same conclusion: America was dumping in Dixie, a predominantly poor African American region of the country. Since then, researchers have mainly confirmed or called into question the existence of environmental racism within the south. However, none have investigated the south’s environmental …

A Glance At The Mirror: Ensemble Perception Of Symmetry, Gene Jerskey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A growing body of research has demonstrated the ability of subjects to extract representative statistics from visual ensembles, images of similar but distinct groups of objects, without conscious effort or attention focused on individual members of the ensemble. When presented with ensembles, subjects have been able to accurately report the mean, range, and even distribution of various features in the ensemble. Research into ensemble perception, as it has become known, has divided mainly into studies of either low-level features, such as orientation, motion, and color, which are processed in early visual areas, at least for individual objects, or high-level features, …

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil? On The Interpersonal Effects Of Boredom Expression, Manuel F. Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored how people react to employees who express boredom at work. I consider boredom expression as a social signal that the current situation does not adequately stimulate the expresser. The expression may then propel others to help stimulate the expresser, depending partly on others’ initial appraisals and reactions to the expression, and on the surrounding context. In Study 1, using qualitative surveys, I uncovered various affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to employees who expressed boredom. In Study 2, using experimental vignettes, I manipulated the emotion expressed by a “subordinate” (boredom, enthusiasm, or no emotion) and the manager’s beliefs about …

Grassroots Tales: Journeys Of Inward Healing And Outward Movement Building – “A Story Of Youth Development And Healing”, Andrew Cory Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rooted in Liberation Psychology epistemology, this dissertation was engaged to liberate myself as well as psychology. Positing Healing Justice and Sociopolitical Development as theoretical guides, this dissertation explored a community specific approach of radical healing to develop urban youth’s abilities to sustain (build) spirit and collective hope for grassroot movement building. This dissertation asks, what are the possibilities of bringing urban youth (n=9) together who shared similar realities, dared to dream together (i.e., think tank), and turn those dreams into a Grassroot Movement Building?

The methodological praxis of this dissertation project was politically and theoretically situated to study learnings at …

On The Temporal Interpretation Of Epistemic Modals: Evidence From Palestinian Arabic, Alaa M. Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of temporal interpretation of epistemic modals in Palestinian Arabic (PA), and develop a cross-linguistic analysis. The epistemic necessity modal akeed and the epistemic possibility modal yimkin in PA exhibit similar temporal configurations to English epistemic modals must and might, respectively. We argue for a unified underlying structure to account for the temporal configurations. The linearized combination of the epistemic modal, a silent present tense morpheme and an aspectual head morpheme derive either a present-oriented reading when the aspectual head is empty, or a future-oriented reading in presence of a silent prospective …

Essays On The Short-Term Impact Of Minimum Unit Pricing Policy In Scotland, Irena P. Xhurxhi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters, and it evaluates the short-term impact of Scotland’s Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP) policy on a variety of outcome measures. Excessive alcohol consumption has long been considered one of Scotland’s greatest public health challenges, and in an attempt to change this harmful relationship with alcohol, the Scottish Government proposed an alcohol strategy comprising of over 40 measures, a central part of which was the introduction of a statutory minimum price of 50 pence per unit (10ml/8gr) of alcohol known as Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP). This policy aims to reduce alcohol consumption, and in turn, alcohol …

Paper, Places, And Familias: Tracing The Social Mobility Of Mexicans In New York, Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why and how do some undocumented immigrants, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, and their families in the United States do better than others in terms of family household income and educational planning? Immigrant “illegality” can limit specific possibilities and opportunities for most immigrants and their family members. But important variations have been identified in ethnographic fieldwork for this dissertation and through a dataset of contemporary immigrants interviewed in New York. The objective of this dissertation is to analyze how immigration status, place or local ecosystem, human capital, social networks, and intra-family dynamics affect the socioeconomic mobility of individuals, born …

Using Brief Session Duration During Functional Analysis To Inform The Treatment Of Problem Behavior In 13 Consecutive Cases, Theresa Fiani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Functional analyses allow a clinician to identify causal relations between environmental stimuli and problem behavior. Recent developments in functional analysis methodology have been devoted to creating practical procedures that can be conducted in a brief period of time. However, the extent to which improvements in analytic efficiency affect treatment outcomes have yet to be fully explored. We conducted a consecutive case series with 13 individuals who exhibited problem behavior. The participants experienced a comprehensive assessment and treatment program beginning with a functional analysis using 3-min sessions and ending with functional communication training and delay/denial tolerance training. Results demonstrated near elimination …

Working Memory Training: Cognitive And Linguistic Implications In Adult English Language Learners, Deepti Wadhera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study used a cognitive training paradigm to explore whether the same mechanisms of working memory underly conflict resolution in non-verbal and verbal domains in adult English language learners.The association between an individual’s Working Memory (WM) performance and their success in skills such as interference control, decision-making and language processing has been repeatedly highlighted by researchers in cognitive psychology and linguistic fields. Particularly, acquisition and use of a second language is one life experience in which WM ability seems valuable. However, when this association is put to the test in studies that train participants’ WM and measure transfer of these …

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

Crumbs To Keep Them Full: Neoliberal Spectacle At The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Lisa Gueldenzopf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been a fall staple in the U.S. for nearly a century. This event has the potential to make a significant impact on national culture due to its immersion in long-held traditions, the extent of media consumption, and the role of advertising. Unlike many other parades and cultural festivals in the world, opposing values and points of view are placed side by side, meant to be consumed as a single package. This thesis argues that today neoliberal ideology engulfs the annual event, as seen in part through token representation of marginalized identities. The parade of …

Mitigating Gender Bias In Neural Machine Translation Using Counterfactual Data, Alan Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the ability of researchers to develop effective machine translation systems. In particular, the application of modern neural architectures, such as the Transformer, has achieved state-of-the-art BLEU scores in many translation tasks. However, it has been found that even state-of-the-art neural machine translation models can suffer from certain implicit biases, such as gender bias (Lu et al., 2019). In response to this issue, researchers have proposed various potential solutions: some have proposed approaches that inject missing gender information into models, while others have attempted modifying the training data itself. We focus on mitigating …

Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:

digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu

It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

Doing Discipline Different: Evaluating The Implementation Of Restorative Justice As An Alternative To Punitive Discipline In New York City Public Schools, Virginia Diaz-Mendoza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given that punitive discipline practices have disproportionately impacted its poor students of color, New York City is committed to transforming school discipline and improving school climate by implementing restorative justice as an alternative. This study is an evaluation of the restorative justice pilot program funded by the New York City Council and managed by the New York City Department of Education where key stakeholders including officials at the Department of Education, school administrators, educators, school staff, and community organizations are involved in the implementation of restorative justice in schools with high suspension rates. Data was collected through interviews, observations of …

Mobile Cognitive Training For The Cognitive Symptoms Of Depression In Young Adults: A Double-Blind, Randomized Pilot Study With Active Control, Alice Grinberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Depression is associated with a broad range of cognitive symptoms, including reduced attention, verbal learning and memory, executive functioning (EF), and processing speed (PS). Computerized cognitive training (CCT) has been shown to ameliorate the cognitive symptoms of depression. Younger adults, in particular, are understood to benefit more from CCT than older adults due to their greater capacity for neuroplasticity. However, several issues remain unclear about the effectiveness of CCT: (1) whether the benefits of CCT are driven by the specific content or by non-specific factors, such as engagement, motivation, novelty, and expectancy, which have been inadequately controlled in prior …

Ujamaa Policies And Women Gender Issues Of Land Tenure In Tanzania, Nasa S. Edgar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

History has shown us that women always have a part to play in society and that they have fought to receive equal opportunity with their male counterparts. In the United States in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, this movement by women became known as the women’s suffrage movement. It paved the way to women fighting for equal opportunity including for the right to vote and equal pay. In Tanzania, women fought and continue to fight against customary practices that are discriminatory against them. In this thesis I make three arguments: 1. I argue that the history of the …

Migratory Timescapes: Experiences Of Pausing, Waiting, And Inhabiting The Meanwhile Of Migrants And Asylum Seekers In Mexico, Isabel Gil Everaert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico´s southern border with Guatemala, this dissertation provides insights into contemporary experiences of migration in Mexico by engaging with the notions of movement, control, and settlement from a critical perspective. I explore these experiences through the idea of migratory timescapes, defined as structural temporal-relational contexts in which migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are socially embedded. In the case of this dissertation, I unpack three migratory timescapes which are situated in a regional context of growing displacement and increasingly restrictive migratory and asylum policies, what I call the block-and-wait system.

First, I introduce the idea …

Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies And Political Mobilization In Moscow's Renovation, Anna Zhelnina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In summer 2017, residents of thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings in Moscow were invited to vote and decide whether their building should be included in the demolition and relocation program proposed by the Mayor’s Office. Renovation is an ongoing urban renewal plan, first announced in Moscow in February 2017, to demolish whole neighborhoods of socialist-era, five-story buildings and replace them with high-rises. The vast project affected more than 5,000 buildings with approximately a million inhabitants.

This dissertation addresses general questions of political agency and the possibility for diverse people in urban neighborhoods to produce change: to achieve desired policy outcomes, …

Essays On Trade Liberalization, Structural Change, And Technical Efficiency, Li Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A recent and growing literature analyzes differential growth across regions of Asia, Latin America, and Sub Saharan Africa. The structural change of labor reallocation is an important determinant of growth in developing countries having large productivity gaps across sectors within the border. Therefore, sectoral characteristics are still an important determinant of cross-region studies. In addition, it is well-known that labor reallocation across economic sectors does not automatically occur without external shocks, especially from international trade.

However, recent studies debate the importance of trade policy as more research focuses on the cost of transportation and communication in international trade and economic …