Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Triple Helix: Ai-Artist-Audience Collaboration In A Performative Art Experience, Xuedan Zou

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Imagine an art exhibition that morphs its content according to the audience’s experience like a chameleon, reflecting the audience’s mind and culture and turning the artist’s exhibition into the viewer’s. But when the viewers leave, the work fades back to the creator’s original work and waits for the next audience. In this project, my team introduced an interactive exhibition called "Triple Helix," where audience members were provided the opportunity to alter the artworks created by the artist, thus imbuing them with their own perspectives. This interactive exhibition was held at three physical-locations and online, and a comprehensive user study was …

Characterizing How Food Advertising And Genetic Obesity Risk Factors Affect Neural Reward Reactivity And Eating In The Absence Of Hunger In Children, Dabin Yeum

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The complex and multifactorial etiology of obesity involves the interaction of numerous risk factors. Assessing the gene-environment interaction of pediatric obesity can provide valuable insights for the characterization of key factors contributing to obesity and identification of potential points of intervention. The data used in this thesis comes from a single sample of young children recruited from the communities surrounding Dartmouth College. The primary objective of this thesis is to assess the impacts of complicated gene-environment interaction on pediatric obesity. First, we assessed the dynamic and static advertising of food cues to examine they lead to differential neural reward responsivity. …

Who Should Run? Examining The Positions, Experiences, And Conditions That Best Prepare A Candidate To Run For And Serve As President Of The United States., Davis M. Bernstein

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Over the United States’ 246-year history, the nation has had 46 presidents. These individuals often carried with them decades of military, political, or judicial experience. In 2016 this long held political norm was dashed, and America elected its first candidate without any traditional experience. With this enormous precedent setting change in electoral and governmental politics, experience has come under a new spotlight; and questions on what experience matters, or if experience matters at all have received new scrutiny. Polling data, historical precedent, conventional wisdom, and political norms will all be integral for the purpose of examining pre-presidential experience and put …

The Role Of Justice In Colombia’S Renewable Energy Transition: Wind Energy Development In Wayúu Territory, Adriana P. Fajardo Mazorra

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Amidst the defining issue of our time – climate change – the world faces an imperative to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, aligning with the 2015 Paris Agreement goals. This global focus on low-carbon energy infrastructure has brought forth local socio-environmental conflicts, and at the heart of this transition lies La Guajira, a peninsula in northern Colombia, home to the indigenous Wayúu people and abundant wind energy resources. This research delves into the critical role of energy justice as large-scale wind energy projects expand in La Guajira. By examining the struggles faced by the Wayúu people provoked by …

Anatoview: Using Interactive 3d Visualizations With Augmented Reality Support For Laypersons’ Medical Education In Informed Consent Processes, Michelle Chen

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

AnatoView is an interactive multimedia educational application that visualizes medical procedures in three-dimensional (3D), augmented reality (AR) space. By providing visual and spatial information of medical procedures, AnatoView acts as a learning supplement for laypersons/patients in informed consent (IC) processes — wherein instructional content is traditionally limited to purely spoken explanations that lead to poor patient comprehension. We design a mixed study and conduct a randomized, controlled trial with 15 laypersons as participants: administering a traditional IC process to a control group, and an IC process supplemented by the use of AnatoView to experimental groups. As a primary outcome, medical …

Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus Connectivity With The Dorsomedial Subsystem Of Default Network Tracks Real-World Conversation Behaviour, Dhaval M. Bhatt

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Social interactions are multifaceted, complex, and critical to social behaviour as they help gather information, develop social connections, and regulate social behaviour (Lakey & Orehek, 2011; Testard et al., 2021; Jolly & Chang, 2021). Among social interactions, conversations find a special place for humans due to the nuances associated with language, conversational behaviour (e.g., gestures), and context (e.g., where conversations occur and what is discussed). Researchers have studied aspects of single conversation behaviour, content related to conversations, and brain function (Sievers et al., 2020). However, little is known about the brain function of densely-sampled in-person conversation behaviour. Filling this gap …

Unraveling The Neural Basis Of Emotions: Advancing Understanding With Ecologically Valid Paradigms And High-Resolution Intracranial Eeg, Tiankang Xie

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Background

Emotion arises from integrating information about the external world with memories of past experiences, current homeostatic states, and future goals. They play a vital role in regulating our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, significantly impacting our mental health. Thus, it is important to understand the neurobiological mechanisms that give rise to emotions. While there has been considerable work investigating the neural basis of emotions, progress has been hampered by several methodological limitations. For example, prior work has relied on relatively simple and isolated stimuli, which often fail to effectively capture the dynamic and multifaceted nature of emotional experiences in real-life …

Democracy In 2022: Trump’S Rhetoric, Truth Social And Election Integrity Platforms, Daniel Brooks

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis focuses on how Populism and Democracy remain constantly opposing forces in 21^st century United States domestic politics. A focal point of populist sentiment, rhetoric and narrative dissemination is the Trumpian MAGA wing of the American right. This thesis seeks to address scholarly analysis of Donald Trump’s populist MAGA movement in the context of the 2022 Midterm election, highlight populist narratives of the movement through Truth Social posts and the negative effects upon voters in states with rhetorical focus from MAGA election integrity narratives. This thesis was done through a 3 month phenomenological study with the object of …

Critical Geopolitics And The Created Worlds Of Post-9/11 Spy Film, Caitlin Anne Mccarthy

Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses

Critical geopolitics seeks to understand how we view the world, and popular film can be a key source in unveiling common fears and hopes of a particular time. in this thesis, I explore the portrayal of the world world and themes in 21st century spy film franchises to understand what worldviews are being reinforced and created through these films. Using the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as my chief historical event of influence, I analyze spy films in the James Bond and Mission: Impossible film franchises to get a sense of how these films reflected and reproduced the popular …

Why Not Be Free: The Black Worldmaking Praxis, Research Method, & Manifesto For Developing Music Interventions Against Stress In Black Youth, Armond Epps Dorsey

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Why Not Be Free? is an interdisciplinary exploration of music intervention development demonstrating the application of my integrated research and artistic practices through an outlined antiracist method for designing music to reduce stress in Black college youth and a manifesto detailing the compositional process. I draw from Black feminist and womanist thought, music cognition, and public health literature to outline a framework for designing music interventions to reduce stress among Black populations: the Music Medicine Critical Race Praxis. I situate my work among Black speculative artists reimagining experiences in everyday Black life as well as music intervention researchers integrating …

Digital Age And Developing Countries: Can The China Model Be Replicated?, Xiaohu Ma

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In recent years, digital technology has developed rapidly, including the digital hardware production, big data application, and digital service platforms, among others. Digital technology is considered a critical tool for promoting global economic growth, and governments of various countries have introduced industrial policies to try to catch the wave of its popularization to promote national economic growth. This thesis particularly focuses on two phenomena: (1) developed countries have considerable advantages in the development of digital technology based on their technological dominance and multinational corporations (MNCs), while developing countries face many technological development difficulties, such as excessive external import dependence, imbalance …

Say That Again: The Role Of Multimodal Redundancy In Communication And Context, Brandon Javier Dormes

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

With several modes of expression, such as facial expressions, body language, and speech working together to convey meaning, social communication is rich in redundancy. While typically relegated to signal preservation, this study investigates the role of cross-modal redundancies in establishing performance context, focusing on unaided, solo performances. Drawing on information theory, I operationalize redundancy as predictability and use an array of machine learning models to featurize speakers' facial expressions, body poses, movement speeds, acoustic features, and spoken language from 24 TEDTalks and 16 episodes of Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents. This analysis demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish between these …

(Dis)Connected: Internet Access, Health Disparities, And The Covid-19 Pandemic, Spencer Allen

Sociology Undergraduate Senior Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered American life. Caused by a novel virus that infected over 29 million people and killed over half a million people between January 20, 2020, and March 8, 2021, the pandemic offered the first opportunity to utilize digital tools on a large scale to protect the American people. Public health agencies leveraged the internet to quickly disseminate rapidly changing health recommendations, and the public responded by moving many of their in-person interactions — attending school and work, socializing, and buying groceries — online. While many scholars have investigated the role that the internet has played in …

The Dilemma Of Disclosure: Designing Interpersonal Informatics Tools For Mood Tracking, Daniel Earl Westphal

Computer Science Senior Theses

Mental health is a serious issue that affects people of all ages, but is especially prevalent amongst college age youth. In the 2020-2021 school year, researchers found that around 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health condition, such as major depression or generalized anxiety disorder. Many digital interventions have been innovated in order to help address this issue. These range in type and functionality from teletherapy to medication tracking applications. Some of these digital interventions include social features that allow users to interact with other users, friends, family, or doctors; however, having social features …

Epistemic Mentalizing And Causal Cognition Across Agents And Objects, Bryan S. Gonzalez

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

This dissertation examines mentalizing abilities, causal reasoning, and the interactions thereof. Minds are so much more than false beliefs, yet much of the existing research on mentalizing has placed a disproportionately large emphasis on this one aspect of mental life. The first aim of this dissertation is to examine whether representing others’ knowledge states relies on more fundamentally basic cognitive processes than representations of their mere beliefs. Using a mixture of behavioral and brain measures across five experiments, I find evidence that we can represent others' knowledge quicker and using fewer neural resources than when representing others’ beliefs. To be …

Information Diffusion In Online Social Networks: A Simulation Experiment, Maxwell Jacob Blum

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

The advent of online social networks has completely transformed the way we communicate, with news, opinions, and ideas now spreading faster than ever before (Guille et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2022). That online social networks have a profound impact on the spread of information suggests further investigation of the relationship between network structure and information diffusion (Light & Moody, 2020). This honors thesis investigates degree assortativity – a measure of large-scale network structure that has often only been a footnote in relevant literature on infor- mation diffusion in online social networks – and its effect on the speed of …

The Flow Of Power: Addressing Asymmetric Flood Risk In The Upper Valley, Eric Vr Hryniewicz

Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses

Floods are the most damaging natural disasters in America. Land use change in upland watersheds can increase the probability and severity of floods (Bronstert, Niehoff, & Burger, 2002). When watersheds are divided by political and private property boundaries it leads to a misalignment of incentives in which downstream users lack recourse for upstream land use decisions contributing to flood risk. In this thesis, researchers interrogate the attributes of town officials and towns that determine what motivates town governments to act on flooding and what motivates and enables town officials to collaborate on planning and how do they collaborate in practice. …

Concrete July: Forging A Critical Peace In Korea From Fragments Of The Past, Sheen Kim

Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

"Got A Long List Of Ex-Lovers, They'll Tell You I'M Insane": Gender, Agency, And Image In Taylor Swift's Lyrics Over Time, Emily Patel

Sociology Undergraduate Senior Theses

As a globally renowned superstar, Taylor Swift’s lyrics not only reflect notions of gender on a culture level, but also influence them, as language both reflects and constructs society. The purpose of my project is to identify how Taylor Swift’s lyrics surrounding conceptions of gender, agency, and image have changed over the course of her career in order to better understand the messages she disseminates to the world. My central research questions are: How do Taylor Swift’s lyrics display different types of femininity, such as normative or deviant femininity, over time? How do Swift’s varying conceptualizations of her gender identity …

Pathways To Pricelessness: How The Value Of 'Priceless' Art Is Socially Constructed In Both Valueless And Limitless Forms, Cristina M. Javens

Sociology Undergraduate Senior Theses

The word “priceless” gets thrown around a lot in colloquial language, but upon further reflection, the idea that something can be so valuable that it transcends the realm of commerce challenges the rational economic perspective of “market money,” whereby money “homogeniz[es] all qualitative distinctions into an abstract quantity” that may be exchanged “free from cultural or social constraints” as Zelizer (1989: 345) explains. In the subfield of economic sociology, scholars have argued against this pragmatic conception of money, proving that social ties, culture, institutions, social status, and systems of meaning all play a significant and demonstrable role in monetary exchange, …

Utilizing Mixed Graphical Network Models To Explore Parent Psychological Symptoms And Their Centrality To Parent Mental Health In Households With High Child Screen Usage, Piper F. Stacey, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Damien Lekkas

Computer Science Senior Theses

Especially among adolescents, screens are being used more than ever. In conjunction with this trend, mental illness is increasingly prevalent among both adults and children, and parental psychological problems are shown to be associated with children's TV watching, video watching, and gaming (Pulkki-Råback et al., 2022). This study aims to approach parent mental illness symptom by symptom to explore which specific symptoms are most central to parent psychological problems in households where children show high screen time behaviors. We draw from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study®), a nationwide sample of 11,875 children aged 10-13 collected by …

What You Don’T Know Matters: An Ignorance-Focused Investigation Of Theory Of Mind, Steven M. Shin, Jonathan S. Phillips

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

This project examines the ways in which knowledge, or ignorance, impact healthy adults’ theory of mind (i.e. their considerations of others’ mental states). In a pilot study, and four experiments, an effect is found which supports the hypothesis that knowledge states influence the execution of theory of mind. The present findings suggest that attention is directed differently when participants reason from positions of knowledge, or positions of ignorance, in regard to a task-relevant fact. This project provides a starting point for further research, investigating the rich contextual contributions to the fluent functioning of the ‘theory of mind system.’

Investigating English-Language Dialect-Adjusted Models, Samiha Datta

Computer Science Senior Theses

This thesis describes several approaches to better understand how large language models interpret different dialects of the English language. Our goal is to consider multiple contexts of textual data and to analyze how English-language dialects are realized in them, as well as how a variety of machine learning techniques handle these differences. We focus on two genres of text data: news and social media. In the news context, we establish a dataset covering news articles from five countries and four US states and consider language modeling analysis, topic and sentiment distributions, and manual analysis before performing nine experiments and evaluating …

Bridging Philosophy And Neuroscience: How Behavioral Experiments Inform A Recent Theory Of Animal Consciousness, Qasim Abrar Qureshi

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Consciousness is a loaded term and can mean many different things to different people. The goal of this paper is to investigate animal consciousness with an emphasis on rats. We investigated different ways of approaching the problem of animal consciousness including neuroscientific and philosophical methods. Next, we examined, a recent theory of animal consciousness in detail and examined neuroscientific evidence to support animals possessing the features described in the theory. The theory posited that consciousness includes five different components: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, self-consciousness, unity, and temporality. After, we discussed the phenomenon of “insight” and how it is similar and …

Cognitive Feedback Theories And Artificial Intelligence: A Case For A Grammarly Of Ui/Ux Design, Jordan Buchanan Paff

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This thesis is concerned with utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques and cognitive theories of feedback to enhance learning outcomes in the field of user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design. The capabilities of AI/ML have expanded immensely over the past several years, and it is now being effectively used in software programs like Grammarly, a tool that provides intelligent feedback on writing skills including grammar, tone, and clarity. Grammarly has been uniquely successful as a feedback tool because it relies on lessons from cognitive science regarding student feedback and learning outcomes. Currently, there is no comparable software …

Re-Membering The Living Earth: A Year In Rural Sri Lanka, Samuel C. King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The following thesis tells the story of my year in rural Sri Lanka. After college, I traveled from suburban New York to the highlands of the island country with the hopes of writing an ethnography on agrarian Buddhism. I soon realized, however, that I was not just embarking on an academic project, but an inner journey to explore ways of being that had been lost in the modern culture I had known. My narrative recounts how immersion in a rice cultivating village deepened my sense for what it means to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world—a world of plants, …

Social Reproduction And Covid-19, Caroline I. Donovan

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

As Covid-19 rips across the world we are collectively asked to examine the structures of society to see what is working and what we can change. What can we learn from the roughly 6.9 million deaths (and counting) worldwide? How can we prevent something like this from happening again? This paper follows the course of Covid-19 from its birth in Wuhan, China, to the present day of mid-April 2023. By looking at the ways in which we have reacted to the pandemic, we are able to look forward and imagine new ways of tackling future pandemics and other pressing problems …

Towards Scalable Mental Health: Leveraging Digital Tools In Combination With Computational Modeling To Aid In Treatment And Assessment Of Major Depressive Disorder, Matthew D. Nemesure

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating disorder that impacts the lives of nearly 280 million individuals worldwide, representing 5% of the overall adult population. Unfortunately, these statistics have been both trending upward and are also likely an underestimate. This can be primarily attributed to lack of screening paired with a lack of providers. Worldwide, there are roughly 450 individuals living with MDD per mental health care provider. Adding to this burden, approximately half of affected individuals that do receive care of any kind will fail to remain in remission. The goal of this thesis work is to leverage statistical …

What Makes Conversation Good? How Responsivity, Topics, And Insider Language Predict Feelings Of Connection, Emma M. Templeton

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

We spend our lives having conversations, and some inevitably go better than others. What happens in conversation that makes people feel connected? To explore this question, I recorded pairs of strangers and friends having unstructured conversations. In Chapter 1, I show that people who feel connected tend to respond quickly, creating short gaps between turns. However, long gaps are not necessarily bad. Although long gaps signal moments of disconnection and awkwardness for strangers, they mark moments of heightened connection for friends by providing space for enjoyment and mutual reflection. In Chapter 2, I examine how people start their conversations. Specifically, …

Mapping The Malleable Self: How Self-Views Are Represented And Learned Within The Social Brain, Sasha Carmela Brietzke

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Humans possess a unique and wide-ranging ability to self-reflect that takes center stage in our everyday cognition. While many people believe their own self to be immutable, different contexts may warp how we perceive the self. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate two lenses through which we may view the self: (1) across time in the past and future, and (2) through the eyes of others via evaluative feedback. In Studies 1-3, I demonstrate that people’s ratings of their own personality become increasingly less differentiated as they consider more distant past and future selves. This effect was preferential …