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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Welfare Dependency And Work Ethic: A Quantitative And Qualitative Assessment, Yvonne M. Christopher Jan 2017

Welfare Dependency And Work Ethic: A Quantitative And Qualitative Assessment, Yvonne M. Christopher

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This study examined relationships between work ethic and welfare dependency. The 65-item Multidimensional Work Ethic Profile (MWEP) (Miller, Woehr, & Hudspeth, 2002) and the 28-item MWEP (Meriac, Woehr, Gorman, & Thomas, 2013) with attached socioeconomic surveys were administered to n=338 and n=247 adult subjects, respectively. A negative correlation between the two variables was anticipated, so that as levels of agreement with work ethic increase, reported use of welfare benefits decrease. After running correlation matrices to examine Pearson’s r, hierarchical regressions were conducted, culminating in a model which partially predicts the connection between the variables. Bivariate analyses for the 65-item MWEP …


Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas Jan 2017

Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas

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This study uses Margaret Hermann’s Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) to compare Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping and see if they have the same style. Through a content analysis of a leader’s speeches, researchers can gain insight into a leader’s motivation for obtaining office and power. In the course of this research, 167 speeches by Mao, and 79 Speeches by Xi were inputted into the content analysis program Profiler+ (Hermann, 2003). The analysis showed that Mao and Xi have some similarities in their LTA results, but the differences in their scores indicate different approaches to leadership. An analysis of the context …


Governed By Guerrillas: When Armed Insurgents Become Political Leaders, Megan Patsch Jan 2017

Governed By Guerrillas: When Armed Insurgents Become Political Leaders, Megan Patsch

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When an internal conflict ends, many states are faced with a choice of whether or not the insurgents they were fighting against should become political figures they govern beside. Increasingly, peace settlements involve the proposed evolution of guerrilla groups into political parties, yet little is known about rebel groups' long-term effectiveness in governing (Vines and Oruitemeka, 2008). However, the recurrent interest in converting guerrillas to politicians calls for a clear understanding of the chances of success. What makes a guerilla group more or less successful in governance? I hypothesized that a state with formerly armed insurgents would produce fewer pieces …


Predicting Goal Progress And Burnout Using Goal Hierarchies, Truman J. Gore Jan 2017

Predicting Goal Progress And Burnout Using Goal Hierarchies, Truman J. Gore

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The current study examined the relationships between aspects of goal hierarchies (i.e., goal importance, goal progress, goal relatedness, goal number, goal achievement) and specifically their effects on the important outcomes of goal progress and burnout. Although goal pursuit is an important area of study in psychology, aspects of goal hierarchies are understudied, especially in relation to perceived progress and outcomes of wellbeing. The current research provided evidence that goal progress is negatively related to burnout, that the relatedness between goals of the same hierarchical level and across levels influences our perceptions of the importance of these goals, and that explicit …


Work And Women's Empowerment: An Examination Of South Asia, Kathryn Elise Chaney Jan 2017

Work And Women's Empowerment: An Examination Of South Asia, Kathryn Elise Chaney

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"What contributes to the differences in women's economic empowerment" To investigate this problem, a large N statistical analysis set up this comparative case study of Bangladesh and India that evaluates the relationship between women's access to employment in the formal labor market and women's access to ownership of accounts in banks and other financial institutions. The large N statistical analysis results illustrate a global pattern that the percentage of women working in the formal labor market is associated with a greater percentage of women having accounts in banks or other financial institutions. Neither Bangladesh nor India fit this pattern, and …


Aggression And Boxing Performance: Testing The Channeling Hypothesis With Multiple Statistical Methodologies, Silas G. Martinez Jan 2017

Aggression And Boxing Performance: Testing The Channeling Hypothesis With Multiple Statistical Methodologies, Silas G. Martinez

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D. G. Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, and Duncan (1998) demonstrated the first use of the channeling hypothesis to show how the explicit personality trait of extraversion channeled one’s implicit achievement and affiliation personality to predict important life outcomes. Since then, various implicit and explicit measures of personality have been combined, but moderation analyses have predominantly been the “mechanism of operation” to demonstrate the channeling hypothesis (Bing, LeBreton, Davison, Migetz, & James, 2007, p. 147). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to use implicit and explicit measures of aggression to predict performance of 325 men and women …


Interface Design For The Supervisory Control Of Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicles, Kyle Joseph Behymer Jan 2017

Interface Design For The Supervisory Control Of Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicles, Kyle Joseph Behymer

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In order to meet the demand for enabling one operator to control multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicles numerous automated support systems are being developed. These systems are too often focused on replacing, rather than supporting, the human decision maker. In contrast, the Intelligent Multi-UxV Planner with Adaptive Collaborative/Control Technologies (IMPACT) system was designed from a collaborative systems approach that allowed human operators to work with autonomous systems to accomplish mission tasks. Multiple cognitive task analyses were conducted with base defense experts as well as unmanned vehicles (UV) operators to inform the development of human-autonomy interfaces (HAI) that were designed to support …


I Saw Something, Do I Say Something? The Role Of The Organization, Supervisor, And Coworkers In Encouraging Workers To Peer Report Others’ Counterproductive Work Behavior, Joseph William Dagosta Jan 2017

I Saw Something, Do I Say Something? The Role Of The Organization, Supervisor, And Coworkers In Encouraging Workers To Peer Report Others’ Counterproductive Work Behavior, Joseph William Dagosta

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Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) harm organizations and their members (Bennett & Robinson, 2000; Niehoff & Paul, 2000). CWBs, however, often go unnoticed by management. Peer reporting, which refers to employees notifying organizational authorities of their peers’ CWBs, can help the organization detect CWBs. Employees, however, are generally hesitant to peer report (Bowling & Lyons, 2015; Treviño & Victor, 1992). The purpose of the current study was to investigate the mechanisms by which the organization, supervisor, and the workgroup might each facilitate employees’ peer reporting of CWBs. Drawing from situational strength theory, I argue that the organizational peer reporting policies, supervisors’ …


Processing Global Properties In Scene Categorization, Hanshu Zhang Jan 2017

Processing Global Properties In Scene Categorization, Hanshu Zhang

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The current research examined the role of global properties in human observers' scene perception. In Experiment 1, comparisons of four global properties ("natural", "manmade", "open", and "closed") were collected online from a wide range of subjective choices. These answers were analyzed in a pairwise comparison model to generate four standardized reference ranking scales describing the extent to which characteristics can describe scene global properties. In Experiment 2, scene images selected from the reference scales were used to test human's performance in processing global properties conjunctively. Cognitive modeling indicated that human observers were more efficient in categorizing scene images as "natural …


Exploring The Time-Based Resource-Sharing Model Of Working Memory Through Computational Modeling, Joseph Glavan Jan 2017

Exploring The Time-Based Resource-Sharing Model Of Working Memory Through Computational Modeling, Joseph Glavan

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Working memory is the fundamental component of cognition that allows us to temporarily maintain information needed for concurrent processing. An existing theory from the literature, the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model, posits that working memory is a serial, rapidly switching, attentional refreshing mechanism. While others have sought previously to formalize the TBRS model into a computational process model, I go further, using ACT-R to model the influence of working memory on an entire task from end to end. I leverage ACT-R's existing base-level learning mechanism, typically used to model recency and frequency effects in long-term memory, to enact the attentional refreshing …


Multi-Gain Control: Balancing Demands For Speed And Precision, Lucas Warner Lemasters Jan 2017

Multi-Gain Control: Balancing Demands For Speed And Precision, Lucas Warner Lemasters

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Woodworth's Two-Component Theory (1899) partitioned speeded limb movements into two distinct phases: (1) a central ballistic open-loop mechanism and (2) a closed-loop feedback component. The present study investigated the implementation of multi-gain control configurations that utilized separate gain values for each movement phase. A target acquisition task using Fitts' Law (1954) was performed within a virtual environment using three control devices with three gain settings: mono-gain, dual-gain and continuous gain. The gain settings differed by the amount of gain values available to the participant. It was found that dual-gain and continuous gain configurations yielded lower movement times and higher information-processing …


Self-Compassion And Its Relation To Nonsuicidal Self-Injury, Justin M. Wiseman Jan 2017

Self-Compassion And Its Relation To Nonsuicidal Self-Injury, Justin M. Wiseman

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There have been relatively few studies that have empirically explored the relationship between self-compassion and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). Previous studies have found that engagement in self-injurious behaviors is closely related to being self-critical (Glassman, Weierich, Hooley, Deliberto, & Nock, 2007; Hooley, Ho, Slater, & Lockshin, 2010).Therefore, it has been suggested that higher levels of self-compassion may be associated with less engagement in NSSI. The current study explored the relationship between self-reported self-compassion and past self-reported occurrences of NSSI. This study used Neff's (2003a) 12 item Self-Compassion Scale- Short Form (SCS-SF) to measure one's level of self-compassion and a Client Information/Demographics …


Sampling Expertise: Incorporating Goal Establishment And Goal Enactment Into Theories Of Expertise To Improve Measures Of Performance, Frank Eric Robinson Jan 2017

Sampling Expertise: Incorporating Goal Establishment And Goal Enactment Into Theories Of Expertise To Improve Measures Of Performance, Frank Eric Robinson

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Task-specific performance measures informed by incomplete theories of expertise do not capture the full range of domain-relevant behaviors, threatening content validity. Surgery is a particularly good example of a domain that has neglected cognitive accounts of performance in favor of task-specific measures of technical skill and experience-based definitions of expertise. Likewise, cognitive accounts of performance tend to neglect skilled performance, including the interaction between automaticity and cognitive control. The present study merges cognition and psychometrics in the context of a surgical task. I analyzed archival surgical performance data from a study of surgical training, including video of human cadaver procedures, …


When Words Are Worse Than Bullets: A Study Of Corruption As An Unintended Consequence Of Threats Of Sanctions, Aleksei Balanov Jan 2017

When Words Are Worse Than Bullets: A Study Of Corruption As An Unintended Consequence Of Threats Of Sanctions, Aleksei Balanov

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This research contributes to the debates on the efficacy of economic sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy. It focuses on corruption, one of the potential unintended consequences of sanctions. Using multiple regression on a custom cross-sectional time series dataset of more than a thousand observations, this research finds the correlation between threats of sanctions and level of corruption statistically significant. The model suggests each new round of threats translates into a 1.25% increase in corruption for relatively clean states and a 5% increase for already corrupt states. The resulting policy implications are examined in this thesis.


The Role Of Peripheral Vision In Configural Spatial Knowledge Acquisition, Lisa J. Douglas Jan 2017

The Role Of Peripheral Vision In Configural Spatial Knowledge Acquisition, Lisa J. Douglas

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This study investigated the importance of the peripheral visual field for acquiring configural spatial knowledge, especially knowledge about structural components like doorways, corners, and walls, but also information about objects. Although peripheral vision helps us orient our bodies in space, navigate successfully through an environment, and physically interact with objects in near physical space (Kesner & Creem-Regehr, 2012; Burgess, Jeffrey, & O’Keefe, 1999), previous research has not investigated the role of the peripheral visual field for the acquisition of spatial knowledge during navigation. All participants in this experiment viewed a virtual navigation tour through a four-room environment with objects located …


Assessing The Conditions For Post-Cold War Conflict Interventions, Daniel Wesley Clark Jan 2017

Assessing The Conditions For Post-Cold War Conflict Interventions, Daniel Wesley Clark

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This research seeks to understand the reasons regarding why states intervene in conflicts? This study utilizes all European states who are a member of NATO and seeks to understand their reason for intervening in 14 post-cold war conflicts. Specifically, this study seeks to address whether the involvement of the United States, their NATO membership, and the humanitarian extent of the crisis play a role in their intervention decision. To answer these questions, this study uses an ordered probit statistical study to tests the hypothesis. The results show that the United States involvement in a conflict, and the European states membership …


Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas Jan 2017

Mao Zedong And Xi Jinping: A Trait Analysis, Dan Douglas

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This study uses Margaret Hermann's Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) to compare Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping and see if they have the same style. Through a content analysis of a leader's speeches, researchers can gain insight into a leader's motivation for obtaining office and power. In the course of this research, 167 speeches by Mao, and 79 Speeches by Xi were inputted into the content analysis program Profiler+ (Hermann, 2003). The analysis showed that Mao and Xi have some similarities in their LTA results, but the differences in their scores indicate different approaches to leadership. An analysis of the context …


Improv In International Diplomacy: Creating A Cooperative Narrative, Preston J. Eberlyn Jan 2017

Improv In International Diplomacy: Creating A Cooperative Narrative, Preston J. Eberlyn

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The utilization of improvisation theatre in businesses and organizations to revolve conflict began to be used at the turn of the century. This new and growing tool has helped with company mergers and internal disputes. Thus, why not use these same improv theatre elements in international conflicts? The analysis of three distinct cases of track two diplomacy and improv theatre has shown the possibility of a new tool for diplomacy mediators to utilize.


The Effect Of Action Video Game Play On The Distribution And Resolution Of Visuospatial Attention, Andrew Thomas Fent Jan 2017

The Effect Of Action Video Game Play On The Distribution And Resolution Of Visuospatial Attention, Andrew Thomas Fent

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Previous research has found that Video Game Players, or VGPs, perform better on a variety of attention tasks (i.e. attentional blink, useful field of view, flanker compatibility, etc.) as compared to Non-Video Game Players, or NVGPs. We examined the extent of this previously observed VGP attentional advantage on a target identification task. Most VGP studies have examined the VGP advantage on tasks that primarily require detection but not identification. Identification is an important process beyond detection for encoding and later retrieving information. VGPs and NVGPs were tested on briefly flashed strings of digits subtending less than 10 degrees of visual …


Post Arab Spring Examination Of American Foreign Aid: Libya And Egypt, Andrew Robert Dickerson Jan 2017

Post Arab Spring Examination Of American Foreign Aid: Libya And Egypt, Andrew Robert Dickerson

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Every year, the United States uses foreign aid as a foreign policy tool. The Arab Spring gave the United States an opportunity to achieve a historically difficult task in the Middle East: promoting and establishing democracy across the Middle East. This study examines United States foreign aid, primarily military and economic aid, and the success it has on the ruling governing bodies in Libya and Egypt. Does American foreign aid lead to stability of the recipient government? The majority of published works regarding foreign aid effectiveness utilize a large-n case study over several decades without thoroughly examining each case. The …


Role Of Self-Efficacy And Anxiety In Resilience Effects On Performance And Well-Being, Kathleen Renee Wylds Jan 2017

Role Of Self-Efficacy And Anxiety In Resilience Effects On Performance And Well-Being, Kathleen Renee Wylds

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The current study examined the role of motivational and affective factors in resilience effects on the outcomes performance and well-being. Prior research has examined the direct relationships between resilience and outcomes but not the variables through which resilience has beneficial effects on outcomes. The current study examined a path model that addresses the underlying mechanisms (e.g., motivational and affective variables) that explain the beneficial effects of resilience on performance and well-being. Results provided support for a revised path model and evidence of a motivational pathway, an affective pathway, and a more complex pathway that explain how resilience has beneficial effects …