Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sexually Dimorphic Effects Of Prenatal Stress On Cognition, Hormonal Responses, And Central Neurotransmitters, Rachel E. Bowman, Neil J. Maclusky, Yessenia Sarmiento, Maya Frankfurt, Marisa Gordon, Victoria N. Luine

Psychology Faculty Publications

Exposure to stress during gestation results in physiological and behavioral alterations that persist into adulthood. This study examined the effects of prenatal stress on the postnatal expression of sexually differentiated cognitive, hormonal, and neurochemical profiles in male and female rats. Pregnant dams were subjected to restraint stress three times daily for 45 min during d 14-21 of pregnancy. The offspring of control and prenatally stressed dams were tested for anxiety-related and cognitive behaviors, stress and gonadal steroid hormone levels, as well as monoamines and metabolite levels in selected brain regions. Postnatal testosterone levels (measured at 1 and 5 d) did …

Testing The Robustness Of A Risk Information Processing Model, Robert J. Griffin, Maria Powell, Sharon Dunwoody, Kurt Neuwirth, Vladimir Novotny

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Two survey data sets test a model of Risk Information Seeking and Processing, informed by Eagly and Chaiken’s (1993) Heuristic-Systematic model, that describes characteristics of individuals that predispose them to seek and process information about health and environmental risks in different ways. Results indicate that information insufficiency relates positively with active seeking and systematic processing of risk information and negatively with avoidance and heuristic processing of it. Individuals are more likely to process systematically if they believe that media channels contain essential validity cues.

Levittown, Pennsylvania: A Sociological History, Chad M. Kimmel

Dissertations

I take the suburban community of Levittown, Pennsylvania, as my field of study. I use primary documents to tell the history of this community, a story filtered through a sociological perspective, one that is firmly grounded in the sociology of C. Wright Mills. "All sociology worth the name," argued Mills, "is historical sociology." An important voice in this story is that of the original Levittown resident--those individuals still living in their homes after 50 years.

As a sociologist, my task is to uncover and make real the interrelationships between biography (the individual resident) and history (the community of Levittown and …

Negative Stereotypes And Childhood Paternal Relationships As Predictors Of Paternal Identity In African American Fathers, Danielle K. Wright

Dissertations

African American men have been widely ignored in the social science literature. When African American men have been studied, it has primarily been from a deficit model. The purpose of this study was to give voice to the African American father, whether he is working-poor, middle-class, or upper-class, biological or non-biological, residential or non-residential. The intent of the study was to explore how African American men view themselves as fathers and their own experiences of being a parent.

One hundred and one men who identified as African American, were at least 18 years old, and who had at least one …

The Effects Of Individual And Group Incentives On High Performance, Heather M. Mcgee

Dissertations

The present study examined the performance levels of high performers under equally-divided group monetary incentives, individual monetary incentives, and hourly pay to determine: (a) whether the performance levels of high performers would be higher under individual and group incentive pay systems than under an hourly pay system, (b) whether the performance of high performers would be lower under group incentives than under individual incentives, and (c) whether changes in performance would be due to comparative feedback indicating that the participant is a high performer. Participants were eleven college students who performed a computerized work task that simulated the job of …

Role Of Naming In Stimulus Categorization By Preschool Children, Caio Flavio Miguel

Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to assess whether children would categorize pictures when taught the relevant listener and speaker behaviors separately. A category-sort test was used to assess emergent conditional relations. Category-sort trials consisted of looking at (Test 1) or tacting/labeling (Test 2) a samplestimulus and selecting the appropriate comparison stimuli. In Experiment 1, 4 children (3- 5 years) were taught to tact pictures of six U.S. state maps as either north or south. An assessment was conducted to determine whether they would (1) correctly categorize or sort when presented with a visual sample and (2) select the …

The United States Supreme Court And American Individualism, Gary C. Roberts

Dissertations

The United States Supreme Court occupies an unusual, oftentimes paradoxical position within American democracy. On one hand, it is an institution that seemingly lacks democratic legitimacy, and on the other, it is an institution that dutifully gives meaning to the nation's democratic values. The uniqueness and possibly the grandeur of the American Supreme Court is that it has historically been able to successfully combine these two apparently contradictory aspects in such a manner as to expand upon the nation's traditional sense of individualism--the whole notion of an individual's inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

Using legal case analysis, the …

A Behavioral Account Of Remembering: Precurrent Behavior And Mediation Of Delayed Matching To Sample, David W. Sidener

Dissertations

Although “memory” research and theory often come under the domain of cognitive psychology, these areas may also be seen as being open to radical behavioral interpretations. Delayed matching to sample (DMTS) preparations have often been used to study performance that involves the occurrence of behavior some time after the presentation of a relevant stimulus, or what is typically called short-term memory (STM). The current study involved three experiments that provided evidence for the role of overt behavior in the mediation of DMTS performance in five-year-old children. Experiments 1 and 2 support the assertion that sample-specific, differential mediating behavior (in the …

Examining The Meaning And Experience Of Self-Determination And Its Impact On Quality Of Life For Individuals With Cognitive Disabilities, Carol Marie Sundberg

Dissertations

There is a national agenda for advancing self-determination for persons with disabilities. Broadly defined, self-determination means having control over ones own life. The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of self-determination and its effect on the quality of life of persons with cognitive disabilities. A qualitative, phenomenological approach was selected. Ten individuals from a community mental health system in southwest Michigan participated in the study. Participants had a developmental disability and were dependent on others for their care. The research combined qualitative interviews with behavioral observations and proxy interviewing, and included the audiotaping of those interviews. …

Exploring The Relationship Between Race-Related Stress, Identity And Well-Being Among African Americans, Darrick Tovar-Murray

Dissertations

For almost four hundred years, African Americans have been victims of race-related stress. Race-related stress is defined as the encounters between individuals and their environment that surface from racism and strain an individual's resources or threaten his or her well-being. Despite findings on the negative impact of racism on African Americans' well-being, very little research has focused on the relationships between race-related stress, identity and well-being among African Americans.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between race-related stress, identity, and well-being among African Americans. A total of 196 African American community members and college students participated …

From Violence-Prone To Violence-Prepared Organizations Assessing The Role Of Human Resources Management In Preventing Workplace Violence In American City Governments, Saleh Abdel Rahman Ahmed

Dissertations

Violence is a significant occupational hazard in the American workplace. Nearly a thousand employees are murdered on the job each year and workplacehomicide has become the leading cause of death for women and the second for men. From 1993 to 1999, there were an average of 1.7 million nonfatal violent victimizations each year, accounting for 18% of all violent crime. Although government employees accounted for 18% of the U.S. workforce, they made up 37% of workplace violence victims.

A review of literature found no unified definition of workplace violence. Recent scientific research regarding this problem is rare, despite its increasing …

Essays On The Econometrics Of Financial Volatility, Yasemin Bardakci

Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three essays on the econometric analysis of financial volatility.

My first essay is titled "The Runs Test for Volatility Forecastibility: Extensions and Comparisons with Tests for GARCH." Recently, Diebold and Christoffersen (2000) introduced a test for forecastable volatility. In this paper, I compare the size and the power of the runs test and the optimal LM test for GARCH by Monte Carlo simulation. For high frequency returns the LM test has superior power to the runs test. For low frequency returns however, the tests have very similar power. I also propose a switching variance model. For …

Examining The Behavioral And Physiological Components Of Communication Skills Training With Married Couples: Are Differential Effects Mediated By The Topic Discussed And Initial Level Of Marital Distress?, Tara L. Cornelius

Dissertations

The purpose of the present study was to experimentally examine the effects of the Speaker-Listener technique when the couple was instructed to either (a) discuss an issue within, or (b) outside the marriage, on couples’ initial and long-term levels of marital distress and satisfaction. This study was designed to examine Gottman, et al. (1998) hypothesis that the Speaker-Listener skills training technique may be effective and lead to improved levels of marital satisfaction when the couple is complaining about a third party, but complaining about each other may become divisive and weaken the marital relationship, and that such an effect would …

The Effects Of Task Structure And Group Target Monetary Incentives On Social Loafing, Nelson R. Eikenhout

Dissertations

Social loafing refers to the decrease in individual performance output that occurs when individuals perform a task in groups in which the output is pooled. Pooled output refers to the performance of all group members added together to get a total group output. Therefore, because all group members contribute to a single group outcome, individual performance output is obscured. This study examined the following questions. First, what are the effects of the method of pooling the output (additive vs. disjunctive) on individuals who work on a concurrent task in small groups? Second, what are the effects of group target based …

Chinese Adolescents’ Decision-Making, Parent-Adolescent Communication And Relationships, Yan Ruth Xia, Xiaolin Xie, Zhi Zhou, John Defrain, William H. Meredith, Raedene Combs

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

The present study described Mainland Chinese adolescents’ decision-making, and examined the relationship among their decision-making involvement, parent-adolescent communication and relationship variables by using Structural Equation Modeling. Results demonstrated that Chinese parents appeared to be less authoritarian than the prevailing literature had described. Chinese adolescents experienced a passage of autonomy development similar to that of their American counterparts. Good parent-adolescent communication was positively associated with cohesion and negatively associated with conflict. It also mediated the relationship between adolescent age and parent-adolescent conflict. The relationships between parent-adolescent communication and cohesion as well as the relationship between adolescents’ age and decision involvement were …

Using Administrative Data For Workforce Development Program Evaluation, Kevin Hollenbeck

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper addresses the question of whether administrative data that are collected for performance monitoring purposes can be used for program evaluation. It argues that under certain circumstances, such data can be used. In particular, data from the state of Washington are used to examine the effectiveness of services provided to adults under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). The general theme of an emerging literature on techniques for nonexperimental evaluations of social programs is that many different techniques have appropriate asymptotic properties. A contribution of this paper is to examine the sensitivity of net impact estimators to various estimation techniques. …

Avid Program Graduates: Negotiating The First Year Of College, Leslie J. Hays Edd

Dissertations

Although the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program has been operating in San Diego County for more than twenty years, there was a lack of research investigating how AVID program graduates experienced the transition to college. A well-established positive correlation between acceptances to four-year universities by AVID program graduates exists, but research on AVID lacked individual student narrative needed to give more depth to the data. The purpose of this case study was to investigate the transition experiences of AVID program graduates who were beginning their second year of college at competitive four-year public universities. All eight participants, in the …

Finding Meaning By Participating In Decisions Affecting Us, Our Work And Our Lives: Lessons Learned At Mondragón, David Herrera Edd

Dissertations

There has been a growing interest in exploring participatory organizational models for the last fifty years, accentuated by the recent corporate scandals that revealed the inadequacies of non-participatory organizational systems. Research studies have focused on organizational structures, policies and practices that make participation possible but it is persons who make participation happen. The purpose of this study was therefore to explore the significance of participation by examining the question: What does the experience of partaking in decision making mean to persons who engage in it. This research is a phenomenological-heuristic study. Phenomenology explores the lived experience of participating in decision …

Language Interactions Between Reading Recovery Teachers And Their English-Language Learners, Leslie Yerington Edd

Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated characteristics of student-teacher interactions during the new book introduction portion of Reading Recovery lessons. The new book introduction provides the student with background knowledge and story plot sufficient to render a successful first attempt reading the book that takes place directly after the introduction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of student-teacher interactions during the new book introduction portion of Reading Recovery lessons in order to describe the nature of these interactions and discover the relationships, if any exist, between the interactions and student performance. The study also searched for common themes …

The Politics Of Wto Enforcement Mechanism, Pao Li Chang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper attempts to develop a formal economic framework to analyze the influences of domestic political considerations by democratic governments in shaping the WTO enforcement outcomes following a violation ruling against the defendant. Since a different mix of import and export sectors in the defendant and complainant country will benefit from the various potential enforcement outcomes, they become competing forces which steer the strategic interactions between the disputing governments. The results of the paper illustrate the complainant's strategy in selecting the retaliation list, and the likelihood of the defendant's compliance or compensation in response to the proposed or foreseeable retaliation, …

The Optimal Design Of Fallible Organizations: Invariance Of Optimal Decision Criterion And Uniqueness Of Hierarchy And Polyarchy Structures, Winston T. H. Koh

Research Collection School Of Economics

We present a general framework to study the project selection problem in an organization of fallible decision-makers. We show that when the organizational size and the majority rule for project acceptance are optimized simultaneously, the optimal quality of decision-making, as determined by the decision criterion, is invariant, and depends only on the expertise of decision-makers. This result clarifies that the circumstances under which the decision-making quality varies with the organizational structure are situations where the organizational size or majority rule is restricted from reaching the optimal level. Moreover, in contrast to earlier findings in the literature that the hierarchy and …

The Effects Of Cultural Congruity, University Alienation, And Self-Concept Upon Multiracial Students' Adjustment To College, Derrick Adam Paladino

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine key factors that relate to the self-perception of cultural congruity, university alienation (powerlessness, meaninglessness, and social estrangement), and self-concept (perceived intellectual ability, perceived scholastic competence, perceived social acceptance, appearance, and global self-worth) in multiracial college students. One goal of this study is to discover if there is a relationship between cultural congruity, alienation, and self-concept among multiracial college students. In addition, this study examined what factors predict cultural congruity, university alienation, and self-concept in multiracial college students. Finally, this study explored the relationship of cultural congruity, university alienation, self-concept, and specific demographic …

Characteristics Of Preschoolers With Lower Perceived Competence, Robert J. Coplan, Leanne C. Findlay, Larry J. Nelson

Faculty Publications

The goal of the present study was to identify preschool children with “age-inappropriate” less positive self-perceptions, and to explore their parental and peer relationships as compared to their classmates with “age normal” self-perceptions. Participants were n = 127 preschool children (M age = 54.98 mos., SD = 8.21). Data were collected from multiple sources including parental ratings, child self-reports, and teacher ratings. Results indicated that as compared to their peers, children with less positive self-perceptions demonstrated more internalizing problems (i.e., loneliness, social-withdrawal), were more excluded by peers, and had mothers with less positive parenting styles. Results are discussed in …

New Mexico Labor Market Review 07-31-2004, New Mexico Department Of Labor

Historic Publications

The New Mexico Labor Market Review is a monthly publication presenting statistical data and analysis on labor market conditions throughout New Mexico. Issues examine statewide and regional trends in employment, unemployment, labor force estimates, industry activity, wages, occupational demand, and related economic conditions, often accompanied by feature articles on topics affecting the state’s economy. This issue covers June 2004.

“Politics As Markets” Reconsidered: Economic Theory, Competitive Democracy And Primary Ballot Access , David N. Schleicher

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Vision For Pakistan’S Financial Service Industry, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

I am extremely happy to be present here this evening on the occasion of the signing of the joint venture partnership agreement between BMA Capital and Abraaj Capital. This partnership will raise the capital of the company to a level where it can get into new areas of business. I would like to congratulate the sponsors, management and staff of both these companies on their successful transaction and hope they will use this expanded platform to launch new products and services which will be focus of my remarks this evening.

The Effect Of Teachers' Error Feedback On International Students' Self-Correction Ability, Youngju Hong

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of teachers' error feedback on ESL students' self-correction ability. One hundred and nineteen international students enrolled in ESL composition classes at Brigham Young University's English Language Center participated in this research. The participants were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: (1) a coded feedback group, (2) a non-coded feedback group, and (3) a no-feedback control group. All participants were asked to write an in-class essay and to self-correct their grammatical errors during 20-minute time period. A grammar test and attitudinal survey were administered at the same time.

Will Rise Of New Diets Raze Old Pyramid?, Zachary Hunnicutt, Darrell R. Mark

Cornhusker Economics

The United States Department ofAgriculture (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid was promoted in its 1992 launch as a more detailed, yet easier to understand, system of guidelines and recommendations for daily food consumption. Although widely recognized by much of the American public, it has also been the source of considerable confusion. Recommended intakes are given by "servings," a unit that many interpret as the amount consumed in one sitting. This misunderstanding is cleared up only through thorough investigationthat entails locating information not available on the simple pyramid. Further, many have raised concerns that the placementof"fats, oils and sweets" at the top …

Central Florida Future, Vol. 36 No. 72, July 28, 2004

Central Florida Future

SmartCard now good for pizza so much more; Grads to hear Miss America; Marketplace jumps on diet trend; Plan for new visual and performing arts school sketchy at best.

Agribusiness Sheep Updates - 2004 - Part 1, Mark Dolling, Len Stephens, David Thomanson, Norm Adams, Shimim Liu, Peter Buchman, Mike Paton, Dianne Evans, John Edwards, Scott Champion, Alan Langford, A. C. Schlink, J. C. Greeff, M. E. Ladyman, Kimbal M. S. Curtis, John Stanton, Stuart Adams, Neal Fogarty, Matthew Kelly, James Skerritt, Ian Mcfarland

Sheep Updates

Proceedings of the Agribusiness Sheep Updates - 2004 Forward Dr Mark Dolling Manager, Sheep Industries and Pasture, Department of Agriculture Western Australia Keynotes Australian Wool Innovation Limited DR LEN STEPHENS AUSTRALIAN WOOL INNOVATION LIMITED (AWI) Commercialisation of Sheepmeat Eating Quality Outcomes, David Thomason, General Manger Marketing Meat & livestock Australia Limited PLENARY The Fitness of the Future Merino, Norm Adams and Shimin Liu, CSIRO Livestock Industries Ovine Johne’s Disease – Managing the Disease, Managing the Issues, PETER BUCKMAN, CHIEF VETERINARY OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Animal Welfare – Changes in Latitudes Changes in Attitudes, Michael Paton and Dianne Evans, …