Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Arkansas Animal Science Department Report 2012, David L. Kreider

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Series

No abstract provided.

Probabilistic Cue Combination: Less Is More, Daniel Yurovsky, Ty W. Boyer, Linda B. Smith, Chen Yu

Psychology: Faculty Publications

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non-normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the dilution effect, predictions made from the combination of two cues of different strengths are less accurate than those made from the stronger cue alone. Here we show that dilution is an adult problem; 11-month-old infants combine strong and weak predictors normatively. These results extend and add support for the less is more hypothesis: limited …

Rice, Tobacco, And Agricultural Globalization: Exploring The Narrative Of The Chinese Agricultural Colony In Sub-Saharan Africa, Hunter Bradley

Geography Honors Projects

According to media outlets, China's involvement in the Sub-Saharan African agricultural sector is part of a colonial land grab to meet the needs of a modernizing China. This paper challenges this narrative by examining the two constituent narrative elements: 1) China actively purchases land or land rights to meet the food needs at home and 2) that this process has led to decreased food security for African states. Using Zimbabwe and Mozambique as cases, this paper demonstrates China's participation is not part of a long-term food security strategy and is better understood in light of the "Go Out Policy." However, …

Heuristics: Bias Vs. Smart Instrument. An Exploration Of The Hot Hand, Jehangir Cooper

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Classical perspectives on judgment and rationality view heuristics as erroneous, leading to suboptimal judgments. Conversely, ecological perspectives view heuristics as smart mechanisms that result in good judgments in the face of uncertainty. Our research focused on the hot hand heuristic and examined it using non-linear analysis methods. This research attempted to answer two questions. The first question concerned the applicability of frequency analysis methods for detecting constraints (such as the hot hand) or structure in a time series of binary data, which we attempted to investigate through Monte Carlo simulations. We found that this method was sensitive enough to detect …

Flash Lag Effect Model Discrimination, Stephen R. Gabbard

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The purpose of this study was to test the various models describing the Flash Lag Effect (FLE). Beginning with the initial work of Nijhawan (1994), several models have emerged endeavoring to explain the FLE (e.g., Eagleman & Sejnowski, 2000; Whitney, 2000; Baldo & Caticha, 2005). Two series of studies comprising 11 separate experiments were undertaken to differentiate these models, with a particular focus on the neural network model of Baldo and Caticha (2005). The experiments included the three primary FLE experimental paradigms: continuous motion (CM), flash-initiated (FIC) and flash-terminated (FTC). Ninety-three participants made observations in these three paradigms using a …

Batterer's Intervention Program: The Partner's Perspective, Megan Denae Nichols

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The following study attempted to determine the effectiveness of the Preventing Abuse in the Home (PATH) batterer's intervention program from the perspective of the partners of men enrolled in the program. The partner's perspective was obtained through the collection of qualitative data from interviews conducted with women who were currently or recently involved with men who had been participating in the PATH program for a minimum of 16 weeks. Interview questions were created based upon several variables including review of empirical literature and specific questions that researchers were interested in addressing in regards to PATH. Results highlighted the various types …

Diffusion Of Innovative Panic Disorder Treatment Strategies In A Community Mental Heath Agency, Whitney Noelle Pierce

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This translational research piece involved collaborating with a local community mental health agency to examine knowledge, skills, attitudes, practices, and outcomes for panic disorder treatments. The project included designing and administering an online survey to client care personnel including psychologists, counselors, social workers, nurses, and psychiatrists. Additionally, a database review was utilized to obtain information about treatment modalities, duration, and outcomes. Survey results were analyzed using goodness of fit statistics to show differences between attitudes of participants by discipline regarding the safety and effectiveness of panic disorder treatments. The database analysis of pre and post GAF scores revealed comparable outcomes …

The Effects Of Cerebrovascular Accidents On Prospective Memory, Scott A. Magnuson

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Prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future, also known as meta-remembering. Prospective memory is required to complete certain tasks, such as remembering to take medications, pay bills, and perform various activities of daily living. The Memory for Intentions Screening Test (MIST) is a standardized objective assessment of prospective memory that has been utilized to document impairment in prospective memory in various clinical populations such as Alzheimer's Disease, mild cognitive impairment, mild traumatic brain injury, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), schizophrenia, and Parkinson's Disease (Raskin, 2009). The current research project utilized the MIST to identify the …

Examination Of The African-American Father-Daughter Relationship: Application Of The Marschack Interaction Method, Amber N. Thornton

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Early research on the Black family implied an enormous lack of African-American father presence and involvement among African-American fathers. However, more current research negates those findings by highlighting the contributions African-American fathers make when parenting their children (Coley, 2003; Cooper, 2009; Mandara, Murray & Joyner, 2005). In spite of facing unique psychological and social challenges, such as disproportionate levels of poverty, and race related social barriers, such as the invisibility syndrome (Franklin & Boyd-Franklin, 2000), researchers who have studied the African-American father-daughter dyad have discovered that this relationship has many benefits for African-American girls, including cognitive and academic enhancements, reductions …

Barriers To Group Therapy For Latino College Students In The United States, Michelle C. Stoyell

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While group therapy appears to be gaining popularity at University Counseling Centers, scant research has been done on Latino students' group therapy participation. The present study examined the barriers that Latino college students face in considering whether to join group therapy. Participants (N=81) completed three measures. The first measure was a demographic questionnaire. The second measure was a modified version of the Barriers Scale, originally developed by Harris (2012), a 44-item survey in which participants were assessed in terms of: their willingness to consider group therapy, group therapy modality preferences, expectations of group therapy, expectations of group members, expectations of …

Mindfulness-Based Interventions And Processes Of Change: A Conceptual Model For Clinicians, Shalagh A. Frantz

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Mindfulness-based interventions are receiving a great deal of attention from clinicians and researchers and research in this field is increasing dramatically in the past decade. Much of this research is consistent with positive psychotherapeutic outcomes for a wide range of presenting clinical issues. As with any seemingly successful psychotherapeutic treatment, it can be helpful to understand the processes of change underlying mindfulness-based interventions that are responsible for observed positive outcomes. In doing so, the effective components of an intervention can be refined and perfected, while components deemed unneeded can be appropriately discarded. This dissertation critically reviews the literature's current understanding …

The Role Of Hope And Resilience In Pediatric Obesity Intervention Outcomes, Brigitte Dawn Beale

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Childhood obesity is a major health concern in the United States (McClanahan, Huff, & Omar, 2009). In recent years, the prevalence of pediatric obesity has stabilized. However, a substantial decrease in obesity rates has not yet occurred, nor has the gap of health disparity been closed amongst ethnic groups experiencing obesity. African-American and Hispanic youth continue to experience obesity at substantially higher rates than other ethnic groups (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2012). The purpose of this study was to examine correlations between Positive Psychology constructs and pediatric obesity intervention outcomes. A single-participant research design was utilized to compare baseline outcomes …

The Student Perspective: An Exploration Of The Experiences And Needs Of University Students With Mental Illness, Hannah Lee Gammon

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There is a gap in the current literature concerning the study of university students with mental illness. Particularly, very few qualitative studies have been conducted in which interviews with university students with mental illness have yielded knowledge about the population's experiences and needs. The present study, employing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, was designed to promote a more accurate perception of the lives of university students with mental illness by allowing the voices of members of this group to be heard. Eight matriculating university students who self-identified with mental illness participated in this exploratory PAR initiative. The study involved …

The Psycho-Social Impact Of Colorism Among African American Women: Crossing The Divide, Lauren A. Fultz

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This study was designed to examine how skin tone discrimination affects African American women. The phenomenon of colorism is not exclusive to African American women, but the manifestations on this group are diverse, and the effects are unique. Previous research has shown that the experience of colorism is pervasive within the Black community and that most African American women have been, either culturally or personally, affected by intra-racial discrimination. This body of work used a focus group to investigate the experiences of African American women who were categorized according to their self ascribed skin tone group. It specifically explored skin …

Open Access To Scholarly Articles: Good Policies Ensure Good Practices, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Open access (OA) to scholarly journal articles is now widely accepted as a good thing. However, it will not become the norm without policies promoting openness. This presentation looks at policies that ensure that hundreds of thousands of articles become OA every year.

The Effects Of The Proportion Of Women In A Work Role And Tenure On Performance, Kathryn Gabrielle Van Dixhorn

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Token theory (Kanter, 1977) suggests that being a token individual in an organization can cause that individual to experience discrimination, increased pressure to perform, isolation from the majority group, negative stereotyping, and can interfere with performance. The purpose of this research was to determine if varying percentages of females in a work role do indeed influence the likelihood that these negative outcomes will occur by using performance data from an applied sample. By using both supervisor ratings and objective sales figures from a sales organization, this research filled a gap in the current research, in which token theory is often …

The Power Of Perception: Securitization, Democratic Peace, And Enduring Rivalries, Derrick Charles Seaver

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What best explains the democratic peace: empirical indicators of democracy or the mutual perceptions of democracy within a dyadic relationship? This paper will examine three enduring rivalry dyads: the United States-Great Britain, France-Germany, and India-Pakistan, during the course of their respective enduring rivalries (Bennett, 1997; Diehl and Goertz, 2000). Within each of these dyads, I will provide detailed case studies of two conflicts at different phases of democratization - six cases in total - in order to ascertain the answers to three questions: 1) What role, if any, did the democratic character of the individual governments play in the resolution …

Job Crafting: The Pursuit Of Happiness At Work, Cristina D. Kirkendall

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Traditional job satisfaction theories focus on either environmental causes or stable underlying personality characteristics as determinants of job satisfaction, giving very little attention to the possibility that employees may be able to affect their own job satisfaction levels. Recent research on job crafting, however, has provided a source of optimism for changing job satisfaction levels. Job crafting is the processes by which employees actively shape their job to fit their individual needs and unlike the traditional models, it offers hope to those employees that work in a dissatisfying environment or whose personalities may not predispose them to high job satisfaction. …

Religious Fundamentalism Vs. Security: What Really Drives Likud's Policies Towards Israeli Settlements?, Claudio Vinicius Santo

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This research challenges the general claim that religious fundamentalist groups exercise great influence in Israeli policies regarding settlements in the Palestinian disputed territory. It proposes an alternate hypothesis that security considerations, rather, are the driving factors underlying the government's decision process. These two propositions are evaluated by assessing three settlement decisions made under a Likud led government - a common factor purposely chosen given the known symbiotic relation between religious fundamentalist groups and the Likud's right wing political movement. Upon assessing the return of Sinai to Egypt, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the unilateral disengagement from Gaza Strip, …

Impact Of Binaural Beat Technology On Vigilance Task Performance, Psychological Stress And Mental Workload, Elizabeth Ann Shoda

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Currently, there is only one published study examining the impact of binaural beats on the performance of a laboratory vigilance task, however this study had mixed results and left many questions unanswered. I further examined this phenomenon by using a successive vigilance task, between-subjects design, and a control condition to determine whether beta frequency binaural beats could affect vigilance performance over time and across conditions. I hypothesized that participants listening to beta binaural beats would have more hits and fewer misses on the vigilance task than participants in the control condition. In addition, I hypothesized that participants listening to beta …

The Effects Of Multicollinearity In Multilevel Models, Patrick Carl Clark Jr.

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This study examined a method for calculating the impact of multicollinearity on multilevel modeling. The major research questions concerned a) how the simulation design factors affect (multilevel variance inflation factor) MVIF, b) how MVIF affects standard errors of regression coefficients, and c) how MVIF affects significance of regression coefficients. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to address these questions. Predictor relationships were manipulated in order to simulate multicollinearity. Findings indicate that a) increases in relationships among Level 1 predictors and also relationships among Level 2 predictors led to increased MVIF for those specific variables, b) as MVIF increases for a predictor, …

Spatialized Audio And Landmarks In Team Navigation, Andrew Hampton

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Using data collected from a prior study that established the benefit of spatialized audio on team navigation, the current paper examines the underlying mechanisms by which that benefit arose. With linguistic measures extracted from trial transcripts, I study emergent patterns of conversation for four dyads as they attempt to rendezvous in an immersive virtual environment. Spatialized audio is compared to landmarks, traditionally viewed as integral to navigation tasks, on the basis of coordination and strategy. Analyses reveal that spatialized audio creates a decreased need to speak overall. Paired with the performance advantage, this creates a more linguistically efficient task structure. …

Dissociation And Potential Space On The Rorschach As Predictors Of Concurrent Ptsd And Substance Dependence Treatment Outcomes, Stephen John Anen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Both posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders (SUD) are ongoing public health crises. Dissociative experiences are considered core processes within both of these conditions (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1989; Briere & Runtz, 1987; Schafer et al., 2010). Dissociation, which involves the compartmentalization of psychic experience, also exerts a significant influence over psychotherapies that aim to address both PTSD and SUD (Davidson & Foa, 1991; Spitzer, Barnow, Freyberger, & Grabe, 2007). However, dissociation is a wide concept that encompasses several perceptual, cognitive, affective, memory, and self-state processes (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986; Briere, Weathers, & Runtz, 2005). …

Reflective Functioning And Differentiation-Relatedness During Pregnancy And Infant Attachment Outcomes At One Year, Amy Elizabeth Daley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study compared maternal reflective functioning (RF) and differentiation-relatedness (DR) during pregnancy and examined how these processes relate to the quality of mother-infant attachment at one year. The subjects were 35 mother-infant pairs drawn from the control group of a longitudinal treatment study, "Minding the Baby (MTB)," a federally and privately funded home intervention program developed jointly by the Yale School of Nursing and Yale Child Study Center, led by Drs. Lois Sadler and Arietta Slade, and targeting a low socio-economic status area of New Haven, CT. The Pregnancy Interview (Slade, 2003) was administered to the women (ages 14-25 years) …

The Digital Diaspora In Sunset Park: Information And Communication Technologies In Brooklyn’S Chinatown, Sarah Wendolyn Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis is that, contrary to expectations that working-class Chinese immigrants would have less access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and fewer skills in using them, struggling immigrants to Brooklyn's Chinatown are skilled at using ICTs and do so on a daily basis, in ways that enrich their relationships and transnational participation. They are able to do this despite the severe limitations that ethnic enclave employment places on their time and opportunities, in part because of heavy use of affordable internet cafes in the neighborhood. Building on a growing body of literature on new media and diaspora, this thesis …

Producing Bodies, Knowledge, And Community In Everyday Civilian Struggle Over Surveillance, Michelle C. Billies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a global context of rapidly expanding security practices, those cast as social threats are themselves often most risk of harm. In this dissertation, I develop the concept surveillance threat (ST) to describe the perception or experience of impending or actual harm faced by targeted civilians when they are stopped or screened by law enforcement. Singled out by race and other lines of sociocultural force, those stopped risk physical, legal, sexual, and spatial consequences. Yet focusing solely on the risk of harm limits the full meaning of this encounter. As I show in my research, civilians persistently struggle against these …

Pathways Of Activity: Lessons From Dominican College Students, Monika L. Son

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

High attrition rates among Latino students have long been identified as a major problem in college. Few attempts have been made to understand the normative developmental experiences among this population. This study, based on a study of lives, a narrative approach, examines the experiences of urban Dominican-American college students. Their strategies for effectively navigating a wide variety of contexts (e.g., school, work, family, and neighborhood) are analyzed, and implications for their educational efforts are examined within a developmental framework. Gender disparities and immigrant processes are also explored.

Two part interviews were completed with eleven participants. The first interview was semi-structured …

Pathways To High-Lethality Suicide Attempts, Megan Schaffer Chesin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to develop a model of the trajectory to high-lethality suicidal behavior for individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). An increased number of previous suicide attempts, substance use immediately prior to the attempt, and objective planning were proposed to lead directly to an attempt of higher lethality. Meanwhile, aggression and impulsivity were hypothesized to lead indirectly, through their association with past suicidal behavior, to a higher lethality attempt. Path analysis revealed a revised model that applied only to individuals with BPD. In this final model, impulsivity was found to be …

Unexpected Work Intrusions Into Employees' Personal Lives: Investigation, Measure Development, And Exploration Of Causes And Consequences, Angela R. Grotto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present research explored unplanned work performed during employees' nonwork hours in response to unexpected work intrusions. Three studies were conducted to achieve four goals: 1) better understand the nature of switching from nonwork roles to the work role in response to work intrusions during nonwork hours, 2) help distinguish unplanned role switching from planned role transitions (e.g., bringing work home), 3) develop and validate new episodic measures of work intrusions and three aspects of unplanned nonwork-to-work role switching (frequency, mental difficulty, and physical effort), and 4) begin developing a nomological net of antecedent and outcomes variables surrounding the construct. …

'Bootstraps' Or 'Helping Hand:' An Exploration Of The Relationship Between Economic Stratification Among Black Americans And Their Racial Attitudes Toward Merit-Based Opportunities And Affirmative Action, Sherman Ernest Lee Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the last thirty years, much has been written about the increasing disparity between Black Americans who have achieved upward mobility and those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. This dissertation utilizes the General Social Survey (GSS) to contribute to this dialogue on stratification within the Black American community. More specifically, it asks the questions: from 1994-2006 - during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations - how did socioeconomic status affect Blacks' racial attitudes about themselves? To answer this question, the racial attitudes of a sample of Black Americans of low socioeconomic status will be compared …