Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Idrissa Ouedraogo, The Maestro Of Burkina Cinema, Boukary Sawadogo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Introduction By The Editor For This Issue, R. W. Hafer

Missouri Policy Journal

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Joseph A. Cernik

Missouri Policy Journal

No abstract provided.

Racial Differences In The Effect Of Marriageable Males On Female Family Headship, Terry Ann Craigie, Samuel L. Myers, William A. Darity

Economics: Faculty Publications

Female family headship has strong implications for endemic poverty in the United States. Consequently, it is imperative to explore the chief factors that contribute to this problem. Departing from prior literature that places significant weight on welfare-incentive effects, our study highlights the role of male marriageability in explaining the prevalence of never-married female family headship for blacks and whites. Specifically, we examine racial differences in the effect of male marriageability on never-married female headship from 1980 to 2010. By exploiting data from IPUMS-USA (N = 4,958,722) and exogenous variation from state-level sentencing reforms, the study finds that the decline in …

Threat-Related Attentional Bias In Relation To Anxiety And Depressive Symptoms In The General Population: The Potential Role Of Sex Effects, Beril Yaffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heightened sensitivity to relevant environmental stimuli (attentional bias) has been observed in relation to clinical and non-clinical anxiety and depression symptoms. While depression symptoms are associated with sensitivity to disorder and self-relevant words, hypervigilance to threatening stimuli is observed in relation to anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, attentional bias has been shown to play an important role in the development and maintenance of depressive and anxiety disorders. Accordingly, a large body of literature has examined threat-related attentional bias in relation to symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, several methodological inconsistencies exist across studies, including variability in definitions of threat, lack of consideration …

On The Front Lines: Managerialism In Substance Abuse Agencies, Jocelyn E. Lewiskin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neoliberal economic policies have led to changes within the field of human services in the United States since the mid-1970s. These policies, which seek to reduce the role of thefederal government through tactics such as privatization, continue to be evident across human services organizations today. This policy approach is operationalized through New Public Management (NPM), which is also referred to as ‘Managerialism’, and is characterized by output-orientated, quantitative focused, performance based measures and evidence-based practice. These characteristics have impacted the workforce in human service organizations. Using qualitative semi-structured interviews of front line workers, this dissertation will examine the effects of …

Subthreshold Ptsd And Associated Psycholgical Distress In Trauma Exposed Male And Female Veterans, Matthew A. Southard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) represents the upper end of a stress-response continuum to traumatic events, rather than a discrete pathological syndrome (Ruscio, et al., 2002). Individuals with PTSD report higher levels of anxiety, depression, anger, aggression, and adjustment difficulties compared to non-traumatized individuals (Ginzburg, Ein-Dor, & Soloman, 2009; Thompson et al, 2011; Novaco and Chemtob, 2002; Kotler et al, 2001; Orth & Wieland, 2006). Subthreshold PTSD represents a less severe range on the stress-response continuum and these individuals may experience similar rates of symptoms of anger, aggression, and depression as those with full-PTSD (Jakupcak, et al., 2007; Mylle & Maes, …

Delivering Justice: Food Delivery Cyclists In New York City, Do J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In New York City (NYC), food delivery cyclists ride the streets all day and night long to provide convenient, affordable, hot food to New Yorkers. These working cyclists are often Latino or Asian male immigrants who are situated within intersectional and interlocking systems of global migration and capital flows, intense time pressures by restaurants and customers, precarious tip-based livelihoods, an e-bike ban and broken windows policing, and unsafe streets designed for drivers. I approach this research through participatory action research (PAR) and han, an indigenous Korean word that describes collective transgenerational traumas that are rooted in systems and structures …

Disorderly Histories: An Anthropology Of Decolonization In Western Sahara, Mark Drury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation situates the disputed geopolitical territory of Western Sahara in a broader, regional history of decolonization. Eschewing the conceptual framework of methodological nationalism, and pushing beyond the period of Moroccan-Sahrawi political conflict, it examines how decolonization has generated multiple, unresolved political projects in this region of the Sahara, dating back to the 1950s. These formations, encompassing southern Morocco, Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, and northern Mauritania, include a zone of militarized occupation, a movement for nation-state sovereignty based in refugee camps, and the borderlands in between. By considering the overlapping processes that emerge through these unresolved …

Forensic Analysis Of Fiber Dyes Via Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy, Mircea A. Comanescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fibers are a common piece of evidence found at crime scenes that may become a link between the scene and a suspect, or allow for the reconstruction of certain crime events. Although a big portion of fibers are still white cottons, the advancement of commercial fiber production and dyeing in the past century led to an increase in types of synthetic fibers and dye applications that can be found and used in forensic analyses. Nonetheless, the fiber evidentiary value is not fully explored, as for the most part, the separation and analysis of the dye on the fiber is not …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Oil Pollution On The High Seas: The Establishment Of An International Regime To Deal With Public International Law And Private Law Issues And The Role Of Non-State Actors In Their Resolution Prior To And At The 1969 International Legal Conference On Marine Pollution Damage (“Brussels Conference”), Milton Ottensoser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On March 18, 1967, the Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker flying the flag of Liberia and carrying thirty million gallons of crude oil, smashed onto rocks off the coast of the United Kingdom. The oil spill metastasized into an environmental catastrophe, and this event became the first major environmental disaster of the electronic media age. As a direct result of the Torrey Canyon catastrophe, two treaties were signed in November 1969, at a conference in Brussels sponsored by the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), a United Nations Specialized Agency. The first treaty (the public law treaty) dealt with the right …

An Experimental Study Of The Differences Between "Just" And "Only": Npi Licensing And Modal Scope, Taletha Callahan-Kanik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout much of the theoretical semantic literature, the two exclusives only and just have been assumed identical in their structures and semantics. This manuscript contests that assumption, using parallel examples with negative polarity items (NPIs) and modals to demonstrate the asymmetry of these exclusives. After reviewing the existing theoretical literature, I utilize these examples to inform an experimental study centering around NPIs. This experiment (influenced by Chemla, Homer, and Rothschild (2011)) employs an acceptability judgment task where participants (n=90) are asked to judge sentences containing negation, only, and just (both with and without NPIs) on a 6-point scale.

Using …

A Functional Neuroimaging Study Of Self-Regulatory Control In Adults With Gambling And Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Nidhi Parashar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: Recent findings suggest phenomenological similarities across gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The key similarity between the disorders is the failure to inhibit or control a repetitive behavior (or urges to engage in a behavior) and intrusive thoughts. Our current understanding of the neural pathophysiological mechanisms linking gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders is limited. Thus, the aim of the present study was to examine the functioning of frontostriatal brain regions that support self-regulatory control in adults with gambling and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Methods: The study compared functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen level dependent response in 19 adults with pathological gambling (PG), …

Testing The Efficacy Of Interventions To Decrease Racial Bias In Jury Selection, Karima Modjadidi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite legal restrictions, attorneys continue to use peremptory challenges to strike minorities from juries (Clark, Boccaccini, Caillouet, & Chaplin, 2007; Equal Justice Initiative, 2010; Gabbidon, Kowal, Jordan, Roberts, & Vincenzi, 2008). The current protection against racially motivated peremptory challenges provided by Batson v. Kentucky (1986) has not been effective in reducing racial discrimination during voir dire and social scientists have yet to identify a suitable procedure for reducing the bias. The present research examined if methods used in reducing discrimination in industrial and organizational psychology can have a similar impact in a legal setting. Participants viewed venirepersons who varied in …

Caught Between The State, The Market, And Civil Society: The Divergent Paths Of Chinese Non-Governmental Organizations (Ngos) Seeking To Make Social Change In China, Wenjuan Zheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on Chinese civil society has tended to focus on the relationship between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. Such work has underestimated the complexity of the emerging institutional environment where Chinese NGOs are often caught between the state, the market, and a constrained civil society. How do civil society organizations and their respective nonprofit sectors emerge, what forms do they take? More specifically, how do organizational forms and strategies reflect political and market structures at the time? Chinese nonprofit sectors re-emerged in the late 1990s, and their relationships with the state have been contentious. The rapid transformation of the …

A Qualitative, Phenomenological Study Of Psychotherapists’ Perception Of Ethnic Identity Shifts In Immigrant Patients, Ricardo Corbetta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative phenomenological paper investigates ethnic identity shifts in immigrant patients by interviewing nine psychotherapists who work with immigrant patients in New York City. It takes into consideration the privileged and biased perspective of the therapist’s subjective experience of their patient’s ethnic identity shifts. The study argues that ethnic identity affiliation is relevant and worth investigating during the psychotherapeutic work, as it can shed light on crucial aspects of one’s emotions, thoughts and behavior.

The Relationship Between Parenting And Child Trauma: An Intergenerational Investigation, Miriam A. Dreyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the intergenerational transmission of trauma by investigating the relationship between parental trauma and child trauma exposure by considering parenting variables including emotion regulation, aggression, monitoring, and punitiveness as potential mechanisms of transmission. Though ample research exists which suggests that experiences of trauma are passed down from one generation to the next, this intergenerational transmission is not inevitable, and the mechanisms of transmission need to be better understood. Parenting is a crucial construct to examine given that it shapes interactions between two generations and represents a forum for intervention.

The study was a secondary analysis of a selection …

A Comparison Of Quiz Grading Criteria, Exam Question Type And Novelty, And Their Effects On Exam Scores, Samantha Dalfen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Students in higher education perform better on exams when they complete frequent quizzes on the assigned reading material; but little research has investigated the different ways quizzes can be administered and how these variations affect quiz and exam performance. One variable that influences how quizzes are administered is the grading criterion. The standard practice grading criterion consists of receiving a score for the quiz based on the number of correctly answered questions. A passing criterion consists of requiring a student to obtain a certain score to earn full credit for the quiz. Previous research has found that students, particularly those …

The Impact Of Defendant Gender And Attractiveness On Juror Decision-Making In A Sexual Offense Case, Georgia M. Winters

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, instances of educator sexual assault against students have flooded the media. In particular, female teachers who abused students have seized the public’s attention as they are often portrayed as attractive and a sexual fantasy. This portrayal can then impact the way society perceives these sexual assaults. Importantly, however, it is not known whether this perception influences the prosecution and sentencing of these cases. The current study examined the impact of gender and attractiveness of a teacher, as well as gender of the student victim, on juror decision-making in a teacher/student sexual assault case. Using a 2 (Teacher …

Essays On The Market Structure Of The U.S. Health Care System, Ayse S. Diebel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the welfare implications of vertical restraints in the U.S. health care market. I focus on two phenomena that influence vertical relationships between hospitals and insurers: vertical integration and vertical bundling. Both of these practices have potential efficiency-inducing and anti-competitive effects from a theoretical standpoint, making welfare implications ambiguous. I analyze their impact on welfare in an empirical setting. This task requires structurally modeling the market by using data on hospitals, insurers, and consumers, and simulating counterfactual worlds free of vertical restraints.

I construct my dataset by combining data from multiple sources. Hospital characteristics come from the American …

"When We Demand Our Share Of This World”: Struggles For Space, New Possibilities Of Planning, And Municipalist Politics In Mumbai, Malav J. Kanuga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents an urban history of Bombay/Mumbai from the perspective of a politics of plurality, arguing that while the city has emerged from governmental control and planning, its development has also been shaped by myriad popular productive forces of urban society. The dissertation traces the uneven development of the city through significant planning policies, popular movements, and lived experiences of various struggles against regimes of developmentalism—the governing ideologies of development, techniques, policies, and rules of law through which the city has been planned and governed. These ideologies and practices have shifted over time, but since the earliest days of …

The Politics Of Service: Affectivity, Social Relations, And The Power Of Tipping In The Restaurant Industry, Jacqueline A. Ross

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The #MeToo movement and the growing spotlight on sexual harassment and misconduct has increasingly brought industries and individuals into the public eye. The restaurant industry is one such industry to receive this spotlight. While most of the coverage has stemmed from celebrities, the misconduct of celebrity chefs has been paralleled by the stories of servers and their customers. The NY Times published several articles on harassment in the restaurant industry and some specifically focusing on the abuses that tipped workers face. Often these workers were women. When asked about experiences of harassment, responses were often that servers felt that they …

Dietary Curcumin Promotes Resilience To Chronic Social Defeat Stress In A Highly Susceptible Mouse Strain, Antonio V. Aubry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic exposure to stress is a risk factor for the development of major depression and post traumatic stress disorder in humans and induces depressive- and anxiety-like phenotypes in rodents. However, there are few pharmacological interventions available that effectively treat maladaptive responses to chronic stress in the clinical setting. One therapeutic agent that has recently shown promise in treating psychiatric disorders is curcumin, a yellow-pigmented polyphenol compound found in the turmeric plant. Curcumin has been shown to prevent the development of stressed-induced depressive-like behavior in rodents and reduce symptoms of depression in clinically diagnosed patients. In this dissertation, I investigated whether …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

Wukongism: Monkey King, Kungfu/Jazz, And Asian/American Performance, Sissi Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wukongism offers one of the first non-western epistemic frameworks to examine theatre and performance that traverse beyond the shifting taxonomies of national, cultural, racial boundaries, and in particular, Asian/American theatre and performance. Wukongism, or shapeshifter consciousness, is built on the narrative of Sun Wukong the Monkey King, a supernatural shapeshifting character from the 16^th century classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Juxtaposing physical shapeshifting (plastic surgery and performing of the racialized face) with institutional shapeshifting (reinventing and eliminating invisible and hypervisible boundaries), this dissertation project posits Wukongism as a means to examine the varying, fluid, and precarious …

The Upright Battle: Morphological Trends Of The Bipedal Pelvis, Nicole M. Webb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The shift to bipedal locomotion is a distinguishing feature of the human lineage that required substantial remodeling of the postcranium in hominins. The pelvis, due to its important functional role as a stabilizing and weight-bearing structure, has undergone one of the most drastic transformations in the skeleton to accommodate obligate bipedalism, thus making it a valuable region for studying locomotor behavior within the fossil record. Although bipedalism occurs in several mammalian groups, it is rare within primates and the ability to utilize a striding gait with an erect, or orthograde, posture remains unique to hominins. Orthograde posture in this context …

The Role Of Self-Disclosure In Improving Workplace Cross-Race Mentoring Outcomes, Christine R. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the racial diversity of the workforce is increasing, minority employees still do not appear to be advancing professionally at the same rates as White employees. There are many explanations for why minority employees do not experience the same rates of advancement as White employees. One key developmental relationship that can aid in increasing the opportunities for minority employees to advance and grow in an organization is the mentoring relationship. However, given the lack of diversity in the upper levels of organizational hierarchies, minorities are more likely to have a White mentor than they are to have a minority mentor. …

The Unemployment Rate For Post-9/11 Veterans: A Multivariate Statistical Evaluation Of American Community Survey Data, 2003–2015, M. Celada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research has two objectives: to develop the case for examining Post-9/11 veteran unemployment through the prism of race and gender and to analyze Post-9/11 veteran unemployment, 2003-2015, through this demographic lens. First, it critically considers how entrenched normative assumptions and statistical methodologies for veteran unemployment analyses, largely irrespective of race, gender, and skill-biased technological change, impede the development of an alternate theoretical frame and analytical method to assess Post-9/11 veteran labor outcomes. As a result, scant information exists on the labor force outcomes of Post-9/11 veterans. Secondly, it conducts an intersectional methodological multivariate analysis of unemployment outcomes for Black, …

Distinct Neuropsychological Profile And Associated Neurochemical Changes In Individuals With Mitochondrial Encephalomyopathy, Lactic Acidosis, And Stroke-Like Episodes (Melas), Emily B. Leaffer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Mitochondrial Encephalomyopathy, Lactic Acidosis, and Stroke-like Episodes (MELAS) is a maternally inherited progressive multisystemic disorder. Occurrence of seizure and/or stroke-like episode, as well as classic biomarkers (i.e., cerebral lactic acidosis, depleted N-acetylaspartate (NAA)), have been linked to neuropsychological deficit and trigger the developmental cascade of neurodegeneration affecting posterior prior to anterior brain regions. While a pattern of global deterioration has been reported, systematic examination in a large MELAS cohort has not been conducted.

Objective: First, we examined verbal and visual memory function and its relationship to brain metabolites (lactate, NAA) in individuals with MELAS. Second, we hypothesized that MELAS …