Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effects Of Script Variation, Literacy Skills, And Immersion Experience On Executive Attention: A Comparison Of Matched Monoscriptal And Biscriptal Bilinguals, Sujin Yang, Hwajin Yang, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

To examine script effects, monoscriptal Spanish-English (SE) bilinguals, who use two similar Roman alphabetic systems, were compared to biscriptal Chinese-English (CE) bilinguals, who use logographs and Roman alphabets. On the Attention Network Test, script effects were most evident in global processing efficiency (i.e., inverse efficiency and reaction time) and in the local network of executive control in favor of biscriptal CE bilinguals over matched monoscriptal SE counterparts. Literacy effects were found on the executive control network among Chinese-English bilinguals of high L1-literacy skills over their script- and immersion-matched counterparts, who varied only in low L1 literacy. In a similar vein, …

Doing Business And Increasing Emissions? An Exploratory Analysis Of The Impact Of Business Regulation On Co2 Emissions, Annika Marie Rieger

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since 2005, the World Bank has released a data set titled "Doing Business: Measuring Business Regulations." These data have become an important set of indicators of the international business climate. However, the impacts of pro-business regulation on the environment have generally been overlooked. To help resolve this problem, I estimate a time-series cross-sectional Prais-Winsten regression model to test the relationship between business climate—represented by the World Bank’s Doing Business data set—and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in developing nations over 10 years, from 2005 to 2014. The results show that there is a statistically significant and positive association between business climate …

The Uses Of History In International Society: From The Paris Peace Conference To The Present, Margaret Macmillan, Patrick Quinton-Brown

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

History has been used—and abused—for centuries. Yet the more familiar notion of ‘history's lessons’—a notion which tends to make most historians uncomfortable, and which surely demands thoroughgoing skepticism—is far from exhaustive of history's uses in the practice and study of international relations. One important and timely subject is the more constitutive role of history in international deliberations over the creation, fragmentation and transformation of nation-states. What follows is a historical comparison of the changing ways in which the past has been used to frame the terms and content of such debates. While we will be exploring the uses of history …

Retrieval Practice Enhances Analogical Problem Solving, Sarah Shi Hui Wong, Gavin Jun Peng Ng, Tobias Tempel, Stephen Wee Hun Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The impact of retrieval practice on analogical-problem-solving performance was investigated using a complex, educationally relevant task. Participants studied a statistical hypothesis testing scenario and practiced recalling the material or repeatedly studied it. Participants then completed a final test either 5 minutes or 1 week later involving a novel hypothesis-testing scenario that shared an intermediate procedural strategy and superficial and structural similarity with the study scenario but that differed at a specific procedure level. When the final test was given after 5 minutes, no differences in performance were observed across conditions (d = 0.01). Crucially, on the delayed test, retrieval practice …

Prevention-Permission-Promotion: A Review Of Approaches To Errors In Learning, Sarah Shi Hui Wong, Stephen Wee Hun Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Errors are often perceived as undesirable events to be avoided at all costs. However, a growing body of research suggests that making errors is, in fact, beneficial for learning. Building on human resource development literature, the present review proposes a 3P framework of approaches to errors during learning: prevention (avoiding or observing errors), permission (allowing errors), and promotion (inducing or guiding errors). This framework is applied to examine and integrate the empirical evidence on errors that have been commonly investigated in cognitive, educational, and applied psychology research. The psychological mechanisms of each error approach are discussed, and implications for education …

Is Memory Enhanced By The Context Or Survival Threats? A Quantitative And Qualitative Review On The Survival Processing Paradigm, Peter Kay Chai Tay, Peter K. Jonason, Norman P. Li, Grand H.-L. Cheng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Consistent with an evolutionary perspective, memory may be enhanced when people are in precarious situations. Particularly, a survival processing effect (SPE) has been found whereby people have better memory for a list of items when the items are rated for their relevance in a grassland context that contains survival threats including predators, and the lack of food and water. In this article, we systematically review research that investigated the SPE to disentangle the contextual effects (e.g., grassland) from survival effects (e.g., presence of predators) on memory. A total of 56 articles (106 experiments) that reported findings relating to the SPE …

Dispositional Gratitude Moderates The Association Between Socioeconomic Status And Interleukin-6, Andree Hartanto, Sean T. H. Lee, Jose C. Yong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Socioeconomic disparities in health are prevalent and growing in importance as a concern amongacademics, policymakers, and the general public. However, psychological resources that can narrowsuch disparities have not been well-examined. The current study examined the moderating role ofdispositional gratitude in the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and infammationrisk as an index of health. Participants consisted of 1,054 midlife adults from the biomarker projectof the Midlife in the United States. Infammation risk was measured by interleukin-6 biomarker andSES was operationalized by education attainment and income. We found that dispositional gratitudesignifcantly moderated the relationships between SES and interleukin-6. Among individuals withlow dispositional …

The Effects Of Perceived Decision-Making Styles On Evaluations Of Openness And Competence That Elicit Collaboration, Ming-Hong Tsai, Nadhilla Velda Melia, Verlin B. Hinsz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

When interacting with a task partner, individuals often rely upon characteristics they infer about their partner to determine their level of collaboration with the partner. To explore social perception processes related to collaboration, we examined perceptions of an actor’s decision-making style as predictors. Using different methods in various research settings, we found that compared with perceptions of an actor’s intuitive decision-making style or of a nonspecific decision-making style, perceptions of an actor’s rational decision-making style were more positively associated with inferences of the actor’s openness and competence, both of which were in turn associated with the perceiver’s collaborative intention with …

Review: Red China’S Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, And Economic Development Under The Commune, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Professor Joshua Eisenman’s book, “Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune,” is as paradoxical as the enigmatic era that it seeks to illuminate. On the one hand, the volume contains compelling evidence – much of it newly and painstakingly collected provincial and county-level data – that the later Maoist period, particularly the 1970–1979 period, was not the disaster that it is sometimes portrayed to be. It fundamentally undermines the discredited (yet often rehearsed) fable that decollectivization was initiated and promulgated solely by desperate protesting farmers. The author supports his argument via an impressive …

From Syndication To Misinformation: How Undergraduate Students Engage With And Evaluate Digital News, Cara Evanson, Jayme Sponsel

Communications in Information Literacy

To determine how undergraduate students engage with digital news, researchers at Davidson College surveyed 511 incoming first-year students on their news consumption habits and asked them to evaluate screenshots of news stories. The researchers found that a high percentage of the students were accessing news through social media platforms, and that syndication and fake URLs posed challenges for them in making accurate evaluations. Additionally, students indicated they would share a tweet containing an impostor URL at higher rates than they would share the other news story examples. The findings have implications for how educators teach students to evaluate misinformation.

A Student Journal To Celebrate, Preserve, And Improve Beginning Undergraduate Writing, Ann E. Biswas, Maureen E. Schlangen, Heidi Gauder

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

At the end of each semester, composition instructors at the University of Dayton (UD) collected portfolios of student writing for the annual program assessment, encouraging their students to return the following semester to pick up their folders of work. However, the stacks of unclaimed portfolios that piled up in faculty offices each year was an indication that students cared little about what they had written, perhaps believing no one beyond their instructor was interested in reading their writing now or in the future. Nevertheless, academic scholars have recognized that student writing improves—as do a sense of ownership and pride in …

The Association Between Increase In Maternal Education And Child Behavioral And Academic Outcomes: The Mediating Role Of The Home Learning Environment And Positive Parenting, Samantha R. Awada

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Research on maternal educational attainment has shown associations between higher levels of maternal education and positive child outcomes, such as greater academic proficiency and fewer externalizing problems. Most studies examine maternal education as a stable construct, measuring it at one point in time; however, a sizeable minority of mothers pursue education after the birth of a child. As such, it is important to investigate whether an increase in maternal education is a protective or a risk factor for child outcomes. Further, few have explored the processes through which the association between increases in maternal education and child outcomes exist. The …

Migration And Remittances, Seyedsoroosh Azizi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on three topics: motivations behind remittances, cyclicality of remittances, and the impacts of remittances on human capital and labor supply in developing countries.

In the first chapter, I introduce the three topics. In the second chapter, I examine the primary incentives of remitting. Using estimated bilateral data on remittances, this chapter demonstrates that a rise in the remittance-receiving countries' GNI per capita leads to fewer remittances and that a rise in the host remittance-sending countries' GNI per capita motivates migrants to remit more. Real exchange rates and real interest rates have no effect on remittances. These results …

Farmers, Workers, And State Responses To The Food Crises: State-Society Conflicts And The Politics Of Agricultural Development In Indonesia And Nigeria, Sirojuddin Arif

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

A solid agricultural foundation is required to build a strong industrial sector. However, how such a foundation can be established remains debated. This study addressed this question by examining the politics of state responses to the food crises in Indonesia and Nigeria. Despite the similar problem of food shortages faced by the two countries in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, respectively, why did they pursue divergent policy responses? Why did Indonesia implement rural-biased policies while Nigeria urban-biased ones to deal with the food crisis? What factor explains these different policy choices? And how did this factor affect the distributional outcome …

Psychological Reactance Applied To Instruction To Disregard, Jessica Louise Bozeman

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study applies theory of psychological reactance to instructions to disregard (ITD). When inadmissible testimony is made in front of jurors, a judge may issue an ITD that orders jurors to not consider the inadmissible evidence when making their verdicts. The theory of psychological reactance proposes that when a person’s choices are limited or their freedom is threatened, there will be a resulting attempt to regain or prioritize their freedom. Using a jury transcript study, the experiment has both a control condition including the evidence but without an ITD and a condition where the ITD is included. Results showed that …

From Tony Soprano To Donald Trump: Situating The Rhetoric Of The 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign In The Antihero Genre, Harry Bodell

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, scholars and political pundits alike were left scrambling to understand what had occurred. While there is no single explanation for this unexpected turn of events, the present study argues that an overlooked and central aspect of Trump’s appeal was foreshadowed by the increased prominence of antihero protagonists in American media, particularly exemplified by the recent “Golden Age” of television wherein television series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Dexter found critical and popular success by building compelling narratives around morally flawed …

Impact Of Agreeableness On Virtual Team Performance Through Team Identification And Shared Mental Models, Alexandria Brown

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Virtual teams help organizations efficiently utilize their employees for a task without the requirement of co-location. The literature on team performance suggests that teamwork is integral to a team’s success; however, in virtual teams this is often a challenge. Certain personality characteristics on virtual teams may be particularly important to the development of effective teamwork. An under-investigated factor is the role agreeableness in virtual team processes and how it affects the overall team performance. The main research question of this study is how the degree of agreeableness on a virtual team affects the overall team performance through predicted associations with …

Providing Counseling In A Rural Setting: A New Multicultural Perspective, Danessa Ann Carter

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Counseling research shows a lack of information regarding training counselors to work in rural communities. However, more than 80% of the United States land is considered rural. This appears to be an extremely desperate combination of lack of information and training for a large portion of the country’s population. An additional complication to this dynamic is that neither CACREP standards nor the ACA Code of Ethics mandate any specific trainings or address any specific needs of rural communities.

To improve the understanding of rural community dynamics, this qualitative study explored the phenomenological experiences of counselors working in rural communities. This …

Understanding Collaborative Performance: The Case Of Illinois 9-1-1 Emergency Call Service, Erica Ceka

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation empirically tests the effects of system context conditions such as political dynamics, legal framework, and conflict history on collaborative performance in the context of mandated collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) at the local level, namely the Illinois 9-1-1 Emergency Telephone System Boards (ETSBs). More specifically, this study examines how system context conditions affect the decision-making capacity of the Illinois 9-1-1 emergency call service and whether the system context and formative conditions affect the 9-1-1 ETSB’s productivity performance expressed through collaborative capacity to manage and marshal financial resources. The results suggest that more importance should be given to the influence …

Educational Experiences Of 1.5 Generation Cambodian Americans, Kassandra A. Chhay

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

During the 1980s, an influx of Cambodian Americans resettled in the United States due to the Cambodian genocide. Those Cambodian refugees who came to the United States as either infants, children or adolescents due to warfare, are members of the 1.5 generation. This thesis examines the educational trajectory of 1.5 generation Cambodian Americans in the context of family, school, and community from their resettlement in the United States to adulthood. Using a narrative approach, I examine how the eighteen participants in the study overcame certain challenges to attain success and how they negotiated their cultural and ethnic identity in relation …

How Fitting In To The Social Context Influences Work-Life Balance Effectiveness And Work Performance, Amanda Lynn Conlin

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the notion that what may matter most in achieving an authentic feeling of work-life balance is fit within the immediate social context among work teams. Both work-life balance effectiveness and work performance depend on managing and meeting others’ expectations. Thus, the extent to which an individual shares work-life balance values and preferences with others on their team (i.e., a form of person-team fit influences the amount of resources expended or gained from navigating and negotiating others’ expectations. In a field study, 106 full time employees at a commercial real estate company were surveyed measuring the extent to …

Still A Hollow Hope: Significant Social Change, The Second Amendment, And State Political Culture, Anthony David Cooling

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation expands the literature on law, courts, and social change. The Supreme Court increasingly matters in American political life when those across the political spectrum look at the Court for relief from policies they oppose and as another venue for advancing their own policy agendas. This dissertation expands the volume of case studies that research the ability of Courts to make major political and social change to include the topic of firearms in the wake of the Supreme Court’s controversial and divided opinions in D.C. v Heller (2008) and McDonald v Chicago (2010). These decisions interpreted the Second Amendment …

An Assessment Of The Effectiveness Of Positive Self-Talk On Engagement With Feared Stimuli And Control Related Beliefs, Sara Louise Conley

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a disorder characterized by obsessions and compulsions that causes noticeable impairment across multiple life domains. Various mechanisms have been implicated in the development of OCD, including maladaptive control-related beliefs related to: (1) individuals’ sense of control over any given situation, and (2) trait motivation for desire of control. Specifically, low levels of perceived control and/or an elevated desire for control have been linked to obsessive-compulsive symptoms across a variety of OCD subtypes, including contamination concerns. The current gold-standard treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP), which requires individuals to yield control and confront a …

Reactions To Daily Abusive Supervision: Exploring Day-To-Day Fluctuations With A Justice Perspective, Rushika Nadia De Bruin

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Abusive supervision is a widely-studied phenomenon experienced by a multitude of workers across organizations. While abusive supervision is typically studied in terms of negative outcomes (i.e., supervisor-directed retaliation), there is some preliminary evidence that not all consequences of abusive supervision are negative. While there have been several studies exploring employee reactions to abusive supervision, they predominantly take a cross-sectional design perspective. The current study utilized 102 full-time employees from the U.S. who responded to 932 daily surveys assessing personality, workplace behaviors, and justice perceptions. The current study explored how perceptions of abusive supervision changed on a day-to-day basis and how …

Assessment Of “Meaning Made”: An Empirical Examination Of Factorial Structure And Measure Validity, Andrea M. Despotes

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Meaning-making theory posits that appraisal of a stressful event leads to distress if it is discrepant with one’s sense of “global meaning,” and such distress stimulates meaning-making processes aimed at eliminating the discrepancy. If meaning making leads to new meaning (i.e., “meaning made”), the stress-induced discrepancy is reduced, which generally is expected to result in positive adjustment. This study investigated the factorial structure of the meaning made construct using a sample (N = 372) of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers in the United States having “Masters” status and a minimum approval rating of 95%. Participants reported an average age of about …

Dekalb, Illinois, Muslim Women’S Agency Negotiating And Re-Affirming Their Muslim Identity, Sinta Febrina

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Post 9/11 American Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of their patriarchal religion and as perpetrators of terror. These conditions led to the discrimination of American Muslim women which requires them to continuously strategize and negotiate their identity. This thesis examined DeKalb, Illinois Muslim women’s agency to strategize and negotiate their identity in lager American society. In this study, fifteen Muslim women from three different categories were interviewed: American-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrants. This study found that Muslim women’s various backgrounds (country of origin, education, socio-economic status, and immigration status) affected their strategy and agency to negotiate and re-affirm …

Minimum Dropout Age And Juvenile Crime In The United States, Md. Abdur Rahman Forhad

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation examines how an increased minimum dropout age (MDA) affects juvenile crime not only in the community, but also in school. I first empirically estimate the magnitude of the impact of a higher MDA on high school enrollment. I then develop an economic model of crime that explains the relationship between an MDA and contemporaneous juvenile crime and empirically examine how a higher MDA affects juvenile crime both in the community and in school. I find that raising the MDA from 16 to 18 significantly increases school enrollment by 2.57%. Next, I find that raising the MDA to an …

Exploring The Use Of Podcasts On Students’ Language Learning And Change Of Students’ Self-Efficacy About The Use Of Podcasts, Silvia Rehulina Ginting

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Similar to other types of mobile technologies, podcasts are believed to provide many advantages for language instruction, including English as a second language (ESL) learners’ listening skills and pronunciation and changes in their self-efficacy from using the podcasts for learning ESL. The convergent parallel mixed methods design used Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning and Bandura’s self-efficacy as foundations. It used 11 different instruments to collect quantitative data and qualitative data from two sections of an upper-intermediate ESL class at one university in Midwest United States. Quantitative data were collected using a pre-test, a post-test, and the note taking quizzes …

Caring High School Teachers: Promoting Students’ Social And Emotional Development, Roberta Jean Geosling

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

High school students are experiencing increasing numbers of social and emotional stressors in their lives. While Illinois and other states have adopted state standards to address social and emotional development in the classroom, care theorists posit that the answer may lie in positive relationships between caring teachers and their students. This study explores the perspectives of six teachers from a Midwest high school who were nominated by their students as being caring teachers. After a series of three 45-minute interviews and two to three 45-minute observations, data were analyzed within the framework of Noddings’ Theory of Care (1984) and the …

Examining The Utility Of A Brief Self-Compassion Intervention For Emotion Regulation In Individuals With Exposure To Trauma, Sara Jean Himmerich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Research suggests that abilities to moderate and process trauma-related emotions may predict symptoms of posttraumatic stress, with the overuse of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies presenting a potential vulnerability to experiencing difficulties following trauma exposure. Self-compassion has been associated with the acceptance of negative emotions, with research finding evidence for positive associations between self-compassion and adaptive emotion regulation. Additionally, research suggests an inverse relationship between self-compassion and symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Self-compassion has been conceptualized and studied as a skill that can be learned, with studies finding support for improved abilities following targeted interventions. However, more research is needed to establish …