Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Increment And Decrement Effects In Motion Induced Blindness, Sofia C. Lombardo

Honors Theses and Capstones

Motion induced blindness (MIB) refers to the perceptual disappearance of a stationary stimulus in the presence of a motion mask. The current study investigated the degree to which afterimages affect MIB inhibition when measured as a contrast detection threshold in a modified replication of White et al. (2020). Adult participants (N = 3) with normal or corrected-to-normal eyesight completed a series of target detection tasks while viewing a standard MIB stimulus with the motion mask removed that consisted of increment versus decrement inducer and target components. A univariate ANOVA data analysis procedure revealed a significant afterimage effect (Scheffé p < 0.0253) on contrast detection threshold was found for targets presented at an interstimulus interval of 500 ms. This effect was stronger for decrement targets compared to increment targets in the decrement inducer conditions. Based on a comparison with previous research in which the MIB effect was found to endure across interstimulus intervals up to 15500 ms, the current findings indicate that afterimages do not significantly influence contrast detection thresholds for MIB. Further research is necessary for determining the strength and duration of afterimage effects on contrast detection thresholds in MIB that may be caused by interaction with the motion mask.

Understanding The Factors That Influence Tweet Popularity, Kyle A. Jalbert

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Covid-19’S Impact On Human Trafficking: The Invisible Industry In New Hampshire, Brittany Dunkle

Honors Theses and Capstones

Human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that operates on the premise of exploitation, such as forced prostitution and labor, and organ trafficking. This is a global industry resulting in billions. Despite the current global pandemic, COVID-19, putting a halt to many livelihoods around the world, human trafficking will persist, but in conditions that are potentially more harmful for the victims. Victims of trafficking are in an increasingly vulnerable position, and it is important to establish possible mechanisms to protect as many victims and potential victims as possible. Typical risk factors (i.e., poverty, state’s interest vs. individual interest, unemployment) …

Scottish Marine Renewable Energy: U.S. Approaches For Development Of Wave And Tidal Technologies, Stella Kathryn Fairall

Honors Theses and Capstones

Marine renewable energy, energy harnessed from various ocean resources such as waves, tides, currents, thermal gradients, and marine streams, has incredible potential in the United States. Several European countries have realized the potential of the resource in the North Sea and Atlantic and have created incredibly successful industries already. The United Kingdom, particularly Scotland, is the world leader because of the comprehensive policy, labor force, and markets it has established in order to make MRE a competitive energy source. In the United States, the industry is immature, underfunded, and lacks policy support. In order to establish itself as a world …

Predictors Of The Treatment Retention And Quality Of Recovery From Opioid Use Disorder Using Buprenorphine In Medication-Assisted Treatment: A Pilot Study Of The Effects Of Hope, Grit, And Readiness To Change, John S. Pulliam

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Opioid misuse remains at epidemic proportions in the United States and other countries. Buprenorphine has been found effective in treating opioid use disorder (OUD). Understanding the roles of personal characteristics and readiness to change in addiction treatment retention and quality of recovery could be beneficial in office-based medication-assisted treatment for OUD. Researchers have explored OUD treatment methods and outcomes and have examined various predictive factors in treatment results, including demographic, socioeconomic, and psychological variables. However, few characteristics have been found to be consistent indicators of treatment retention and recovery quality. The constructs of hope agency, hope pathways, grit, and readiness …

The Rural Church As Community Support For Grandparents Raising Their Grandchildren, William Shane Cassida

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A growing trend in rural communities located in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, as well as across much of the United States, is the significant increase in the number of grandparents that are being forced to accept the responsibility of raising their grandchildren due to a crisis within the family structure. The US Census Bureau cited in 2016 that over 2.5 million grandparents are helping with the responsibility of raising their grandchildren, and that 7.8 million children live in homes owned by their grandparents. This accounts for almost 10% of all children nationally. There is a current ministry need for churches …

Effects Of A Suggestion Based Intervention On Human Cooperation In The Stag Hunt Game, Melvin S. Marsh

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Cooperation has been one of the most foundational aspect of human society and is frequently studied via use of “The Stag Hunt” which has been used to tease out factors which may influence cooperation. The present study is the first study to attempt to influence human cooperation by means of positive imagery. Participants included 33 males and 72 females) who listened to either an a 7-minute audio designed to encourage them to trust others or an audio designed to encourage them to trust themselves. Participants played 40 rounds of the Stag Hunt game. The total number of times the participant …

Influence Of Political Affiliation On Perceived Media Bias And Trustworthiness In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Tabitha Lamberth

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Partisanship and news source attribution may influence perceived media bias and trust in COVID-19 information. This study aimed to explore how the similarity liking effect relates to political identity and perceived credibility. Our main hypothesis was that individuals would find news sources that shared their political affiliation as more trustworthy than other news sources. To test our hypothesis, 216 undergraduate students participated in a study that measured participants’ trustworthiness of a news article with randomized source attribution from a liberal, conservative, and neutral source. A 2X3 ANOVA tested the relationship between our participants’ political affiliation, measured by the 12-item Social …

Evaluating The Effects Of Self-Control Depletion On Task Persistence: A Focus On The Moderating Effects Of Performance Monitoring, Hayley Houseman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Self-control is essential in day-to-day life and has important implications for goal attainment, successful living, and psychological well-being. However, self-control is known to fail when resources are depleted physically, cognitively, or emotionally, which can lead to difficulties completing important tasks. Performance monitoring, which makes a standard salient so that people can sustain their performance while attending to their goals, might buffer the loss of self-control on task performance. Overall, the purpose of this study was to experimentally examine the effects of self-control depletion and performance monitoring on task persistence. Eighty undergraduate students were recruited to participate in the study. Participants …

College Athletes' Experiences With A Lower Body Re-Injury: A Phenomenological Investigation, Samantha Holder

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Lower extremity injuries are the most common musculoskeletal sport injuries and are an inevitable risk to sport participation (Chalmers, 2002; Dane et al., 2004; Kay et al., 2017). When an athlete sustains an injury, fear of re-injury is a salient emotion many athletes experience (e.g., Disanti et al., 2018; Kvist et al., 2005; Lentz et al., 2015). Previous research has identified fear of re-injury as a risk factor to suffering a subsequent injury (e.g., An et al., 2019; Andersen & Williams, 1988; Paterno et al., 2018; Podlog et al., 2011; Tagesson & Kvist, 2016). Epidemiology studies have highlighted that re-injuries …

Trail Marker Trees, Kaleigh Edwards

Buder Center for American Indian Studies Research

For arborists and others who study forests and plant life, “Indian trail trees” or “trail marker trees” are an intriguing way to mark a path. But, for Native American people, the trees provided a trail marker that led to essential resources. According to Guy Sternberg (2015), there are several criteria for a tree to be defined as a trail marker tree; such standards are that the “species is Native to the area, long-lived, and point towards a significant location” (Sternberg, 2015). Through traditional deformation, white and red oak trees were the primary species of trail marker trees because of their …

Cswe Recommendations For Social Work Educators And Social Workers, Kaleigh Edwards

Buder Center for American Indian Studies Research

Poster summary of Council on Social Work Education's statement of accountability and reconciliation for harms done to Indigenous and Tribal Peoples

An Encore In Social Work? How Our Schools Can Become More Age Inclusive, Cal J. Halvorsen, Erin Emmanuel

Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging

At a time when the number of younger students entering our colleges and universities is stagnant and the number of older people in our society continues to grow by the millions, schools of social work have an opportunity to broaden their student base by intentionally including people past midlife. This commentary argues that we must recruit and retain “encore students”—defined as those aged 35 and older—in our social work programs for schools, students, the profession, and society. It covers key demographic changes in the U.S. and their relation to social work programs, the importance of multigenerational classrooms, interest in encore …

Teletherapy Among Dialectical Behavior Therapy Clinicians And Associations With Treatment Of Patients At Risk For Suicide, Kevin Rebmann

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Title : Teletherapy among Dialectical Behavior Therapy Clinicians and Associations with Treatment of Patients at Risk for Suicide

Authors: Kevin Rebmann, Chelsey Wilks, PhD

University of Missouri—Saint Louis

Abstract Body:

Telemental health has emerged rapidly as a treatment delivery platform, although many clinicians who treat complex and high-risk suicidal patients have expressed concern in the implementation of this technological service. Despite this initial trepidation, the coronavirus pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19) upended the way that traditional evidence-based psychotherapy is being delivered, resulting in most outpatient treatment providers to deliver their treatment via telehealth. One such treatment which focuses on complex patient …

Does The Emigration Of Skilled Labor From Hungary Merit Being Called A Brain Drain?, Alexa Marie Mayo

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Before And After The #Metoo Movement: Investigating How The Media Discusses Male Perpetrated Sexual Harassment, Maya Rose Coykendall

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Agent-Based Model Of Broadband Adoption In Unserved And Underserved Areas, Ankit Agarwal

Masters Theses

"In the last two decades, demand for broadband internet has far outpaced its availability. The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2020 Broadband Deployment report suggests that at least 22 million Americans living in rural areas lack access to broadband internet. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting normal life, there is an overwhelming need to enable unserved and underserved communities to adapt to the “new normal”. To address this challenge, federal and state agencies are funding internet service providers (ISPs) to deploy infrastructure in rural communities. However, policymakers and ISPs need open-source tools to predict take-rates of broadband service and formulate effective strategies …

Spatiotemporal Observations Of Water Stress In Kansas Winter Wheat And Corn From Remotely Sensed Evapotranspiration And Ndwi, Lindi Diane Oyler

Masters Theses

"Optimizing water use is a growing concern, especially in agricultural communities where water use is high. An important challenge in agricultural water optimization is knowing when and where crop water stress is occurring, particularly on large scales where in-situ measurements are no longer practical to obtain. In an effort to combat this challenge, this study utilizes remotely sensed evapotranspiration (ET) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to evaluate the responses of integrated satellite datasets to water-stressed conditions over fields of irrigated corn, irrigated winter wheat, and rainfed winter wheat from 2007 to 2017 in southwestern Kansas. Using two different ET …

Communicating Uncertain Information From Deep Learning Models To Users, Harishankar Vasudevanallur Subramanian

Masters Theses

“The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) decision support systems is increasing in high-stakes contexts, such as healthcare, defense, and finance. Uncertainty information may help users better leverage AI predictions, especially when combined with domain knowledge. I conducted two human-subject experiments to examine the effects of uncertainty information with AI recommendations. The experimental stimuli are from an existing image recognition deep learning model, one popular approach to AI. In Paper I, I evaluated the effect of the number of AI recommendations and provision of uncertainty information. For a series of images, participants identified the subject and rated their confidence level. Results …

Spelling And Reading Novel Homophones: Testing The Value Of Lexical Distinctiveness, Jayde Homer

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Lexical distinctiveness, according to which a written form represents one and only one morpheme, is a feature of some writing systems. For example, ‹bear› and ‹bare› are spelled differently in English. In two experiments, we asked whether readers and spellers of English benefit from distinctive spellings of homophones. In Experiment 1, university students listened to 40 passages, each containing a novel homophone (e.g., /kel/ used to mean a gossip-lover). In Experiment 2, participants read the passages. Half of the novel homophones were homographic (e.g., ‹kale›), and half were heterographic (e.g., ‹kail›). In both experiments, participants answered questions about the novel …

Impaired Suppression Of Attentional Capture Near The Hands, Xiaojin Ma

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Attention tends to be attracted to eye-catching stimuli, which, however, are not always helpful to look at, depending on the particular task. Recent findings demonstrated that attention to a salient but task-irrelevant distractor could be actively suppressed via a top-down process. In other research, increased scrutiny in visual inspection has been found in the near hand space, making it interesting to question, at the intersection of the two lines of research, whether the ability to ignore salient distraction would be compromised near the hands. Two experiments were conducted to test this idea. Experiment 1 compared the attentional allocation to a …

Teacher Perception On Integrating School Psychology In The Developing Nation Of Grenada, Carla Erica Maria St. Louis

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractInternationally, formalized school psychology and related services strive to address the academic and mental health of students in schools. In developing nations, teachers are the primary professionals to address students’ needs in schools. Little research has focused on teachers’ perceptions of students’ needs, available services’ quality, and how formalized structures with qualified certified professionals can further address students’ needs. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems and Nastasi’s participatory culture-specific intervention model are the theoretical underpinnings of this qualitative study and focus group interviews were used to investigate special education needs (SEN) teachers’ perceptions. Data were collected using open ended questions and probes with …

Staff Education On Medication Screening Tool For Nursing Home Residents, Jinkee Sarah Beltran

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The prevalence of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) among nursing home residents continues to be high. Researchers have demonstrated that the use of a medication screening tool identifying PIMs can improve medication safety among older adults. Screening tools, such as the Beers criteria and the Screening Tool for Older Persons’ Prescriptions (STOPP), are evidence-based guidelines that use several validated criteria to identify PIMs in older adults’ medication regimens. While the use of these tools is standard in the acute care setting, limited studies have been conducted regarding their use in the nursing home setting. The purpose of this project was to …

Exploring The Need For Sustainable Reform Of Local Government To Build Administrative Capacity In Jamaica, Mario Antonio Perez Woode

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The lack of labor and financial resources in local Jamaican governments’ corporation negatively impacts senior management government officials’ sustainability efforts. Grounded in Buchanan’s and Tullock’s public choice theory, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences and perceptions of 20 randomly selected Jamaican senior management government officials from two local government corporations concerning the financial and human resource capacity issues. Data were collected using semistructured interviews, government documents, and public and government legislative data. The data were analyzed using the Smith and Osborn interpretative phenomenological analysis, and the Moustakas modified van Kaam 7-step analysis method. …

Puerto Rico School Administrators’ Authentic Leadership And Turnover Intent Moderated By Supervisor Support, Cristal Vazquez Davila

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The turnover rates of Puerto Rican high school teachers continue to increase and have an adverse effect not only on the quality of education but also on the budget of Puerto Rico’s Department of Education (PRDE). By examining the factors of perceived supervisor support and authentic leadership influencing teachers’ turnover intentions, steps can be taken to reduce the turnover rates. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between school administrators’ authenticity and the turnover intentions of a sample of high school teachers employed by the PRDE. The framework was based on social exchange theory, authentic leadership theory, …

Public Perceptions Of Nigeria Police Monetary Bribery In Awka, Nigeria, Benjamin Chukwuka Nnadozie

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractThe Nigerian police are often perceived by the Nigerian public as a very corrupt institution due to reports in the media and direct experiences of police brutality, extortion, injustice, and especially monetary bribery. The refusal to pay monetary bribes to the police has led to loss of lives and a lack of trust in the police. The purpose of this study was to investigate public perceptions of police monetary bribery in Awka in Anambra State, Nigeria. The conceptual framework was Novak et al.’s dynamic social impact theory. The research questions focused on understanding how the public perceived police monetary bribery …

An Analysis Of Liquefied Petroleum Gas Adoption For Household Cooking In Nigeria, Saheed Olanrewaju Lasisi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The Nigerian government established a domestic liquefied petroleum gas penetration program (DLPGPP) to support Nigerian households that still use traditional fuels, which are inefficient and hazardous for users while polluting and degrading the environment. Little is known about the relationships that exist among liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) accessibility, LPG affordability, and LPG adoption to guide DLPGPP implementation. Narrowing this gap was the purpose of this study using the general framework of consumer theory. The study's research questions addressed the effects of LPG affordability and LPG accessibility on LPG adoption for cooking in Nigeria’s households. A cross-sectional, correlational survey was employed …

The Lived Experience Of Quality Of Life Of Older Adults In Rural Ghana, Benjamin Arthur

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The quality of life (QOL) of older adults in rural Ghana is of growing concern, locally and throughout the country. In Ghana, it is the tradition for family members to take care of older adults without any government support, but research has shown that changing economic and social structures make this tradition less optimal, so older adults suffer physically and emotionally. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of QOL for older adults in rural Ghana. The ecological systems theory was used to explore the integral role of family support and QOL in the microsystem, …

Perceptions Of Emotional And Social Intelligence Competencies Among Leaders Within Collective Impact Initiatives In Puerto Rico, Geraldine Bayron-Rivera

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The complexity of global societies’ issues requires leaders whose competencies facilitate collective impact initiatives as strategies for coordinating multisector efforts to transform substantial social problems. In Puerto Rico, such endeavors are not producing expedient long-term impact. It is crucial to implement said collaborations relying on leaders' emotional strength and skills, enabling efficient processes to find solutions for subpar circumstances in communities. It was unknown whether senior managers in Puerto Rico understood the necessary emotional and social intelligence leadership competencies which must be developed to improve organizational processes in local cross-sector collaborations. This phenomenological study aimed to understand whether these leaders …

Electoral Justice Traits Of Youth-Led Election Violence In Nairobi’S Informal Settlements, Gezahegn Kebede Gebrehana

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Youth residing in Kenya’s informal urban settlements commonly engage in election-related violence, yet little is known about why this occurs. This study explored the triggers for the escalation of such violence in informal settlements, which has been characteristic of almost all elections held since the introduction of the multiparty system in 1991. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand lived experiences of young adults and community leaders who lived in one of Nairobi’s informal settlements who had witnessed the level of youth violence in the city. A conceptual foundation related to electoral justice that manifests in different …