Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Psychological Allure Of Alford: Why Innocents Plead Guilty, Johanna Hellgren

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Alford plea allows defendants to maintain their innocence while accepting a plea. Although this plea is more prevalent than jury trials, it is largely unknown to both lay people and researchers (Redlich & Özdoğru, 2009). Legal scholars have argued that the Alford plea may present an undue influence on innocent defendants who may not otherwise accept a plea, while other assert that the Alford plea is a beneficial alternative for defendants who want to preserve their reputation (Ronis, 2009; Ward, 2004). However, no research to date has explored either of these assumptions.

The goals of the current research were …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Demobilizing And Reintegrating Ex-Combatants: Explaining Success And Failure On The National And Subnational Levels, Sally Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) is the largest intervention in nearly all the United Nation ongoing large-scale peacekeeping missions and is tasked with restoring public security, law, and order after conflict. A well-planned and flexible reintegration process is known to restore social capital and promote the viability of long-term peace locally, nationally, and internationally. War-torn countries run the risk of returning to war if former combatants are not provided with vocational skills, placed into employment, and reintegrated successfully. Through analyzing DDR programs on the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, this dissertation is an attempt at finding determinants for a successful DDR …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Remarkably Ordinary, An Oral History:
 Examining The Micro Effects Of Family Reunification On The Lee Siblings And Their Spouses, Carol Joo Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Family reunification accounts for a majority of entry mechanisms by which current Korean immigrants arrived in the U.S. The peak Korean immigration period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s saw a dwindling of skill-based immigration and a rapid increase of immigrants who arrived through family preferences as a direct result of the Immigration Act of 1965. Despite there being ample studies and aggregate data on the post-1965 immigrants from Korea, not enough micro-level research has been conducted on the ways in which the family reunification provisions affected individuals, their brothers and sisters, and the inter-family dynamic both prior and …

Climate Change And The Ancestors: Rain, Gender And Politics In An African Water Catchment, Jessie Fredlund

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Uluguru, a small mountain range in eastern Tanzania and one of the rainiest places in East Africa, serves as the principal water catchment for Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, and for commercial farms along the country’s central coast. Home to smallholder farmers who cultivate a variety of crops on mostly rain-fed farms, the catchment has been a site of struggle over water and nature since the nineteenth century. Today, climate change has rendered rainfall increasingly unpredictable, and a wave of “sustainable development” interventions has pressured farmers to change their practices and to engage in unpaid forms of ecological labor …

Avocado Mania: The Rise And Costs Of Our Obsession With Avocados, Rosa C. Lourentzatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The past two decades have seen a surge in global demand for avocados, which have become popular among middle- and high-income fractions of society in developed regions of the world. Avocados are predominantly consumed far from their centers of origin and out of their traditional cultural context. The United States imports 87 percent of its avocados from a single region in Mexico, Michoacán. The systems of production and provision that have risen to meet the demand for this fashionable fruit have had devastating social and environmental effects, including deforestation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, pollution, displacement of indigenous populations, food insecurity, …

Contributions Of Reward Identity And Time Prediction Errors To Pavlovian Learning, Daniel B. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some models of associative learning attempt to explain effects such as blocking and unblocking as reflecting a prediction error (PE): Associative strength, and thereby learning, are said to be greater when the unconditioned stimulus (US) received following a cue deviates from one’s expectations. Some models of PE-motivated behavior and PE-relevant brain activity represent the US as a single quantitative variable for outcome value, and that learning therefore only occurs when outcome value differs from expectations. There is growing evidence to suggest that changes in other dimensions of reward, such as identity and timing, also contribute to learning. In Experiment 1, …

A Comparison Of Simulated Schizophrenia In Mental Health Experts And Genuine Schizophrenia In Psychiatric Patients, Amanda Rosinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Malingering includes the intentional feigning of psychiatric symptoms combined with motivation for external gain (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Malingering is likely to occur in the justice system in both criminal and civil contexts, as there is increased opportunity for secondary gain in these settings. When individuals successfully malinger, it can be very costly for the United States. For example, if an individual successfully malingers, it can delay their criminal proceedings, allow them to inappropriately use resources associated with psychiatric or medical treatment, allow them to gain access to unneeded medications or financial assistance, or allow them to avoid work (Chafetz …

Detection And Morphological Analysis Of Novel Russian Loanwords, Yulia Spektor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper investigates recent English loanwords in Russian and explores ways in which computational methods can help further theoretical research. The goal of the study is two-fold: to find new, previously unattested loanwords borrowed over the last decade and to examine the rate of adaptation of the new borrowings, attested by the degree to which they conform to the constraints of the Russian language. First, we train a finite-state pipeline that combines character n-gram language models, which encode phonotactic and lexical properties of loanwords, with a binary classifier to detect loanwords. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance results during evaluation, surpassing …

From Rulay To Rules: Perceptions Of Prison Life And Reforms In The Dominican Republic’S Traditional And New Prisons, Jennifer Peirce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the implementation of reforms to the prison system in the Dominican Republic, with an emphasis on how incarcerated people perceive their conditions and daily life in confinement. In 2003, the Dominican Republic established a New Prison Management Model, focused on international human rights standards and rehabilitation. This model now manages over half of the prison facilities and a third of the incarcerated population, while the previous, “traditional” model continues to operate in tandem. The “new” and reformed facilities (Centers for Correction and Rehabilitation) feature new buildings, programs, and correctional officer staff with multi-disciplinary training. In contrast, the …

Bodies On The Line: The Politics Of Regulating Pornography In Los Angeles, Christopher J. Baum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the regulation of sexually explicit media in the United States – specifically in Los Angeles – and the site used to understand it is the modern pornography industry at its points of production. I argue that since the industry's formation in the early- 1970s, regulatory efforts have focused on controlling porn worker’s bodies as a way of enacting broader social transformations and reshaping the domains of erotic life. Drawing from eighteen months of ethnographic research, I explore several interlocking forms of regulation. I begin by examining the formation of pornographic production cultures during what I call the …

Orban's Hungary: Lack Of Freedoms Becoming The Motivation For Hungarian Emigration, Fanni Sampson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past 10 years Hungary has gone through some major systematic changes since the Orban administration took office. The implementations of the Orban government serve the benefits and power of his party and aim to limit the freedom of Hungarian citizens. Orban, throughout these changes, emphasizes the importance of preserving the Hungarian national identity, which he defines as far-right conservative christian values and takes control over everything that does not fit under this definition. This thesis argues that the Hungarian government is becoming increasingly dictatorial under the Orban administration which not only challenges the life of Hungarian citizens but …

How Frustration Impacts The Relationship Between Potential For Child Physical Abuse Perpetration And Emotion Processing, Amanda L. Zwilling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research conducted over the past 20 years has substantiated the serious, long-lasting impacts of child physical abuse (CPA) has on individuals, families, and society. Research has also suggested several appreciable risk factors for perpetration of CPA. Intergenerational transmission of abuse, described as the personal experience of abuse or neglect during childhood, is prominent in the literature as a predictor of subsequent perpetration of CPA. However, the majority of individuals who experience abuse in childhood do not subsequently engage in perpetration of child abuse as adults. As such, the literature has sought to investigate risk factors that mediate the relationship between …

Por Ellas: A Latina’S Autoethnography On Emotions, Achievement And Agentic Learning, Ivonne Barreras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, students of Spanish-speaking descent classified as Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx attending public school districts continue to demonstrate alarmingly high academic underachievement and dropout rates. Standards-based learning environments and related assessments tend to marginalize people whose lived realities already make the prospect of achievement daunting. In other words, people living amid high-risk factors, including low educational and occupational aspirations, health, or family-related absenteeism, counterculture or early pregnancy, are often among those whose decision to drop out is most often influenced by social and academic experiences (Rumberger, 2011). Research on neuroplasticity and mindfulness explains the influence emotions have …

The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …

From The Voices Of Five African American Teenage Girls: Demystifying The Role Of Stress In School, Selena M. Williams-Yii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored how African American Teenage Girls framed and navigated their stressful experiences in educational contexts. Drawing from one-on-one interviews and focus groups, this study aimed to raise awareness about the ways African American Teenage Girls defined, interpreted, and internalized the tensions of stress in a school setting. This exploratory qualitative study was grounded in the conceptual frameworks of Black Feminist Theory (BFT), and Critical Race Theory (CRT). These theories were used to explore how systemic oppression may cause stress. By sharing their collective and individual stories, this study revealed my participants grappled with sources of stress, such as …

Advancing Gender Equity Through Legislation: Overview Of Select Laws Passed From 2014–2020, Maria J. D’Agostino, Nicole M. Elias

Publications and Research

Advancing Gender Equity through Legislation: A Compilation of Laws Passed from 2014 - 2020 aims to provide New York City residents with information about legislation passed under the de Blasio administration that aims to promote gender equity in the city.

Safety And Belonging In Immigrant-Serving Districts: Domains Of Educator Practice In A Charged Political Landscape, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Dafney Blanca Dabach, Ariana Mangual Figueroa

Publications and Research

Drawing from a context of reception framework, this article asks the following questions: How do educators describe issues of safety and belonging in the context of a charged immigration policy climate? What practices have educators developed to support immigrant-origin youth? And, what are the relationships between educators’ perceptions of safety and belonging and educator practices? We analyze educators’ survey responses administered across six school districts in different contexts across the United States, including the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. We synthesize four domains of educator practice: signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space …

Cocaine, Cocaethylene And Ethanol In Postmortem Blood Submitted To The New York City Office Of Chief Medical Examiner, Jada T. Alexis

Student Theses

Cocaine overdose deaths are on the rise in the United States. This increase may be due to the co-consumption of cocaine with other drugs. When cocaine is ingested in conjunction with alcohol, a specific metabolite called cocaethylene forms. Information regarding cocaethylene, specifically its interpretive value in post-mortem cases, has not been widely studied. Data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City revealed that there were 195 cases in 2017 positive for cocaethylene. These cases were most likely to involve black (42.1%) males (79.5%) in Manhattan (28.2%) aged 50 - 59 (34.4%). Most of the cases …

Stigma Towards Treatment Amongst People With Mental Illness, Haya M. Khan

Student Theses

There is evidence for the persistence of stigma towards people diagnosed with mental illness, as well as that endorsement of stigma is associated with reluctance to seek treatment. However, the process by which self-stigma impacts treatment choice amongst people with mental illness is not well understood. This study examined the impact of self-stigma on one’s decision to take medication or undergo psychotherapy; as well as the impact of stigma on choice of individual or group therapy. Surveys were administered through CloudResearch to 128 participants from the U.S, who reported a disorder diagnosed by a professional. The SSMIS-SF and ISMI-9 estimated …

Refugee Higher Education & Participatory Action Research Methods: Lessons Learned From The Field, Hadas Yanay, Juan Battle

Publications and Research

Refugee access to higher education is devastatingly low. Recognizing the complex barriers facing refugee learners, global educational initiatives are innovating flexible learning models which promote blended online and in-person learning modalities. This article describes the implementation of a five month, online-based internship pilot offered to 21 refugee participants in qualitative and quantitative research methods, through a participatory action research (PAR) framework in five different countries -- Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, and Lebanon. The internship is part of the Global Education Movement (GEM), which brings refugees accredited online college degree and career development opportunities. Through direct engagement, observation of the …

A Day At The Races In Black And White: How An 1898 Horse Race Led To A Whipping, A Lawsuit, And A 1901 Arrest, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

After losing an 1898 horse race in the Bronx, New York, African-American jockey Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Clayton, who had won the Kentucky Derby in 1892 at the age of fifteen, heard an insult from the crowd along the rail and struck a white spectator from Brooklyn across the face with his riding whip. The blow resulted in a two hundred dollar fine by the track stewards, but ultimately led to a civil trial, a financial judgment against Clayton that he ignored, and then an arrest and incarceration for non-payment of the judgment, which some writers mistakenly still claim was for race-fixing. …

Agency Rescues Competition For Credit Assignment Among Predictive Cues From Adverse Learning Conditions, Mihwa Kang, Ingrid Reverte, Stephen Volz, Keith Kaufman, Salvatore Fevola, Anna Matarazzo, Fahd H. Alhazmi, Inmaculada Marquez, Mihaela D. Iordanova, Guillem R. Esber

Publications and Research

A fundamental assumption of learning theories is that the credit assigned to predictive cues is not simply determined by their probability of reinforcement, but by their ability to compete with other cues present during learning. This assumption has guided behavioral and neural science research for decades, and tremendous empirical and theoretical advances have been made identifying the mechanisms of cue competition. However, when learning conditions are not optimal (e.g., when training is massed), cue competition is attenuated. This failure of the learning system exposes the individual’s vulnerability to form spurious associations in the real world. Here, we uncover that cue …

Review Of Alternatives To Incarceration Efforts Worldwide, Emma Barton, Charlotte Drozd, Anne Fatooh, Katelyn Ferguson, Marc Gale, Parkash Garcha, Karen Giraldo, Aimee Hanstein, Matthew Jobson, Josephine Kehm, Lindsay Lerner, Meera Martin, Devon Mcmanamon, Mervyn Payne, Brianna Rivers, Bianca Suazo, Arlinda Xhuveli, Rosemary L. Barberet

Publications and Research

Despite global interest in treating substance use disorders as a health issue, many countries choose a criminal justice response instead. The goal of this project was to research the readiness of countries to establish or expand alternatives to incarceration (ATIs) for persons with substance use disorders (SUDs) in countries around the globe. This report gathers, compiles and analyzes information on alternatives to incarceration for persons involved in the criminal justice with substance use disorders, worldwide (193 UN Member States plus Greenland, Kosovo, Palestine and Taiwan). As such, this report presents the first attempt to compile this information globally and completely. …

Shooting Surge Continuing To Slow Across New York City, Jeffrey A. Butts, Richard A. Espinobarros

Publications and Research

This report looks at quarter-specific comparisons of police reported shooting incidents across New York City. Shooting incidents increased between the first and second quarters of both 2020 and 2021. However, shooting incident increases slowed between quarters 1 (January-March) and 2 (April-June) in 2021, compared to the same quarters of 2020. Quarter-specific comparisons are one way to address seasonal fluctuations in gun violence.

Police Spending And Crime Rates: Evidence From U.S. Cities, 1985 – 2010, Daniel Padrick

Theses and Dissertations

Panel data covering the largest U.S. cities from 1985-2010 is used to reevaluate the endogeneity issue between policing and crime rates. Crime rates are not found to be a strong predictor of police spending, indicating that reverse causality is not as severe an issue as frequently thought. Increases in police spending result in modest decreases in certain index crimes.

Notes From The Editor, Derek Stadler

Urban Library Journal

I am very pleased to welcome you to the second issue of the 26^th volume of Urban Library Journal. The second, or fall issue, of each volume is typically a collection of proceedings from the LACUNY Institute, held annually in spring. However, in light of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Institute was not held in 2020. Therefore, this issue will not contain proceedings. Instead, it is a special issue devoted to urban libraries and the pandemic. All articles underwent peer-review.

The Impact Of Select Buses On Taxi Ridership In Nyc, Sara Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this research is to measure the impact of select buses on taxi ridership in NYC. Due to the phased implementation of select buses in NYC, a difference-in-differences model was used. Taxi ridership on the M14A/M14D, M34, M79, and M15 bus routes was examined as the treatment group. The control group is the M100/M101 non-select bus route that runs along Lexington and Amsterdam Avenue. The results from this model show that the M14A/M14D, M34, and M79 select buses had a negative statistically significant impact on taxi ridership. The M15 select bus had a positive statistically insignificant impact on …

Case 3847 – Simopithecus Oswaldi Andrews, 1916 (Currently Theropithecus Oswaldi; Mammalia, Primates, Cercopithecidae), Proposed Conservation By Reversal Of Precedence With Cynocephalus Atlanticus Thomas, 1884., Eric Delson, David M. Alba, Stephen R. Frost, Dagmawit Abebe Getahun, Christopher C. Gilbert

Publications and Research

The purpose of this application, under Articles 23.9.3 and 81.1 of the Code, is to conserve the usage of the species-group name Simopithecus oswaldi Andrews, 1916 by giving it precedence over its senior subjective synonym Cynocephalus atlanticus Thomas, 1884. Theropithecus is a common to dominant member of the extinct primate community across Africa after 4 million years ago (Jablonski & Frost, 2010) and often co-occurred with extinct humans (Hominini); fossils are also known rarely across Eurasia (Roberts et al., 2014). Most fossil samples are currently included in Theropithecus oswaldi (Andrews, 1916), which is often divided into chrono-geographic subspecies. Cynocephalus atlanticus …