Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From Psychology To Phylogeny: Bridging Levels Of Analysis In Cultural Evolution, Mason Youngblood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cultural evolution, or change in the socially learned behavior of a population over time, is a fascinating phenomenon that is widespread in humans and present in some non-human animals. In this dissertation, I present an array of cultural evolutionary studies that bridge pattern and process in a wide range of research models including music, extremism, and birdsong. The first chapter is an introduction to the field of cultural evolution, including a bibliometric analysis of its structure. The second and third chapters are studies on the cultural dynamics of music sampling traditions in hip-hop and electronic music communities and far-right extremism …

A Lasting Impression: Higher Education’S Effects On Mass Polarization In The Us, Bradley Highfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Political polarization has been growing exponentially over the past few decades, not only with political elites and party activists, but also in the mass public. During the same period of time, the United States has also seen an exponential increase in higher education attainment. This paper examines the possible relationship higher education and elite political polarization may have in regards to the increasing polarization within the American electorate. Additionally, I aim to extrapolate how collegiate institutions create an increase in ideological polarization, as well as affective partisanship, while synthesizing Political Science studies on the effects of college education towards political …

Young Women And The Initiation Trajectory Of Prescription Opioid Misuse, Rachel Chernick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The most recent opioid epidemic in United States history emerged in the late 1980s and continues its destructive impact to this day. It has evolved into a devastating public health crisis with a broad range of medical, social, and economic consequences. This dissertation focuses on the “first wave” of this opioid epidemic characterized largely by the misuse of prescription opioids. The research questions here were focused on developing a greater understanding of the social processes involved in young women’s initiation of prescription opioid misuse (POM) during this first wave. The research methodology consisted of a cross-sectional, exploratory study using qualitative …

Optimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will? A Gramscian Analysis Of Two New York Police Reform Campaigns, Christian Covington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper attempts to analyze two recent New York police reform campaigns - one to overturn the state’s system of criminal bail release, the other to make police officer discipline transparent to the public - using theories given by Antonio Gramsci. The paper will apply the concepts of hegemony, hegemonic discourse, the intertwining of the state and civil society, the attainment of political agency amongst the subaltern, and the role ideology plays in all of these concepts, to assess the success of the reform campaigns. The paper will argue that many of these concepts are further developments of political theories …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

How Are Refugees Depicted In The Amarillo Globe-News?, Shannon Reimers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research uses media analysis to ask how refugees in Amarillo, Texas, are portrayed in the Amarillo Globe-News from 2002 until January 2021. Amarillo, Texas is a small, conservative city with a long history of refugee resettlement. Researching one town, over an extended period, tells a rich story of how refugees are depicted in the local media. This research is important because while the United States takes in refugees on a national level, the local level is where they settle and become long-term members of a community. It shares what a community resettling refugees has to say about them. In …

Predictors Of Lexical Accessibility Of Common And Proper Nouns In Older Age: Evidence From The Tip-Of-The-Tongue State, Amy Victoria Vogel-Eyny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the notable language difficulties experienced by healthy older adults is word retrieval failure, specifically the tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT). A TOT occurs when one has a strong sense of knowing the word, such that the semantic content is accessed, but the entirety of the word’s phonology is temporarily inaccessible. Such retrieval difficulty is attributable, at least in part, to characteristics of the target word. Psycholinguistic features may uniquely influence the semantic and/or phonological stages of word production. An additional factor known to influence TOT-likelihood is noun type: proper nouns elicit TOTs more often than do common nouns. The discrepancy …

Circuits Underlying Serotonin Mediated Sex Differences In Fear Learning, Rebecca Ravenelle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a trauma-related disorder characterized by intense fearful memory formation. Women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, indicating there may be sex differences in the underlying neural circuits. Given that serotonin (5-HT) dysfunction is implicated in PTSD, and 5-HT modulates fear learning, we investigated whether there are sex differences in the modulation of fear learning by 5-HT. We administered the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram (20mg/kg or 10m/kg, i.p.) once to male and female mice prior to auditory fear conditioning and tested the effects on fear memory the next day. We found …

Remaking Cinema: Black Hollywood Films, Filmmakers, And Finances, Kiana A. Carrington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of my project was to create a dataset of black film that can be used for analysis of fiscal trends in black film. It includes the estimated budget, domestic and worldwide box office numbers for over 700 American black films. I defined black films as those that centered on African American stories and African American characters, or were made by Black filmmakers. I also included movies embraced by African American audiences that were made by non-Black filmmakers like Bad Boys, Django Unchained, and The Color Purple. I used a combination of Box Office Mojo, The Black Cinema Database, …

Traces Of Absence: How The Trauma Of The Yemenite, Mizrahi And Balkan Kidnapped Children Affair Is Present In Photographs And Home Movies, Natalie Haziza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1948 and 1956, an estimated thousands of babies and young children were kidnapped through the state medical system, in the newly established State of Israel. They were offered for adoption to barren parents (often Holocaust survivors), sold to international adoptive families (often in the United States), and in the most disturbing cases used in medical experiments. Parents were often told that their children had died during routine medical care, but were provided with neither death certificate nor body. The majority of the victims of these kidnappings were Mizrahi - Jewish immigrant families from Arab and Muslim countries. Most families …

Sanctuary Says, Alexandra Délano Alonso, Abou Farman, Anne Mcnevin, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

In 2018, the New School Working Group on Expanded Sanctuary collaboratively organized a series of workshops in New York to reflect on the question of sanctuary as a conceptual and practical starting point for cross-coalitional politics, including its tensions and risks. This short piece is an attempt to bring together the sentiments expressed in those workshops by activists, organizers, students and academics focusing on anti-racist, pro-migrant, and pro-Indigenous struggles, in a form that engages sanctuary as an ongoing question.

Testing The Waters: An Investigation Of The Impact Of Hot Tubbing On Experts From Referral Through Testimony, Jennifer T. Perillo, Anthony D. Perillo, Nikoleta Despodova, Margaret Bull Kovera

Publications and Research

Objective: The present research examined whether concurrent expert testimony (“hot tubbing”) and court appointed testimony reduced adversarial allegiance in clinical experts’ judgments compared with traditional adversarial expert testimony. Hypotheses: We predicted Hypothesis 1: Defense experts would render more not responsible judgments and lower ratings of criminal responsibility than would prosecution experts; Hypothesis 2: Adversarial allegiance effects on experts’ judgments would be heightened for adversarial experts and attenuated for concurrent experts over time; Hypothesis 3: Adversarial and concurrent experts would report higher dissonance than would court-appointed experts and adversarial experts’ ratings would increase over time, concurrent experts’ ratings would decrease, and …

Delayed Modulation Of Glutamate Receptors By Anti-Epileptic Drugs After Traumatic Brain Injury In Rats, Edgar Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant health concern. Around 74 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury worldwide. The damage caused by TBI produces two types of injury; primary and secondary injuries. Primary injury is caused within milliseconds and is irreversible. Secondary brain injury is delayed and produced by molecular, cellular, and structural disruption after the initial injury. One of the most devastating dysfunction after TBI is glutamate neurotransmitter overactivation that could lead to neurotoxic levels of glutamate in the brain (i.e., excitotoxicity). Excitotoxicity has been linked with the development of epilepsy after TBI, also known as post-traumatic epilepsy …

Learning To Feel Safe: A Translational Study Of The Influence Of Safety Learning On Anxiety-Related Overgeneralized Fear, Hyein Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health diagnoses, affecting about a third of the population in their lifetime. However, approximately a third of individuals with anxiety do not respond to current treatment approaches, highlighting the need to identify additional potential therapeutic mechanisms. Safety learning is one such mechanism, but methodological challenges and a dearth of research have prevented the field from advancing the understanding of the role of safety learning in the etiology and remediation of anxiety disorders. Animal research, using single-cued safety learning paradigms, has yielded promising early findings, demonstrating that safety learning directly reduces anxiety-related behaviors …

Examining The Transient Neural Dynamics Underlying Working Memory Maintenance For Complex Visual Stimuli, Chelsea Reichert Plaska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working memory (WM) is the temporary storage of information to accomplish a future goal. The WM delay period is the time after encoding but before retrieval when information is being maintained, typically in the absence of relevant stimuli. Understanding how the brain supports maintenance during the delay period, and how neural activity and connectivity are related to memory is critical for advancing both basic knowledge as well as informing declines in memory and cognition related to neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging. An open question in the field of WM research is how information is stored during this delay period. One …

From Poor Campesinos To Tortilla Kings: Mexican Migrant Elites, Yesenia Ruiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes a recent transnational Mexican migrant elite—a new social and economic group that emerged not from established elites or from privileged backgrounds, but from poor campesino families. Members of this group migrated to the U.S. from Mexico during the 1980s. The majority of these (male) entrepreneur migrants crossed the border as mojados without passports or money. Over a period of thirty years, these migrants have accumulated an unprecedented amount of wealth and, thereby, gain prestige and status within their communities. Successful in both the US and Mexico, these entrepreneurs are distinct from other transnational migrant groups. They have …

The Role Of Authoritarianism In The 2020 Election, Brandon Vigil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rise of authoritarianism in the United States has frequently been touted as an impossibility in the face of long-standing democratic institutions and processes. Yet recent trends in American political behavior suggest that this is not the case, that authoritarian behaviors can in fact be facilitated through these means. This study is concerned with measuring the prevalence of authoritarian attitudes among Americans, asking the key question, “Did authoritarianism play a role in the 2020 election?”, followed by an investigation into the extent of this effect. Logistic regression using 2020 ANES data is employed to predict 2020 presidential vote choice among …

Information Justice: The Histories And Futures Of Technology And Social Categories, Patrick Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation examines two controversies related to emergent uses of information from social media in psychological research and application. It focuses on controversies surrounding studies of face-based gaydar and the use of psychographic targeting by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US presidential election. Each controversy is analyzed in a case study that explores the issues specific to that study in relation to broader patterns across contexts to identify emergent trends in the use of information from social media in psychological research. Qualitative Content Analysis is used to analyze extant texts relevant to each case. In each study, findings related to …

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker, Sandy Mui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker curates local news stories in the United States that resulted in substantial accountability or change. Published on a Tumblr website, each local news story includes a blurb detailing what the story was about as well as the accountability or change that followed the story’s publication. News stories must meet the following criteria for inclusion:

1. Be published by a news outlet in the United States;
2. Cover a social issue or criminal activity at the local level;[1]
3. Lead to heightened awareness (whether local, national, or international) in the general public about the social issue or criminal …

The Ambiguity Of Diversity: How Parents Understand And React To School Desegregation Efforts, Adam Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New York City has one of the most segregated public school systems in the United States. The Department of Education is attempting to address segregation through district level diversity planning processes that potentially change school admissions policies. Using mixed methods, this thesis explores how advantaged parents in a Queens school district understand efforts to diversify and desegregate their district. I conducted semi-structured interviews with parents in the district, analyzed transcripts from public meetings about the planning process, and analyzed quantitative data about the schools, students, and residents of the district of study. Although parents were universally supportive of “diversity”, most …

El Pueblo Unido: How Threats Increased Latinx Turnout In Arizona’S 2020 General Election, Conner Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Latinx voter turnout in the United States has persisted to remain below White, Black, and Asian Americans. In 2020, county level data shows Latinx turnout reached historic levels in Arizona’s 2020 general election (Pew Research 2020; Census 2020). But throughout the past two decades, Latinx’s in Arizona have faced some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies in the nation. Currently, the literature on Latinx mobilization shows mixed results on the impact of political threats on Latinx turnout (Jones-Correa et al. 2018). Through in depth interviews with Latinx organizational leaders who managed mass mobilization efforts in 2020, this paper explores the role …

Relationships Between Sports, Physical Activity Participation, And Phys-Ed Gpa: Results And Analyses From A National Sample Of Asian American Students, Howard Z. Zeng, Raymond E. Weston, Juan Battle

Publications and Research

Relationships among sports, physical activity (PA) participation, and educational outcomes have been studied in various venues, however, used a longitudinal method with a national sample of Asian-American High-School Students (AAHSS) was barely covered. This study employed the latest National High-School Longitudinal Study data (Participants, N = 950); hierarchical regression modeling and intersectionality theory examined, analyzed, and evaluated the relationships among sports, PA participation, and the outcomes on the physical education grade point average (Phys-Ed GPA). Moreover, the demographics factors impact on the participants' Phys-Ed GPA was also analyzed and evaluated. The primary results included: 1) the female students who participate …

Witchcraft, Magic, Religion: Anth 1102 Oer Syllabus, Lisa Pope Fischer

Open Educational Resources

People rely on religion and various belief systems to bring meaning and understanding to everyday life. This course will show how anthropologists unravel and interpret cultural belief systems to gain insight into the cultural environment. Cross-cultural ethnographic examples will illustrate the various ways in which Anthropologists analyze belief systems as a way to understand a culture. Topics include religion, worldview, symbolism, taboo, myth, ritual, witchcraft, shamanism, religious practitioners, magic, healing, and spirits. Students must be prepared to look at both literate and pre-literate ritual systems. Non-Western belief systems are contrasted with religions of the Western world.

Are Delusions Beliefs?, Dorothy Reviss

Publications and Research

A belief is one’s personal attitude regarding an issue in the universe that contains evidence of truth to it. A delusion can be defined as a peculiar belief that contradicts reality, scientific evidence, and rational thinking, and may be attributed to personality disorders. In order to determine where a delusion is a belief, it is important to recognize the circumstances under which certain beliefs are held. While a delusion sounds similar to a false belief, it is an entirely unique phenomenon. In the case of personality disorders like the Capgras delusion, schizophrenia, and Reverse Othello syndrome individuals genuinely believe in …

Impact Of Warnings On Gamified Personality Assessments, Sabrina Yu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several years, there has been a growing interest in using gamified and game-based assessments to measure individual differences (e.g., cognitive ability, personality) in both research and selection contexts. This interest, in part, stems from the research showing that gamified assessments are associated with more positive candidate reactions to selection processes and the potential to mitigate faking on personality assessments. To date, little research has examined the impact of gamification on faking overall and little research has combined gamification with a more traditional method of mitigating faking on personality assessments such as warnings. The purpose of this study …

Eco-1400 - Money And Banking Syllabus, Cesar Castope

Open Educational Resources

A comprehensive study of the nature of money and monetary standards; the development, structure, and functions of American central banking; commercial banking; non-bank financial intermediaries; investment banking; and financial markets. Federal and State bank regulation and supervision, major monetary theories. Analysis of the impact and major role of the American banking system on the economy. Includes a study of international finance. Successful completion of this course satisfies one Civic Engagement interaction.

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

Publications and Research

Many cities in the United States experienced increased gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021. Shootings in New York City grew sharply in 2020 and remained elevated in 2021, but the degree of increase may be in decline. This databit looks at the percent change in shootings citywide by quarter and shooting incidents across the NYC boroughs by quarter from 2007 to 2021.

The Social Contract Theory In The Face Of Empirical Morality: Integration And Its Consequences, Margaux F F Ramee

Student Theses and Dissertations

The following study experimentally investigated moral attitudes, both intuitive and reasoned, to assess the validity of the social contract theories of four prominent thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls. These social contract thinkers, though different in their proposals, all attempt to provide an answer to one long-withstanding question: which governmental structure is best? Their theories also interweave moral cognition with the governmental structure recommended. Thus, this research endeavored to contribute to the contemporary discussion of the social contract theory, encourage empirical investigation of the social contract theory, and provide a framework for future research of a …

Exploring Social Determinants Of Covid-19 Related Sickness And Suffering In The Bronx, Hamida Chumpa

Student Theses and Dissertations

Through a positivistic and phenomenological approach, the study examines social determinants of COVID-19 related sickness and suffering in the Bronx, New York City, New York, ZIP codes 10462, 10472, 10467, 10458, 10474, and 10464. I utilize a violence paradigm (structural and everyday violence) to describe the social determinants of risk and sickness-related suffering and deploy an assemblage framework to shed light on how these determinants create negative synergies that undermine wellbeing and render certain communities vulnerable to extreme suffering. The mixed methods include 64 surveys and eight interviews. Analysis methods include a descriptive analysis of survey results and a thematic …

Hiring Candidates With Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd): Effects Of Diagnostic Disclosure And Presence Of Asd Behaviors On Employability Ratings, Geetanjali Sugrim

Student Theses and Dissertations

Despite the increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses and organizational emphasis on workplace diversity, limited information is known about how disclosure of an ASD diagnosis and presence of ASD behaviors impact perceived employability in an interview setting. The purpose of this study was to evaluate these factors using an experimental design. Participants were 258 students (M_age = 21.9 years, SD = 5.1; 56% female; 75% non-White) at an urban public college who completed questionnaires on ASD knowledge and stereotypes and evaluated employability of vignette characters interviewing for a job interview. Vignettes varied across two dimensions: ASD disclosure …