Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Resting-State Functional Connectivity In Youth With Gender Dysphoria, Felix L. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Current developmental models of gender identity and gender dysphoria (GD) lack sex-specific profiles of brain function that differentiate between typically-developing and cross-gender identified youth, as postulated by models like the unified theory of the origins of sex differences (Arnold, 2009) and the neurobiological theory of the origins of transsexuality (Swaab & Garcia-Falgueras, 2009). Previously, investigators have used brain imaging modalities such as Resting-State functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (R-fMRI) to demonstrate differences in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between typically-developing male and female youth, and between typically-developing and GID-diagnosed youth. In the present pilot study, I used R-fMRI to investigate differences in …

Using Cogenerative Dialogue To Catalyse Change, Carol A. Woodburn-Mcdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cogenerative dialogue is an empowering pedagogical approach to advance research. In my study cogenerative dialogue and coteaching were employed in an algebra 1 class in an urban high school in New York City. Lessons were cotaught with students and were videotaped for further analysis. The findings suggest that cogens constitute an excellent avenue to catalyze change in an urban algebra class.

Detecting Cognitive, Functional And Behavioral Response To Donepezil In Alzheimer’S Disease: The Role Of Attention Tasks, Clara Vila-Castelar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction: Cholinesterase Inhibitors (ChEIs) used in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) have modest effects, heterogeneous treatment response, and it has been difficult to detect treatment response. The standard research and clinical outcome measure, the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog) aggregates multiple cognitive domains, and has limited sensitivity. We propose that because acetylcholine is directly linked to the cognitive domain of attention, and ChEIs increase available acetylcholine, measures of attention under high-load conditions could predict long-term cognitive, functional and behavioral response, and thus, unlike global measures, could be sensitive to treatment efficacy.

Method: We conducted a longitudinal, open label donepezil trial …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

The Relationship Between Cognitive And Neural Bases Of Metamemory Judgments, Alexandra M. Gaynor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metamemory monitoring, the process of making subjective assessments of the status of one’s own memory, is crucial to guiding behavior and effective learning. Past cognitive research has shown that subjective confidence judgments are inferential in nature, and based on cues available at the time of the judgment. When confidence is based on cues that are related to objective memory performance, metamemory accuracy is high. However, past studies have shown that metamemory monitoring tends to be inaccurate because individuals base their confidence on information that is not predictive of memory success, such as the fluency with which items were encoded during …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Stereotype Threat As An Explanation For Sexual Risk Taking Behavior In Gay Men: A Multi-Study Exploration Of Mechanisms, Inna Saboshchuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stereotype threat is a hindrance in performance that occurs when an individual’s awareness of negative stereotypes associated with his/her group results in inadvertent conforming to that stereotype. Stereotype threat research has been conducted on myriad group and domain identifications but gay men are strikingly absent from the stereotype threat literature. One of the most prevalent stereotypes about gay men indicates they are sexually promiscuous and that this promiscuity is linked to HIV infection. In a series of three research projects, a theoretical model proposing stereotype threat as a mechanism for sexual risk taking behavior in gay men is tested. In …

Synthetic Control And Dynamic Panel Estimation: A Case Study Of Iran, Orkideh Gharehgozli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

International sanctions imposed on Iran, targeting primarily Iran’s key energy sector and its ability to access the international financial system, have harmed Iran’s economic growth, specifically from 2011 to 2014. This thesis uses this case to study and compare the applicability of two different popular approaches used in comparative case studies exploring the effect of a policy intervention.

In the Chapter 1 we study the synthetic control method. Using this method, we estimate the effect of the intensification of sanctions on Iran’s GDP during the period 2011 to 2014. The year of 2011 was Iran’s first full year under these …

Insecure Hegemony: The Cultural Construction Of 'Righteous Retaliation' In The Hunt For Osama Bin Laden, Marisa Tramontano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the American “authorized discourse” about the hunt for and killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to better understand it as an episode in American cultural hegemony maintenance. Through a structural hermeneutic analysis of presidential speeches and widely-circulated national strategy documents, high distribution news coverage, and entertainment media, alongside one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I illuminate the symbolic mechanics by which the death of Osama bin Laden was constructed as righteous and legitimate retaliatory violence in response to the unprompted, offensive violence of the 9/11 attacks.

Drawing on an array of theoretical approaches including classical sociologists Karl …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Using …

Essays On The Economics Of Unhealthy Behaviors, Raul Segura-Escano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore a variety of responses in the form of unhealthy behaviors as a consequence of different sudden events perceived by individuals. The first one is the doubtlessly pure exogenous shock caused by an unexpected terrorist attack, Boston Marathon Bombings. The second one is the turmoil caused by the Great Recession of 2008, which is the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression during the 1930’s. This dissertation consists of the following two chapters:

Chapter 1: “The Impact of Terrorism on Mental Health and Substance Use: Evidence from the Boston Marathon Bombings” On April 15, 2013, …

Syntactic Processing And Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming In Heritage Spanish Speakers And Late Bilinguals: Effects Of Exposure To L2 English On Processing Illicit Structures In L1 Spanish, Ian Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines real-time heritage language syntactic processing and tests the hypothesis that some commonly observed properties of heritage languages—apparent instability in grammatical knowledge and divergence from monolingual grammatical norms—can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the socially dominant language during online processing. To test this hypothesis, a novel cross-linguistic structural priming experiment based on self-paced listening was conducted with a group of heritage Spanish speakers and late Spanish-English bilinguals to test whether exposure to preposition stranding in English—a feature of core syntax that does not exist in Spanish—could facilitate processing of (ungrammatical) preposition stranding in a subsequently encountered Spanish …

The Trajectory From School To Work: A Study Of Life Chances Of School Leavers In The United States, The United Kingdom, Germany, And Sweden, Dirk Witteveen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The school-to-work transition is traditionally perceived as a one-time event; moving from education to one’s first job. In response to the increased complexity within today’s relationship between education and work, the research in this dissertation takes a different approach to the study of inequality and stratification. It considers the life phase between these two institutions as a trajectory – a pathway of several years wherein school careers and work careers overlap and interact.

Given the longitudinal approach, this study starts with a comparison of patterns of school-to-work trajectories in four distinct welfare state regimes: the United States, the United Kingdom, …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Manipulating Goal States And Brain States: Using Eeg And Hd-Tdcs To Investigate Mechanisms Underlying The Influence Of Achievement Goals On Declarative Memory, Yuliya Ochakovskaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When it comes to learning factual information, students may benefit from having opportunities where they can learn from their mistakes as opposed to only being asked to study that information. However, the achievement goals that instructors set for their students may influence how students engage with these learning opportunities. Although some instructors may focus students on learning (i.e. mastery goals), others may seek to motivate students by focusing them on doing better than others (i.e. performance goals), which is thought promote greater sensitivity to errors and impair learning. Across two studies, the present dissertation examined the roles of dorsolateral frontal …

Chile’S Decree-Law 1094: A Source Of Immigrant Vulnerability, Joao M. Da Silva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The South American nation of Chile is rapidly becoming a receiving nation for immigrants from other South American nations and the Caribbean. By December 31, 2017, the immigrant population had surpassed 1.1 million, 300,000 of whom are in irregular status. Immigration to Chile is governed by Decree-Law No. 1094 (DL 1094) of 1975, the oldest immigration law in South America, decreed by the military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet. I argue that the continued application of DL 1094, and the Chilean state’s failure to enact a new law that addresses immigration from a human rights-based approach, contributes to perpetuating …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

The study was a secondary analysis of a selection …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography Of An Indian Resource Frontier, Madhuri Karak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work analyzes resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in India’s bauxite-rich, densely forested Niyamgiri Hills. Nestled in the southwestern corner of Odisha state, the region is marginal to both colonial and postcolonial orders, an inaccessible resource frontier. I discuss how Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities threatened with displacement by bauxite mining – two of India’s 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups – draw on historically oppositional subjectivities to re-envision relations of power between the state, the market and the commons.

Over the past decade, new forms of sociality borne out of Niyamgiri’s anti-mining social movement …

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Against Criminalization And Pathology: The Making Of A Black Achievement Praxis, Charles M. Green Sr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Utilizing 29 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the life-course narratives of Black male scholars who, as victims of varying manifestations of structural violence, have “beat the odds” academically. Findings suggest that Black men and boys benefit from positive, racially-informed socialization that assists in the development of an internalized identity that (a) acts as a protective and resistant barrier against some of the impediments of institutional racism, (b) operates as a counter-criminogenic influence, and (c) facilitates educational resilience. Criminogenic Resistance Theory (C.RT) is presented as an alternative conceptualization of the process by which Black boys resist the criminogenic influences of structuralized violence.

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

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

Recursive Neural Networks For Semantic Sentence Representation, Liam S. Geron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic representation has a rich history rife with both complex linguistic theory and computational models. Though this history stretches back almost 50 years (Salton, 1971), recently the field has undergone an unexpected shift in paradigm thanks to the work of Mikolov et al., 2013(a & b) which has proven that vector-space semantic models can capture large amounts of semantic information. As of yet, these semantic representations are computed at the word level, and finding a semantic representation of a phrase is a much more difficult challenge. Mikolov et al., 2013(a&b) proved that their word vectors can be composed arithmetically to …

A Narrative Approach To Investigating The Contextual Nature Of Adolescent Self-Regulation, Kelly Conover

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Self-regulation has been identified as important for academic achievement, positive mental health, and social success (Steinberg, 2014, Mischel, 2014). This inquiry begins with self-regulation defined traditionally as “modulation of thoughts, emotions and behaviors working in conjunction, with deliberate or automated use of specific mechanisms and skills" (Karoly, 1993, pg. 25) and extends beyond that and similar definitions to a definition that adds “as enacted in relationships and situations with culturally-relevant media.” The need for such an expansion urgently accounts for the fact that young people are living in high-risk settings, where trauma, violence and economic difficulty are implicated not only …