Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Attention In Hiv, Kathleen Marie Van Dyk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In contrast to the striking benefit of advances in antiretroviral therapy on longevity and health in the HIV+ population, mild cognitive disorders persist (Heaton, Clifford et al., 2010). Additional factors that may be related to cognitive decline and warrant consideration in this population are aging and physical health status. Among cognitive domains affected, attention and processing speed have emerged as particularly vulnerable to the effects of HIV. There are also age effects observed in these domains, and we proposed that reduced physical health can also impact cognition in these areas, comparably to pain. Sensitive measures of attention that vary attentional …

Children First Reforms, Fair Student Funding And The Displacement Of Accountability In The New York City Department Of Education, Daniel Voloch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the first decade of the 21st century, Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw a radical transformation of the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) into a portfolio management district in which the primary responsibility of the NYCDOE was not to develop the capacity of school leaders or teachers, but instead to create a marketplace through which strong schools could be created and failing schools could be closed. Central to these reforms was a focus on the individual school as the site of both reform and accountability. In a 2006 interview with William Ouchi (2009), Joel Klein …

Does Financial Openness Affect Economic Growth In Asian Economies? A Case Study In Selected Asian Economies, 1980-2010, Hsinrong Wei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, financial liberalization has been one of the most important strategies for Asian countries to promote growth. However, debate emerges following several financial crises on whether liberalizing financial markets and allowing for free access to international capital markets, would benefit or impede economic development. The objective of this study is to examine the impact of financial openness on selected seventeen Asian economies and answer the three questions: 1. Is there any linkage between financial openness and economic growth for these seventeen Asian countries? 2. Does any of the financial openness pose positive or negative effects? 3. If no …

Homeland Security And Community Policing: Shift In Federal Funding Post Sep. 11: From Community Policing To Homeland Security, Mohsen S. Alizadeh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the aftermath of the 9/11, Homeland Security became the major model of the American Policing system, thus superseding community policing model. The purpose of this research is to use "before and after study design" to follow the grant trends of policing systems in order to examine whether the catastrophic events of 9/11 had a positive or negative impact on the grant funds of the mentioned policing models. Preliminary analyses revealed that there is significant difference in the mean level of funding prior and after the event for Homeland Security, community policing, and general policing programs. Segmented and Stepwise Regressions …

The People Behind The Presidential Bully Pulpit, Kara Susan Alaimo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"The People Behind the Presidential Bully Pulpit" argues that civil servants best serve the interests of both the President of the United States and the American people as public affairs officers in the Department of the Treasury. Using interviews conducted with political appointees who served as Treasury spokespeople during the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, civil servants who served in public affairs for the Treasury, and Treasury reporters who interacted frequently with the government officials, the study finds that civil servants better advance the goals of the President in the press than the political appointees personally …

The Myth Of The Unteachable: Youth, Race And The Capacity Of Alternative Pedagogy, Cathy R. Borck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research consisted of three years of qualitative inquiry, including 62 interviews with members of the Department of Education, school administrators, teachers and students, as well as a yearlong ethnography at a transfer school that I chose because of its history of success with the city's hardest- to-reach youth. To my knowledge, mine is the first formal study of New York City transfer schools. "Transfer schools" are New York City's public alternative schools, which serve "over-age, under- credited" high school students (i.e. students who are "behind" in school). These students experience many challenges and interruptions to their education, including homelessness, …

The Emergence Of L1 Innovations In Spanish-English Bilinguals: Evidence From Cross-Linguistic Structural Priming, Agustina Carando

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the hypothesis that structural priming is an internal mechanism motivating processes of convergence in bilinguals. The focus of the investigation is linguistic innovations in Spanish produced by Spanish-English bilinguals. Innovations involve both changes in the frequency of alternative constructions and existing patterns produced in new contexts modeled on English equivalents. From structural priming techniques that model convergence, the data assess the extent of English influence on Spanish, in a contact setting (New York, United States) and a non-contact setting (Córdoba, Argentina).

In the field of language contact, convergence may manifest itself as an increase in the use …

Use Of The Modified Emotional Stroop Task To Detect Suicide Risk In College Students, Yeunjoo Chung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is a challenge to detect those who are at potential risk for suicide because the base rate of suicidal behaviors in non-clinical samples is low. The aim of the present study was to investigate the concurrent and predictive validity of the emotional Stroop task (EST) as a behavioral marker for suicidal behaviors in a college population. Eight hundred and twenty students were asked to perform the EST and to respond to suicide-related self-report measures and were followed up with18 months later. The results indicated that participants with past suicide attempts had longer response latencies to the word "suicide" as …

Tonic And Phasic Inhibitory Mechanisms Mediating Sensorimotor Decision-Making In The Goldfish Auditory Startle Circuit, Paul C.P. Curtin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work describes related studies of cellular and synaptic signaling mechanisms involved in the balance of excitation and inhibition in the goldfish auditory startle circuit. The general purpose of these experiments was to identify novel mechanisms that contribute to action selection at different stages of the motor control hierarchy. The methods applied to achieve this goal tested the effects of selective antagonists for target receptor systems on sound-evoked excitation and inhibition of startle.

Chapter 2 describes a study of a poorly-understood serotonergic mechanism, the 5-HT_5A receptor, that was not previously functionally characterized in native tissues or associated with neural …

Policy Advocacy And The Performance Of Muslim American Identity, Emily Cury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In much of the political science literature, lobbying is conceptualized as a strategic attempt to influence policy. Policy actors are seen as independent agents competing to achieve policy outcomes that closely resemble their preferences. This understanding of policymaking has acquired a taken-for-granted nature and is therefore seldom questioned. The discourse of policy advocacy as a bargaining process has becomes, in part, a constraining discourse, leading academic inquiry to focus on questions of tactics and policy outcomes and ignore questions of how the policy process itself shapes and influences actors' identities and behavior.

Understood in purely strategic terms, Muslim American foreign …

Child Abductors Who Have Killed Their Victims: A Theoretical Approach To Spatial Analysis, Tonya M. Desa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the intense and prolonged public attention received when a child is abducted and killed, there are major gaps in the academic literature. One of the gaps pertains to the distances traveled by the offender between key crime locations. The overall aim of this study was to provide information concerning typical travel distances of offenders. This project utilized an archival data set compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The database constructed for this project consisted of 72 victims who were abducted and murdered by 68 offenders. The date range for these …

Street Code Adherence, Callous-Unemotional Traits And The Capacity Of Violent Offending Versus Non-Offending Urban Youth To Mentalize About Disrespect Murder, Zoe A. Berko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

National statistics are not available on the proportion of violent juvenile offenses driven by the experience of being disrespected. However, the New York Police Department estimates that about 40% of the city's shootings involve members of violent crews of 12 to 20 year olds with most of this gun violence driven by incidents of disrespect. Mentalization, defined as the ability to envision mental states (i.e., feelings, beliefs and intentions) in oneself and others, is viewed as underlying affect regulation, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the experience of self-agency, all of which are implicated in interpersonal violence (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, …

Techniques For Automatic Normalization Of Orthographically Variant Yiddish Texts, Yakov Peretz Blum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Yiddish is characterized by a multitude of orthographic systems. A number of approaches to automatic normalization of variant orthography have been explored for the processing of historic texts of languages whose orthography has since been standardized. However, these approaches have not yet been applied to Yiddish.

Using a manually normalized set of 16 Yiddish documents as a training and test corpus, four techniques for automatic normalization were compared: a hand-crafted set of transformation rules, an off-the-shelf spell checker, edit distance minimization with manually set weights, and edit distance minimization with weights learned through a training set.

Performance was evaluated by …

Target Zero: Why States Choose To Eradicate Infectious Diseases And How They Succeed, Gifty Abraham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Realism has remained the dominant paradigm within international relations for most of the modern era, emphasizing the competitive nature of the international arena and the unlikeliness of states to within it to cooperate. The attempts and further still, successes, by states to eradicate infectious diseases--which remain among the most cooperative enterprises--present a number of challenges to realism's assumptions, particularly with respect to the unlikely world historical-times during which the eradication campaigns took place. As such, a two-part puzzle arises. First, why would states, which are natural competitors, cooperate to eradicate infectious diseases given structural and situational incentives not to do …

"I Shall Not Fear:" Secure Attachment To G-D As A Buffer Against Anxiety, Peryl Agishtein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Religion has a long and mixed history in the field of psychology. Historically, some leading figures in the field viewed religion as a source of neuroses and poor mental health; others saw a more positive spiritual resource. Recently, empirical data on religion and mental health has proliferated. There is now consensus that religion is associated with lower depression. However, the link between religion and anxiety is less clear-cut. This paper proposes that a) religion can have exacerbating or alleviating effects on anxiety depending on which aspect of religion is being studied and b) the primary religious variable that affects anxiety …

Guilty Stereotypes: The Social Psychology Of Race And Suspicion In Police Interviews And Interrogations, Sara C. Appleby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over 300 people have been exonerated by post conviction DNA testing, unequivocally proving their innocence. Nearly 70% of these post conviction DNA exonerees are members of minority groups, and approximately 69% of those convicted as a result of false confessions are racial/ethnic minorities (www.innocenceproject.org). To date, there is little research on the role of race in police interviews and interrogations. The present research had two goals. First, we examined Black and White participants' experiences during a mock crime interview. Second, using the interviews from Study 1, we evaluated the role suspect race plays in police officers' veracity judgments. Using a …

Impact Of Ethnic Conflict On Development: A Case Study Of Guyana, Visnoonand Bisram

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study presents an alternative framework, from the dominant political and economic theories, for explaining the feeble and relatively slow pace of development of an ethnically divided, resource rich country.

The study, using primary and secondary sources, empirical evidence, and interpretive analysis, examines the emergence and role of racial conflict and its stifling impact on national development in Guyana, which represents an extreme case of a society plagued by racial division. Organizations including labor unions and political parties, as well as occupations and aspects of the economy, among other social constructs, are all racially divided. Utilizing an inter-disciplinary (sociology, political …

Institutionalizing Colonial Identity: A Case Study On The Indian Partition, Jamie Bodine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1947, the British colony of India was declared independent and emerged as two separate states, Pakistan and India. To examine this event, I ask what material cause(s) made possible the institutional separation between these two new states. To approach this question, I will review the process of political identity formation from the upheaval of 1857 to the 1947 partition. In so doing, I argue that the system of categorizing those who were under British colonial rule manufactured a particular set of political identities on the Indian subcontinent.

Theory Development And Pilot Testing Of A New Survey Instrument On Usability By Older Adults, Meriam Caboral-Stevens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An aging population and the use of technology are two pervasive phenomena that are burgeoning simultaneously. The confluence of these phenomena may present challenges for the older adults that could prevent a successful interface. Barriers and challenges can be addressed by examining the interface between older adults and technology. Usability is described as how well and how easily a user without formal training can interact effectively with the system. A review of the literature shows paucity in nursing theories on usability and the use of technology among older adults. This paper describes the development of a conceptual model - Use …

Consuming Poverty: The Unexpected Politics Of Food Aid In An Era Of Austerity, Maggie Dickinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks the remarkable growth of food assistance in the U.S. over the past fifteen years and asks what this expansion of food aid means for poor people living in New York City. Much of the scholarly literature on welfare policy in the U.S argues that social programs have become more stingy and punitive, particularly since the passage of welfare reform in 1996. On the surface, this does not seem to be the case for the food stamp program or for emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries. Since 2001 food stamp rolls have risen 120% in …

Essays On Spatial Econometrics: Estimation Methods And Applications, Osman Dogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of four essays on the estimation methods and applications of spatial econometrics models. In the first essay, we consider a spatial econometric model containing spatial lags in the dependent variable and the disturbance terms with an unknown form of heteroskedasticity in the innovations. We first prove that the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not taken into account in the estimation. We show that the necessary condition for consistency of the MLE depends on the specification of the spatial weight matrices. Then, we extend the robust generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation approach …

An Examination Of The Effect Of Vision-Related Factors And Availability Of Health Care Resources On Depression, Functional Status, And Falls Among New York City Senior Center Attendees, Lauren Evans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is substantial variability across different geographic regions and demographic groups in health outcomes and health resource availability. This dissertation examines the relationship between self-reported ocular disease and depression, functional status, and falls in a diverse sample of senior center attendees in New York City. Further, these analyses explored whether the availability of health care resources at the area level affects the observed relationship between ocular disease and these other adverse outcomes.

This dissertation project addresses two main gaps in the current research, specifically, the need to better understand elders' experiences with these conditions in different geographic regions and demographic …

Neural Mechanisms Underlying The Perception Of Three-Dimensional Shape From Texture: Adaptation And Aftereffects, Carole Filangieri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Input into the visual system is two-dimensional (2D) and yet we effortlessly perceive the world around us as three-dimensional (3D). How we are able to accurately extract 3D shape information from the 2D representations that fall on the retina remains largely unknown. Although much research has been conducted that investigates higher levels of form processing (i.e. face recognition), less is known about the mechanisms that underlie the perception of simple 3D shape. Previous studies in our lab have shown that our ability to perceive 3D shape from texture cues relies on the visibility of orientation flows -- patterns that run …

Pennsylvania Academic Career/Technical Training Alliance Initiative: Engaging Youth In School And Work, Marna Goodman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research offers a feasibility study on the effectiveness of the Pennsylvania Academic Career Technical Training Alliance (PACTT) at engaging youth in school and work upon return to the community. The sample included adjudicated youth from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania committed to PACTT-affiliated residential facilities and who discharged between July1, 2011 and June 31, 2012. An overview of the PACTT Initiative, with specific attention to its core elements, is presented and examined in the context of Ecological Systems Theory. Secondary data was analyzed using logistic regression to measure the overall impact of the five PACTT elements, dosage of PACTT elements, and …

An Assessment Of The Therapeutic Fib: The Ethical And Emotional Role Of Therapeutic Lying In The Caregiving Of Alzheimer's Disease Patients By Non-Medical Caregivers, Dina Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study qualitatively assesses the various aspects of the use of the therapeutic lie in care giving for Alzheimer's Disease patients while examining the ethics of lying associated in and out of the medical setting. The objectives of this study are to: gain an understanding of the role therapeutic lying plays in the care given by non-medical caregivers through a series of focus groups and interviews; examine the moral and emotional issues related to the use of this practice with a focus on non-medical caregivers; gather knowledge of the use of therapeutic lying in order to improve care for Alzheimer's …

Vocabulary Through Affixes And Word Families - A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Program For Adult Ell Students, Magdalena Kieliszek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vocabulary plays an important role in language learning of ELL (English Language Learner) students. This work discusses the importance of metalinguistic awareness in teaching vocabulary to adult English Language Learners at an intermediate- or advanced-level of English language proficiency with an emphasis on learning vocabulary through word families and increased morphological awareness. The main contribution is a computer-based program that guides users through a series of interactive reading and vocabulary practice exercises which allow them to explore and learn how certain words are connected through word families and how some of the most common affixes in English can affect the …

The Ties That Bind: Gender, Race, And Empire In Caribbean Indenture Narratives, Alison Joan Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the ways that oppressive gender roles and racial tensions in the Caribbean today developed out of the British imperial system of indentured labor. Between 1837 and 1920, after slavery was abolished in the British colonies and before most colonies achieved independence, approximately 750,000 laborers, primarily from India and China, traveled to the Caribbean under indenture. This is a critical but under-explored aspect of colonial history, as this immigration dramatically altered the ethnic make up of the Caribbean, the cultural norms and traditions of those who migrated, and the structure of British imperialism. I focus on depictions of …

Opportunities For Play-Based Experiences In Post "No Child Left Behind" Kindergarten Classrooms: The Role Of Training, Resources, And Accountability Pressures In Meeting Best Practices, Cristina Medellin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In response to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), opportunities for play-based experiences in classrooms have been challenged over the past decade. Despite research demonstrating the educational benefits of child driven play, teachers and schools have been pressured to focus on improving children's success on standardized assessments which may not relate to the developmental achievements expected from activity based experiences. To explore teachers' response to the tension between assessment driven mandates and best early childhood practices, this study investigated which factors influence teacher practices and values. Specifically, how do teacher training and classroom resources influence teachers' values about the appropriateness of …

The Neurophysiology Of Intersensory Selective Attention And Task Switching, Jeremy W. Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Our ability to selectively attend to certain aspects of the world and ignore others is fundamental to our day-to-day lives. The need for selective attention stems from capacity limitations inherent in our perceptual and cognitive processing architecture. Because not every elemental piece of our environment can be fully processed in parallel, the nervous system must prioritize processing. This prioritization is generally referred to as selective attention. Meanwhile, we are faced with a world that is constantly in flux, such that we have to frequently shift our attention from one piece of the environment to another and from one task to …

The Mechanisms Of Transmission: Examining The Effects Of Childhood Interpersonal Violence Across Generations, Amber Nemeth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the direct relationship between maternal exposure to childhood interpersonal violence (sexual and/or physical abuse) and behavioral problems in her pre- to early-adolescent children. It also examined whether maternal aggression (psychological and physical aggression) and emotion dysregulation (lifetime PTSD diagnosis and alexithymia) exerted a significant indirect effect on this relationship. This study was a secondary analysis of data collected from a cross-sectional and cross-generational study designed to examine associations among maternal impairments (substance abuse, general psychopathology, neuropychological functioning), child-rearing deficits (parenting deficits, child neglect, child physical/ sexual abuse), and adverse child outcomes (self-regulation deficits, aggressive behavior, and substance …