Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Perceived Knowledge And Defense Of Political Attitudes, Matthew H. Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three experiments tested if perceived knowledge about a political issue predicted people’s willingness to engage with relatively weaker versus stronger belief-threatening information on that issue. Study 1 assessed people’s perceived knowledge on four political issues and, for each issue, manipulated whether participants chose between arguing against a weak versus moderate argument or a moderate versus strong argument. Only one issue provided some support for the primary hypothesis. When people believed they were not knowledgeable about the carbon tax, giving them a relatively stronger set of arguments to choose from (moderate versus strong) further increased their preferences for the weaker argument …

Angelenos, Vivian Liang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of Los Angeles’s city myth on the lived realities of its minority populations. I assert that the abstract erasure of the city’s Mexican past is mirrored in the physical concealment and removal of its minority populations. This paper pays particular attention to the ways in which the city’s foundational myth is intertwined with both the racialization of Mexican-Americans in the early 20th century and the rising prominence of neoliberal urbanism in the latter half of the 20th century. The LAPD and city council’s racialization of Mexican-Americans as dangerous and undesirable …

Multimodal Depression Detection: An Investigation Of Features And Fusion Techniques For Automated Systems, Michelle Renee Morales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Depression is a serious illness that affects a large portion of the world’s population. Given the large effect it has on society, it is evident that depression is a serious health issue. This thesis evaluates, at length, how technology may aid in assessing depression. We present an in-depth investigation of features and fusion techniques for depression detection systems. We also present OpenMM: a novel tool for multimodal feature extraction. Lastly, we present novel techniques for multimodal fusion. The contributions of this work add considerably to our knowledge of depression detection systems and have the potential to improve future systems by …

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

Educational Relevance As A Motivating Operation For Equivalence Class Formation: Implications For Application, Julia Brodsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Equivalence-Based Instruction (EBI) is a method of teaching sets of physically disparate stimuli that uses stimulus equivalence principles (Critchfield & Fienup, 2008). The basic stimulus equivalence literature informs which procedural variants are used in research and clinical practice, but application of these findings requires determining the effect of educational relevance on equivalence class formation. In the current study, Experiment 1 compared the relative difficulty of the stimulus sets to be used in the educationally relevant conditions of Experiment 2, while Experiment 2 examined the effects of stimulus meaningfulness and educational relevance. The Arbitrary group learned nonsense symbols from Steele and …

The Potency Of Policy?: A Comparative Study Of Filipino Elder Care Workers In The United States And Israel, Abigail F. Kolker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the population of the United States and Israel rapidly ages, the elder care industry is expanding at an unprecedented rate. In-home care work is increasingly performed by migrants, many of whom are from the Philippines. This study, based on two years of ethnographic research and 163 in-depth interviews, examines how the United States’ and Israel’s differing immigration and labor policies impact the lives of Filipino caregivers. Despite vastly different policy approaches to migrant elder care workers—highly unregulated in the U.S. and highly regulated in Israel—this study found many striking similarities between Filipino caregivers’ migration and work experiences in the …

English Influence On L2 Speakers’ Production Of Palatalization And Velarization, Jennifer C. Gabriele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Irish is a Celtic language spoken in Ireland. It is currently endangered with only 73,803 people using the language on a daily basis as of 2016 (Official Office of Statistics, 2016). The reason for the decline is that English is the dominate language, pushing Irish to the periphery. Revitalization efforts have been put into place in an attempt to revitalize the language. There has been a growth in L2 speakers of Irish. The position of English as the dominate language, and high amounts of L2 speakers creates an environment where English is likely to influence the Irish language. The purpose …

Race And Gun Violence In The United States: A Case Study Of Policy Reform In Missouri, Morgan C. Williams Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gun violence remains an important contributor to racial differences in mortality within the United States. Despite the existence of these significant racial disparities in firearm homicide victimization, the relationship between gun control policy and racial disparities in homicide remains largely unexplored within the empirical crime literature. Previous research suggests that access to secondary firearm markets serves as a salient contributor to local gun violence with the regulation of private firearm sales falling exclusively within state-level jurisdiction. The role of state-level background check requirements for private firearm sales in reducing gun violence remains controversial in both the empirical literature and gun …

Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the fight for justice, equality, and true liberation, African American organizations and institutions have often acted as a voice for the African American community at large focusing on common issues and concerns. With the civil rights movement being broadcast across the world, there was no better time for African American community and civil rights organizations to take a role within the movement in combatting the oppression, racism, and discrimination of white supremacy. Often left out of this history of the civil rights movement is an analysis of black-owned private businesses, also giving shape to the African American community. Black …

Sociality And Stress In Female Chacma Baboons (Papio Ursinus) In The Cape Peninsula Of South Africa: Behavioral Flexibility And Coping Mechanisms, Shahrina Chowdhury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The physiological stress responses that animals exhibit to the myriad stressors in their environment can be used to assess the state of their health and well-being, and even survival capability. Although the stress response is adaptive in many cases, chronic stress responses may be maladaptive in some situations when it leads to dysfunction of the physiological system involved in the stress response itself, and can also cause deleterious effects on health, reproduction and survival. The stress response includes physiological responses to both environmental perturbations and psychosocial stress and anxiety associated with social perturbations. The latter factor is particularly important for …

Describing Doggo-Speak: Features Of Doggo Meme Language, Jennifer Bivens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Doggo-speak is a specialized way of writing most commonly associated with captions on Doggo memes, humorous images of dogs shared in online communities. This paper will explore linguistic features of Doggo-speak through analysis of social media posts by Doggo fan pages. It will use the discussed features as inputs to five machine learning classifiers and will show, through this classification task, that the discussed features are sufficient for distinguishing between Doggo-speak and more general English text.

Essays On The Economics Of Health And Human Capital, Paloma Lopez De Mesa Moyano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores dynamics related to the formation of human capital. In the two chapters contained within, my work investigates how human capital is formed and maintained through either individual decisions or historic events. In particular, the first chapter analyzes the long-term health effects of a large-scale bombing campaign on the population of a developing country up to two generations after the event occurred; the second chapter analyzes how attending a public honors college in the U.S. affects the degree completion of students and their college quality choice. In these two different contexts, I approach the common topic of human …

Explaining Animosity Towards The Roma: A Case Study Of Twitter Communication In Italy During The Refugee Crisis, Mayuko Nakatsuka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Italy is known for hostile treatment of the Roma, one of the largest ethnic minority groups in Europe. This paper seeks to understand what is causing Italians to talk negatively about the Roma on Twitter. Statistical analysis is performed utilizing the data mined from Twitter along with other variables. The study finds that Roma population, foreign population, and number of refugees all have significant effects on the total number of tweets or the average negative sentiment of tweets. The results indicate that native Italians may group minority groups all together and regard them as “others”. Although the research design has …

Out Of The Shadows: Women Of The Fmln Guerrilla Army In El Salvador’S Civil War, 1979–1992, Erica Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of a century, revolutionary movements have emerged every few years across the region of Central America, movements that fought for overturning dictatorships and confronting socio-economic inequalities. Women experience higher levels of poverty, human rights violations and discrimination due to gender inequalities. Representing 30% of the FMLN guerrilla army, women in El Salvador took a quantum leap into one of the most horrific and violent armed conflicts in the history of the country (Montgomery 123). Theorists have sought to explain why women became involved in the war. Experts of insurgent collective action agree that women's participation played a …

Dancing, Mindfulness, And Our Emotions: Embracing The Mind, Body, And Sole, Alisha M. Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project examines dance, as an intervention and mindfulness practice that assists with managing our emotions. There is a need for dance therapy in social institutions such as, healthcare facilities, schools, and community centers. Dance therapy has the potential to reduce negative emotions, create mindfulness, improve self-expression, and promote a healthy well-being. I am proposing that dance therapy is applied as a regular practice in social institutions to develop mindfulness and promote emotional stability.

In this study, I argue that dance therapy can contribute to our well-being long term. In addition to this written thesis, a visual component of …

Broad Skill Focused Job Seeking: A Study Of Intervention And Employment Outcomes, Eric A. Knudsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The job search has been the subject of research across many disciplines adopting varied perspectives. However, the industrial-organizational psychology literature on the job search has failed to properly consider the role of individual differences in thought about the utility of job skills independent of context. This dissertation is an attempt to establish and study the construct of broad skill focus- the extent to which individuals adopt a perspective and understanding of the broader generalizability of their work skills, versus their context-specific applications (i.e., the settings in which they were learned). As no measurement tool exists for studying this construct, Study …

The Library Of Pantainos: A Unique Ancient Library, Michael W. Handis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Library of Pantainos is not typical of Greco-Roman libraries built around the same time. When comparing the library to two libraries built within 35 years of it, the Library of Celsus (135 CE) in Ephesus and the Library of Hadrian (132 CE), there are major differences in design. The Library of Pantainos proper was surrounded by two stoas, which housed various stores, the revenue from which may have been used in the upkeep of the library and its collection. The library was built on land that had been fallow since the sack of Sulla in 86 BCE. Contrary to …

Some Like It Hot: The Effect Of Serving Temperature On Perceived Caloric Content And Intent To Purchase Complementary Food, Sara Baskentli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research introduces the serving temperature bias, which is defined as the belief that a food or beverage served hot has more calories and is considered more fattening than the same item served cold. Six studies, including an observational field study and follow-up controlled experiments, demonstrate that people indeed hold the serving temperature bias. This belief is grounded in the conceptual associations between warm foods and beverages and consumers’ affiliative semantic associations regarding home and hearth - concepts captured by the phrase “homelike.” Specifically, hot foods and beverages are perceived to be labor of love and reminder of home (homelike) …

Capital Growth: Precision Agriculture And Vertical Farming In The Corporate Food Regime, Justin Taylor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Agriculture in the 21st century has entered a digital age. New technologies emphasize GPS, big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, automation, sensors, and robotics, contributing to two modes of modern food production known as precision agriculture and vertical farming. Through an interdisciplinary review of scientific and social scientific scholarship, this paper examines the ways in which these two technologies interact with the global corporate food regime and explores their impact in core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral countries. It also engages in a discourse analysis of promotional materials and interview statements from precision agriculture and vertical farming firms to expose …

A Critical Assessment Of The Internship At The Ngo Committee On The Status Of Women, New York, Ching-Kang Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone research project is the critical assessment of my internship paper at the The NGO Committee on the Status of Women, New York (NGO CSW/NY), which documents my experience of working from September, 2017 to December 2017. Part one focuses on the analysis and observation on LGBTQ human rights work at the United Nations. Part two records my work and experiences at the NGO CSW/NY, including the UNGA Gender Mapping Project and UN meetings. Part three is my observations and reflections upon the half-year internship experience, which serve as reference for people who intend to do NGO advocacy work …

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants And Their Phonetic Variants, Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes phonetic realizations of aspirated phonemes in Purepecha [pua] from Azajo. The distribution of aspiration in Purepecha is limited to roots, a small number of spatial suffixes, one argument structure changing suffix, and clitics. Aspiration is never contrastive for inflexional suffixes, which occur in word final position. There are three basic allophones of aspirated segments: (i) post-aspirated; (ii) unaspirated, (iii) pre-aspirated, with pre-aspiration showing 4 distinct phonetic forms, depending on dialect, and phonetic context. Strengthening of pre-aspiration has been documented in the Lake and Sierra dialects as well as vowel lengthening in the Lake dialect. In Azajo Purepecha …

Differences In The Role Of Acculturation On The Correlates Of Suicidal Ideation Among Asian Subgroups, Khadijah Ahmad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ethnic and racial differences have been acknowledged in the relationship between culture and psychopathology, and acculturation has been associated with risk for suicidal ideation. The present paper examined the relation between acculturation and the correlates of suicide (i.e., hopelessness, depression) among Asian subgroups. Because an emphasis on Asians as a homogenous group obfuscates important ethnic differences that may influence risk for suicide, the present paper sought to highlight differences in risk for suicide among different Asian subgroups. This paper is divided into seven sections that address the role of acculturation and cultural values, norms, and beliefs on the correlates of …

Nature Versus Nurture, Matilda Nikehasani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this paper is to expose the differences and similarities between nature and nurture. How they correlate to each other, and shape human development. Without nature and nurture, we would all be the same, and have the same experiences. This controversial topic is one of the oldest arguments in psychology

Venezuela: Oil And Madness. Politics, Propaganda, And Realities Of The Chavista Era, Alvaro E. De Prat

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an interdisciplinary exploration of Venezuela’s political paradoxes and their consequences during the Chavista years. On a concrete level, in this work I propose how the manner in which Hugo Chávez implemented his at first apparently benign redistributive politics in fact precipitated the country's current humanitarian crisis and what I will argue are the times of starkest inequality in modern Venezuelan history. Integral to this, although on a more philosophical level, here I also offer a theory of how and why Chávez’s representations might have been so misinterpreted.

The list of eminent political thinkers who have vouched for …

Electric Light: Automating The Carceral State During The Quantification Of Everything, R. Joshua Scannell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the rise of digitally-driven policing technologies in order to make sense of how prevailing logics of governance are transformed by ubiquitous computing technology. Beginning in the early 1990s, police departments and theorists began to rely on increasingly detailed sets of metrics to evaluate performance. The adoption of digital technology to streamline quantitative evaluation coincided with a steep decline in measured crime that served as a proof-of-concept for the effectivity of digital police surveillance and analytics systems. During the turbulent first two decades of the 21^st century, such digital technologies were increasingly associated with reform projects designed …

Speech Perception In “Bubble” Noise: Korean Fricatives And Affricates By Native And Non-Native Korean Listeners, Jiyoung Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examines acoustic cues used by second language learners of Korean to discriminate between Korean fricatives and affricates in noise and how these cues relate to those used by native Korean listeners. Stimuli consist of naturally-spoken consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) syllables: /sɑdɑ/, /s*ɑdɑ/, /tʃɑdɑ/, /tʃ^hɑdɑ/, and /tʃ*ɑdɑ/. In this experiment, the “bubble noise” methodology of Mandel at al. (2016) was used to identify the time-frequency locations of important cues in each utterance, i.e., where audibility of the location is significantly correlated with correct identification of the utterance in noise. Results show that non-native Korean listeners can discriminate between …

Assessing The Ordinality Of Response Bias With Item Response Models: A Case Study Using The Phq-9, Venessa N. Singhroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Improper scale usage in psychological and clinical assessment is an important problem. If respondents do not use the scales in a consistent manner, the reliability of a composite is likely to be attenuated. This is particularly problematic when particular items are singled out for special treatment or when subscales are of interest, not just a total score. This study used both non-parametric and parametric item response theory (IRT) methods to gain further insight into the validity of the PHQ-9, a dual purpose instrument that assesses the severity of depressive symptoms using nine Likert-scale items and allows the investigator to establish …

Being In Performance: A Philosophical Account Of The Embodied Actor, Brad M. Krumholz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I present and analyze three distinct actor-training exercises primarily through the lens of the Embodied Cognition (EC) branch of contemporary philosophy, which attempts to frame human understanding as a fully embodied interaction with the environment. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and other branches of philosophy, EC provides both an excellent set of tools and a strong theoretical framework to help explain how people encounter meaning in life. I apply its unique perspectives to this philosophical account of the embodied actor as I analyze the various elements at play in actor training praxis, which allows me to shed …

Food Network Fallout: Why There Are Labor Shortages In Restaurant Kitchens, Jennifer M. Dillon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a desperate shortage of line cooks and kitchen staff in restaurants all over the world. In New York City, kitchens are running with as little as 50% of staff capacity, due to a lack of people, qualified (defined as certified or skilled) or not, willing to work in restaurant kitchens, so chefs are forced to simplify their menus.[i] I design workforce development programs for homeless men in New York City, 70% of whom have an incarceration background. On paper, the culinary field seems like the perfect match for the population that I serve; there is a huge …

Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women who made notable accomplishments are underrepresented in commemoration. Some American cities have brought women to the forefront of becoming visible through commemoration in statues. This thesis compares the commemoration of historical women in four different American cities. Stakeholders hold the key to implementing and changing public policy to increase the visibility of women and people of color in public monuments. Cities which lack representation of women and people of color may learn from and follow the efforts of a leading city to achieve lasting and effective change in representing those who historically been underrepresented.