Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The History Of Martha J. Lamb: Her Origin, Rise, And Progress., Mary Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On June 16, 1883, Harper’s Weekly ran a story foreshadowing the transformation of the City of New York from the island of Manhattan to a massive metropolis, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Another article on the page announced that Martha J. Lamb “has become editor of the ‘The Magazine of American History.’” It does not mention that she was also president of the company purchasing the journal. Ten years later, just a few months after her death, Mrs. Lamb’s great work, her History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise, and Progress, was included in …

The “Olympiad Of Photography”: Fiap And The Global Photo-Club Culture, 1950–1965, Alise Tifentale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the global photo-club culture of the 1950s through the work of the International Federation of Photographic Art (Fédération internationale de l'art photographique, FIAP), founded in 1950. By 1965 FIAP united national associations of photo clubs in fifty-five countries across Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The regular exhibitions and publications of FIAP provided a unique platform where photographers living in the “second” and “third worlds” were welcome to present their work on equal grounds with their peers from the “first world.” FIAP, I posit, created a nonprofit, egalitarian, and open system of image production …

Applying A Metacognitive Framework In The Neuropsychological Assessment Of Subjective Cognitive Decline And Mild Cognitive Impairment, Susan Y. Chi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The characterization of the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a topic of major research interest because it is critical for early diagnosis and emerging interventions. Metamemory, or knowledge about memory, including awareness of one’s own memory functions, has been investigated in AD especially in relation to how impairment in memory and executive functions contribute to unawareness of cognitive deficits, termed anosognosia. Previous research, however, has not systematically investigated metamemory functioning in older adults with prodromal dementia conditions. Therefore, we investigated metamemory accuracy in cognitively healthy older adults (HC) and those with subjective cognitive decline but intact neuropsychological test …

Identifying Construct-Irrelevant Variance And Construct Under-Representation As Support Of External Evidence Of Validity, Jennifer Case

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Test validity has commonly been defined in terms of a test measuring what it is supposed to measure, however there has been a century of discussion and debate on test validity and what qualifies as evidence of test validity. Some argue in favor of restricting test validity evidence to that which is internal to the test, such as the test items, while others argue that external information, such as the relationships with other variables, also offers evidence toward test validity. Cronbach and Meehl’s groundbreaking paper in 1955 introduced the concept of the nomological net, which is the construct’s lawful relationships …

A Grounded Theory Investigation Of The Subjective Responses From Partners In Couples Where Infidelity Has Occurred, Malika Bhowmik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative study investigates the subjective responses elicited by partners in long-term committed couples where infidelity has taken place. Each of these couples attended a couple therapy session in the aftermath of their experience of an affair, and the transcriptions of these therapy sessions served as the data set for this investigation. In their seeking of help, most couples articulated a broad, comparable trajectory of the issues; their post-affair understanding of their pre-affair relationship including the state of their pre-affair sex, the origins of the unfaithful partner’s ability to stray from the primary relationship, the impact of the affair on …

The Interplay Between Interference Control And L2 Proficiency In L2 Auditory Sentence Comprehension In The Presence Of Verbal And Non-Verbal Masking, Jungna Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Speech perception and comprehension in the presence of interfering auditory stimuli is a challenge for bilingual listeners (e.g., Ezzatian, Avivi-Reich, & Schneider, 2010; Krizman, Bradlow, Lam, & Kraus, 2017). How efficiently and skillfully listeners manage auditory interference may also be closely related to their ability to pay attention to a target and suppress irrelevant information. Based on Friedman and Miyake’s (2004) framework of interference control, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of late Korean-English bilingual individuals’ auditory interference control in the presence of auditory verbal and nonverbal masking and evaluated the potential interaction between L2 proficiency and interference control.

Two …

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

Mapping The Spatial And Temporal Dynamics Of Visual Percepts Elicited By A Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Technique, Kelly Webster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While many of us rely on vision to interact with and experience the world, for people with damage or disease to the eye or visual cortex, experience through this modality is extremely limited. Brain and retinal stimulation devices show exciting promise for restoring vision, but little is understood about where and when vision percepts can be induced through stimulation. Using a non-invasive brain stimulation technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we characterized the spatial and temporal dynamics of perception induced through brain stimulation. In the first set of experiments, we explore the importance of higher visual and non-visual areas vs. …

Essays On The Application Of The Machine Learning Methods In Finance And Policy Evaluation, Olga Guska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the age when "Big Data" is becoming almost a household word, such abundance of information in different forms and representations can be of a great help for one's decision-making let it be a trader betting on a stock, or a policy-maker assessing the potential impact of proposed regulation. Whereas traditional economic research is primarily based on the use of numerical data continuous or discrete, there is a great deal of useful information that can be extracted from text data. Such information can power novel identification strategies or help perceive solutions from a different angle, but observed volumes of such …

Exploring Vicarious Resilience Among Practitioners Working With Clients Who Have Experienced Traumatic Events, Adam Reynolds

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vicarious Resilience is the positive impact that practitioners may experience when working with individuals who have lived through traumatic events. The effects of this phenomenon may be noticed as changes in life goals and perspective, client-inspired hope, increased recognition of clients’ spirituality as a therapeutic resource, increased capacity for resourcefulness, increased self-awareness and self-care practices, increased consciousness about power and privilege relative to clients’ social location, and increased capacity for remaining present while listening to trauma narratives.

While prior research into vicarious resilience has focused primarily on practitioners in trauma-specific settings, this quantitative dissertation studied the experiences of a convenience …

Collective Healing: A Restorative Justice-Based Response To Sexual Abuse, Delene Bromirski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For much of the last 20 years, the United States has been at the center of the sexual abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church. Victim-survivors of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse have long been waiting for the Church to acknowledge them and respond to their needs. This study sought to answer two important research questions: (1) whether restorative justice can be used to redress harms stemming from clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse and promote healing, and (2) whether there are common characteristics among victims who benefit from restorative events. The study employed a mixed-method research design consisting of both a quantitative and qualitative …

Whose War Is It Anyway? How Afghanistan Became A Battlefield Over Global Hegemony During The Cold War, Kathryn Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditional scholarship depicts the Cold War, which began immediately after World War Two and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as a battle of freedom and democracy over communism and authoritarian control. Cold War propaganda cartoons often show an Uncle Sam figure facing off against the Soviet Union, or a Soviet Bear reaching out to grab and control Western Europe. While this may have been popular Cold War discourse, a close look at internal documents from the United States Government at the time reveals that the United States was more interested in protecting resources and their …

Asians Applying For Postsecondary Success: Students, Schools, And Socioeconomic Status, Avery M.D. Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Higher education recruitment rates are rapidly declining as schools are stymied by dynamic demographic shifts and a competitive ecosystem. Despite the constant realities of this challenge for tertiary institutions, the complexities of the interplay for demographics, student motivation, parental influences, and school environments during the postsecondary education application process is often overlooked. This thesis analyses how these four domains impact Asian American students within the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) in terms of the number of postsecondary schools to which they apply? This study examines a sample (N = 662) of the ELS by employing multivariate regression analysis on the number …

Beyond Exposure: Markers Of English Proficiency In School-Aged French–English Bilinguals, Erin Quirk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual children show more variation in their language development than monolingual children, a fact that has been linked to their experience with their languages. Bilingual language experience also varies more than monolingual children's, both in terms of how much they hear the language spoken around them (exposure) and how much they speak the language themselves (production). This dissertation investigates the following aspects of the relationship between bilinguals’ language experience and development which are not well-understood: how children’s language production relates to their proficiency in that language, how children’s language exposure relates to receptive versus expressive and lexical versus grammatical skill, …

Goals, Power, And Culture: The Effects Of School Organizational Features On Parental Involvement, Vandeen A. Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on organizational theory and the school effectiveness literature, this project incorporates new methodological approaches to the analysis of a national longitudinal data set (ECLS-K: 2011) in order to investigate ways in which school goals around parental involvement, distribution of power, and culture affect parental involvement in children’s education, especially in schools serving large proportions of lower socioeconomic status families.

Parental involvement is widely accepted among researchers and policymakers to be essential for students’ academic success; however, parents with lower socioeconomic status exhibit less participation in both home-based and school-based activities compared to those of higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

Many recent …

The Freddie Gray Uprising: Persistence And Desistance Narratives Of Community-Engaged Returning Citizens, Maurice Vann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored how selected returning citizens in Baltimore who experienced the Freddie Gray Uprising of 2015 quelled community violence, stopped looting, and cleaned up the community in the aftermath made meaning of their experiences of the unrest. The central purpose of this study was to collect and analyze the life stories of returning citizens in Baltimore who experienced the Uprising. These men who had been incarcerated for between 5 and 20 years responded to government officials who called on them to quell violence in their neighborhoods that stemmed from the in-custody homicide of Freddie Gray.

The informants provided narratives …

An Affective Events Theory Analysis Of Conflict Perception Emergence, Michael J. Covell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Popular conceptualizations of conflict conflate conflict perception with other discrete constructs such as disagreement and emotions. This makes research using those conceptualizations difficult to interpret. I invoke affective events theory to describe how constructs conflated with conflict perception, as well as negative prescriptive expectancy violations (EVs), may collectively serve as antecedents to conflict perception. By reconceptualizing conflict perception as an evaluative judgment and distinguishing between episodic (short-term) and global (long-term) conflict perceptions, my model describes how episodic conflict perceptions cumulatively influence global conflict perceptions over time. Two types of events (disagreements and negative prescriptive EVs) were proposed to predict episodic …

Unpaid Care Work And Civic Engagement: A Review Of Literature Suggesting Unpaid Care Work As Civic Engagement, William Novello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unpaid care work in the family is categorized as work done in the private sphere. However, Pamela Herd and Madonna Meyer (2002) have suggested a new framework that recognizes unpaid care work in the family as a form of civic engagement. Since women continue to perform the majority of unpaid care work in the family, the new framework seeks to recognize unpaid care labor women perform as a contribution to society - in particular for the development of children. The framework uses previously developed concepts from social capital theorist Robert Putnam (1995, 1996, 2000) to demonstrate that unpaid care work …

Exploring The Relationship Between Perceived Interpersonal Influence And Citizenship Behavior: The Mediating Roles Of Social Identity And Team Member Exchange, Laura Sywulak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social or interpersonal influence has been widely studied in both social and organizational psychology, however no research to date has examined how perceptions of one’s ability to influence their coworkers impacts work-related attitudes and behavior. Experimental work in lab settings provides evidence that successfully influencing others consistently leads to increased helping behavior (Bruno, 2013; Bruno et al., 2008; Sywulak, Sommer & Bourgeois, 2013), but the relationship between influence and helping has not been studied in an organizational setting. Further, while several mediating mechanisms have been tested, how perceived influence leads to helping is still unknown. I present a study that …

Knowledge Of The Present Perfect By Albanian/English Bilinguals, Erjon Xholi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper concerns the acquisition process of a specific part of English grammar by native speakers of Albanian. The focus is the English present perfect, and the similarities and differences that it bears to the Albanian Compound Perfective. The two constructions are made from similar parts, but they crucially differ in the aspectual nature of their participles. While the Albanian particle is perfective, the English is underspecified. We argue that the process of the acquisition of the PP by Albanian bilinguals is one where input, analogy, and direct grammar teaching do not suffice. We apply Generative Grammar logic to the …

Familismo, Fafsa, And Sallie Mae: A Study Of Second Generation Latinx Student Loan Debt, Jasmine Gonsalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As college expenses continue to skyrocket, borrowing thousands of dollars to pay for college has become a rite of passage towards achieving the American Dream. Very little has explored the problem of rising student loan debt thorough a sociologically-oriented lens, and even less work has examined the variations in the lived experiences of underrepresented student borrowers. This study focuses on second-generation Latinx students who have used student loans to pay for college. As American citizens with Latin American roots, this generation lives in a precarious situation, often straddling the lines between their traditional family-oriented values, and the more individualistic values …

Assessment Of Third Wave Therapy Assumptions About The Relation Between Emotional Schemas And Psychoemotional Functioning, Emily Rachel Edwards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent advancements in emotion theory propose that emotional schemas – individualized conceptualizations and beliefs about emotions – serve a fundamental function in guiding psychoemotional processes. These advancements have progressed alongside the development of third-wave therapies, which presume emotional schemas to be deeply involved in perpetuating psychological distress and emotional dysfunction. To critically assess the validity of this presumption, the current research proposed and evaluated an integrative model of psychoemotional functioning.

Two studies were completed using a combination of behavioral, performance-based, and self-report measures of emotional schemas and psychoemotional functioning. Though further research is needed, results suggest the integrated model of …

Cyborgs For Environmental Justice: East Asian American Stories From The 1991 People Of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Lisa Ng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this paper is threefold: to serve as an oral history archive of the East Asian American experience at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to analyze the role of East Asian Americans in the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM), and to fill an ideological and political vacuum that exists in East Asian American communities. This work analyses the experiences of East Asian Americans who were present at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit--an event scholars have attributed to igniting the EJM. The paper argues that East Asian Americans act as “Cyborgs”—both as their ascribed …

Neural Correlates Of Automatic Emotional Processing And Emotion Regulation In Empathy And Psychopathy-Related Coldheartedness, Danielle Difilipo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that is defined, in part, by a lack of empathy. Psychopathy-related empathic deficits have been associated with atypical behavioral and neural responses to emotional facial expressions. Although the mirror neuron system (MNS) has been implicated in empathy, very few studies have examined the role of MNS functioning as it pertains to empathy impairments in psychopathy. Moreover, there is very little empirical research regarding emotion regulation in psychopathy, and specifically whether emotional responses can be intentionally upregulated. The present study sought to clarify whether the MNS is functionally intact in adults with subclinical psychopathic traits, particularly …

Examining The Use Of Hebephilia And Paraphilia Non-Consent In Sexually Violent Predator (Svp) Evaluations, Nicole Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sexually violent predator (SVP) legislation requires, in part, that an individual has a mental abnormality which causes difficulty in controlling sexual behavior. Previous research has found paraphilia not otherwise specified (NOS) to be one of the most prevalent diagnoses proffered in SVP evaluations. Since these studies, however, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has updated the paraphilia NOS diagnosis in two ways. First, this diagnosis has been divided into two new diagnoses—other specified paraphilic disorder (OSPD) and unspecified paraphilic disorder. Second, OSPD requires an added specifier to indicate the individual’s source of sexual arousal. To date, no study has systematically …

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Sounds Of Alter-Destiny And Ikonoklast Panzerist Fabulations, Mette Christiansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is a multifaceted attempt to complicate ideas about study, to think about the critical potential and social implications of certain kinds of stories, and how we might effectively disrupt and reinvent notions and techniques of critique and resistance in the names of hope and social transformation. It looks at the creative practices of Jazz musician and other-worldly being Sun Ra, the dual philosophies of “Ikonoklast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism” of an artist known as Rammellzee, and the concept-engineering of theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun, in an attempt to think through how radically unconventional forms of study might make …

A Deep-Er Practice For Educators: Reflecting, Unpacking And Confronting Racism Through Critical Performative Pedagogy, Natalia Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the current political climate, we have seen time and time again the killings of black and brown youth, witnessed the separation of immigrant families, and the mass murders caused by nativist xenophobic white rage. Teachers in schools across our country need to be better prepared to engage in critical race dialogues and need to understand their location in the larger educational system so to contest, rather than reproduce, racism. This study is based on the premise that teachers are not adequately learning about structural oppression that impact the experience of school children and are not trained in the art …

The Diffusion Of A Movement Moment: Labor Organizing In The Shadow Of Occupy Wall Street, Pamela Whitefield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is widespread agreement that the Occupy Wall Street mobilization reshaped American public life. The mobilization which took the stage on September 17, 2011 decried corporate abuse, rising inequality, and political corruption. Since its emergence in 2011, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on this critical movement episode. Conspicuously absent in this body of research, particularly within the field of social movement studies, is any focus on labor specifically as it relates to movement “spillover,” diffusion, or consequences. Through a set of case studies, this research examines the extent to which Occupy Wall Street alters the political opportunity structure …