Child maltreatment and violence are two major public health concerns in the United States. The relationship between maltreatment and subsequent violent behavior, also referred to as the "cycle of violence", is not well understood. The present study examines whether a history of maltreatment predicts violent behavior in a sample of...
This dissertation explores price differences observed in the market. While some differences are necessitated by market conditions, the others are strategic. I illustrate the former in a study of electricity spot markets in Italy and the latter for the video rental industry.
The first project examines the welfare gains from...
The dissertation research examines the evolution of EU social and employment policy in regard to gender equality in the labor market and analyzes how EU guidelines of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and EU directives on social policy have different effects on political processes in the United Kingdom and Germany....
Musical theater is a discipline that, by its very nature, engages several disciplines, specifically music, visual art, theater, and dance. The elementary classroom is a viable setting for the study of the arts in an interdisciplinary manner, yet the number of studies examining interdisciplinary instruction with regard to elementary music...
The linear food chain of high school biology textbooks has been replaced by the food web, the increasingly complex network of trophic interactions in an ecosystem. This complexity, however, masks a number of robust statistical properties. Yet much research to date has concentrated upon predicting and testing the existence of...
In this dissertation I examine the impact of core values on foreign policy opinion, the dynamics of value change, and the differences between elites and the mass public in their values change. I find that two core values - humanitarianism and democracy - strongly affect citizens' support for various anti-terrorism...
Behavioral activation (BA) trains depressed clients to engage in more positive activities in order to increase their experience of pleasure and accomplishment, thereby reducing depression. Recent research suggested that BA might be as effective in treating depression as current leading treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and antidepressant medication (Jacobson,...
By combining cultural theory with empirical data, this dissertation asserts that late-twentieth-century mainstream theatre had the potential to support emergent ideologies in the U.S. context. The study finds fault with those who dismiss mainstream theatre based on its commercialism and shows how a production's mainstream status may position its emergent...
This thesis presents results and analysis on a series of donor-bridge-acceptor (D-B-A) charge transfer systems in which we use time-resolved spectroscopy and magnetic resonance techniques to study the relationship of molecular structure to energy, charge, and spin transfer dynamics. We find that the sequence of events following the initial charge...
Markov models are widely employed in cost-effectiveness analysis of healthcare interventions. Although such models are usually formulated at the individual level, it is also useful to examine outcomes at the population level. Analysts may wish to know the impact of a health intervention on a whole population instead of an...
A comprehensive understanding of how image processing occurs in the primary visual cortex (V1) requires learning what aspects of neuronal responses are driven by strong feed-forward input from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and what aspects arise due to the densely recurrent network operating within the cortex itself. From an...
Although non-viral gene therapy has great potential for use in the lung, several problems including inefficient gene transfer and expression and the relative lack of cell-specific targeting have limited its applications. The two approaches that have been used to target genes to desired cell types are through specific ligand-receptor interactions...
Middle childhood is an important but often overlooked developmental period. Similarly, a large literature examines the importance of child care as a developmental context, focusing almost exclusively on pre-school child care experiences. Through three related empirical studies, this dissertation aims to address these two gaps in the extant literature. These...
The first chapter of this dissertation investigates the pricing of systematic variance risk in the equity options market. Cross sectional tests on synthetic variance swap returns reveal no evidence of a negative market variance risk premium. Furthermore, we show that a class of linear factor models cannot simultaneously explain index...
In the age of what George W. Bush has called a global democratic revolution, the freedom to consume an ever-expanding variety of images and goods in the global marketplace is often equated with the conditions of democratic freedom. With just such rhetorical elisions in mind, this dissertation examines the discursive...
Until the late twentieth century, the American small town at the turn of the century was popularly conceived as the quintessential nostalgic object: an "ideal" moment of lost "innocence," albeit one never existing in reality. This conception is belied, however, by my study of its representation in film and television...
Preventing the build-up of indoor pollutants represents an emerging goal in environmental chemistry. Heterogeneous catalysis provides an attractive method of remediating indoor air pollution, but optimization through rational catalyst design requires a detailed understanding of the catalytic surface and surface-pollutant interactions. In this work, a chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS)...
Packaging of DNA into nucleosomes and chromatin not only enables DNA to fit within the nucleus, but it also protects and organizes DNA. However, the wrapping of DNA around histones occludes DNA from binding proteins in solution. Proteins that regulate, express and repair DNA are able to function only when...
What is the nature of the relation between a verb and its arguments? In this dissertation, I look to evidence from language acquisition for answers.
Any theory of ditransitives must explain certain structural asymmetries noted for both double-object (DO) datives (e.g. Alfonso gave Derek the bat) and prepositional datives (Alfonso...
This work investigates children's early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., 'big', 'long'), maximum standard absolute (e.g.,...