My dissertation explores the rational and emotional foundations of ethical decision making. Traditional research has associated ethical superiority with an analytic, rational decision making process and has suggested that emotions (e.g., empathy or anger) undermine ethics because they lead people to breach ethical principles such as the norm of impartiality....
After nearly 100 years of research, the function of sleep is unknown, prompting the desire to examine its regulation in a simpler model organism. In 2000, <em>Drosophila</em> was described as a novel model system to investigate sleep. These early studies defined features of normal sleep in <em>Drosophila</em>, and presented evidence...
Interfaces and surfaces are ubiquitous in the environment. Heterogeneous binding events and reactions control the transport and speciation of dissolved pollutants in groundwater. Many heterogeneous processes occur at mineral oxide/water interfaces, and can be controlled either by the mineral oxide, or organic molecules bound to the surface. The prevalent natural...
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The linear food chain of high school biology textbooks has been replaced by the food web, the increasingly complex network of trophic interactions in an ecosystem.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,...