This thesis analyzes the role segregation and white flight played in the development of New York City’s suburban Westchester County, particularly in regards to how white flight from (and within) New Rochelle during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was presaged by the racial reification of the suburb’s communal boundaries during...
One of the most dynamic in South Asia, Pakistan’s vibrant and outspoken media is de facto credited to the media liberalization policies of 2002 by President Pervez Musharraf. Yet, the country’s media landscape, particularly the private news channels, are known to be sensational for their exaggerated reporting style. Using Pakistan’s...
Drill rap, a subgenre of hip-hop intimately connected to Chicago street life and brought into the nation’s musical mainstream by Chicago rapper Chief Keef, sounds and means differently than traditional forms of hip-hop. Unlike most hip hop, drill is outwardly unconcerned with mobility. This project explores drill’s departure from hip-hop’s...
Affective science has long been interested in the coherence between different emotion response systems (e.g., subjective emotional experience, behavior, physiology). Although evolutionary functionalist accounts of emotion hold that emotional coherence should be related to greater adaptation, few studies have analyzed links between emotional coherence and wellbeing. Thus, in this laboratory-based...
With 80% of US hospitals seeing limited English proficient patients on a regular basis, language assistance services are a pivotal component of ensuring equal access to health care. State and federal civil rights policies guarantee the provision of language assistance services to limited English proficient hospital patients. However, local civil...
Each successive wave of immigrants to America has faced prejudice founded in fear and uncertainty. Immigrants from Italy were particularly discriminated against in the early years of their arrival, from 1880 through 1920. They faced violence, racial slurs, and media attacks based on an unsubstantiated stereotype of criminality. This project...
The purpose of this project is to investigate the lack of significant reform regarding women’s issues during the perestroika period. Part one establishes the foundational ideology by analyzing Marxist and Leninist ideas on women and comparing them to official Soviet doctrine as established by government officials and leading scholars. Also...
Marital emotional functioning is one of the most important predictors of marital outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction), which in turn has important consequences for wellbeing and health factors for both spouses and their children. Thus far, negative emotions (e.g., anger) have been the central focus in distinguishing dissatisfied from satisfied couples...
Approximately 1 in 3 deaths in the US is caused by cardiovascular diseases, among them atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis occurs through excessive cholesterol deposition (hyperlipidemia) along the inner layer of the artery called the intima, resulting in plaque formation that blocks arterial blood flow and could lead to heart attacks and strokes....
The High Energy Density Sciences group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory studies materials in extreme conditions such as very high temperatures and pressures. We use shock waves produced by the Linac Coherent Light Source to compress polycrystalline diamond samples. Compressing these samples allows us to use x-ray diffraction to study...
According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether...
A survey of adults (n = 706) found low levels of awareness of two social movements aimed at decreasing weight stigma: the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size movement. For HAES, providing a brief story of an overweight person who endorses HAES improved perceptions of the movement.
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight,...
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by flashbacks of the traumatic event and high comorbidity with major depressive disorder (MDD). Prior stress is known to increase the likelihood of developing PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event. Currently, PTSD is diagnosed clinically, its biological etiology is not known...
Anxiety disorders are the most common group of mental illnesses in the United States and affect over 15% of the population. Prior work utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) from the scalp has shown success in isolating certain neural correlates related to increased risk for developing anxiety disorders....
Given any polyhedron in R3, we can cut it open along its edges, flatten it out, and obtain a polygon in the plane R2. In this project, we explored the opposite process, an open question that was first posed about 70 years ago: given a polygon in R2, what is...
The bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 system shows promise as a genome-editing tool to treat human disease. It is integral to understand the binding and unbinding kinetics of Cas9 to its target DNA to study specificity of the Cas9 protein. Standard practices involve the use of negatively charged polymer Heparin to reduce unspecific...
Due to their ability to be engineered for specific cellular targeting, nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as promising drug delivery vessels for immunotherapeutic and vaccination treatments. However, a major unsolved obstacle for cell-specific nanoparticle delivery is non-specific circulatory clearance by the mononuclear-phagocytic system(MPS). Comprised of various phagocytic cells, the MPS removes...
This study aims to advance our basic understanding of how we perceive objects in our environment. It’s unclear whether we understand object structure based on only how we perceive or on how it truly exists in the world. Examining eye-movements provides insight into how our visual system represents and understands...