The linear food chain of high school biology textbooks has been replaced by the food web, the increasingly complex network of trophic interactions in an ecosystem.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...