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- Creators: Arizona State University
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An emerging body of literature suggests that humans likely have multiple threat avoidance systems that enable us to detect and avoid threats in our environment, such as disease threats and physical safety threats. These systems are presumed to be domain-specific, each handling one class of potential threats, and previous research generally supports this assumption. Previous research has not, however, directly tested the domain-specificity of disease avoidance and self-protection by showing that activating one threat management system does not lead to responses consistent only with a different threat management system. Here, the domain- specificity of the disease avoidance and self-protection systems is directly tested using the lexical decision task, a measure of stereotype accessibility, and the implicit association test. Results, although inconclusive, more strongly support a series of domain-specific threat management systems than a single, domain- general system
ContributorsAnderson, Uriah Steven (Author) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Thesis advisor) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Committee member) / Becker, David V (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Gendered language has been a topic of study for centuries. The most recent efforts to promote inclusive language have been championed by parents, teachers, and social reformers over the last thirty years. Replicating in part a research study that was done over thirty years ago, this study examines what effects have taken place in children's perceptions of male and female roles in regards to specific activities and occupations and how their perceptions compare to the current work force, what role children's literature has played in these changes, and what children's natural speech in describing personified animals can tell us about their subconscious gender labeling. The results were remarkable in two ways: native language evidently exudes little emphasis on pronoun choice, and children are more readily acceptable of gender equality than that portrayed in either Caldecott winning children's books or real life as seen through current labor statistics.
ContributorsArter, Lisa Maxwell (Author) / Nilsen, Alleen (Thesis advisor) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Grace, Judy (Committee member) / Mathur, Sarup (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) policy scheme launched in 2004 by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Government of India, aims to provide secondary level education (grade 6-8) for girls residing predominantly in minority communities, the Scheduled Caste (SC), the Scheduled Tribe (ST), and the Other Backward Caste (OBC). Since its launch, the Government of India established 2,578 KGBV schools in 27 states and union territories (UTs). The present study examines the new policy and its implementation at three KGBV schools located in rural villages of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. The purpose was to analyze the Government of India's approach to increasing education opportunity and participation for educationally disadvantaged girls using the empowerment framework developed by Deepa Narayan. Observations at three schools, interviews with teachers and staff members of the implementation agency (i.e., Mahila Samakhya (MS)), and surveys administered to 139 teachers were conducted over a four month period in 2009. Adopting creative teaching approaches and learning activities, MS creates safe learning community which is appropriate for the rural girls. MS gives special attention to nurturing the girls' potential and empowering them inside and outside the school environment through social discussion, parental involvement, rigid discipline and structure, health and hygiene education, and physical and mental training. Interviews with the state program director and coordinators identified some conflicts within government policy schemes such as the Teacher-pupil ratios guidelines as a part of the programs for the universalization of elementary education. Major challenges include a high turnover rate of teachers, a lack of female teachers, a lack of provision after Class 8, and inadequate budget for medical treatment. Recommendations include promoting active involvement of male members in the process of girls' empowerment, making MS approaches of girls' education in rural settings standardized for wider dissemination, and developing flexible and strong partnership among local agencies and government organizations for effective service delivery.
ContributorsWatanabe, Miku (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Wiley, Terrence (Committee member) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Psychology of justice research has demonstrated that individuals are concerned with both the process and the outcomes of a decision-making event. While the literature has demonstrated the importance of formal and informal aspects of procedural justice and the relevancy of moral values, the present study focuses on introducing a new form of justice: Substantive justice. Substantive justice focuses on how the legal system uses laws to constrain and direct human behavior, specifically focusing on the function and the structure of a law. The psychology of justice literature is missing the vital distinction between laws whose function is to create social opportunities versus threats and between laws structured concretely versus abstractly. In the present experiment, we found that participant evaluations of the fairness of the law, the outcome, and the decision-maker all varied depending on the function and structure of the law used as well as the outcome produced. Specifically, when considering adverse outcomes, individuals perceived laws whose function is to create liability (threats) as being fairer when structured as standards (abstract guidelines) rather than rules (concrete guidelines); however, the opposite is true when considering laws whose function is to create eligibility (opportunities). In juxtaposition, when receiving a favorable outcome, individuals perceived laws whose function is to create liability (threats) as being fairer when defined as rules (concrete guidelines) rather than standards (abstract guidelines).
ContributorsLovis-McMahon, David (Author) / Schweitzer, Nicholas J. (Thesis advisor) / Saks, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Kwan, Sau (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Most studies on refugee populations tend to focus on mental health issues and communicable diseases. Yet, reproductive health remains a major aspect of refugee women's health needs. African refugee women in the United States continue to experience some difficulties in accessing reproductive health services despite having health insurance coverage. The purpose of this study was to understand the reproductive health journey of African refugee women resettled in Phoenix, Arizona. This study also explored how African refugee women's pre-migration and post-migration experiences affect their relationships with health care providers. The study was qualitative consisting of field observations at the Refugee Women's Health Clinic (RWHC) in Phoenix, verbally administered demographic questionnaires, and semi-structured one-on-one interviews with twenty African refugee women (between the ages of 18 and 55) and ten health care providers. The findings were divided into three major categories: pre-migration and post migration experiences, reproductive health experiences, and perspectives of health care providers. The themes that emerged from these categories include social isolation, living between two cultures, racial and religious discrimination, language/interpretation issues and lack of continuity of care. Postcolonial feminism, intersectionality, and human rights provided the theoretical frameworks that helped me to analyze the data that emerged from the interviews, questionnaire and fieldnotes. The findings revealed some contrasts from the refugee women's accounts and the accounts of health care providers. While refugee women spoke from their own specific social location leading to more nuanced perspectives, health care providers were more uniform in their responses leading to a rethink of the concept of cultural competency. As I argue in the dissertation and contrary to conventional wisdom, culture per se does not necessarily translate to resistance to the American health care system for many African refugee women. Rather, their utilization (or lack thereof) of health services are better conceived within a broader and complex context that recognizes intersectional factors such as gender, racialization, language, displacement, and class which have a huge impact on the reproductive health seeking patterns of refugee women.
ContributorsJatau, Mary (Author) / Koblitz, Ann Hibner (Thesis advisor) / James, Stanlie (Committee member) / Robillard, Alyssa (Committee member) / Johnson, Crista (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT This multi-case study research, using qualitative and quantitative methods, examines, compares, and validates the traits, behaviors, and formulas for success utilized by four experienced, long-term, exemplary executives who lead nonprofit organizations (NPOs) that serve homeless and "at risk" populations. Service longevity is a measure of success in this study and each leader subject must have served a minimum of five years at their NPO to participate, though most have been leading their respective NPOs far longer. An NPO leader affects not only an organization but individual constituents and the entire community. Each leader subject is considered successful by numerous constituents and the community. Anyone is at risk for homelessness and its effects on the entire community are boundless. Traits and formulas for success are measured using three surveys: Kouzes & Posner's 360 LPI and Most Admired Characteristics surveys and Cialdini's Influence IQ Test. Additional data sources are personal interviews, organizational 990s, annual reports, and other financial and programmatic data. The instruments for data analysis are a Likert 7 Point Importance Scale used for the program and organizational evaluations by NPO professional outside raters and the Strategic Plan. Analytic tools are the Pearson Product Moment Correlations, the organization's 990s, a 3 year annual report comparison, and participant observation. This study measures the leaders against the ideal. One common theme among all the leaders is consistency, one of Cialdini's Six Principles of Influence; ii
ContributorsOstrom, Martha (Author) / Cayer, N. Joseph (Thesis advisor) / Cialdini, Robert B. (Committee member) / Schlacter, John L (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Masculinity has been increasingly recognized as a critical and relatively unexplored area of inquiry in anthropological gender studies. This project seeks to expand anthropological research on masculinity to contemporary American society. Using the case study of a male-centered popular new sport, Mixed Martial Arts (also known as cagefighting) this project integrates theories of embodiment and feminist perspectives to explore how masculinity and masculine hegemony are shaped, contested, and perpetuated in the United States. Using a multi-level framework this project explores: 1) How is masculinity experienced and expressed by Mixed Martial Arts fighters as a form of self-identity? How do their bodies play a role in constructing masculinity? 2) What are the pervasive forms of masculinity associated with Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)? Are they truly representative of the sport? 3) Can these pervasive forms of masculinity be seen as hegemonic? How would hegemony operate in relation to individual experience? Using multiple methods to capture multiple points of view was critical to thoroughly examining the complex notion of masculinity. This study employed participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, surveys, photo elicitation, and media content analysis, as each presented particular benefits and allowed for the development a more well-rounded understanding of masculinity within the realm of MMA. This study also situates the rise of MMA and its representations of masculinity within the greater perspective of contemporary American society. By doing so reveals how ideologies of prescribed masculinity do not arise out of a vacuum but in relation to particular economic, social and political contexts. An emphasis of this study was to examine the daily lives of MMA fighters to understand how their participation in what may be regarded as a hypermasculine activity affects their own perceptions of masculinity. In looking at how masculinity is embodied, the gaps and often contradictions between representation and individual experiences are revealed. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of masculinity as both an embodied and relational construct.
ContributorsHolthuysen, Jaime (Author) / Hjorleifur Jonsson (Thesis advisor) / Tsuda, Takeyuki (Committee member) / Ballestero-Salaverry, Andrea (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
An offender's expression of remorse plays an important role following relational transgressions, yet it is not well understood how the experience and expression of remorse relate to both victim responses to hurt and forgiveness in close relationships. This study uses a social functionalist framework to investigate the role of remorse in the forgiveness process and tests whether offender remorse experiences mediate the associations between victim responses to hurt and remorse expressions. Undergraduate participants (N=671) completed questionnaires about a time when they hurt a close relational partner and reported their partners' responses to hurt, their own experiences and expressions of remorse, and their perceptions of forgiveness. Results indicated that victims' sad communication positively predicted offenders' other-oriented and affiliation remorse experiences; victims' threatening communication positively predicted offenders' self-focused remorse experience; and victims' conciliatory communication and withdrawal positively predicted offenders' affiliation and self-focused remorse experiences. Results of the mediation analyses revealed that self-focused remorse fully mediated the relationship between victim threatening communication and low status behaviors; other-oriented remorse partially mediated the association between victim sad communication and apology/concern behaviors; and affiliation partially mediated the relationship between victim conciliatory communication and connection behaviors. Victims' withdrawal behaviors and offenders' use of compensation were not related. Finally, offenders' apology/concern and connection behaviors associated positively with perceptions of forgiveness, whereas low status behaviors negatively predicted forgiveness. Use of compensation following a hurtful event was not significantly related to forgiveness. Results are interpreted within the framework of evolutionary psychology and further validate the functional approach to studying emotion.
ContributorsGracyalny, Monica (Author) / Mongeau, Paul A. (Thesis advisor) / Guerrero, Laura K. (Committee member) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT This thesis proposes that a focus on the bodily level of analysis can unify explanation of behavior in cognitive, social, and cultural psychology. To examine this unifying proposal, a sensorimotor mechanism with reliable explanatory power in cognitive and social psychology was used to predict a novel pattern of behavior in cultural context, and these predictions were examined in three experiments. Specifically, the finding that people judge objects that require more motor effort to interact with as farther in visual space was adapted to predict that people with interdependent self-construal(SC) , relative to those with independent SC, would visually perceive their cultural outgroups as farther relative to their cultural in-groups. Justifying this cultural extension of what is primarily a cognitive mechanism is the assumption that, unlike independents, Interdependents interact almost exclusively with in-group members, and hence there sensorimotor system is less tuned to cross-cultural interactions. Thus, interdependents, more so than independents, expect looming cross-cultural interactions to be effortful, which may inflate their judgment of distance to the out-groups. Two experiments confirmed these predictions: a) interdependent Americans, compared to independent Americans, perceived American confederates (in-group) as visually closer; b) interdependent Arabs, compared to independent Arabs, perceived Arab confederates (in-group) as closer; and c) interdependent Americans, relative to independent Americans, perceived Arab confederates (out-group) as farther. A third study directly established the proposed relation between motor effort and distance to human targets: American men perceived other American men as closer after an easy interaction than after a more difficult interaction. Together, these results demonstrate that one and the same sensorimotor mechanism can explain/predict homologous behavioral patterns across the subdisciplines of psychology.
ContributorsSoliman, Tamer (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Committee member) / Kwan, Sau (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This project examines C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming's appropriation of the European Bildungsroman, a novel depicting the maturation of the hero prompted by his harmonious dialectical relationship with the social realm (Bildung). I contend that James, Naipaul, and Lamming use the Bildungsroman genre to critique colonialism's effects on its subjects, particularly its male subjects who attend colonial schools that present them with disconcerting curricula and gender ideologies that hinder their intellectual and social development. Disingenuously cloaked in paternalistic rhetoric promising the advancement of "uncivilized" peoples, colonialism, these novels show, actually impedes the development of its subjects. Central to these writers' critiques is the use of houses, space, and land. Although place functions differently in Minty Alley, A House for Mr. Biswas, and In the Castle of My Skin, the novels under consideration here, the corresponding relationship between a mature, autonomous self and a home of one's own is made evident in each. Tragically, the men in these novels are never able to find communities in which they cease to feel out of place, nor are they ever able to find secure domestic spaces. Because the discourse of home so closely parallels the discourse of Bildung, I contend that the protagonists' inability to find stable housing suggests the inaccessibility of Bildung in a colonized space. Further, I assert that this literal homelessness is symbolic of the educated male's cultural exile; he is unable to find a location where he can live in dialectical harmony with any community, which is the ideal aim of Bildung. Leaving the Caribbean proves to be the colonized male's only strategy for pursuing Bildung; thus, these novels suggest that while Bildung is impossible in the Caribbean, it is not impossible for the Caribbean subject.
ContributorsPate, Leah (Author) / Castle, Gregory (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Bivona, Dan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012