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While acceptance towards same-sex marriage is gradually increasing, same-sex marriage is banned in many states within the United States. Laws that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying have been shown to increase feelings of depression, exclusion, and stigma for same-sex attracted individuals. The intention of this study was to explore the effect both pro- and anti-same-sex marriage advertisements have on heterosexual individuals' implicit attitudes towards same-sex couples. It was predicted that exposure to anti-same-sex advertisements would lead to viewing same-sex couples as more unpleasant and heterosexual couples as being more pleasant. However, heterosexual participants who viewed anti-same-sex marriage ads were more likely to rate heterosexual couples as being unpleasant and same-sex couples as pleasant. It is theorized that viewing anti-same-sex marriage advertisements led heterosexual individuals to report heterosexual stimuli as being more unpleasant compared to same-sex stimuli as a form of defensive processing.
ContributorsWalsh, Theodora Michelle (Author) / Newman, Matt (Thesis advisor) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Bully victimization has been associated with blunted cardiovascular responses to stress as well as elevated responses to stress. The difference between these altered physiological responses to stress is largely unknown. This study explored several possible moderators to the relationship between chronic stress and future cardiac output (an indicator of increased stress) in response to future stressors. These moderators include the difference between social and physical stressors and individual levels of loneliness. Participants were administered measures of loneliness and victimization history, and led to anticipate either a "social" (recorded speech) or "non-social" (pain tolerance test ) stressor, neither of which occurred. EKG and impedance cardiography were measured throughout the session. When anticipating both stressors, loneliness and victimization were associated with increased CO. A regression revealed a three-way interaction, with change in cardiac output depending on victimization history, loneliness, and condition in the physical stressor condition. Loneliness magnified the CO output levels of non-bullied individuals when facing a physical stressor. These results suggest that non- bullied participants high in loneliness are more stressed out when facing stressors, particularly stressors that are physically threatening in nature.
ContributorsHaneline, Magen (Author) / Newman, Matt (Thesis advisor) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / Miller, Paul (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Society places great trust in the police to uphold and protect the law. People who have a duty to protect (vs. no duty) and violate the institution they are supposed to safeguard are often judged more harshly. I test whether people will punish an on-duty police officers more severely for committing a violent crime compared to an off-duty officer or a civilian. I hypothesized that this effect might be enhanced when a perpetrator commits a violent crime against an African-American compared to a Caucasian. Furthermore, I predicted that this effect will be exacerbated after highly publicized controversial incidents of police use-of-force. In a mock jury paradigm involving a defendant who committed a violent crime, I found that the protective role of the perpetrator and race of the victim did not affect punishment judgments. Participants did, however, punish defendants less and identified with police more after a highly publicized incident (the Ferguson grand jury decision) compared to before the incident.
ContributorsSanchez, Manuel Justin (Author) / Salerno, Jessica (Thesis director) / Schweitzer, Nicholas (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This study hypothesizes that a sampling of prosecutors would be more likely to prosecute juveniles who identify as homosexual versus those who identify as heterosexual. To test this hypothesis, surveys were mailed to 1,000 prosecutors around the United States with a between subject design, meaning that each participant was only exposed to one condition in the vignette they read. There were a total of four vignettes, creating four conditions of different sexual orientations and gender in sexually appropriate relationships. The vignettes contain conditions in which either a male or female junior in high school was videotaped having oral sex with either a male or a female freshman in high school. Prosecutors were asked questions about whether they would prosecute the older student for statutory rape. Results indicated that our manipulations of sexual orientation and gender were not statistically significant on prosecutorial discretion or punishment severity/motives, however, these manipulations did alter the prosecutor's perceptions of the offender.
ContributorsCaraveo Parra, Diana Patricia (Author) / Fradella, Hank (Thesis director) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The objective of this study was to determine whether prosecutors would be more inclined to prosecute a juvenile sex offense case when the offender is gay versus straight. I also tested whether the effect of offender sexual orientation would be different for male versus female juvenile offenders. Based on previous research showing leniency toward lesbian juvenile sex offenders among laypeople, I hypothesized that prosecutors would be more likely to prosecute a case in which the offender was gay instead of heterosexual—but only if they were boys. In contrast, if the offenders were lesbians, I hypothesized that prosecutors would be less inclined to prosecute, compared to heterosexual girls. Based on survey data, I found that prosecutors’ decisions to prosecute were not affected by the offender’s gender or sexuality, but their impressions of the offender were. Prosecutors perceived males to be more likely to recidivate than females. Specifically, gay males were perceived as more likely to recidivate than heterosexual males; however the difference between lesbians and heterosexuals were nearly indistinguishable. Prosecutors also viewed gay males as having more negative attributes than heterosexual males. Contrarily, lesbian girls were perceived as having slightly less negative attributes than heterosexual girls. Still, females overall were perceived as having less negative attributes than males. These impressions on recidivism and negative attributes were important because they both positively correlated with the prosecutor’s decision to prosecute the case.
ContributorsFletcher, Sarah Renee (Author) / Salerno, Jessica (Thesis director) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Previous studies exploring variability in sentencing decisions have consistently found gender differences, such that women receive lighter sentences than men. In the proposed study, I present a new framework for understanding gender differences in sentencing preferences, including circumstances under which no gender differences should emerge. The Affordance Management Approach suggests that our minds are attuned to both group- and individual-level threats and opportunities that others afford us. I conceptualize the sentencing difference between men and women as driven by perceived affordances that assist or hinder an individual in achieving certain fundamental goals. When faced with sanctioning an offender in our community, the offender's sex, the victim's age, and environmental variables such as the ratio of men to women may influence our decision-making, because these factors have affordance implications. Thus, I hypothesized that individuals will express differences in the sentencing of offenders who commit assault, and that these differences vary by offender sex, victim age, and sex-ratio. The results indicate that, as predicted, female offenders received lighter sentencing than men when the offender committed an assault against a same-sex adult, but received equally punitive sentences as men when the assault was committed against a child. In general, results do not support a consistent effect of sex ratio as a factor when making sentencing decisions. Although results do not fully support the current study's specific hypotheses, there remains much to be gained from applying an affordance management perspective to understanding variability in sentencing between the sexes.
ContributorsUzzanti, Charlene Ann (Author) / Neuberg, Steven (Thesis director) / Knight, George (Committee member) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Critical flicker fusion thresholds (CFFTs) describe when quick amplitude modulations of a light source become undetectable as the frequency of the modulation increases and are thought to underlie a number of visual processing skills, including reading. Here, we compare the impact of two vision-training approaches, one involving contrast sensitivity training and the other directional dot-motion training, compared to an active control group trained on Sudoku. The three training paradigms were compared on their effectiveness for altering CFFT. Directional dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training resulted in significant improvement in CFFT, while the Sudoku group did not yield significant improvement. This finding indicates that dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training similarly transfer to effect changes in CFFT. The results, combined with prior research linking CFFT to high-order cognitive processes such as reading ability, and studies showing positive impact of both dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training in reading, provide a possible mechanistic link of how these different training approaches impact reading abilities.
ContributorsZhou, Tianyou (Author) / Nanez, Jose (Author) / Zimmerman, Daniel (Author) / Holloway, Steven (Author) / Seitz, Aaron (Author) / New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2016-10-26
Description
Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a serious lifelong condition, its underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Recently, neuroimaging-based classifiers for ASD and typically developed (TD) individuals were developed to identify the abnormality of functional connections (FCs). Due to over-fitting and interferential effects of varying measurement conditions and demographic distributions, no classifiers have been strictly validated for independent cohorts. Here we overcome these difficulties by developing a novel machine-learning algorithm that identifies a small number of FCs that separates ASD versus TD. The classifier achieves high accuracy for a Japanese discovery cohort and demonstrates a remarkable degree of generalization for two independent validation cohorts in the USA and Japan. The developed ASD classifier does not distinguish individuals with major depressive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder from their controls but moderately distinguishes patients with schizophrenia from their controls. The results leave open the viable possibility of exploring neuroimaging-based dimensions quantifying the multiple-disorder spectrum.
ContributorsYahata, Noriaki (Author) / Morimoto, Jun (Author) / Hashimoto, Ryuichiro (Author) / Lisi, Giuseppe (Author) / Shibata, Kazuhisa (Author) / Kawakubo, Yuki (Author) / Kuwabara, Hitoshi (Author) / Kuroda, Miho (Author) / Yamada, Takashi (Author) / Megumi, Fukuda (Author) / Imamizu, Hiroshi (Author) / Nanez, Jose (Author) / Takahashi, Hidehiko (Author) / Okamoto, Yasumasa (Author) / Kasai, Kiyoto (Author) / Kato, Nobumasa (Author) / Sasaki, Yuka (Author) / Watanabe, Takeo (Author) / Kawato, Mitsuo (Author) / New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2016-04-14
Description
Past research has shown that serving on a jury can put the jurors under distress. Most research has shown that the nature of the trial (violent vs. non-violent) is a major factor in predicting distress. Though there is a lot of research identifying the distress, there is little research on how to resolve or prevent the distress from occurring in the first place. The purpose of this study is to examine what kinds of treatments prior jurors would have wanted, and to determine how this is related to the specific profiles of symptoms they experienced. To address these research questions, we screened for participants that have served on a violent trial (homicide, rape, child abuse, sexual offenses towards children, and torture) in the last 10 years. They were given the SCL-90 Checklist to measure their symptoms, if any, and then asked to rate a set of possible resources to cope with their stress as to how much they would have wanted the specific resource. Results of the study showed that participants experiencing more distress would have liked more efforts to alleviate that stress and resources afterward. Although these were not linked to any particular symptom profile, seven resources showed a significant relationship between the severity of symptoms and endorsement of those resources. The most desired resources were a thorough understanding of the laws pertaining to the crime; a thorough understanding of the punishments pertaining to the crime; and disclosure of the severity of the evidence to be presented in the trial before it begins. Limitations of this study and future directions are discussed.
ContributorsSauer, Catherine McKenna (Co-author) / Taff, Lindsay (Co-author) / Shiota, Michelle (Thesis director) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Past research has shown that serving on a jury can put the jurors under distress. Most research has shown that the nature of the trial (violent vs. non-violent) is a major factor in predicting distress. Though there is a lot of research identifying the distress, there is little research on how to resolve or prevent the distress from occurring in the first place. The purpose of this study is to examine what kinds of treatments prior jurors would have wanted, and to determine how this is related to the specific profiles of symptoms they experienced. To address these research questions, we screened for participants that have served on a violent trial (homicide, rape, child abuse, sexual offenses towards children, and torture) in the last 10 years. They were given the SCL-90 Checklist to measure their symptoms, if any, and then asked to rate a set of possible resources to cope with their stress as to how much they would have wanted the specific resource. Results of the study showed that participants experiencing more distress would have liked more efforts to alleviate that stress and resources afterward. Although these were not linked to any particular symptom profile, seven resources showed a significant relationship between the severity of symptoms and endorsement of those resources. The most desired resources were a thorough understanding of the laws pertaining to the crime; a thorough understanding of the punishments pertaining to the crime; and disclosure of the severity of the evidence to be presented in the trial before it begins. Limitations of this study and future directions are discussed.
ContributorsTaff, Lindsay Abigail (Co-author) / Sauer, Catherine McKenna (Co-author) / Shiota, Michelle (Thesis director) / Salerno, Jessica (Committee member) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12