FLUID OCCUPANCY: POLITICS AND SPACE IN A TAIPEI NIGHT MARKET
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation shows how street vendors in Shilin Night Market, in Taipei City, Taiwan, through spatial, social, and material practices, shape and reshape an urban landscape. I find the space they produce to be a vernacular representation of modernity for an authentic urban identity. Dealing with the municipality and local community, street vendors have continually appropriated public and private property in both legal and extralegal situations. Municipal officials and urban planners have followed these spatial practices in an effort to fix, standardize, and tax their vending spaces. Extralegal vendors, provoked by this official scrutiny, developed a spatial practice of "fluid occupancy" supported by social relations, micro politics, and embodied performances to sustain their operation outside legal boundaries. Culturally speaking, the culinary practices of domestic and migrant food vendors, and the clothing vendors' involvement with transnational wholesale trades, stretch the identity of Shilin Night Market from that of a local trading place to a liminal space that subsumes a grounded, place-specific practice within a network of transnational flows. Despite the fact that street vendors created economic and cultural capital as the basis of a thriving market, they eventually became the targets of removal in the political discourse of reframing the market as a tourist space shaped in the spirit of capitalist modernity. To maximize the transnational quality of Shilin Night Market as they seek to forge a cosmopolitan identity for Taipei, municipal officials redeveloped the market into a prominent tourist destination, building a new, indoor market and relocating extralegal vendors into storefront arcades under the privatized governance of a property association. Eventually, some street vendors were incorporated into the municipal prototype, and others have kept contesting unauthorized space. I celebrate the hybridity of this commercial landscape that unifies the steady and the fluid occupancies of public space, as well as the global and the local synergy infused within the setting. My dissertation suggests that modern design practices can pursue process-driven planning strategies that forego displacement and exclusion, seeking instead to balance esthetic and economic concerns with an acknowledgement of the social ecologies of physically and culturally distinct, urban places.
The Eye and the Couch: Dialectical and Metaphorical Aspects of Seeing and Being Seen in Development and Psychoanalytic Treatment
Year of Dissertation:
2011
ABSTRACT
Dissertation The relationships among custody and visitation arrangements, parental conflict, and adolescent outcomes in the context of divorce
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Experiencing parental divorce during adolescence has been associated with a number of negative adolescent outcomes. A high level of parental conflict has been identified as an important determinant of adolescents' adjustment to their parents' divorce. This study sought to examine the relationships between level of parental conflict, custody and visitation arrangements, and negative adolescent outcomes. This research is based on archival data obtained in the course of a forensic child custody evaluation, and utilized a sample of 89 couples and 196 pre-adolescents and adolescents. Results demonstrated that higher levels of parental conflict were associated with a greater number of negative adolescent outcomes. It was also found that children whose parents had joint custody experienced fewer negative adolescent outcomes than those who were in the sole custody of one parent. These results suggest several important implications for practice, policy, and future research.
MERIT- Mentalization Enhanced Remediation an Integrated Treatment - A Comprehensive Intervention for Children with Autism
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In the treatment of autism two models have evolved that have attempted to integrate aspects from skill based approaches with a more developmental model. These models remain predominantly developmental. Although these more integrated models have taken into consideration the advances that have allowed us to better understand the neuropsychological profiles of children on the spectrum, they do not attempt to intensively remediate many of the areas we know to be compromised.
An Investigation of the Psychological Processes Involved in Juror Rehabilitation
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Judges often attempt to rehabilitate jurors who express an inability to be fair during voir dire. The present research examined psychological mechanisms operating during juror rehabilitation. Study One investigated whether the influence of rehabilitative questioning on juror judgments observed in previous research is attributable to informational or normative influence from the judge. I manipulated the presence of two components of rehabilitation (i.e., legal instruction and elicitation of a commitment to forgo bias) within a mock voir dire. I also varied evidence strength to assess whether rehabilitative questioning improves the quality of jurors' judgments. Jurors watched a trial and rendered a verdict. Rehabilitative instructions reduced the number of guilty verdicts for biased and unbiased participants. Rehabilitation did not increase jurors' sensitivity to evidence strength. Study Two tested the hypothesis that traditional suppression rehabilitation will lead to increased accessibility of PTP under conditions of cognitive load. I manipulated exposure to PTP and the type of rehabilitation questioning received (i.e., no rehabilitation, rehabilitation framed in terms of suppression, rehabilitation framed in terms of concentration). Efforts were taken to induce a state of cognitive busyness in all participants while they watched the trial; after the trial participants deliberated to a verdict. Exposure to PTP increased the likelihood that participants would vote guilty. In the no rehabilitation and concentration conditions, participants who read PTP perceived the defendant as more guilty than did participants who did not view PTP. However, in the suppression rehabilitation condition, participants who read PTP perceived the defendant as less guilty than did participants who did not read PTP. Rehabilitative instructions and suppression rehabilitation resulted in more lenient judgments than the no-rehabilitation control, suggesting that participants were not well calibrated to the magnitude of their bias, and when prompted to be unbiased, overcorrected in the opposite direction. Although rehabilitated jurors may be motivated to correct for bias, they appear to have difficulty estimating the degree to which biases influence their judgments. It is possible that jurors may be better able to assess the presence of and correct for a biasing influence if it is discrete rather than attitudinal in nature.
The Relationship Specificity of the Reflective Function: An Empirical Investigation
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The present study examines the stability of the Reflective Function (RF) across relationship contexts by testing the correlation between mothers' RF in discussing their children/parenthood and their RF in discussing their parents/childhood. It was hypothesized that RF would be stable across these contexts as evidenced by a positive, significant correlation between RF scores on separate interviews that focus on parenthood and childhood in detail.
The Effects of Pre- and Post-Venire Publicity on Juror Decision Making
Author:
Tarika Daftary-Kapur
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Given the proliferation of the media in everyday life, finding jurors who have not been exposed to potentially biasing pretrial publicity (PTP) is somewhat of a challenge, especially in high profile cases. This has long been recognized by the courts, but some question the effectiveness of the remedies that have been put in place. Over the past 45 years, psychologists have studied these effects to understand whether and how PTP influences juror decision making. This research has shown that PTP effects do indeed exist and can jeopardize the defendant's right to a fair an impartial trial. At the same time, some have questioned the methodological rigor of these studies and their applicability to the trial setting. Additionally, some important questions remain, specifically the durability of PTP effects, the influence of quantity and type of PTP (pro-prosecution vs. pro-defense), the medium of exposure (print vs. television), and the influence of mid-trial publicity.
EXAMINING SPATIAL RESOLUTION, STIMULUS PERCEPTION AND RELATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE OCTAVOLATERALIS SUB-SYSTEMS OF THE GOLDFISH (CARASSIUS AURATUS)
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Christopher Braun
In two separate series of behavioral experiments, spatial resolution and perceptual dimensions corresponding to physical stimulus attributes (frequency, amplitude and position) of a vibratory dipole source were assessed using classically conditioned respiratory suppression in goldfish (Carassius auratus).
THE EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD MALTREATMENT ON CRIMINAL AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE OUTCOMES IN URBAN YOUTH DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD
Author:
Virginia De Sanctis
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Results from longitudinal studies of individuals diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) in childhood have clearly shown that these children are at heightened risk for poor outcomes as they enter into adolescence and early adulthood. Among poor outcomes criminality (Barkley, Fischer, Edelbrock, & Smallish, 1990; Hechtman & Weiss, 1986; Mannuzza, Klein, Konig, & Giampino, 1989; Mannuzza, Klein, Bessler, Malloy, & LaPadula, 1993) and substance use disorders (SUDs; Mannuzza, Klein, Bessler, Malloy, & LaPadula, 1998; Wilens, Biederman, & Mick, 1998; King, Iacono, & Mcgue, 2004) are particularly prevalent and cause significant hardship for the individual, their family, and society at large.
Emotion Regulation and Aging: A Neurophysiological Study
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Cognitive emotion regulation (ER) pertains to the ability to change the way we attend to and experience emotional information and events. Older and younger adults, however, differ in the way that they attend to emotional information. Socioemotional Selective Theory (SST) suggests that as we age we become more adept at using cognitive ER strategies to reduce negative emotion because we have less time left in life. As a result of these motivational changes, a branch of SST, the positivity effect, proposes older versus younger adults attend to and remember more pleasant than unpleasant stimuli. Research that systematically examines different types of cognitive ER in controlled (reappraisal) and automatic (directed attention) contexts, using neurophysiological measures, has the potential to clarify the nature of the positivity effect. The present research capitalizes on the excellent temporal resolution of the late positive potential (LPP) which is sensitive to attention to emotion and the use of cognitive ER strategies: increasing emotional responses produces larger LPP amplitudes and decreasing smaller LPP amplitudes. Chapter one served to first evaluate whether cognitive ER impacts memory performance and if the LPP during a cognitive ER task was associated with memory performance in younger adults (N = 49). Subsequent research presented uses the LPP to understand whether younger (n = 49) and older adults (n =28) differ in: a) how they attend to emotional information during a passive viewing task (bottom-up); b) how they use two types of cognitive ER strategies, reappraisal (top-down) and directed attention (intermediary top-down); c) how cognitive ER strategies impact memory performance. Results highlight several important contributions to the cognitive ER and aging literature. First, in the initial study results showed that instructions to increase emotional responses to unpleasant stimuli results in larger LPP amplitudes as compared to viewing or decreasing emotional responses. Memory performance in the increase and view conditions was better than the decrease condition. Additionally, larger LPP amplitudes in the increase and decrease conditions were associated with better memory performance. Second, older adults showed sustained attention to emotional stimuli; however younger and older adults did not show preferential attention to unpleasant and pleasant stimuli (respectively). Third, younger and older adults did not differ in their ability to use reappraisal as measured via the LPP, but did show differences in LPP amplitudes on the directed attention task to unpleasant stimuli. Younger, but not older adults showed larger LPP amplitudes to unpleasant stimuli presented with an arousing versus non-arousing focus. Fourth, age differences in memory performance did not emerge; however stimuli presented with an arousing focus were remembered more than those with a non-arousing focus. Fifth, only larger LPP amplitudes to unpleasant stimuli in the decrease condition (relative to a neutral maintain) were associated with better memory performance for younger and older adults. Taken together results suggest that older versus younger adults may sustain processing of emotional stimuli and that age differences in cognitive ER may lie within bottom-up cognitive ER tasks as opposed to reappraisal. Results hold promise that the LPP may be a useful tool for examining other types of cognitive ER strategies in younger and older adults.