The circadian clock is a biological oscillator present in all terrestrial life forms that aligns organismal functions with the daily rising and setting of the sun. In mammals clocks are expressed both in pacemaker cells in the brain that are directly entrained by light as well as in all peripheral...
Understanding how contexts shape child development is a primary goal of human development research and theory. Child effects, or the influence of children on their own environment, may be a key process by which contexts and children interact to shape subsequent development. Yet, child effects have been under-studied in social...
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,...
Most organisms use rhythms of sunlight to synchronize their activity to the environment. These rhythms of activity are called circadian rhythms. The rhythms persist with near 24 hour periods when external synchronizing cues are absent. In mammals, the circadian clock is generated at the molecular level by a transcriptional/translational feedback...
The primary purpose of this study was to describe what comprises an undergraduate compositional identity. Building upon recent research investigating musical identities with a social psychological framework (Macdonald, Hargreaves, & Miell, 2002), I examined the confluence of socially based experiences that shaped four undergraduate composers' lives. Specifically, this study investigated...
This dissertation considers price indices in the context of two rapidly growing markets. The first is the emerging market for Internet Service Providers in the mid-1990s. The second is the emergence and growth of the DVD hardware market. In both, we examine indices ranging from the most rudimentary to quality...
Recent work exploring children's verb learning in the laboratory has generated some interesting contradictions. Some studies have found that children as old as 4 years old are unable to reliably map a novel verb to an action (e.g., Kersten & Smith, 2002; Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005), even though much...
People today increasingly first meet others in mediated spaces, undergoing impression formation processes where they view information, gain impressions, and make decisions about others. Previous research examines profile information (e.g. name, photo, about me) that people provide about themselves within this process, finding that people try to craft profiles for...
The finite element method is used to investigate failure mechanisms in pin-hanger connection in aging highway bridges. Bridge pins and hangers are typically considered as critical elements whose failure may result in partial or entire collapse of the structure. The primary function of a pin-hanger connection is to allow for...
Estrogens are traditionally thought to act through a nuclear receptor-mediated mechanism to regulate gene transcription in target tissues. The hippocampus has been shown to be sensitive to estrogen; estrogen regulates GABAergic inhibition and spine density of dorsal CA1 pyramidal cells. However, very few neurons expressing nuclear estrogen receptors (ERs) have...