Evidence suggests that female victims of sexual abuse are revictimized more often than non-victimized females, placing them at risk for the negative consequences, including increased psychopathology, medical issues and interpersonal difficulties. Research is needed to protect childhood sexual abuse survivors from the risk of further sexual assault. The present study examines if victim status and perception of social costs inhibit heterosexual females’ perception of risk and behavioral response. Results indicate that victim status affects the perception of risk and that sexually abused women in a high social cost condition use less assertive behavioral responses. Implications of these findings for sexual assault prevention and interventions are discussed.

Evidence suggests that female victims of sexual abuse are revictimized more often than non-victimized females, placing them at risk for the negative consequences, including increased psychopathology, medical issues and interpersonal difficulties. Research is needed to protect childhood sexual abuse survivors from the risk of further sexual assault. The present study examines if victim status and perception of social costs inhibit heterosexual females’ perception of risk and behavioral response. Results indicate that victim status affects the perception of risk and that sexually abused women in a high social cost condition use less assertive behavioral responses. Implications of these findings for sexual assault prevention and interventions are discussed.

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Mark A. Barnett / The present study is an extension of our prior work (Jones et al., 2016) and explored two specific goals. The primary goal examined the predictive ability of target-specific, rejection-relevant individual difference measures on participants’ anticipated emotional and behavioral responses to ambiguous social situations involving specific potential rejectors (i.e., significant others, friends, acquaintances). The secondary goal explored differences in participants’ anticipated emotional and behavioral responses to perceived rejection by the same potential rejectors. Concerning the primary goal, correlations revealed that previous experience with and/or sensitivity to being rejected by any individual is associated with heightened anticipated emotional responses which, in turn, is associated with different anticipated behavioral responses. However, path analyses revealed that the target-specific, rejection-relevant individual difference variables used in the current study were uniquely predictive of participants’ anticipated responses to ambiguous social situations involving similar potential rejectors, but only for those who read about potentially being rejected by a friend (results of the path analyses for those who read about potential rejection by significant others or acquaintances were uninterpretable). Concerning the secondary goal, analyses revealed that the intensity of the emotional responses as well as the type of behavioral response were dependent on the role of the potential rejector. Taken together, the present findings provide insight into the individual differences associated with our tendency to feel and behave as if we have been rejected within ambiguous social situations and help to shed additional light on the dyadic nature of interpersonal rejection.

In cases where refuge acquisition or captive breeding programs are not practical or justifiable, wild caught animals are frequently translocated into areas of suitable habitat. Such management programs seldom are designed to account for the behavioral responses of translocated animals to an unfamiliar habitat, breakup of social units, and/or interactions with existing social units in the new habitat. Ongoing efforts to translocate threatened Utah prairie dogs (Cynomys parvidens) from areas where conflicts with other land uses are occurring to public land sites have met with limited success. This could be due, in part, to behavioral responses associated with disrupting social units and placing animals in an unfamiliar environment. The purpose of this research was to test a series of hypotheses regarding the behavioral responses of Utah prairie dogs to translocation. Focal animal sampling was used to estimate the durations and frequencies of five behavioral variables and five interaction types at four treatments: control, new site, supplemental site, and new population. In Chapter 1, activity budgets were compared among control animals, animals released into a new site versus a supplemental site, and animals already present at a supplemental site. The objective was to evaluate the relative effects of new and supplemental translocations and the effects of translocations on resident animals. In Chapter 2, the frequencies of interactions were compared among these same treatments to evaluate the effects of translocation on the sociality of Utah prairie dogs as reflected by changes in the frequencies of greeting displays, dominance/subordinance displays, and amicable and agonistic interactions. Chapter 3 compares the activity budgets of animals released at a site containing natural burrows (i.e., new population) and animals released into a site containing artificial burrows (i.e., new site) to a control. Habitat measurements for these treatments were also compared to evaluate the importance of habitat characteristics typical of prairie dog colonies to translocated animals. Hotelling's T2 analyses were used to compare behavioral durations between treatments and log-linear analyses were use to compare behavioral frequencies among treatments. Activity budgets were altered by translocation through tradeoffs between the amount of time spent foraging, being vigilant, exploring the unfamiliar habitat, and minimizing conspicuousness. Predicted changes in interactions frequencies as a result of translocations were not observed. Activity budgets of animals released into the site containing natural burrows did not differ from those of control animals . The most important behavioral consideration is the effects of burrow and habitat characteristics in providing centers of activity and effective predator detection and avoidance.

The detection of predators by prey species is crucial in order to escape the threat posed by a predator. In mammals, the olfactory sensory system is commonly used to detect odors emitted by predators, and to determine how threatening the situation actually is. However, knowledge about this ability is still sparse and in some cases conflicting. The aim of the present study was therefore to assess whether CD-1 mice (Mus musculus) show behaviors such as avoidance, anxiety and/or decreased activity when exposed to any of the three odorants: cat bladder urine, horse voided urine or a fruity odor (N-pentyl acetate), with a blank solvent as an alternative in a two-compartment test arena. I found no significant differences between avoidance (the time that the mice spent in the different compartments), anxiety (the numbers of fecal pellets dropped by the mice), or the overall activity (the number of switches between the two compartments), when the mice were exposed to the three different odors. The fact that the cat urine derived from the bladder of the cat may explain the lack of avoidance responses, since bladder urine might not contain the same chemical components as voided urine. Bladder urine might therefore also lack the chemical components that signal “predator” to the mice. In conclusion, mice do not respond differently to the odor of cat bladder urine than to horse voided urine or to the fruity odor of N-pentyl acetate.

Labeled by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) as one of fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering, the management of the nitrogen cycle has become an increasingly difficult obstacle for sustainable development. In an effort to help overcome this challenge, the goal of our study is to expand on the limited scientific understanding of how the nitrogen cycle within aquatic environments may be affected by increasing human- and climate-induced changes. To this end, we are using freshwater mussels as a sentinel species to better understand the impacts of ecosystem perturbation on nitrogen processing in large river systems. This was completed by examining the physical, biological, and chemical characteristics of a mussel habitat in the Mississippi River, evaluating the impact of the 2008 floods on the habitat and the ecosystem's nutrient processing, establishing a well-equipped mussel laboratory habitat to investigate mussel behavioral responses, and analyzing highly time resolved data to examine the mussels' contribution to daily nitrate fluxes.

This thesis consists of five self-contained essays. Essay 1. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto)  Using a calibrated overlapping-generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age-dependent labor income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can transfer consumption across periods through savings. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent nonlinear tax varies between 2.4% and 4% of GDP. Part of the welfare gain is due to capital accumulation effects and part descends from relaxing incentive-compatibility constraints. The welfare gain is of about the same magnitude as the welfare gain that can be achieved by moving from a linear- to a nonlinear labor income tax. Finally, the welfare loss from tax-exempting interest income is negligible under an optimal age-dependent labor income tax. Essay 2. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto) Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods has been made in models where agents differ only in terms of market ability. Second, the magnitude of the welfare gains achievable through public provision schemes has not been assessed. Third, the similarities/differences between public provision schemes and tagging schemes have not been thoroughly analyzed. Our purpose in this paper is therefore threefold: first, to extend previous contributions by incorporating in the theoretical analysis both heterogeneity in market ability and in the need for the publicly provided good; second, to perform numerical simulations to quantify the size of the potential welfare gains achievable by introducing a public provision scheme, and to characterize the conditions under which these welfare gains are sizeable; finally, to compare the welfare gains from public provision with the welfare gains from tagging. Essay 3. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto) Subsidized child care is a common phenomenon in both Europe and the United States. In this paper we study the efficiency of some of the most common types of child care subsidies. These are a (refundable) tax credit, tax deductibility and public provision. We evaluate the relative efficiency of these instruments using a quantitative simulation model calibrated to resemble the US economy. In our framework there is a special tax treatment for families with children of child care age, which is based on an assumption that agrees with facts pertaining to actual circumstances in the United States, as well as many other countries. We keep the net tax revenue for this group of tax payers constant, hence the subsidies to child care are paid for by the group itself. It is a commonly held view that in a 'good society' all children should have equal opportunities in life. Many proponents of subsidized childcare argue that one way to move in this direction is to allow all children access to good quality child care. We capture this ideological perspective by using a paternalistic social welfare function which places special emphasis on the quality of child care purchased by households. Using a standard social welfare function we find tax deductibility to be the most efficient instrument to subsidize child care and public provision the least efficient instrument. These results are completely reversed when using the paternalistic welfare function and when  society has the goal of providing all children with access to good quality child care.  Public provision then becomes the best way to subsidize child care.  An important aspect of public provision is that it is an efficient instrument in raising the quality of child care. Essay 4.  In a recent paper Alesina et al. (2011) construct a model in which different labor supply elasticities for men and women emerge endogenously from intra-household bargaining. In this paper I explore the optimal tax implications of their model in an economy with both singles and couples and inequality across as well as within households. In the model, the welfare of married women can be improved by lowering taxes for single women. However, this benefit must be weighed against the welfare cost of taxing single men and women at different rates. Moreover, if single men earn more than single women, the welfare of married women can alternatively be improved by a gender-neutral tax scheme which taxes singles at a higher rate. Because the government is concerned not only with equalizing utilities within families, but also with the redistribution between high income and low income households, gender-based adjustments in the income tax must be weighed against the welfare consequences of changing the progressivity of the tax system. I find that larger lump-sum transfers to women is always optimal. Interestingly, marginal tax rates, on the other hand, should be lower for women only if the exogenous bargaining power of men is moderate. The welfare gains of gender based taxation are sizable and the welfare gains of having tax instruments which depend on household composition are even larger. Essay 5. (with Håkan Selin) Recent microeconometric studies of taxpayers' responsiveness to taxation have shown that intensive margin labor supply and earnings elasticities typically are modest and sometimes equal to zero. However,a common view is that long-run responses might still be large since micro-estimates are downward biased owing to optimization frictions. In this paper we estimate the taxable income elasticity at a very large kink point of the Swedish tax schedule using the bunching method. During the period of study the change in the log net-of-tax rate reached a maximum value of 45.6%. Interestingly, we obtain a precise elasticity estimate of zero for wage earners at this large kink. The size of the kink allows us to derive tighter bounds on the long-run elasticity than previous studies. If wage earners on average tolerate 1% of their disposable income in optimization costs, the upper bound on the long-run taxable income elasticity is 0.39. We also evaluate the performance of the bunching estimator by performing Monte Carlo simulations.

The assertive training literature has documented the effectiveness of both behavioral and cognitive methods to increase individual's assertiveness. However, the ability for such methods to enhance the generalization of treatment effects to untrained assertive response classes and the natural environment has been poor. In addition, little notice has been paid to the durability of these changes. Although the past several years have witnessed more intensive efforts by investigators to program generalization as part of their interventions, results have continued to be disappointing. A specific generalization-enhancing treatment strategy, self-directed practice, has been utilized with much success in phobic populations. This strategy, and the theoretical orientation it reflects, has been proposed for use in assertive training. The present study sought to examine the effectiveness of this method as compared to the traditional assertive training procedures and investigate the role of self-efficacy expectations in mediating initial behavior change and its subsequent generalization.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The research of neural mechanisms related to training of emotions has increased in recent years. Fear is a behavior originated in response to the dangers encountering by animals, originating in defensive responses displayed when exposed to threatening stimuli. Fear memory helps animals and humans recognize putative sources of danger and adopt the appropriate behavioral response. The primary neural circuits for fear acquisition and extinction involve connections between prefrontal cortex, ventral hippocampus and amygdala, and these áreas are modulated by brainstem networks. The nucleus (n.) incertus in the dorsal pontine tegmentum provides a strong GABAergic projection to these forebrain centers and is strongly activated by neurogenic stressors. In this study in male, adult rats, we injected miniruby anterograde tracer into n. incertus and delineated its projections to the amygdala; and examined the effect of electrolytic lesions of n. incertus on different stages of the fear conditioning-extinction process. N. incertus-derived nerve fibers were observed in anterior medial amygdala, endopiriform nucleus, intra-amygdala bed nucleus of stria terminalis, amygdalohippocampal transition area, and the ventromedial nucleus of the lateral amygdala, with a broad fiber band present between the basolateral amygdala and the olfactory nuclei of amygdala. In a conventional contextual fear conditioning paradigm, we compared freezing behavior in control (naïve) rats (n = 13), with that in rats after sham- or electrolytic lesions of n. incertus (n = 9/group). There were no differences between the three groups in the habituation, acquisition, or context conditioning phases; but n. incertus-lesioned rats displayed a markedly slower (delayed) extinction of conditioned freezing responses than sham/control rats; suggesting n. incertus-related circuits normally promote extinction through inhibitory projections to amygdala and prefrontal cortex. The results helps in understanding the neurobiological mechanisms involved and in development of the future biotechnological techniques to minimize the effects of disorders associated with fear in humans, such as panic, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder. / A pesquisa dos mecanismos neurais relacionados à formação das emoções tem crescido nos últimos anos. O medo é um comportamento originado em resposta aos perigos enfrentados pelos animais, tendo sua origem nas reações defensivas exibidas quando da exposição a estímulos ameaçadores. A memória do medo ajuda os animais e os seres humanos a reconhecem as fontes putativas de perigo e adotar a resposta comportamental apropriada. Os circuitos neurais primárias envolvidos nos mecanismo de aquisição de medo e extinção envolvem conexões entre o córtex pré-frontal, hipocampo ventral e a amígdala, e estas áreas são moduladas por redes do tronco cerebral. O núcleo incertus (NI) no tegmento dorsal pontino fornece uma forte projeção GABAérgica a estes centros prosencéfalicos e é fortemente ativado por estressores neurogênicos. Neste estudo em ratos adultos machos foi injetado o traçador anterógrado miniruby no NI, delineado as suas projeções para a amígdala e examinado o efeito de lesões eletrolíticas no NI sobre diferentes fases do processo de condicionamento do medo-extinção. Fibras derivadas do NI foram observadas na amígdala medial anterior, núcleo endopiriforme, parte intra-amígdala do núcleo do leito da estria terminalis, área de transição amígdala-hipocampal, e o núcleo ventromedial da amígdala lateral, com uma ampla faixa de fibra presentes entre a amígdala basolateral e os núcleos olfativos da amígdala. Em um paradigma de condicionamento contextual de medo convencional, comparou-se o comportamento de congelamento em ratos controle (não operados) (n = 13), com ratos operados sem lesão do NI e ratos com lesão do núcleo incertus (n = 9). Não houve diferenças entre os três grupos nas fases de habituação, aquisição ou condicionamento ao contexto, mas ratos com lesão no NI exibiram uma extinção nitidamente mais lenta (com atraso) de respostas condicionadas de congelamento em comparação com ratos operados sem lesão do NI e controles, sugerindo que circuitos NI relacionados normalmente promovem a extinção através de projeções inibitórias para a amígdala e o córtex pré-frontal. Os resultados encontrados auxiliam na compreensão dos mecanismos neurobiológicos envolvidos e no desenvolvimento futuro de técnicas terapêuticas biotecnológicas visando minimizar os efeitos dos distúrbios associados ao medo em humanos, a exemplo do pânico, ansiedade patológica e estresse pós-traumático.