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High quality interactions with racial outgroup members have been shown to improve explicit racial attitudes. However, the links between high quality interracial interactions with other cognitive and social factors have received less attention in the research literature. Contact theory posits that more contact with outgroup members leads to less bias towards outgroup members. The disclosure-liking effect posits that we like those who we have disclosed to and those who have disclosed to us. Therefore, some researchers have explored whether intimate self-disclosure in contact experiences can be used as a strategy to foster better interracial interactions. The current study found support for the use of self-disclosure as a strategy in interracial interactions to reduce executive functioning impairments typically found for both African-Americans and Caucasians following interracial interactions. This strategy was not as effective for other interracial interaction outcomes. Although implicit trust for the outgroup increased for Caucasians who interacted with an outgroup member, it decreased for African-Americans following an outgroup interaction. Intimacy of self-disclosure was unrelated to these observed changes in implicit outgroup trust. Furthermore, while this strategy reduced the salience of racial category differences for those who interacted with an outgroup member with high intimacy, the strategy also increased racial category salience for African-Americans. The study's results suggest that for some outcomes the quantity of contact may be as important as quality of contact and highlights the importance of studying effects for both minority and majority group members in interracial interactions. / Psychology

This study examined the differences in teacher racial ideology among white teachers in urban, suburban, and rural areas. This study advances the scholarship on the ideological frames used by teachers in urban, suburban, and rural areas through an examination of the differences in teachers’ discourse and racial ideology. Using contact theory, this study employed interviews to examine teachers’ discourse related to racial inequality in education to determine whether there were similarities in teacher discourse within and across urban, suburban, and rural areas with differing racial compositions. Interviews were conducted with 42 teachers in urban, suburban, and rural school districts during the 2014-2015 school year. There were three major findings in this study. First, four original frames of color-conscious racial ideology were present in data across urban, suburban, and rural areas. Second, teachers across all areas employ the systemic responsibility frame to talk about the achievement gap, and the cultural racism frame to talk about increased violence in urban areas, revealing that teachers frame some topics similarly across areas of differing racial composition. Third, analysis of teacher racial ideologies using the eight frames of color-conscious and color-blind racial ideology reveal that teachers within Lincoln City, Gresham, and Arcadia employ specific frames within each area to talk about racial inequality in education. Further, teachers in Lincoln City and Gresham framed racial inequality in education more consistently using color-conscious frames than teachers in Arcadia, indicating that contact with outgroup members also shapes teacher racial ideology. / Urban Education

According to the American Cancer Society, Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States, only exceeded by heart disease. Over the past decade, deciphering the complex structure of individual cells and understanding the symptoms of cancer disease has been a highly emphasized research area. The exact cause of Cancer and the genetic heterogeneity that determines the severity of the disease and its response to treatment has been a great challenge. Researchers from the engineering discipline have increasingly made use of recent technological innovations, namely the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), to better understand cell physics and provide a means for cell biomechanical profiling. The presented work's research objective is to establish a fundamental framework for the development of novel biosensors for cell separation and disease diagnosis. By using AFM nanoindentation, several studies were conducted to identify key distinctions in the trends of cell viscoelasticity between healthy, nontumorigenic cells and their malignant, highly tumorigenic counterparts. The possibility of identifying useful 'biomarkers' was also investigated. Due to the lack of an available human ovarian cell line, experiments were done on a recently developed mouse ovarian surface epithelial (MOSE) cell line, which resembles to human cell characteristics and represents early, intermediate, and late stages of the ovarian cancer. Material properties were extracted via Hertz model contact theory. The experimental results illustrate that the elasticity of late stage MOSE cells were 50% less than that of the early stage. Cell viscosity also decreased by 65% from early to late stage, indicating that the increase in cell deformability directly correlates with increasing levels of malignancy. Various cancer treatment and component-specific drugs were used to identify the causes for the changes in cell biomechanical behavior, depicting that the decrease in the concentration levels of cell structural components, predominantly the actin filament framework, is directly associated with the changes in cell biomechanical property. The investigation of MOSE cells being subject to multiple mechanical loads illustrated that healthy cells react to shear forces by stiffening up to 25% of their original state. On the other hand, cancerous cells are void of such response and at times show signs of decreasing rigidity. Finally, deformation studies on MOSE cancer stem cells have shown that these cells carry a unique elasticity profile among other cell stage phenotypes that could allow for their detection. The results herein carry great potential into contributing to cell separation methods and analysis, furthering the understanding of cell mechanism dynamics. While prior literature emphasizes on the elastic modulus of cells, the study of cell viscosity and other key material properties holds a critical place in the realistic modeling of these complex microstructures. A comprehensive study of individual cells holds a great amount of promise in the development of effective clinical research in the fight against cancer. / Master of Science

This research is a detailed look at intercultural competence, an issue showing escalating importance in today's higher education and the society at large. In this study, intercultural competence was defined in light of the concept of culture and the contact hypothesis. Person-environment interaction theory and college impact theories were incorporated as theoretical foundations for the operationalization of this research. The development of students' intercultural competence was examined from two perspectives--intercultural competence is viewed both as a desirable outcome of college education and as an active environment component that exerts important influence on students' self-reported gains. Findings of this study evidenced that a variety of college activities, especially those emphasizing cooperative and associated learning, play important role in students' intercultural competence development. Intercultural competence, in turn, has substantially positive effect in student gains in multiple realms. The intrinsic influences of student characteristics were also examined. In the end, previous research was drawn upon to scrutinize the findings of this study. Implications to future practice and policy as well as the values and limitations of this study were also presented. / Ph. D.

Auditing literature recently identified what has been termed a "social mismatch" between novice auditors and older, more experienced, more knowledgeable client contacts (Bennett and Hatfield 2013). This phenomenon occurs when novice auditors avoid face-to-face interactions with clients and can adversely affect the audit process. In light of the importance of novice auditor-client interactions, I conduct an experiment to identify potential mechanisms to mitigate the social mismatch phenomenon. Specifically, accounting students proxying for novice auditors are randomly assigned to experimental conditions in which they participate in role-play and perspective-taking exercises and complete an audit task commonly performed by novice auditors. Initial findings indicate that role-play interventions, such as those currently used in training at large public accounting firms, may exacerbate novice auditor inhibition tendencies. Furthermore, additional results suggest that actively taking the client's perspective prior to choosing an evidence gathering technique does not improve novice auditor decisions. Finally, auditor inherent characteristics are studied, including levels of emotional intelligence and impression management, and also do not appear to have implications for selection of evidence gathering techniques. Results of this study provide valuable insight into novice auditor-client interactions, as well as the implications of such interactions for audit evidence gathering activities. / Ph. D.

This dissertation aims to contribute towards the understanding and modeling of tribological phenomena of contact, friction, and wear in viscoelastic materials with application in rubber compounds. Tribiological properties of rubber compounds are important for many applications such as tires, shoe heels and soles, wiper blades, artificial joints, O-ring seals, and so on. In all these applications, the objective is to maximize the friction coefficient to avoid slipping and reduce the wear rate to improve the life expectancy and performance of the products. The first topic in this study focuses on a novel multiscale contact theory proposed by Persson and explains the advantages of this theory over other classical contact theories. The shortcomings of this theory are also investigated, and three methods are proposed to improve Persson's original contact model by correcting the approximation of deformation in the contact area. The first method is based on the original Greenwood and Williamson (GW) contact theory, which neglects the effect of elastic coupling between asperities. The second method is based on an improved version of GW theory, which considers the elastic coupling effect of asperities in an approximate way. The third method is based on the distribution of local peaks of asperities, which is particularly suitable to determine the fraction of a skewed height profile involved in tribological processes. This method can be implemented within the framework of other proposed methods. Since the height profiles of rough surfaces studied in this dissertation are approximately normally distributed, the second correction method is applied to the original contact model to calculate the real contact area and friction coefficient. The second topic addresses the theoretical model of hysteresis friction in viscoelastic materials. The multiscale temperature rise of the rubber surface due to hysteresis friction is also modeled and the effect of flash temperature on the real contact area and friction coefficient is studied. Since the hysteresis friction is not the only mechanism involved in the rubber friction, a semi-empirical model is added to the hysteresis model to include the contribution of adhesion and other processes on the real contact area. Based on the improved multiscale contact theory, a pressure-dependent friction model is also developed for viscoelastic materials, which is in good agreement with experimental results. The third topic deals with the theory of stationary crack propagation in viscoelastic materials and the effect of crack tip flash temperature on the instability of crack propagation observed in some experimental results in the literature. Initially, a theoretical model is developed to calculate the tearing energy vs crack tip velocity in a Kelvin-Voigt rubber model. Besides, two coupled iterative algorithms are developed to calculate the temperature field around the crack tip in addition to the tearing energy as a function of crack tip velocity. In this model, the effect of crack tip flash temperature on the tearing energy is considered to update the relation between tearing energy vs crack tip velocity, which also affects the flash temperature. A theoretical model is also developed to calculate the contribution of the hysteresis effect to the tearing energy vs crack tip velocity using the dynamic modulus master curve of a rubber compound. Then, the low-frequency fatigue test results are compared with the theoretical predictions and used in the framework of powdery rubber wear theory to calculate the stationary rubber wear rate due to fatigue crack propagation. Moreover, a sliding friction and wear test set-up, with both indoor and outdoor testing capability, is developed to validate the theoretical models. The experimental results confirm that the theoretical model can successfully predict the friction coefficient when there is no trace of thermochemical degradation on the rubber surface. Investigating the wear mechanism of rubber samples on three different surfaces reveals that the contribution of fatigue wear rate is less important than other wear mechanisms such as abrasive wear due to sharp asperities or thermochemical degradation due to a significant rise of temperature on the contact area. Finally, the correlation between friction coefficient and wear rate on different surfaces is studied, and it is found that the relation between friction and wear rate strongly depends on the dominant wear mechanism, which is determined by the surface characteristics, sliding velocity, normal load, and contact flash temperature. / PHD / The objective of this dissertation is to understand and develop models for contact, friction, and wear in rubber-like materials. Friction and wear of rubber-like materials are important in many applications such as tires, shoe heels and soles, wiper blades, artificial joints, O-ring seals, and so on. In all these applications, it is desired to maximize the friction to avoid slipping and reduce the mass loss due to abrasion to improve the life expectancy of the products. The first topic in this dissertation focuses on a novel multiscale contact theory proposed by Persson and different approaches proposed in this work to improve this theory. Then, the real contact area is calculated using an improved version of the contact model. The second topic addresses the theoretical model of rubber friction due to hysteresis energy dissipation and the effect of frictional heating on the real contact area. Since the hysteresis friction is not the only mechanism involved in the rubber friction, a semi-empirical model is also used to include the contribution of adhesion and other processes on the real contact area. Based on the improved contact theory, a pressure-dependent friction model is also developed for rubber-like materials, which is in good agreement with the experimental results. The third topic deals with the theory of stationary crack propagation in rubberlike materials and the effect of crack tip temperature rise on the instability of crack propagation observed in some experimental results in the literature. The low-frequency fatigue test results are compared with the theoretical predictions, and the results are used in the framework of powdery rubber wear theory to calculate the rubber wear rate due to slow crack propagation. A sliding friction and wear test set-up is also developed to validate the theoretical models. The theoretical model of the friction coefficient is successfully validated by experimental results. Investigating the rubber wear on different surfaces reveals that the contribution of fatigue wear rate is less important than the other wear mechanisms. The correlation between friction coefficient and wear rate on different surfaces reveals that relation between friction and wear rate strongly depends on the dominant wear mechanism, which is determined by the surface characteristics, sliding velocity, normal load, and temperature rise on the contact surface.

Utilizing survey data collected through the City Planning and Indigeneity on the Prairies (CPIP) Project in the summer of 2014 this thesis examines what, if any, affect contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people has on non-Aboriginal people’s racial attitudes. Two hypotheses are tested: contact with Aboriginal people reduces new and old-fashioned racism attitudes amongst non-Aboriginal people; and contact has greater effect on the racial attitudes of those with lower education levels than those with higher education levels. Key findings indicate that both hypotheses are in fact correct but each with its own caveats.

abstract: This dissertation investigated positive intergroup contact and communication in the experiences of fans at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Guided by concepts from Intergroup Contact Theory (ICT), formerly Allport’s (1954) Contact Hypothesis, I asked fans to identify and discuss factors that were relevant to their experiences at the event. These factors are reported in previous literature to foster positive intergroup relations. The fan participants also provided detailed, experience-based rationales for why and how the factors supported each other and created individual models of their experiences of ICT at the Olympics. The study relied on participant-centered, in-depth qualitative interviews using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) software. Based on an integration of ICT, communication theories, social capital concepts, and calls from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and mega-sporting event industry, the dissertation sought to answer four research questions. It started with a broad approach to the array of previous scholars’ ICT factors in order to identify what factors were present and relevant in fans’ experiences. It also sought to understand why and how the factors worked together by analyzing the ways factors related to and supported each other in Olympic fans’ experiences and producing a composite meta-structure of the factors’ relationships. Additionally, through thematic analysis, the research explored where and when in fans’ experiences the factors emerged and were active. Finally, the study identified the functions that each ICT factor served in fostering positive intergroup contact and communication and offered suggestions for practitioners and organizers of intergroup contexts. The study aimed to make theoretical contributions by addressing gaps and calls in ICT literature, as well as practical contributions by providing insight about how to organize intergroup contexts to foster positive contact and communication. In addition to addressing its research questions, the study provided a comprehensive list of previous scholars’ ICT factors, a preliminary, tentative model of ICT for ideal intergroup contexts adapted from Pettigrew’s (1998) model of group membership transformation for problematic contexts, and promising future directions given the unique, ideal, and unexplored features of the Olympics. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2017

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