<p> While several investigations have reported a higher proportion of lipid oxidation (lower carbohydrate oxidation) in females performing heavy endurance exercise at the same relative intensity as males, some studies have failed to support this. Possible factors contributing to the lack of agreement may be differences in subject training status and diet, or the hormonal status of female subjects related to menstrual phase. All these variables are known to affect substrate metabolism during submaximal exercise. These factors were controlled in the present study by selecting subjects who were matched for level of physical conditioning and performance experience and placing them on eucaloric identical diets for 3 days. The females were tested during the mid-follicular phase of their menstrual cycle. Six males and 6 females ran on a treadmill at 65% VO2 max for a total distance of 15.5 km (range in performance times, 90 to 101 min). Pre and post exercise needle biopsies of vastus lateralis were assayed for glycogen concentration. Plasma glycerol, glucose, free fatty acids and selected hormones (catecholamines, growth hormone, insulin and glucagon) were measured throughout and following the run by sampling from an indwelling venous catheter. Exercise protein catabolism was estimated from 24 hr (resting and exercise) urinary urea N excretion. </p> <p> Males were found to have significantly higher respiratory exchange ratios (X =0.94 vs 0.87), greater muscle glycogen utilization (by 25%) and greater urea nitrogen excretion (by 30%) than females. Changes in selected hormone concentrations could not explain the greater lipid utilization observed in females. The lower insulin and higher epinephrine levels seen in males could in part explain the greater glycogenolysis and protein catabolism observed inn this group. It is concluded that, during moderate intensity long duration exercise, females demonstrate greater lipid utilization and less carbohydrate and protein metabolism than equally trained and nourished males. </p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

<p> This dissertation investigated the importance of information from various sensory receptors on the perception of self-orientation. In five experiments, we systematically manipulated the relative orientation between the gravitational inertial forces and the body. </p> <p> The first experiment was originally designed to evaluate the effect of body inversion on the perception of straight-ahead. Interestingly, when participants were inverted, females presented a greater footward bias in the perception of straight-ahead than males. Two follow-up experiments revealed that whole-body rotation and altered blood-distribution could not explain the gender differences in the perception of straightahead. As a result, we attributed the gender differences in the perception of selforientation to differences in the use of afferent information from stable gravireceptors (i.e., otoliths). </p> <p> A fourth experiment examined the contribution of perceptual strategy to the perception of self-orientation. Once again, females exhibited a greater footward bias than males in the perception of straight-ahead. However, this bias was reduced slightly when female participants were instructed to focus on cues arising from inside the body. This finding indicates that, at least to some extent, strategy mediates gender differences in perceptual decision-making. </p> <p> The final experiment was designed to examine the importance of limb movement on the perception of spatial orientation. Five response modes were used to gradually increase the motor demands associated with perceptual judgments about self-orientation. This study was designed to test a theory of visual information processing (i.e., Milner & Goodale, 1995), which claims that the use of distinct visual processing modules depend on the motor demands of a visual perception task. Interestingly, we found that whole limb movements affect the perception of an egocentric illusion (i.e., oculogravic illusion; see Graybiel, 1952). </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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In adult populations, it is generally accepted there is an overall male advantage on spatial tasks and an overall female advantage on verbal tasks. These differences are inconsistent in children. The present study examined relations among age, sex, EEG hemispheric activation, and performance on spatial and verbal tasks. Thirty-two eight-year-olds (16 boys) and 32 college students (16 men) had EEG recorded at baseline and while performing a computerized 2-dimensional Gingerbread Man mental rotation task, a computerized 2-dimensional Alphanumeric mental rotation task, a computerized 3-dimensional Basketball Player mental rotation task, and a computerized Lexical Decision-Making task. Additionally, participants completed a paper-and-pencil Water Level task and an oral Verbal Fluency task. On the 2-dimensional Alphanumeric and 3-dimensional Basketball Player mental rotation tasks men performed better than boys, but the performance of women and girls did not differ. On the Lexical Decision-Making and Water level tasks, men performed better than women, while there was no difference between boys and girls. No sex differences were found on the 2-dimensional Gingerbread Man mental rotation task or Verbal Fluency task. Analyses of task-related data also indicate that computer familiarization or computer related task demands might contribute to sex differences on computerized tasks. EEG analyses indicated that, on the 2-dimensional Alphanumeric mental rotation task, men exhibited more left posterior temporal activation than women, while there were no differences between boys and girls. Additionally, there was evidence that simple, or 2-dimensional, mental rotation tasks are associated with left posterior brain activation, while 3-dimensional mental rotation tasks are associated with right posterior brain activation. On the 2-dimensional Gingerbread Man mental rotation task, males exhibited more activation of the left parietal area than females, while on the 2-dimensional Alphanumeric mental rotation task, men exhibited more activation of the left posterior temporal area than women. On the 3-dimensional Basketball player mental rotation task, all participants exhibited greater activation of the right parietal area than the left parietal area. / Ph. D.

Early studies in the sociological stream of new institutionalism contributed much to the study of organization, especially in illuminating organizational isomorphism that might appear in organizational fields. Yet, at the same time, they were limited in accounting for organizational differences in the design of institutions. To help explain such differences, this study introduces a conceptual framework that brings together the Selznick tradition of old institutionalism with recent studies in new institutionalism. The framework includes multiple institutional logics, organizational positions, and organizational belief systems, all of which generate particular contexts that convey varying identities and produce organizational variations in institutional design. To examine the utility of the conceptual framework, I applied it to the design of 240 masters' programs in public affairs that are members of NASPAA, APPAM, or both. I found much variation in the coverage and structure of the programs' curricula. I discovered, for example, that programs that are affiliated only with NASPAA tend to be located in political science, public administration, and public affairs units; to be ranked in the lower-tier; to have been established in 1970 or later; to have the program mission of producing public leaders; to offer MPAd degrees; and to require higher proportions of core hours to be taken in public management. In contrast, programs affiliated only with APPAM or with both NASPAA and APPAM typically are housed in public policy units, ranked in the upper-tier, were founded in 1969 or earlier, focus on generating policy analysts, offer MPP degrees, and require higher proportions of core hours in public policy. Among the implications of these findings are that public affairs education continues to be polarized into two camps, traditional public administration and public policy. The field still lacks agreement about the courses that should be taken and how they should be taught. It seems that differing interpretations of what public affairs is and how it should be taught have helped generate the variation in the design of masters' programs in public affairs. The results of the empirical analyses also demonstrate the utility of the conceptual framework for explaining institutional differences (and similarities). More importantly, the concept of identity may offer a helpful way to combine several key features in studying organizations, including micro versus macro approaches, old versus new institutionalisms, and organizational theory versus organizational behavior. Eventually, this idea promises to enrich the analysis of institutional similarities and differences. / Ph. D.

The primary goal of the present study was to assess linkages between parents' beliefs about children's emotions, parent-child discourse, and children's independent and interdependent self-construals with sixty 7th and 8th grade children. Children were interviewed with the Self-Guide Questionnaire (Higgins, Klein, & Strauman, 1985) and completed an independent and interdependent reaction time measure (Watson & Quatman, 2005). Children's self-guide responses were coded for independent and interdependent traits and behaviors. Parents completed the Parents' Beliefs about Children's Emotions Questionnaire (Halberstadt et al., 2008) to assess their beliefs about the danger of emotions and parents' and children's roles in emotion socialization. Parents' elaborative reminiscing style and both parent and child emotion labeling were measured through a cooperative game designed to elicit emotion-related discourse. Results showed that girls responded faster to interdependent traits and included more interdependent and connected self attributes than did boys, whereas boys included more independent and unique self attributes than did girls. Parents who believe children can guide their own emotion socialization elaborated less about their children's independent and interdependent memories. Their children who responded more slowly to both independent and interdependent traits, with a stronger effect for independent compared with interdependent traits. The interaction between parents' beliefs about the danger of emotions and about their guidance of their child's emotions was related to girls', but not boys', balance of independent and interdependent traits in their self-construal. Results have implications for identifying beneficial developmental trajectories of positive adjustment and mental health. / Ph. D.

Parental socialization of emotions has been a topic of interest in developmental research for decades because of the importance of understanding how children learn about their emotions. The influence of the sex of both parent and child, however, are often not considered, and research on parent emotion socialization has often focused on infants and young children. Not considering these constructs during middle childhood ignores the importance of this developmental period, during which children have a more established gender identity and thus might recognize a shared identity with a parent. Emotion socialization from both parents during this developmental period has the potential to differentially inform children’s expectations of gender norms related to emotions. Men and women interpret and express their emotions differently and may differentially socialize their children regarding emotions along these patterns. The current study examined parental emotion coaching and elaboration observed during discussions of positive and negative emotions between 44 children with their mothers and fathers, with specific focus on the sex of the parents and children. I expected that mothers would engage in more emotion coaching and use a more elaborative style than fathers. Additionally, I expected that parents of girls would be more encouraging of positive emotions than parents of boys and that parents of boys would be more discouraging of negative emotions than parents of girls. Children between the ages of 6 and 9 visited the Children’s Emotions Lab with their mothers and fathers on separate occasions and participated in an emotion talk task with each parent. Each pair discussed a time when the child was happy and a time when the child was upset; each discussion lasted two and a half minutes each. I found a significant emotion valence by child sex interaction: parents were more elaborative and encouraging when discussing positive emotions with daughters than with sons and that parents were more elaborative and encouraging when discussing negative events with sons than with daughters. There was also specific parent gender by child sex interaction: mothers were less elaborative and encouraging with daughters than sons and that fathers were less elaborative and encouraging with sons than daughters. Findings from this study suggest that parents’ experiences with their own emotions influence their emotion socialization practices with their children. Recommended practices for future studies and interventions are suggested. / M.S. / Emotion socialization refers to the ways we come to understand the rules, expectations, and understanding of emotions. Research often looks at the ways that parents socialize, or teach, emotions to their children by examining parent attitudes about children’s emotions, parents’ reactions to children’s emotions, and parent-child discussions of emotions. However, often this research is limited in scope, examining only mothers’ parenting, only examining socialization of negative emotions, or using only parent-report data. Research has previously found that boys and girls are socialized differently when it comes to emotions, and I want to build on established research to examine these differences further. For this study, I have observed parent-child conversations about positive and negative emotions, including both mothers and fathers. Forty-four children participated with both their mothers and fathers. I looked at parental elaboration, which is how parents ask for and provide information within a conversation, and parental encouragement of emotions, which relates to how parents validate children’s emotions and help children to understand cause and consequences of their emotions. I hypothesized that mothers would be more elaborative, that is ask for and give more information in conversations, and encouraging, that is helping children to accept, understand and respond to their emotions, than fathers. I also hypothesized that parents of daughters would be more elaborative and encouraging when talking about positive emotions and that parents of sons would be less encouraging of negative emotions. Only parts of my hypotheses were supported by the data from my study. Mothers and fathers did have different strategies of emotion socialization, and fathers of daughters were more encouraging of positive emotions. However, parents of sons were more encouraging of negative emotions. Further, parents were less elaborative and encouraging of their same-sex children’s emotions. These findings suggest that parents’ own experiences, and possibly even the ways their own parents socialized them, is related to the ways they socialize their children.

This study examined individual differences in spatial memory performance in 12-month-old infants using brain electrical activity and walking experience. Greenough's experience-expectant and experience-dependent model of development was used to examine EEG power values among infants with different levels of walking experience (non-walkers, novice, experienced). In accordance with this model, a trend was shown for novice walkers to have higher EEG power values than both non-walkers and experienced walkers only in the central region. Walkers were also found to score higher on an object retrieval (OR) spatial memory task than non-walkers, with amount of walking experience being inconsequential. In addition, infants who scored higher on the OR spatial memory task showed a trend for higher EEG power values in medial frontal, central and parietal areas than infants scoring lower on the OR task. This was not the case for the manual search spatial memory task (AB). There was no interaction among spatial memory performance, walking experience and brain electrical activity. The utility of OR as a spatial memory task that requires the integration of relevant perceptual-motor integration is discussed. / Master of Science

General mental ability (GMA) has been found to be the best predictor of job knowledge and job performance, and it is widely-used for personnel selection decisions. However, the use of GMA in selection is a concern for practitioners because of the large Black-White race differences associated with GMA tests. The use of GMA tests, therefore, results in adverse impact when basing decisions on predicted performance. In order to address this validity-diversity tradeoff, a more specific cognitive ability is examined – working memory (WM). Two-hundred participants (50% Black, 50% White) were given measures of GMA and WM before being presented with learning opportunities meant to teach them novel information. The participants were then instructed to complete tasks which apply this newly learned knowledge. WM was examined in terms of how much additional variance was accounted for in task knowledge and task performance after controlling for GMA. In addition, race group differences of WM were compared to those of GMA. Results indicated that WM was able to account for significant additional variance in knowledge and performance, and that this relationship have been moderated by task complexity. WM exhibited slightly smaller absolute race differences as well, but these reductions were nonsignificant. Results are discussed in terms of the possible use of WM in a selection context. / Doctor of Philosophy / General mental ability (GMA), or general intelligence, has some of the largest correlations with both job knowledge and job performance. However, Black applicants tend to score lower on GMA tests compared to White applicants. Therefore, when using GMA tests to select applicants, a higher proportion of Whites than Blacks are selected for a given job. This study aimed to examine whether someone’s ability to hold and manipulate information in the midst of distracting tasks (i.e., working memory, WM) would also have large correlations with knowledge and performance. In addition, this study aimed to determine whether Black and White test takers had differences in mean WM scores that were smaller than those exhibited by GMA tests. Two-hundred participants (50% Black, 50% White) were given measures of GMA and WM before being presented with learning opportunities meant to teach them novel information. The participants were then instructed to complete tasks which apply this newly learned knowledge. Results indicated that the correlations between WM and task knowledge/performance were almost as large as those of GMA. In addition, there were smaller differences in means between Black and White test takers, although this difference was nonsignificant. Results are discussed in terms of the possible use of WM in a job selection context.

Despite countless efforts to elucidate market participants" understanding of the implications of earnings quality, empirical accounting research has rendered two distinct perspectives. The first perspective considers market participants naïve users of accounting information who fail to grasp the implications of earnings quality resulting in temporary security mispricing. The second perspective suggests that market participants scrutinize earnings reports carefully and subsequently discern and price the quality of earnings. The purpose of my research is to help clarify the ambiguity surrounding market participants" pricing of earnings quality using one clearly observable indicator of low-quality earnings, accounting restatements. This study examines the effect pre-restatement earnings quality has on short-window returns and analyst forecast revisions and dispersion following restatement announcements using a cross-section of 719 publicly traded firms that announced restatements between 1997 and 2004. Accrual and book-tax difference metrics are used to proxy for earnings quality. The metrics are examined separately and collectively to ascertain their individual and incremental effects in modeling the market reaction. Further analyses investigate the effects that various levels of investor sophistication have on the market reaction. Results indicate that the market reaction to restatement announcements is significantly influenced by pre-restatement earnings quality. Specifically, both the accrual and book-tax difference measures of earnings quality are significantly and negatively related to the market reaction. Further analysis indicates the predictive power of the model is improved by including both the accrual and book-tax difference proxies. This finding suggests the information in book-tax differences may provide market participants with signals from which to assess earnings quality that are distinct from those contained in accruals. Basic results for analyst forecast dispersion and revisions are not conclusive. Results of the interactions between each earnings quality proxy and level of investor sophistication are significant only for the accrual based measure of earnings quality. This suggests that sophisticated investors are more attuned to the implication of accrual based measures of earnings quality than book-tax difference measures. / Ph. D.