This research investigated the precision with which spatial information can be maintained in memory and reproduced as well as factors which may effect these emerging abilities. To study this, ten males and ten females in each of first, third, fifth, and seventh grades participated in three drawing tasks under two conditions (match and recall). The tasks involved the presentation of a 4" straight line or a 2" x 2" right angle drawn on an 8" white disc. Subjects were asked to draw a line exactly the same size and in the same place (static), after an imagined rotation, or after an imagined bending or unbending of the line (transformation) on an 1" white disc. Several mixed design analyses of variance with repeated measures on the task variables were run. First graders made significantly more errors than all other subjects. Third and fifth graders differed little and both performed significantly less accurately than seventh graders. Performance on the rotation task and the transformation task did not differ significantly with performance on both yielding more error than performance on the static task. The match condition generally proved easier than the recall condition, straight lines led to less error than bent lines, and orientation information was more accurately preserved than metric information. The requirements of the task, i.e., no change, change in position, or a change in form, interacted with both the stimulus type and the type of information preserved. Grade level also interacted significantly with task and stimulus type. When determining how spatial abilities emerge and the accuracy with which spatial information can be dealt, task demands, stimulus characteristics, and type of information being measured must be considered along with the developmental changes.

When evaluating a situation that results in harm, it is critical to consider how a person’s prior intention may have been causally responsible for the action that resulted in the harmful outcome. This thesis examined children’s developing understanding of intentional causation in reasoning about harmful outcomes, and the relation between this understanding and mental-state reasoning. Four-, 6-, and 8-year-old children, and adults, were told eight stories in which characters’ actions resulted in harmful outcomes. Story types differed in how the actions that resulted in harm were causally linked to their prior intentions such that: (1) characters wanted to, intended to, and did perform a harmful act; (2) they wanted and intended to perform a harmful act, but instead, accidentally brought about the harmful outcome; (3) they wanted and intended to perform a harmful act, then changed their mind, but accidentally brought about the harmful outcome; (4) they did not want or intend to harm, but accidentally brought about a harmful outcome. Participants were asked to judge the characters’ intentions, make punishment judgments, and justify their responses. Additionally, children were given first- and second-order false-belief tasks, commonly used to assess mental-state reasoning. The results indicated that intention judgment accuracy improved with age. However, all age groups had difficulty evaluating the intention in the deviant causal chain scenario (Searle, 1983), in which the causal link between intention and action was broken but a harmful intention was maintained. Further, the results showed a developmental pattern in children’s punishment judgments based on their understanding of intentional causation, although the adults’ performance did not follow the same pattern. Also, younger children referred to the characters’ intentions less frequently in their justifications of their punishment judgments. The results also revealed a relation between belief-state reasoning and intentional-causation reasoning in scenarios that did not involve, or no longer involved, an intention to harm. Further, reasoning about intentional causation was related to higher-level understanding of mental states. The implications of these findings in clarifying and adding to previous research on the development of understanding of intentional causation and intentions in moral reasoning are discussed.

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This thesis suggests that Luce Irigaray's recent focus on spirituality in 'Luce Irigaray: key writings' makes explicit themes already suggested by her career-long insistence on the importance of sexual difference. It traces Irigaray's imagination of a dynamic, life-giving duality of sexual difference, suggesting that Irigaray's sexual difference displaces western philosophy's division between the natural and the spiritual; the earth and the sky; and mortals and the divine. In Irigaray's philosophy, cultivating sexual difference between men and women is the key to relinking the natural and the spiritual. This thesis calls this re-linking a religious task.Within this broad project, emphasis is placed on Irigaray's insistence that in order for sexual difference to be our redemption, women need to attend to creating a spiritual world appropriate to our own natural world. Indispensable to this project is the cultivation of a genealogy of mother-daughter relationships. This thesis explores this theme in Irigaray by discussing Drucilla Cornell's book, 'Legacies of dignity: between women and generations', as an Irigarayan genealogical exercise.This thesis also explores Irigaray's demand that western culture rethink its understanding of God. She suggests that we cultivate a sense of the divine as 'sensibly transcendent.' In order to highlight the distinction between Irigaray's divine and a monotheistic, transcendent God, this thesis turns to Patricia Huntington's article 'Contra Irigaray: the couple is not the middle term of the ethical whole.'The concluding chapter explores Irigaray's reworked notions of incarnation and salvation.Throughout these explorations, this thesis holds that Irigaray's re-integration of the natural and the spiritual will promote more ethical living -- with others, our selves, the earth and the divine.

Darbo objektas. Adaptavimosi aspektai. Tikslas. Nustatyti turizmo ekspatriantų adaptavimosi aspektus tarpkultūrinėje aplinkoje. Uždaviniai: 1.Išanalizuoti ekspatriacijos ir ekspatrianto sąvokas teoriniu aspektu. 2.Nustatyti faktorius, darančius įtaką turizmo sektoriaus ekspatriantų adaptacijai tarpkultūrinėje aplinkoje. 3.Ištirti turizmo sektoriaus ekspatriantų adaptacijos procesą. Metodai. Mokslinės literatūros apžvalga, sisteminimas, analizė, kritinis vertinimas; giluminis pusiau struktūruotas interviu; tyrimo „content“ analizė. Rezultatai. Mokslininkai nustatė, kad tarpkultūrinę adaptaciją įtakoja svetimos kalbos mokėjimas, gyvenamojo laikotarpio trukmė naujoje kultūroje, žinios apie ją, sąveikos su priimančios kultūros žmonėmis ir jų pripažinimas, įmonės taikomos akultūracijos strategijos (Barhem, 2008). Tyrimas atskleidė: pagrindinės problemos, iškylančios ekspatriantams, yra darbo patirties užsienyje trūkumas, skirtingas gyvenimo bei darbo ritmas. Paaiškėjo: kuo dažniau darbuotojas išvyksta, tuo trumpesnis adaptavimosi periodas; kurį palengvina informacijos turėjimas apie šalies specifiką, draugų atsiliepimai apie šalį. Išvados. Turizmo darbuotojų tarpkultūrinę adaptaciją veikia faktoriai, susiję ne tik su pasikeitusia ekonomine, klimato aplinka, atsiskyrimu nuo šeimos, tarpkultūrinių skirtumų, bet ir ekspatrianto ankstesnės gyvenimo patirties ekspatriacijoje bei organizacijos pagalbos išvykstančiam. Pasiūlymai. Atsižvelgiant į gautus tyrimo rezultatus, Prieš... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Substantiation. In a modern world of globalization companies function in an international environment and employees have to adapt to this environment. In particular, this issue is inevitable for tourism organizations whose field of activity is related to work with clients out of Lithuania. Tourism specialists are often sent to work abroad in order to achieve the main goals of the company. Employees encounter various obstacles which negatively (or positively) affect their professional or personal lives. One of the main obstacles to face is intercultural differences which should be overcome first of all while adapting in a new country. In order to facilitate an organization’s human recourses’ management and to ease the employees’ adaptation period during the expatriation, it is necessary to find out what kind of problems do the tourism specialists face while on mission abroad. The aim of research. To identify tourism expatriates' adaptation aspects in a cross-cultural environment; to identify the factors, which make influence on expatriates’ intercultural adaptation process ; to explore the process of intercultural adaptation of tourism expatriates. Methods. Scientific literature review, organization, analysis, critical evaluation; in-depth semi-structured interview; “content” analysis of research. Results. The researchers determined that foreign language proficiency, length of residence in a new culture, knowledge of peculiarities of a new culture, the interaction with the... [to full text]

Women are four to eight times more likely to injure their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) compared to men. It is most commonly injured through a non-contact mechanism during game time situations. During landings, women display valgus collapse, where a less active gluteus medius muscle (GMed) may be unable to control the internal rotation of the thigh, causing an increase in knee joint abduction angle, augmenting the risk of ACL injury. This study’s purpose was to determine the difference between 12 male and 12 female athletes in muscle activity, specifically the GMed, and the 3D kinematics and kinetics of the lower-limb during drop jump landings from three heights; maximum vertical jump height, tibial length, and a commonly used height of 40cm. Results showed that females had greater hip adduction and knee abduction angles compared to men. The GMed activity showed no significant differences between sexes at each drop jump height.

Access to abstract permanently restricted to Ball State community only. / Access to thesis permamnently restricted to Ball State community only. / School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science

This thesis describes a series of empirical studies about perceptions of trustworthiness and trusting behaviour. My first three studies investigate how perceptions of trustworthiness are related to both general preferences for sexually dimorphic face characteristics and individual differences in these preferences. My first study (Chapter 2) provided evidence against a simplistic 'halo-effect' view of the relationship between attractiveness and trustworthiness. The next two studies (Chapters 3 and 4) clarified the role of perceptions of trustworthiness in individual differences in women’s preferences for sexually dimorphic cues in men’s faces; while perceptions of trustworthiness did not explain condition-dependent individual differences (Chapter 3), they were implicated in temporal context-dependent preferences, such as when women assessed men’s attractiveness for long-term relationships (Chapter 4). My next two studies examined perceptions of trustworthiness in different contexts. The first of these studies demonstrated that different individuals are more likely to be trusted according to the type of information that they are conveying (Chapter 5); men are more likely to be trusted when delivering male-stereotyped information and women are more likely to be trusted when delivering female-stereotyped information. The last of my studies (Chapter 6) demonstrated how own appearance affects trusting behaviour in an economic game; the extent to which participants trusted game partners who could see them more than game partners who could not see them was positively related to their other-rated attractiveness. Collectively, the findings reported in this thesis demonstrate the relationship between perceptions of attractiveness and perceptions of trustworthiness, highlighting the complexity and sophistication of the perception of these fundamental social characteristics.

Social stress is the most common stressor experienced by humans and exposure to social stress is thought to cause or exacerbate neuropsychiatric illness. Social stress also leads to behavioral and physiological responses in many animal models that closely mirror the symptoms of fear and anxiety in humans. Our laboratory uses Syrian hamsters to study behavioral responses to social stress. Hamsters are highly territorial, but after losing an agonistic encounter, hamsters exhibit a striking behavioral change, abandoning all territorial aggression and instead becoming highly submissive. This behavioral shift is termed conditioned defeat. Epigenetic modifications, such as changes in histone acetylation, are a possible molecular mechanism underlying such behavioral shifts. Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors have been shown to enhance fear learning and conditioned place preference for drugs of abuse, while suppressing histone acetylation with histone acetyltransferase (HAT) inhibitors impairs long-term memory formation. The first goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that histone acetylation is a molecular mechanism underlying conditioned defeat. We found that animals given an HDAC inhibitor systemically before social defeat later exhibited increased conditioned defeat. This treatment also suppressed defeat-induced immediate-early gene activity in the infralimbic cortex but not the basolateral amygdala. Next, we demonstrated that administration of an HDAC inhibitor in the infralimbic cortex before defeat enhanced stress-induced behavioral responses while HAT inhibition blocked these behavioral changes. Although both males and females exhibit conditioned defeat, the behavioral expression is more pronounced in males. We next used transcriptomic analysis to investigate potential genetic mechanisms leading to this sexually dimorphic expression and to further delineate the role of acetylation in stress-induced behavioral changes. We sequenced the whole brain transcriptome of male and female hamsters as well as the transcriptome of basolateral amygdala, a nucleus necessary for the acquisition and expression of conditioned defeat, of dominant, subordinate, and control animals. Our analysis revealed that numerous genes relating to histone acetylation, including several HDACs, were differentially expressed in animals of different social status and between sexes. Together, these data support the hypotheses that histone modifications underlie behavioral responses to social stress and that some of these modifications are sexually dimorphic.

This thesis compares the academic and military performance of women with that of men at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) and U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA). Measures of performance are grade-point average and military proficiency scores. The SAT scores for men and women at the two academies were also compared. The population included the Classes of 1997 through 2003, totaling 1,184 cadets from USCGA and 6,598 midshipmen from USNA. A number of hypotheses were tested quantitatively for all cadets and midshipmen from these classes as well as for those who majored in a technical discipline. The results indicate that women at the two academies generally perform as well or better than do their male counterparts. This was especially true on measures of military proficiency, where women tended to outperform men, particularly those who were enrolled in a technical major. Further research should seek to explain gender differences in performance, given the pressures on women at these institutions and differences in scores on the SAT. Continued study of gender differences is recommended, and examples of possible research are provided. / US Coast Guard (USCG) author.