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Exaggerated cardiovascular reactivity and impaired recovery to psychological stress is independently related to cardiovascular disease (CVD), and may play a causal role in its development. I examined autonomic reactivity and recovery in 136 black, white, and Hispanic women who were predisposed to CVD, as indicated by a positive family history (FH+). Pre-ejection period (PEP; sympathetic) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; parasympathetic) were measured during public speaking, mental arithmetic, and cold pressor tasks. Overall, FH+ participants exhibited greater RSA reactivity, while black participants exhibited impaired RSA recovery. These findings suggest that a hereditary predisposition for CVD is related to altered autonomic reactivity before any differences in resting levels are observed. Further, black participants did not exhibit a RSA rebound after the stress tasks, a key component in buffering the damaging effects of exaggerated sympathetic reactivity. These findings demonstrate the importance of examining parasympathetic activity in addition to sympathetic reactivity measures.

In this dissertation, I argue that from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the Jewish community of Montreal underwent a series of changes that significantly altered its character. And while increasing numbers of Jews from all over the world began arriving on the island, the established elites reacted by creating and then entrenching a new cultural orthodoxy based on their own practices and values. Jewish women were fundamental to this process, as both objects of the new cultural discourse as well as active participants. Understanding the process through which a "Jewish community of Montreal" group was created requires a consideration of both public and private ethnic signifiers, so an analysis of the construction of gender norms for Jewish women is key. This dissertation will track these fractured dialogues through an analysis of currents of thought and discussion among Jewish individuals living in Montreal between 1945 and 1980. I will accomplish this through a comparison of both textual documents and oral interviews. In sum, I will examine how dominant discourses are constructed by elites, and how they are in turn experienced by the women themselves. / Graduate

Although they clearly exist, affinities among individuals are not all easily identified. Yet, they offer unique opportunities to discover new social networks, strengthen ties among individuals, and provide recommendations. We propose the idea of Implicit Affinity Networks (IANs) to build, visualize, and track affinities among groups of individuals. IANs are simple, interactive graphical representations that users may navigate to uncover interesting patterns. This thesis describes a system supporting the construction of IANs and evaluates it in the context of family history and online communities.

Finding Sundays: A Collection of Stories is a collection that explores the lives of people in the fictional town of Hickory Springs, Virginia. The title story "Finding Sundays" follows the life of Deacon Taylor and connects him to the characters around him in the proceeding pieces. These stories explore the lives of Deacon, his family, and his childhood friend, Sandra. The focus of this collection is not meant to be about spirituality or religion in general, although these exist as themes in the background of the stories. Instead, it is meant to look at how the lives of people connected through a church and a small town setting can affect them and lead them on different paths through the choices they make. Their personal struggles and challenges help them to either discover who they are or lose a piece of themselves in the process, which is especially true for Deacon. He is the character who appears as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult. Self-discovery is not always peaceful or satisfying for him or any of the characters around him, and their individual journeys show this process and the different events that come from the choices they make. This collection focuses on how religious roots, friendships, and familial connections, or the lack of such bonds, affect the characters' own personal views and decisions as well as how they relate to those around them

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L’histoire de la famille musulmane est née au début des années 1990 d’un souci commun d’éviter les généralisations hâtives et d’accumuler les faits élémentaires de la vie familiale et résidentielle. Or, le discours scientifique actuel, aussi bien que celui qui l’a précédé, restent fondés sur une même série de postulats qui conduisent à voir dans les modalités de la vie résidentielle et familiale propres aux sociétés de l’Islam la prégnance d’une mentalité collectiviste, la persistance d’une volonté ancrée dans l’esprit des individus de vivre « entre soi » dans la promiscuité d’une maisonnée nombreuse et complexe. Dans l’esprit d’une critique positive, cette thèse s’attache à illustrer la pertinence d’une perspective « atomiste » au regard des Ammeln, à savoir un groupe de paysans berbérophones natifs des hautes terres de l’Anti-Atlas, dans le Sud du Maroc. Cela se fera à la lumière d’une multitude de sources ethnographiques, démographiques et archivistiques, grâce auxquelles il sera possible de remonter le fil du temps et de suivre les processus de formation et de transformation des maisonnées établies par les habitants du pays des Ammeln depuis l’époque précoloniale jusqu’à nos jours. Ainsi, il apparaitra plus clairement que, dans les sociétés de l’Islam, aussi petites et isolées soient-elles, les noyaux familiaux sont enclins à vivre « chacun chez soi », et qu’ils n’acceptent de faire autrement qu’en raison d’un ensemble de forces et de contraintes sociales particulières les empêchant d’atteindre l’autonomie résidentielle et de bénéficier de la liberté d’action qui en découle. / Family history in the Islamic Middle East was born in the early 1990s from a shared concern to avoid sweeping generalizations and accumulate the basic facts about residential and family life. However, both the current scientific discourse and the one that preceded it are based upon a common set of assumptions that suggest that members of Islamic societies share a collectivistic mentality and a common desire to live amongst themselves in the promiscuity of large and complex households. In the spirit of positive criticism, this thesis aims to illustrate the relevance of a new “atomistic” perspective by studying the case of the Ammeln, a group of peasants from the Berber highlands of the Anti-Atlas, in Southern Morocco. This research is based on a variety of ethnographic, demographic and historical sources that make it possible to go back in time and follow the process of formation and transformation of households in this small village community, from pre-colonial times to the present day. As such, it will become clearer that, in Islamic societies, as small and isolated as they may be, elementary family units are inclined to live on their own, and that they choose to do otherwise only because of a given set of forces and constraints preventing them from attaining residential autonomy and benefiting from the resulting freedom. / Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris).

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.