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No description available.

This study examined portrayals of terrorists in several action films and their effects on participants' thoughts concerning the films and their characters. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial experiment was used to test the effects of antagonist ethnicity (white or non-white), antagonist portrayal type (sympathetic or non-sympathetic), and mortality salience (treatment or control) on narrative transportation, attitude toward the antagonist, attitude toward the video, stereotype endorsement, and response time for attitude toward the antagonist. Gender differences were also investigated.Participants viewed one 15-minute clip from an action film that manipulated antagonist ethnicity and antagonist portrayal. Then, participants answered several questionnaires surrounding the previously mentioned dependent variables. White terrorists and sympathetic portrayals were preferred over non-white terrorists and non-sympathetic portrayals. Participants in the mortality salience control condition evaluated Arabs more favorably than those exposed to the mortality salience treatment. In addition, males rated antagonists more favorably than females, and males were also less likely to engage in stereotyping of Arabs and African Americans. Implications for theory and suggestions for future research were discussed. / Master of Arts

This pre-test, post- test experiment examined the effects of mortality salience, frames of the military and military personnel, and regulatory focus on viewer attitudes toward the military, support for the military, and their perceptions of military personnel's criminal behavior. Participants viewed a short video clip from an episode of NCIS which contained either a sympathetic or non-sympathetic frame of the military and, in the treatment condition, a mortality salience reminder. Frame (sympathetic or non-sympathetic) had a significant effect on participant attitudes toward the military in the control condition when there was no mortality salience reminder present in the video clip. However, when participants' mortality was made salient, attitudes and support for the military did not change. Theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. / Master of Arts

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been difficult to differentiate in clinical settings, as these two disorders are phenotypically similar and both exhibit atypical attention and executive functioning. Mischaracterizations between these two disorders can lead to inappropriate medication regimes, significant delays in special services, and personal distress to families and caregivers. There is evidence that ASD and ADHD are biologically different for attentional and executive functioning mechanisms, as only half of individuals with co-occurring ASD and ADHD respond to stimulant medication. Further, neurobehavioral work has supported these biological differences for ASD and ADHD, with both shared and distinct functional connectivity. In specific, two brain networks have been implicated in these disorders: the salience network (SN) and frontoparietal network (FPN). The SN is a network anchored by bilateral anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and has been implicated in “bottom-up” attentional processes for both internal and external events. The FPN is anchored by lateral prefrontal cortex areas and the parietal lobe and plays a roll in “top-down” executive processes. Functional connectivity subgroups differentiated ASD from ADHD with between SN-FPN connectivity patterns, but not by within-SN or within-FPN connectivity patterns. Further, subgroup differences in ASD+ADHD comorbidity vs. ASD only were found for within-FPN connectivity. / Master of Science / Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been difficult to differentiate in clinical settings, as these two disorders are similar and both exhibit attention and executive functioning difficulties. ASD and ADHD have shared and distinct functional brain network connectivity related to attention and executive functioning. Two brain networks have been implicated in these disorders: the salience network (SN) and frontoparietal network (FPN). The SN is a network that has been implicated in “bottom-up” attentional processes for both internal and external events. The FPN plays a roll in “top-down” executive processes. This study found that functional connectivity patterns between the SN and FPN differentiated ASD from ADHD. Further, connectivity patterns in children with co-occurring ASD and ADHD were characterized by within-FPN connectivity.

The aim of the present research was to investigate the issue of loss anxiety within the framework of disability and terror management theory. A questionnaire package was administered to 217 participants twice to examine the effects of mortality salience and disability salience. Besides mortality salience, paralysis salience was found to be effective. Highly conservative participants were becoming more conservative in the paralysis salience and mortality salience conditions. Content analysis was also conducted relating the participants&rsquo / accounts. It was concluded that death and disability were both inducing sadness for the participants. However, this sadness experience could have two different formats. The relation between experimental manipulations and global sadness accounts was not significant. However, the relationship between experimental manipulations and individual sadness accounts was significant. Participants in the mortality salience condition were experiencing less individual sadness than expected. In contrast, participants in the paralysis salience condition were experiencing more individual sadness than expected. It is concluded that death may not be the one and only fundamental fear as terror management theory suggests. Disability might be as fearful as death. A theoretical model is proposed for the alternative experimental manipulation in terror management theory studies. According to this conceptualization, an experimental manipulation could be successful if it satisfies the following three conditions: moderately fearful, highly imaginable/easily available and highly self-relevant. Any kind of loss which satisfies these conditions might result in cultural worldview defense. The threatening nature of disability might provide one more reason relating the importance of a disability-friendly environment.

Current developments of hardware devices have allowed the computer vision technologies to analyze complex human activities in real time. High quality computer algorithms for human activity interpretation are required by many emerging applications, such as patient behavior analysis, surveillance, gesture control video games, and other human computer interface systems. Despite great efforts that have been made in the past decades, it is still a challenging task to provide a generic gesture recognition solution that can facilitate the developments of different gesture-based applications. Human vision is able to perceive scenes continuously, recognize objects and grasp motion semantics effortlessly. Neuroscientists and psychologists have tried to understand and explain how exactly the visual system works. Some theories/hypotheses on visual perception such as the visual attention and the Gestalt Laws of perceptual organization (PO) have been established and shed some light on understanding fundamental mechanisms of human visual perception. In this dissertation, inspired by those visual attention models, we attempt to model and integrate important visual perception discoveries into a generic gesture recognition framework, which is the fundamental component of full-tier human activity understanding tasks. Our approach handles challenging tasks by: (1) organizing the complex visual information into a hierarchical structure including low-level feature, object (human body), and 4D spatiotemporal layers; 2) extracting bottom-up shape-based visual salience entities at each layer according to PO grouping laws; 3) building shape-based hierarchical salience maps in favor of high-level tasks for visual feature selection by manipulating attention conditions of the top-down knowledge about gestures and body structures; and 4) modeling gesture representations by a set of perceptual gesture salience entities (PGSEs) that provide qualitative gesture descriptions in 4D space for recognition tasks. Unlike other existing approaches, our gesture representation method encodes both extrinsic and intrinsic properties and reflects the way humans perceive the visual world so as to reduce the semantic gaps. Experimental results show our approach outperforms the others and has great potential in real-time applications. / PhD Thesis