Anti-immigrant sentiment particularly against Mexicans in the United States has had a dramatic influence on the lives of immigrants and on how they perceive the host society. Today, little research has addressed the extent to which this enmity has affected the mental-well being of immigrants. Based on 30 in-depth interviews in Houston this study investigates the degree to which nativism contributes to depression among Mexican-origin immigrant women. The findings reveal that undocumented status was salient and contributed to symptoms of depression. Additionally, my respondents revealed perceptions of intra-ethnic conflict among Mexican Americans. This thesis further explores how segmented assimilation theory can be expanded to better understand the complexities and nuances that Mexican immigrant women endure taking into consideration immigration status, racial/ethnic identity, and the structural barriers which plays a major role in their integration and mental health well-being.

The objective of this study is to discover the non-linear effect of market sentiment to characteristic factor returns. We run ¡¥Quantile Regression¡¦ to help us extract useful information and design an effective strategy. Based on the quantitative investment method, using the platform of Multi-Factor Model (MFM), we attempt to construct a portfolio and enhance portfolio performance. If the market-sentiment variable increases performance, we could conclude that some characteristic factors in a high sentiment period will perform better or worse in the next period. What is the market or investor sentiment? It is still a problem in the finance field. There is no co-definition or consensus so far. We do our best to collect the indirect data, such as transaction data, price and volume data, and some indicators in other studies, VIX, put/call ratio and so on. Then, we test the proxy variables independently, and obtain some interesting results. The market turnover, the ratio of margin lending on funds/ margin lending on securities, and the growth rate of consumer confidence index have significant effects on some of the characteristic factors. This holds that some market sentiment variables could influence stocks with certain characteristics, and the factor timing approach could improve portfolio performance under examination by information ratio.

This report explores various aspects of sentiment mining. The two research goals for the report were: (1) to determine useful methods in increasing recall of negative sentences and (2) to determine the best method for applying sentence level classification to the document level. The methods in this report were applied to the Movie Reviews corpus at both the document and sentence level. The basic approach was to first identify polar and neutral sentences within the text and then classify the polar sentences as either positive or negative. The Maximum Entropy classifier was used as the baseline system in which the application of further methods was explored. Part-of-speech tagging was used for its effectiveness to determine if its inclusion increased recall of negative sentences. It was also used to aid in the handling of negations within sentences at the sentence level. Smoothing was investigated and various metrics to describe the sentiment composition were explored to address goal (2). Negative recall was shown to increase with the adjustment of the classification threshold and was also seen to increase through the methods used to address goal (2). Overall, classifying at the sentence level using bigrams and a cutoff value of one was observed to result in the highest evaluation scores. / text

This study constructs a two-step model to test the most prominent market timing factors. We decompose equity issuances into 1) firm-specific components, which are predicted by firms’ characteristics, and 2) market-wide components, which are predicted by aggregate time series measures. Our evidence shows that, at the firm level, firms with higher market-to-book ratio, smaller size, more growth opportunities, and fewer tangible assets are more likely to issue equity. At the aggregate level, a greater proportion of firms issue equity in years with higher aggregate market-to-book ratio and lower asymmetric information. After controlling for the aggregate market-to-book ratio and information asymmetry, sentiment has no direct effect on equity issuance. This paper provides direct evidence that firms time their favorable market conditions to reduce adverse selection costs, and to exploit higher individual security valuations or capture growth opportunities.

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

This experiment analyzes “tweets” gathered from Twitter and determines whether the positive or negative emotions conveyed in the contents of a massive collection of these tweets correlate with the percentage change in indexes of Standard & Poor's 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the NASDAQ stock markets. This experiment uses an algorithm that parses a random sample of live tweets and calculates their sentiment value, which is an indicator of whether a tweet is either negative or positive in its emotional content. The daily ­average sentiment value is then compared to the percent change in the stock exchanges.

El abuso sexual infantil ha sido considerado uno de los problemas de salud pública más graves que tiene que afrontar la sociedad y, especialmente, los niños y jóvenes (MacMillan, 1998). Los estudios realizados confirman que el abuso sexual es un problema mucho más extendido de lo previamente estimado e incluso hasta las tasas de prevalencia más bajas incluyen a un gran número de víctimas. Es importante considerar que el impacto psicoemocional que el abuso sexual llegue a producir en la víctima va a estar mediado por diferentes variables, entre las que destacan el sentimiento de culpa y la percepción de apoyo social. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo conocer la prevalencia del abuso sexual en población universitaria y establecer la sintomatología psicológica presente en este tipo de víctimas, en contraste con la generada por otros estresores y en función del posible efecto de las variables mediadoras. La muestra se compone de 1.033 estudiantes universitarios (317 varones y 716 mujeres) de entre 18,0 y 30,6 años (M = 21,71; DT = 2,63), pertenecientes a distintas facultades y centros adscritos de la Universidad de Barcelona. Se aplicaron los cuestionarios a) "Brief Symptom Inventory" (Derogatis, 1993), que evalúa nueve dimensiones de síntomas psicopatológicos; b) "Cuestionario de Apoyo Social Percibido" (Gracia, Herrero, y Musitu, 2002), diseñado para evaluar la red de apoyo y el apoyo percibido; c) Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire (Kubany y Haynes, 2001), que evalúa la vivencia de 22 acontecimientos potencialmente traumáticos, entre los que destaca el abuso sexual infantil; d) "Distressing Event Questionnaire" (Kubany, 2001), que evalúa los síntomas característicos del trastorno por estrés postraumático; e) y "Trauma Related Guilt Inventory" (Kubany y Haynes, 2001), centrado en la evaluación del sentimiento de culpa. Un 92,3% de los estudiantes (93,4% de los varones y 91,8% de las mujeres) manifestaron haber experimentado al menos un acontecimiento estresante a lo largo de su vida, siendo los varones aquellos que presentaron un mayor número de acontecimientos estresantes. La experiencia de abuso sexual fue relatada por un 15,5% de los varones y un 19% de las mujeres, un 17,9% del total de la muestra estudiada, un 14,9% de ellos antes de los 13 años y un 3% entre los 13 y los 18 años. Las víctimas de abuso sexual infantil presentan mayores niveles de sintomatología que las víctimas de otros acontecimientos estresantes. Respecto a la sintomatología postraumática, los acontecimientos referidos a violencia interpersonal, destacando la experiencia de abuso sexual infantil, ofrecen los mayores porcentajes en todos los criterios del trastorno por estrés postraumático. En relación con la percepción de apoyo social, no se han observado diferencias significativas entre sexos ni entre distintos estresores. Las víctimas de abuso sexual infantil son las que presentan una mayor puntuación en todas las escalas de culpa, especialmente en el área cognitiva de este sentimiento. El modelo de relación entre acontecimientos estresantes, apoyo social percibido, sentimiento de culpa y consecuencias psicopatológicas muestra que la experiencia de abuso sexual en la infancia es distinta a la vivencia de otros acontecimientos traumáticos, presentando las víctimas de abuso sexual un significativo mayor nivel de malestar. Sin embargo, el contraste entre los modelos aplicados a víctimas de abuso sexual en la infancia y a víctimas de otros acontecimientos traumáticos indica que, a nivel cualitativo, las variables implicadas en la experiencia de abuso sexual infantil u otro acontecimiento traumático mantienen las mismas relaciones. En conclusión, el abuso sexual infantil es un fenómeno frecuente en nuestra sociedad, tal y como establecía López (1994), incluso en muestras que en un principio pueden considerarse resistentes, como son los estudiantes universitarios. El abuso sexual es uno de los acontecimientos estresantes causante de un mayor grado de malestar psicológico general, sintomatología postraumática y sentimiento de culpa. Un dato relevante es que las variables implicadas en el desarrollo de sintomatología en este tipo de víctimas mantienen las mismas relaciones que en los acontecimientos traumáticos muerte de un ser querido y violencia interpersonal. / The widespread prevalence of child sexual abuse highlights the social importance of understanding the nature and scope of this problem. Child sexual abuse is clearly a major public health problem associated with many psychological effects. The main objective of this study was to examine the prevalence and psychological sequelae of childhood sexual abuse in university students. Also, the effect of mediating variables was analyzed. A total of 1,033 undergraduate students (317 males, 30.7%; and 716 females, 69.3%), ranging in age from 18 to 30.6 years old (M = 22.1; SD = 31.46) were surveyed. Participants completed five paper-and-pencil measures: a) The Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis, 1993), b) Cuestionario de Apoyo Social Percibido (Gracia, Herrero, y Musitu, 2002), c) The Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire (Kubany y Haynes, 2001), d) The Distressing Event Questionnaire (Kubany, 2001), and the Trauma Related Guilt Inventory (Kubany y Haynes, 2001. Child contact sexual abuse was reported by 185 students (17.9%), 49 boys (15.5%) and 136 girls (19%). Contact sexual abuse before age 13 was reported by 154 students (14.9%), and contact sexual abuse after age 13 but before age 18 was reported by 31 students (3.0%). Child sexual abuse victims reported more psychological symptoms than victims of other stressors. Interpersonal violence events, especially child sexual abuse, showed the highest levels of posttraumatic symptoms. Comparisons between groups revealed no statistically significant differences on perception of social support. However, child sexual abuse victims demonstrated the highest levels of the trauma-related guilt cognitive aspects. The relationship model between traumatic events, perception of social support, guilt and psychological consequences showed that, child sexual abuse is quantitatively different from other traumatic events. However, the variables related to child sexual abuse and other traumatic events are qualitatively the same. In conclusion, child sexual abuse is a prevalent phenomenon in the Spanish society, as previously stated by López (1994). The results suggested that reports of sexual abuse were associated with high levels of psychological distress, posttraumatic stress disorder and trauma-related guilt. Nevertheless, variables related to the development of psychological symptoms on child sexual abuse victims maintain the same relationship than on other traumatic events.

This study shows that investor sentiment plays an important role in affecting the pricing dynamics between the spot and futures markets. The empirical evidence suggests that investor sentiment has a positive impact on price volatility and the bid–ask spread on both the spot and futures markets, which induces higher arbitrage risk and trading costs during high sentiment periods. As a consequence, during high sentiment periods, informed traders become less willing to leverage their information advantages on the futures market, which diminishes the futures markets’ leading informational role and contributions to price discovery. My findings provide support for the theory of limits to arbitrage.

abstract: Internet sites that support user-generated content, so-called Web 2.0, have become part of the fabric of everyday life in technologically advanced nations. Users collectively spend billions of hours consuming and creating content on social networking sites, weblogs (blogs), and various other types of sites in the United States and around the world. Given the fundamentally emotional nature of humans and the amount of emotional content that appears in Web 2.0 content, it is important to understand how such websites can affect the emotions of users. This work attempts to determine whether emotion spreads through an online social network (OSN). To this end, a method is devised that employs a model based on a general threshold diffusion model as a classifier to predict the propagation of emotion between users and their friends in an OSN by way of mood-labeled blog entries. The model generalizes existing information diffusion models in that the state machine representation of a node is generalized from being binary to having n-states in order to support n class labels necessary to model emotional contagion. In the absence of ground truth, the prediction accuracy of the model is benchmarked with a baseline method that predicts the majority label of a user's emotion label distribution. The model significantly outperforms the baseline method in terms of prediction accuracy. The experimental results make a strong case for the existence of emotional contagion in OSNs in spite of possible alternative arguments such confounding influence and homophily, since these alternatives are likely to have negligible effect in a large dataset or simply do not apply to the domain of human emotions. A hybrid manual/automated method to map mood-labeled blog entries to a set of emotion labels is also presented, which enables the application of the model to a large set (approximately 900K) of blog entries from LiveJournal. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

abstract: Muslim radicalism is recognized as one of the greatest security threats for the United States and the rest of the world. Use of force to eliminate specific radical entities is ineffective in containing radicalism as a whole. There is a need to understand the origin, ideologies and behavior of Radical and Counter-Radical organizations and how they shape up over a period of time. Recognizing and supporting counter-radical organizations is one of the most important steps towards impeding radical organizations. A lot of research has already been done to categorize and recognize organizations, to understand their behavior, their interactions with other organizations, their target demographics and the area of influence. We have a huge amount of information which is a result of the research done over these topics. This thesis provides a powerful and interactive way to navigate through all this information, using a Visualization Dashboard. The dashboard makes it easier for Social Scientists, Policy Analysts, Military and other personnel to visualize an organization's propensity towards violence and radicalism. It also tracks the peaking religious, political and socio-economic markers, their target demographics and locations. A powerful search interface with parametric search helps in narrowing down to specific scenarios and view the corresponding information related to the organizations. This tool helps to identify moderate Counter-Radical organizations and also has the potential of predicting the orientation of various organizations based on the current information. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2012