Background: The long-term detrimental impact of childhood emotional maltreatment is being increasingly recognised in the empirical literature. Adulthood trait-aggression is one proposed outcome of childhood emotional maltreatment. However, the pathways by which emotional maltreatment leads to trait-aggression are not well understood. Method: A systematic review was conducted to appraise the current empirical evidence base regarding the relationship between childhood emotional maltreatment and adulthood trait-aggression. Eighteen studies were reviewed and their quality analysed based on a number of pre-defined criteria. An empirical study was conducted using a cross-sectional, survey based design to evaluate hostile attribution bias and emotion regulation difficulties as mediators between childhood emotional maltreatment and adulthood trait-aggression. Participants were men (N = 42) recruited from NHS Forensic Mental Health Services. Results: Results from the systematic review provided support for a positive and significant association between childhood emotional abuse and adulthood traitaggression. There was evidence to indicate that childhood emotional neglect was also positively associated with adulthood trait-aggression, however, only a small number of studies have examined this relationship. The empirical study found significant indirect effects of childhood emotional abuse on self-reported aggression through emotion regulation difficulties. Emotion regulation difficulties did not have a significant effect on the relationship between childhood emotional neglect and aggression. Hostile attribution bias was not found to significantly mediate the relationship between either emotional abuse and aggression or emotional neglect and aggression. Conclusion: Those who experience emotional maltreatment during childhood may be at increased likelihood of engaging in aggressive behaviour in adulthood. Emotion regulation difficulties may play a key role in the relationship between childhood emotional abuse and aggression and this should be taken into consideration when assessing and treating adults who have difficulties with aggression. The routes by which emotional neglect and emotional abuse lead to aggression may differ. Further research is required to better understand the processes which lead from emotional maltreatment to aggression, particularly with regards to emotional neglect.

Rape is a highly prevalent crime, and it is one of the most severe traumatic events experienced by women. Previous researchers have found that, unlike other crimes, blame attribution in rape cases is inconsistent and influenced by many external elements (Bieneck & Krahe, 2011; Grubb & Turner, 2012; Masser, Lee, & McKimmie, 2010; Stewart & Jacquin, 2010). In this study, the influence of willing substance use and race on attribution of blame from a sample of 316 undergraduate students attending a large, Southeastern, public, urban university was examined. More specifically, results from this investigation described how the type of substance (alcohol, marijuana, and heroin) consumed by female survivors and survivors’ race/ethnicity (Black, Hispanic, and White) influenced the level of blame assigned to them. Additionally, the researcher explored the interactive effect of the drug type and survivors’ race. The results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that both survivors’ substance use and race significantly influenced blame attribution. Survivors who consumed alcohol prior to the assault were blamed more than survivors who used heroin or marijuana and survivors who did not consume any substances. Regarding the influence of survivors’ race/ethnicity, White female survivors were attributed significantly higher levels of blame than Black and Hispanic female survivors. In addition to the examined conditions of substance use and race/ethnicity, the results of this study indicated that observers’ demographic characteristics influenced blame attribution as well. Observers’ gender, race, and knowledge of a person who has survived rape were all significant factors effecting attribution of blame.

In many forensic investigations, questions linger regarding the identity of the authors of the software specimen. Research has identified methods for the attribution of binary files that have not been obfuscated, but a significant percentage of malicious software has been obfuscated in an effort to hide both the details of its origin and its true intent. Little research has been done around analyzing obfuscated code for attribution. In part, the reason for this gap in the research is that deobfuscation of an unknown program is a challenging task. Further, the additional transformation of the executable file introduced by the obfuscator modifies or removes features from the original executable that would have been used in the author attribution process. Existing research has demonstrated good success in attributing the authorship of an executable file of unknown provenance using methods based on static analysis of the specimen file. With the addition of file obfuscation, static analysis of files becomes difficult, time consuming, and in some cases, may lead to inaccurate findings. This paper presents a novel process for authorship attribution using dynamic analysis methods. A software emulated system was fully instrumented to become a test harness for a specimen of unknown provenance, allowing for supervised control, monitoring, and trace data collection during execution. This trace data was used as input into a supervised machine learning algorithm trained to identify stylometric differences in the specimen under test and provide predictions on who wrote the specimen. The specimen files were also analyzed for authorship using static analysis methods to compare prediction accuracies with prediction accuracies gathered from this new, dynamic analysis based method. Experiments indicate that this new method can provide better accuracy of author attribution for files of unknown provenance, especially in the case where the specimen file has been obfuscated.

This thesis is a constructive attempt to unravel the dilemma posed by Mischel's (1968) work with trait and state theories of personality, through the use of a novel design. Mischel found a failure to predict behavior incrementally from inferences about underlying traits (personalities) and states (situations). This impasse is demonstrated in attribution theory by the difference between Kelley's (1967) emphasis on environmental cues (i.e., consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness) in attributional situations, and Russell's (1982) search for an attributional style (specific to the individual). This thesis shows the relative influence of the situation and one's personality in attributions to a successful subordinate. Subjects were 527 psychology students at Florida International University (FIU). They completed James' (1957) Internal-External (I-E) Locus of Control Scale, to distinguish between internal, mid-range, and external personalities. Each subject read one of the vignettes about an army event that varied according to Kelley's (1967) (1) internal, (2) ambiguous, and (3) external patterns, and was asked to make an attribution about the depicted event (i.e., they completed the locus of causality subscale of the Causal Dimension Scale [CDS]). These attribution making scores constitute a major dependent variable of interest. The degree of attributional difficulty experienced by the subject and the evaluative disposition of the subject toward the actions in the vignette were tapped as opportunistic dependent variables. Afterwards, subjects indicated their willingness to complete evaluative forms on the subordinates in the vignettes. This measured the subject's willingness to reward the subordinate, and constitutes another dependent variable of major interest in this study. MANOVA was used to account for the variance in the dependent variables (i.e., attribution making, attributional difficulty, evaluative disposition, and evaluative behavior). The 3 X 4 (personality X situation) MANOVA showed that the situation significantly accounted for the variance in all four dependent variables, while the subjects' personality significantly accounted for attributional difficulty and evaluative disposition. I discuss the possibility that personality distinguished the more private cognitions (since those analyses were significant) from the more public cognitions (which were not significant). I conclude that the strong situational influence supports Mischel's findings. Future researchers would do well to utilize an integrated research design (as this study has done) with processes involving personality and situation antecedents.

This study examined how social anxiety, gender, and mode of presentation influenced miscommunication and perception of negativity in children’s interpretation of computer-mediated messages. The initial phase of the research involved developing and validating the stimuli for emotion recognition via presentation of various emotionally toned messages. Following preparation of the stimuli, the 98 participants (aged 8-12 years) in the main study were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: audio-visual, audio-only, and text message. The same emotionally toned messages were presented in each of these three conditions. Participants were instructed to select from a list of six emotions (happy, sad, disgusted, angry, surprised, scared) which emotion each message conveyed. Participants then rated how positively or negatively they perceived each sentence, using a 5-point Likert scale that ranged from very negative to very positive. Following the emotion recognition and Likert rating task, participants completed questionnaires that gathered information about social anxiety and attribution bias. Findings revealed that additional nonverbal and paralinguistic, as in the audio-visual or audio-only condition, allowed participants to more accurately identify the emotion being conveyed in the message, compared to the text message condition. This advantage was found for all emotions with the exception of happiness. For happy messages, participants were able to identify the intended emotion at above-chance levels regardless of mode of presentation. When making interpretations about angry messages, a significant three-way interaction was observed between sex, condition and social anxiety. Likert rating analyses revealed that condition, sex, and social anxiety played important roles in the interpretation of both ambiguous and unambiguous emotions, such as surprise and happiness.

This thesis titled Effective Use PPC to promote products services on the Internet is focused on traditional systems AdWords from Google, Sklik from Seznam and attribution models in Google analytics. The theoretical part of the history of the Internet, the development of online marketing individual marketing tools forms of advertising. The practical part is divided according to the strategic focus of the campaign. Acquisition, performance and remarketing campaigns. The last part is the comparison of measurement conversions in these systems with Google Analytics. The aim is to propose suitable metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of campaigns, banner ad and according to their strategic focus right perspective on measurement conversions.

Paulhus's (1984) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) contains scales designed to assess the two major components of socially desirable responding. The Self-Deception Scale (SDS) assesses the tendency to give favorably biased but honestly-held self-descriptions; the Impression Management Scale (IMS) assesses the tendency to give deliberately favorable self-descriptions. Research by Millham (1974) and Roth, Snyder and Pace (1986) has distinguished two tactics of desirable responding: (a) attribution: the claiming of positive attributes, and (b) denial: the rejection of negative attributes. This thesis presents three studies designed to evaluate the relative importance of these two distinctions in the BIDR. The first study, a factor analysis of 130 cases, demonstrated that both the content (self-deception vs. impression-management) and tactic (attribution vs. denial) were important in determining responses to the BIDR. The IMS items, including both attribution and denial, formed one factor. The attribution SDS items fell on a second factor. Surprisingly, the denial SDS items fell closer to the IMS factor. Rosenberg's Self-Esteem scale was most highly correlated with the attribution SDS items. Study 2 was a similar factor analysis of the data from a much larger dataset (N = 670). The factor pattern was identical to that in Study 1. Moreover, the SDS attribution items again predicted adjustment, including high self-esteem, low social anxiety and low empathic distress. Study 3 (N = 137) was designed to determine whether the critical difference between the attribution and denial items depends on: (a) whether the item refers to positive or negative attributes, or (b) whether the statement as a whole is favorable or unfavorable. To test these competing hypotheses, 20 negations were written, one for each of the 20 original assertions on the SDS. Results showed that items referring to positive characteristics (I am a saint; I am not a saint) formed a distinct factor from items referring to negative characteristics (I am a sinner; I am not a sinner). Simple negations (I am not a sinner) fell on the same factor as their corresponding assertions (I am a sinner) but at the opposite pole. Finally, the correlations with various personality measures were consistent with Studies 1 and 2. These results clarify the distinction between attribution and denial components. The distinction is not simply one of keying direction, that is, whether the statement as a whole is desirable or undesirable. Rather, the critical factor is whether the item content refers to a positive or negative characteristic. This distinction is critical in measuring self-deception, but not impression management. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

The reformulated learned helplessness model posits that individuals who make internal, stable and global attributions for undesired outcomes are more likely than others to become depressed when faced with important life events that are perceived as uncontrollable. Seligman, Abramson, Semmel and von Baeyer (1979) found significant correlations between attributional style and concurrent measures of depression in a sample of college undergraduates. The purpose of the present study was to address two questions arising from the Seligman et al. study within the context of the event of childbirth. The first question was whether the relationship between depressive attributional style and concurrent depression found in college undergraduates could be extended to women anticipating the birth of their first child. The second question was whether depressive attributional style would have predictive utility with this group, that is, whether women's prenatal attributional style would be predictive of depression in the first week postpartum. The results provide neglible support for the notion of depressive attributional style as defined by the reformulated learned helplessness hypothesis. Although this study was not designed to test hypotheses based upon any other model of depression, the findings were consistent with Beck's (1967) formulation. Several alternative explanations for the discrepancy between the present findings and those reported by Seligman et al. are discussed. Notably, 17% of this relatively homogeneous sample of primiparous women reported depression of clinical severity during the first week postpartum. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

While the proliferation of literature on the subject of growing incivility in society demonstrates the increasing importance given to civility by corporate America, there has been little academic investigation of the concept. The limited number of academic studies on civility reveals immense negative consequences for uncivil behavior. One question for marketers of businesses is whether lack of civility among front-end personnel can negatively influence sales. This dissertation is an attempt to fill this research gap by exploring responses to uncivil behavior under the theoretical framework of attribution theory. Using the CDSII scale based on attribution theory, experimental research design was used with current civil and uncivil behavior by the store employees and past experiences (positive, negative, and no-experience) with the store as stimulus. The consumers' perception of civility, attributions and behavioral intentions were measured and used as dependent variables. The results of the experiment showed that when a customer discerns employee behavior to be uncivil, the customer's perception of the level of the ability of the employee to control his own behavior decreases. The results of the study enhance the knowledge of two important consumer behaviors, namely complaining and switching behaviors by empirically studying their antecedents in a particular market interaction context. The results imply that it is important to eliminate or minimize any experience that the customer may construe as negative at a store. If practitioners can work towards eliminating or decreasing certain attributions of consumers, they can reduce the switching behaviors and thus impact customer retention rates and future sales. Though this study contributes to marketing theory and provides vital insights to practitioners, this study is but a starting point for further examination of the role of civility in consumer behavior and decision making.

L'objectif de notre travail est de proposer un modèle explicatif de l'humeur dépressive, intégrant à la fois un ensemble de cognitions, ainsi qu'une évaluation des écarts entre les sois. Plusieurs études préliminaires à ce modèle ont été réalisées. D'une part, deux études investissent l'opérationnalisation et l'organisation structurale de huit cognitions spécifiques. En outre, nous essayons de mettre en évidence deux mécanismes les reliant à l'humeur dépressive, l'un bénéfique via le contrôle perçu, et l'autre délétère via l'auto-blâme. Nos résultats confirment nos hypothèses en reléguant les attributions causales au second plan, et en montrant que l'auto-blâme et le contrôle perçu correspondent à des dimensions plus proximales de la dépression. D'autre part, une troisième étude présente les qualités psychométriques de notre adaptation française d'une échelle évaluant les écarts entre les sois idéal, moral et non désiré (Hardin et Lakin, 2009). Cette validation préliminaire permettra la mise en oeuvre d'une quatrième étude destinée à mettre à l'épreuve notre modèle intégratif. La mise en perspective de ces dimensions est analysée sous l'angle de leurs effets sur l'estime de soi, variable supposée médiatrice. Tandis que les cognitions spécifiques conservent les effets précédemment démontrés, certaines propositions de la théorie des écarts entre les sois (Higgins, 1987) ne sont pas vérifiées et feront l'objet d'analyses post-hoc. Enfin, nous interrogeons le sens de ces relations en montrant que, si la personnalité peut influencer l'émergence de l'humeur dépressive (« vulnerability model »), celle-ci est également susceptible d'altérer la façon de penser (« scar model »). / The aim of this study is to propose an integrated model of depressive mood, by including several cognitions and self-discrepancies. Several preliminary studies were conduct. On the one hand, two studies were devoted to the measure and test of a structural organisation between eight specific cognitions. In addition, we try to explain their relationship to depressive mood by the way of two distinct mechanisms: a salutary one via perceived control and a detrimental one via self-blame. Results corroborate our hypothesis by relegating causal attributions to the background and by showing that self-blame and perceived control have more proximity with depressive mood. On the other hand, one study presents the preliminary validation of our French adaptation of the Integrated Self-Discrepancy Index (ISDI; Hardin & Lakin, 2009). Then, through the use of structural equation modeling, the integrated model was tested. Self-esteem is proposed as mediator of the relationship between cognition, self-discrepancies and depression. While effects of cognition are confirmed, one hypothesis of self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987) isn't. Additionally, post-hoc analyses were then performed. Finally, we addressed the direction of causality between personality and depression, by comparing five structural models including vulnerability hypothesis, scar hypothesis, or both. Results showed that a mixed model integrating both types fit best to the data.