The majority of police departments across the United States are led by part-time police leaders who are expected to provide high quality public safety and policing services. Research results have not been conclusive on best practices for community policing in larger cities, and the community policing model has not been researched for small police organizations staffed by part-time police leaders and police officers. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the community policing experiences of 12 part-time police leaders in a northeastern U.S. state. Ecological theory provided the conceptual framework. The research questions examined the participants' experiences of community policing in rural communities. The data analysis strategies included reading the transcripts from the taped interviews, reading the field notes, and writing preliminary memos to form and understand the data. Open coding was used initially to organize the data, which were assigned labels and grouped into themes or categories. Content analysis resulted in the development of broader themes that were analyzed using a cross-case comparison for each. Results suggested that all of the police leaders believed that they provided services to the community and faced many of the same issues as full-time police leaders, despite having fewer resources. This study may help to address the problems that part-time police leaders experience in balancing the allocation of limited resources and the establishment of public policy regarding policing best practices. The study provides police and community leaders with a better understanding of the resources needed to ensure adequate policing and public safety services for their communities.

Previous research has shown that individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may dwell on restricted topics of interest during conversations (Mercier et al., 2000; Smerbeck, 2019). Stocco et al. (in press) found that individuals may prefer a conversational-skill intervention that includes access to restricted topics over an intervention that only provides high-quality attention for speech about experimenter-led topics. We replicated and extended Stocco et al. in two ways. First, we evaluated if speech about restricted topics (a) occurred at high levels and (b) was sensitive to interested responses from a listener. Second, we experimentally evaluated the additive effects of using restricted topics as reinforcement on participant preference for intervention. Finally, we sought to evaluate the reliability and generality of previous findings by conducting this study using telehealth. All participants spoke about restricted topics at high levels, and their speech was sensitive to different qualities of attention. Additionally, two out of three participants preferred an intervention with access to restricted topics, compared to an intervention that only included differential attention. These outcomes may have implications for practitioners who are asked to conduct virtual assessments or interventions for clients who engage in speech about restricted topics.

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The behavior of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can influence caregiver responses that lead to countertherapeutic outcomes. However, there are few experimental evaluations of variables that can cause potentially undesirable interactions between those with ASD and their caregivers. Specifically, little is known about the effects of listener interest on the restricted topics presented by caregivers. We evaluated the influence of listener responses exhibited by a confederate acting as a person with ASD on the topics presented by three undergraduate students who were interested in working with individuals diagnosed with ASD. Each session consisted of a 5-min conversation, during which the participant was instructed to talk about three topics. We compared the duration of topic presentation across phases in which the confederate behaved as an interested listener for one topic or for all three topics. Results showed that topic presentation was controlled by the confederate’s behavior as an interested or uninterested listener. All participants reported that the simulation was believable, acceptable, and useful. These findings have implications for understanding interactions between caregivers and individuals with ASD that might foster restricted interests and for developing corresponding interventions and caregiver-training programs.

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<p>In this thesis I examined behavioural, physiological, and molecular aspects of the stress response of the highly social cichlid <em>Neolamprologus pulcher</em>. Through this work, I established that dominant individuals within a group have higher baseline stress levels (as measured by plasma circulating cortisol concentrations) than subordinate group members, and hypothesize that this is due to the high demands placed on dominant individuals in both acquiring and maintaining their dominance status. Additionally, social behaviours, and activity levels were positively correlated with stress levels in subordinate males but these correlations were not observed in any other social class. Life history traits of males may explain this pattern, as subordinate males are arguably the social class with least stability in a group, and may need to appease dominant individuals in order to be allowed to stay; this may in tum cause stress. I was also able to establish that while dominant individuals had higher resting cortisol levels than subordinates, they were in no way maximal, as the application of a 10 minute stressor caused large increases above resting levels (>10 fold in magnitude) in circulating cortisol levels of both social classes and in both sexes. As an extension to the characterization of the stress response in <em>N. pulcher</em>, we examined differences in corticosteroid receptor levels between dominants and subordinates. This will paint a much fuller picture of the stress response in <em>N. pulcher</em> and highlight differences and similarities between stress responses in each social class, both physiologically and at the molecular level.</p> <p>In a second experiment, dominant female breeders were repeatedly stressed to assess possible maternal and offspring fitness costs. Through this manipulation we found that stressing females resulted in a longer interval between spawning events, and decreased maternal growth rates. Additionally there was a significant decrease in the number of eggs laid, as well as egg size in stressed mothers compared to those left unstressed. Helpers within a group seemed to have no effect on the above-mentioned characteristics, however mothers without helpers released highly variable cortisol concentrations during the first and second lay, while those with helpers saw less variability in the concentration of cortisol they released into eggs.</p> <p>The results presented in this thesis shed light on the stress responses of <em>N. pulcher,</em> highlighting the impacts that within-group social dynamics have on stress levels, and their potential impacts on maternal and (possibly) offspring fitness.</p> / Master of Science (MS)

Parenting behaviors and a variety of behavioral problems in children covary. The current study first aimed to examine how and why parenting and child behavioral problems are linked in middle childhood. In particular, a longitudinal design (1364 children assessed from 54 months to 5th grade) was used to examine whether the developmental link between parenting and child behavioral problems were reciprocal. A twin design (131 pairs of monozygotic and 173 pairs of dizygotic twins assessed from 6 to 8 years of age on average) was used to examine the underlying genetic and nongenetic etiology of this link. In addition, using these two samples, the current study also aimed to examine whether parental attributes, including negative affect, executive function, and social cognitive factors, modulate the link between parenting and child behavioral problems. Results across these two studies suggested that parenting and child behavioral problems mutually influenced the development of each other over time, potentially through both evocative and passive gene-environment correlation processes and environmental transmissions. In addition, maternal dispositional anger modulated the effects of child behavioral problems on changes in maternal parenting quality over time. Finally, implications of the current study were also discussed. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Rosen Valchev / I study how economic conditions and strategic incentives affect belief formation of rational agents with a limited information processing capacity. I study the impact of cognitive and information frictions on individual risk taking, investment and portfolio choice, and their implications on aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations. In my first chapter "Rational Overoptimism and Moral hazard in Credit Booms" I develop a framework in which over optimism in credit booms originates from rational decisions of managers. Because of moral hazard, managers pay too little attention to the aggregate conditions that generate risk, leading them to over borrow and over invest during booms. Periods of low risk premia predict higher default rates, higher probability of crises and systematic negative banks excess returns, in line with existing evidence. I document a negative relation between the convexity of CEO's compensation and their information on a larger sample of firms, which is consistent with my theory. My model implies that compensation regulation can play an important role in macro prudential policy. In my second chapter "Biased Surveys" Rosen Valchev and I improve on the standard tests for the FIRE hypothesis by allowing for both public and private information, and find new interesting results. First, we propose a new empirical strategy that can accommodate this richer information structure, and find that the true degree of information rigidity is about a third higher than previously estimated. Second, we find that individual forecasts over-react to private information but under-react to public information. We show that this is consistent with a theory of strategic diversification incentives in forecast reporting, where forecasters are rational but report a biased measure of their true expectations. This has two effects. First, it generates what looks like behavioral “over-reaction” in expectations, and second biases the information rigidity estimate further downward. Overall, our results caution against the use of survey of forecasts as a direct measure of expectations, and suggest that the true underlying beliefs are rational, but suffer from a much larger degree of imperfect information than previously thought. This has particularly profound implications for monetary policy, where inflation expectations play a key role. I explore further how economic incentives shape beliefs in my third chapter "International Trade and Portfolio Diversification". I show that information choice can explain the puzzling positive relation between bilateral investment and trade across countries. I present a model of endogenous information with both investment in assets and income from trade. While standard model of risk-hedging would require agents to invest in non-trading countries to diversify income risk, I show that limited information capacity and preferences for early resolution of uncertainty reverse this result. The intuition is that investors collect more information on trading partners to reduce income uncertainty, and therefore perceive their equity as less risky. I find that allowing for information choice reduces the role of risk hedging on portfolio decisions. I test my model’s implied relation between trade and attention in the data and find robust empirical support. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.