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<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 70.85pt 70.85pt 70.85pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} -->Människan har en tydlig tendens att begå det fundamentala attributionsfelet, det vill säga överskatta personlighetsbundna faktorer vid förklarandet av andras beteende. Den aktuella undersökningen genomfördes på en högskola i Mellansverige. Deltagarna fick besvara en enkät utformad i sex olika varianter där betingelserna beteende och person manipulerades. Den aktuella studien visade att fundamentala attributionsfelet till en viss del påverkas av relationer och typ av beteende. En person som utför ett positivt beteende skattas som vänligare och snällare än en person som utför ett negativt beteende. Likaså skattas en väns personlighet som vänligare än en ej omtyckt bekants och en främlings personlighet. Dessa resultat väcker intresset för ytterligare studier om hur relationer påverkar människans uppfattning om individen i andra situationer.

Over the past decade, the AdS/CFT correspondence has proven to be a remarkable tool to study various properties of strongly coupled field theories. In the context of the holography, Ryu and Takayanagi have proposed an elegant method to calculate entanglement entropy for these field theories. In this thesis, we use this holographic entanglement entropy to study a candidate c-theorem and entanglement entropy for singular surfaces. We use holographic entanglement entropy for strip geometry and construct a candidate c-function in arbitrary dimensions. For holographic theories dual to Einstein gravity, this c-function is shown to decrease monotonically along RG flows. A sufficient condition required for this monotonic flow is that the stress tensor of the matter fields driving the holographic RG flow must satisfy the null energy condition over the holographic surface used to calculate the entanglement entropy. In the case where the bulk theory is described by Gauss-Bonnet gravity, the latter condition alone is not sufficient to establish the monotonic flow of the c-function. We also observe that for certain holographic RG flows, the entanglement entropy undergoes a ‘phase transition’ as the size of the system grows and as a result, evolution of the c-function may exhibit a discontinuous drop. Then, we turn towards studying the holographic entanglement entropy for regions with a singular boundary in higher dimensions. Here, we find that various singularities make new universal contributions. When the boundary CFT has an even spacetime dimension, we find that the entanglement entropy of a conical surface contains a term quadratic in the logarithm of the UV cut-off. In four dimensions, the coefficient of this contribution is proportional to the central charge c. A conical singularity in an odd number of spacetime dimensions contributes a term proportional to the logarithm of the UV cut-off. We also study the entanglement entropy for various boundary surfaces with extended singularities. In these cases, extended singularities contribute through new linear or quadratic terms in logarithm only when the locus of the singularity is even dimensional and curved.

The Laguna Madre is a hypersaline lagoon. Despite harsh conditions, the upper Laguna Madre (ULM) is a highly productive ecosystem and a popular sportfishing area, especially for spotted seatrout and red drum. It is also the most important Texas bay for commercial fishing of black drum. TPWD’s Coastal Fisheries division began conducting routine monitoring of coastal fishery resources in 1977 to guide management. The goal of the present study was to improve understanding of spatiotemporal trends in relative abundance of selected fish and macro-invertebrate species in the upper Laguna Madre. I used TPWD’s bag-seine and water-quality data from the years 1985-2004 to examine variation in species’ relative abundances and relationships to several environmental factors. I hypothesized that one or more of these variables, alone or in combination, were related to spatial and temporal trends in community composition. I used detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) to measure species turnover (beta diversity) and to determine which model (linear or unimodal) of species response along a gradient to apply. I used canonical correspondence analysis to relate species abundances directly to explanatory variables. The explanatory variables were tested for significance and the variance partitioned among three groupings: temporal, spatial and environmental. DCA indicated complete species turnover along two dimensions: seasonal and spatial. It also indicated that a unimodal method such as CCA was appropriate for further analysis. The CCA model included 39 variables. The included variables explained 14% of the variation in species abundance in the data set. Since the first four axes explained 67% of the variation contained in the first two DCA axes, the chosen explanatory variables were sufficient to explain the majority of the tractable variation in species abundance. The variance partitioning procedure indicated that temporal effects were the most important in explaining species variation in the Upper Laguna, followed by the spatial component. The pure environmental component explained the least amount of variation. In this study, much of the variability in species abundance was due to the spawning patterns of estuary-dependent species, most of which spawn in the spring and summer months, leading to higher abundances from spring through fall.

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During the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Women from literary families all wrote letters with an awareness of the possibility of the world reading them. Even as letters were viewed as ostensibly private forms of communication, they were serving an intimate public as a vehicle for public feelings long before publication. Exploring the epistolary remains of three nineteenth-century women writers from literary families, I focus, in particular, on how these writers confronted illness, grief, and death, all things that kept them isolated from others and made correspondence necessary. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death. While Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise, Charlotte Brontë did not write about her death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating on it while she was still living. Instead Bronte focused on her sisters’ deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her life got written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Throughout the study, Virginia Woolf acts as a mediating figure who both engaged in these epistolary practices of bereavement and read and wrote about letter collections from the past. The significance of these letters is how they reflect attitudes towards death and dying in the nineteenth century, particularly in how narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief itself provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement. The work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life. / text

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This project offers a multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the contemporary post-Soviet Internet bride phenomenon and the rationales, motives, and aspirations of the industry's participants. As international marriage services have incorporated information and communications technologies (ICTs) to assist in the marketing of women of post-communist nations for correspondence courtship with Western men, the industry has furthered the globalization of marriage markets and the opportunities for communicative exchange among disparate nations and cultures. By way of case study, the project takes a special focus on the Belarusian/American segment of the industry, turning to personal interviews with participants and employing qualitative techniques to dissect marketing methods. The study gives primary consideration to processes and elements of globalization, postmodern consumer culture, and aspects of human sexuality (particularly sexual exchange theory), recognizing their interactive and mutually-constitutive nature that calls for their analysis through a Baudrillardian lens.

This study examines the coming out process for transgendered individuals using the framework of Austin's speech act: the locutionary force, the illocutionary force, and the perlocutionary force. A grounded theory analysis of 43 letters in two different Internet databases revealed similarities and differences in the coming out process for transgendered individuals, compared to what we know about the process for gay and lesbian people. Similarities were found in all three acts: labels and scripts are used in the locutionary act; confession, education, affirmation and remorse are used as framing strategies in the illocutionary act; and rejection and acknowledgement are addressed in the perlocutionary act. Unique aspects of the coming out process for transgendered individuals include the importance of and reliance on labels in the locutionary act, education in the illocutionary act, and the visualization and cooperation of others in the perlocutionary act. These findings have a number of important practical and theoretical implications for interpersonal relationships and scholarship. / Department of Communication Studies