Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / This study is an investigation of the relationship between the motivational state of dependency and the recall of dependency material. Recent research has shown increasing interest in need states of individuals and in establishing relationships between need-related stimuli and cognitive behavior. Work by Williams, Wolf, Maccoby, Cohen and Gofstein suggests that facilitation of learning occurs if there is a congruence between a person's motivational state and the cognitive task he is asked to perform. Inhibition of learning can be observed if the need state interacts with inconsonant stimulus material. A systematic investigation of specific need states is still lagging. Studies have examined the drive state of hostility, oral needs, and achievement motives. An implication of their findings is that the relationship between stimulus material and motivation is not confined to the few isolated need states studied but has general validity in the area of learning and motivation. Since relatively little is known about the consistency of the cognition-motivation interdependence, this study attempts to determine whether or not similar expectations can be maintained regarding the motivational state of dependency.[TRUNCATED]

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The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of Integrated Circuits (IC). An effective way of verifying a design can be achieved by adding assertions to the design. Automatic translation of hardware specifications from natural language to assertions in a formal representation has the potential to improve the verification productivity of ICs. However, natural language specifications have the characteristics of being imprecise, incomplete, and ambiguous. An automation framework can benefit verification engineers only if it is designed with the right balance between the ease of expression and precision of meaning allowed for in the input natural language specifications. This requirement introduces two major challenges for designing an effective translation framework. The first challenge is to allow the processing of expressive specifications with flexible word order variations and sentence structures. The second challenge is to assist users in writing unambiguous and complete specifications in the English language that can be accurately translated. In this dissertation, we address the first challenge by modeling semantic parsing of the input sentence as a game of BINGO that can capture the combinatorial nature of natural language semantics. BINGO parsing considers the context of each word in the input sentence to ensure high precision in the creation of semantic frames. We address the second challenge by designing a suggestion and feedback framework to assist users in writing clear and coherent specifications. Our feedback generates different ways of writing acceptable sentences when the input sentence is not understood. We evaluated our BINGO model on 316 hardware design specifications taken from the documents of AMBA, memory controller, and UART architectures. The results showed that highly expressive specifications could be handled in our BINGO model. It also demonstrated the ease of creating rules to generate the same semantic frame for specifications with the same meaning but different word order. We evaluated the suggestion and rewriting framework on 132 erroneous specifications taken from AMBA and memory controller architectures documents. Our system generated suggestions for all the specs. On manual inspection, we found that 87% of these suggestions were semantically closer to the intent of the input specification. Moreover, automatic contextual analysis of the rewritten form of the input specification allowed the translation of the input specification with different words and different order of words that were not defined in our grammar. / Doctor of Philosophy / The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of hardware circuits. An effective way of verifying a design is to add programming codes called assertions in the design. The creation of assertions can be time-consuming and error-prone due to the technical details needed to write assertions. Automatically translating assertion specifications written in English to program code can reduce design time and errors since the English language hides away the technical details required for writing assertions. However, sentences written in English language can have multiple and incomplete interpretations. It becomes difficult for machines to understand assertions written in the English language. In this work, we automatically generate assertions from assertion descriptions written in English. We propose techniques to write rules that can accurately translate English specifications to assertions. Our rules allow a user to write specifications with flexible use of word order and word interpretations. We have tested the understanding framework on English specifications taken from four different types of hardware design architectures. Since we cannot create rules to understand all possible ways of writing a specification, we have proposed a suggestion framework that can inform the user about the words and word structures acceptable to our translation framework. The suggestion framework was tested on specifications of AMBA and memory controller architectures.

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We compare selected European countries using an economic dependency ratio which emphasizes the role of age-specific levels of production and consumption. Our analysis reveals large differences in the age- and gender-specific level and type of production activities across selected European countries and identifies possible strategies to adjust age-specific economic behaviour to an ageing population. The cross-country differences in economic dependency of children and elderly persons are largely determined by the age at which people enter, respectively exit, the labour market. The ability of the working age population to support children and elderly persons in turn is strongly influenced by the participation of women in paid work. We also provide a measure for the age-specific production and consumption in form of unpaid household work. The inclusion of unpaid household work leads to a decrease of the gender differences in production activities and indicates that the working age population supports children and elderly persons not only through monetary transfers but also through services produced by unpaid work (e.g. childcare, cooking, cleaning. . .). Given the available data, we cannot distinguish the age profile of consumption by gender and have to assume - in case of unpaid work - that each member of the household consumes the same. Hence, our results have to be regarded as a first approximation only. Our paper aims to argue that a reform of the welfare system needs to take into account not only public transfers but also private transfers, in particular the transfers in form of goods and services produced through unpaid household work.

Three studies examined the effects of benevolent sexism and gender on support provision and relationship functioning across multiple contexts. Benevolent sexism refers to sexist attitudes towards women that are seemingly positive, but still stereotypical (Glick & Fiske, 1996). Study 1 examined benevolent sexism and dependency-oriented support in friendships by asking participants how they would respond to either a female or male acquaintance in hypothetical helping scenarios. Study 2 examined benevolent sexism and secure base support among individuals in heterosexual romantic relationships using an Internet-based survey. Secure base support differs from other forms of support in that it is not provided in order to help someone cope with adversity, but rather involves supporting a partner’s exploration or personal goal pursuit in non-adverse scenarios. Study 3 used behavioral observation to examine benevolent sexism and secure base support among romantic couples participating in a videotaped exploration task. Multiple regression and dyadic analyses were conducted to test for interactions between gender, benevolent sexism, and support provision. In both men and women in Study 1, benevolent sexism was associated with an increased likelihood of providing dependencyoriented help towards others, suggesting that men are not the only ones providing dependency-oriented support to women. However, men were more likely than women to provide dependency-oriented help towards women, regardless of their degree of benevolent sexism. In Studies 2 and 3, there were no significant main effects of benevolent sexism or gender on secure base support. In Study 2, women higher in benevolent sexism reported being more interfering towards their male partner’s goal pursuit, suggesting that benevolent sexism may be harmful to men as well. In Study 3, women reported lower feelings of competence during the exploration task than men. For individuals with partners high in benevolent sexism, gender moderated their feelings of competence. Women with male partners high in benevolent sexism reported lower feelings of competence, whereas men with female partners high in benevolent sexism reported higher feelings of competence. The mixed results suggest that the effects of benevolent sexism on support exchanges may be more complex than current theoretical perspectives imply. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Context Chronic pain and opioid dependence confer substantial individual and societal burdens and are notoriously difficult to treat effectively. Their comorbid presentation further complicates effective treatment through complex physiological and environmental interactions. Objectives (1) What are the clinical characteristics and treatment outcomes associated with comorbid chronic pain in ORT patients? (2) Does the patient-attributed direction of the causal relationship in the development of opioid dependence and chronic pain identify two clinically-distinct treatment populations? (3) What is the incidence of iatrogenic opioid dependence or abuse following opioid analgesic treatment? (4) Is there evidence of opioid-induced hyperalgesia in humans? Methods Primary data Participants were 467 treatment-seeking, opioid-dependent patients. Materials comprised standardised instruments – focusing on illicit substance use and mental health characteristics – completed by medical staff at study inception, and extracts of routinely-collected clinical datasets spanning the follow-up period. Procedures involved the use of a health informatics approach. Electronic linkage of data collected at study inception with routinely-collected clinical datasets spanning the 5-year follow-up period. Secondary data Systematic searches were undertaken using six electronic research databases, supplemented by manual searches. Study quality was assessed using instruments developed by NIH. Data synthesis using random effects models (DerSimonian-Laird method) generated: (1) a pooled incidence of iatrogenic dependence or abuse following opioid analgesic treatment; and (2) a pooled effect of opioid exposure on the development of opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Additional analyses included assessment of heterogeneity in study effects, within- and between-study risk of bias and sensitivity analyses. Results A total of 246 (53%) patients reported comorbid chronic pain. This ‘comorbid’ group was associated with increased mortality, physical and mental health problems, service utilisation and illicit drug use, specifically benzodiazepines and cannabinoids. Within the ‘comorbid’ group, patients who reported a causal impact of opioid dependence on the development of pain were associated with increased illicit drug use and psychiatric morbidity. Secondary data analyses revealed a 4.7% incidence estimate of iatrogenic dependence or abuse following opioid analgesic treatment, and evidence of the development of opioid-induced hyperalgesia following therapeutic opioid exposure. Conclusions Elevated mortality, morbidity and illicit drug use in opioid-dependent patients with comorbid chronic pain reflects a patient population with substantial health burdens. The dynamic relationship between these severe and chronic conditions necessitates complex, multimodal treatment strategies and multiagency collaboration, including general psychiatric intervention. Whilst a substantial proportion reported that opioid dependence developed as a consequence of pain problems, there is evidence to suggest that the assumed risk of iatrogenic opioid dependence and abuse may be an overestimate; however, therapeutic opioids may lead to other problems that impact on treatment effectiveness, such as opioid-induced hyperalgesia.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-63). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss&rft%5Fval%5Ffmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss:MQ99384

Tourism in the rural areas of developing countries is expanding at a rapid pace and is often a primary means of income in these areas. While the WTO (World Tourism Organization) and local developers encourage the expansion of this industry, others criticize tourism’s use as a tool for development in poor regions. Critics frequently use the core-periphery framework to examine how external control and high external leakages often result in the destination area remaining underdeveloped despite the large expenditures by tourists. Several studies have used the dependency framework to examine the core-periphery relationship on the international scale, but due to dependency’s traditional confinement to the international scale, the dependency framework has not been employed on smaller spatial scales. This study will examine the utility of the dependency framework on a regional scale in a rural area of a developing country by examining the distribution of income between the core and periphery. Additionally, while this economic problem of leakage, a major symptom of dependency, is well documented, there is a paucity of research on the methods to reduce leakage out of peripheral areas. Strategies that can be employed on the village level may be especially useful, as they do not require the cooperation of outside stakeholders who may profit from the leakages. By conducting informal interviews with key stakeholders, consulting informants, and surveying tourism businesses, this study seeks to understand the issue of dependency in Northern Thailand's rural tourism industry as well as to identify and evaluate the strategies currently employed in these villages to reduce leakages. The four case studies of rural villages determined that in all cases, the urban areas profited more from rural tourism than the villages; however, the amount of leakage out of the villages was highly varied. This variation appears to be largely due to the different strategies that each village employed. The villages, which employed a proactive economic strategy, had more success in reducing leakages than other villages. These findings support the unorthodox dependency framework.