The purpose of this study it to research the role and public perception of security surveillance on a university campus. The research measured variables such as age, gender, class standing political affiliation, and one's residence whether on campus or off campus. This study is focused on how students view security surveillance, and whether they see security surveillance as an important tool for the safety of the public or a threat to privacy. A student survey was administered to undergraduate students asking how they felt about crime on campus and whether crime was a problem that could be solved by security cameras. The research indicates that the majority of students do not view security surveillance as a threat to their privacy, and that security cameras are an important tool in combating crime.

This work provides cultural and political explanations on how and why cigarette smoking has increasingly become an object of intolerance and control in Hong Kong. Since the 1980s, the smoking population has been falling. Smoking behavior, sales and promotion of cigarette products have been under close surveillance by the government, medical experts and society at large. Cigarette smoking, as well as smokers, has increasingly been rejected and demonized in the public discourse. What are the conditions that make the growing intolerant discourses and practices against cigarette smoking possible and dominant? Why and how has the tobacco control campaign become prevalent as a governmentalist project, which is strong enough to tear down the alliance of tobacco industry giants? Why is tobacco singled out from other legal but harmful substances, such as alcohol, as an imperative object of intolerance and control? This work tackles these questions by adopting a Foucauldian discursive approach and the theory of articulation developed in cultural studies. By considering tobacco control as a historical and contextual practice, it traces the specific trajectory of tobacco control in Hong Kong, maps the cultural and political contexts that make it possible, and considers its consequence regarding the complex relationship among control, construction of risk, identity and freedom in society.

Retaliation is a well-established response to abusive supervision. Leading edge research explains the occurrence of supervisor-directed retaliation through processes associated with the strength model of self-control (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). The present research builds on these ideas by considering the role of emotions in the retaliatory processes. 407 participants completed an online survey that included questionnaires measuring personality traits associated with self-control and emotional experiences. Findings indicate that a predisposition to negative emotional experiences predicts retaliatory behavior in response to abusive supervision, even for individuals with a high capacity for self-control. It is suggested that future research should determine whether emotion-driven retaliation is mediated by a desire for revenge.

This dissertation is a cultural history of deviance in the United States. I use a series of case studies to examine the way deviant figures have been represented and experienced within American culture. The dissertation covers four historical eras and examines a representative deviant figure in each of them. The first chapter deals with the figure of the witch in Puritan New England, the second examines the libertine in the early American republic, the third deals with freaks in Victorian America and the fourth studies the flapper in the roaring twenties. Each of these chapters is focused on a particular historical crisis, trial or scandal that produced a rich body of historical evidence for study and analysis: the Salem Witch Trial of 1692, the Apthorp-Morton Scandal of 1788, the sensational Beecher-Tilton Affair of 1875 and the Ruth Snyder Trial of 1927. My overarching thesis is that representations of deviants reveal a deep cultural preoccupation with failure and inadequacy, which are projected onto deviant figures. This interpretation is an attempt to move beyond viewing representations of deviance as simply being attempts to repress those who do not conform to societal norms, or to shore up fragile social identities by creating ‘others’ against whom the normal American could be negatively defined. Instead, I argue that representations of deviance were compelling to the Americans who created them primarily as powerful fantasies about failure, lack and inadequacy. On to the rich symbolic canvas of the deviant figure, Americans projected their anxieties about personal and social failure. In different ways at different times, deviants have been used to articulate the various possible ways in which a person could fail to meet their society’s ideals and expectations, and to imagine the consequences of such failures for both individual personhood and society as a whole. The deviant has therefore historically served as a kind of mirror to the culture which produced him or her: a mirror in which a culture might darkly glimpse its own values, distorted by the terrifying failure to achieve that which is most prized.

Retaliation is a well-established response to abusive supervision. Leading edge research explains the occurrence of supervisor-directed retaliation through processes associated with the strength model of self-control (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). The present research builds on these ideas by considering the role of emotions in the retaliatory processes. 407 participants completed an online survey that included questionnaires measuring personality traits associated with self-control and emotional experiences. Findings indicate that a predisposition to negative emotional experiences predicts retaliatory behavior in response to abusive supervision, even for individuals with a high capacity for self-control. It is suggested that future research should determine whether emotion-driven retaliation is mediated by a desire for revenge.

There have been few investigations of sexual coercion in relationships. I conducted several studies to develop a measure of partner sexual coercion and to identify its proximate causes and the relevant personal characteristics of male perpetrators. Community participants’ self-reported propensity to engage in various tactics to obtain sex from a reluctant partner clustered into a subscale relating to sexual coercion and a subscale pertaining to sexual coaxing. These subscales had excellent internal reliability, construct validity, criterion validity, and were used to test predictions in subsequent studies. I tested the application of Lalumière et al.’s (2005) three-path model for the development of sexually coercive behavior in general to sexual coercion in relationships. Self-reported interest in partner sexual coercion in a community sample was significantly related to psychopathy, but not age or neurodeveopmental insults. I confirmed the importance of psychopathy in this model by comparing men who raped their partner to other sex offender groups. Another characteristic of sex offenders, sexual deviance, was tested for its application to partner rapists. Unlike non-partner rapists, men who raped their partner exhibited low sexual arousal to rape scenarios, similar to community controls. Cuckoldry risk, a hypothesized proximate cause of partner sexual coercion, was also tested. Direct cues to cuckoldry risk were related to self-reported propensity for partner sexual coercion, whereas indirect cues of cuckoldry risk were related to sexual coaxing. In a forensic sample, most partner rapists had experienced cuckoldry risk prior to committing their offense, and they experienced more cuckoldry risk events than partner assaulters. A necessary condition of the cuckoldry risk hypothesis is that men should exhibit sexual arousal to cues signaling cuckoldry risk. Men in a community sample exhibited as much sexual arousal to stories depicting partner infidelity as they did to stories depicting consenting sex with their partners, and men who were currently in relationships showed greater arousal to stories of infidelity than consenting sex. Taken together, my results suggest psychopathy and cuckoldry risk are important contributors to partner sexual coercion. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2008-07-16 11:13:04.26

The current study examined divergences among impulsivity and sensation seeking items from the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire Impulsive Sensation Seeking scale in terms of their relations to other personality models, deviance, and laboratory task outcomes. A sample of 654 undergraduates was gathered across two studies and given a Five Factor Model of personality measure (e.g. NEO Five Factor Inventory, NEO Five Factor Report Form), deviance measures (e.g. Antisocial Behavior Inventory, Explicit Attitudes Towards Marijuana Questionnaire), and three laboratory tasks (e.g. Balloon Analogue Risk Task, Newmans Card-Playing Task). Results demonstrated the hypothesized divergences among impulsivity and sensation seeking items on measures of personality and deviance as well as laboratory tasks. We conclude that Impulsive Sensation Seeking is multidimensional and would be more useful if employed as two independent constructs: (Lack of) Premeditation and Sensation Seeking.

Drawing on prior research from several areas of psychology, I predicted that different forms of organizational justice would predict counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) depending on employees’ age. In particular, I predicted that distributive justice would be associated with CWB more so for younger than older employees, whereas interactional justice would be associated with CWB more so for older than younger employees. In an initial study, 192 employees completed an online survey which assessed the focal variables. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed the two predicted 2-way interactions. The findings are in line with aging research suggesting that, whereas younger people are more motivated by instrumental concerns, relational concerns become more salient as they age. The results have important implications for research on justice and CWB, and they extend basic research on human aging to an applied context.

This study is an exploration of the nature and formation of moral sentiments concerning what constitutes deviance and how deviants should be treated. These sentiments establish the general climate of moral tolerance or intolerance within which reactions to particular instances of deviance take shape. The study is based upon the assumption that differences between people in terms of such moral sentiments reflect further differences in other areas of their lives, in the roles in which they find themselves and the distinctive ideologies to they adhere. The thesis starts from an examination of the work undertaken in this area by Ranulf in developing his theory of moral indignation. This holds that a repressive morality embracing hostility towards hedonism and punitiveness towards deviants is characteristic of the lower middle class as the indirect result of the restraints forced upon its members by their position in the class structure. The present thesis employs the critical appraisal of Ranulf's theory as an opportunity to draw together evidence which serves as a means of elaborating a more comprehensive theory of moral indignation. This evidence is culled from the examination of a number of studies taken from the fields of sociology, social psychology and social anthropology. A study of three "moral crusades" - the Responsible Society, the Nationwide Festival of Light, and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association – is undertaken to investigate the nature of moral indignation in a contemporary setting. The study concludes by setting forth an explanation of the nature and origin of moral authoritarianism as the product of social constraints.

This thesis presents a modification of existing entropy-based splitting criteria for classification and regression trees. Trees are typically grown using splitting criteria that choose optimal splits without taking future splits into account. This thesis examines localised splitting criteria that are based on local averaging in regression trees or local proportions in classification trees. The use of a localised criterion is motivated by the fact that future splits result in leaves that contain local observations, and hence local deviances provide a better approximation of the deviance of the fully grown tree. While most recent research has focussed on tree-averaging techniques that are aimed at taking a moderately successful splitting criterion and improving its predictive power, this thesis concentrates on improving the splitting criterion. Use of a localised splitting criterion captures local structures and enables later splits to capitalise on the placement of earlier splits when growing a tree. Using the localised splitting criterion results in much simpler trees for pure interaction data (data with no main effects) and can produce trees with fewer errors and lower residual mean deviances than those produced using a global splitting criterion when applied to real data sets with strong interaction effects. The superiority of the localised splitting criterion can persist when multiple trees are grown and averaged using simple methods. Although a single tree grown using the localised splitting criterion can outperform tree averaging using the global criterion, generally improvements in predictive performance are achieved by utilising the localised splitting criterion's property of detecting local discontinuities and averaging over sets of trees grown by placing splits where the deviance is locally minimal. Predictive performance improves further when the degree of localisation of the splitting criterion is randomly selected and weighted randomisation is used with locally minimal deviances to produce sets of trees to average over. Although state of the art methods quickly average very large numbers of trees, thus making the performance of the splitting criterion less critical, predictive performance when the localised criterion is used in bagging indicates that different splitting methods warrant investigation. The localised splitting criterion is most useful for growing one tree or a small number of trees to examine structure in the data. Structurally different trees can be obtained by simply splitting the data where the localised splitting criterion is locally optimal.