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Telomeres are located at the ends of all eukaryotic chromosomes and provide the stability of chromosomes. They consist of simple tandem hexametric repeats and play an important part in cell longevity. In human lymphocytes, telomeres shorten progressively with age. Mental retardation (MR) is a disorder with intelligence quotient below average (IQ < 70) and impairment in adaptive skills. IQ by Weschsler Adult Intelligence Scales revised (WAIS-R) appears to peak in the of 30-34 and thereafter decline gradually. Life expectancy is defined as the number of years remaining to be lived. The overall increase in life expectancy indicates an improvement in longevity. The life expectancy of MR patients is shorter than that of the general population. The purpose of this study is to predict the relationship between telomere length and IQ in normal control as well as to analyze the differences among the average telomere length for the control and subgroups of MR cases. Fifty-nine patients who met the fourth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria for mental retardation were included in this study. According to the degree of intellectual impairment, MR patients were divided into 4 types: mild, moderate, severe, and profound. Fifty-two female nursing students aged 19-21 were recruited as normal controls. DNA was isolated from their lymphocytes. Telomere length was analyzed by Southern blot hybridization. The length was calculated by the Photo CaptMw Version 99.03 software. Correlation between the telomere length and IQ in normal control was performed by the Pearson product-moment correlation. One-way ANOVA was used to test if any differences existed among the normal, mild, moderate, severe, and profound MR. Analyses displayed that there were no correlations between telomere length and IQ including PIQ(r=-0.001; p=0.922), VIQ(r=-0.033; p=0.817), TIQ(r=-0.026, p=0.857), and no difference existed among the normal and subgroups of MR cases. Results obtained from this study indicated that life expectancy of MR patients may approximate to that of the general population if live in the well environment.

Owning to the heterogeneity of services, service failures are inevitable to happen in service encounters. Therefore, recovery efforts play important roles in mataining the relationship with customer. Recovery paradox (RP) refers to the situation in which the customer who experiences a failure followed by a superior recovery rates a service as high as or even higher than s/he would rate a service involving no failure. By contrast, Double deviation (DD) refers to the situation in which inappropriate and/or inadequate recovery results in magnification of the negative evaluation. The RP and the DD are essentially symmetrical because both of them represent a phenomenon in which the recovery contributes to customer¡¦s evaluation more heavily than the initial failure dose. Although numerous studies devotes to the question whether the RP and DD exist, very few are trying to answer the question of why they exist. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to conceptually and empirically compare the RP and the DD in order to uncover the potential asymmetry, as well as to understand why recovery influences evaluation more greatly? Because the investigated conditions are not easy to be identified in the real world, a scenario-based quasi-experimental design is chosen. The data is collected from customers actually engaged in the target services. Customers are asked to answer questions about an organization they have recently patronized and then evaluate experimentally-generated scenarios in a restaurant setting to understand whether a negative discrepancy can really magnify the customer¡¦s evaluation toward an identical following event. The result reveals that after a negative-discrepant first event, a positive-discrepant second event is evaluated more positively than non-discrepant second event, but a negative-discrepant second event is evaluated less negatively than a non-discrepant one. That is to say the result supports RP, but doesn¡¦t support DD.

¡§Recovery Paradox¡¨ (RP) means that customer who experienced a service failure and a superior service recovery were more satisfied than the customer who didn¡¦t experience a service failure. Furthermore, ¡§Double Deviation¡¨ (DD) means that customer who experienced a service failure and a inferior service recovery were more dissatisfied than the customer who didn¡¦t experience a service failure or just experience a service failure. These two phenomena imply that customers pay more attention on the recovery than on the failure and that the evaluation of recovery is boosted by the initial failure. This study aims to discuss the boundary conditions in which the RP and DD are more likely to occur. This study uses experimental design to examine the boundary conditions of RP and DD. Experiment scenarios were composed of a series of service event in a restaurant. And the experiment wants to examine whether the customer who experienced the service failure would magnify the evaluation of recovery. Moreover, the experiment also wants to examine whether there are other factors affect the occurrence of these two phenomena. The previous failure experience, the strength of service and the measurement of satisfaction were included in this study as potential boundary conditions. The result supports RP, but doesn¡¦t support DD. And the result shows that there is no significant effect between the satisfaction and the previous failure experience. Beside, the strength of service and the measurement of satisfaction have effect on recovery satisfaction.

A considerable body of research supports the application of behavioral economic principles to study the relative reinforcing efficacy of drug and alcohol use. One self-report measure, the Alcohol Purchase Task, is thought to account for individual differences in the subjective valuation of alcohol consumption. To date, however, behavioral economic approaches have not evaluated the possible influence of memory-based expectations regarding the cognitive and behavioral effects of substance use on their measures. Alcohol expectancy research has found that more positive expectancies about the effects alcohol directly mediate drinking behavior and are associated with a number of alcohol-related outcomes. Given the importance of alcohol expectancies, the current study incorporated cognitive priming techniques into the Alcohol Purchase Task instruction set to test whether the activation of alcohol expectancy primes influenced patterns of alcohol consumption. Although previous research has primarily used the Alcohol Purchase Task in samples of heavy drinkers, we also examined differences between heavier and lighter drinkers to test whether expectancy primes would differentially influence alcohol demand. As expected, both heavier and lighter drinkers in the expectancy priming conditions purchased more alcohol overall relative to those in a non-primed condition. Results also suggest the positive-social expectancy content in the Alcohol Purchase Task increased the overall demand for alcohol relative to a modified Alcohol Purchase Task with no contextual primes, even after controlling for alcohol consumption. Although previous behavioral economic research has examined alcohol expectancies as a secondary outcome, the current study is the first to directly examine the influence of expectancies on alcohol demand using the Alcohol Purchase Task.

Value, a component of expectancy-value theory, has been shown to be predictive of task interest and choice. Attainment value, a component of value, has been defined as the degree to which a task affords the opportunity to confirm or disconfirm salient aspects of one’s self-conception. This paper presents a review of expectancy-value theory generally, and attainment value specifically. Additionally, given that attainment value has received relatively little research attention, the rationale, method, and results of a quantitative study of attainment value is presented. / text

Sociological interest in the relationship between the social structure and health began with the classic work of Durkheim, who first identified socially constructed patterns of suicide rates in Western European countries. Drawing on this structural tradition, a large literature has investigated how health is influenced and shaped by societal factors. Despite a great deal of research on the social causation of health, however, the potentially adverse effects of social structures have been rarely studied. If people's health is linked to broader social conditions, then it follows that health is also subject to societal disruption, especially in the wake of the breakdown or failure of the existing social structure. This dissertation advances our understanding of the relationship between the social structure and health at the population level, focusing on post-communist Eastern Europe as a case study. There are three interrelated goals in this dissertation: first, to elucidate differences in health and mortality outcomes between East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union; second, to numerically substantiate the association between drastic social change and the risk of death due to suicide; and third, to reveal the structural factors related to overall population health status in Eastern Europe. Using aggregate-level data for Eastern European countries for the post-communist period, I find that (1) there are growing inequalities in life expectancy and infant mortality between East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, and mechanisms associated with disparities vary by gender and age; (2) consistent with Durkheim's theory of suicide, drastic structural change is related to increased suicide death rates for the period immediately after the collapse of communism; and (3) the malfunctioning of the social structure is inversely associated with the health status of populations. Taken together, fully understanding the health consequences of communism's fall in Eastern Europe requires research that looks beyond individual-level risk factors to incorporate the broader characteristics of the social structure in which populations are embedded. / text

Japan is the longest lived population in the world and has led the world in low mortality for over two decades. The United States, although its GDP exceeds all other countries, has a life expectancy that falls substantially below most other western countries. Taiwan, although it has an emerging economy with rapid aging population, has a life expectancy approaching that of the United States. Previous studies have investigated multiple domains of physical health for elderly Japanese, American, and Taiwanese, but very few studies have compared mortality across these countries and even fewer have examined how mortality and morbidity intersect differently across the countries to influence differences in healthy life expectancy. This dissertation is aimed at filling this gap. Based on studies in the United States and other Western countries, education is increasingly characterized as a "fundamental cause" of health -- with more years of educational attainment associated with better health. Although the association is robust for a variety of health measures and mortality in the United States and other Western countries, studies in East Asia report more modest associations or no associations. Thus, whether the association extends beyond the Western context is less clear. In my dissertation, I investigate these issues in detail. In the United States, the more-educated enjoy longer life expectancy and a compression of mortality comparing with their less-educated counterpart. Here, data from Taiwan and Japan are used to assess whether education has similar consequences in two important non-Western settings. In sum, the findings reveal that: (1) older Japanese people not only have the highest total life expectancy but also have the highest absolute healthy life expectancy in each gender group, (2) older American and Taiwanese people have similar total life expectancy in each gender group, but they have very different health profiles, (3) educational gradients on mortality/health differ across gender and country groups, and (4) within a population, having more education helps maximize lifespan, changes and delays the biological aging process in the different contexts. Overall, the results underscore the importance of international perspective in explicating health disparities, especially educational differentials in health. / text

Within the education literature, satisfaction with the quality of public schools has received very little scholarly attention. Conversely, in the public administration literature, citizen satisfaction with public services has been studied since the late 1970s and in the past decade, models based on expectancy disconfirmation theory have increasingly been utilized. Of these models, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) model goes beyond satisfaction to examine the effect of satisfaction on behavioral consequences, such as the desire to move away from a locality, which may be of inherent interest to policymakers and public managers. This study extends the research on the ACSI model in the public sector by examining the effects of expectations, perceived quality, perceived disconfirmation, and grade on satisfaction with school quality. In turn, the effect of satisfaction on behavioral outcomes that are of interest to policymakers, modeled as the desire to choose a different schooling option or willingness to recommend public schools to others, are also examined. Using existing data from a public opinion poll, models for two groups of participants were estimated via regression-based path analysis. The study found a small negative effect of expectations on satisfaction and a larger role, directly and indirectly, of perceived quality on satisfaction judgments. Addition of the grade variable dispersed the effect of perceived quality but the total effect of the variable was unchanged. As theorized, satisfaction had a strong negative effect on the desire to choose a different schooling option and a strong positive effect on the willingness to recommend public schools to others. Suggestions for further research include a qualitative study incorporating interviews and focus groups to identify the information sources utilized in making satisfaction decisions and how individuals’ synthesize various pieces of information to determine whether their expectations have been met. In addition, use of objective measures, such as test scores, along with subjective measures may provide increased understanding of the influence of exogenous variables on the model.

This project investigated the statistical learning of musical expectancy. As a secondary goal, the effects of the perceptual properties of tone set familiarity (Western vs. Bohlen-Pierce) and textural complexity (melody vs. harmony) on the robustness of that learning process were assessed. A series of five experiments was conducted, varying in terms of these perceptual properties, the grammatical structure used to generate musical sequences, and the methods used to measure musical expectancy. Results indicated that expectancies can indeed be developed following statistical learning, particularly for materials composed from familiar tone sets. Moreover, some expectancy effects were observed in the absence of the ability to successfully discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical items. The effect of these results on our current understanding of expectancy formation is discussed, as is the appropriateness of the behavioural methods used in this research.