Theoretical models posit that the perception of situations consists of two components: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving (Murray, 1938; Rauthmann, 2012; Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2013; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). In this study participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). The RSQ was used to calculate the overall agreement among ratings of situations and to examine the objective and subjective properties of the pictures. These results support a twocomponent theory of situation perception. Both the objective situation and the person perceiving that situation contributed to overall perception. Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits in a theoretically meaningful manner. For instance, individuals high in Openness indicated that these pictures contained comparatively more humor (r = .26), intellectual stimuli (r = .20), and raised moral or ethical issues (r = .19) than individuals low on this trait. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / This paper will review prior research to support the notion that innovation does in fact lead to a competitive advantage for business, and that this competitive advantage is translated into increased profitability and productivity. Though the body of work reviewed here will by no means unequivocally prove that this relationship always holds true in real-world markets, it will provide a convincing argument that fostering innovation will likely have positive economic affects. Building off this assumption, this paper will then focus specifically on examining the relationship between environmental regulation and innovation in more detail. This paper looks to answer the question: Under what conditions will environmental regulation cause firms to begin choosing to innovate technologically rather than simply to meet regulation with compliance? Using a simple model of price competition between two firms it will be shown that environmental regulation can effectively induce innovation through spending on R&D projects to develop more efficient technology. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

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The Hygiene Hypothesis and Old Friends Hypothesis focus attention on the coevolutionary relationship between humans and pathogens, positing that reduced pathogen exposure in economically developed nations is responsible for immune dysregulation and associated increases in chronic inflammation, allergy, and autoimmunity. Despite progress in testing these ideas, few studies have examined these relationships among populations undergoing the transition from traditional to more market-based lifestyles. The present study tests relationships between economic development and social change, altered infectious disease exposure, and immune function among the Shuar forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador, a population undergoing rapid economic change associated with increased market participation. Using stool samples to assess soil-transmitted helminth (STHs; parasitic intestinal worms) burden, dried blood spot measurement of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP), and interviews to evaluate level of market integration (MI; the suite of social and cultural changes associated with rapid economic development) and disgust sensitivity, this dissertation tests the Hygiene and Old Friends Hypotheses. The first study tests relationships between STH exposure and MI, using geographic location in relation to the regional market center as a proxy for MI. This study documents lower rates of STHs in people living in more market integrated regions. The second study tests the coevolutionary role that STHs and other pathogens have played in shaping human psychology and behavior. Findings suggest that pathogen exposure has acted as a selective pressure, resulting in evolved disgust sensitivity toward pathogen related stimuli. This study provides evidence that disgust sensitivity is calibrated to local environments, acting to decrease STH exposure. The third study tests the role of STHs in immune function. CRP was positively related to age in uninfected individuals. No relationships existed for more traditionally living or infected individuals. These findings suggest that STH exposure may decrease the risk of developing chronic inflammation and associated diseases with advancing age. These studies provide support for the idea that STHs provide stimuli that decrease chronic inflammation, suggesting that altered intestinal microflora in developed nations may be partially responsible for the development of chronic inflammatory disorders like allergy and autoimmunity. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished coauthored material.

Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Philosophy. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 385-390. / Ph.D.

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Lee Shun-yi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Tests of Hypotheses --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- Likelihood Ratio Statistic --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- The Rao´ة s Score Statistic --- p.5 / Chapter 1.2.3 --- Wald's Statistic --- p.6 / Chapter 1.3 --- Notation --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- Fixed Effects Model --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Pearson Chi-square Statistic --- p.9 / Chapter 2.3 --- Logistic Regression Model --- p.11 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Testing Linear Hypotheses about the Regression Coefficients --- p.12 / Chapter 2.4 --- Combining Proportions --- p.16 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- Classical Estimators --- p.17 / Chapter 2.4.2 --- Jackknife Estimator --- p.18 / Chapter 2.4.3 --- Cross-validatory estimators --- p.19 / Chapter 3 --- Random Effects Model --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2 --- DerSimonian and Laird Method --- p.22 / Chapter 3.3 --- Generalized linear model with random effect --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Quasi-Likelihood --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Testing Linear Hypotheses about the Regression Coefficients --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- MINQUE --- p.27 / Chapter 3.3.4 --- Score Test --- p.31 / Chapter 4 --- Overdispersion and Intraclass Correlation --- p.36 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2 --- C(α) Test --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Correlated Binomial model and Beta-Binomial model --- p.40 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- C(α) Statistic Based On Quasi-likclihood --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3 --- Donner Statistic --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4 --- Rao and Scott Statistic --- p.51 / Chapter 5 --- Example and Discussion --- p.53 / Bibliography --- p.57

This thesis argues that caffeine use offered a survival advantage to our ancestors and that moderate use continues to offer modern humans benefits. Caffeine ingestion, through the blocking of adenosine receptors, elicits broad elements of the mammalian threat response, specifically from the ‘flight or fight’ and ‘tend and befriend’ repertoires of behaviour: in effect, caffeine hijacks elements of the stress response. If the effects of caffeine had been discovered recently, rather than being available to Homo sapiens since Neolithic hunter gatherer times, it is likely that caffeine would be considered a ‘smart’ drug. More caffeine is being ingested today than ever previously recorded. Caffeine use is found across all age groups, all socio-economic strata, most ethnic groups, and is being used increasingly by the medical and pharmaceutical industries and by the armed forces. Yet despite this wide usage and a substantial body of research literature, there is at present no clear pattern or plausible model for the way caffeine achieves its effects. There is much contradiction in the literature and ambiguity as to why caffeine use should improve performance on some tasks, impair it on others and have no effect on other tasks, for some but not all of the time. The present work argues, through an examination of the specificity of caffeine’s operation, that these effects are not arbitrary but elicited by the nature of the tasks, in particular that caffeine ingestion affects those processes and behaviours which improve the probability of survival under perceived threat or stress. This is argued through the perspective of evolutionary psychology and relies theoretically on Polyvagal Theory. The argument generates testable hypotheses and empirical support for the thesis is garnered from nine experiments on card-sorting, verbal and numerical processing, local and global categorization, field dependence-independence, the Stroop task, tests of visuo-spatial ability, and from a correlational study of caffeine use and personality traits. It is concluded that moderate caffeine use in healthy adults promotes behaviours likely to be adaptive under perceived threat or stress. Limitations of both theory and empirical work and are discussed, together with potential practical applications and suggestions for further work.

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first one in childhood. Research on language attrition (language loss) questions the validity of this assumption and raises questions that will not only help in describing and explaining the nature of linguistic attrition, but also shed light on the mental (cognitive) representation of human language. The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the general program of research that investigates possible domains of first language attrition and its cause(s). More specifically, I endeavor to test the predictions and theoretical tenability of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci 2006) as applied to language attrition (e.g. Tsimpli et al 2004). The Interface Hypothesis claims that certain linguistic properties, namely those at external interfaces such as the syntax/discourse interface, are especially vulnerable to optionality in language acquisition (see Sorace and Serratrice 2009). For attrition, it predicts that, upon sufficient exposure, linguistic properties that are dependent on interfaces between the linguistic computational system and external domains of cognition (such as pragmatics and discourse structure) are more vulnerable to erosion than those that lie internally to the linguistic system (e.g. syntax/semantic interface) or those that are purely syntactic in nature. Within this framework, attrition is hypothesized to either be due to direct interference from the L2 or due to linguistic processing deficits that are a byproduct of being bilingual. The comprehensive nature of this case study, which tests the L1 grammar of an adult native speaker of Spanish after 25 years of uninterrupted naturalistic exposure to Brazilian Portuguese across the different property types, not only allows for an examination of possible domains of attrition (e.g. external interfaces, internal interfaces, syntax) but also allows for teasing apart of the cause of attrition by combining both untimed and timed methodologies. Although the main focus of this dissertation is to test the limits and explanatory value of the Interface Hypothesis, the data will also be examined in light of other theories such as Paradis' (2004) Activation Threshold Hypothesis and Jakobson's (1940) Regression Hypothesis to determine the extent to which various theories might best explain the data to be obtained.

In recent years, the entertainment industry has begun to announce the release dates of many of their movies years in advance. This leads one to believe that movie studios are not taking into account the quality of a movie when a studio decides its release date. This paper will be an analysis in whether there is a difference in seasonality between different qualities of movies. If a studio announces the release date before filming even begins, it is clear that they do not know, and therefore cannot properly consider, the quality of the movie when they make its release date public. I will use films that make over a million dollars at the box office from 2000-2016 to examine the seasonality of good, average, and bad movies. My models will control for variables that were found to be significant in previous research. These include budget, MPAA rating, genre, and Oscar nominations. I will prove that there is a difference in seasonality between all three of these qualities groups. This will show that the Hollywood is now dismissing a key component in the difficult decision process that is movie release dates.