Significant research in cultural psychology has underlined differences in Eastern and Western cultures. While differences in many cognitive domains have been examined, there is a gap in cross cultural research on information processing and integration. This research explores the effect of independent or interdependent thinking on how a subject processes information. It is hypothesized that subjects with an interdependent mindset will process information holistically and subjects in an independent context will process information individually, or with an attribute based approach. A preliminary study tested the averaging and additive effects of information processing and served as the foundation for two subsequent explorations. The first examined cultural differences in information processing through presenting subjects of different cultural backgrounds with presenter and evaluator situations. In the second study, individualistic and collectivist priming methodology was used to prompt subjects' ability to process information individually or holistically. Established measures of religiosity and connectedness were examined as possible moderators of the relationship between self-construal and information integration. Results show that differences between subjects primed in the interdependent condition were moderated by religiosity. Possible explanations for this effect are discussed. / Master of Science

To identify potential determinants of emotion socialization (ES) in the socio-cultural context, the current study examined a moderated mediation model whereby parents’ independent and interdependent self-construals were proposed to moderate associations of parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions with parents’ ES, which in turn relate to children’s social competence. Seventy-five Chinese parents (65 mothers, 10 fathers) with children in middle childhood (43 girls, 32 boys; Mage=9.18, SD=1.26) completed translated Chinese versions of the Parents’ Beliefs about Children’s Emotions Questionnaire, the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale, the Parental Reactions to Children’s Positive Emotions Scale, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, the Self-Construal Scale, and a demographic questionnaire. Measurements were modified to include ego-focused and other-focused positive and negative emotions (i.e., pride, warmth, anger, and shame/guilt). Bivariate correlations, hierarchical multiple regressions, and exploratory analyses using the PROCESS macro were conducted. Parents endorsed both independent and interdependent self-construals, and on average reported significantly higher interdependent than independent self-construals. Chinese parents’ endorsement of independent self-construal may make their beliefs about ego-focused emotions more salient, thereby inducing ES responses aligned with their beliefs. Parents’ interdependent self-construal was related to their ES to other-focused emotions. Chinese parents’ nonsupportive reactions to children’s anger and pride were related to children’s social competence, which suggests that the inhibition of emotions may have some adaptive functions in Chinese society. Overall, findings contributed to the understanding of parental ES in Chinese families and emphasized the role of parents’ self-construal as an individual-level indicator of cultural values in the ES process. / M.S. / Centered around the process through which parents socialize children’s social and emotional competence (emotion socialization, ES), the current study examined how parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions associated with their ES reactions, how their beliefs together with their perceptions of self (self-construal) related to their ES reactions, and how their ES reactions associated with their children’s behaviors in a Chinese sample. Seventy-five Chinese parents (65 mothers, 10 fathers) with children from 7- to 11-year-old (43 girls, 32 boys) completed Chinese versions of questionnaires about their beliefs about children’s emotions, their ES reactions, their self-construal, their perceptions of children’s behaviors, and some demographic information. The associations aforementioned were tested. Chinese parents perceived themselves as both unique entities (independent self-construal) and connected with others (interdependent self-construal), with a higher level of interdependent self-construal. Parents’ endorsement of independent self-construal may spotlight their beliefs about children’s pride and anger, which in turn induce more ES reactions that are consistent with their beliefs. Parents’ interdependent self-construal was related to their ES reactions to children’s feelings of love and shame/guilt. Parents’ nonsupportive reactions to children’s anger and pride were related to children’s higher competence, which suggests that Chinese society may endorse the inhibition of emotions. Overall, findings contributed to the understanding of cross-cultural differences of parental ES between American and Chinese families and the impact of their perceptions of self on their ES reactions.

We find ourselves, as interpreters and listeners, living, discerning, prioritizing, asking, and answering questions in and through particular communal and theological traditions. As the discerning and prioritizing process is inevitable, we suggest to move the question about prioritizing from the context of ‘privileged access or interpretation' to the context of the ‘preferences' of the believing communities. We imply by this ‘relocation' the interdependent relationships between believing communities and their beliefs and practices. We propose, following Maturana's epistemology, three steps to argue about the dynamic and interdependent relationships among believers, communities, and their beliefs and practices. We affirm, first, that whenever we engage in the discerning process we have before us two paths of explanations. These two paths place the believers in a central place in their task for deciding for one of the options. The recognition about the interpreters' active participation suggests the crucial role of the believers and their preferences. The crucial point in the process of discerning and deciding for one of the paths is the type of believing communities that we would like to promote and conserve. We suggest, second, that the proposal of answers and the acceptation of those answers as explanations imply the active participation of both interpreters and listeners. We propose the interdependence relationships between our existence in particular believing communities and those questions and answers that we prioritize, ignore, and conserve. We claim, third, that in language or in and through our dialogical spaces we distinguish and coordinate the many and possible dimensions of our existence and relationships. As believers, in and through the contexts of our believing communities we discern, prioritize, and conserve the accents of our beliefs and practices. We stress the crucial role of the preferences as the believing communities prioritize and conserve the ‘nature' and ‘course' of their particular communities.

Urban service networks have come under increased pressure due to expansion of urban population, decrease of capital investment, growing interdependence, and man-made and natural hazards. This thesis introduces a simulation-based methodology for the estimation of the fragility of urban networks subjected to earthquake perturbation. The proposed Interdependent Fragility Assessment (IFA) algorithm abstracts the steps required for perturbation-induced damage propagation within and between networks through internal and interdependent links, respectively. Damage propagation uncertainty is accounted by considering conditional probabilities of failure for components and interdependent strengths measuring the likelihood of intersystemic failure propagation. The IFA algorithm is used in four applications. The first application subjected two simplified models of real interdependent urban power and water networks to selected seismic scenarios. Test results showed that interdependence presence worsens systemic fragility, but that the features of interdependence effects were jointly influenced by local fragility properties and interdependence strengths. A second application examined the role of cascading failures caused by component overloading in systemic fragility. The results showed that cascading failures worsen interdependence fragility, and that mitigation actions improving local component capacity have limited effect on controlling interdependent-induced fragility. Two additional conceptual mitigation measures, component fragility reduction ( CFR ) and interdependence redundancy enhancement ( IRE ), were explored. CFR , decreases component seismic fragilities while IRE adds interdependence links to dependent nodes. Test results showed that CFR outperforms IRE ; however, their combination achieved comparable fragility reductions. This outcome highlights the potential of synergistic mitigation policies in controlling interdependent systemic fragility. Finally, the IFA methodology was adapted to use a probabilistic seismic description for the estimation of unconditional systemic fragilities. The hazard description was obtained following an existing approach that uses importance sampling for the generation of intensity maps. The value of the hybrid methodology rests on its capacity to generate unconditional fragility estimates for direct use in risk assessment. Topics for future work include the development of more sophisticated models of cascading failure, the analysis of optimal mitigation actions using mitigation cost-structures and life-cycle costs, the extension of the IFA methodology for perturbation such as hurricanes and flooding, and interdependent fragility studies of theoretical network models.

Abstract The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate and compare the effects of coworkers¡¦ relational demographic similarities and guanxi base on coworkers¡¦ helping behavior. Moreover, the mediation mechanisms of social liking between coworkers¡¦ relational demographic similarities and helping behavior, and guanxi obligation between coworkers¡¦ guanxi base and helping behavior were examined. Furthermore, the moderation effect of interdependent self on the relationship between relational demographic similarities and helping behavior, and the moderation effect of individual traditionality on the relationship between guanxi base and helping behavior were examined. There were three studies in this dissertation, and the data were collected by scenario experimental design combined with questionnaire survey. The subjects were working employees sampled from different industries. Results showed that both coworkers¡¦ relational demographic similarities and guanxi base have significant effects on the interpersonal-related helping behavior, but not on work-related helping behavior. Moreover, the mediation effects of social liking towards coworker, and guanxi obligation were significant in both study 1 and study 2. The moderation effect was not significant in study 1, but was significant in study 2. The individual traditionality moderated the relationship of guanxi base and guanxi obligation. The results of study 3 showed that coworkers with guanxi base have stronger effect on both interpersonal-related and work-related coworkers¡¦ helping behavior than coworkers with relational demographic similarities. The results were discussed and the limitations and suggestions for future research were proposed.

The influence of reading ability on cross-language transfer in Mandarin-speaking ninth graders was explored. Each participant's native language (L1-Mandarin Chinese) and second language (L2-English) were assessed. Although the relationship between L1 and L2 reading ability has been discussed in many previous studies, few studies have examined this relationship among L2 readers whose L1 is sharply different from their L2, who are at the junior-high-school age range, and who are learning English in a setting where English is not used in daily communication (e.g., English as a foreign language). To investigate the role of L1 reading competence in the language reading ability transfer, a reformed public examination, called the Basic Competency Test (BCT), was applied in this study. The 30,000 Taiwanese ninth grade participants, randomly selected from the pool of the national examination involved in a consecutive six-year period, were considered as a whole and then disaggregated into six groups based on the year they took the BCT. A preliminary analysis was about reliability coefficients of twelve examinations (six in Mandarin Chinese reading, and six in English reading) used in the present study. Scores from both Mandarin Chinese and English reading comprehension tests were subjected to descriptive, correlational, and regressional analyses. Both correlation and regression analyses revealed congruent results that provided support for the positive influence of Mandarin Chinese reading competence on English reading ability, that is, L2 reading ability is dependent on L1 reading competence. The finding supported the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis. In addition, participants' gender and school district also played statistically significant roles to affect the cross-language transfer of reading ability, whereas the length of time in English exposure had no statistically significant effect on the language reading ability transfer. Thus, cross-language transfer in reading ability was influenced by learners' L1 reading competence, gender, and school district. This suggested educational policy makers in Taiwan that boost native-Chinese speaking students' Mandarin knowledge help support the development of English reading ability. Apparently, if students' L1 reading abilities can be built up more soundly, their L2 reading ability should be easier to acquire.

abstract: What is the effect of decision-making-style (maximizer versus satisficer) and an interdependent-versus-independent self-construal on the subjective happiness of Native Americans? One hundred seventy-nine Native American adult community members were administered the Maximization Inventory, the Self-Construal Scale, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Correlations between variables in addition to multiple regression analyses were conducted with predictors of decision making style, self-construal, gender, annual income, traditionalism, and Native language ability with subjective happiness as the dependent variable. These variables explained a significant amount of the variance of subjective happiness for this sample of Native Americans. The most variance was explained by satisficing. Maximizing was associated with unhappiness. Individuals with greater satisficing tendencies also tended to be more interdependent. Higher income was positively associated with happiness and negatively associated with maximizing. Interdependence did not have an effect on happiness. However, independence increased happiness while having no effect on maximizing. No gender differences were found for maximizing. Traditionalism and Native language ability were not associated with satisficing nor interdependence. Limitations, implications for counseling, and future directions are explored. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Counseling Psychology 2015

abstract: Research on cultural socialization, the process in which individuals learn messages regarding the traditions and values of their culture (Hughes et al., 2006), has dedicated little attention to Latinx and Asian American groups. This study examined whether an interdependent self-construal (i.e., viewing oneself as connected to others and endorsing behaviors that depend on others; Singelis, 1994) was a mediator between cultural socialization and ethnic identity for these two groups. The current study utilized mediation analyses to explore the associations between cultural socialization via different agents (i.e., parents, teachers, romantic partners, peers), interdependent self-construal, and ethnic identity exploration and commitment for Latinx (N = 258, 68.6% female, Mage = 20.54) and Asian (N = 281, 66.5% female, Mage = 20.34) American college-attending emerging adults. Results revealed that for the Latinx sample, interdependent self-construal mediated the relation between cultural socialization and ethnic identity exploration or commitment in regards to parents and peers, but not teachers. In addition, interdependent self-construal mediated the association between cultural socialization from romantic partners and ethnic identity commitment, but not exploration. For the Asian American sample, interdependent self-construal mediated the association between cultural socialization and ethnic identity exploration or commitment in regards to romantic partners and peers, but not parents and teachers. These results highlight the important role of different cultural socialization agents in ethnic identity formation for these two groups and suggest that the endorsement of cultural values can be a mechanism through which ethnic identity is strengthened. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Counseling Psychology 2017

In this thesis, we address several generic problems concerned with procurement of tasks from a crowd that consists of strategic workers with uncertainty in their qualities. These problems assume importance as the quality of services in a service marketplace is known to degrade when there is (unchecked) information asymmetry pertaining to quality. Moreover, crowdsourcing is increasingly being used for a wide variety of tasks these days since it offers high levels of flexibility to workers as well as employers. We seek to address the issue of quality uncertainty in crowdsourcing through mechanism design and machine learning. As the interactions in web-based crowdsourcing platform are logged, the data captured could be used to learn unknown parameters such as qualities of individual crowd workers. Further, many of these platforms invite bids by crowd workers for available tasks but the strategic workers may not bid truthfully. This warrants the use of mechanism design to induce truthful bidding. There ensues a complex interplay between machine learning and mechanism design, leading to interesting technical challenges. We resolve some generic challenges in the context of the following problems. Design of a quality eliciting mechanism with interdependent values We consider an expert sourcing problem, where a planner seeks opinions from a pool of experts. Execution of the task at an assured quality level in a cost effective manner turns out to be a mechanism design problem when the individual qualities are private information of the experts. Also, the task execution problem involves interdependent values, where truthfulness and efficiency cannot be achieved in an unrestricted setting due to an impossibility result. We propose a novel mechanism that exploits the special structure of the problem and guarantees allocative efficiency, ex-post incentive compatibility and strict budget balance for the mechanism, and ex-post individual rationality for the experts. Design of an optimal dimensional crowdsourcing auction We study the problem faced by an auctioneer who gains stochastic rewards by procuring multiple units of a service from a pool of heterogeneous strategic workers. The reward obtained depends on the inherent quality of the worker; the worker’s quality is fixed but unknown. The costs and capacities are private information of the workers. The auctioneer is required to elicit costs and capacities (making the mechanism design dimensional) and further, has to learn the qualities of the workers as well, to enable utility maximization. To solve this problem, we design a dimensional multi-armed bandit auction that maximizes the expected utility of the auctioneer subject to incentive compatibility and individual rationality while simultaneously learning the unknown qualities of the agents. Design of a multi-parameter learning mechanism for crowdsourcing We investigate the problem of allocating divisible jobs, arriving online, to workers in a crowd-sourcing platform. Each job is split into a certain number of tasks that are then allocated to workers. These tasks have to meet several constraints that depend on the worker performance. The performance of each worker in turn is characterized by several intrinsic stochastic parameters. In particular, we study a problem where each arriving job has to be completed within a deadline and each task has to be completed, honouring a lower bound on quality. The job completion time and quality of each worker are stochastic with fixed but unknown means. We propose a learning mechanism to elicit the costs truthfully while simultaneously learning the stochastic parameters. Our proposed mechanism is dominant strategy incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational with asymptotically optimal regret performance.

Children who are physically inactive are more likely to suffer numerous health complications such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. The Good Behavior Game (GBG) has been identified as an effective method for decreasing inappropriate behaviors and increasing appropriate behaviors in a variety of settings; however, few studies have used the GBG to increase physical activity. Furthermore, no previous research has evaluated the effects of feedback while playing the GBG to increase physical activity. Some research suggests certain characteristics of feedback tend to produce consistent changes in behaviors such as providing feedback immediately and privately. The purpose of the current study was to extend previous research and evaluate whether the addition of feedback to the Step it UP! Game, a modified version of the GBG has an impact on children’s step counts. A reversal (ABCAB) design was used to examine the number of steps students took during baseline (A), the Step it UP! Game (B), and the Step it UP! Game with feedback (C). Sealed pedometers were distributed to 21 students from a fifth-grade general education classroom. The results of this study suggest that the Step it UP! Game with feedback did not enhance the number of steps taken during recess. Additionally, the Step it UP! Game (with and without feedback) did result in a slight increase in mean steps per min during recess initially but, these steps did not maintain overtime.