This study investigated the roles of negative affect and cardiovascular reactivity on the attributional responding of hostile males. College males were screened with the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Cook & Medley, 1954). High and low hostile males were assigned to an arousal inducing (serial subtraction by 7's) or a non-arousal inducing condition (serial subtraction by 1's). Cardiovascular reactivity and self-report of affect were measured to the serial subtraction task. After the task was completed, the participant listened to a vignette (provocative or neutral) which depicted an interpersonal situation. The participant answered questions about the scene to assess attributional responding. The arousal-inducing condition was associated with significantly greater changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate and a higher level of self-reported negative affect than the non-arousal inducing condition. More negative attributions were reported for provocative than neutral scenes. Males in the arousal inducing condition made more negative attributions to neutral scenes than males in the non-arousal condition. There was no significant effect of arousal condition on the negative attributions to provocative scenes. Hostility did not influence the relationship between arousal condition and self-reported affect or arousal condition and attributional responding. This study showed that inducing cardiovascular reactivity prior to a neutral encounter with a partner can affect the males' perception of the potentially neutral encounter. / Master of Science

This research posed the question "How does racism in the gay community and homophobia in the Black community restrict gay Black male's life chances and life opportunities?" Previous research has uncovered racist attitudes within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community as well as homophobic attitudes within the Black community. Because of conflicting social identifiers (Is it possible for one to be both homosexual and Black?) and the invisibility of a gay Black voice, it is imperative to deconstruct the relationship between gay Black men and the communities they are a part of. I utilized qualitative in-depth interviewing techniques interviewing 15 Black men aged 18 and older who identified themselves as homosexual. The questions revolved around three primary questions designed to center the researcherâ ¦How do gay Black men describe their lives, How do gay Black men describe what their lives ought to be, and What obstacles do gay Black men see effecting their opportunity to live the lives they feel they ought to be living. The gay Black male research participants disclosed that because of Black stereotypes, gay stereotypes, acceptance with stipulations in the gay community and the black community, racism in the gay community, homophobia in the Black community, and perceptions of blackness and masculinity's affect on gay Black menâ ¦gay Black men live their lives with various restrictions. In other words, gay Black men do not appear to be living their lives the way they feel they ought to be living it. This work is important because a majority of the participants stated they wished to live restriction free lives. They are not able to fully be themselves in their daily lives and often have to assimilate to be accepted. / Master of Science

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is the major cause of enterically transmitted non-A, non-B hepatitis in many developing countries, and is also endemic in many industrialized countries. Due to the lack of an effective cell culture system and a practical animal model, the mechanisms of HEV pathogenesis and replication are poorly understood. It has been speculated that HEV replicates in sites other than the liver. Since HEV is presumably fecal-orally transmitted it is unclear how the virus reaches the liver and extrahepatic replication could be a possible explanation. The recent identification of swine HEV from pigs affords us an opportunity to systematically study HEV replication in a swine model. We experimentally infected specific-pathogen-free (SPF) pigs with two strains of HEV: swine HEV and the US-2 strain of human HEV. Eighteen pigs (group 1) were each inoculated intravenously with swine HEV, nineteen pigs (group 2) with the US-2 strain of human HEV, and seventeen pigs (group 3) as uninoculated controls. To identify the potential extrahepatic sites of HEV replication using the swine model, two pigs from each group were necropsied at 3, 7, 14, 20, 27, and 55 days post inoculation (DPI). Thirteen different types of tissues and organs were collected from each necropsied animal. Reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) was used to detect the presence of positive strand HEV RNA in each tissue collected during necropsy at different DPIs. A negative strand-specific RT-PCR was standardized and used to detect the replicative, negative-strand of HEV RNA from tissues that tested positive for the positive strand RNA. As expected, positive strand HEV RNA was detected in almost every type of tissue at some time point during viremic period between 3 and 27 DPI. Positive-strand HEV RNA was still detectable in some tissues in the absence of serum HEV RNA from both swine and human HEV inoculated pigs. However, replicative, negative strand of HEV RNA was detected primarily in the small intestine, lymph nodes, colon, and liver. Our results demonstrate for the first time that HEV replicates in tissues other than the liver and that the gastrointestinal tract is also the target of virus infection. The data from this study may have important implications for HEV pathogenesis, xenotransplantation, and the development of an in vitro cell culture system for HEV. / Master of Science

Epidemiological studies indicate that between 8 and 20% of children suffer from an anxiety disorder (Costello, Egger, & Angold, 2004). Researchers have worked for many years to map the developmental trajectory of anxiety in children, yet the pathways remain unclear. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between specific predictors and anxiety in middle school Caucasian and African American adolescents. A secondary purpose was to explore whether acculturation contributes to the prediction of anxiety, after controlling for exposure to negative life events, in the African American adolescents. For the total sample, results indicated that negative life events, social support, coping, and ethnicity were all significant predictors of anxiety, accounting for 18.9% of the variance in anxiety scores. These relationships were confirmed in separate analyses for the African American and Caucasian youth. Furthermore, acculturation moderated the relationship between negative life events and anxiety in the African American sample, as anticipated. More specifically, the relationship between negative life events and anxiety was stronger for those adolescents reporting more affiliation with their own culture. These findings suggest that culture is an important context in understanding the development of anxiety and that it requires additional exploration to understand its relations to the development of mental health problems more broadly. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study is to determine some probable effects of certain procedures in overcoming negative attitudes toward school music and to show the possibilities of locating and eliminating some of the factors associated with children's difficulties in music.

Yes / In this paper we draw upon the close relationship between statistical physics and mathematical finance to develop a suite of models for financial bubbles and crashes. The derived models allow for a probabilistic and statistical formulation of econophysics models closely linked to mainstream financial models. Applications include monitoring the stability of financial systems and the subsequent policy implications. We emphasise the timeliness of our contribution with an application to the two largest cryptocurrency markets: Bitcoin and Ripple. Results shed new light on emerging debates over the nature of cryptocurrency markets and competition between rival digital currencies.

The microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum lies between the infrared radiation and radio frequency region and corresponds to wavelengths of 1 cm to 1 m (frequencies of 30 GHz to 300 MHz respectively). Gaisford and Walters developed the microwave GC oven in 2000, which operated at 919 MHz. The microwave GC oven has been engineered to generate a uniform microwave field around an open tubular capillary column with elimination of cold spots which are common in a domestic microwave oven. Only the column is heated in a microwave GC oven. In microwave GC, ramp rates in excess of 6 degree/sec, isotherms as high as 450 degree, and 1 min cool-down times from 300 to 50 degree can be achieved. In conventional GC, only positive temperature programming is used because the oven cools down slowly due to the great thermal mass of the oven. Short cool-down time in microwave-heating GC makes it possible to employ negative temperature programming for the separation of compounds during the process. The theory and feasibility of negative temperature programming in microwave GC were investigated in this research. Negative temperature programming was employed to analyze and quantitate four different critical pairs of non-volatile and volatile compounds. The influence of cooling rate, holding time, and reheating rate in negative temperature programs for enhanced resolution were investigated. The results obtained from negative temperature programming were compared to those from positive temperature programming. Negative temperature programming afforded greater resolution of critical pairs of analytes. / Master of Science

Metamaterials are artificial materials and named by those who work in the microwave material area. According to existing documentation, the metamaterials have relative permittivity and/or relative permeability of values less than 1, including negative values. If the material has negative permittivity and permeability at the same time, the material is also referred to as simultaneously negative medium (DNG medium). Such medium has several features that any natural medium is not equipped with: negative refraction, backward phase, and evanescent wave amplification [5]. Though the medium does not exist in nature, it seems that it can be artificially made through synthesizing metallic insertions inside the natural dielectrics [2]. Due to its unique feature of negative refraction and this feature is not equipped with any reported natural medium, the concept of making perfect lenses with metamaterials has attracted attentions in recent years. However a number of questions need to be answered: How can we quantize the refractive index of the metamaterial given that the permittivity and permeability are known or vice versa; can the metamaterial be made isotropic medium under effects of different incident angles? The answer to the first question will help us to define the dimension of the lenses more efficiently; and the answer to the latter question will help determine if such medium is capable of being used to make lenses. Previous publications from others demonstrated the negative refraction phenomenon of metamaterials though this phenomenon is restricted to a very narrow band [4] [11]. The derivation of the negative refractive index through full-wave simulation and comparison with its value through calculating the simulated negative permittivity and permeability obtained from the simulated scattering matrix have not been reported. The work carried in this thesis fully explored the ways to address this and answer those questions mentioned in previous paragraph. To fully understand the negative refraction effect of metamaterial, the author built a mathematical geometric model to calculate refractive index for rectangular metamaterial slab. With this approach, the refractive index can be obtained provided that incident and peak-receive angle are known. In order to achieve a metamaterial with isotropy property, the author also presented three different types of metamaterial slabs: parallel-arranged, vertical-arranged and cross-arranged slab of capacitive-loaded-loops (CLL) in front of standing probes or posts, which are also called CLL-P slabs. The three arrangements are differentiated by the way unit cell is oriented. With the geometric model, the author obtained refractive indexes for three metamaterial slabs at different incident angles through numerical simulation. The refractive indexes have negative values at all circumstance, which shows the negative refraction phenomena unique to the metamaterial. Unlike the other two CLL-P slabs, the cross-arranged CLL-P slab has near constant refractive index and constant received amplitude regardless of incident angles. This result can be attributed to the symmetrical topology of unit cell in x-y plane. To better explain refractive effects occurred for those three CLL-P slabs, the author also employed a way to calculate the effective permittivity and permeability using scattering matrix. Based on effective permittivity and permeability obtained, the analytical values of refractive indexes have been calculated at resonance point. To check the refractive indexes calculated from two different methods: using Snell's Law based geometric approach and using permittivity/permeability obtained from scattering matrix, two results are compared against each other and agree well. Knowing effective permittivity and permeability is very useful for calculating other parameters of the CLL-P slab such as wave impedance and mismatch loss etc. With all the simulation for parallel-arranged, vertical-arranged, and cross-arranged CLL-P slabs, from simulation results, it is found that the cross-arranged slab has the property of isotropy at different incident angles since the coupling between incident magnetic field and CLL loop will maintain constant. As a validation process, the CLL-P simulation result in parallel waveguide is compared with prior simulation (HFSS) and measurements of refractive focusing of the same structure, and both simulation results agree with measurements. The full-wave simulation tools FEKO that employs the Method of Moments (MoM) is used in the two ways of estimating the negative refractive index of the medium. / Master of Science

Playing Jonah's Hand: Poems is a collection of poems with a critical introduction. The introduction consists of two independent essays, both of which examine intersections between poetry and Christian theology. In the first essay I identify the imaginative faculty as the primary source of agency for the speaker in John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." Working upon Barbara Lewalski's assertion that these sonnets represent "the Protestant paradigm of salvation in its stark, dramatic, Pauline terms," I consider the role of the imagination in the spiritual transformation represented within the sequence. Donne foregrounds a Calvinistic theology that posits both humanity's total depravity and God's grace and mercy as the only avenue of transcendence. Whatever agency the speaker exhibits is generated by the exercise of his imagination, which leads him to a recognition of his sinfulness and the necessity of God's grace. In the second essay I investigate the presence of a negative theology within "Lachrimae, or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans," a sonnet sequence by Geoffrey Hill. In this sequence, Hill demonstrates the possibilities that surface through an integration of negative theology with postmodern theories of language, both of which have been influenced by the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger. The two inform and transform each other while producing a tension that is productive ground for poetry. The main body of the manuscript includes a collection of poems built upon thematic parallels with the Biblical account of Jonah, acknowledging the character's continued frustration with God in Chapter Four of Jonah, which is commonly forgotten in popular and religious representations of the story. The four sections in the manuscript include poems that struggle to negotiate the tensions between the will of a compelling God and the will of the individual.

Do global financial institutions and the governments of developed nations owe anything to the global poor? I argue that they do. In my view, the global poor are owed a form of assistance because of the unjust harms imposed upon them. The negative rights of the global poor, which are the rights involving freedom from unjust interference, are consistently violated by the global economic order (GEO). I demonstrate that the causal chain that connects global poverty directly with the policies of institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization reveals that the negative rights of the global poor are being violated. These violations occur through the effects of trade policies, unjustified sovereignty, and loan conditions, which serve to trap the poor in inescapable cycles of poverty. I argue that rather than relying on controversial accounts of the positive rights of the poor, and the appeals to charity that follow from them, we can ground the obligation to alleviate global poverty in negative rights, which are more minimal and widely accepted. My argument establishes that poverty poses a problem even if one does not see inequality as a problem in itself. I argue in support of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to poverty, which discusses the effects of poverty as a deprivation of a person’s abilities to do and be what she has reason to value. This approach identifies what is really at the heart of the problem with poverty: a deprivation of the ability to act in ways that allow the expression of basic freedoms, rather than merely a lack of resources or income. The negative rights approach to grounding an obligation to alleviate global poverty has traditionally been based on a conception of wrongdoing as a deprivation of basic needs. However, I contend that wrongdoing should be seen as a deprivation of fundamental capabilities instead. Using capability deprivations as a baseline for wrongdoing presents us with the theoretical resources required to create a foundation for an ecumenical theory of global justice, and the framework within which to demonstrate that the GEO has an obligation to help alleviate global poverty. / 2020-11-27T00:00:00Z