Prior research has attempted to develop a model of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and counterproductive work behaviors (CWB), but limited testing remains a problem. The purpose of the current study is to examine OCB and CWB from a job stressor-strain approach. The sample consisted of 235 employees throughout the United States and their supervisors. Results of the study suggested OCB and CWB are affected by stressors (including interpersonal conflict, low interactional justice, job demands, and organizational constraints). Additionally, trait emotion and attributional styles affect the amount of stressors perceived. The implications as well as limitations of the study are discussed.

Contextual stress has been associated with poor school readiness skills during early childhood. This study evaluated mechanisms by which parent’s exposure to poverty-related contextual stressors influence the acquisition of school readiness skills from child age 2 to 4 among 167 parent-child dyads. Parent report of contextual stress and observational measures of parenting quality were collected during the children’s 2-year-old assessment. Teacher reports and children’s scores on school readiness tasks were collected during the 4-year-old assessment. Two approaches were used to understand the process by which contextual stressors influences school readiness; the accumulation of stressors approach and the constellations of stressors approach. Using the accumulation of stressors approach, each indicator of contextual stress was identified as a stressor or non-stressor and the number of categories in which families experienced a stressor were summed. Results from separate structural equation models (SEM) indicated that the accumulation of stressors did not influence school readiness skills by way of positive parenting. The constellation of stressors approach considered how clusters of stressors may differentially impact children’s school readiness. Results of the Latent Class Analysis (LCA) revealed the presence of two risk profile groups that differed qualitatively, indicating that not all stressors are equal; the “low-stressor” group and the “multi-stressor” group. The multi-stressor group represented thirty-three percent of families (n= 55). When considering the influence of the multi-stressor group probability to each of the school readiness indicators, none of the path coefficients were statistically significant. Implications for research and intervention are discussed.

Thesis advisor: Gorica D. Petrovich / Learned associations are formed when cues from the environment are paired with biologically important events and can later drive appetitive and aversive behaviors. These behaviors can persist and reappear after extinction because the original learned associations continue to exist. In particular, cues previously associated with food can later stimulate appetite and food consumption in the absence of hunger. Renewal, or reinstatement, of extinguished conditioned behaviors may help explain the mechanisms underlying persistent responding to food cues and difficulty associated with changing unhealthy eating habits. The aim of this dissertation was to determine key components in the neural circuitry mediating renewal of responding to food cues. The main focus was on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; includes the infralimbic (ILA) and prelimbic (PL) areas) because that region was selectively recruited during context-dependent renewal (Chapter 3). In all of the experiments, the behavior and neural substrates of male and female rats were compared. It was important to examine both males and females because sex differences in context-mediated renewal were recently established: males consistently show renewal responding while females fail to do so (Chapters 2 and 3). The first study in this dissertation examined whether behavioral sex differences were driven by estradiol (Chapter 2) and whether the vmPFC is recruited during renewal responding (Fos induction; Chapter 3). Then, to establish the vmPFC is causal in driving the behavioral responding during renewal in a sex-specific way (Chapter 4), the vmPFC was silenced in males and stimulated it in females. This was accomplished using a chemogenetic methodology, DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs). Inhibiting the vmPFC in males blocks renewal responding. Reversely, stimulating the vmPFC in females resulted in renewal of responding. To determine key components of the vmPFC circuitry mediating renewal and whether these were different in males and females the experiments in Chapter 5 examined activation of PL inputs using a retrograde tract tracing combined with Fos detection design. The pathways to the PL from the ventral hippocampal formation (subiculum and CA1), the thalamus (anterior paraventricular nucleus), and the amygdala (anterior basolateral nucleus) were recruited in males and not recruited in females. This lack of recruitment could explain the lack of behavioral responding during renewal for females. Taken together, there are distinct and sex-specific circuitries recruited during context-mediated renewal. The findings from these experiments advanced our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sex differences in associative memory and contextual processing. They are also important for our understanding of the resilience of food cue to influence our consumption and diet choices. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

<p>The internet advertising market is growing much faster than any other advertising vertical. The technology for serving advertising online goes more and more towards automated processes that analyze the page content and the user’s preferences and then matches the ads with these parameters.</p><p>The task at hand was to research and find methods that could be suitable for matching web documents to ads automatically, build a prototype system, make an evaluation and suggest areas for further development. The goals of the system was high throughput, accurate ad matching and fast response times. A requirement on the system was that human input could only be done when adding ads into the system for the system to be scalable.</p><p>The prototype system is based on the vector space model and a td-idf weighting scheme. The cosines coefficient was used in the system to quantify the similarity between a web document and an ad.</p><p>A technique called stemming was also implemented in the system together with a clustering solution that aided the ad matching in cases where few matches could be done on the keywords attached to the ads. The system was built with a threaded structure to improve throughput and scalability.</p><p>The tests results show that you accurately can match ads to a website’s content using the vector space model and the cosines-coefficient. The tests also show that the stemming has a positive effect on the ad matching accuracy.</p>

<p>Designing touch screen devices includes many variables off how to address design issues in the best possible way. The design includes what type of touch interaction method is to be used, how the interface is to be designed and in which context it will be used. The problematic issue that has to be dealt with is how the designer must put together all these parameters into one final product. This paper presents the case of re-designing a touch screen bedside monitor, a device used in hospitals to observe the vital signs of patients. The design solution presented deals with the issues of how the device was designed to suit the users and environment of a hospital. A contextual inquiry showed the many constraints and standards that had to be met and how they shaped the design solution. Earlier work shows the different methods for touch interaction, interface design and feedback that can be applied for touch screen devices. The resulting design is discussed in relation to the different ways of creating touch screen interfaces, and an example of a work method is presented in the end of the paper on how to design for contextual touch screen devises.</p>

There are multiple sorts of reasoning by analogy between two domains; the one with which we are concerned is a type of contextual analogy. The purpose of this paper is to see whether two domains that look analogous would be analogous in all aspects and contexts. To perform this, we analyse the domain according to different particularities. For each particularity or context we continue the analysis and search for another one within the same domain. In this way we create a kind of structure for the different domains. This sort of analysis is represented by frames and frames which are nested within each other. This paper describes this concept and an implemented system "MULTI_ANALOG", a limited example of knowledge-acquisition, problem solving, and automatic-acquisition based on this particular form of analogy namely structural analogy.

Aspect splits can affect agreement, Case, and even preposition insertion. This paper discusses the functional ‘why’ and the theoretical ‘how’ of aspect splits. Aspect splits are an economical way to mark aspect by preserving or suppressing some independent element in one aspect. In formal terms, they are produced in the same way as coda conditions in phonology, with positional/contextual faithfulness.This approach captures the additive effects of cross-cutting splits. Aspect splits are analyzed here from Hindi, Nepali, Yucatec Maya, Chontal, and Palauan.

Designing touch screen devices includes many variables off how to address design issues in the best possible way. The design includes what type of touch interaction method is to be used, how the interface is to be designed and in which context it will be used. The problematic issue that has to be dealt with is how the designer must put together all these parameters into one final product. This paper presents the case of re-designing a touch screen bedside monitor, a device used in hospitals to observe the vital signs of patients. The design solution presented deals with the issues of how the device was designed to suit the users and environment of a hospital. A contextual inquiry showed the many constraints and standards that had to be met and how they shaped the design solution. Earlier work shows the different methods for touch interaction, interface design and feedback that can be applied for touch screen devices. The resulting design is discussed in relation to the different ways of creating touch screen interfaces, and an example of a work method is presented in the end of the paper on how to design for contextual touch screen devises.

This investigation explored the contextual factors affecting young consumers’ attitudes and their intentions of green purchase behavior in the area of consumer behavior. This study seeks to understand young consumers’ green purchase intentions based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). At the same time, this study also intends to detect variables that influence young consumers’ intentions of buying green products.  In this thesis, a quantitative approach was adopted. Using a sample of 282 young people, a survey was developed and conducted in Umeå University, Sweden. Results indicate that parental influence is the top predictor among all the variables we studied. From the correlation analyses; we can see that top three predictors are important for understanding purchase intentions of young consumers.  Influence of contextual and background factors –parents, peer, and environmental knowledge – clearly played an important role in influencing young consumers’ purchase intentions of buying green products. To the end, a proposed model is developed to understand green purchase intentions of young consumers. Implications for marketers are also discussed in this study.

This thesis is an exploratory study of the Kitchener John School Diversion Program. As a primarily community-based initiative, this program has been developed in response to a particular social problem, street prostitution. The primary focus of the program is to address the problem by targeting the clients of prostitutes. Using a contextual constructionist framework, eight qualitative, semi-structured interviews and three participant observation sessions were conducted to explore and understand how the John School works within the context of its objectives and mandate. Four research questions have been developed to achieve this and focus on (1) how program objectives are implemented within the operation of the diversion program, (2) how stakeholders problematize prostitution and its social actors, (3) what the social conditions and characteristics related to the social construction of prostitution are, as perceived by the social actors, and finally, (4) how the diversion program addresses the problem of prostitution. Through analysis of the data collected, key findings emerge that help to contextualize the diversion program within a broader understanding of its mandates and operations. Specifically, four objectives are identified as the primary goals of the school, being knowledge dissemination, accountability, diversion and change. There are notable discrepancies, however, in terms of how program staff interpret these objectives within the context of their program lectures and materials. Additionally, while strong themes and typifications emerge with respect to how prostitution and its social actors are problematized by the program staff, these themes and typifications have a tendency to conflict with one another when presented to the participants. For example, where prostitution is understood to be a social problem with a number of victims and perpetrators, the participants are frequently typified simultaneously as both victim and villain. In light of these discrepancies, however, it appears that the intended objectives and the actual operation of the diversion program both work towards the same, ultimate goal: change.