According to prospect-refuge theory, humans prefer to be in spaces that afford protection from threat (refuge), but also provide large fields of view (prospect). These preferences are said to arise from the adaptive advantages of such locations with respect to both avoidance of predation from refuge and survey of opportunities for resource collection by prospect. Prospect-refuge theory in the past has traditionally only been applied to human beings, but many of the same contingencies governing spatial preference ought to also hold true in other animals. If people's spatial preferences are influenced by prospect-refuge considerations, then such preferences ought to be found in other animals that are subject to the same pressures to find safety and resources. The overall objective of this study was to explore spatial preferences of the Mongolian gerbil in situations in which prospect-refuge theory makes specific predictions about which regions of an environment will be preferred. Gerbils were placed in an arena containing three dome shaped refuges that varied in the amount of prospect and refuge. A predator was released during the trial to examine how contextual factors may influence the degree of prospect and refuge preferred. There was a preference for an enclosed refuge at stimulus onset even though this was not reflective of what happened prior to stimulus onset, which suggests there was a shift in preferring refuges with greater concealment upon exposure to a threatening stimulus. These results indicate that shelter preference does in fact depend on contextual factors. An explicit comparison of these preferences in widely divergent species may help to place theories of spatial preference on a firmer biological footing, and may provide a greater understanding of how the principles of spatial cognition might underpin parts of the design process.

There are many studies have been devoted to solve the all-atom protein back- bone reconstruction problem (PBRP), such as Adcock¡¦s method, MaxSprout, SAB- BAC and Chang¡¦s method. In the previous work, Wang et al. tried to solve this problem by homology modeling. Then, Chang et al. improved Wang¡¦s result by refining the positions of oxygen based on the AMBER force field. We compare the results in CASP7 and 8 from Chang et al. and SABBAC v1.2 and find that some proteins get better predicting results by Chang¡¦s method and others do better in SABBAC. Based on SVM, we propose a tool preference classification method for determining which tool is potentially the better one for predicting the structure of a target protein. We design a series of steps to select the better feature sets for SVM. Our method is tested on the proteins with standard amino acids in CASP7 and 8 dataset, which contains 30 and 24 protein sequences, respectively. The experimen- tal results show that our method has 7.39% and 2.94% RMSD improvement against Chang¡¦s result in CASP7 and 8, respectively. Our method can also be applied to other effective prediction methods, even if they will be developed in the future.

Swordtail fishes of the genus Xiphophorus have been studied as a model of sexual selection for many years. Many single-trait manipulation studies have been performed, determining female preferences for individual male traits. I characterized how five traits (standard body length, body depth, dorsal fin width, sword length and vertical bar number) correlate to one another within natural variation of populations of X. birchmanni, X. malinche and three hybrid populations and created synthetic 3- dimensional animations exhibiting these traits within ranges of natural variation. I then performed choice tests on females of the above populations using a computer system that automatically played these stimulus videos and simultaneously tracked a female’s position within a test tank to determine female preference for different male phenotypes. Only X. birchmanni females showed significant preferences. Their preferences were in line with past research of univariate trait manipulation experiments. They showed significant preference for larger bodies and dorsal fins and smaller or no swords. They also showed a non-significant preference for vertical bar numbers. My results also confirmed univariate studies in which X. malinche females showed reduced preference for conspecific males and being rather indifferent to the presence of swords. Hybrid females were also shown to have reduced preferences for any specific trait, suggesting that they express recombinant preferences, which can also be explained by reduced color vision at low levels of light.

The goal of this dissertation is to contribute in three ways to the literature on son preference and fertility through a comparative perspective. First, I examine the impact of son preference on fertility in China and South Korea compared with the United States. The impact that a female birth has on the likelihood of a woman having another birth is of the most concern: Women who have one or two daughter(s) as previous child(ren) are expected to be more likely to experience the hazard of having a second or a third birth. Second, my dissertation attempts to examine the effects of women’s status on son preference if women’s education reduces son preference. Third, my dissertation examines son preference and fertility in the U.S. Even though the U.S. has never shown son preference regarding sex ratios at birth, recent research has shown this association to exist among poor Hispanics. My dissertation used data from a national sample, 2002 National Survey of Family Growth. The results showed that women in China and South Korea who had a daughter instead of a son as their first child had a higher hazard of having a second birth as expected. Moreover, the results showed that the hazard ratio of having a third birth for Chinese and South Korean women was almost four and five times more, respectively. As expected, the hazard ratios for the U.S. were not significant and thus did not support the hypothesis. And the more educated women who had a daughter(s) instead of a son(s) as their previous child(ren) were less likely to have a second birth, but not in the third birth. This means women’s education apparently does not reduce son preference in the case of the third birth. Thus, women’s education apparently has limited or no influence on the childbearing decision where son preference is strong. Third, Hispanic women with low socioeconomic status did not have a significant hazard ratio of having a higher order birth. Accordingly, the dissertation does not find any statistical evidence of American son preference at the national level.

Lifestyle, the external demonstration of personal values and preferences, has great influences on individual behavior. In terms of occupational choice, individuals would choose jobs that best fit with their lifestyles according to the values and preferences. The consistency of individual lifestyle and work-style created from the work environments will affect their job satisfaction and willingness to remain in the organizations. This study explores lifestyles of four coffee shop workers and three pub workers, and the results show that those two types of jobs create distinctive lifestyles, which would be caused by the personal characteristics and the different working hours. Based on the results, lifestyles could be used as the indicator of recruitment for employers of coffee shops and pubs, and criteria of occupational choice for individuals who are interested in working in coffee shops or pubs.

Saving is viewed as deferred consumption and studied within the framework of intertemporal choice. The literature, drawn from psychology, economics and economic psychology, suggests that whilst there have been many theoretical references to the relationship between individual differences associated with intertemporal decision-making and saving, and these individual difference variables have been studied in relation to other behaviour, there is a lack of empirical research investigating their relationship with saving. The particular variables of interest are delay of gratification, time preference (impatience), self control, impulsiveness and consideration of future consequences. This thesis presents a series of empirical studies which used carefully constructed or selected measures to investigate the relationship between individual differences associated with intertemporal decision-making and saving. A variety of methods were used. The first two studies measured delay of gratification using a behavioural choice paradigm and investigated its relationship with saving. The next three studies measured a construct known as the consideration of future consequences and examined its relationship with saving. In-depth interviews, focusing on impulsiveness and impatience provided a more realistic investigation of the personality structure of delay, and aided the development of quantitative measures of impulsiveness. Secondary analysis of Dutch panel data enabled the hypotheses to be tested with a larger dataset and shifts in assets as a measure of saving. The group of studies culminated in a postal survey of married couple households, allowing a multivariate investigation of all the individual difference constructs which had been developed and investigated. This final study also addressed issues such as the relative influence of psychological data from both spouses in a decision-making unit. The results are discussed throughout the thesis in the light of their implications for psychology, economics, policy-making and marketing, as well as for economic psychology. The main contributions are some new measures of theoretically relevant individual difference constructs, which will require further testing in order to prove their worth

Stuttering has been defined as an atypical disruption in the forward flow of speech (Conture, 2001). The onset of stuttering is reported to be 2 to 3 years of age; the age at which the child is first learning to communicate more frequently with words rather than nonverbal behaviors. Interestingly, this is also the time at which children seek interactions with others rather than the former tendency to play independently. Because of the overt nature of this disorder, the timing of the onset and its co-occurrence with significant social developmental shifts, stuttering has the potential to impact the child’s ability to make and maintain friendships. The purpose of this report is to investigate the impact of stuttering awareness on the friendship preferences of preschool children who stutter. / text

People prefer symmetric over asymmetric patterns (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). According to the fluency attribution perspective, this preference reflects differences in processing speed where increased processing efficiency leads to increased pattern preference. To test the account, in Experiment 1, participants’ speed of response to a pattern predicted the relationship between pattern symmetry and pattern preference. Experiment 2 expanded this account and found that a second measure of processing efficiency, recognition accuracy for patterns, predicted the relationship between pattern symmetry and pattern preference. Experiment 3 tested the attribution account of the fluency attribution hypothesis. Participants made a judgment of pattern mood rather than pattern preference. Despite a change of judgment task to an unintuitive judgment of pattern mood, participants attributed increased processing efficiency for patterns to increased pattern happiness. The three experiments provide an integration of the information processing and fluency attribution perspectives to account for symmetry preference judgments.

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People prefer symmetric over asymmetric patterns (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). According to the fluency attribution perspective, this preference reflects differences in processing speed where increased processing efficiency leads to increased pattern preference. To test the account, in Experiment 1, participants’ speed of response to a pattern predicted the relationship between pattern symmetry and pattern preference. Experiment 2 expanded this account and found that a second measure of processing efficiency, recognition accuracy for patterns, predicted the relationship between pattern symmetry and pattern preference. Experiment 3 tested the attribution account of the fluency attribution hypothesis. Participants made a judgment of pattern mood rather than pattern preference. Despite a change of judgment task to an unintuitive judgment of pattern mood, participants attributed increased processing efficiency for patterns to increased pattern happiness. The three experiments provide an integration of the information processing and fluency attribution perspectives to account for symmetry preference judgments.