The purpose of this research was to explore any significant correlations between age, marital status, parental status, age at birth of first child, number of children in family, wait from marriage to first birth, job status, educational status, religious preference and attitude toward timing of parenthood. The sample consisted of 103 males in Blacksburg, Virginia. It was a heterogeneous sampling which included males at all social levels ranging in age from 18 to 71 years. Previous research had shown little conclusive data in this area. Using a scale of 10 Likert-type items coupled with a demographic sections, the research attempted to designate items showing an inclination for subjects to prefer early or late parenthood. The data were analyzed by the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient and the one-way analysis of variance. The most significant relationships occurred between attitude scores and age, marital, parental and job states, and wait from marriage to the birth of the first child. / M. S.

It is proposed to place a space station in a short period orbit about the L₄ triangular point in the earth moon system for the purpose of communication and possibly astronomical observations. Within limits of a linear analysis, an exhaustive and general approach to the dynamical problem is presented. The equations of motion for a finite sized body of arbitrary shape and internal mass distribution are derived. The phenomenon of resonance and stability are discussed. Stability boundaries for such a space station are established. Initial conditions and pointing errors are analyzed. / Master of Science

The symptomatology of depression includes affective and cognitive features. As such, depression has been associated both with maladaptive concern over emotional material, and also with general impairments in attentional control. In the current thesis, I investigated the potential influence of such depression-related dysfunctional emotional processing on a range of cognitive control abilities, using experimental paradigms containing either neutral or affective stimuli. In contrast to the hypothesis that depressive symptoms are associated with generally compromised cognitive control, depression-related impairments were not found on a range of ‘classic' measures of cognitive control, including error-processing (pre-error speeding, posterror slowing and error-related ERPs), overriding response conflict (colour-word Stroop interference, conflict adaptation) or more sustained control processes (cued-RT performance, preparatory ERPs, and maintaining long-term speed-accuracy tradeoffs). Interestingly, however, differences between groups with low and elevated levels of depressive symptoms emerged during the performance of emotionally valenced tasks. First, an elevated depressive symptom group showed a reduced ability to resolve emotional conflict arising between competing affective representations. When compared with spared performance on the classic Stroop task, this result suggests that depressive symptoms are associated with a specific impairment in the ability to regulate emotional distraction. Secondly, an ERP related to advanced preparation in cued-RT tasks (the CNV), but not those associated with early perceptual processing (P1, N170), was selectively modulated by negative, but not positive, task-irrelevant emotional distractors presented during the cue-target interval. This pattern of ERP results supports a late processing locus of affective attentional bias in depression. Together, the current results propose that control processes which facilitate the regulation of emotional material (i.e. over emotional sources of distraction) might be selectively affected by increased depressive symptoms, suggesting that future work should consider affective variables when investigating executive control processes in depression.