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- Creator:
- Erica Walker
- Description:
- In everyday life, consciousness appears to be insulated from external control. Processes such as decision making seem voluntary. However, recent theories propose that consciousness operates automatically in a manner resembling a reflex. To investigate the boundary conditions of involuntary processes, the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) has been employed to elicit and measure the involuntary entry of contents into consciousness. The current study sought to extend the RIT to attention, while pairing the behavioral measures of the task with electroencephalography (EEG). By manipulating perceptual load and the duration of the presentation of stimuli, we observed decreased frequency and increased latency of involuntary cognitions for stimuli presented for brief durations (90 ms) in comparison to stimuli presented for long durations (10 s). Alpha power reflected subjects’ reports of involuntary cognitions, such that alpha power was significantly lower in the 10 second condition in comparison to the conditions with brief stimuli durations. These findings suggest that environmental content can directly affect how attention is allocated to external stimuli. That the cognitions were involuntary supports the view that attention could also operate reflexively under certain circumstances. This is consistent with a contemporary framework that construes attention as an effect, rather than as a cause, of processing. These findings have implications for many areas of research concerned with high-level cognitive control, including models of attention and action selection.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Robin Clinton Crawford
- Description:
- I am enchanted by the reliable magic of abstract painting. My children have been embarrassed when, at a public gallery, I would take their hands and stand directly in front of a painting that is chaotic with color, then slowly back away with them until the picture’s gestalt slips into place. Suddenly, a coherent image. With them in hand, I would move back and forth, watching bits of information gather themselves into a picture and fall into chaos as we moved further then closer to the art. In the same way, these poems are discrete points of experience. As reports of particular moments, they seem chaotic. Together, they gather themselves into a coherent picture.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English: Creative Writing
- Creator:
- Alexander J. Cook
- Description:
- Stimulus-driven capture of attention has been used extensively in visual search tasks to examine the automatic deployment of attention. Few studies have examined the attention capture ability of salient singletons when the task requires the participant to not attend to anything. In these studies, involving a variant of the Reflexive Imagery Task, participants were presented with an array of six objects and instructed to not think of the name (subvocalize) of any of the objects presented. In Study 1, another condition instructed participants to subvocalize the name of any of the objects. On half of the critical trials, one object was presented in a color that differed from that of all the other objects (the Singleton condition). In this condition, the subvocalization was for the critical stimulus on a high proportion of the trials for both the voluntary and involuntary conditions. Study 2 included conjunction trials which contained target stimuli defined by two features (color and motion). The attention capture effect was not observed for the conjunction trials, but it was enhanced for trials with a flashing singleton. These results provide evidence that the visual saliency of an object influences which representations enter into consciousness, regardless of whether one intends to attend to the object or not. This finding has implications for advertising and the design of user interfaces.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Melissa Thea Valk
- Description:
- This thesis dissects the role of melancholic imagery and religion in Alfred Tennyson’s poetry, with a special focus on his magnum opus, In Memoriam A.H.H (1850) and how the use of melancholy and religion act as rhetorical tropes in conveying the depths of his grief after losing his dear friend, Arthur Hallam. Furthermore, I analyzed particular cantos adjacent to a few of his other poems such as “The Lady of Shalott” (1833 and 1842), “Mariana” (1830), and “The Sleeping Beauty” (1830). The use of melancholic imagery is abundant in Tennyson’s work, but this thesis argues that upon the death of Arthur Hallam, Tennyson reconfigured his melancholic aesthetic that we see in his older poems to fit the melancholic tone in his elegy. Therefore, I trace Tennsyon’s original aesthetic of melancholy in his more fantastical works and how he reconfigures his aesthetic through the writing process of In Memoriam, shifting from a romantic and colorful melancholy to a confrontation of a dark and grim grief and its place in the interrelation between faith and doubt. The shift in Tennyson’s aesthetic of melancholy and cantos in In Memoriam work brilliantly together when intertwined not only with each other, but also with Tennyson’s beautiful command of meter, diction, and syllabic dexterity. The death of Tennyson’s beloved friend Arthur Hallam was the catalyst for Tennyson’s artistic manifestation of grief and doubt employed in In Memoriam as well as the religious odyssey Tennyson embarks on for seventeen years after Hallam’s death. This grief and doubt intertwine with Tennyson’s reconfigured aesthetic and serves to speak to and unite his Victorian audience because they both embraced the notion of depression as a unifying human emotion and related to him on a religious level. Because Tennyson’s writing invokes melancholy and discusses mental illness, particularly depression, his poetry serves as unifying in the face of death. His understanding of his religion plays a similar role in unifying Victorian and modern readers alike with a common human emotion. This thesis ends with an analysis of The Prologue, which serves as the final admission of Tennyson’s baptism of fire and how he is able to heal himself through the love and salvation of Christ.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Nikolas Paul Bunton
- Description:
- The aim of this thesis is to explore and analyze David Lynch’s films noir through a psychoanalytic lens, predominantly employing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories to dissect and explicate these films. This thesis defines and explores what I call “Lynchian noir”; that is, I make the case that Lynch’s films noir carve out a distinct and idiosyncratic niche in the film noir canon and aesthetic. I make the claim that Lynch’s films noir are a particular offshoot of what some scholars have termed postmodern neo-noir and meta-noir, and that the Lynchian manifestations of postmodern neo- and meta-noir deftly translate the psychological processes of the unconscious mind into powerfully unsettling cinematic experiences. In particular, Lynch’s films noir are cinematic reflections of the unconscious as it attempts to fantasmatically cope with psychic trauma, the distressing enigma of human desire, and the alienating illusion of identity.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English
6. Gorge
- Creator:
- Dasha Bulatova
- Description:
- Gorge consists of poetry, prose poetry, and experimental/hybrid-genre pieces that explore obsession, trauma, and memory through personal and historical lenses. A loose narrative framework centers around the archetype of “Mudman,” an anti-hero whose arc follows roughly along the mythological lines of Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, the golem, and others. His story and the speaker’s relationship with him weave into a fictionalized reimagining of the events of the 1970s and 1980s in Skidmore, Missouri. This rural town was home to Ken McElroy, a man who performed countless robberies and sexual and violent assaults. He was indicted for twenty-one crimes but only convicted of one. Ul1 mately, the story goes, somebody shot and killed McElroy outside of the tavern, in an act described as vigilante justice. Nobody was charged with the killing and it remains “unsolved,” despite 40+ witnesses. This work also contains a “Museum” of found text, mostly sourced online through simple searches of the term “Mudman.”
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- San Francisco
- Department:
- English: Creative Writing
7. Fly.
- Creator:
- Cook, Erin Lynn.
- Description:
- Fly is a collection of short stories. The title suggests the main thematic element present, that of movement from or desire for some kind of freedom from a person, situation, or mind‐set faced by the characters. Some stories deal with this idea directly, most indirectly. There is also a certain play with the narrative in two of the stories that suggests the idea of flying away from the traditional narrative structure. In “80/20:Fact/Fiction” for example, there is a narrator breaking through the present push of the story frame to expand the narrative into the margins as footnotes. In this story, a discussion of where truth stems from and how it is identified is explored. The story “Bird” also plays with traditional narrative. An outside narrator is telling an unnamed character the more traditional story line. Several stories play with conceptual and physical manifestations allowing the stories to “fly” from the concrete into the abstract.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- Fine Arts
- Creator:
- Marg, Klaus Richard.
- Description:
- The VO2 slow component (SC) is a slow, time-dependent rise in VO2 during constant-load exercise exceeding gas-exchange-threshold (GET). Approximately 86% of the VO2 SC reportedly originates from working peripheral muscles, with the remainder originating from the central systems. The effects of caffeine on these systems during heavy exercise are unclear. Metabolic, cardiovascular, respiratory, and electromyographic parameters were evaluated in nine competitive cyclists (VO2max = 57.5 ± 4.9 ml·kg-1·min-1) performing constantload, heavy exercise in control and caffeinated conditions. No effect on muscular activation, arterial pressure, and respiratory exchange ratio was observed. VO2 was ~200 ml/min higher (p < .05) throughout exercise in the caffeinated states, with no interaction (p > .05) relative to time (i.e., no effect on VO2 SC). Elevated VO2, in the absence of any other treatment effects, suggests that caffeine during heavy exercise may up-regulate metabolic processes related to cyclic AMP triggered by elevated catecholamines.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- Kinesiology
9. A Correlational Study Between Leadership Styles and Job Satisfaction Within Flowserve Corporation
- Creator:
- Viramontes, Alejandro and Raygoza, Cesar J.
- Description:
- This study’s main objective was to demonstrate a correlation between job satisfaction and the two main leadership styles, transformational, and transactional for Flowserve Corporation’s operation department in the seal division for North America. The study also took a deeper dive into the data to find the overall perception of leadership styles from an employee standpoint. The same observation was done with job satisfaction levels in North America. Additionally, demographics were also statistically analyzed against job satisfaction. The data collection was executed with a questionnaire using the simple random method. The questionnaire comprised of demographical questions, the Minnesota Satisfactory Questionnaire (MSQ), and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) that was sent to the targeted population via email. The data was collected via Microsoft Form and statistically analyzed using Microsoft Excel. The study results illustrated a statistically positive relationship between job satisfaction and all attributes of transformational leadership. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between job satisfaction and transactional leadership attributes except for contingent rewards and management by exception (active). The overall perception of leadership was transactional leadership, which correlated to overall low job satisfaction levels for the operations team. The study also found that specific demographics did not have a factor in job satisfaction.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Pomona
- Department:
- Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering
- Creator:
- Villanueva, Matthew Gaston.
- Description:
- Purpose: Ten resistance-trained subjects participated in an investigation aimed to examine the impact of creatine loading with acute caffeine ingestion (CC) on upper body muscular strength (MS) and the associated neuromuscular function (NF). Methods: MS was determined from the number of repetitions completed in the supine bench press (SBP) with a load equivalent to 87.5% of a previously predicted 1 repetition maximum (RM). NF during the SBP sets was evaluated from surface electromyographic (EMG) records obtained from the right long head of the triceps brachii (TRI) and the right pectoralis major (PM) muscles. From these records, the median power frequency (MedPF), mean power frequency (MeanPF), and EMG signal amplitude scores (IEMG) were derived. Results: Paired Sample T-tests revealed no significant difference (p > 0.05) in the number of repetitions completed, MedPF, MeanPF, and IEMG scores between CC and PL treatments. Conclusions: CC supplementation does not seem to significantly affect upper body muscular performance, as well as the frequency, type, and magnitude of motor unit activation during periods of short-term, high-intensity resistance exercise.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- Kinesiology