College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item USE OF MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION IN PLAY INTERACTIONS WITH CHILDREN WITH AUTISM(2020) Rain, Avery; Bernstein Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In typical adult-child interaction, adults tend to coordinate gesture and other nonverbal modes of communication with their verbalizations (multimodal communication). This study explored the effectiveness of multimodal communication with young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to encourage child responses. The maternal use of verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal initiations and the subsequent response or lack of response of their child was examined in fifty mother/child video-recorded play interactions. Results indicated that mothers initiated multimodally at similar rates with children with lower and higher expressive language levels. Child response rates to multimodal communication initiations were higher than response rates to verbal-only or nonverbal-only initiations; this finding was consistent across low and high expressive language groups. Additionally, a significant positive correlation was found between maternal wait time after initiation and overall child response rate. These findings have important ramifications for clinical practice and parent training.Item MEDIA PRIMARIES: THE ROLE OF NEWSWORTHINESS VALUES IN SHAPING ISSUE COVERAGE IN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES(2020) Scott, Zachary A.; Karol, David; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Presidential primary candidates vie for the attention of voters by emphasizing specific issue stances or prioritizations. Yet not all candidates get their messages across. Why does the media follow the candidate’s agenda in some cases but not others? I answer this question by noting the role professional values play in journalists’ evaluations of “newsworthiness” and the important political ramifications those professional values have. Journalists prefer news stories that feature conflict, human-interest components, are timely, and are simple. I argue that there may be ways candidates can cue these values via their rhetoric and that the structure of primaries may affect how journalists apply these values when crafting coverage. I further argue that media outlets should differ in how strongly they prioritize these values. Finally, I argue that the media ignoring a candidate’s message should affect how voters evaluate candidates and how well voters are able to “correctly” vote. I show that the amount of anger language and candidate-based appeal rhetoric are positively correlated with the level of similarity between a candidate’s and the media’s agendas. I also show that expanding primary fields, where the contextual simplicity of the race is shrinking, are correlated with reductions in agenda similarity between candidates and the media. I also show that these effects are not homogenous across media outlets. Newspapers react more strongly to anger in candidate messages than TV news while news outlets with tighter space constraints are more responsive to declines in contextual simplicity. To assess the ramifications of these findings on political behavior I designed a laboratory experiment to test the effects of candidate-media agenda similarity on candidate evaluations and “correct” voting behavior. Subjects exposed to the low convergence treatment displayed higher rates of incorrect voting behavior. Collectively, these findings improve our understanding of the political repercussions of journalism’s professional values and provide insights into an oft-overlooked level of election. They also illustrate the normatively undesirable effects of low convergence. I close with a discussion of how to create a more efficient, media-centric primary process.Item Public Communication as Counter-Terrorism: An Examination of Zero-Sum Counter-Terrorism Assumptions(2017) Fisher, Daren Geoffrey; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Terrorist groups from around the globe rely on a range of communication tactics to rally support to their political movement, including publicly directed discourse ranging from public talks to online publications. Thus far, the criminological literature has focused primarily on efforts embodied in law and policy to make terrorism harder to commit. Based on the zero-sum assumption that any losses for a terrorist group result in gains for a government, this perspective suggests that terrorism may only be reduced through deterrence or by diminishing the relative capacity of terrorist organizations. In contrast, this dissertation argues that public communications are a relatively inexpensive, readily available, and less oppressive means to potentially reduce terrorism. Seeking to identify the role that government public communications have played in existing counter-terrorism strategies, this dissertation examines US public communications regarding terrorism delivered by US Presidents and their Press Secretaries between 1970 and 2014. Drawing upon the 6,001 transcripts of presidential communications concerning terrorism during this period, a series of structural equation models are employed to estimate the impact of the quantity and sentiment of presidential communications concerning terrorism on subsequent terrorism aimed at US targets. Findings from these models suggest that the frequency of presidential communications regarding terrorism is consistently related to reductions in terrorism targeting the US in the following month. The frequency of terrorism communications is related to decreases in both domestic and international terrorism, but is also related to increases terrorist casualties between 1970 and 2014. After accounting for the sentiment in these models, support primarily emerged that communicating negative sentiment reduces terrorism in line with restrictive deterrence theory. Key differences in the impact of both the frequency and sentiment of terrorism communications between presidential administrations are also identified, suggesting that influences were more prominent for Presidents such as Carter and George W. Bush. Finally evidence that public approval moderates the impact of presidential communications on domestic terrorism is provided, with presidents with approval ratings in the lowest 25% netting the largest decreases in terrorism but greatest increases in terrorist casualties through their communications.Item Essays in Behavioral and Experimental Economics(2015) Lopez Vargas, Kristian Miguel; Ozbay, Erkut; Filiz-Ozbay, Emel; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation consists of three essays on behavioral and experimental economics. In Chapter 1, I introduce an integrated model of risk attitudes and other-regarding preferences that extends the standard notion of inequity discount to lotteries. In this model, a decision maker perceives inequity partly by comparing the marginal risks she and others face. It predicts that fairness considerations will alter risk attitudes, in particular, a higher tolerance to positively correlated (fair) risks compared to negatively correlated (unfair) risks. It is also capable of explaining the behavior by which people help others probabilistically (known as ex ante fairness). Furthermore, in contrast with the existing view of ex ante fairness based on expected outcomes, my model does not imply that stronger ex ante fairness behavior is associated with less risk sensitivity. I study these predictions with evidence from an experiment. I find that subjects take more risks when outcomes are ex post fair compared to when they are ex post unfair. I confirm ex ante fairness behavior is a common choice pattern and document how, according to the model, it responds to its relative price. Finally, I reject the implication of existing models that stronger ex ante fairness behavior correlates with less risk sensitivity. Chapter 2 is a joint work with Professor Brit Grosskopf (University of Exeter, UK). People communicate in economic interactions either aiming to alter material outcomes or because they derive direct satisfaction from expressing. In our study, we focus on the latter, the non-instrumental motivates, and find that this less researched aspect of expression has important economic implications. In particular, we experimentally study ex-post verbal expression in a modified Power-to-Take game and document people's willingness to pay for this kind of expression possibility. Our experiment contributes to previous studies discussing the role of mood-emotional states. We find that purely expressive as well as reciprocal motives are both non-trivial components of the valuation for non-instrumental expression. We demonstrate that expression possibilities have important impacts on welfare beyond what our standard economic view predicts. In Chapter 3, Emel Filiz-Ozbay, Erkut Ozbay and I study multi-object auctions in the presence of post-auction trade opportunities among bidders who have either single- or multi-object demand. We focus on two formats: Vickrey auctions where package bidding is possible and simultaneous second-price auctions. We show that, under complementarities, the Vickrey format has an equilibrium where the objects are allocated efficiently at the auction stage whether resale markets are present or not. The simultaneous second-price, on the other hand, leads to inefficiency with or without resale possibility. Our experimental findings show that the possibility of resale in second-price auctions decreases the efficiency rate at the auction stage compared to the no resale case. However, after resale, the efficiency rate in second-price is as high as that of Vickrey auction without resale outcomes in the experiment. Preventing resale neither benefits nor hurts auction revenues in a second-price format. This last chapter has been recently published in Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 89, Pages 1-16, January 2015.Item Incivility in Mass Political Discourse: The Causes and Consequences of an Uncivil Public(2013) Gervais, Bryan T.; Uslaner, Eric M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation project, I explore the effect that exposure to uncivil political talk has on deliberative attitudes and behavior. I hypothesize that incivility in political discourse can induce anti-deliberative attitudes among the public, and increases the use of incivility in political talk. I argue that an anti-deliberative spirit among the public helps fuel mass partisan polarization, and limits the positive effects that come from public deliberation. Using survey data, I find that use of incivility by the public when talking politics has increased. This trend has come alongside changes in partisan polarization and media over the last few decades. A separate analysis confirms the tie between exposure to partisan, uncivil media and uncivil political talk; using panel data, I find that exposure to political talk radio and pundit-based television programming leads audience members with like-minded political views to mimic uncivil language and tactics when expressing their own political opinions. I use experimental methods to explore incivility's effects more in-depth. Drawing from affective intelligence theory, I hypothesize that political incivility has the ability to induce anger, which in turn reduces deliberative attitudes. In one experiment, I manipulate the amount of incivility in an online message board. I find that uncivil political talk induced feelings of anger in individuals when one's partisan in-group was targeted, and led to an increased use of incivility when the partisan out-group was targeted. When feelings of anger are stimulated in people, they reprimand the uncivil "perpetrator" on the message board, and display anti-deliberative attitudes--including a reduced propensity to consider alternative views and lower levels of satisfaction with interactive online communication. A second experiment, embedded in a national survey, confirms that disagreeable incivility and like-minded incivility have different effects. Uncivil messages that are disagreeable induce feelings of anger, decrease willingness to compromise, and boost use of incivility. While the connection between like-minded incivility, anger, and anti-deliberative attitudes is less clear, uncivil messages lead like-minded messages to mimic uncivil and anti-deliberative behavior. My findings show that incivility limits political deliberation. I conclude by noting the consequences of this, as well as directions for future research.Item Champions of the Public or Purveyors of Elite Perspectives? Interest Group Activity in Information and Communications Policy(2004-07-06) Sherman, Tina Won; McIntosh, Wayne; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Communication is a valuable tool of democratic politics as it is used by citizens to persuade decision-makers, and it also allows groups to come together and provide citizens with information about the polity. Today, communication that relies on the Internet plays an increasing role in how information is exchanged between citizens. Theorists assert that the democratic potential of the Internet and related communication technologies is great, given that citizens are able to serve as both producers and receivers of information. Yet, the policies that underlie the communications industry and the technologies it produces can limit that potential. This industry and its technologies are influenced by business interests that can limit democratic potential in favor of marketplace demands, leaving the policymaking process described in arenas, including as information and communications (info-comm) policy, as more elitist in nature than political scientists would otherwise like to believe. This study seeks to examine how elitism impacts the public interest position furthered by info-comm groups by exploring the following paradox: the leadership of the info-comm policy community help citizens participate in politics while at the same time deem the public generally unaware and uninformed on info-comm policy issues. This study's primary research question asks whether leadership of the info-comm policy community inform themselves about the public interest through dialogue with citizens. The secondary question for this research observes whether the leadership of the info-comm policy community approach their decision-making in a democratic fashion. These research questions and related propositions were tested through semi-structured interviews with the leadership of the info-comm policy community, including info-comm group leaders and the foundation grant officers that financially support them. The responses of the interviewees illustrate the impact of elitism on the formulation of policy positions by leaders and pose further considerations for the activities of this policy community. The findings of this study support the aforementioned paradox, suggesting that the public's voice in this policy arena may be more limited than we would otherwise expect. This could have implications for the future direction of info-comm policy and its related technologies, ultimately limiting the citizen participation in democratic deliberation.