VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Variations on a Theme of Within-Person Variation

Variation characterizes much of everyday life. People's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not static, but change depending on who they are, where they are, and with whom they are. For personality psychologists interested in describing this variation, new and low-cost methods of assessment can describe how people differ from each other on average, as well as how people differ from their own average across multiple real-life situations and social interactions. Researchers use such within-person methods to develop sophisticated models of personality, emotion, and self-esteem that aim to represent real-life variance in experience./nIn this dissertation, I extend this within-person approach to the study of emotion regulation and social hierarchy. Researchers consider emotion regulation and social hierarchy to be domains of psychological life that serve important social functions. Yet few studies have examined these domains in real-life social interactions, and no research has examined how these domains change across a person's everyday life./nIn Chapter 1, I introduce the topic of within-person variation more formally with a review of key concepts and differences from other approaches to psychology. Specifically, I argue that a within-person approach is fundamental for researchers to understand psychological processes. I then summarize the methods of assessment and analysis that I will use in this dissertation, and develop three broad research questions about within-person processes that guide my empirical research./nIn Chapter 2, I present research on within-person variation in expressive suppression – a strategy that people use to regulate their emotions by hiding expressions in the face and body. In contrast to past research that emphasizes the negative consequences of stable suppression use, I find evidence that suppression use can serve adaptive functions when used in specific situations./nIn Chapter 3, I focus my within-person approach on the study of social hierarchy. Although past theory differentiates social power (a person's ability to exert influence or control in a situation) from social status (a person's respect or reputation) and from social class (a person's rank in society), these three related dimensions of social hierarchy are not well-differentiated at the empirical level. In this chapter, I demonstrate ways in which accounting for within-person variation supports existing theory and offer new insights that differentiate these related hierarchical dimensions./nTogether, the findings reported in these two chapters demonstrate the prevalence and potential of within-person variation in psychological research. In Chapter 4, I summarize the major findings in the two empirical chapters, discuss the broader implications and limitations of this research and within-person methods of assessment more broadly, and conclude with suggested ideas for future research.

Advisor: John, Oliver P
Pulses and Populism: Diversified Farming Systems on the Northern Great Plains

This dissertation examines a values-based supply chain in Montana that supports approximately twenty family farms by marketing their heritage, organic lentils. Despite their location in an isolated, low-income region, characterized by low and erratic rainfall and short growing seasons, this network of farmer-scientists has managed to simultaneously improve their land and their livelihoods by transitioning from commodity wheat monoculture to diversified farming systems based on legume fertility and value-added markets. This study explains how a regenerative approach to agriculture has arisen in this place, and identifies both opportunities for, and barriers to, scaling up such resilient food systems, focused on three broad themes: social and ecological "slow variables" critical to resilience, agrarianism and agrarian moral economy, and transformative social learning./nThe first chapter analyzes the value chain and its larger network through the lens of socioecological resilience, identifying the "slow variable" processes that underpin these farmers' ability to successfully weather drought and other shocks. The second chapter describes the governance of this value chain as a form of agrarian moral economy, recommending a policy approach focused on facilitating such networks of mutual aid and peer review. The third chapter considers the processes of transformative social learning that led value chain members to transition from commodity grain monoculture to low-input diversified farming.

Advisor: Sayre, Nathan
Essays on Deception and Lying Aversion

Abstract/nEssays on Deception and Lying Aversion/nBy/nGlynis Margaret E. Gawn/nDoctor of Philosophy in Agricultural and Resource Economics/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Jeffrey M. Perloff, Chair/nThis dissertation consists of three experimental essays on deception and lying aversion. Chapter 2, “Do Lies Erode Trust?” studies the interaction between honesty and trust and trustworthiness. Specifically, the chapter investigates the effect of being lied to or told the truth in a Gneezy (2005) deception game on behavior in a subsequent trust game with different players. Treatment effects are decomposed between the impacts of being “burned” by a low payoff in the deception game, mood change, and the specific experience of a lie. The specific experience of being lied to significantly erodes trust, trustworthiness, and the use of communication to promote trust. However, the experience effect on trustworthiness occurs only for subjects who are burned./nChapter 3, “Pure Lying Aversion”, studies several factors affecting the propensity to tell the truth when no one would be directly negatively impacted by the lie. Utilizing a simple experiment, the effect of the strength of the message one is using to convey information is examined, while the economic incentive to lie is also varied. The effect of being lied to in a prior interaction on one’s subsequent truthfulness is also studied in a separate set of experiments. The strength of the message has a strong effect on truthfulness regardless of the incentive to lie, while the effect of the size of the economic gain from lying has a non-monotonic effect on truthfulness. Additionally, the effect of knowledge about whether one has been lied to before interacts with the payoff outcome received in the prior interaction to reduce truthfulness in some cases and increase it in others./nChapter 4, “Lying Through Others”, considers the question of how agency relationships, ubiquitous in economic interactions, affect an individual’s willingness to lie for monetary advantage? Does individual lying aversion tend to decline if the lie (or truth) is sent through an agent, rather than sent directly by the individual? In three experiments that control for the effects of delegation on preferences over payoffs and probabilities of actions, it is found that delegation reduces – but does not eliminate – lying aversion.

Advisor: Perloff, Jeffrey M
A Combinatorial Peptoid-Based Platform for the Development of Selective Metal Binding Materials

Ligands with the ability to selectively chelate individual metals can be applied in heavy metal remediation, recycling, and metal separations, yet such ligands are currently rare and those processes are avoided or expensive due to the use of nonspecific methods. In order to identify compounds that will selectively chelate metal ions, we designed and synthesized a peptoid library and several screening methods to identify motifs capable of chelating low concentrations of various metal ions in complex sample media. Peptoids, or N-substituted glycine oligomers, are a recently developed class of peptidomimetics that have a variety of new structures and applications. The first target application was the remediation of water contaminated with toxic Cr(VI). Identified structures outperformed commercially available resins and demonstrated the ability to reduce the amount of Cr(VI) to levels within the range of the EPA guidelines. A new library generation was developed for the selective coordination of individual ions in a biological context. One target of this library was lethal Cd(II), and peptoid-based ligands were capable of reducing the concentrations of Cd(II) in human serum to 0.5 μM, comparable to the reported threshold for acute toxicity. After demonstrating the success of this screening platform, the platform has been adapted for many applications with a variety of metal ions described within. Towards the development of inexpensive functional materials, a biorthogonal bioconjugation reaction has been applied to immobilize peptoid sequences after synthesis. This work begins to illuminate the diverse array of applications of selective ligands for individual metal ions and demonstrates the potential for peptoids in highly functional materials.

Advisor: Francis, Matthew B
The Effects of Motion on Position Representations for Perception and Action

Accurately perceiving the locations of objects is essential for successfully interacting with our environment. However, the visual system must constantly contend with motion, both from objects moving through space and on the retina as the observer moves through the environment. Previous work has shown that motion can bias the perceived locations of both moving and non-moving targets, demonstrating that the visual system uses information from motion to update the represented locations of objects. Here, we examined the extent and circumstances under which motion-induced position shifts can influence perception, and whether they can influence action. First, we used psychophysics to demonstrate that motion can influence the location at which low-level adaptation is observed, supporting the idea that motion can bias retinotopic coding of stationary objects at early stages of visual processing. Moreover, we demonstrate that motor responses are not immune to these early influences of motion on position representation. Specifically, we show that position shifts resulting from motion can bias saccade targeting. However, this influence of motion-induced position shifts on saccade targeting does not simply result from perceptual shifts in position. Instead, we demonstrate that the saccade system updates information from motion-induced position shifts before observers are able to consciously perceive these changes. Together, these experiments support the idea that motion exerts an early influence on represented positions and that the saccade system has access to this information before it is perceptually registered.

Advisor: Whitney, David
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a Model for the Study of Glial Calcium Signaling in Awake, Behaving Animals

Glial biology has been studied for over a century, yet the existence of dynamic calcium signaling in astrocytes was only discovered in 1990. Early studies used cultured astrocytes to investigate this phenomenon; however, studies in cultured cells are highly vulnerable to artifactual results that do not accurately represent normal physiological conditions. More recent studies in vivo have revealed a broad heterogeneity in astrocyte signaling—the mechanisms that trigger a calcium rise, the sources of that calcium rise, and the downstream effects of astrocyte signaling all vary with different brain regions and types of stimulation. In zebrafish (Danio rerio), the primary glial cell type is radial glia that persist into adulthood, which have previously been shown to perform many of the same roles as mammalian astrocytes, including regulating synaptic glutamate uptake and maintaining CNS water balance. This study establishes that zebrafish are an appropriate model for studying glial calcium signaling, which can be triggered by eliciting an acoustic startle response in awake, behaving fish. The glial calcium signal, measured by the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP5, reliably peaks following an escape response and is mediated by the group I metabotropic glutamate receptor mGluR1.

Advisor: Isacoff, Ehud
Consuming the Native Other: Mestiza/o Melancholia and the Performance of Indigeneity in Michoacan

This projects examines the contested terrain of cultural appropriation within mestizo/indigenous relations in México. Inspired by Phillip Deloria’s theory of ‘playing Indian,’ I sought to understand the concept’s applicability to the Mexican context. I utilize performance theory, specifically the performance of racialized identities and the performance of embodied memory, as a lens to examine touristic consumption and as a means to understand the relationship between indigenous identities and mestizaje. Employing ethnographic field methods, I consider how both mestizos and natives act as performers in touristic transactions during the Days of the Dead in Michoacan as well as how the commodification of the P’urhepecha dead racializes P’urhepecha Indians as inferior others and impacts P’urhepecha communities./nI pose that mestiza/o visits to Michoacán are motivated by their desire to alleviate mixed identity anxiety; mestizos seek indigenous people to resolve their feelings about the Spanish Conquest and to understand the violent moment of rape which birthed mestizaje as well as to encounter their romanticized notion of indigenous primitivity in its purest form. I propose that mestiza/o tourists view P’urhepechas as surrogate stand-ins for their pre-Columbian ancestors while P’urhepechas struggle to represent themselves as contemporary beings invested in the globalized political economy. The mestiza/o longing to tour P’urhepecha communities functions alongside an articulated P’urhepecha fear of being viewed as accessories to an imaginary ‘pre-Columbian’ landscape which relegates indigenous people to the past./nI argue that mestizos’ majoritarian position in Mexican society and their distance from contemporary indigenous realities facilitates their consumption and appropriation of the indigenous dead as well as the commodification of living Indians. Mestiza/o tourists engage in mestiza/o melancholia by mourning what they view as the decline of ‘traditional P’urhepecha culture’ while not acknowledging their own participation in the ongoing destruction of indigenous communities. Touring indigenous communities and appropriating indigenous culture does not resolve the violence but further propagates it. P’urhepechas, however, consider themselves partners in the touristic relationship with an investment in preserving their communities’ intimacy and in controlling how they are perceived, consumed, and toured. P’urhepechas view mestizos as spiritually disoriented, culturally astray people who should be catered to for the sake of profit. The P’urhepecha preoccupation with preserving community intimacy motivates P’urhepechas to engage in acts of resistance such as constructing cheap/imitation cultural goods to sell to tourists, barring tourists from particular festivities, and holding specific ceremonies away from the public eye.

Advisor: Biolsi, Thomas
The role of RFRP-3 in chronic stress induced reproductive dysfunction and astrocyte communication

Though it is well established that chronic stress induces female reproductive dysfunction, whether stress negatively impacts fertility and fecundity when applied prior to mating and pregnancy has not been well explored. My dissertation has investigated the mechanism behind stress-induced infertility in female rodents, as well as the long-term effects of chronic stress on reproductive success. Using naturally cycling female rats, Chapter 2 looks at changes in reproductive hormones and behavior after chronic immobilization stress. I also examined the long-term repercussions of chronic stress, allowing animals recovery from the stressors and looking at later mating and pregnancy success. My research has focused primarily on the role of a reproductive inhibitory hormone, RFRP-3, a hypothalamic peptide modulated by high stress. However, in Chapter 3, I investigate a new mechanism for RFRP-3 outside of that role, in hippocampal astrocytes. I see that RFRP-3 may also mediate an effect on how astrocytes connect and communicate with each other within the hippocampus. This opens a new intriguing line of research for novel roles of RFRP-3 outside of reproduction. These studies show that chronic stress has long-term effects on pregnancy success, even post-stressor, that are mediated by RFRP3, and point to RFRP3 as a potential clinically-relevant single target for stress-induced infertility.

Advisor: Kaufer, Daniela
Territorial Masquerades: Frontier State Formations in Northwest Colombia

How are the limits of state power imagined and acted upon in a place where the state supposedly does not exist? This dissertation explores the kinds of political formations that emerge at the real-and-imagined limits, or frontiers, of the state in a region of northwest Colombia called Urabá. For the last 50 years, Urabá has been one of the most violent hotspots of the country’s civil war. Both locals and outside observers almost unanimously explain the region’s violent history and its unruly contemporary condition by pointing to “la ausencia del estado,” the absence of the state. But, as an even cursory review of its history shows, Urabá has in fact been a persistent site of state-building projects, raising a second question: How did this region become understood as stateless in the first place?/nIn short, this dissertation is about how “statelessness” became and remains a powerful ideological and material force in Urabá, beginning in the early 1900s and into the contemporary moment. It follows the accumulated weight of violent contradictions arising from recursive waves of statecraft in Urabá: from the United Fruit Company, to insurgent guerrilla groups; from paramilitaries, to technocratic planners. My aim, in other words, is to understand “the absence of the state” historically and ethnographically, not to debunk it as a bizarre case of collective false consciousness. Indeed, rather than analyzing the region as a case of state absence or failure, I argue that Urabá’s violent political-economic conflicts have produced surprisingly resilient, though by no means benevolent, regimes of accumulation and rule.

Advisor: Watts, Michael J
Have Your City and Eat It Too: Los Angeles and the Urban Food Renaissance

Time and time again, the residents of Los Angeles have used the promises of the “garden city” and urban agriculture to imagine a way out of the persistent problems of urban life. In the contemporary moment, alternative food system activists are again working to create a cultural movement committed to “slow,” local and small-scale community-based urban food systems – which, paradoxically, they are organizing through sophisticated digital tools and global social media. This study argues that, beyond debates over urban diets, food is a lens through which post-industrial imaginaries of an egalitarian digital society are fused with pre-industrial imaginaries of utopian, agrarian communities. The consequence of these entangled visions is a unique set of practices that attempt to inject a sense of radical possibility into an urban geography that is itself the result of decades of struggle over land use, livelihoods, and urban culture. Drawing on a combination of archival research, ethnography, interviews and a survey, this dissertation examines how planners, boosters, government officials, and ordinary citizens have sought to wield food and agriculture in the city as a force to ameliorate the economic, social and ecological alienation that can dominate urban life. This study shows that the political, class and racial underpinnings of urban food movements are far more complex and contingent than normally understood, and the case of Los Angeles reveals both deeply conservative, reactionary moments and unprecedented coalitions emerging to make claims on the right to self determination, health and progressive social change in the city.

Advisor: Walker, Richard A
The Contribution of Food Vendor Availability to Body Mass, Glycemic Control, and Neighborhood Health Disparities among Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

Background:/nDiabetes is a diet-sensitive chronic disease with crippling complications and costs.1 In concert with other factors, the food retail options available in the residential neighborhood may support or hinder diabetes self-management efforts and influence disease outcomes. Consequently, geographic variation in the availability of specific food vendors may contribute to disparities in diabetes self-care between affluent and deprived neighborhoods.2–4 In recent years, numerous states and localities in the United States have developed financing programs to increase the availability of supermarkets and other fresh food vendors in underserved neighborhoods. However, the health consequence of increasing physical proximity to supermarkets is still unknown. Moreover, no analyses have investigated whether geographic variation in food vendor availability plays a role in explaining neighborhood health disparities. This overarching goal of my dissertation research is to address these gaps in the evidence base./nMethods:/nThis dissertation is broken out into three separate sets of analyses that are presented in five chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the research and policy context that motivates this research. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether the association between neighborhood deprivation (NDI) and BMI is mediated by the availability of “healthful” and “unhealthful” food vendors, as is commonly assumed. In Chapter 3, I examine whether increasing supermarket proximity is associated with weight reduction among a subsample of patients living in close proximity to twelve new supermarkets. In Chapter 4, I examine the association between changes in neighborhood supermarket presence (supermarket development and closure) and changes in glycemic control (hemoglobin A1c). Finally, in Chapter 5, I summarize study conclusions and recommendations for future research./nStudy subjects for each analysis represent different subsamples of adults from the Kaiser Permanente of Northern California (KPNC) Diabetes Registry, a large (>300,000 members) and well-characterized longitudinal cohort of insurance plan members with diabetes mellitus identified from clinical records and survey self-report. The Registry was an ideal data resource for research on the association between food retail change and change in clinical outcomes because all available electronic medical records (including inpatient, outpatient, laboratory and pharmacy records) could be linked with geospatial measures by the member’s address of residence./nDiscussion:/nThese analyses will help further our understanding of how neighborhood deprivation “gets under the skin” and will help clarify the role of neighborhood food vendor availability in shaping clinical outcomes. The findings are directly applicable to current policy discussions on the health impacts of supermarket development in food deserts and may help policymakers evaluate policy options for improving diabetes outcomes.

Advisor: Mujahid, Mahasin
Laraia, Barbara