VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Reconfiguring Canadian Penality: Gender, Diversity, and Parole

This research provides a local case study of responses to ‘gender’ and ‘diversity’ within Canada’s federal parole system. I examine the following questions: How are certain ‘differences’ and categories of offenders constituted as targets for ‘accommodation’ or as having ‘special needs’? How do penal institutions frame ‘culturally relevant’ or ‘gender responsive’ policy and, in doing so, use normative ideals and selective knowledge of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, and other social relations to constitute the identities of particular groups of offenders? I explore these questions by tracing the history of policy discussions about gender and facets of diversity within legislation and penal and parole policies and practices, as well as the current approaches to managing difference used by the National Parole Board (NPB). Specific focus is given to the organizational responses and approaches developed for Aboriginal, female, and ‘ethnocultural’ offenders. In this study, I show that the incorporation of diversity into the federal parole system works to address a variety of organizational objectives and interests, including fulfilling the legislative mandate to recognize and respond to diversity; appealing to human rights ideals and notions of fairness; managing reputational risk and conforming to managerial logics; instituting ‘effective’ correctional practice; and addressing issues of representation. At the same time, the recognition of gender and diversity produces new penal subjectivities, discourses, and sites upon which to govern. I argue that the accommodation of gender and diversity provides a narrative of conditional release and an institutional framework that positions the NPB as responsive to the diverse needs and/or experiences of non-white and non-male offenders. In the Canadian context, the penal system strives to deliver ‘fair’ punishment through the selective inclusion of difference, and without altering or reconsidering fundamental structures, practices, and power arrangements. Diversity and difference are instead added onto and/or incorporated into preexisting penal policy and logics, including risk management and managerialism.

Keywords: parole
gender
diversity
punishment
Advisor: Hannah-Moffat, Kelly
Withdrawal Motivation and Empathy: Do Empathic Reactions Reflect the Motivation to "Reach Out" or the Motivation to "Get Out"?

Evolutionary accounts of empathy often focus on the ways in which empathy-motivated helping can give rise to indirect fitness benefits. These accounts posit that empathy is adaptive insofar as it motivates strategic helping behavior, but they neglect a key feature of the empathic process – it can prepare one to act effectively within a shared environment. In particular, adopting the affective and motivational states of others provides a rapid and automatic way to avoid danger and threat, which play a disproportionately large role in shaping behavior. Based on the idea that empathic processes facilitate adaptive reactions to threat, I conducted four experiments to test the hypothesis that empathic reactions reflect withdrawal motivation. In the first experiment I used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure baseline right-frontal cortical asymmetry, a reliable neural correlate of withdrawal motivation. I then assessed empathic reactions to images of children ostensibly taken from a charity campaign. Participants who showed greater right-frontal cortical asymmetry also showed stronger empathic reactions to the images. In the second study I used self-report measures fear and anger to assess dispositional withdrawal- and approach-motivation, respectively. This time, participants indicated their empathic reactions to targets experiencing happiness and targets experiencing sadness. Empathy for both types of targets was positively related to fear and negatively related to physical aggression, again supporting a link between empathy and withdrawal motivation. In the third study I measured state withdrawal motivation by using facial electromyography (EMG) to assess disgust expressions towards charity images. These expressions were positively correlated with empathic reactions, demonstrating that state withdrawal motivation is also positively related to empathy. In the final study I manipulated approach and withdrawal emotions by having participants make emotional facial expressions. Focusing on fear and anger, I found that participants were more empathic when making fearful faces than when making angry faces, although these results must be interpreted with caution, as the manipulation may not have had the intended effects on emotional state. Taken together, these four studies provide converging evidence of an association between withdrawal motivation and empathy, supporting the idea that empathy plays a role in the adaptive response to threat.

Keywords: Empathy
Emotion
Motivation
Electroencephalography
Electromyography
Advisor: Inzlicht, Michael
Clinician Mandatory Reporting and Maintenance of the Therapeutic Alliance

The objectives of this study are two-fold: (a) to delineate the factors that guide Ontario social workers’ decision-making when rendering judgments on the mandatory reporting of child maltreatment and (b) to understand how social workers maintain the therapeutic alliance with children and families following the decision to report suspected child maltreatment. The study is informed by two distinct bodies of literature: the decision-making theoretical literature within the fields of medicine, psychology, social work, and marriage and family therapy and the therapeutic alliance theoretical literature. Harnessing the advantages of online survey technology, the study surveyed registered members (n = 480) of the Ontario Association of Social Workers who provide direct service to children and families. Participants responded to prepared vignettes of suspected child maltreatment followed by Likert-scale questions (strongly agree to strongly disagree) and open-ended questions on strategies to maintain the alliance. Open-ended questions allowed respondents to offer further commentary regarding their opinions on mandatory reporting and on maintaining the therapeutic alliance. These comments added a rich source of information to the quantitative data. Multiple logistic regression analyses showed that social workers’ ethical responsibility to the College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers, their legal responsibility to the provincial mandatory reporting laws of Ontario, and consultation with peers or eliciting direction from a supervisor comprised the main factors in their decision-making around reporting suspected child maltreatment to the Children’s Aid Society. Qualitative analyses showed that social workers employ a plethora of strategies to repair the alliance following a disclosure of child maltreatment including reporting strategies, information strategies, affect regulation strategies, advocacy strategies, and resource strategies. The major limitation of the research design was the use of vignette research, which in proscribed circumstances may not reflect what the social worker does in actual practice. Design features that compensate for this limitation include (1) use of a 5-point Likert-item response of strongly agree to strongly disagree to allow respondents a range of responses; and (2) use of open-ended questions to allow respondents the opportunity to express their opinions on the issues.

Keywords: mandatory reporting
therapeutic alliance
Advisor: Bogo, Marion
Exploring Impulsive Activation During Spoken Language Comprehension

A language comprehension mechanism that immediately starts processing language as it is encountered is typically thought of as one that speeds and facilitates spoken language comprehension. However, there exist cases where the earliest parts of a word or phrase encode information that is somewhat at odds with the remainder of the word or phrase in full. Examples of these "potentially misleading" cases include compound words where the initial subpart of the compound belongs to a different syntactic category than the entire compound (e.g., "popcorn", "greyhound"), or noun phrases where the initial element of the phrase signals perceptual properties possessed by the referent of the noun phrase (e.g., some Chinese Cantonese classifier-noun phrases). Using a visual-world methodology, this dissertation explores the kinds of unintended or "impulsive" activation that are triggered when listeners encounter such cases, as well as how syntactic and contextual cues can constraining this impulsive activation. Experiment 1 examines whether hearing compound subparts (e.g., "pop-" in "popcorn") activates conceptual associates across syntactic categories, and Experiment 2 examines whether this activation is moderated by listeners' expectations about the syntactic structure of the sentences they encounter. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the processing of compounds whose initial subparts correspond to colour terms (e.g., "greyhound"). Experiment 3 explores whether these colour subparts trigger the activation of phrasal-level descriptions of non-target objects in the visual display, and whether this activation is influenced by the presence/absence of motivation to use colour descriptions when naming screen objects. Experiment 4 further explores whether a perceptual mismatch between a target object and the colour term in its name increases this impulsive activation. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates whether listeners use the perceptual information encoded in pre-nominal classifiers in Cantonese Chinese to guide their consideration of referential candidates whose perceptual properties do or do not match the classifier semantics. The findings from this dissertation point to the highly interactive nature of spoken language comprehension, suggesting that the kinds of impulsive activation under current discussion are rampant and automatic, but can also be suppressed to varying degrees by the syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues available to the listener.

Keywords: psycholinguistics
impulsive processing
sentence processing
real-time language comprehension
bottom-up activation
interaction
Advisor: Chambers, Craig
Modulation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors by Gαs- and Gαi/o-coupled receptors

The induction of synaptic plasticity at CA1 synapses requires NMDAR activation. Modulation of NMDAR function by various GPCRs can shift the thresholds for LTP and LTD induction and contribute to metaplasticity. Here we showed that the activity of GluN2A- and GluN2B-containing NMDARs is differentially regulated by Gαi/o-coupled, Gαq- and Gαs-coupled receptors. Furthermore, enhancing the relative function of GluN2A-to-GluNB NMDAR activity by GPCRs can alter the balance of LTP and LTD induction and contribute to metaplasticity. In CA1 neurons, activation of the Gαs-coupled D1/D5R selectively recruited Fyn kinase and enhanced GluN2B-mediated NMDAR currents. Biochemical experiments confirmed that D1/D5R stimulation activates Fyn kinase and enhances the tyrosine phosphorylation of GluN2B subunits. In contrast, activation of the Gαq-coupled PAC1R selectively recruited Src kinase to enhance the function of GluN2A-containing NMDARs. Enhancing the functional ratio of GluN2A-to-GluN2B subunits by PAC1R activation lowered the threshold for LTP induction whereas enhancing the functional ratio of GluN2B-to-GluN2A subunits by D1/D5R activation increased the threshold for LTP induction. Unexpectedly, activation of the Gαi/o-coupled mGluR2/3 enhanced NMDAR-mediated function via a previously unidentified mechanism. Inhibition of the cAMP-PKA pathway via mGluR2/3 activation resulted in activation of Src via decreased phosphorylation of its C-terminal Tyr527 by Csk. Stimulation of mGluR2/3 selectively potentiated the function of GluN2A-containing NMDARs but whether it shifted the modification threshold θm to the left requires further investigation.

Keywords: N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors
synaptic plasticity
metaplasticity
G-protein-coupled receptor
schizophrenia
dopamine D1-like receptor
metabotropic glutamate receptors 2 and 3
Advisor: MacDonald, John F.
The Development of Team Relationships in Teacher and Early Childhood Educator (ECE) Integrated Staff Teaching Teams in Full-day, Every Day Kindergarten

This collective case study examined the factors affecting the collaborative relationship between teachers and early childhood educators (ECEs) teaching together in elementary schools as Early Learning Teams in the first year of implementation of full-time kindergarten in Ontario. There are six major adjustments required concurrently by the Ontario government’s new policy in all kindergarten classrooms: team-teaching (sharing instruction, not just classroom management); supporting ECEs as new staff; changing from theme-based to inquiry-based; balancing the School District’s literacy goals with provincial play-based curriculum; double the instructional time, and the increased number of children in the classroom (up from 19 to 24-30). Two of the four classrooms studied in a rural Ontario school district were full-day, every day kindergartens (FDK) for 4 and 5 year olds and the other two were alternate full-days. Data were collected through classroom observations and interviews with principals, kindergarten teachers and ECEs. Case study theory guided the collection and analysis of data with open coding of transcripts, active code notes and memos to help answer the question of how to best implement FDK programs in Ontario. Results indicated that the FDK Team relationship itself enabled and constrained classroom instructional strategies, which would in turn have an impact on student outcomes. Collaborative practice involved a process that was affected by both internal factors (such as teacher foreknowledge of ECE skills), and thirteen external factors which arose from government and school district mandates, as well as practices of the school principal. Examples are: planning time, pay differential, hiring practices and adjusting to the new curriculum at the same time as the team adjusts to team teaching. The collaboration of more than 9,500 teacher and ECE teams is key to the success of Ontario’s new full-time early learning program. The education sector needs to adopt the long-established business practice of supporting team development through recognizing progressive teaming stages, such as those identified by Tuckman (1965). Recommendations are made for principals, school districts offices, government policy, FDK teachers, ECEs, and colleges that provide ECE training. A mnemonic for the four attributes evident in high-functioning collaborative integrated teaching teams (RISE) is proposed.

Keywords: collaborative practice
full day kindergarten
all-day kindergarten
every day kindergarten
pre-K
team teaching
early childhood educator
ECEs in schools
early learning program
teaching team building
instructional aides
kindergarten
early learning teams
teacher structure
education policy
Advisor: McDougall, Douglas Emerson
Vulnerability, Care, Power, and Virtue: Thinking Other Animals Anew

This thesis is a work of practical philosophy situated at the intersection of bioethics, environmental ethics, and social and political thought. Broadly, its topic is the moral status of nonhuman animals. One of its pivotal aims is to encourage and foster the “sympathetic imaginative construction of another’s reality” and to determine how that construction might feed back on to understandings of ourselves and of our place in this world that we share with so many other creatures. In the three chapters that follow the introduction, I explore a concept (vulnerability), a tradition in moral philosophy (the ethic of care), and a philosopher (Wittgenstein) that are not often foregrounded in discussions of animal ethics. Taken together, these sections establish a picture of other animals (and of the kinship that humans share with them) that can stand as an alternative to the utilitarian and rights theories that have been dominant in this domain of philosophical inquiry. In my fifth and sixth chapters, I extend this conceptual framework by turning to the work of Michel Foucault. Here, I develop a two-pronged approach. The first direction – inspired by Foucault’s work on “technologies of power” – is a broad, top-down engagement that explores many of the social apparatuses that constitute the power-laden environments in which human beings and other animals interact. I focus on the slaughterhouse in particular and argue that it is a pernicious institution in which care and concern are rendered virtually impossible. The second direction – inspired by Foucault’s later work on “technologies of the self” – is a bottom-up approach that looks at the different ways that individuals care for, and fashion themselves, as ethical subjects. Here, I examine the dietary practice of vegetarianism, arguing that it is best understood as an ethical practice of self-care. One virtue of my investigation is that it enables a creative synthesis of disparate strands of philosophical thought (i.e. analytic, continental, and feminist traditions). Another is that it demonstrates the philosophical importance of attending to both the wider, institutional dimension of human-animal interactions and to the lived, embodied experiences of individuals who must orient themselves and live their lives within that broader domain. This more holistic approach enables concrete critical reflection that can be the impetus for social, and self-, transformation.

Keywords: Vulnerability
Animal Ethics
Foucault
Wittgenstein
Ethic of Care
Vegetarianism
Slaughterhouse
Technologies of Power
Technologies of the Self
Advisor: Morgan, Kathryn
Demand for Health among Canadians: Roles of Immigration Status, Country of Origin and Year since Migration

This thesis investigates the effects of immigration status, country of origin, and duration in Canada on three main health outcomes, namely health care utilization, occurrences of hypertension and heart disease, and body mass index. The first two chapters are cross-sectional studies that utilize data derived from linked national health survey and Ontario databases, whereas the third chapter is a longitudinal study which draws data from the longitudinal National Population Health Survey (NPHS). The first chapter examines the role of immigration status and country of origin in explaining the use of three types of health services: primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitals. The findings suggest that immigrants, especially those who are male and have low educational attainment, use more primary care physicians than comparable non-immigrants. However, immigrants are found to use fewer expensive health services, i.e. specialist and hospital care, compared to Canadian-born residents. Likewise, immigrants from non-traditional source countries make even fewer visits to specialists than do those who came from traditional source countries. The second chapter investigates the associations of immigration status, occurrence of hypertension, and occurrence of heart disease. Findings from this chapter show that immigrants have comparable odds of hypertension and heart disease to those of Canadian-born residents after adjusting for other factors. The third chapter examines the effects of time since arrival in Canada on the change in BMI over the 14-year period. This chapter shows that, holding other factors constant, an additional year in Canada leads to a 0.14% increase in an individual’s BMI. This association is found to be more pronounced for women than men and for married than non-married individuals. The effect of time since arrival in Canada on the change in BMI is reduced to 0.07% after controlling for sample selection bias, suggesting that by ignoring the sample selection issue, the effects of time since arrival in Canada on the change in BMI may be overestimated.

Keywords: demand for health
immigrant
year since migration
country of origin
Canada
Advisor: Coyte, Peter C.
The Development of a Phenotype for Lung Disease Severity in Cystic Fibrosis and its Application in the CF Gene Modifier Study

Genetic studies of lung disease in Cystic Fibrosis are faced with the challenge of identifying a severity measure that accounts for chronic disease progression and mortality attrition. Further, combining analyses across studies requires common phenotypes that are robust to study design and patient ascertainment. This thesis uses data from the North American Cystic Fibrosis Modifier Consortium (Canadian Consortium for CF Genetic Studies (CGS), Johns Hopkins University Twins and Siblings Study (TSS), and University of North Carolina/Case Western Reserve University Gene Modifier Study (GMS)), to calculate two novel phenotypes using age-specific CF percentile values of FEV1 (Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 second), with adjustment for CF age-specific mortality. The normalized residual, mortality adjusted (NoRMA) was designed for population based samples, while KNoRMA, using Kulich percentiles, is robust to sample ascertainment; both account for the effects of age-related disease progression and mortality attrition. NoRMA was computed for 2122 patients representing the Canadian CF population. KNoRMA was computed for these 2122 patients and also 1137 extreme phenotype patients in the GMS study and 1323 patients from multiple CF sib families in the TSS study. Phenotype was distributed in all three samples in a manner consistent with ascertainment differences, reflecting the lung disease severity of each individual in the underlying population. The new phenotype was highly correlated with the previously recommended mixed model phenotype1; 2, but computationally much easier and suited to studies with limited follow up time. As an example of its use, KNoRMA was used to test the association between locus variants in a previously published candidate gene, Transforming Growth Factor β1(TGFβ1), and lung function in CF, in an attempt to provide insight into discrepant results in the literature. A disease progression and mortality adjusted phenotype reduces the need for stratification or additional covariates, increasing statistical power and avoiding possible interpolation distortions.

Keywords: Cystic Fibrosis
Phenotype
Lung Function
Mortality Attrition
Advisor: Corey, Mary