A survey of the likes and dislikes of children in grade two for the stories in the Ginn and Company basal reader We are Neighbors.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Democracy, Foreign Direct Investment and Natural Resources

Existing studies assume that the impact of democracy on FDI is the same for re- source exporting and non-resource exporting countries. This paper examines whether natural resources alter the relationship between FDI and democracy. We estimate a linear dynamic panel-data model using data from 112 developing countries over the period 1982-2007, and we .nd that there is some critical value of the share of miner- als and oil in total exports below which democracy enhances FDI, and above which democracy reduces FDI. We identify 90 countries where an expansion of democracy may enhance FDI and 22 countries where an increase in democratization may reduce FDI.Democracy, Foreign Direct Investment, Natural Resources.

Affinely invariant matching methods with discriminant mixtures of proportional ellipsoidally symmetric distributions

In observational studies designed to estimate the effects of interventions or exposures, such as cigarette smoking, it is desirable to try to control background differences between the treated group (e.g., current smokers) and the control group (e.g., never smokers) on covariates $X$ (e.g., age, education). Matched sampling attempts to effect this control by selecting subsets of the treated and control groups with similar distributions of such covariates. This paper examines the consequences of matching using affinely invariant methods when the covariate distributions are ``discriminant mixtures of proportional ellipsoidally symmetric'' (DMPES) distributions, a class herein defined, which generalizes the ellipsoidal symmetry class of Rubin and Thomas [Ann. Statist. 20 (1992) 1079--1093]. The resulting generalized results help indicate why earlier results hold quite well even when the simple assumption of ellipsoidal symmetry is not met [e.g., Biometrics 52 (1996) 249--264]. Extensions to conditionally affinely invariant matching with conditionally DMPES distributions are also discussed.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000000407 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Hunger in America: Suffering We All Pay For

Estimates the recession's impact on food insecurity and the national and state-by-state cost of hunger from hunger-induced illnesses, including depression; poor educational outcomes and reduced lifetime earnings, and private charity to help feed families

A study of the personal and social characteristics of public offenders from three Massachusetts correctional institutions in treatment with the division of legal medicine

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Aging, Emotion, Attention, and Binding in the Taboo Stroop Task: Data and Theories.

How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo than neutral base-words (taboo Stroop interference); better incidental recognition of colors and locations consistently associated with taboo versus neutral words (taboo context-memory enhancement); and greater speed-up in color-naming RTs with repetition of color-consistent than color-inconsistent taboo words, but no analogous speed-up with repetition of location-consistent or location-inconsistent taboo words (the consistency type by repetition interaction for taboo words). All three phenomena remained constant with aging, consistent with the transmission deficit hypothesis and binding theory, where familiar emotional words trigger age-invariant reactions for prioritizing the binding of contextual features to the source of emotion. Binding theory also accurately predicted the interaction between consistency type and repetition for taboo words. However, one or more aspects of these phenomena failed to support the inhibition deficit hypothesis, resource capacity theory, or socio-emotional selectivity theory. We conclude that binding theory warrants further test in a range of paradigms, and that relations between aging and emotion, memory, and attention may depend on whether the task and stimuli trigger fast-reaction, involuntary binding processes, as in the taboo Stroop paradigm

Family-Expressed Emotion, Childhood-Onset Depression, and Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Is Expressed Emotion a Nonspecific Correlate of Child Psychopathology or a Specific Risk Factor for Depression?

Expressed emotion (EE) was examined, using the brief Five Minute Speech Sample measure, in families of (1) children with depressive disorders, (2) children with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and (3) normal controls screened for the absence of psychiatric disorder. Consistent with the hypothesis of some specificity in the association between EE and the form of child disorder, rates of EE were significantly higher among families of depressed children compared to families of normal controls and families of children with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Within the depressed group, the presence of a comorbid disruptive behavior disorder was associated with high levels of critical EE, underscoring the need to attend to comorbid patterns and subtypes of EE in future research