Why Do (We Think) They Hate Us: Anti-Americanism, Patriotic Messages, and Attributions of Blame

This study explores how news coverage about anti-American sentiment interacts with U.S. adults’ sense of national identity and affects their understandings and interpretations of such negative attitudes. We build on scholarship on patriotism and social identity to conduct an experiment in which participants read one of two news stories focused on anti-American impressions. The findings suggest that news content influences both (a) how Americans interpret anti-American sentiment in general and (b) how Americans draw upon their identification with the nation in formulating attributions of blame for such sentiments and in deciding on what foreign policies to support

Manager–employee communication in the# MeToo Era: The role of gender similarity and context ambiguity in ethical leadership

Sexual harassment is a widespread problem in the American workplace. Managers must understand how their employees perceive ethical leadership in this context. This includes current undergraduates—managers’ future employees. Undergraduates are entering the workforce in a climate of heightened awareness due to the #MeToo movement and federally required collegiate sexual violence training. Grounded in scholarship on ethical leadership and feminist standpoint theory, the experiment compares U.S. undergraduates’ perceptions of male and female managers across common workplace scenarios and examines their evaluations of managers’ traits and behaviors. Analysis reveals (a) what manager behavior is deemed ethical, (b) a general preference for female managers, and (c) that women evaluate female managers more positively than male managers. This study’s findings provide important implications for employee–manager communicative exchanges.Ye

2020 Democratic presidential candidates tweets about climate change

Database of four 2020 Democratic presidential candidates' tweets about climate change, including Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.Climate change is a consensus issue among US Democrats, yet even within this agreement there can be divergence. Rooted in scholarship on rational choice theory and framing, this study content analyzes how the top four 2020 Democratic presidential candidates differentially framed climate change on Twitter. Results revealed that (a) progressive versus moderate Democrats constructed climate change narratives befitting their intraparty ideologies, (b) candidates created cohesive framing strategies across Entman’s (1993) framing functions and a newly proposed function of framing affected publics, and (c) climate change frames were integrated with the campaign’s overarching themes and issue foci.NoneYesDouble blind peer review process for the accepted article which uses the database

Promising a Greener Paris: Anne Hidalgo’s Framing of Environmental Issues in Her Mayoral Campaigns

Content analysis of how Anne Hidalgo framed environmental issues during her 2014 and 2020 mayoral campaigns

A Woman's Place: Gender Politics and Twitter in the 2012 Elections

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2013This dissertation examined how men and women candidates constructed their online self- presentations when running for U.S. Senate in 2012, and how such self-presentations impacted the public's perceptions of the candidates. Specifically, I employed a content analysis to examine how candidates communicated via their campaign Twitter accounts based on their gender and political party affiliation, and the gender and party affiliation of their opponent. As such, I analyzed tweets from 24 candidates running in 12 elections that featured male-versus-female, all- male, and all-female general elections, exploring their levels of interactivity and personalization, as well as their political issue and character trait emphases. Building on this analysis, I then implemented an experiment to examine the effects of personalized versus depersonalized tweets, in which personalized tweets connected campaign content to a personal aspect of the candidate. The experimental design also examined the effects of personalization across a candidate's gender and party affiliation. Overall, I found important differences across gender and political party in how candidates' Twitter communications emphasized my concepts of focus, and how the public evaluates personalized candidates. This work has several implications for our understanding of political communication, digital campaigning, and gender in American politics

Weak action potential backpropagation is associated with high-frequency axonal firing capability in principal neurons of the gerbil medial superior olive

Principal neurons of the medial superior olive (MSO) convey azimuthal sound localization cues through modulation of their rate of action potential firing. Previous intracellular studies in vitro have shown that action potentials appear highly attenuated at the soma of MSO neurons, potentially reflecting specialized action potential initiation and/or a physically distant site of generation. To examine this more directly, we made dual patch-clamp recordings from MSO principal neurons in gerbil brainstem slices. Using somatic and dendritic whole-cell recordings, we show that graded action potentials at the soma are highly sensitive to the rate of rise of excitation and undergo strong attenuation in their backpropagation into the dendrites (length constant, 76 μm), particularly during strong dendritic excitation. Using paired somatic whole-cell and axonal loose-patch recordings, we show that action potentials recorded in the axon at distances > 25 μm are all-or-none, and uniform in amplitude even when action potentials appear graded at the soma. This proximal zone corresponded to the start of myelination in the axon, as assessed with immunocytochemical staining for myelin basic protein in single-labelled neurons. Finally, the axon was capable of sustaining remarkably high firing rates, with perfect entrainment occurring at frequencies of up to 1 kHz. Together, our findings show that action potential signalling in MSO principal neurons is highly secure, but shows a restricted invasion of the somatodendritic compartment of the cell. This restriction may be important for minimizing distortions in synaptic integration during the high frequencies of synaptic input encountered in the MSO

Financial Capability in Children: Effects of Participation in a School-Based Financial Education and Savings Program

Financial capability, Financial education, Financial services, Young children, Saving, College savings,