The Effects of a Brief Mindfulness Intervention on Interracial Anxiety and Avoidance

Interracial anxiety, psychological discomfort in the context of interactions with racial outgroup members, is associated with less satisfying interracial interactions and more avoidance of interracial contact. For White Americans, avoidance of interracial contact, especially with Black Americans, is an especially pernicious outcome, as it can perpetuate racial bias and anxiety. Mindfulness, the awareness and acceptance of present-moment experience, has potential as an intervention to reduce avoidance in interracial interactions given its theoretical mechanism of weakening the relationship between anxiety and avoidance behavior, necessarily reducing anxiety. The present study examined the effects of brief mindfulness training on anxiety and avoidance behavior in an impending interracial conversation. 59 White undergraduates were presented with the image of a Black interaction partner with whom they would discuss a racially-charged topic, and their anxiety about the impending conversation was assessed. After listening to mindfulness meditation or distraction control instructions, participants were asked to arrange chairs in advance of the supposed conversation. Avoidance was measured by the distance participants placed between chairs, as well as the latency until participants’ proposed reschedule date for the conversation, when they were told that the interaction had to be postponed. It was hypothesized that condition and anxiety would significantly interact, such that positive relationships between anxiety and avoidance behaviors in the control condition would be attenuated in the mindfulness condition. Results generally did not support these hypotheses and are discussed in the context of post-hoc analyses that suggested mindfulness instructions may have functioned to increase the salience of existing trait-level anxiety

Exploring the Effects of Brief Mindfulness and Reappraisal Training on Executive Control and Affect

Despite the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions for a wide range of psychological problems, their mechanisms remain unknown. Analogue studies of key treatment components can help distinguish these approaches. One such component, focused-breathing meditation, has rarely been studied in direct comparison to another active and theoretically distinct technique, cognitive reappraisal. The present study examined the effects of mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal instructions on negative affect and executive control, two potential mechanisms of mindfulness, in a laboratory setting. Non-clinical college undergraduates (N = 136) were randomly assigned to a 10-minute mindfulness, reappraisal, or mind-wandering control condition. Contrary to hypotheses, no between-group differences were found in sadness ratings, state mindfulness, or the inhibitory control dimension of executive control following the intervention. The mindfulness condition showed lower inattention compared to the mind-wandering condition. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of specific theoretical mechanisms of mindfulness- and cognitive-reappraisal-based interventions

Decisions Set in Stone: Spatial Analyses of Ozark Rock Art Sites, Elements, and Motifs with GIS

This thesis uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to spatially analyze rock art distributions in the Salem Plateau section of the Arkansas Ozarks. Statistical tests, such as chi-square and t-testing, are applied to provide an objective view of rock art patterning in relation to the overall landscape. The data collected from these methods allow one to discern the locational preferences for rock art, which potentially reveal cultural details about the people involved with its creation. Multiple analytical perspectives are applied throughout, initially focusing on comparisons with expected values and random points. Later statistical tests use bluff shelter distributions as reference data for understanding rock art location selection. The final analysis compares motif distributions with each other to see whether certain designs tend to appear in different contexts than others. Results suggest that bluff shelter distributions serve as better comparative data, as they reveal which environmental variables are unique to rock art. These primarily include southern-facing aspects, ease of accessibility from mounds, proximal distance from streams, orientation toward winter solstice phenomena, and occasionally strong viewsheds. An analysis of motifs indicates a duality between geomorphic shapes, both basic and celestial, and more “earthly” designs, such as terrestrial animals. Another observation suggests that certain anthropomorphic rock art were reserved for accessibility, while others were placed in relatively secluded locations. The results presented in this thesis potentially shed light on rock art locational preferences, as well as the meanings or activities behind their designs

Inequalities for Light Nuclei in the Wigner Symmetry Limit

Using effective field theory we derive inequalities for light nuclei in the Wigner symmetry limit. This is the limit where isospin and spin degrees of freedom can be interchanged. We prove that the energy of any three-nucleon state is bounded below by the average energy of the lowest two-nucleon and four-nucleon states. We show how this is modified by lowest-order terms breaking Wigner symmetry and prove general energy convexity results for SU(N). We also discuss the inclusion of Wigner-symmetric three and four-nucleon force terms.Comment: 10 page

Approximate Submodularity and Its Implications in Discrete Optimization

Submodularity, a discrete analog of convexity, is a key property in discrete optimization that features in the construction of valid inequalities and analysis of the greedy algorithm. In this paper, we broaden the approximate submodularity literature, which so far has largely focused on variants of greedy algorithms and iterative approaches. We define metrics that quantify approximate submodularity and use these metrics to derive properties about approximate submodularity preservation and extensions of set functions. We show that previous analyses of mixed-integer sets, such as the submodular knapsack polytope, can be extended to the approximate submodularity setting. In addition, we demonstrate that greedy algorithm bounds based on our notions of approximate submodularity are competitive with those in the literature, which we illustrate using a generalization of the uncapacitated facility location problem

A narrative inquiry into the experience of negotiating the dominant stories of physical education: living, telling, re-telling, and re-living

This paper explores the tensions that surfaced as a teacher of physical education shifted his ‘stories to live by’ (Clandinin and Connelly, 1999) around physical education. The tensions became explicit when his shifting ‘stories to live by’ bumped against dominant narratives of physical education that shaped his professional knowledge landscape. Our inquiry is framed by Dewey’s pragmatic ontology (1938) and Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) narrative conception of experience as the living and telling, re-telling and re-living, of stories of experience. We also draw on Connelly and Clandinin’s (1999) narrative conception of identity as ‘stories to live by’ which is an embodied, fluid and context-dependent view of identity as situated at the interface between personal practical knowledge and professional knowledge landscapes. We begin with situating this work within the broader spectrum of narrative research. We then describe the relational processes of re-telling the stories through narrative inquiry (Author 1 and 2) and finally explore the re-living of these stories in order to show the tensions that surfaced as Author 1’s ‘stories to live by’ shifted. We engage in the narrative inquiry process of re-telling using the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (with dimensions of place, sociality, temporality), to show tensions and shifting identities. We conceptualize these tensions as moments of autobiographical revisions (Carr, 1986). These revisions are seen as a part of a person’s struggle for narrative coherence; a struggle to compose a life in the professional knowledge landscape that is meaningful to each individual. In these moments of autobiographical revision we show the reflexive relationship between living, telling, re-telling and re-living of stories. We end by considering what we have learned about our own stories to live by through this process and theoretically and practically suggest ways other teacher educators and physical educators might benefit from engaging in narrative inquiry work

Modeling the Alignment Profile of Satellite Galaxies in Clusters

Analyzing the halo and galaxy catalogs from the Millennium simulations at redshifts $z=0,\ 0.5,\ 1$, we determine the alignment profiles of cluster galaxies by measuring the average alignments between the major axes of the pseudo inertia tensors from all satellites within cluster's virial radius and from only those satellites within some smaller radius as a function of the top-hat scale difference. The alignment profiles quantify how well the satellite galaxies retain the memory of the external tidal fields after merging into their host clusters and how fast they lose the initial alignment tendency as the cluster's relaxation proceeds. It is found that the alignment profile drops faster at higher redshifts and on smaller mass scales. This result is consistent with the picture that the faster merging of the satellites and earlier onset of the nonlinear effect inside clusters tend to break the preferential alignments of the satellites with the external tidal fields. Modeling the alignment profile of cluster galaxies as a power-law of the density correlation coefficient that is independent of the power spectrum normalization ($\sigma_{8}$) and demonstrating that the density correlation coefficient varies sensitively with the density parameter ($\Omega_{m}$) and neutrino mass fraction ($f_{\nu}$), we suggest that the alignment profile of cluster galaxies might be useful for breaking the $\Omega_{m}$-$\sigma_{8}$ and $f_{\nu}$-$\sigma_{8}$ degeneracies.Comment: accepted for publication in ApJ, Introduction and Conclusion sections improved, mistakes in plotting the figures corrected, detailed explanations for the dependence of the alignment profiles on the mass and redshift provided, 7 figures, 3 table

Thermal Dileptons from a Nonperturbative Quark-Gluon Phase

Assuming that gluon condensates are important even above the deconfining phase transition, we develop a model for the dilepton yield from a quark gluon plasma. Using a simple fire ball description of a heavy ion collision, and various estimates of the strengths of the gluon condensates, we compare our predicted dilepton yields with those observed in the CERES and HELIOS experiments at CERN. The simple model gives an adequate description of the data, and in particular it explains the observed considerable enhancement of the yield in the low mass region.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, reference adde