What Would You Be Feeling? An Exploration into the Relationship between Emotions and Bystander Intervention to Reduce Sexual Assault

Bystander intervention is thought to be an important strategy to reduce sexual assault toward women, and identifying predictors of bystander intervention may be key to developing effective protocols to increase bystander intervention in sexual risk situations. The dominant theoretical models of bystander intervention in the field primarily focus on cognitive decision-making while there has been less focus on emotional reactions as predictors of bystander intervention. Yet emotions, especially negative emotions, can motivate behavior that may relieve the negative emotions that were provoked by witnessing sexual assault. Thus, the purpose of this study was to fill these critical gaps in the literature; specifically, we sought to describe the different emotional reactions to witnessing a sexually risky situation between a male perpetrator and female victim as well as examine the connections between emotional reactions and bystander intervention. We used an existing dataset of 498 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. First, the participants viewed a written vignette that depicted a low or high sexual risk situation. All participants then responded to an open-ended question about their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in this situation. A team of three undergraduates analyzed the participants’ text reactions for emotions, the use of adverbs qualifying the emotions, and the targets of the emotions. Our hypotheses were that those who are in the high-risk condition would express more emotions overall than those in the low-risk condition, those who expressed emotion would be more likely to also have expressed intervention behaviors, higher certainty emotions would have stronger associations with intervention variables, and those who qualified their responses with adverbs would be more likely to also intervene. The first hypothesis was partially supported; those in the low-risk condition were more likely to express no emotion. The second hypothesis was fully supported; there was a significant association between expressing emotion and a continuous intervention variable. The third hypothesis was partially supported because upset and indifference were the only emotions to have a significant association with intervention. The fourth hypothesis was partially supported as those who used minimizing adverbs had a lower mean score on the continuous intervention variable, and those who used emphasizing adverbs had a higher score on the continuous intervention variable, while the association between adverb usage overall and intervention was null. Significant associations were found between specific emotions and intervention strategies, and intention to intervene in exploratory analyses. Limitations, implications, and future directions will be discussed

Relax and Recharge Club

An afterschool club that focuses on providing calming and stress relieving activities that also help them build healthy coping mechanisms to stress at a young age

Relax and Recharge Club

An afterschool club that focuses on providing calming and stress relieving activities that also help them build healthy coping mechanisms to stress at a young age

NEURAL NETWORK METHOD TO PREDICTING STANCE-PHASE GROUND REACTION FORCE IN DISTANCE RUNNERS

The purpose of this study was to use machine learning (i.e., artificial neural network – ANN), to predict vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) from tibial accelerations in runners with different foot strike patterns and at different running speeds. Thirty-eight healthy runners ran at three different speeds: the pace at which the runner spends most of their training time (LSD), 15% faster than LSD (LSD15), and 30% faster than LSD (LSD30). vGRF and IMU-based accelerations from the tibia were collected during the last 30 seconds at each speed. Tibial accelerations were used to calculate the resultant tibial acceleration (RTA). Time-series stance-phase vGRF and RTA from 34 subjects at all three speeds were used to train the ANN. Trials from two males and two females, who exhibited different foot-strike patterns, were used to test the ANN. The prediction error of the ANN was 102.4 N (1.6 N/kg or 0.16 BW) across the entire stance phase of running. The ability to predict GRF with an ANN and only RTA as input appears to be practical and feasible

Hope Global -- In Process Laser Cutter Blade Cleaning

Since 1883, Hope Global has been manufacturing and supplying various high quality and durable textiles to businesses and industries around the globe. Their most demanded product is the beaded profile which is used primarily in interior seat linings of trucks. [1] These are produced across four production lines and involves a 1000W laser cutter on each. In these laser cutters are configurations of aluminum blades that act as supports for the profiles running underneath the laser. When the laser makes its automated cuts, the polypropylene plastic of the beaded profile gets melted on to the blades. Over the course of continuous cutting, the melted plastic builds up these blades and becomes a problem. The current cleaning process of these blades involves the machine operator opening the laser cutter door which stops the laser from cutting. However, the profile is still fed through the line at 80 ft/min creating scrap. The time it takes the operator to clean each blade takes about two minutes per production line. The blades are usually cleaned two or three times per hour during a 21-hour work day, which, across four separate lines, creates huge amounts of scrap throughout the day. This immense amount of scrap causes significant material loss for Hope Global which means significant money lost. The scope of this project is to reduce the clean time of these blades as much as possible to reduce the scrap produced. Throughout the course of this semester, a design was formulated to help Hope Global with this problem. Extensive research was performed to generate ideas and explore similar design concepts and ideas. This search was two-fold; firstly, a scholarly literature search was performed, then a patent search. Unfortunately, because the laser cutter machine is custom built to fit Hope Global’s needs, there are no similar designs on the market today. Therefore, a bank of concepts was generated among group members and analyzed until a design concept was chosen for the foundation and continuation of the project. This concept was reviewed while considering the design specifications laid out later in this report, and continuously improved upon. After review, the design was constructed and proven to work in physical form. This provided evidence for an integral step in the design process, the proof of concept. After proving the basic design worked effectively, the process of optimizing the design began. Over the course of the Spring semester, the team prototyped and tested its proof of concept repeatedly. After numerous tests, it was determined a scraper design was more effective than a brush design. For the remainder of this semester, this scraper idea was applied to the prototype and optimized into the final product of the project. The design was proven to work very effectively and efficiently and was easy enough to operate by the machine operators to deem it as a viable and usable way to clean aluminum blade sin the laser cutter. Overall, the team’s work on this project was successful in completing the main objective from the beginning of the year

Modelling the impact of condition-dependent responses and lipid-store availability on the consequences of disturbance in a cetacean

This work was supported by the United States Office of Naval Research (awards N00014-17-1-2757 and N00014-19-1-2479).Lipid-store body condition is fundamental to how animals cope with environmental fluctuations, including anthropogenic change. As it provides an energetic buffer, body condition is expected to influence risk-taking strategies, with both positive and negative relationships between body condition and risk-taking posited in the literature. Individuals in good condition may take more risks due to state-dependent safety (‘ability-based’ explanation), or alternatively fewer risks due to asset protection and reduced need to undertake risky foraging (‘needs-based’ explanation). Such state-dependent responses could drive non-linear impacts of anthropogenic activities through feedback between body condition and behavioural disturbance. Here, we present a simple bioenergetic model that explicitly incorporates hypothetical body condition-dependent response strategies for a cetacean, the sperm whale. The model considered the consequences of state-dependent foraging cessation and availability of wax ester (WE) lipids for calf provisioning and female survival. We found strikingly different consequences of disturbance depending on strategy and WE availability scenarios. Compared with the null strategy, where responses to disturbance were independent of body condition, the needs-based strategy mitigated predicted reductions in provisioning by 10%–13%, while the ability-based strategy exaggerated reductions by 63%–113%. Lower WE availability resulted in more extreme outcomes because energy stores were smaller relative to the daily energy balance. In the 0% availability scenario, while the needs-based strategy reduced deaths by 100%, the ability-based strategy increased them by 335% relative to null and by 56% relative to the same strategy under the 5%–6.7% WE availability scenario. These results highlight that state-dependent disturbance responses and energy store availability could substantially impact the population consequences of disturbance. Our ability to set appropriate precautionary disturbance thresholds therefore requires empirical tests of ability- vs needs-based response modification as a function of body condition and a clearer understanding of energy store availability.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Gas Absorption Column Refurbishment

The purpose of this project was to refurbish the gas absorption column in the Moody Engineering Building for use as a supplement to some engineering classes. The group broke the project up into five subsections and each subsection was addressed based on different requirements. After completing the refurbishment, each subsystem was tested separately before the system was tested as a whole. After completing the final system test, the results were analyzed and grades given based on completion of goals for each subsystem. The final project was viewed as a success because the majority of work was completed and the system is operational such that it can be used in classes next year

Searches for Extremely Metal Poor Galaxies using ALFALFA-selected Dwarf Galaxies

We present a study of nearby dwarf galaxies selected from the ALFALFA blind HI survey. A primary goal of the project was to utilize a non-standard selection method with the hope of detecting previously unrecognized extremely metal-poor (XMP) galaxies. The study was motivated by the recent discovery of two XMP galaxies $-$ Leo P and Leoncino $-$ which were both originally found via the ALFALFA survey. We have obtained narrowband H$\alpha$ images for 42 dwarf systems, many of which are located in the local void in front of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster. Spectra for eleven of the best candidates resulted in the determination of metal abundances for ten of the systems. None were found to be extremely metal poor, although one system (AGC 123350) was found to have an oxygen abundance of log(O/H)+12 = 7.46, or $\sim$6\% solar. One of the galaxies in our sample exhibits a high oxygen abundance for its luminosity, suggesting the possibility that it may have a tidal origin.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, 4 table