Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2023, Psychology

• Bullshit is an empty, and misleading form of communication that is a ubiquitous component of our society. Bullshit can be found in many areas including politics, the workplace, advertisements, and social media. Bullshit's prevalent usage and impact has led to the development of research on bullshit. Previous research has found multiple types of bullshit and has looked to relate it to various things such as cognitive ability, spreading of false news, and personality traits. Expanding upon this research, this present study examines the correlations between participant's frequency of bullshit transmission and receptivity to bullshit of both types of bullshit to the two (grandiose and vulnerable narcissism) and three-factor model of narcissism (antagonism, agentic extraversion, and narcissistic neuroticism). We hypothesized that those who are higher in narcissistic traits that encourage one to be flashy and impressive will positively associate to transmission of persuasive bullshit and those high in narcistic traits that encourage avoiding criticism will positively associate with transmission of evasive bullshit. Furthermore, we expect narcissist traits that are more skeptical of the world to negatively relate to bullshit receptivity. The findings show a positive association between narcissism antagonism and persuasive and evasive bullshit as well as agentic extraversion and persuasive bullshit. Results also showed narcissistic neuroticism was positively related to both persuasive and evasive bullshit. This study helps provide a base for the association between the types of bullshit and components of narcissism and gives further insight on how bullshit utilization is related to desires and motivations of different personality traits.

Committee: William Davis (Advisor) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Clinical Psychology; Personality; Personality Psychology; Psychology; Social Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2020, Urban Studies and Public Affairs

There has been a long-standing perception by the American public that bureaucrats are incompetent. Public administration scholars have studied the negative perceptions of bureaucrats and the work of these scholars has brought about a dichotomous characterization of bureaucrats. On one end, scholars characterized bureaucrats as incompetent individuals with truncated personalities who add to the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy (Hummel, 2008). At the other end scholars find bureaucrats to be ordinary individuals with a remarkable sense of purpose, competence, and dedication (Goodsell, 2015). The characterization of bureaucrats serves as the backdrop to the study's purpose which was to develop communicator profiles of government bureaucrats. Developing a taxonomy of profiles of their communicator styles and predispositions allowed us to gain an understanding of the competency levels, as it pertains to communication, that exist in current modern bureaucracies which supported and opposed the negative long-standing perception of the general American public toward bureaucrats. The taxonomy of communicator profiles may provide bureaucrats with self-awareness, and concrete understanding of their communication predispositions and styles when performing their jobs. This concrete knowledge may enable bureaucrats and their managers to seek ways in which to enhance communication styles and predispositions during service delivery as well as provide opportunities to mitigate their predispositions so that they may interact with the public in manner that is more in-line with that of responsible public service characterized by kindness, charity, and benevolence (French, 1983). A public sector workforce that interacts with the public with higher levels of communication competency creates an environment of perceived effectiveness, and citizens who come face-to-face with bureaucrats will experience a higher-level quality of service which in turn will ameliorate the perceptions h (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Raymond Cox III PhD (Committee Chair); Julia Beckett PhD (Committee Member); Namkyung Oh PhD (Committee Member); Andrew Rancer PhD (Committee Member); Heather Walter PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Public Administration

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2012, Environment and Natural Resources

Animal communication systems, which rely upon complex cognitive behavior, specific social contexts, and environments that permit effective transmission, are vulnerable to disruption by anthropogenic disturbance. Forests in urban landscapes are known to differ from rural forests in terms of vegetation, avian communities, and anthropogenic noise. Although these urban-associated differences can elicit demographic consequences, little is known about sub-lethal behavioral effects. Recent studies have implicated anthropogenic noise as a cause of changing bird song in urban areas; however, few have considered alternative explanations, nor the evolutionary and ecological consequences of altered songs. I investigated song variation in an urban landscape by asking the following questions: 1) How do the structural and behavioral components of bird song change across a rural-urban landscape gradient? 2) Which aspects of urbanization best predict changes in song properties? and 3) Does urbanization alter relationships among song, indicators of fitness and male quality? I investigated these questions by recording vocal behavior and monitoring the breeding activity of individually-marked male Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) at nine sites distributed across riparian forests within a rural to urban landscape gradient in central Ohio. Forests within urban versus rural landscapes differed ecologically so that urban forests had greater densities of conspecifics, denser understory vegetation with greater numbers of large trees, louder ambient noise (primarily from traffic), and smaller birds than more rural forests. As expected, cardinal song also changed with urbanization, with songs becoming longer, faster and with higher minimum, maximum and peak frequencies (Hz) as urbanization increased. Ambient noise at the territory level explained shifts in minimum frequency, whereas changes in conspecific densities best explained temporal variation in song structure (e.g., length an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amanda D. Rodewald PhD (Advisor); Douglas A. Nelson PhD (Committee Member); Mazeika S.P. Sullivan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Ecology

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2012, Communication

The Argumentativeness (ARG) and Verbal Aggressiveness (VA) scales have been used in hundreds of studies since their development. Numerous researchers have employed these scales in studies designed to explore differences in aggressive communication within and across cultures. Both scales have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Korean, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Romanian, and Slovakian, among others and have been found to be reliable and valid. However, neither scale had yet been translated or tested in the Spanish-language. In a globalized world community in which technological advances have made it possible to communicate instantly, it seems both logical and necessary to translate the two scales into a language that arguably has the second largest number of speakers in the world (329 million), is spoken in more than 44 countries, and has an overwhelmingly increasing population in the United States. The purpose of this study was to develop Spanish-language versions of the VA and ARG scales, and to test their validity and reliability in a Spanish-speaking country with native Spanish-language speakers. A total of 744 participants from three different universities in a northern state of Mexico took part in the study. The data analyses yielded a both valid and reliable Spanish-language VA and ARG scales. The universal characteristics of trait verbal aggressiveness and trait argumentativeness were supported.

Committee: Andrew Rancer Dr. (Advisor); Yang Lin Dr. (Committee Member); Heather Walter Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication