MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Much research has been devoted to understanding how the confidence of an eyewitness influences jurors' global assessments of the witness's credibility. However, even credible witnesses are likely to report well-remembered aspects of an event with certainty, and less well-remembered aspects of the same event with uncertainty. The current study assessed whether participants would believe all testimony provided by a given witness to the same extent, or whether they would instead selectively disbelieve those aspects of a witness's testimony that were delivered with uncertainty, while accepting as valid those pieces of testimony that were delivered with certainty. When belief in witness testimony was assessed at short retention intervals, participant-jurors selectively disbelieved uncertain pieces of witness testimony, and their belief ratings were well calibrated with the amount of uncertainty expressed (Experiment 1). However, after a delay of one week, participant-jurors evidenced inflated belief in uncertain testimony, and no sensitivity to the amount of uncertainty expressed (Experiment 2). Finally, delaying participant-jurors' belief ratings affected ratings of uncertain and certain testimony differently: Whereas belief in uncertain testimony increased over a one-week retention interval, belief in certain testimony remained nearly identical over the same interval (Experiment 3), thus showing that participant-jurors' memory for witness uncertainty was short-lived.

Committee: Maria Zaragoza (Advisor); William Merriman (Committee Member); Katherine Rawson (Committee Member); Beth Wildman (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Psychology

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2020, Philosophy (Arts and Sciences)

This paper attempts to answer a theoretical question: How can ordinary people reliably gain knowledge from an epistemic system—a social system designed to have knowledge—whose interests may not align with theirs? I begin by constructing a model in which ordinary people attempt to gain knowledge from an epistemic system. I argue that people can gain knowledge from an epistemic system, but this possibility depends on the level of trust people have in the epistemic system. I then modify the model to represent the epistemic relationship between ordinary people and epistemic systems in a minimally-democratic society. I argue that a democratic society requires that its citizens be able to access knowledge within public epistemic systems, insofar as that knowledge is necessary for informed, critical thinking about important public matters. I conclude by pointing out how distrust between epistemic systems can prevent the required distribution of knowledge to ordinary people.

Committee: Yoichi Ishida (Advisor); Christoph Hanisch (Committee Member); Jeremy Morris (Committee Member) Subjects: Epistemology; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Comparative Studies

As the number of forcibly displaced people increases globally, border crossing into Global North countries is often discussed as a crisis or emergency. Europe's recent "refugee crisis" illustrates the range of circumstances to which these discourses refer: humanitarian issues requiring urgent response; institutional crises, given the insufficiency of extant systems and structures to accommodate arriving migrants; or dangers for local and national communities who perceive the arrival of outsiders as a threat to their security and cultural identity. In Witnessing Emergency: Testimonial Narratives of Precarious Migration to Italy, I argue that in Italy, a key port of entry for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, the "emergency imaginary" that has shaped public and political responses to migrant arrivals perpetuates the idea that Africa-Europe migration via the Mediterranean Sea is sudden, unforeseen, and detached from historical mobilities. In fact, the recent crisis bears echoes of longer histories of transit, in particular between former African colonies and former European colonizing powers. To map the stakes and contours of "emergency," and to understand its limits and omissions, this dissertation examines how media and political framings of irregular Mediterranean migration as a crisis or emergency enable the racialization of migrants and obscure the colonial relations that continue to shape notions of identity and otherness in Italy and across Europe. I interrogate these framings through testimonial transactions that contextualize and challenge emergency discourses. The testimonies I put in conversation include published life writing (memoir and documentary film) that centers migrant experiences; oral history interviews I conducted with migrants, staff, and volunteers at multiple reception sites in Italy in 2017, 2018, and 2019; and a set of encounters in urban spaces and art installations. The transactions reflected in or mobilized through thes (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dana Renga (Advisor); Amy Shuman (Advisor); Ashley Pérez (Committee Member); Julia Watson (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Cultural Anthropology; Ethnic Studies; European Studies; Film Studies

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2019, Psychology - Experimental

Children's narrative accounts play a major role in cases of alleged child maltreatment. Case outcomes are highly dependent upon the statements children provide during forensic interviews. Bilingual children are vastly underrepresented in the forensic interviewing literature despite the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. The present study compared monolingual (n = 31) and bilingual (n = 34) preschool-aged children's ability to provide meaningful reports about a staged event following a delay. Additionally, we examined group differences in resistance to suggestion, language abilities, and executive functioning. Bilingual and monolingual children's narrative quality scores and performance on suggestive questions did not differ significantly. Individual difference factors such as age, language abilities, and executive functioning were significantly correlated with narrative quality and resistance to suggestion. Explanations for the findings and forensic implications are discussed.

Committee: Kamala London (Committee Chair); Jason Rose (Committee Member); Stephen Christman (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2019, Latin American Studies

The Buenos Aires Herald has a rich history in Buenos Aires, Argentina as a long-standing English-language newspaper that actively bore witness to the repression of the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship. In production since the 1800s and the sole English-language newspaper from 1959 until its closure in 2017, the Herald provided news, community updates, and credible journalism to the English-speaking community in Argentina and the world. The Herald is survived by its human rights legacy during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1976 until 1983, Argentina was under the control of a military dictatorship, characterized by state-sponsored terrorism and the severe repression of human rights. For the eight long years of the dictatorship, the majority of the Argentinean press failed to report on the human rights abuses taking place, instead reporting the official position presented by the military or not reporting on the events at all. However, one newspaper in particular consistently reported the truth of the events taking place throughout the entirety of the dictatorship. The Buenos Aires Herald was able to document the repression and state-sponsored terrorism taking place during the dictatorship while most other papers were censored and forced into silence. As an English-language newspaper, the Herald occupied a unique space. Managed by mostly British expats in Argentina and owned by a company in the United States, the Herald had the support of the British government and certain protections and freedom that Argentinean papers lacked. Under the guidance of editor Robert Cox, this freedom was employed to cover the disappearances and killings taking place at great length, saving many lives along the way and making the repression known throughout the world. This thesis creates a space for understanding the capacity of the press to serve as a witness to repressive historical events. It introduces new primary source materials on the Argentinean dictatorsh (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ana Del Sarto (Advisor); Abril Trigo (Committee Member); Terrell Morgan (Committee Member) Subjects: Journalism; Latin American History; Latin American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2016, Psychology - Experimental

Children involved in maltreatment investigations often discuss allegations with their mothers before formal reports are made to authorities. The primary purpose of the current study was to evaluate the amount and the accuracy of information children reported to their mothers about a non-shared experience. Children aged 4- to 7-years-old (N = 142) individually participated in a staged event and discussed the experience with their mothers approximately six-days later. Prior to interviewing children, mothers were provided with some details about the non-shared event. Accurately-biased mothers had accurate information about the event. Inaccurately-biased mothers had both accurate and inaccurate information about the experience. Individual difference factors including children's age, maternal reminiscing style, and attachment quality were hypothesized to moderate the relationship between maternal bias and children's reports. The results revealed older children had highly reliable reports regardless of maternal bias or maternal reminiscing style. However, younger children with inaccurately biased and high elaborative mothers reported less accurate and more inaccurate information about the event compared to younger children with inaccurately-biased and low elaborative mothers. Additionally, children of mothers with insecure attachment quality reported fewer details and made more inaccurate statements regarding the event. Results suggest that the mnemonic consequence of discussing past experiences with mothers varies depending on maternal bias, children's age, maternal reminiscing style, and attachment quality. Forensic and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Committee: Kamala London PhD (Committee Chair); Stephen Christman PhD (Committee Member); Sarah Francis PhD (Committee Member); Jason Rose PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Pescara-Kovach PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Developmental Psychology; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2016, Counselor Education and Supervision

College students with mental illness benefit from counseling services to overcome barriers to success. Resident Advisors (RAs) can refer students, but need education and training to decrease the effects of mental health stigma. The purpose of this study was to determine if anti-stigma interventions produced differences in mental health stigma in the RA population. In this study, 94 RAs participated in interventions involving education and personal testimony. Three published instruments were selected to measure mental health stigma. The Separate-Sample Pretest-Posttest Design 12c (Campbell & Stanley, 1963) was used to separate participants into two groups. Paired samples and independent samples t-tests were calculated to determine within and between group results. Results showed that public stigma and one factor of self-stigma was less from time one to time two. Effect sizes were mostly in the small to medium range. In addition, post-test scores were not sensitized by pre-test scores with any of the measures. Limitations include reliability of one of the instruments and generalizability to other populations. Implications for counseling center personnel, Residence Life staff, and university administrators are discussed as well as future directions for research.

Committee: John Laux Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Debra Harmening Ph.D. (Committee Member); Caroline O'Hara Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christopher Roseman Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Counseling Education; Higher Education; Mental Health; Social Structure

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

This project explores how U.S. women of color detective fiction novels interpret and revise methods for obtaining and transmitting knowledge while operating within political and economic climates that discipline and occlude oppositional narratives, historiographies, and identifications. U.S. women of color detective fiction emerged in the early 1990s during a time when institutions began to incorporate historically marginalized perspectives, but also when American and transnational corporate initiatives sought to stigmatize and profit from poor women of color. The novels featured in this project make use of a genre that is invested in creating exceptionally intelligent and capable detectives who seek to identify and correct social injustice. In the process, these novels employ historiographic epistemologies that are typically elided in Anglo-European philosophical and narrative productions. Historiographic epistemologies are theories concerning the encoding and transmission of knowledge that also serve as mediations regarding the composition of history, testimony, and narrative. Through the use of historiographic epistemologies, U.S. women of color detective fiction novels reveal the creative and narrative-building aspects of logical reasoning employed by detective fiction and rationalist discourse more broadly. Moving from the local with Barbara Neely's Blanche on the Lam, to the transnational with Lucha Corpi's Black Widow's Wardrobe and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders, to the global with Charlotte Carter's Coq au Vin and Lupe Solano's Havana Nights, this project identifies connections and distinctions among these texts that in turn enable a more nuanced understanding of how precarity is constituted through the pervasive, implicit division between domestic (white) space and public (surveillanced) space. In their use of a genre that reflects institutional and social structural alignments and in their employment of non-European epistemolo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Linda Mizejewski (Committee Chair); Lynn Itagaki (Advisor); Theresa Delgadillo (Advisor) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; American Literature; American Studies; Asian American Studies; Black Studies; Caribbean Literature; Caribbean Studies; Comparative Literature; Epistemology; Ethnic Studies; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Latin American History; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Native American Studies; Performing Arts; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2014, College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences

A growing body of literature demonstrates that child witnesses are frequently asked to recall conversations during forensic investigations. The present study examined children's (n = 90) ability to recall a dyadic conversation after a one-week or three-week delay. Children were questioned about the target conversation using free recall and recognition style questioning during the memory test. Children's overall accuracy and characteristics of their memory reports were examined. Children in the one-week delay condition accurately reported significantly more of the conversation than children in the three-week delay condition, but free recall of the conversation was low for children in both conditions. The majority of what children recalled from the conversation was accurate. Additionally, when asked to recall the conversation in its entirety, children had a strong tendency to recall what they said from the target conversation and rarely recalled utterances said by their conversational partner. Memory for self-generated and partner-generated utterances did not differ during recognition testing. Memory for the structure of the conversation was low in both delay conditions and across all question types. Forensic implications and future directions are discussed.

Committee: Kamala London PhD (Advisor); Stephen Christman PhD (Committee Member); A. John McSweeny JD, PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, French and Italian

This dissertation proposes a new theory of translation to explain how trauma testimony is performed by survivors who have experienced a death of their selves. It shows that certain 20th century French and Francophone authors translate their voices across languages, literary genres, and bodies (both human and animal) in order to testify of trauma when they are no longer able to bear witness in the first-person. The two French works studied-- Journal (2008) by Helene Berr and La Douleur [The War] (1985) by Marguerite Duras-- exhibit translations by the authors to different subject-positions within themselves. Berr translates across languages to negotiate between different socio-linguistically constructed identities and cites English literature to speak in her stead when she is no longer able to voice her experiences. On the other hand, Duras translates across different literary genres (autobiography, auto-fiction, and fiction) in order to recreate a sense of self and increase her capacity for emotional expression. The two Francophone works studied--Djamila Boupacha (1962) by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi and Le passe devant soi [The Past Ahead] (2008) by Gilbert Gatore--exhibit translation movements across bodies. Djamila Boupacha translates her voice to Gisele Halimi, her Tunisian-French lawyer, and to Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist author, in order to testify of the torture she endured during the Algerian War. Each time that Boupacha's testimony is re-voiced, it is transformed due to differences in the three women's social positioning. Gatore translates his identity across a series of fictional selves (each of which exists in the imagination of the previous one) in order to verbalize the unsayable and the unknowable experiences of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While a translation to human bodies allows him to express the unsayable, translation onto animal bodies is necessary to express the unknowable. In all four works, the first translation movement cr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer Willging (Advisor); Cheikh Thiam (Committee Member); Danielle Marx-Scouras (Committee Member); Maurice Stevens (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; Comparative Literature; European Studies; Health; Modern Literature; Psychology; Sociolinguistics; Sub Saharan Africa Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, EDU Teaching and Learning

The purpose of the research was to investigate how students, teacher and text intersected to develop interpretations and understandings of “edgy” literature. Aronson (2001) states that young adult literature includes texts which address, “the profoundest, deepest, and richest issues that we face as a nation” (p.8). The mediation of one such young adult novel, Night Fires (Stanley, 2009) is the focus of this teacher research, which took place with a class of urban sixth grade students during the 2011-2012 school year. The ways students interpreted and understood the text were analyzed through the theoretical frames of critical literacy, testimony and dialogism. These theories do not fully align with one another; however the data shows how they can work together in the analysis of a mediation. Data are drawn from a qualitative teacher research study conducted in an urban sixth grade English class located in a large Midwestern city. Teacher research positions the researcher as an insider whose first responsibility teacher and not researcher (Baumann & Duffy-Hester, 2002). Within this research project, having my students as my primary responsibility meant that I was not an unbiased observer, instead I worked to understand the mediation of the novel through my knowledge of the students and through theoretical lenses and related research. In order to better understand how my students were interpreting the novel, I also worked to understand the research context – an urban middle school in a diverse community – from the students' perspective. This allowed me to recognize and honor how the students defined themselves and their community, as opposed to imposing the label “urban”. This aspect of the research facilitated both my teaching and the research as the intersections of the students' urban location and the novel became a part of the mediation. Data analysis of six episodes from the novel mediation shows that the students, text and teacher intersected and interacted in a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Enciso (Advisor); Valerie Kinloch (Committee Member); Linda Parsons (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Literacy; Literature

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, African-American and African Studies

This paper will examine the narrative construction and varied perspectives of two novels that with others make up the Fest' Africa Commemorative Project “Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember”. The two texts are Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi, the Book of Bones (Bloomington, 2000) and Veronique Tadjo's The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (Johannesburg, 2002). Diop is a famous Senegalese journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. His most recent novel Doomi Golo (Dakar, 2006) is among the first few novels written in Wolof. Tadjo was born in France and grew up in Cote d'Ivoire. She is a poet, writer, and novelist, also well known for her creative illustrations in children's books. Some of Tadjo's works include the novel A vol d'oiseau [As the Crow Flies] (Paris, 2001) and Talking Drums (England, 2000) an anthology of poems from various African artists. Fest' Africa was a Francophone African initiative formed with the purpose of conveying experiences of the Rwandan genocide as well as the authors' own experiences during their visit in 1998, four years after the massacre. A number of questions necessarily arise for a representational enterprise of this sort. How are the traumatic experiences of Rwandans tellable? What renders texts like Diop's and Tadjo's legitimate in wider discourse on the modes of production, memory, and the archive of testimonies on traumatic experiences of the genocide? Can we ‘read' Patricia Yaeger's concept of ‘empathy-denial' in these testimonial narratives? Where in these stories does one find spaces of "empathy contestation" in their depiction of the actors involved with the event? Could it not be argued that what occurred in Rwanda in 1994 pushes against the very limits of the narrative conventions and frames that attempt to make sense of the event? What are the sites of disruption of one's usual expectations of a testimonio, autobiography, or fictive account when a text attempts to capture the sheer horror of what someone saw or (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Korang Kwaku PhD (Committee Chair); Luphenga Mphande PhD (Advisor); Maurice Stevens PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Physical Activity and Educational Services

Vocational experts are increasingly being called upon to provide testimony in a variety of legal arenas. To ensure that experts possess appropriate qualifications and apply valid and reliable methodologies, courts have introduced strict standards to prevent incompetent professionals from testifying on forensic matters. Despite the recent growth of the field, no formal training program exists that is designed to prepare individuals for providing vocational testimony. Further, no universally accepted certification exists specifically for vocational witnesses which attest to their attained status as an expert in the field. Professionals in the field of vocational testimony were surveyed to assess the need for formal training and certification. Four primary questions were posed to identify the need for training, the content to be included, the means of disseminating training, and whether certification should be required of the field. Results indicate that a training program is indeed desired, with a variety of topics offered through a blend of on-site and web-based instruction. It was further found that certification remains a controversial topic, with mixed support for the creation of a valid certification process, currently seen as lacking in the field. This dissertation makes recommendations for the creation of a formal training program and certification process for professionals testifying on vocational matters in a court of law.

Committee: Bruce Growick (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2008, English

In this dissertation I analyze the public writing produced at the Hindman Settlement School, a rural social settlement founded on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Appalachian Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century. Modeled after urban settlement houses, the Hindman school was founded by two women who sought to redress the perceived poverty and illiteracy of Appalachia with classes on reading, writing, and domestic arts. Methodologically informed by both classical rhetorical analysis and feminist historiography, I reclaim the settlement women as savvy rhetoricians who deployed their arguments through the letters, pamphlets, and serialized novels mailed frequently to a nationwide donor base. In Ciceronian terms, the settlement founders would likely have claimed that these fundraising documents were meant to move readers-to exhort them to action. In so doing, however, the settlement women were also instructing a bourgeois Bluegrass, Midwestern, and Northeastern readership, defining eastern Kentucky (and, accordingly, the entire mountain region) for readers wholly unfamiliar with the land, people, and customs. In their rhetorical stances and methods of appeal, the settlement women construct a simultaneously compelling and troubling version of Appalachia for an audience removed from the mountains in nearly every imaginable way. The rhetoric of the Hindman Settlement School-which includes the invention of mountain topoi, the use of fiction as a rhetorical genre, and the manipulation of testimony as a rhetorical strategy-therefore constitutes an important chapter in the evolving history of "Appalachia" as a cultural invention.

Committee: Dr. Katharine Ronald (Committee Chair); Dr. LuMing Mao (Committee Member); Dr. Morris Young (Committee Member); Dr. Mary Frederickson (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2004, English

This study uses the African churches in Philadelphia in the 1790s and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy trials in Charleston in 1822 as focal points of inquiry into intersections of race and rhetoric in the Early Republic (1783-1828). I invite scholars in rhetoric and composition to reconsider this period as a crucial site of investigation for a field devoted to elaborating its history and understanding the widest array of rhetorical practices. This “extracurricular” history of rhetoric demonstrates that the Early Republic holds insight into rhetorical relations among others than the cultural elite. The vernacular, material rhetorics discussed here illustrate ways that different groups of blacks deployed verbal, written, and bodily language to manage the complex sociopolitical world of postrevolutionary America. Testimony, which I define as the material and embodied performance of truth, links these key events in African American rhetorical history and provides an overarching frame for my analysis. In the first chapter, I outline the historiographical issues undergirding the project. The next one situates testimony as a discursive and rhetorical form within ancient and modern contexts. I identify trials, both spiritual and legal, as loci for rhetorical activity for Philadelphia and Charleston blacks. Chapter Three examines the role of bodily testimony in the conversion experiences and ordinary lives of Philadelphia's first black Methodists in relation to contemporaneous evidentiary debates about revealed religion. I read two cultural texts, a painting and a pamphlet, as direct evidence of whites' postrevolutionary anxiety about blacks' new sociopolitical freedoms, and as indirect evidence of blacks' effective uses of their bodies in various “rhetorical trials.” The fourth chapter treats the persuasiveness of slave testimony in the trials of alleged slave conspirators. I analyze the way in which a bodily form of testimony, which I call “tortured truth,” or physical coerci (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Susan Jarratt (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Rhetoric and Composition

MA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Source confusions between witnessed events and post-event suggestions are more likely to occur when the suggested information helps to explain the causal factors that contributed to the event's outcome. With evidence suggesting that human involvement in a causal chain (either deliberate or unintentional) is a more "satisfying" explanation than the involvement of a purely physical agent (such as wear-and-tear or weather,) the current study sought to answer whether such false memory formation might occur at higher rates for post-event suggestions of human causes than for suggested physical causes. Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis by providing 139 university undergraduate participants with original story events in audio narrative form, then introducing a post-event suggestion regarding a human-deliberate, human-unintended, or purely physical cause for the story outcome, and finally assessing source misattributions through a free recall task. Participants reliably misremembered all three types of post-event causal suggestion as having been part of the original story event, but as predicted, the likelihood of falsely recalling causal post-event information depended on the type of cause that was suggested, with suggested human causes -- either deliberate or unintended -- being misattributed to the original event at higher rates than suggested physical causes. Experiment 2 examined the hypothesis in a sample of 105 university undergraduates with a recognition source test instead of a free recall task. While there was a significant effect of post-event suggestion versus control (no additional causal information,) participants did not misremember human causes as having been part of the original event at a higher rate than physical, as they had in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 1 clearly support the hypothesis, but the results of Experiment 2, while not altogether inconsistent with the underlying expectations, raise perplexing possibilities that beg further invest (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Maria Zaragoza PhD (Advisor); William Merriman PhD (Committee Member); John Akamatsu PhD (Committee Member); John Dunlosky PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

PHD, Kent State University, 2010, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Chrobak and Zaragoza (2008) demonstrated that participants were prone to developing false memories for entire fictitious events that they had earlier been forced to fabricate. The current research was designed to test the hypothesis that participants would be more likely to develop false memories for their forced fabrications when they provided a causal explanation for observed events than when the fabrications did not serve this explanatory role (the explanatory role hypothesis). Experiments 1 and 2 employed similar methodologies, differing only in the memory measure administered at final test. Participants viewed an eyewitness event, were forced to fabricate an entire fictitious event during a subsequent interview, and then returned 6 weeks later for a memory test. The primary manipulation involved the nature of the relationship between the fabricated and witnessed events. In the Explanatory condition, participants' fabrications helped explain outcomes witnessed in the video. However, in Non-Explanatory condition, the fabrications no longer filled this same role – because the related consequence scenes were replaced by unrelated scenes. Overall, participants were more likely to freely report (Experiment 1) and falsely assent to (Experiment 2) their fabrications when they helped explain events witnessed in the video. In Experiment 3, all participants viewed the same eyewitness event. The explanatory strength of participants' forced fabrications was manipulated by varying whether or not participants received an alternative explanation for the events their fabrication helped to explain. Immediately following the forced fabrication interview, participants read narratives that provided additional information about several characters in the video. In the Alternative Explanation (AE) condition, some of the information in the narrative could be used to provide an alternative explanation for the viewed critical outcomes in the video (fabrication had low explanatory streng (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Maria Zaragoza Ph.D. (Advisor); William Merriman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Katherine Rawson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christopher Was Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nancy Docherty Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

PHD, Kent State University, 2009, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

A significant gap in current criticism surrounding Charlotte Bronte's novels has led to a superficial rendering of her primary characters, situating them as mere autobiographical products of a certain place and a certain time. My study, “‘The Events of My Insignificant Existence': Traumatic Testimony in Charlotte Bronte's Fictional Autobiographies,” fills this gap by establishing Bronte's primary characters as complex individuals who cannot be oversimplified and defined by their gender or their historical moment and who are not limited by their creator's frame of reference. To provide a deservedly deeper and more illuminating explication of her work, this study furthers a critical understanding of Bronte's narrative structures in her fictional autobiographies – The Professor (1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853) – through the application of trauma theory, a theoretical stance that has yet to be utilized in analyzing any of her novels. Bronte's primary characters are each defined by a traumatic event that took root on a sub-conscious level, causing their moral and psychological growth to decline, if not cease, as evidenced by repetitive patterns of behavior that occur throughout the novels. These patterns are indicative of an originary trauma and reveal that not only are the narrators discontented in their life choices but they are writing their autobiographies as a means of providing testimony to their continued struggle with trauma in an attempt to master that trauma and experience a true revelation of self. This study covers each novel, looking at the narrator's autobiographic representation of life events as traumatic testimony with the public forum of the novel allowing the reader to serve as witness. Approaching Bronte's novels in this manner (through trauma theory) sheds insight into the traumatic stimulus of these works, mirrored in the characters who, as individuals, reveal the truth of their lives that is not entirely represented in their fictional aut (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Vera J. Camden PhD (Committee Chair); Claire Culleton PhD (Committee Member); Anne Hiebert Alton PhD (Committee Member); Leonne Hudson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Literature; Psychology

Bachelor of Arts, Marietta College, 2013, Psychology

The objective of this two part study was to determine if knowledge of a future public presentation of an eyewitness testimony could obviate positive post-identification feedback effects. All participants had to watch a video that depicted a young male stealing a laptop computer, making them an eyewitness to a crime. Following the video, an identification from a photo line-up had to be made and regardless of the identification, all participants were given positive feedback. A series of post-identification questions were answered and participants in the experimental group were told that when they returned to the lab for part two of the study they would be giving a public presentation of their eyewitness testimony while those in the control group were told no such thing. The post-identification questions had to be answered during part two of the study and an additional question pertaining to confidence was answered as well. A two-tailed independent samples test was used to reveal any differences in participant confidence between groups. Additionally, an ANOVA was used to analyze the effect of time and public presentation expectation on answers to the post-identification questions. The implications of this study are reviewed in the discussion section.

Committee: Christopher Klein (Advisor); Alicia Doerflinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology