The Experience of Micro and Macro Events: A Life-Span Analysis

This study investigated how individuals retrospectively construe their lives in terms of major life events. Ninety-nine participants sorted a set of personal and historical events in terms of perceived importance for their lives. Analyses of variance with repeated measures and rank comparisons were computed. Overall findings revealed no cohort differences with regard to the perception of life events. However, within-cohort differences were found, indicating that more life events were recalled from the young adult years. Those experiences were also perceived as having been more important in the participants' lives than events from other age segments. With regard to historical events, war-related experiences were among the highest ranked. Analyses of variance revealed intracohort differences but not intercohort differences, indicating higher scores for the time between 1930 and 1948 relative to other historical periods.

Human Preferences for Symmetry: Subjective Experience, Cognitive Conflict and Cortical Brain Activity

This study examines the links between human perceptions, cognitive biases and neural processing of symmetrical stimuli. While preferences for symmetry have largely been examined in the context of disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and autism spectrum disorders, we examine various these phenomena in non-clinical subjects and suggest that such preferences are distributed throughout the typical population as part of our cognitive and neural architecture. In Experiment 1, 82 young adults reported on the frequency of their obsessive-compulsive spectrum behaviors. Subjects also performed an emotional Stroop or variant of an Implicit Association Task (the OC-CIT) developed to assess cognitive biases for symmetry. Data not only reveal that subjects evidence a cognitive conflict when asked to match images of positive affect with asymmetrical stimuli, and disgust with symmetry, but also that their slowed reaction times when asked to do so were predicted by reports of OC behavior, particularly checking behavior. In Experiment 2, 26 participants were administered an oddball Event-Related Potential task specifically designed to assess sensitivity to symmetry as well as the OC-CIT. These data revealed that reaction times on the OC-CIT were strongly predicted by frontal electrode sites indicating faster processing of an asymmetrical stimulus (unparallel lines) relative to a symmetrical stimulus (parallel lines). The results point to an overall cognitive bias linking disgust with asymmetry and suggest that such cognitive biases are reflected in neural responses to symmetrical/asymmetrical stimuli.

Eugene Onegin As A Bridge Between Worlds: Aleksandr Pushkin As Translator Of The 19Th-Century Russian Experience

In my thesis, I use literary criticism, knowledge of Russian, and elements of translation theory to study the seminal poet of the Russian literary tradition ¿ Aleksandr Pushkin. In his most famous work, Eugene Onegin, Pushkin explores the cultural and linguistic divide in place at the turn of the 19th century in Russia. Pushkin stands on the peripheries of several colliding worlds; never fully committing to any of them, he acts as a translator between various realms of the 19th-century Russian experience. Through his narrator, he adeptly occupies the voices, styles, and modes of expression of various characters, displaying competency in all realms of Russian life. In examining Tatiana, his heroine, the reader witnesses her development as analogous to the author¿s. At the center of the text stands the act of translation itself: as the narrator ¿translates¿ Tatiana¿s love letter from French to Russian, the author-narrator declares his function as a mediator, not only between languages, but also between cultures, literary canons, social classes, and identities. Tatiana, as both main character and the narrator¿s muse, emerges as the most complex figure in the novel, and her language manifests itself as the most direct and capable of sincerity in the novel. The elements of Russian folklore that are incorporated into her language speak to Pushkin¿s appreciation for the rich Russian folklore tradition. In his exaltation of language considered to be ¿common¿, ¿low¿ speech is juxtaposed with its lofty counterpart; along the way, he incorporates myriad foreign borrowings. An active creator of Russia¿s new literary language, Pushkin traverses linguistic boundaries to synthesize a fragmented Russia. In the process, he creates a work so thoroughly tied to language and entrenched in complex cultural traditions that many scholars have argued for its untranslatability.