Following the events of the 2016 United States Presidential election, evidence emerged of a Russian-led effort to influence the American people via social media. Through a Kremlin-backed organization known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), computational propaganda was conducted against the American people on a variety of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. As part of the ongoing Mueller Investigation and in the name of political transparency, Twitter released a data archive of Tweets and user information for bot and troll accounts linked to the IRA. Prior research completed by data scientists at the University of Washington has revealed that IRA accounts infiltrated the Black Lives Matter discourse community on Twitter. Building off of this work and using the publicly available Twitter dataset, I have analyzed the messaging tactics used by the IRA over time in relation to the Black Lives Matter discourse community on Twitter. I will randomly sample Tweets relating to Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and other related topics beginning in 2009 and ending in 2018, which is when the dataset ends. I use RStudio, Tableau, and other data analytic systems to identify trends, patterns, and messaging themes used by the IRA while they were infiltrating this online discourse community. As an area studies scholar, I provide a more comprehensive understanding of Russian tactics in addition to the data analysis. By examining the methods used by foreign agents when impersonating Americans on social media, I expand the knowledge base about this online effort and highlight themes or trends that could be used by similar groups in the future.

Memes have emerged in the last decade as tools for political commentary, and in some cases, a force for political mobilization. The purpose of this research is to add empirical and methodological data to the emerging field of memetic study by comparing and contrasting two case studies: (1) Britain leaving the European Union (i.e., Brexit) and, (2) the recent 2018-2019 US government shutdown. I collected memes from the social media blogging platform Tumblr from January to early April 2019. I then analyzed the stance and tone conveyed through the template, text, and visuals of the memes to yield insight into how memes impact internet communities that spread them. More importantly, I examine how the internet environment surrounding memes influence them. I expect the analysis of the data to show that memes have responded similarly in both case studies but their dissemination networks and spreading patterns are different. The implications of this study concern how people use online forums to react to perceived threats towards democratic institutions and the democratic process. The research also provides insight to how we consume and produce objects on the internet and how we might act as citizens as the borders separating the online-offline world erodes.

By their second birthday, toddlers help others. Moreover, infants as young as 9 months of age can detect others’ needs. Yet it is unclear if early helping behavior is based on and motivated by an underlying assessment of others’ needs, or motivated by other factors, like the desire to socially interact or affiliate with others. Here, we investigate whether toddlers utilize an experimenter’s needs when helping. We presented N=24, 24-month-old toddlers with two helping tasks: a puzzle and hunger-or-thirst task. In the puzzle task, toddlers watched an actor fail to complete a puzzle due to a missing puzzle-piece. Toddlers then had the opportunity to help the actor by either bringing her a puzzle-piece that fit the puzzle (need-fulfilling) or a puzzle-piece that did not fit the puzzle (not need fulfilling). Overall, toddlers were more likely to help with the puzzle-piece that fulfilled the actor’s need than the puzzle-piece that did not fulfill the actor’s need, p=.008. In the hunger-or-thirst task, the actor told toddlers that she was either hungry or thirsty. Toddlers could help the actor by giving her one of three different items: (a) cereal, (b) water, or (c) a shoe. Here, toddlers brought the needed item (e.g. cereal if she was hungry) at chance, p=.11. However, toddlers were more likely to bring the needed or the thematically related item (e.g. water if she was hungry) significantly more than chance, p<.001. Our findings provide initial evidence that 24-month-old toddlers are motivated to help based on others’ concrete needs: toddlers brought the needed puzzle-piece. However, toddlers have a harder time helping appropriately when the actor’s need is internal and therefore more abstract; hence, the equal likeliness to help with the needed and related item during the hunger-or-thirst task.

Understanding prosocial behavior, the concern for the welfare of others, is critical to navigating the social world. Here, we investigated the nature of infants’ understanding of prosociality by asking whether they expect those who are fair (i.e. those who distribute resources equally) to also be trustworthy (i.e. respect someone else’s property). We showed 32 22-month-olds videos of two actors, one who distributes goods fairly (3:3) and another who distributes goods unfairly (5:1). Using eye-tracking, we captured infants’ active and passive expectations about the trustworthiness of these actors when both were warned by a third character, a toy-owner: “Don’t touch my toy”. When she left the room and came back to find the toy missing, she asked “Where is my toy?”. We predicted that more infants would give anticipatory looks towards the unfair actor than towards the fair actor, suggesting that infants expected the unfair actor to have stolen the toy (i.e., active expectations). Next, infants either saw the fair actor steal the toy (n=16) or the unfair actor steal the toy (n=16). Here, we predicted infants would look longer at display when the fair actor stole the toy, a signal that this event violated their expectations (i.e. passive expectations). Additionally, we were interested in how social-environmental factors may influence infants’ expectations. Thus, we also investigated the influence of siblings on infants’ expectations. Findings revealed that infants with siblings looked anticipatorily at the unfair actor while infants without siblings looked anticipatorily at the fair actor. Additionally, infants who saw the unfair actor steal the toy looked longer at the display. This may be explained by infants looking longer at the actor whose behavior they found most interesting. Together, these findings provide insight into infants’ understanding of various sociomoral traits and how this understanding may be influenced by social-environmental factors.

Establish-Maintain-Restore (EMR) is a professional development training for teachers to strengthen their relationships with their students. Previous studies have shown that the strategies presented in the training have significantly improved academically engaged time and reduced disruptive behavior among elementary and middle school students. The proposed study will examine 9th grade high school student perceptions of the appropriateness and effectiveness of the EMR strategies to improve student-teacher relationships within the school context. Additionally, this study will analyze whether there is a significant difference in these perceptions between the genders of students. It is predicted that male students will tend to perceive the EMR strategies as less effective and appropriate in improving student-teacher relationships compared to their female peers. A focus group was held to present the EMR strategies to 9th grade students at a racially/ethnically diverse high school in the Pacific Northwest. After the strategies were presented, students were asked to provide ratings and comments regarding the appropriateness and effectiveness of each individual strategy. The students were asked about the following items for each of the EMR strategies: appropriateness for school context, appropriateness for both students and teachers, and effectiveness at improving relationships with high school students. Findings from this study will offer insight for improving student-teacher relationships with consideration for the students’ genders. Research has shown that strong student-teacher relationships can serve as a protective factor against high school dropout, and this study may help provide information about culturally responsive strategies to reduce the dropout rates among students of color and male students.

Morality has significant social importance as it influences the way we interact with others. We know that adults and children (aged 3-11) expect all groups to follow moral norms such as fairness, but only in-group members to follow non-moral norms like certain food preferences (Liberman, 2017). It remains unknown if this applies to infants. Studying infants’ moral sensitivities will shed light on the origins of morality, and it will give us insights on its socialization. We are investigating infants’ expectations about in-group and out-group members performing actions that are consistent/inconsistent with moral norms (i.e., distributing resources fairly/unfairly) and actions that are consistent/inconsistent with non-moral norms (i.e., using an object according to its established function or unconventionally). In Study 1, 24-month olds (N=32, testing ongoing) are first familiarized to a storyteller speaking English (in-group) or Spanish (out-group). Infants are then shown the storyteller doing a fair (equal) or an unfair (unequal) distribution of cookies to two third parties. We are measuring, via infants’ visual attentiveness, whether they expect fair or unfair resource distributions. We predict that infants will show enhanced attentiveness to the unfair event, thereby suggesting what they saw violated their expectations. During piloting, infants in both conditions looked longer at the unfair distribution (English-Unfair: M=32.44 seconds (SE=9.09), Fair: M=28.8 seconds, (SE=15.4), Spanish-Unfair: M=27.8 (SE=15.2), Fair: M=17.3 (SE=5.39), providing preliminary support for our hypothesis. We are also testing how non-moral norms translate across group boundaries. After the same familiarization events as before, the test trial shows an unconventional action (ie. brushing your hair with a fork) pitted against a convention one (ie. eating with a fork). We predict that non-moral norms will be group-specific because they should be seen as culturally dependent and not encompasing. In sum, these findings will provide important new insights into the origins of morality.

Information warfare is not a new Russian Federation tactic, or its predecessor state the USSR, but the digital age has allowed for a severe increase in the ease and ability to carry out operations. Information war, an overarching term that includes cyberwar, influencing policy outcomes with ill-gotten information, and propaganda campaigns. Russia’s operations are expanding and increasing in number with Russian state affiliated hackers, troll armies, and bots influencing the globe. In spite of the prevalence of this action, there is a lack of databases that track all Russia’s entire information campaign in its entirety. I am building a dataset using open source methods, including research in English, Russian, and French. The dataset currently contains 78 incidents spanning 30 countries. My initial findings indicate that Russian policymakers have three overarching objectives; (1) re-establishing Russian dominance in the post-communist/Russian sphere of influence, (2) undermining western economic, political, and cultural influence globally, and (3) expanding Russia’s political, economic, and military hegemony to all corners of the globe. I have found that although Russia's overall global strategy may seem somewhat straightforward, how that plays out in each region and country differs. The ways which Russia’s goals are customized on the basis of political landscape, historical background, culture, and religion. Often times, Russian actors will choose a simple disinformation campaign through the local media, but in other circumstances more intensive measures are used by way of hacker groups.

Journalists play a vital role in science communication. As media coverage of science is the gateway for the general public to engage in scientific issues, journalists are responsible for presenting understandable and reliable scientific news. What journalists report on and the underlying tones of their depictions largely shape how lay audience perceive science. Peer-reviewed journals serve to be journalists’ main source of information. The ongoing replication crisis in studies of life and social science, however, indicates that publication in a scholarly venue is not enough to acknowledge the validity of a study anymore. This leads to the question of how journalists determine whether the result of a study is robust enough to communicate to the public. The goal of this research is to understand how journalists interpret scientific findings and how uncertainties in scientific research impact journalists' decision-making. To understand these questions, I have interviewed journalists about their evaluation criteria of assessing the reliability of scientific findings in their depictions. I have also delivered surveys to draw insights about how journalists interpret quantitative reports from scientific researches, and how different factors, such as statistical significance mean or sample size, may affect journalists' judgement about the reliability of the studies they report on. This study, qualitative in nature, contributes to understanding how aware journalists are to uncertainties in science as well as to possibly suggesting ways to improve accuracy and reliability in science news.

About 3.1 million adolescents are diagnosed yearly with depression. Adolescent onset of depression is associated with acute or chronic difficulties in physical, mental, and psychosocial functioning. However, over 60% of adolescents with depression do not receive mental health care, and, among those who do, treatment engagement is low. Behavioral Activation (BA) is an evidence-based psychosocial intervention for individuals with depression. While BA holds promise as an effective treatment, researchers have found that adolescents may be better reached and engaged through social and mobile technologies. In addition, BA requires frequent interaction from patients over time, which can be difficult and costly to administer in-person. There is an opportunity to improve the usability of and engagement with EBPIs via online technologies. Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) is a promising technology-based approach for engaging adolescents that leverages technology’s reach while providing support, social interactions, and motivation. ARCs are private online groups on which researchers can deliver weekly research tasks to participants and gather information about their perceptions in a format that is lightweight, accessible, usable, and low burden. We have used ARC to both discover design requirements and to design/build a platform for administering BA, which we have tested with clinicians and adolescents. We used ARC with 10 mental health clinicians specializing in treating teens with depression to discover their needs. Specifically, we worked with mental health clinicians to better understand their needs and to identify facilitators and barriers to adapting BA to ARC. We used the Slack online platform to create an accessible, anonymous environment where we posted 20-minute long design activities each week for 10 weeks to be completed asynchronously. We were then able to recruit teenagers to understand their needs. Based on the results, we are adapting BA to ARC settings and then testing out the feasibility.