1025 research outputs found
Sort by
Perspectives on Passion
No full textThey say that if you are lucky enough to do what you are passionate about, you never work a day in your life. However, it is also important to realize that passions change and transform over time. Engaging with this theme, our campus community will look critically at dedication, ambition, and discipline. Passion, with its Latin roots meaning to suffer, has come to signify any intense emotion or desire. We might discuss what engenders one drive or desire, and not another. How is identity formed and reformed around shifting interests? As we all pursue our own version of success as well as purpose, this theme can illustrate the importance of seeking experiences that enrich us academically, professionally and personally.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/commonreading/1002/thumbnail.jp
Perceptions of Retirement Savings Relative to Peers
Get PDFDo individuals’ perceptions of how much others save for retirement influence their own long-range financial saving decisions? In this study, social comparison theory was used as a theoretical touchstone for understanding the impact of interpersonal perceptions on saving behavior. Respondents (N = 224) reported not only the amount they had saved for retirement during the previous year, but they also reported perceptions of the magnitude of their savings relative to peers and completed 6 psychological scales related to retirement planning. A 2-stage ordinary least squares (OLS) regression approach was used to examine: (a) the extent to which nine demographic indicators were predictive of individuals’ retirement savings practices, and (b) whether unexplained savings from the initial regression model could be hierarchically predicted using the 6 psychological scales and perceptions of one’s savings relative to peers. The findings suggest that social comparisons do account for savings practices over and above demographic and psychological indicators. Results are discussed in terms of how individuals’ implicit social comparisons might shape not only their perceptions, but also their saving behavior
Transfer of memory retrieval cues attenuates the context specificity of latent inhibition
Get PDFPrevious studies have demonstrated that the transfer of retrieval cues for original acquisition memories, old \u27reactivated‘ memories, and extinction memories attenuated the context shift effect. This study examined whether latent inhibition (CS preexposure) cues would also transfer, thus alleviating the context specificity. Rats preexposed to a particular context were immediately exposed to a different, novel context. When these rats were trained and tested in the shifted context following preexposure/exposure they showed the latent inhibition effect, i.e., retarded learning in the context that differed from preexposure. That the rats treated the shifted context as the preexposure context demonstrates that the preexposure retrieval cues transferred. These results are consistent with other findings that a novel context can serve as retrieval cues for an event learned in a different setting
Perspectives on Adventure
No full textWhat do you make of adventure? Would you dive with Atlantic walruses or climb Mount Everest? Would you prefer to follow Jake and Firm in your imagination? What about take a bus across the United States? Consider these possibilities: make a pilgrimage to Mecca, follow your own mother around Manhattan, host an illegal political conversation in Tehran, or argue publicly for women\u27s rights. Are you an adventurous person?
Cory Edwards, an Earth and Environmental Sciences major who graduated from Susquehanna University in 2014, proposed the theme of adventure for 2015-2016. He noted that Helen Keller once declared: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Edwards suggested that the term \u27adventure\u27 can encompass a broad range of experiences, from entering college to climbing a mountain, meeting new people, and rafting a wild river to learning something new or immersing oneself in another culture through a Susquehanna GO program. But just what do climbing a mountain and learning something new have in common? Does adventure necessitate an element of risk?
The anthology you hold in your hands is the culmination of a yearlong adventure taken by a group of Susquehanna students, faculty, and staff. Our intent is to make you think and to invite you into future conversations. One of the authors in the anthology, Edwidge Danticat, will visit our campus on September 1, 2015, to give the annual Common Reading Lecture. A world-famous author of literary novels, short stories, essays, and memoir, Dan- ticat will address the topic of adventure and enrich our interactions with her work. Over the fall semester, a monthly book club on campus will meet to discuss other readings. Various classes on campus will engage with the texts. A film series will entertain and further our inquiry. For now, as you discover the readings on your own, we hope that you enjoy them, fully and deeply. We hope they lead you to questions to explore this upcoming year.
We would like to thank Bonnie Bucks (\u2765) Reece and James S. Reece (P\u2793), who established the Reece Family Endowment in 2006. The Reece Family Endowment provides funding to support the Common Reading Program at Susquehanna University.
- Catherine Zobal Dent
Director of the Common Reading Programhttps://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/commonreading/1001/thumbnail.jp
‘Valar Dohaeris’: Problems of Transmedia Storytelling in Game of Thrones
Get PDFMore than fifty over five complete seasons. Five books, thousands of pages. Seven kingdoms, seven hells, one Lord of Light, and one true king, and upwards of two hundred characters! Describing the Game of Thrones series as “epic” is an understatement. If you haven’t read George R. R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire, or if you haven’t seen the very successful and critically acclaimed HBO television series, you may not know that each episode of Game of Thrones, like those novels, is comprised of a series of vignettes that focus on a particular character, charting each individual’s narrative journey in short bursts. While serialized, character-based storytelling is far from new, the epic scale of Game of Thrones balloons this method to new levels. The series comes to follow over thirty major characters and include over two hundred minor characters over the five seasons and five books…which are soon to be six and seven books, and who knows how many additional viewing seasons. While the television program’s creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, should be lauded for their attention to maintaining Martin’s written narrative style in a genre that has seen its share of paltry screen adaptations, the program’s storytelling, like the novels, fragments character and plot development. By the time viewers are midway through Season 1, which focuses mainly on the Stark family, there are already too many major characters to get “everyone” into a single, one-hour episode, and this practice continues (and snowballs) as the show progresses and more characters and complexities are added to the narrative. What are the effects of these fragmentary narrative characteristics for viewers, and what might their purpose be
Vanishings
No full textVanishings is a stunning collection of autobiographical narratives that propel us into the life and mind of a literary genius. Yams were in stories about Africa that I read in Sunday school. Tribes ate them, villagers who still carried spears and stared at missionaries who visited them to explain Jesus. I was out of college before I willingly ate a yam, filling a groove I cut in its skin with butter and brown sugar a minute before I took it from the oven. A few years later, when I had children of my own who complained about yams, wishing for French fries or mashed potatoes with gravy, the milk carton that sat on the table during dinner always featured the face of a missing child. “Have You Seen Me?” its caption read, and those faces reminded me to be thankful even as my children yammered their petty complaints. As the three of them poked at their half-eaten yams, wasting what was left after a half hour of whining, those milk carton faces kept my anger in check. —from the bookhttps://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1013/thumbnail.jp