Faculty Profiles

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/691

This site provides a forum for showcasing the work of individual faculty members. Faculty may have their work archived here as well as with their departments or institutes.

Faculty interested in establishing a collection for themselves in Scholars' Bank are invited to contact, Scholars' Bank team, University of Oregon Libraries.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 991

Open Access
Re-evaluating hypertragulid diversity in the John Day basin, Oregon, USA
(Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 2024-09-25) Famoso, Nicholas; Jewell, Lana K.
Despite their relative abundance, members of the family Hypertragulidae (Artiodactyla, Mammalia) have proved a conundrum regarding species diversity in the Turtle Cove Member (Oligocene) of the John Day Formation, located in central and eastern Oregon. Three species and two separate genera are described in the area, but previous research lacks statistical support for this level of variation. We use coefficients of variation (V) on measurements of dentition and astragali of hypertragulid specimens designated Hypertragulus hesperius, Hypertragulus minutus, and Nanotragulus planiceps as a metric for determining whether there were multiple species present in the population. Asymptotic and modified signed-likelihood ratio V equality tests show that V values of anterior-posterior molar length and transverse molar width vary significantly when comparing single species of modern ecological analogs (Muntiacus muntjak, Muntiacus reevesi, and Tragulus javanicus) to groupings of a combined population. However, the V equality tests on dental and postcranial measurements yield almost no significant results when comparing variation in the extinct John Day hypertragulids to an extant population comprised of a single species. Similar comparisons between astragali measurements of hypertragulids and T. javanicus express no significant difference in the level of variation from the combined population to a modern single species. The low level of variation in the hypertragulids and the lack of differentiation between dental characters of individuals does not statistically support the hypothesis that there were multiple species present in the population, suggesting either that cryptic species may be present but impossible to identify without soft tissue remains, or there may have been taxonomic over-splitting of a single hypertragulid species in the John Day region.
Open Access
Esports buffs: the perceived role of fans and fandoms in U.S. collegiate programs
(Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2024-09-11) Cote, Amanda C.; Rahman, Md Waseq Ur; Foxman, Maxwell; Wilson, Andrew; Harris, Brandon C.; Can, Onder; Hansen, Jared C.
Introduction: Collegiate esports—organized competitive gaming—has expanded rapidly in the United States, drawing in student players, broadcasters, and support staff, as well as university employees. Universities have invested financially in esports, hoping to capitalize on gaming fandom to attract prospective students and enhance campus community integration. Little research, however, addresses collegiate esports fandom in depth. Methods: Drawing on thirty-one in-depth interviews with collegiate esports players, student workers, program directors, and administrators, this article investigates how collegiate esports participants perceive and discuss their fans. Results: We identify three central themes related to fans in the dataset: discussions of fans’ role in the collegiate esports environment, comparisons between esports and traditional sports fans, and concerns about the underutilization of fans within collegiate esports spaces. Subsequently, we theorize these themes through existing research on professional esports and traditional collegiate sports fandoms, as well as through the concept of “fan labor,” or how the productive work of fans provides value to the nascent industry. Discussion: This article thus not only specifically explores how collegiate esports programs are normalizing fan labor as an essential part of their practices, but also questions who benefits from this relationship and how. Investigating collegiate esports fans as an under-researched group additionally provides a new perspective on how fan labor integrates with media industries more broadly.
Open Access
Discovery of Oligocene-aged mammals in Glacier National Park (Kishenehn Formation), Montana
(Geodiversitas, 2024-06-24) Famoso, Nicholas; Calede, Jonathan J., 1988-; Kehl, Winifred A.; Constenius, Kurt N.
The Kishnehn Formation crops out in Glacier National Park of northwest Montana where a rich fossil record of plant macrofossils, pollen and spores, insects, terrestrial and aquatic mollusks, and fish has been unearthed. Past research has also described an extensive mammal fauna from the Eocene (Uintan-Chadronian). Oligocene-aged fossil mammals have been reported before, but none has ever been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Here, we present the first Arikareean-aged fossil mammals from the Kishenehn Formation, the youngest fossil mammals ever discovered in the park. The fossils consist of a set of lower jaws of the leptomerycid Pronodens transmontanus (Douglas, 1903) and a partial lower jaw of the rodent Paciculus montanus Black, 1961, both endemics of the northern Rocky Mountains. These new fossils enable us to explore the morphological variation in Pronodens Koerner, 1940 and Paciculus Cope, 1879. Our analyses suggest the existence of a single widely distributed and sometimes locally abundant species of Pronodens, which may co-occur with a rare and very large second species. Our revised diagnoses for the genus and species show the need for additional work on this little-studied artiodactyl genus. Similar efforts on the systematics of cricetid rodents will benefit from building upon our analysis of tooth morphology in Paciculus to shed light on the rise of leidymines. The last fossil we describe, partial paired dentaries of Miohippus Marsh, 1874, is the northern-most occurrence of the genus in the Rocky Mountains and shows the potential for future work in the Kishenehn Formation to enable the study of faunal change across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary in the northern Rocky Mountains.
Open Access
New occurrences of mammals from McKay Reservoir (Hemphillian, Oregon)
(Journal of Paleontology, 2024-05-07) Orcutt, John D.; Schmer, Christiana J.; Lubisich, Jeffrey P.; Abrams, Lacy T.; Famoso, Nicholas
Encompassing global cooling, the spread of grasslands, and biogeographic interchanges, the Hemphillian North American Land Mammal Age is an important interval for understanding the factors driving ecological and evolutionary change through time. McKay Reservoir near Pendleton, Oregon is a natural laboratory for analyses of these factors. It is remarkable for its small vertebrate fauna including rodents, bats, turtles, and lagomorphs, but also for its larger mammal fossils like camelids, rhinocerotids, canids, and felids. Despite the importance of the site, few revisions to its faunal list have been published since its original description. We expand on this description by identifying taxa not previously known from McKay Reservoir based on specimens collected during fieldwork and through reidentification of previously collected fossils. Newly identified taxa include the borophagine canid Borophagus secundus (Matthew and Cook, 1909), the camelids Megatylopus Matthew and Cook, 1909 and Pleiolama Webb and Meachen, 2004, a dromomerycid, and the equids Cormohipparion Skinner and MacFadden, 1977 and Pseudhipparion Ameghino, 1904. Specimens previously assigned to Neohipparion Gidley, 1903 and Hipparion de Christol, 1832 lack the features necessary to diagnose these genera, which are therefore removed from the site's faunal list. The presence of Borophagus secundus, Cormohipparion, and Pseudhipparion is especially important, because each occurrence represents a major geographic range extension. This refined understanding of the fauna lays the foundation for future studies of taphonomy, taxonomy, functional morphology, and paleoecology—potentially at the population, community, or ecosystem levels—at this paleobiologically significant Miocene locality.
Open Access
Recasting Twitch: Livestreaming, Platforms, and New Frontiers in Digital Journalism
(Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-04-05) Foxman, Maxwell; Harris, Brandon C.; Partin, William Clyde
Despite Twitch’s dominant position in Western livestreaming markets, institutional journalists rarely produce content on the platform. This paper investigates how journalistic practices, cultures, business models, and institutions approach Twitch through three empirical sites: The Washington Post’s experimentation with the app, left-leaning political influencer Hasan Piker, and the pro-QAnon 24/7 “news” channel, Patriots’ Soapbox. The cases demonstrate how newsmaking on Twitch flouts traditional journalists’ ideological and occupational boundaries, exploiting the platform’s features and affordances to enroll the audience in a live broadcasting experience.
Open Access
Microtomography of an enigmatic fossil egg clutch from the Oligocene John Day Formation, Oregon, USA, reveals an exquisitely preserved 29-million-year-old fossil grasshopper ootheca
(Parks Stewardship Forum, 2024) Lee, Jaemin; Famoso, Nicholas; Lin, Angela
Eggs are one of the least understood life stages of insects, and are poorly represented in the fossil record. Using microtomography, we studied an enigmatic fossil egg clutch of a presumed entomological affinity from the Oligocene Turtle Cove Member, John Day Formation, from the National Park Service-administered lands of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Oregon. A highly organized egg mass comprising a large clutch size of approximately 50 slightly curved ellipsoidal eggs arranged radially in several planes is preserved, enclosed in a disc-shaped layer of cemented and compacted soil particles. Based on the morphology of the overall structure and the eggs, we conclude that the specimen represents a fossilized underground ootheca of the grasshoppers and locusts (Orthoptera: Caelifera), also known as an egg pod. This likely represents the oldest and the first unambiguous fossil evidence of a grasshopper egg pod. We describe Subterroothecichnus radialis igen. et isp. nov. and Curvellipsoentomoolithus laddi oogen. et oosp. nov., representing the egg pod and the eggs, respectively. We advocate for adopting ootaxonomy in studying fossil eggs of entomological affinities, as widely practiced with fossil amniotic eggs. An additional 26 individual and clustered C. laddi collected throughout the A–H subunits of the Turtle Cove Member suggest the stable presence of grasshoppers in the Turtle Cove fauna, and we discuss the paleoecological implications. Oothecae have convergently evolved several times in several insect groups; this ovipositional strategy likely contributed to the fossilization of this lesser-known ontogenetic stage, enriching our understanding of past insect life.
Open Access
The Fear of Personal Death and the Willingness to Commit to Organ Donation
(Sage, 2023-09) Kogut, Tehila; Pittarello, Andrea; Slovic, Paul
In three studies, with samples from different countries (the United States and Israel) and religions (Christians and Jews), we found that individual levels of fear of death significantly predicted lower willingness to register as organ donors (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, after being asked about their organ donation status (i.e., whether they are registered as donors), fear of death significantly increased among unregistered people. This did not occur among registered people, who had already faced the decision to become donors in the past (Study 2). Finally, providing non-registered (non-religious) people with a defense strategy to manage their fear of death increased their willingness to sign an organ donation commitment, partially by increasing their feelings of hopefulness. The implications of these findings for increasing organ donation registration are discussed.
Open Access
The prominence effect in health-care priority setting
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-11) Persson, Emil; Erlandsson, Arvid; Slovic, Paul; Vastfjall, Daniel; Tinghog, Gustav
People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominent attribute — the prominence eﬀect. We studied the eﬀect of prominence in health care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to health would trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individuals themselves evaluated diﬀerent treatment options as equally good. We conducted pre-registered experiments with a diverse Swedish sample and a sample of international experts on priority setting in health care (n = 1348). Participants, acting in the role of policy makers, revealed their valuation for diﬀerent medical treatments in hypothetical scenarios. Participants were systematically inconsistent between preferences expressed through evaluation in a matching task and preferences expressed through choice. In line with our hypothesis, a large proportion of participants (General population: 92%, Experts 84% of all choices) chose treatment options that were better on the health dimension (lower health risk) despite having previously expressed indiﬀerence between those options and others that were better on the cost dimension. Thus, we ﬁnd strong evidence of a prominence eﬀect in health-care priority setting. Our ﬁndings provide a psychological explanation for why opportunity costs (i.e., the value of choices not exercised) are neglected in health care priority setting.
Open Access
Lessons for Journalists from Virtual Worlds
(Columbia Journalism Review, 2022-10-06) Foxman, Maxwell
In the darkest days of the covid-19 pandemic, as many people figured out how to work and live in isolation, they turned to various virtual worlds and spaces for comfort. From games like Animal Crossing to Zoom, the popularity of communing and communicating both virtually and synchronously skyrocketed and persists in “post pandemic” life. Everything from conferences to the rising concept of the “metaverse” connects to virtual worlds. At the same time, the pandemic was merely tinder for a fire that has been flickering in digital gaming for decades. Almost twenty years earlier, news outlets like CNN and Reuters set up bureaus in Second Life and experimented with virtual-reality (VR) content. While concepts like the metaverse are positioned as future technology, virtual worlds are already widely available. Given this reality, how should journalists write about them, or even use them, in the present? This report takes a first step in answering this question. After providing a brief history, it defines virtual worlds as online and digital spaces of implied vast size in which users congregate, mostly synchronously. Approximations of virtual worlds can be found in online gaming, VR, and livestreaming platforms like Twitch, all of which cater to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, if not more, at any given time. Using the pandemic as the launching point for research, the report then analyzes 379 articles that reflect journalists’ current and shifting views about virtual worlds. Animal Crossing, Twitch, and VR technology represent three archetypal cases. An inductive analysis of key themes is followed by semistructured interviews with twenty-one journalists who wrote about the subject. These interviews support specific lessons writers can take in how to approach virtual worlds from a journalistic viewpoint, as well as the opportunities and drawbacks of using them as tools.
Open Access
Beyond Genre: Classifying Virtual Reality Experiences
(IEEE, 2022-09) Foxman, Maxwell; Beyea, David; Leith, Alex P.; Ratan, Rabindra; Hua Chen, Vivian Hsueh; Klebig, Brian
Because virtual reality (VR) shares common features with video games, consumer content is usually classified according to traditional game genres and standards. However, VR offers different experiences based on the medium’s unique affordances. To account for this disparity, the paper presents a comparative analysis of titles from the Steam digital store across three platform types: VR only, VR supported, and non-VR. We analyzed data from a subset of the most popular applications within each category (N=141, 93, and 1217, respectively). The three classification types we analyzed were academic game genres, developer defined categories, and user-denoted tags. Results identify the most common content classifications (e.g., Action and Shooter within VR only applications), the relative availability of each between platforms (e.g., Casual is more common in VR only than VR supported or non-VR), general platform popularity (e.g., VR only received less positive ratings than VR supported and nonVR), and which content types are associated with higher user ratings across platforms (e.g., Action and Music/Rhythm are most positively rated in VR only). Our findings ultimately provide a foundational framework for future theoretical constructions of classification systems based on content, market, interactivity, sociality, and service dependencies, which underlay how consumer VR is currently categorized.
Open Access
Virtual reality and music's impact on psychological well-being
(Frontier Media, 2022-08-11) Foxman, Maxwell; Pimentel, Danny; Alexanian, Stephen
Quality of life is bound to psychological well-being, which in turn is affected by the frequency and magnitude of negative mood states. To regulate mood states, humans often consume media such as music and movies, with varied degrees of effectiveness. The current investigation examined the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) vs. two-dimensional (2D) online interventions with various stimuli (audiovisual vs. visual only vs. audio only) to assess which interventions were most effective for improved well-being. Additionally, this study examined which groups displayed the highest amount of perceived presence to understand what components are essential when maximizing a person’s subjective feeling of being “in” a new place and if this translated toward therapeutic results. Our data suggests that even though VR participants generally experienced more presence and had similar benefits as 2D groups for increasing positive mood, only participants in the 2D groups had a reduction in negative mood overall with 2D audiovisual participants experiencing the best results. These results contradict past studies which indicate that there could be other psychological and theoretical considerations that may play a role in determining what online experiences are more effective than just examining presence and immersive stimuli. Further research and development into using VR as a tool for improved wellbeing is needed to understand its efficacy in remote and in-person setting.
Open Access
Estimating ability for two samples
(2022-07-13) Revelle, William; Condon, David M.
Using IRT to estimate ability is easy, but how accurate are the estimate and what about multiple samples?
Open Access
The SAPA Personality Inventory: An empirically-derived, hierarchically-organized self-report personality assessment model
(2022-07-07) Condon, David M
The influence of personality on important life outcomes has been widely recognized for thousands of years (Condon, 2014), and the difficulty of its measurement has been vexing for many decades (Galton, 1884; Cattell, 1945; Goldberg, 1981; Ackerman, 2018). The challenge with objective measurement stems from the need for massive amounts of data to account for dynamic interplay between variations in thousands of narrow dispositional traits (aka individual differences in behavior) and the ever-evolving contextual factors inherent to modern living. It is a prototypical “big data” problem. Despite this, dozens of ambitious social scientists have posited a diverse array of personality assessment models. Many of these are heavily imbued with theory, nearly all are focused solely on one domain of personality (e.g., very broad dispositional traits or vocational interests) to the exclusion of others (e.g., cognitive abilities, values, or less generalizable maladaptive behaviors), and most have been derived based on surprisingly small samples drawn from populations that have come to be known as "WEIRD" (Henrich et al., 2010). Simply put, there is widespread need for models that are empirically-grounded in more (and more representative) data. In this manuscript, I demonstrate that it is possible to address the shortcomings of extant theory-driven approaches by combining recent innovations from outside of personality research to empirically derive personality assessment models. This is done by administering a large pool of widely-used public domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 1999) to three large online samples (N > 125,000) using a planned missingness design (Revelle et al., 2016). While the existing "best practices" for developing personality assessment models tends towards several iterative rounds of data collection and analysis guided by theory culminating in publication of only the final product, I have endeavored to make a highly detailed record of all steps followed during the development of the SAPA Personality Inventory in order to encourage feedback regarding critical analytic decisions. This has unfortunately resulted in the production of a book-length manuscript but I hope that this transparency will serve to minimize (even if it does not eliminate) the influence of bias.
Open Access
Leveraging a more nuanced view of personality: Narrow characteristics predict and explain variance in life outcomes
(2022-07-07) Mõttus, René; Bates, Timothy C.; Condon, David M.; Mroczek, Daniel K.; Revelle, William
Among the main topics of individual differences research is the associations of personality traits with life outcomes. Relying on recent advances of personality conceptualizations and drawing parallels with genetics, we propose that representing these associations with individual questionnaire items (markers of personality “nuances”) can provide incremental value for predicting and explaining them—often even without further data collection. For illustration, we show that item-based models trained to predict ten outcomes out-predicted models based on Five-Factor Model (FFM) domains or facets in independent participants, with median proportions of explained variance being 9.7% (item-based models), 4.2% (domain-based models) and 5.9% (facet-based models). This was not due to item-outcome overlap. Instead, personality-outcome associations are often driven by dozens of specific characteristics, nuances. Outlining item-level correlations helps to better understand why personality is linked with particular outcomes and opens entirely new research avenues—at almost no additional cost.
Open Access
Frequency of use metrics for American English person descriptors: Extensions of Roivainen's internet search methodology
(PsyArXiv, 2022-05-02) McDougald, Sarah; Condon, David M.
Personality traits are often measured using person-descriptive terms, but data are limited regarding the frequency of usage for these terms in everyday language. This project reports on the relative frequency of usage for a large pool of American English terms (N = 18,240) using count estimates from search engine results and in books cataloged by Google. These estimates are based on the ngrams formed when each descriptor is combined with a common person-related noun (person, woman, man, girl, boy). Results are reported for each noun form and a frequency index in an online database that can be sorted, searched, and downloaded. We report on associations among the different noun forms and data types, and propose recommendations for the use of these data in conjunction with other resources. In particular, we encourage collaborative approaches among research teams using large language models in psycholexical research related to personality structure.
Open Access
First occurrences of Palaeogale von Meyer, 1846 in the Pacific Northwest, United States
(Geodiversitas, 2022-04-08) Famoso, Nicholas; Orcutt, John D.
The feliform carnivoran Palaeogale von Meyer, 1846 first appears in the Eocene of North America and had a Holarctic distribution in the Oligocene and early Miocene. Despite its large range, Palaeogale has not previously been reported from the Pacific Northwest of North America. We report three new specimens from the John Day Basin of Oregon that fill in this geographic gap. The oldest of these is a largely complete cranium from the Turtle Cove Member of the John Day Formation (Oligocene, 30.0-28.9 Ma). The other two specimens are a left and a right dentary from separate individuals, both recovered from the Kimberly Member (Oligocene, 25.3-23.5 Ma). Because Palaeogale species are almost entirely distinguished by their lower dentition, the cranium cannot be identified to species. However, the cranium is the oldest occurrence of the genus in the Pacific Northwest. The absence of a posterior accessory cusp on the p4 and of lateral expansion of the m1 protoconid allows the dentaries to be assigned to an endemic North American species, P. dorothiae MacDonald, 1963. This is not only the first instance of this species in the Pacific Northwest and outside of South Dakota and Nebraska, but also the last known occurrence of P. dorothiae. We expect that these specimens will inform future analyses of phylogenetics, systematics, morphology, and biogeography in Palaeogale.
Open Access
Is Religiosity a Barrier to Organ Donations? Examining the Role of Religiosity and the Salience of a Religious Context on Organ-Donation Decisions
(The University of Chicago Press, 2022-03-10) Harel, Inbal; Mayorga, Marcus; Slovic, Paul; Kogut, Tehila
The disparity between the number of patients awaiting organ transplantation and organ availability increases each year. One of the chief obstacles to organ donation is religiosity. We examine the role of religiosity and other related beliefs in organ-donation decisions among Christians (studies 1 and 3) and Jews (study 2). In all samples, we found a significant interaction between religiosity and the salience of a religious context, manipulated by the order of the questions, such that religiosity (and specifically, extrinsic religion) was significantly associated with lower support for organ donations—but only when religious attitudes were elicited first, not when support for organ donation, or questions about other beliefs (study 3) appeared first. We examine possible mechanisms underlying this effect and discuss theoretical and practical implications of this finding to increase support for organ donations in both personal and policy decisions.
Open Access
Deep Lexical Hypothesis: Identifying personality structure in natural language
(Cornell University, 2022-03-04) Cutler, Andrew; Condon, David M.
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective similarities from language models as done with survey-based ratings in traditional psycholexical studies but using millions of times more text in a natural setting. The correlational structure produced through this method is highly similar to that of self- and other-ratings of 435 terms reported by Saucier and Goldberg (1996a). The first three unrotated factors produced using NLP are congruent with those in survey data, with coefficients of 0.89, 0.79, and 0.79. This structure is robust to many modeling decisions: adjective set, including those with 1,710 terms (Goldberg, 1982) and 18,000 terms (Allport & Odbert, 1936); the query used to extract correlations; and language model. Notably, Neuroticism and Openness are only weakly and inconsistently recovered. This is a new source of signal that is closer to the original (semantic) vision of the Lexical Hypothesis. The method can be applied where surveys cannot: in dozens of languages simultaneously, with tens of thousands of items, on historical text, and at extremely large scale for little cost. The code is made public to facilitate reproduction and fast iteration in new directions of research.
Open Access
Imagination as a facet of Openness/Intellect: A new scale differentiating experiential simulation and conceptual innovation
(PsyArXiv, 2022-02-09) Sassenberg, Tyler A.; Condon, David M.; DeYoung, Colin G.
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. We present a scale for measuring trait imagination that distinguishes between experiential simulation and conceptual innovation, aligned with the two major subfactors (aspects) of the Big Five dimension Openness/Intellect. Across two large samples, we provide evidence of a consistent factor structure distinguishing experiential, conceptual, and general descriptions of imagination, as well as validity as measures of facets of Openness and Intellect. Our findings provide a measure of major forms of imagination in line with mainstream models of the hierarchical structure of personality.
Open Access
Building from the Ground Up: The Archaeology of Residential Spaces and Communities in Southeast Asia
(Springer, 2022-01-27) Carter, Alison Kyra
Despite the ethnographic importance of the Southeast Asian house and household, an explicitly Southeast Asian “household archaeology” is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, archaeologists in Southeast Asia have undertaken excavations within habitation areas and residential spaces, identifying domestic debris, the partial remains of house structures, and activity areas. As a result, archaeologists of Southeast Asia have addressed many topics of relevance to those who use a household archaeology approach, including the identification and description of houses and household activities; the domestic economy; domestic ritual; diversity and variability both within houses as related to questions of identity, specifically gender and age, and between houses, especially as related to status; and identification of supra-household communities. In this review, I consider how archaeologists have addressed these themes using examples from a diverse set of geographic locations and time periods in mainland and island Southeast Asia. I conclude with suggestions for future research directions to continue building an archaeology of residential spaces and communities in Southeast Asia.