INQUIRY

New York University • College of Arts and Science
The Effect of Education on Ideological Polarization in
the U.S. Congress: An Instrumental Variable Analysis
Jaclyn Kaslovsky, Politics
Sponsor: Professor Anna Harvey, Politics
This paper attempts to answer the following question:
Have increasing levels of education contributed to increasing
levels of political polarization in Congress? While many
studies have sought to explain increasing congressional
polarization, the phenomenon remains largely unexplained.
Some evidence suggests that increased education leads to
more extreme ideological preferences; and, it is known
that the education levels of members of Congress have
been steadily increasing, greatly outpacing increases in
the general population. Yet to date no study has sought to
explain increases in congressional polarization as a function
of increases in congressional educational levels. This study
addresses this gap in the literature by using an instrumental
variable design with eligibility for the 1944 G.I. Bill as an
exogenous instrument and the number of postsecondary
degrees held by a member of the 89th Congress as the
endogenous independent variable. The dependent variable
is a measure of ideological extremism derived from roll
call votes, known as a DW-NOMINATE score. The results
indicate that Democratic Senators in the 89 th Congress were
in fact polarized by education, while their Republican peers
were not.
How Children Learn About Hidden Affordances
Danielle Kellier, Biology
Sponsor: Professor Karen Adolph, Psychology
The activities of daily living present a minefield of
objects requiring particular actions: the “hidden affordances”
of door handles, jars, zippers and other closures that cannot
be perceived directly. Adults have difficulty perceiving
whether to push or pull a door handle and whether to press or
twist a lid. Can children learn about such hidden affordances
without adult models or instruction? This study examined
how children learn to open twist-off and pull-off containers
whose target opening actions were hidden. Findings indicate
that children first explore an object’s overt affordances and
then hone in on the target action and finally implement it successfully.
For twist-off containers, 12-month-olds performed
exploratory actions (e.g., mouthing, banging, shaking) that
exploit overt affordances. Occasionally, 18-month-olds
displayed cognizance of the hidden affordance by attempting
the target twisting action; they displayed fewer futile
exploratory actions than younger children, but still failed to
open. By 24 months, infants succeeded at implementing the
target action and opened the container. Children followed a
similar but delayed progression for pull-off containers. These
findings have theoretical implications for how children learn
to perceive hidden affordances and practical implications
for designing objects of daily living to make them more or
less accessible to young children.
Examining How Stress Contagion Affects Dyadic
Performance
Andrew Kelly, Neural Science
Sponsor: Professor Tessa West, Psychology
Although stress is generally considered to be detrimental
and associated with accelerated aging and impaired
decision making (Matthews, Gump et al., 1997; Kassam,
Koslov et al., 2009), this study hypothesizes that a shared
experience of stress may have positive effects. The authors
tested an experimental method of inducing stress for future
implementation in dyad studies to later test the hypothesis.
Participants performed a difficult counting task in front of
evaluators (stress condition) or with no evaluators (control
condition). A trend of higher SNS reactivity was present in
the stress condition (M = -10.75, n = 8) compared to the
control condition (M = -3.2, n = 10), t(16) = -1.185, p= .25.
In ongoing studies, these manipulations are being used to
examine how prior experiences of stress affect later social
interactions and cognitive performance between dyads.
Exploring the effects of stress on a group is relevant to professional
cooperative settings along with the development
of social coping strategies.
Sociolinguistic Variation of y and ll in Spanish
Dennis Keselman, Spanish and Linguistics
Sponsor: Professor Gregory Guy, Linguistics
As the third most widely spoken language in the world
and spoken in the greatest number of countries, Spanish
contains large regional variety. While this variety is often
explained in terms of political and geographical lines, there
exists a notable linguistic variation that is present in most
native speakers of Spanish regardless of regional characteristics
and even seems to show random variation within an
individual’s speech. This variation is the alternation between
the realization of the characters and as a palatal
approximant, represented linguistically as [j] like the in
“yellow,” or as an affricate, represented as [dʒ] like the
in “judge.” The goal of this project is to find the different
rates of use of either of those two variants by speakers of
various socioeconomic class, gender, race and age of many
dialects of Spanish including those of Monterrey, La Habana,
Madrid and Medellín. This study will quantify the relative
frequencies of these two variable sounds (for the letters
and ) in order to see if the articulation of these letters
systematically varies based on regional dialects and social
factors. The alternation between different sounds for the
letters and is one of the most prominent variables
in the Spanish language, but there is a lack of significant
research on this variable. While it appears that speakers
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