Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: community
- All Subjects: psychology
- Creators: School of Social Transformation
The present study explored the relationship between desired purchasing behavior and individual differences using two nationally-representative, longitudinal samples of the U.S. population early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Past research has shown that individual differences provide information about how one might respond to threat. Therefore, we predicted changes in desired purchasing behavior across different sociodemographic variables that might reflect those differences. Specifically, we investigated hypotheses related to political orientation, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and whether or not the participant had children. We measured participants’ reported desired purchasing behavior across eleven categories of goods and investigated the connection between specific demographic variables and desired purchasing behavior. We found that conservatives desired to purchase more basic protection goods (guns/ammunition, cash, gas) and that older people desired to purchase more cleaning supplies and toiletries. These findings illustrate possible explanations for purchasing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and reveal directions for marketing designed to influence purchasing behavior.
Activist burnout theory has produced minimal but meaningful literature and research that explores the dynamics of burnout culture, movement in-fighting, marginalized identities, and dimensions of burnout symptoms. Black feminist visionaries and writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks have developed theories of love, self-care and community as central to resistance that have informed my research approach. Thus, my study aims to investigate activist burnout from a perspective that marries popular activist burnout theory with these frameworks of self-care and community. I conducted a survey of Arizona State University student organizers and activists (N=34) to address the following research questions: What are the causes and symptoms of burnout for Arizona State University activists and organizers? How have self-care and community played a role in their work and countered burnout? Can working conceptions of self-care and community serve as resistance in ways that feel meaningful to activists? The survey was broken into three dimensions: “Demographics and Experience,” “Burnout,” and “Self-Care and Community.” The results reinforced prior findings on established toxic cultures and burnout symptoms but introduced complications to working theories, such as the connections between cycles of burnout and the cyclical nature of electoral politics along with the roles of chronic and mental illness. Respondents largely demonstrated conceptions of self-care and community as resistance but also demonstrated personal and professional barriers to putting these conceptions into practice.
This thesis explores the potential reasons individuals may romanticize violent serial killers and seeks to eradicate the idea that this phenomenon is due to any singular reason alone. In light of the recent explosion of interest surrounding serial killers and other true-crime genre media, this work aims to help the general public understand, not only the reasons that we may feel inclined to romanticize such evil individuals, but also the potential dangers behind such romanticization. This research led to the conclusion that a fascination for media or entertainment surrounding and related to this topic has been long standing in human history. Additionally, it was concluded that, while the personal reasons each individual may have for romanticizing serial killers may vary, today’s media representations of violent serial killers (both fictional and not) appeal to these reasons by subtly portraying killers as more palatable to the public. Ultimately, this project compiled numerous potential causes of romanticizing serial killers in order to conclude that no single reason is the source for this phenomenon, but that it is rather a complex culmination of factors.
commits. Outside of the house, there are people speeding, jaywalking, littering, sharing
medication, and driving without seat belts. Inside the house, people are downloading
music/movies, drinking while underage, using (and abusing) social media while under the age of
18, and reading another person’s mail. With so much of a focus on serious crimes, or felonies,
people tend to forget about the everyday actions in America that are also illegal. For example, a
police officer may not do anything if several cars are going well over the speed limit on the
highway, because it is normalized. This paper explores two sides of this issue: the psychological
side and the legal side. The goal is to find out how culpable people really are for their actions
when they do not have the mental intent that the they are determined to have in court. All human
behavior will be divided into two sections (people with non-extreme mental disorders and people
who have total control over their behavior). First, I dive into the complexity of anxiety,
depression, and ADHD, and explain how these disorders will subtly change someone’s behavior.
Next, I examine how actions like speeding and jaywalking and explain how certain illegal
actions have become so normalized that people may not be very guilty, even when they are
knowingly committing these crimes. I use different misdemeanors as examples for each of these
types of behaviors to argue why people should be more culpable (aggravating factors) or less
culpable (mitigating factors) because of their respective predispositions. Finally, I discuss issues
of fixing the criminal justice system such as: how to make all punishments fair/accurate, how to
fix the public’s distrust towards the law, and how to stop these normalized illegal behaviors for
all people, regardless of mental health or intent.
Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.
Despite countless research reports, research studies, and studies of human psychology verifying that the Reid Method interrogation tactics used by police in the United States cause false confessions, the method is still heavily accepted and used on suspects everyday. This research paper will look into the Reid Method interrogation tactics, their connection to false confessions in order to establish a basis for repealing and replacing the Reid Method with an alternative interrogation technique. This paper will show that the guilt-presumptive nature of the Reid Method leads to innocent individuals falsely confessing and spending years in prison. Evidence of this phenomenon will be shown through research papers, studies, case examples, and an interview with a false confession expert Dr. Richard A. Leo. The Reid Method is problematic and jeopardizes the presumption of innocence for every citizen in the United States and should be repealed by an alternative interrogation technique called P.E.A.C.E in order for justice to be renewed.