Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an international impact since the novel coronavirus first surfaced in late 2019. Since then, different countries have taken different approaches to try and limit transmissions and deaths. While this is seemingly unprecedented in modern day times, many pandemics, or plagues, have happened relatively frequently in history. This paper examines three historical plagues through the lens of social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions to distinguish between cultures: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and indulgence versus restraint. This paper then applies these dimensions to the modern day U.S. and South Korea, two countries who have had different success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Through these dimensions, this paper aims to explain a factor in why South Korea has had better results than the U.S. It also recognizes that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are not the only factor to affect the pandemic, and explores political influences in America through the lens of Henry David Thoreau and John Dewey. Overall, this paper argues that the U.S. has been unsuccessful in taming the pandemic because of certain cultural dimensions, such as more an individualist and indulgent culture, and its unstable and divisive political climate. Given this, the United States has a hopeful, yet arduous path moving forward with COVID-19 and future pandemics.

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.

From 2019, a severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2, began to be a global pandemic. Many high income countries developed different strategies in response. This analysis intends to highlight how the COVID-19 became a global pandemic and the strategies that account for successes and failures. In identifying key policy differences, the high income countries of the United States, New Zealand and France were examined. The analysis found that New Zealand had proactive elimination strategies that proved highly effective, whereas the United States and France both struggled with mitigation factors that resulted in disproportionately higher confirmed cases and mortality rates. The analysis highlights how the airborne virus became a pandemic and then followed public policies’ effectiveness in terms of existing political institutions,and then their ability to be successful in preventing the spread of the virus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated alarming increases in psychological distress and alcohol use behaviors and has caused the greatest increases in depression and anxiety symptoms among college students. Prior studies have examined the impact of COVID-19 broadly on mental health and alcohol use outcomes; however, few studies have examined these impacts in college students. Previous studies have examined individual factors that could moderate the relation between COVID-19 related stressors and mental health and alcohol use outcomes, but knowledge is lacking regarding the role of emotion regulation. The present study aimed to examine the role of emotion regulation in the relation between both COVID-19 stressful experiences and COVID-19 related worry and mental health and alcohol use outcomes, and to explore racial/ethnic differences in their associations. Four hierarchical multiple regression models were conducted to assess main effects of COVID-19 stressors and emotion regulation, as well as moderation of the effect of emotion regulation on depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, alcohol consumption, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms during the past year. COVID-19 related worry was associated with greater symptoms of both mental health outcomes, whereas COVID-19 related stressful experiences were associated with both mental health outcomes, more alcohol consumption, and more AUD symptoms. Difficulties in emotion regulation had significant main effects on mental health outcomes and AUD symptoms, but not alcohol consumption. Hispanic/Latinx students reported higher experiences of both COVID-19 related stressors, but consumed less alcohol than did White/European students. This study provides further insight into the nature of COVID-19 related stressors and their subsequent impacts. Implications for prevention and intervention on college campuses are discussed.

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.