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.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 137
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Politics
- All Subjects: Neuroscience
Description
Historically, Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution of the United States have been significantly important, impacting the lives of every American. This honors thesis seeks to understand the ways in which the Constitution has been interpreted through the lens of political ideology. Using constitutional theory, I explain how the political ideologies of classical liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, and progressive liberalism have played a role in the interpretations of the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments. I also examine how these ideological interpretations have changed from 1776 to 2017, dividing the history of the United States into four eras: the Founding Era, the Civil War Era, the New Deal Era, and the Modern Era. First, the First Amendment's clauses on religion are examined, where I focus on the separation between church and state as well as the concepts of "establishment" and "free exercise." The First Amendment transitions from classically liberal, to conservative, to progressively liberal and classically liberal, to progressively liberal and libertarian. Next, we look at the Second Amendment's notions of a "militia" and the "right to keep and bear arms." The Second Amendment's interpretations begin classically liberal, then change to classically liberal and progressively liberal, to progressively liberal, to conservative. Finally, the analysis on the Fourth Amendment's "unreasonable searches and seizures" as well as "warrants" lends evidence to ideological interpretations. The Fourth Amendment, like the other two, starts classically liberal for two eras, then becomes libertarian, and finally ends libertarian and conservative. The implications of each of these conclusions are then discussed, with emphasis on public opinion in society during the era in question, the ways in which the ideologies in each era seem to build upon one another, the ideologies of the justices who wrote the opinions, and the ideology of the court.
ContributorsSmith, Charlene Anne (Author) / Lennon, Tara (Thesis director) / Hudson, Jill (Committee member) / New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
It is unknown which regions of the brain are most or least active for golfers during a peak performance state (Flow State or "The Zone") on the putting green. To address this issue, electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were taken on 10 elite golfers while they performed a putting drill consisting of hitting nine putts spaced uniformly around a hole each five feet away. Data was collected at three time periods, before, during and after the putt. Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) measurements were also recorded on each subject. Three of the subjects performed a visualization of the same putting drill and their brain waves and GSR were recorded and then compared with their actual performance of the drill. EEG data in the Theta (4 \u2014 7 Hz) bandwidth and Alpha (7 \u2014 13 Hz) bandwidth in 11 different locations across the head were analyzed. Relative power spectrum was used to quantify the data. From the results, it was found that there is a higher magnitude of power in both the theta and alpha bandwidths for a missed putt in comparison to a made putt (p<0.05). It was also found that there is a higher average power in the right hemisphere for made putts. There was not a higher power in the occipital region of the brain nor was there a lower power level in the frontal cortical region during made putts. The hypothesis that there would be a difference between the means of the power level in performance compared to visualization techniques was also supported.
ContributorsCarpenter, Andrea (Co-author) / Hool, Nicholas (Co-author) / Muthuswamy, Jitendran (Thesis director) / Crews, Debbie (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
It seems that we are incessantly scolded about the importance of the American political process and its virtue of practicality in contemporary society. Whether through the accumulation of the so-called facts about the issues that inform the veneration of the contest between candidates, the stern and noble duty of becoming an activist performing dreary tasks, or the religious fervor surrounding the sacred obligation of voting, we are assured and reassured that our system is sound and that we must only confront problems of implementation rather than structural ones. From here, the narrative goes that if we subscribe to the doctrine of exclusively employing the efficient, strictly rational, and the immediately realistic, we will almost assuredly succeed in persuading others toward producing the resolutions required to solve our shared challenges. Admittedly, these ideas serve a role in addressing the issues we face. However, when unaided by sophisticated and nuanced notions and applications of the fantastic, the beautiful, the ideal, the possible, the playful, the useless, in a word, dreaming, we foreclose the possibility of building a future that can qualitatively improve society and more meaningfully elevate our being-with-one-another in the world. Therefore, this work aims to validate the aforementioned claim by engaging in a critical, political, and hermeneutic exploration of what it means to dream against the backdrop of present-day American politics. It will honestly seek to analyze the prevailing notions of contemporary western thought and action to work on the way toward a new, yet latent, way of understanding. This understanding would fundamentally revolutionize the task of civilization as being grounded upon the appropriate channeling of our desires and dissatisfactions toward actualizing the projections of our imagination. Simply put, this project seeks to repudiate the mandate of work as toil and order as oppression to clear the way for envisioning a more suitable alternative.
ContributorsGoldsmith, Adam Jay (Author) / Ramsey, Ramsey Eric (Thesis director) / Gruber, Diane (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In Arizona's early history, Females garnered more independence than most other women in the United States because they were forced to build a completely new life in settlements with little to no infrastructure. Now, Arizona has achieved a level of equality that no other state has yet to achieve in regard to gender representation. Yet, we have yet to achieve total equity. This paper looks to analyze responses that female senators from the Arizona State Legislature gave while being interviewed by the author. With questions derived from previous research conducted on women in politics at the state and federal level, this paper will delve into the personal experiences of six female senators. Although their personal narratives differ, their stories seem to reflect a collective tie that unites the female members together, beyond party allegiance. Each of the responses given by the senators had some aspects that showed trends supporting the majority of the hypotheses. Moving forward, in order to achieve 50% equality, two more senators would need to be elected and replace male senators.
ContributorsMacdonald, James Nicholson (Author) / Woodall, Gina (Thesis director) / Lyon, Jenna (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This thesis examines the problems that occur when the politics and practices of social services, specifically maternal and prenatal care, are guided by a distorted understanding of immigration. It compares the politics and practice of this care across two international borders: the U.S.-Mexico and that within Hispaniola. In an ideal world, care would be extended to all individuals regardless of citizenship. However, since every welfare state has its limits at the national border, citizenship matters to both federal governments and medical professionals. Government-provided resources play an integral role in the current immigration debate, as these programs are a collective investment in which all individuals contribute in order to sustain it. The United States developed the welfare state in order to provide necessary resources to those who could not afford it. Its creators did not view these services as a handout, rather as a support for the future workforce of the country. However, health care was and still is not provided on this model of economic and social citizenship. Current U.S. healthcare policy dictates that no one can be turned away in an emergency situation because someone cannot pay their medical bill, including undocumented immigrants. But for immigrant mothers carrying children across the border, maternal and prenatal care does not qualify as an emergency and the federal government aid typically does not extend to them them as citizens. When care is extended to undocumented immigrants in the United States at all, it typically is provided to the child through Medicaid, who is by dint of the Fourteenth Amendment considered a citizen after birth. The relation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti offers a more complex situation, as the idea of birthright citizenship has recently been revoked. Following the Haitian Earthquake in 2010, the only healthcare to which many Haitians had access was across the Hispaniola border. Haitian women who give birth to children in the Dominican Republic are often not evaluated by a doctor until they are entering the delivery process, and even then health-care is complicated by or denied because of racial prejudice and unclear legal situation. In September of 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic issues a new ruling which declared that any immigrant born between 1929 and 2010 without documentation of their own or of their ancestors does not have citizenship, rendering many Haitians born in the Dominican Republic essentially stateless. To be born to a non-citizen mother typically means the child will likely be born with little or no prenatal care, and the mother will receive poor or inadequate care. Prenatal care is one of the most inexpensive elements of a care-model that carries huge returns relative to its costs. All governments would benefit from improved access to maternal and prenatal care because its future citizens who receive such care would be born healthier and have fewer expensive chronic illnesses. Fewer chronic illness among a population would have huge returns on the welfare state because fewer people would be utilizing it for expensive medical treatments. Though most medical professionals condemn the extreme act of denying care to pregnant women or infants (documented or not), the Dominican Republic and the United States have a popular politics that embraces this cruelty, despite the fact that both pride themselves on a multi-ethnic population. It is easy for policymakers to incriminate undocumented immigrants and claim that they are responsible for an illegitimate share of the consumption of the country's resources. Therefore, it seems likely that the host country's perceptions of immigrant natality and maternity help construct a negative image of the immigration "problem" in such a way that laws and policies are designed without accurate rationale. This thesis examines how the United States and the Dominican Republic might improve the relationship between the culture of healthcare and the role of the legal system for immigrants and their children. It seeks to understand the reasons, motivations, and consequences for denying immigrants services on the account of their citizenship status. The social, economic, and health consequences of being an undocumented citizen will be examined. Current legal policy and what political roadblocks and cultural prejudices must be overcome in order to implement a successful policy will be reviewed. Finally, the best practices prenatal care as a national investment will be discussed, as will the problem of cross-cultural perception of natality, maternity, and immigration.
ContributorsPrassas, Alexandra Rose (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Vega, Sujey (Committee member) / Oberstein, Bruce (Committee member) / College of Letters and Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Females are highly vulnerable to the effects of methamphetamine, and understanding the mechanisms of this is critical to addressing methamphetamine use as a public health issue. Hormones may play a role in methamphetamine sensitivity; thus, the fluctuation of various endogenous peptides during the postpartum experience is of interest. This honors thesis project explored the relation between anxiety-like behavior, as measured by activity in an open field, and conditioned place preference to methamphetamine in female versus male rats. The behavior of postpartum as well as virgin female rats was compared to that of male rats. There was not a significant difference between males and females in conditioned place preference to methamphetamine, yet females showed higher locomotor activity in response to the drug as well as increased anxiety-like behavior in open field testing as compared to males. Further study is vital to comprehending the complex mechanisms of sex differences in methamphetamine addiction.
ContributorsBaker, Allison Nicole (Author) / Olive, M. Foster (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Hansen, Whitney (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Environmental and genetic factors contribute to schizophrenia etiology, yet few studies have demonstrated how environmental stimuli impact genes associated with the disorder. Immediate early genes (IEGs) are of great interest to schizophrenia research because they are activated in response to physiological stress from the environment, and subsequently regulate the expression of downstream genes that are essential to neuropsychiatric function. An IEG, early growth response 3 (EGR3) has been identified as a main gene involved in a network of transcription factors implicated in schizophrenia susceptibility. The serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) seems to play an important role in schizophrenia and the dysfunction of the 5-HT2AR encoding gene, HTR2A, within the prefrontal cortex (PFC) contributes to multiple psychiatric illnesses including schizophrenia. EGR3's role as a transcription factor that is activated by environmental stimuli suggests it may regulate Htr2a transcription in response to physiological stress, thus affecting 5-HT2AR function in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between Egr3 activation and Htr2a expression after an environmental stimulus. Sleep deprivation is an acute physiological stressor that activates Egr3. Therefore to examine the relationship between Egr3 and Htr2a expression after an acute stress, wild type and Egr3 knockout mice that express EGFP under the control of the Htr2a promoter were sleep deprived for 8 hours. We used immunohistochemistry to determine the location and density of Htr2a-EGFP expression after sleep deprivation and found that Htr2a-EGFP expression was not affected by sex or subregions of the PFC. Additionally, Htr2a-EGFP expression was not affected by the loss of Egr3 or sleep deprivation within the PFC. The LPFC subregions, layers V and VI showed significantly more Htr2a-EGFP expression than layers I-III in all animals for both sleep deprivation and control conditions. Possible explanations for the lack of significant effects in this study may be the limited sample size or possible biological abnormalities in the Htr2a-EGFP mice. Nonetheless, we did successfully visualize the anatomical distribution of Htr2a in the prefrontal cortex via immunohistochemical staining. This study and future studies will provide insight into how Egr3 activation affects Htr2a expression in the PFC and how physiological stress from the environment can alter candidate schizophrenia gene function.
ContributorsSabatino, Alissa Marie (Author) / Gallitano, Amelia (Thesis director) / Hruschka, Daniel (Thesis director) / Maple, Amanda (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Epilepsy affects numerous people around the world and is characterized by recurring seizures, prompting the ability to predict them so precautionary measures may be employed. One promising algorithm extracts spatiotemporal correlation based features from intracranial electroencephalography signals for use with support vector machines. The robustness of this methodology is tested through a sensitivity analysis. Doing so also provides insight about how to construct more effective feature vectors.
ContributorsMa, Owen (Author) / Bliss, Daniel (Thesis director) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Scientists, lawyers, and bioethicists have pondered the impact of scientifically deterministic evidence on a judge or jury when deciding the sentence of a criminal. Though the impact may be one that relieves the amount of personal guilt on the part of the criminal, this evidence may also be the very reason that a judge or jury punishes more strongly, suggesting that this type of evidence may be a double-edged sword. 118 participants were shown three films of fictional sentencing hearings. All three films introduced scientifically deterministic evidence, and participants were asked to recommend a prison sentence. Each hearing portrayed a different criminal with different neurological conditions, a different crime, and a different extent of argumentation during closing arguments about the scientifically deterministic evidence. Though the argumentation from the prosecution and the defense did not affect sentencing, the interaction of type of crime and neurological condition did.
ContributorsMeschkow, Alisha Sadie (Author) / Schweitzer, Nicholas (Thesis director) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Patten, K. Jakob (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
An introduction to neuroscientific thought aimed at an audience that is not educated in biology. Meant to be readable and easily understood by anyone with a high school education. The first section is completed in its entirety, with outlines for the proposed final sections to be completed over the next few years.
ContributorsNelson, Nicholas Alan (Author) / Olive, M. Foster (Thesis director) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05