Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

This research highlights the experiences of mothers diagnosed with preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome through qualitative data analysis of social media comments. I collected 300 comments from the Instagram accounts @preeclampsia.foundation and @HELLPsyndrome. The two overarching themes found were: (1) Experiences with maternal healthcare and (2) Virtual Healing Spaces. These Instagram accounts represented unique communities that provide support and information that cannot be found elsewhere. These findings address gaps in the literature on maternal experience with preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome and identify directions for further research. The conclusions drawn add to current research that points to the need for reform in maternal healthcare.

This paper is a literary analysis of texts from ancient historians, specifically Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio, looking at how the image we have today of Emperor Nero is the product of their hostility. Along with looking at how they have created this image, the paper also goes into depth on how these ancient historians have portrayed Agrippina the Younger, Nero's mother, as the main reason why he was such a vicious and unstable tyrant.

Many authors have written about the social and economic risk factors such as poverty, low educational attainment, and discrimination that contribute to global indigenous-nonindigenous disparity. In this work, we consider an additional immunological risk factor — T-helper 2 dominance — that appears to exacerbate the effects of social and economic factors on infectious disease outcomes in tropical zones. To this end, a critical review approach was used to extract published data on total serum IgE — an indicator of T-helper 2 dominance. We found a three-orders-of-magnitude differences in total serum IgE across climate zones (tropical vs. temperate), ecologies within the tropics (forests vs. urban/rural), and clinical conditions (HIGE, TPE, ABAP vs. atopy, and helminthiasis). Additionally, that the highest ever reported total serum IgE levels are reported for tropical regions - mainly, healthy members of forest-dwelling indigenous groups of South America, and patients diagnosed with clinical conditions such as onchocerciasis, tropical pulmonary eosinophilia, and hyper-IgE.

This thesis aims to examine Afghan literature and feminism through the works called On Half from the East by Nadia Hashimi and Roya by Shaina and Nadia Pakrawan. For a couple of years, the Taliban has controlled Afghanistan's literature on women and feminism to silence and squash Westernized notions of freedom and rights for women. However, feminist authors continue to publish and produce many works like On Half from the East and Roya in retaliation. This thesis argues that to them, the pen is mightier than the sword, and their literature will be able to tackle the situation much better than physical retaliation, which only aggravates the situation. Through writing, women in Afghanistan can create their own identities and no longer struggle while doing so. As more and more people become aware of their situation, they hope the world will be able to provide the proper assistance they need to save them while respecting their cultures and religions carefully.

Human communication has been dramatically altered by the emergence of the internet and other communication technologies. Technology facilitates communication in a way that offers both benefits and potential dangers. For example, for those experiencing domestic or intimate partner violence, technology may be used by the perpetrator to extend the psychological and emotional aspects of abuse. This is accomplished by harassment via information communication technology, monitoring of devices, and deprivation of technology by taking or breaking devices. Technology also makes it possible to find domestic violence services and resources online and to communicate with others. With technology offering potential benefits and dangers, this study was conducted to gain insight about the role of technology in help-seeking behaviors and its potential to serve those leaving abusive relationships.

Refugee women face many challenges to obtaining maternal, reproductive, and sexual health post-resettlement including the language barrier, navigating the healthcare system, finding childcare to attend appointments, and cultural mismatches between their beliefs and practices around the prenatal, childbirth, and postpartum periods and that of the healthcare system in which they resettle into. This cultural barrier poses a challenge to healthcare providers as well as it necessitates that they respect their patients’ cultural beliefs while still providing them with the highest standard of care. Cultural competency training has been used to assist providers in understanding and responding to cultural differences, but gaps still exist when it comes to navigating specific scenarios. The objective of this research was to conduct a literature review of studies pertaining to refugee maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare post-resettlement to investigate the following questions: how tensions between biomedically accepted best practices and cultural norms present themselves in these healthcare fields, how healthcare providers take into consideration their patients’ cultural beliefs and norms when providing maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare to refugee women, and what can be done to continue to improve the provision of culturally appropriate care to refugee women. Findings from twenty different studies that focused primarily on eight cultural groups identified that Cesarean sections, inductions, and certain family planning methods are significant points of contention regarding cultural norms for refugee women and that they prefer certain foods, birthing positions, and other cultural practices during the delivery. Healthcare providers consider their refugee patients’ cultural beliefs by creating relationships with them built on trust, utilizing community liaisons, and through attempts to accommodate cultural practices when possible. Some potential improvements offered to improve cultural competency were improved cultural competency training that focused on how healthcare providers ask questions and interact with their patients, increased partnership with refugee communities, and an emphasis on patient education surrounding interventions and procedures related to maternal and reproductive health that could cause hesitations. The results of this literature review accentuated the importance of relationships within the field of refugee women’s healthcare, between both refugee patients and their providers and refugee communities and the healthcare systems. Providing refugee women access to more culturally competent healthcare can increase their trust in the healthcare systems of the countries they resettle in and healthcare utilization that can contribute to improved health outcomes for refugee women and their children.

As the world watched the United States Capitol Building come under siege by thousands of insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021, it was clear that a nation once regarded by conservatives as a “City Upon a Hill” was now in the process of a radical reawakening and party transformation. The American far-right’s radical transformation of the Republican Party and the relentless false belief of “The Big Lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen and fraudulent, delegitimizes America’s political institutions while undermining the nation’s electoral process. This has created a modern rebirth of racism, hatred, and political violence that is seen in American politics and society. Because of this, the far-right has weaponized American institutions to push both racist, discriminatory ideas and laws throughout the country. This study aims to answer the question of "how is The Big Lie dismantling American democracy and reshaping GOP?".

As the use of social media becomes more prevalent, especially in adolescents and young adults, there is a growing need to understand how social media use affects psychological well-being in the emerging adult population. Prior research has found that exposure to nature reduces stress and increases attention in comparison to urban environments, but nature has not been studied as a way to reduce the potentially negative effects of social media. The current study aimed to determine if viewing social media or nature for a brief time affected psychological well-being, social comparisons, future self-identification, and awe, and to test whether viewing nature scenes could buffer the effects of viewing social media. Data was collected from 275 participants using a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results showed that emerging adults exposed to nature scenes had significantly less negative affect compared to those exposed to their social media feeds. Exploratory analyses showed that those who spent more time outside tended to experience decreased negative affect when they viewed both social media and nature photos, but those who spent more time outside experienced increased negative affect when only viewing social media. Those who used social media more often generally experienced lower negative affect. Findings show that relations between humans, social media, and nature, are complex, and further research into these relations and their underlying causes may be beneficial.

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions all around the world, and it has doubled in prevalence in both adults and children in over 70 countries from 1980 to 2015 (Afshin et al., 2017). Excessive weight gain in this proportion has been shown to negatively affect human cognition, reward neurocircuitry, stress responsiveness, and quality of life (Morris et al., 2015). Obesity is an example of a complex interaction between the environment (i.e., high-fat diets) and heredity (i.e., polygenic patterns of inheritance). The overconsumption of a high-fat diet (HFD) is an environmental factor that commonly induces weight gain (Hariri & Thibault, 2010). Two dietary-induced phenotypes have been observed in rats as a bimodal distribution of weight gain: obesity-prone (OP) and obesity-resistant (OR). Levin et al. (1997) investigated male and female HFD-fed Sprague-Dawley rats designated as OR when their weight gains were less than the heaviest chow-fed controls, and OP when their weight gains were greater than the heaviest chow-fed controls. OP rats showed greater weight gain, similar energy intake (EI), and similar feed efficiency (FE) compared to OR rats. Pagliassotti et al. (1997) designated male HFD-fed Wistar rats as OP and OR based on upper and lower tertiles of weight gain. OP rats displayed greater weight gain and EI than OR rats. These investigations highlight a predicament regarding rodent research in obesity: independent variables such as rat age, gender, strain, distribution of dietary macronutrients, and fatty acid composition of HFD and chow vary considerably, making it challenging to generalize data. Our experiment utilized outbred male Sprague-Dawley rats (5-6 weeks) administered a chow diet (19% energy from fat; 3.1 kcal/g) and a lard-based HFD (60% energy from fat; 5.24 kcal/g) over eight weeks. Separate rat populations were examined over three consecutive years (2017-2020), and independent obesogenic environmental variables were controlled. We investigated the persistence of weight gain, EI, and FE in HFD-fed rats inclusive of a population of designated OP and OR rats based on tertiles of weight gain. We define persistence as being p > 0.05. We hypothesize that the profiles (periodic data) of the dependent variables (weight gain, EI, FE) will be similar and persistent throughout the three separate years, but the magnitudes (cumulative data) of the dependent variables will differ. Our findings demonstrate that HFD, OP, and OR groups were persistent for periodic and cumulative weight gain, along with FE across the three consecutive independent years. Our findings also demonstrate impersistence for periodic EI in all groups, along with impersistence in cumulative EI for CHOW, OP, and OR groups. Therefore, our results allude to an inconsistent relationship between EI and weight gain, indicating that EI does not completely explain weight gain. Thus, the weakness between EI and weight gain relationship may be attributed to a polygenic pattern of inheritance, possibly signaling a weight setpoint regardless of EI.