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.
In this quantitative research paper, we explored the correlation between the six dimensions of motivation as part of the Self-Determination Theory spectrum and physical activity. In addition, our aim was to also see if Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) paired with exercise as an intervention would affect motivation to exercise over time.
In this quantitative research paper, we explored the correlation between the six dimensions of motivation as part of the Self-Determination Theory spectrum and physical activity. In addition, our aim was to also see if Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) paired with exercise as an intervention would affect motivation to exercise over time.
Public and private lands depend on organizations to manage and protect them for the recreational enjoyment of humans and the conservation of biodiversity. Organizations that partner, or co-manage, to manage these lands can combine their resources to reach efficient conservation outcomes for biodiversity protection. How organizations express their priorities publicly through their mission statements are important because of their ability to reach stakeholders. In my thesis research, I collect the mission statements for 1144 organizations that are categorized into two groups of those that partner at least once and those that never partner. I analyze the extent to which they align and the drivers through performing text analysis by creating word clouds, word frequency lists, and identifying themes to categorize the words into for each group of partnering and non-partnering. Comparing partnering and non-partnering organization mission statements, I find that partnering organizations use more conservation-themed language and non-partnering organizations use community/people-themed language more frequently. I also find that the type of organization impacted the words being used, as well as the ratio of these different types of organizations that made up the total group of partnering and non-partnering (federal, local, and non-government organizations (NGO)). Future research could center around the dynamics of the partnerships and the extent to which mission statements play a role in attracting other organizations to partner and their role in clearly reflecting priorities to the public.
Adolescence is an important period of scaffolding for educational attainment, which is among the strongest predictors of outcomes in multiple domains. Parents who encourage academic success and promote self-regulation may enhance their offspring’s educational attainment. However, parents with externalizing disorders present a complex constellation of risk factors, including low educational attainment and poor parenting, and are more likely to have children with high levels of disinhibition. Previous research has identified low parental education, poor parenting and adolescent impulsivity as threats to educational attainment, but has not examined risk factors for discrepancies in educational attainment among siblings of the same family. Furthermore, studies have not examined the between- and within-family mechanisms that may explain why adolescents with externalizing parents have low educational attainment. The current study addressed these gaps by testing between- and within-family predictors of educational attainment using data from a longitudinal, multigenerational study that oversampled families at risk for alcohol use disorder. The sample consisted of 555 biological siblings within 240 families. We tested whether parental externalizing predicted lower educational attainment through parents’ own lower education, parents’ differential treatment of offspring, and impulsivity. Results suggested that between families, parents with externalizing disorders had lower educational attainment and more impulsive offspring, but did not exhibit increased differential parenting. Within families, siblings with greater impulsivity had lower educational attainment, whereas receiving more preferential maternal treatment than one’s siblings predicted higher educational attainment. Low parental educational attainment mediated the relation between parental externalizing disorders and low offspring educational attainment.
Recent studies indicate that words containing /ӕ/ and /u/ vowel phonemes can be mapped onto the emotional dimension of arousal. Specifically, the wham-womb effect describes the inclination to associate words with /ӕ/ vowel-sounds (as in “wham”) with high-arousal emotions and words with /u/ vowel-sounds (as in “womb”) with low-arousal emotions. The objective of this study was to replicate the wham-womb effect using nonsense pseudowords and to test if findings extend with use of a novel methodology that includes verbal auditory and visual pictorial stimuli, which can eventually be used to test young children. We collected data from 99 undergraduate participants through an online survey. Participants heard pre-recorded pairs of monosyllabic pseudowords containing /ӕ/ or /u/ vowel phonemes and then matched individual pseudowords to illustrations portraying high or low arousal emotions. Two t-tests were conducted to analyze the size of the wham-womb effect across pseudowords and across participants, specifically the likelihood that /ӕ/ sounds are paired with high arousal images and /u/ sounds with low arousal images. Our findings robustly confirmed the wham-womb effect. Participants paired /ӕ/ words with high arousal emotion pictures and /u/ words with low arousal ones at a 73.2% rate with a large effect size. The wham-womb effect supports the idea that verbal acoustic signals tend to be tied to embodied facial musculature that is related to human emotions, which supports the adaptive value of sound symbolism in language evolution and development.
With the emergence of programs that focus on socio-emotional regulation through online intervention, our focus is to move beyond the current literature to look at how personality might help to identify those in need of such an intervention, while also assessing if personality may moderate the overall efficacy of the treatment in middle-aged adults. In particular, our focus is on the established improvements that similar programs have shown to have on positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and emotional reactivity (ER). Through a randomized controlled trial, this research examines whether an online social intelligence training (SIT) program improves socio-emotional regulation compared to an attention-control (AC) condition. During the pre- and post-test phases of the study, participants (N = 230) completed a questionnaire, along with online surveys for 14-days that included measures of social connectedness, emotional awareness, and perspective-taking. Our analysis, while lacking significant findings in the way of PA and NA, shed light on how SIT programs can improve ER, while personality can simultaneously predict baseline levels of ER and moderate the efficacy of the program.
As the COVID-19 pandemic globally altered the way education was accessed by students and facilitated by teachers. Educators understand the importance of students engaging in the learning experiences to promote achievement. In this paper, we address the following objectives: (1) provide a conceptualization of student engagement from the perspective of teachers, students, and families, (2) identify the factors that influence student engagement, (3) identify the distinctions and similarities between in-person and virtual learning, and (4) recommend practices to increase student engagement during virtual learning. Research plans were to collect data in Oujda, Morocco and Arizona, USA to examine educational experiences in two different contexts. In this paper, we present data from the Oujda participants. Results indicated various levels of students’ emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement due to factors involving technology, supervision, motivation, and teacher pedagogy. Results reflected various perspectives of teachers, students, and parents regarding student engagement, yet all the perspectives indicated that engagement and preference is higher for in-person learning than virtual learning.