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 53
Description
This ethnography outlines the live storytelling culture in Phoenix, Arizona, and what each of its sub-cultures contributes to the city's community. Phoenix's live storytelling events incorporate elements of an ancient art form into contemporary entertainment and sophisticated platforms for community building. These events are described and delineated by stylistic, structural, and content-based differences into the following categories: open-mic, curated, scripted, non-scripted, micro-culture, and marginalized groups. Research presented in this report was collected by reviewing scholarly materials about the social power of storytelling, attending live storytelling events across all categories, and interviewing event organizers and storytellers. My research developed toward an auto-ethnographic direction when I joined the community of storytellers in Phoenix, shifting the thesis to assume a voice of solidarity with the community. This resulted in a research project framed primarily as an ethnography that also includes my initial, personal experiences as a storyteller. The thesis concludes with the art form's macro-influences on Phoenix's rapidly-expanding community.
ContributorsNorton, Maeve (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / McAdams, Charity (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
Women are now living longer than ever before, yet the age of spontaneous menopause has remained stable. This results in an increasing realization of the need for an effective treatment of cognitive and physiological menopausal and post-menopausal symptoms. The most common estrogen component of hormone therapy, conjugated equine estrogens (CEE; Premarin) contains many estrogens that are not endogenous to the human body, and that may or may not be detrimental to cognition (Campbell and Whitehead, 1977; Engler-Chiurazzi et al., 2011; Acosta et al., 2010). We propose the use of a novel treatment option in the form of a naturally-circulating (bioidentical) estrogen called estriol. Due to estriol’s observed positive effects on synaptic functioning and neuroprotective effects in the hippocampus (Ziehn et al., 2012; Goodman et al., 1996), a brain structure important for spatial learning and memory, estriol is promising as a hormone therapy option that may attenuate menopausal- and age- related memory decline. In the current study, we administered one of the three bioidentical estrogens (17β-Estradiol, 4.0 µg/day; Estrone, 8.0 µg/day; Estriol, 8.0 µg/day) or the vehicle polyethylene glycol by subcutaneous osmotic pump to ovariectomized Fisher-344 rats. We compared these groups to each other using a battery of spatial learning tasks, including the water radial-arm maze (WRAM), Morris water maze (MM), and delayed-match-to-sample maze (DMS). We found that all estrogens impaired performance on the WRAM compared to vehicle, while 17β-estradiol administration improved overnight forgetting performance for the MM. The estriol group showed no cognitive enhancements relative to vehicle; however, there were several factors indicating that both our estriol and estradiol doses were too high, so future studies should investigate whether lower doses of estriol may be beneficial to cognition.
ContributorsStonebarger, Gail Ashley (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / Knight, George (Committee member) / Engler-Chiurrazzi, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Poems for the Future President is a chapbook of poetry by Michael Bartelt. Rooted in the democratic idealism of Walt Whitman and the American poetic tradition, the collection is a reflection on Americas of the past, the America we live in now, and an America that could be. The poems encompass a thematic breadth that includes ecological examinations filtered through ancient Taoist and modern ecocritical philosophy, searches for political and ethical authenticity in an over-stimulated information age, and questions about the meaning of romance and tradition in a dystopian present. Included here is the manuscript's critical framework, which highlights the poetry's main influences. The manuscript itself is also included.
ContributorsBartelt, Michael Joseph (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Orion, Shawnte (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
Counternarratives is a print anthology of short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that is characterized by refusal, resistance, and joy. The anthology contains works by writers from all over North America and is the product of a months-long process of collection and curation. The anthology is grounded in the experience of living in the desert southwest, and many of the works reflect that, but it also includes works that reflect different geographical experiences. What binds the works in the anthology together, ultimately, is the ways in which they refuse and resist dominant discourses that dehumanize for the sake of the global capitalist system and in which they joyfully embody alternative ways of existing. Some works take on the aforementioned system explicitly; others do so implicitly, but all of their truths speak to realities that it, through one mechanism or another, marginalizes and obscures. The anthology is published by Four Chambers Press.
ContributorsAnderson, Evan William (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Friedman, Jacob (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Hormone therapy (HT) containing 17beta-estradiol (E2) can greatly reduce physiological symptoms associated with declines in ovarian hormones that are seen with menopause. HT containing E2 has also been shown to play a beneficial role in cognitive function. There is discrepancy, however, surrounding which dose of E2 is the most optimal for cognition. A previous rodent behavioral study in our laboratory evaluated the effects of different doses of E2 on spatial memory performance, and results indicated that rats treated with a low E2 dose (0.3 g E2) made fewer working memory incorrect (WMI) errors, indicating enhanced spatial memory performance, compared to vehicle (0.1ml sesame oil)- and high E2 (3.0 g E2)- treated groups. This finding warranted the present investigation with the overarching aim to evaluate underlying neuromolecular mechanisms that may be modulating these cognitive effects. Both the insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor (IGF1-R) and extracellular regulated kinase (Erk) 2 have been observed to mediate E2-induced memory enhancements. We used the Western Blot to measure IGF1-R and activated Erk1/2 expression in brain regions involved in learning and memory, including the dorsal hippocampus, ventral CA1/CA2 hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and perirhinal cortex. Results demonstrated a linear relationship between IGF1-R expression and administered E2 dose in the perirhinal cortex, whereby IGF1-R expression increased as the dose of E2 increased. Additionally, in the perirhinal cortex, IGF1-R expression tended to increase as activated Erk1 increased for all treatment groups. Further, number of WMI errors tended to decrease as IGF1-R expression and activated Erk1 expression in the perirhinal cortex tended to increase in the low E2 treatment group. Collectively, these findings suggest a downstream-dependent relationship between IGF1-R and activated Erk1 in the perirhinal cortex that may be contributing to the enhancements in spatial memory performance observed in animals in the low E2 treatment group. These findings are a crucial piece in the greater understanding of what underlying molecular mechanisms may be modulating a cognitively beneficial dose of E2, and further contribute to the search for a HT that would be beneficial for cognition in menopausal women.
ContributorsNeeley, Rachel Elizabeth (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / George, Andrew (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
There is preclinical evidence that the detrimental cognitive effects of hormone loss can be ameliorated by estrogen therapy (Bimonte, Acosta, & Talboom, 2010), however, one of the primary concerns with current hormone therapies is that they are nonselective, leading to increased risk of breast and endometrial cancers as well as heart disease. Thus, in order to achieve a successful and clinically relevant long-term hormone therapy option, it is optimal to find an estrogen therapy regimen that is selective to its target tissue. Recently, phytoestrogens have been found to exert selective, beneficial effects on cognition and brain. For example, genistein and diadzein produce neuroprotective effects in cognitive brain regions (Zhao, Chen, & Diaz Brinton, 2002). The purpose of this study was threefold: 1) to examine the cognitive impact of phytoestrogens in young ovariectomized rats, 2) to replicate the dose effects found in the Luine study (Luine et al., 2006), while controlling for manufacturer differences, and 3) to assess if the rodent diet used in our laboratory has an estrogenic-like cognitive impact.The current findings suggest that, at least for object memory, diets containing varying amounts of phytoestrogens can alter cognition, with diets containing high amounts of phytoestrogens showing potential benefits to this type of memory.
ContributorsWhitton, Elizabeth Nicole (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Baxter, Leslie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Following natural menopause, androstenedione becomes the main hormone secreted by the follicle-depleted ovaries. We have previously evaluated high physiological doses of androstenedione in the female rodent, and found relations between higher androstenedione levels and spatial memory impairment; this relationship was shown when androstenedione levels were of endogenous, or exogenous, origin (Acosta et al., 2009, Camp et al., 2012). This androstenedione-induced memory impairment in females led us to question whether this androgen also impairs memory in males; no study has yet evaluated androstenedione's impact on cognition in the male rodent model. This is a clinically relevant question, as androstenedione is a steroid of abuse. In the current study, four-month old male rats were given either a daily injection of androstenedione, androstenedione with anastrozole or vehicle (polyethylene glycol). Subjects completed a battery of cognitive tasks evaluating spatial working, reference, and recent memory including the water radial arm maze (WRAM), Morris water maze (MM), and delayed match-to-sample maze (DMTS). We found that androstenedione administration impaired spatial cognitive performance in MM on early overnight forgetting and DMTS early recent memory trials across all days of testing. In addition, we found that androstenedione with anastrozole administration impaired spatial cognitive performance in the learning phases and early overnight forgetting in the MM but had no impact in DMTS testing. There were no significant differences in the WRAM maze for either group. Our findings suggest that androstenedione can impair spatial reference and early recent memory, and that anastrozole reverses this impairment for early recent memory, but not reference memory. Interpreted in the context of hormone conversion, androstenedione's effects on spatial learning and memory may be due, in part, to its conversion to estrone.
ContributorsTorres, Laura Maria (Co-author) / Camp, Bryan (Co-author) / Karber, Lily (Co-author) / Hiroi, Ryoko (Co-author, Committee member) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Co-author, Thesis director) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Menopause is reproductive senescence characterized by a loss of ovarian estrogen and progesterone. Women can experience cognitive decline and other negative symptoms with the loss of ovarian hormones (Sherwin, 2006). While hormone therapies (HT) can treat symptoms of menopause and may have neuroprotective properties, such as the potential to decrease the risk of Alzheimer's Disease (Behl & Manthey, 2000), there are many effects of current HTs that are not ideal. Indeed, optimizing conventional HTs has proven complex, indicating a need for alternative therapies. Phytoestrogens are estrogenic compounds found naturally in plants such as soybeans, that could provide new treatment options. Dietary phytoestrogens can benefit memory in the rodent model (Luine, 2006), although the mechanism underlying these effects is unclear. Basal forebrain cholinergic projections have been shown to mediate the cognitive benefits of estrogen (Gibbs, 2010); we hypothesize that phytoestrogens act similarly, via the cholinergic system, to impact memory. We administered varying doses of phytoestrogen-containing diets to ovariectomized female rats, and used the place recognition task to evaluate spatial memory. Brains were then analyzed for choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), the synthesizing enzyme for acetylcholine, in the vertical-diagonal bands (VDB) and the medial septum (MS) of the basal forebrain. Results showed that ChAT cell counts in the VDB were marginally higher with dietary phytoestrogen treatment. Further, VDB ChAT cell counts positively correlated with place recognition performance, indicating that animals with more VDB ChAT neurons exhibited better spatial memory performance. These results suggest that phytoestrogens might act similarly to natural, endogenously circulating estrogens, and identify phytoestrogens as a direction for investigation as a HT.
ContributorsMousa, Abeer Abdul (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / Olive, Foster (Committee member) / Deviche, Pierre (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School for the Science of Health Care Delivery (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Menopause is associated with a wide array of negative symptoms. As average lifespan increases due to advances in healthcare and technology, more women are spending a larger portion of their lives in a menopausal state low in estrogen and progesterone. Hormone therapies such as Conjugated Equine Estrogens (CEE) and the bioidentical estrogen, 17-estradiol (E2), are commonly prescribed to treat the negative symptoms of menopause. Our laboratory has previously shown that CEE has differential effects on cognitive ability depending on whether menopause is transitional (VCD) or surgical (ovariectomy, OVX). Further, the negative impact of CEE on cognitive function in a transitional ovary-intact model of menopause was associated with high levels of serum androstenedione; the primary hormone circulating in a follicle-deplete menopausal state. Here, we investigate the cognitive effects of these two common hormone therapies separately, and in conjunction with the hormone androstenedione, in a "blank-slate" OVX mouse model. We assessed cognitive ability using two behavioral tasks such at the Water Radial Arm Maze (WRAM, measuring spatial working and reference memory) and the Morris water maze (MM, measuring spatial reference memory). In the WRAM, every treatment group saw impaired performance compared to Vehicle but the combination group of E2 plus Androstenedione. In the MM, the combination group of E2 plus Androstenedione actually enhanced performance in the maze compared to every other comparable group. Translationally, these results suggest that CEE given in the presence of an androstenedione-dominant hormone milieu is impairing to cognition, E2 in this same manner is not. These results yield valuable insight into optimal hormone therapies for menopausal women.
ContributorsGranger, Steven Jay (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Hiroi, Sheri (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Drospirenone (DRSP) is a novel, pharmacologically unique synthetic progestin with properties more similar to the endogenous progestogen, progesterone, than any other progestin currently on the market. While a significant amount of research has been conducted on the risks associated with DRSP, the impact of DRSP on cognition, especially in reference to learning and memory, is not well understood. However, it is imperative to fully understand the cognitive effects of DRSP, both alone and in combination with EE (as taken in a combined oral contraceptive [COC]), so that women and their physicians can make a fully-informed decision when deciding to take a DRSP-containing COC. Study 1 examined the effects of three doses of DRSP in order to determine the optimal dose for combining with EE, and found that the medium dose of DRSP (30 µg/day) enhanced spatial working memory performance. In Study 2, the medium dose of DRSP from Study 1 was combined with low (0.125 µg/day) and high (0.3 µg/day) doses of EE to examine the effects of DRSP as taken with EE in a COC. The results from Study 2 indicated that when DRSP was combined with a low, but not high, dose of EE, spatial working memory impairments were seen at the highest working memory load. Anxiety-like behavior was evaluated using the OFT, and DRSP was shown to decrease measures of anxiety-like behavior. Additionally, while treatment with a high dose of EE decreased several measures of anxiety-like behavior, a low dose of EE did not, suggestive of a dose response. Taken together, the findings presented from both studies suggest that some of the cognitive effects of the combination of DRSP with EE are different than those of either hormone administered on its own. Further exploration in a preclinical, ovary-intact animal model is a next step to fully understand these effects in the translational context of a contraceptive, given that women taking an EE-DRSP combination are typically ovary-intact.
ContributorsPoisson, Mallori Louise (Author) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather (Thesis director) / Doane, Leah (Committee member) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05