Sex education curricula often do not discuss topics of pleasure and pain, thus perpetuating a cycle of stigma within intimate partnerships. This thesis examines the current research surrounding conversations about pleasure and pain within interpersonal relationships and comprehensive sex education curricula. Interviews were conducted with upper-class undergraduate women at Arizona State University about their sex education history and how this impacted their knowledge and perceptions of sexual pleasure and pain. The interviews also focused on how pleasure and pain have impacted a woman’s sexuality and intimacy both personally and with a partner. This study found that women value sexually fulfilling lives with the absence of pain; however, the sex education they were given did not provide them with the confidence or language to discuss pleasure and pain with their partners. These findings allow for recommendations for developmentally appropriate sex education programs that focus on encouragement and teach women to confidently discuss their pleasure and pain with their partners to ensure they feel safe, comfortable, and fulfilled during sex.

My paper focuses on the existence of God in the face of the existence of evil. I provide a summary of the topic as it stands and provide my own arguments as well as counterarguments to try and provide a logical reconciliation of the existence of God and the necessity of evil in the world.

Romantic relationship research has focused on various characteristics of individual and partner dynamics including intimacy and trust which are important aspects of relationship success. High levels of intimacy in relationships is associated with commitment, passion, psychosocial identity, and lower self-consciousness. Similarly, trust involves the perception of stability and consistency in partner behavior that is in accordance with one’s best interests. Another aspect of romantic relationships that has been heavily researched is attachment style which has been shown to strongly influence how partners behave in relationships. Couples that face relationship challenges have been found to benefit from dance and movement therapy. Current research does not investigate the interactions of all of these facets of relationships and how they might be improved. Therefore, the present study strives to explore how established research on trust, intimacy, and attachment style can be used to improve relationships in the context of dance and movement. The experimental group consisted of 7 couples who participated in partnership dance lessons over the course of one month. The control group consisted of 9 couples who did not participate in the classes. We predicted that partnership dance classes would increase intimacy and trust in couples. We also investigated how attachment style might be implicated in this change. Results show a significant increase in intimacy for participants in the experimental group who participated in partnership dance classes. There was no significant increase in trust. While some participants did change attachment style throughout the study, the majority of participants retained their attachment style from the beginning of the study. Future research should focus on what types of dance are most beneficial for romantic couples, coding participant emotions during the dance class, and how the approach to teaching impacts participants’ experience.

Romantic relationship research has focused on various characteristics of individual and partner dynamics including intimacy and trust which are important aspects of relationship success. High levels of intimacy in relationships is associated with commitment, passion, psychosocial identity, and lower self-consciousness. Similarly, trust involves the perception of stability and consistency in partner behavior that is in accordance with one’s best interests. Another aspect of romantic relationships that has been heavily researched is attachment style which has been shown to strongly influence how partners behave in relationships. Couples that face relationship challenges have been found to benefit from dance and movement therapy. Current research does not investigate the interactions of all of these facets of relationships and how they might be improved. Therefore, the present study strives to explore how established research on trust, intimacy, and attachment style can be used to improve relationships in the context of dance and movement. The experimental group consisted of 7 couples who participated in partnership dance lessons over the course of one month. The control group consisted of 9 couples who did not participate in the classes. We predicted that partnership dance classes would increase intimacy and trust in couples. We also investigated how attachment style might be implicated in this change. Results show a significant increase in intimacy for participants in the experimental group who participated in partnership dance classes. There was no significant increase in trust. While some participants did change attachment style throughout the study, the majority of participants retained their attachment style from the beginning of the study. Future research should focus on what types of dance are most beneficial for romantic couples, coding participant emotions during the dance class, and how the approach to teaching impacts participants’ experience.

The goal of the research is to assist Barrett Honors students at Arizona State University by generating a mindset that embraces feelings of stress rather than avoiding it. After data collection was complete, the researchers created a valuable and necessary field guide for ASU Barrett Faculty to provide for incoming students. The present study has been compiled to prove the importance of reframing one's perception of stress as an aid, reducing one's “symptomatic” perception of stress and experiencing life's stresses as challenges, and to cease living in a constant unhealthy state of fight or flight. The main research questions are: What is the average perceived stress level of Barrett Honors students and what information can ASU further provide incoming Barrett students that will alleviate overall perceived stress levels based on the data collection and field guide generated from the present study? The basis of the present study began with a survey compiled of demographic questions, questions relating to the Human Event (HE - a required honors course), and lastly the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) developed by Sheldon Cohen, Tom Kamarck, and Robin Mermelstein, with slight modification for students relating to their perception of stress over the last semester. After survey responses were concluded, it was determined that the average perceived stress score among honors students was 18.57, shockingly lower than what was previously thought. The overall results of the PSS survey indicate that Barrett students are moderately stressed, disproving the researchers initial hypothesis that honors students perceived stress scores would be considered high on the PSS. The results did provide researchers with enough data to compile an incoming Barrett student field guide based on desired information reported in the survey. A discussion of the results explores the purpose of how the present study can be used in helping students with perceived stress, interpretations and significance of the data, correlation between academic success and perceived stress, major contributions to the study, and limitations and recommendations for future research.

Cancer is sometimes depicted as a reversion to single cell behavior in cells adapted to live in a multicellular assembly. If this is the case, one would expect that mutation in cancer disrupts functional mechanisms that suppress cell-level traits detrimental to multicellularity. Such mechanisms should have evolved with or after the emergence of multicellularity. This leads to two related, but distinct hypotheses: 1) Somatic mutations in cancer will occur in genes that are younger than the emergence of multicellularity (1000 million years [MY]); and 2) genes that are frequently mutated in cancer and whose mutations are functionally important for the emergence of the cancer phenotype evolved within the past 1000 million years, and thus would exhibit an age distribution that is skewed to younger genes. In order to investigate these hypotheses we estimated the evolutionary ages of all human genes and then studied the probability of mutation and their biological function in relation to their age and genomic location for both normal germline and cancer contexts.

We observed that under a model of uniform random mutation across the genome, controlled for gene size, genes less than 500 MY were more frequently mutated in both cases. Paradoxically, causal genes, defined in the COSMIC Cancer Gene Census, were depleted in this age group. When we used functional enrichment analysis to explain this unexpected result we discovered that COSMIC genes with recessive disease phenotypes were enriched for DNA repair and cell cycle control. The non-mutated genes in these pathways are orthologous to those underlying stress-induced mutation in bacteria, which results in the clustering of single nucleotide variations. COSMIC genes were less common in regions where the probability of observing mutational clusters is high, although they are approximately 2-fold more likely to harbor mutational clusters compared to other human genes. Our results suggest this ancient mutational response to stress that evolved among prokaryotes was co-opted to maintain diversity in the germline and immune system, while the original phenotype is restored in cancer. Reversion to a stress-induced mutational response is a hallmark of cancer that allows for effectively searching “protected” genome space where genes causally implicated in cancer are located and underlies the high adaptive potential and concomitant therapeutic resistance that is characteristic of cancer.

Testing mediation models is critical for identifying potential variables that need to be targeted to effectively change one or more outcome variables. In addition, it is now common practice for clinicians to use multiple informant (MI) data in studies of statistical mediation. By coupling the use of MI data with statistical mediation analysis, clinical researchers can combine the benefits of both techniques. Integrating the information from MIs into a statistical mediation model creates various methodological and practical challenges. The authors review prior methodological approaches to MI mediation analysis in clinical research and propose a new latent variable approach that overcomes some limitations of prior approaches. An application of the new approach to mother, father, and child reports of impulsivity, frustration tolerance, and externalizing problems (N = 454) is presented. The results showed that frustration tolerance mediated the relationship between impulsivity and externalizing problems. The new approach allows for a more comprehensive and effective use of MI data when testing mediation models.