Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Green Passport Program: Proposing A Study Abroad Program To Encourage Sustainable Behavior And Offset Emissions, Suraya Souidi

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

The University of Richmond has a goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and in order to do this, carbon offsets are likely a necessary component to implement in lieu of adequate technology to abate the usage of carbon from behaviors such as travel. The scope of this proposal focuses on the Office of International Education and study abroad travel, which accounts for a large amount of emissions in the University’s portfolio. The purpose of this study was to propose a program to the Office of International Education which oriented students towards sustainability while they engaged in a study abroad …

Testing The Waters: An Analysis Of Recent Nutrient Levels In Westhampton Lake And Their Implications For Water Quality Management, Taylor Coleman

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

This investigation was undertaken to understand recent nutrient levels of Westhampton Lake and determine the implications of its water quality relative to the sustenance of aquatic life on campus at the University of Richmond. Nutrient data was obtained from the documentation of ongoing monthly sampling by a research team from Virginia Commonwealth University and consisted in the evaluation of total nitrogen, total phosphorus, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, chlorides, and the bacteria, Escherichia coli between November 20, 2018, and December 9, 2021. Analysis of each individual nutrient included the comparison of its minimum, maximum, and mean level relative to recommended criteria provided …

Red Wolf Reintroduction: Land Ownership And Protection Status Analysis, Anna Frisbie

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

Red wolves (Canis rufus) are critically endangered, and currently the only wild population exists in northeast NC (“Red Wolf,” FWS, n.d.). Here, I use geospatial analysis to investigate the potential for another wild population to establish in the Delmarva Peninsula. I consider land ownership and protection status because these factors influence local public support (Nie, 2001; Naughton-Treves et al., 2003; Berger-Tal et al., 2020), as well as reintroduction success (Carroll et al., 2003; Wolf & Ripple, 2018). I compare the ownership and protection status of land in the Delmarva Peninsula to that in the Albemarle Peninsula, where the red wolf …

Salmon Coding Manual, Paulo Santesso Goncalves

Heritage Conversation Partners

No abstract provided.

Evergreen Coding Manual, Oscar Gonzalez, Liner Solarte

Heritage Conversation Partners

No abstract provided.

Examining The Connection Between Sibling Relationships And Empathy Development, Alicia Joswiak

Research and Scholarship Symposium Posters

Humans are social beings who shape their lives through relationships. The ability to understand the mental status of others, or empathy, is a critical determinant to successful social relationships. Few studies have explored how older siblings influence the development of empathy in younger siblings. The current study examined an aspect of positive sibling relationships to understand what interactions and/or behaviors between siblings foster empathy development. The primary hypothesis was that a positive correlation exists between physical affection among siblings and empathy development in the youngest sibling. This study included 100 adult participants who are the youngest sibling. An online survey …

A Comparison Of Stigma Levels For Individuals With Psychology Disorders And Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities, Isabella E. Wood

Honors Colloquium

This is the flyer for Isabella Wood's Honors Colloquium.

Phonetic Speech Variations Of L1 Portuguese English Learners, Maria Salow Castillo

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

The English pronunciation of six Brazilian Portuguese language learners as well as their language experiences and attitudes are the focuses of this study. Participants provided information regarding demographics and experience with English, then completed the same reading exercise in Portuguese, then English. Interviewees answered the questions and completed the exercises remotely during a Zoom call. Findings include language attitudes and raw phonetic data. All nonstandard pronunciations were transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and prominent unintelligible articulations are highlighted in this study. The resulting pronunciations are derived from the learner’s interlanguage and their understanding of phoneme-grapheme relations between the …

Furniture Donation Helps Foster Youth Of Xenia, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Being a wise steward of its resources and seeing a way to serve others in the community, Cedarville University will donate desks, chairs, bunk beds, and dressers that it no longer uses in its residential housing to the Emerge Recovery Trade Initiative (ERTI) in Xenia. The items from Cedarville will be delivered to the ERTI campus May 9-10.

School Of Nursing To Recognize Student Excellence, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

As the academic year draws to a close, the Cedarville University School of Nursing is planning a series of celebrations to honor its undergraduate and graduate students.

Student Teacher Steps Up During Tragic Loss, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

Winter Fraley, a junior special education major from Cleveland, Ohio, served as a teacher candidate in a second grade classroom in 2021, gaining field experience she hoped would prepare her for a teaching career. Her job became more challenging than she anticipated when the teacher she was supposed to shadow unexpectedly died of COVID-19.

Analytical Study To Determine Significant Causes Of Increased No-Hitters In The 2021 Major League Baseball Season, Joel Robison

Honors Projects

Why were there so many no-hitters in the 2021 MLB season? This project focuses on possible significant causes to the record-breaking number of no-hitters pitched in the 2021 Major League Baseball season. Specifically, this project takes an analytical look at the recent trends in launch angles and spin rates to determine if there are any significant causes to the increased number of no-hitters in baseball. The random nature and unpredictability of the game of baseball make it almost impossible to come to any solid conclusions.

Fighting Food Insecurity In New York City: What Role For Street Trees?, Kristen Cooney

Environment and Sustainability Honors Papers

There is growing recognition that urban forests have the potential to combat food insecurity via their edible parts, namely fruits, berries, and nuts. I researched New York City’s street trees, by locating trees with edible parts within food insecure communities, to analyze this potential.

Urban Forests And Their Potential To Combat Food Insecurity: Analyzing Street Trees In Baltimore, Md For Their Edibility, Victoria Bearden

Environment and Sustainability Honors Papers

Food insecure environments, in which residents lack consistent access to nutritious food materials, can occur in urban settings. Literature on urban forests suggests that trees can provide a range of provisioning ecosystem services, including edible uses. We consider this to determine if street trees in Baltimore, Maryland have the potential to provide nutritious food materials to address food insecurity in Healthy Food Priority Areas (HFPA), designated by Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Our analysis utilizes the Plants For a Future database and the geospatial hotspot analysis tool in Esri’s ArcMap to determine the edible quality ratings (EQR) of …

Cedarville University Business Students Contribute $500 To One Bistro, Mark D. Weinstein

News Releases

On April 26 at 3 p.m., the Cedarville University student business Pursuit, an outgrowth of the university’s Integrated Business Core (IBC), will donate $500 in proceeds from their shirts, hats and pins to One Bistro Café, 87 E. Main St., Xenia.

Rural Resiliency: The Cause And Effect Of Minnesota's Maternal Health Crisis, Annabel Traudie Gregg

Geography Honors Projects

The United States is experiencing a maternal health crisis that disproportionately affects those who give birth in rural communities. Rural birthing people have higher maternal mortality rates, increased risk of postpartum hemorrhage, non-indicated cesarean sections, and other adverse health outcomes. Despite the enhanced risks of rural birth, rural communities are losing access to hospital-based obstetric care at an unprecedented rate. Minnesota has vast rural territory, with one-fourth of its population living outside the urban sphere ­– making it a strategic area of study. As of July, 2021, 31% of Minnesota’s 91 rural hospitals were at risk of closing. The repercussions …

Implications Of Metalinguistic Awareness On Early Childhood Word-Referent Mapping, Zinan Yang

Linguistics Honors Projects

Children exhibit word-referent learning mechanisms like statistical learning (SL) proposed by Yu and Smith (2007) and propose-but-verify (PBV) mechanisms proposed by Medina (2011), but prior work has yet to investigate how children develop metalinguistic awareness within these two approaches. To evaluate the differences in corpus data predictions of the SL and PBV mechanisms, this study proposes a learning bias: an Extralinguistic Reference Bias. Statistical learning predicts a constrained trajectory of children’s development of metalinguistic awareness. Children younger than approximately age 5 have limited access to metalinguistic language use while they are engaged in the initial mapping of forms to their …

Resurrecting Gaelic: Modernity And Heritage Language Revival In Scotland In A Comparative Perspective, Sean Coady

Student Research Submissions

Many people from across the world have little or no connection to their heritage languages. Whether this loss is caused by conquest, colonialization, or simply lack of parent-child transmission, many believe that they are missing an integral part of their cultural identity and want to reclaim the languages of their forebearers. There is wide debate about how, why, and if this linguistic reclamation and revitalization should happen because, in the face of modernity and language evolution, the best solutions are not always clear. What constitutes successful language revitalization in the modern world, and why does it happen? Gaelic in Scotland …

Borderline Personality Symptoms And Relationship Threat: The Moderating Role Of Perceived Parental Rejection, Elsa Baumgartner

Student Research Submissions

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often perceive relationship threats more intensely, resulting in increased emotional reactivity. However, this link has never been examined with physiological measures in “real time,” nor have reports of perceived parental rejection ever been investigated as a potential moderator of this link. To fill this gap, the present study induced romantic relationship threat, after which participants completed an emotional reactivity task while electroencephalography data were recorded. Results reveal that higher levels of BPD features were associated with increased emotional reactivity, indicated by larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes, to negative stimuli in the face of …

The Texas Community-Engagement Research Alliance Against Covid-19 In Disproportionately Affected Communities (Tx Ceal) Consortium, Rebecca A. Seguin-Fowler, Chris Amos, Bettina M. Beech, Robert L. Ferrer, Lorna Mcneill, Jasmine J. Opusunju, Emily Spence, Erika L. Thompson, Luis R. Torres-Hostos, Jamboor K. Vishwanatha

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires urgent implementation of effective community-engaged strategies to enhance education, awareness, and inclusion of underserved communities in prevention, mitigation, and treatment efforts. The Texas Community-Engagement Alliance Consortium was established with support from the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct community-engaged projects in selected geographic locations with a high proportion of medically underserved minority groups with a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 disease and hospitalizations. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the Consortium. The Consortium organized seven projects with focused activities to address COVID-19 clinical and vaccine trials …

Mosaic: A Lifetime Of Poems, Emma F. Bowen

Honors Projects

In hopes of providing a clearer picture of the aging process and its effects on our personalities, follow this collection of poems through diary-like entries of individuals navigating their lives from daycare, heartbreak, and loneliness. The impact that development can have on our psychological well-being and brains is fascinating and feels familiar. Why do we see the world so differently when we are young? As we grow older, what is so important that makes us shift how we view ourselves and our environment multiple times? It is often seen that each generation shares like-mindedness throughout their lives – why?

Psilocybin Psychotherapy With Acceptance And Commitment Therapy: A Potential Treatment For Social Anxiety Disorder, Elliot Sandberg

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Individuals diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD) require effective therapeutic interventions. Due to the nature of SAD, individuals tend to not seek care for their treatment, leading to the continuation of avoidance behaviors that significantly impact their daily existence. Psilocybin psychotherapy has the potential to lead to significant changes in the personality structure of individuals as well as reducing anxious responses to their environment in a relatively short period of time. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can serve as the ideal therapeutic backing to psilocybin as it emphasizes mindfulness and psychological flexibility, both of which aid in the therapeutic mechanisms …

Candidate Emergence Among Women: Responsibility To Run, Abigail Peabody

Politics Honors Papers

Since women make competitive candidates, what explains the fact that fewer women run for political office? This paper analyzes women's emergence as candidates and finds that expectations of gender discrimination, women's tendency to underestimate their own abilities, a lack of encouragement and role models, and greater party support and funding for male candidates have discouraged many women from running for political office. Interviews with women who have actually run for office reveal that they were motivated by a powerful sense of personal responsibility, whether as a reflection of deep values that they feel responsible to uphold, due to relationally embedded …

Conspiracy Vs. Science: A Survey Of U.S. Public Beliefs, Lawrence C. Hamilton

Carsey School of Public Policy

In this brief, author Lawrence Hamilton reports the results of a nationwide U.S. survey that asked respondents whether they agreed, disagreed, or were unsure about a series of statements that mixed pseudo-science con­spiracy claims with well-established scientific facts.

Around 10 percent of respondents agreed with conspiracy claims that the Earth is flat, NASA faked the Moon landings, or COVID-19 vaccinations implant tracking microchips. For comparison, 58 to 83 percent agreed with statements of basic scientific facts—such as the Earth is billions of years old, or revolves around the Sun. Although agreement with conspiracy claims was low overall, it was significantly …

Prevalence Of Bullying Behaviors Among Students From A National University In The United Arab Emirates: A Cross-Sectional Study, Fatima Al-Darmaki, Haleama Al Sabbah, Dalia Haroun

All Works

This study aims to investigate bullying behaviors among college students at one of the national universities in UAE, and also to examine the psychological characteristics of those who were exposed to, or have experienced bullying. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 839 undergraduate students at one of the national universities in the UAE. Students from all colleges participated in this study and were selected by using stratified random sampling. Participants completed a bullying survey designed for the study, in addition to three psychological measures [i.e., Aggression Questionnaire, Buss and Perry, 1992; The Primary Care Anxiety and Depression, El-Rufaie et al., …

Exploring The Relationship Between Art And Environmental Education, Mackenzie Haynes

Honors Projects

To explore the relationship between art and environmental education, I created a lesson plan and then put into practice at Crim Elementary School in a 4th grade art class. The art project had to do with the environment, endangered animals and recyclable materials. I titled the project "Habitat Heroes" and students had to imagine that they were the only people left on Earth along with a few animals and lots of trash. They were tasked with selecting an endangered animal in Ohio from one of five different groups (mammals, birds, reptiles/amphibians, birds and fish) to create a habitat for. The …

The Relationship Between Ptsd-Related Symptoms And Skin Disease Symptom Severity In A Dermatological Sample, Kristin Barnett

Honors Theses

Previous research has demonstrated associations between stress and physical health conditions, including skin disease. The stress cycle, including its associated hormonal responses and stress behaviors, contributes to more severe skin disease symptoms. Psychological stress and anxiety-disorder symptoms are known to be associated with skin disease severity; however, research has yet to examine the relationships between stress disorders and skin disease severity. Therefore, stress disorders (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) are hypothesized to have a similar relationship with skin disease severity, wherein greater severity of PTSD-related symptoms would be positively associated with skin disease severity. Participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N …

An Analysis Of Appearance-Based Assumptions In Content Creation, Emily Andersen

Honors Projects

The purpose of this project is to uncover assumptions and stereotypes held against college majors through content creation. Is it natural to stereotype and label people? Is it harmful? Most may think that is true, while others may believe that is being judgemental. Can others tell what major a student is by a first glance or a brief conversation? Is it the way they dress, their star sign, or political beliefs? These are all examples of stereotypes I believe could influence an assumption. What kind of thoughts goes into these stereotypes from a sociological perspective? Answers are discovered through a …

"Standing In The Gap": Combating Sexual Abuse In The Protestant Church, Hayley N. Carter

Honors Projects

Sexual abuse in the Christian Church has been a problem for many decades, and scholars have written extensively about sexual abuse occurring in the Catholic Church. However, abuse occurring in the Protestant Church has not been given that same attention. In 2017, the #MeToo movement went viral and has inspired many sexual abuse survivors to share their stories. I will argue that the Protestant Church should acknowledge the #MeToo movement’s accomplishments, and that this acknowledgement would lead to positive changes in how it approaches sexual abuse. I also will discuss financial abuse, which is a correlating behavior along with sexual …

Ohio Energy Generation Optimization, Thomas Lynch

Honors Projects

This honors project explores the optimization of energy generation within the state of Ohio to better the energy generation efficiency both environmentally and economically. The proposed solution is a 30-year plan from 2020 to 2050 to reduce the environmental impact caused by electricity generation in Ohio. This project shows guidelines and goals to reach by the end of every decade spanning from 2030 to 2050. This was done using an optimizing program called Multiple Objective Linear Programming (MOLP) and while not perfect it lays a foundation for changes that should come to Ohio’s energy mix in the next 30 years.