Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Spirituality As A Coping Mechanism For Academic Stress, Zurab Kherodinashvili

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Current research has emphasised the adverse effects of stress on well-being and mental health. This paper explores the aspect of stress and well-being in the college student population. Students face multiple stressors during their academic life, such as isolation from family, academic stress, social interactions, financial difficulties, love, and a list of requirements for their future careers. During this period, individuals develop skill sets, ideas, mental prototypes, and coping mechanisms that may be used as a guiding point and retrieved later in life. Coping is mobilizing ideas and behaviors to manage internal and external stressful events. It is a word …

Creativity As Potential: Humanity’S Most Important Trait Reimagined, Jess M. Berkun

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Does Music Percussion Has Impact On The Selective Attention Of College Students?, Lyra Fu

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics and Computing of Bard College.

Who Is Anointed? The Psychological And Social Justice Implications Of Gifted And Talented Programs In The United States, Emma Caroline Gossett

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This paper explores the repercussions of gifted and talented programs in the United States, looking specifically at resulting psychological effects and social justice implications. This analysis is positioned within the discussion of global power struggles for technological advancement. After the success of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States bolstered initiatives in education to ensure they were producing students who could contribute to the prowess of the nation. Gifted programs allowed for a more in-depth focus on those children deemed useful to the labor market. This resulted in additional pressures placed on certain students to excel. The anointment …

Getting Under Your Skin Until You Jump Out Of It: The Psychological Effects Of Music On The Experience Of Film, Clare Ellen Herzog

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Music is like magic. It can sweep you off your feet and spirit you away to places you never thought possible: it can serve as a teleportation device, achieve time travel, and let us read minds. Some pieces of music exist for their own sake, like Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, while others accompany different forms of media: ballets such as The Nutcracker and operas like La Bohème are instantly recognizable for their grandiose and immersive scores. For a moment in time, audiences can really believe that they are traveling to a magical world with Clara, and even without the …

The Role Of A Polyrhythm’S Pitch Interval In Music-Dependent Memory, Hadley R. Parum

Senior Projects Spring 2021

When listening to music, humans can easily and often automatically assess the perceptual similarity of different moments in music. However, it is difficult to rigorously define the way in which we determine exactly how similar we find to moments to be. This problem has driven inquiry in music cognition, musicology, and music theory alike, but previous results have depended on behaviorally mediated responses and/or recursive analytic strategies by music scholars. The present work employs the context-dependent memory paradigm as a novel way to investigate the extent to which listeners consider two musical examples to be similar. After incidentally learning words …

Writing At The Horizon: How Producing Imagined Narratives Affects Mood, David Yu-Zhong Liang

Senior Projects Fall 2021

The present study explores the effect of three different writing activities and their subsequent effects on participant mood. Writing has been of particular interest for psychologists due to its use in interventions aimed at working through traumatic or stressful periods, and recent research has begun to explore the use of narrative in placing traumatic events and experiences in greater context. However, purely therapeutic, intervention-based writing exercises exclude a large amount of more expressive, imagined creations and narratives, which may have the capacity to reorient, contextualize, and otherwise positively affect a person’s mood. This study investigates whether employing the imagination may …

Undressing Evil: On The Language, Function, And Eradication Of Evil, Nelson Hilario

Senior Projects Spring 2021

How does one begin a discussion about evil? The question of evil is approached by different thinkers via fundamentally different routes, leaning on disparate methods, and asking distinct questions—the basis and intention of each inquiry differ. Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morality shows us that the region of violence is language, that violence begins with language. This is Nietzsche’s categorical contribution to the study of evil: that “evil” belongs to the domain of language (in defining “evil,” contrasting “evil,” and developing a dialect to talk about “evil”). Furthermore, Nietzsche’s understanding of the role of guilt, and what one does to …

Voice Of Silence: Women Inmates' Perspective On Sexual Violence In The Soviet Gulag, 1936-1956, Louisa Jane Fulkerson

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Womb With A View, Briauna Marie Falk

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I found my mother’s pregnancy diary when I was 12. The diary presents not only the story of my origin, but also the story of how my biological father left my mother. The diary gave me insight into what unfolded while I was growing inside her, and yet, many questions still remain unanswered. I have heard that trauma experienced by the mother is felt in utero alongside her – I worry one of the first feelings I felt was true sadness. Ideally the diary could answer my unresolved questions, but instead I am left to my imagination. The diary cannot …

How Did The Shift In Chilean Cultural Memory Between 1988 To 1998 Become Politically Salient For International Human Rights?, Elena Ann Botts

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

All The World's Ashamed, Peter David Lane

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

This project is an analysis of three Shakespeare plays through three different ways of understanding shame. Othello, Coriolanus, and Measure for Measure are inspected through a social, bodily, and religious understanding of shame, respectively. The purpose of this tripartite view of shame is to reveal the many different ways in which shame makes itself a part of our lives. The first paradigm is based off of Erving Goffman’s 1956 sociology text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and explores how the ways social …

The [E]Motionless Body No Longer: Tracing The Historical Intersections Of Mental Illness And Movement In The American Asylum, Holly Adele Herzfeld

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

From Once Upon A Time To Happily Ever After: Grimms’ Fairy Tales And Early Childhood Development, Hannah Mccarley

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies and The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Making The Male Manager: Can Non-Cognitive Skills Explain The Glass Ceiling?, Nora Paget Harrington

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Abstract: This project examines whether men and women’s non-cognitive skills —or personality characteristics— influence their respective occupational attainment. I take an interdisciplinary approach to inform my hypothesis by incorporating psychological and sociological theories on the production and reproduction of gender roles in order to understand why men and women may systematically differ along some personality dimensions. I use linear probability and probit models to measure the effect of the non-cognitive traits, locus of control, self-esteem, and risk tolerance on the probability of being a manager. In both models I find that an internal locus of control, high self-esteem, and high …

Together We’Ll Make Magic: Exploring The Relationship Between Empathy And Literature Using Ruth Ozeki’S “A Tale For The Time Being”, Janet Lindsay Dinozzi-Houser

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My project is devoted to untangling the often-misunderstood and misapplied subject of empathy, particularly as it relates to the reading process. I begin with a brief background of the term’s history and the debate surrounding its use by researchers in the fields of both Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. I then apply this critical understanding of a commonly invoked term to a close reading of contemporary novel A Tale for The Time Being by Japanese-American novelist Ruth Ozeki. Dedicated primarily to the fictional story of Nao Yasutani, a teenage girl struggling with her recent move back to Japan after a …

Inferno: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Salome Gwendolyn Dewell-Amiranashvili

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A reflection on the process of a collaborative senior project in theater and performance and an exploration of self-validation and pain.

The Effects Of Affective Arousal On Color Perception And Memory, Nicole Elizabeth Lang

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The link between affective arousal, color perception, and color memory was explored by inducing fear, sadness, or embarrassment in 158 participants who them completed a color perception and memory task. It was predicted that participants experiencing fear or embarrassment would more often correctly identify and remember red and green than a neutral condition whereas experiencing sadness would lead to less correct identification and memory for blue and yellow than neutral. There was only a marginally significant effect of fear on color memory for red. In the low arousal condition, there was an effect of fear on color memory for green …

A Fire To Keep Me Warm, Hannah Isabel Sparagana

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Artist Statement - A Fire to Keep me Warm

The process of creating this film was in many respects non-linear and highly organic in its evolution. I cannot pinpoint an exact moment when the project was solely decided upon and its structure formed, whether it was to be a dramatic narrative, a visual poem, an experimental essay. Even in its final stages I have discovered this labeling to be non-essential. Rather, I would have the viewer interpret the work, navigating the piece solely through the montage of images, sound and rhythm. In my experience, this is what meaningful and inspired …

The Mind, The Brain, And The Self: The Limits Of Sense And Nonsense In Neurology And Psychology, Max Boris Baird

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

"I Is An Other": An Exploration Of The Development Of Childhood And Adolescent Self-Concept, Jessica Lebovits

Senior Projects Spring 2012

A multidisciplinary project that combines original empirical research with an analysis of two Modernist novels, The Waves by Virginia Woolf and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

The Family Dialogue: Language Acculturation And Its Impact On Perceived Family Conflict Among Asian Americans, Qi Xu

Senior Projects Spring 2011

The present study examines the acculturation gap and the acculturation dimension of language between 1^st - 2^nd generation Asian Americans (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian) adolescents and their first generation immigrant parents and its predicted relationship to the likelihood of perceived family conflict. Survey data was collected from 34 Asian American college students using the Suinn-Lew Asian Self Identity Acculturation Scale (SL-ASIA) and the Asian American Family Conflicts Scale (AAFCS). It was predicted that the larger the gap between the levels of acculturation and language acculturation of the parent and child, the greater the likelihood of experienced family conflict. …