Digital Commons Network^™

User Experience – Lindenwood University Admissions Website, Dillon Edward Bittiker

Theses

This project focuses on how to improve Lindenwood University’s admissions web page experience. The primary focus is to study current admissions staff member’s roles within the organization, and work to create a better online experience for them and their students.

Exploration Of The Process Of Building Brand Equity As A Digital Painter, Andrew Lim

Theses

The mainstream debut of the World Wide Web in the 20th century has increased the use of branding from its simple origins of being a visual marker into a multi-faceted entity. Branding has evolved to become a multi-faceted effort that creates rational and emotional attributes and can foster interactions and develop and deepen relationships with customers (Rubinstein, 2002).

The boom of the Internet brought forth new inventions and software that affected many industries, particularly the arts. A new emergent form of art known as digital painting emerged where a drawing tablet, stylus and digital image rendering software such as Adobe …

An Interactive Medication Reminder To Bond Senior Citizens And Their Family Members, Bei Liu

Theses

This project is about assisting seniors in their daily life. More and more senior citizens in the world are facing the problem of living alone. After research, I find that medication is a very important part of seniors’ life. My design is about medication reminder that can also connect the seniors with their family members. At first, I focused on the social relationship of senior citizens and started to research medication reminders in the market. I also read many books and magazines about the medication of senior citizens and try to figure out the size and volume of my design. …

Breathing Pacer Device For Stress And Anxiety Relief, Maria Grazia Guerrero Bejarano

Theses

Stress and stress-related physical and mental diseases are increasing and affecting more people every day. There have been many approaches to try to solve this issue. Many of them are based on the idea that meditation and mindfulness breathing could improve these conditions. The problem is that not everyone can achieve those levels of meditation for that to work. Another issue is that those solutions are relying on a particular way of breathing to help all.

In contrast, this project developed under research that shows that the amount of CO₂ in a person's exhaled breath could be an indicator of …

Exploring English Teacher Beliefs And Actual Practice Of The Use Of Interactive Reading Strategies In Kindergarten Classes In Al Ain’S Schools, Saleha Saleh Al Harthi

Theses

This study aimed to investigate the beliefs of the kindergarten teachers in the UAE Ministry of Education on the assigned teaching and assessment reading strategies and to explore the implementation in teaching and assessment in Al Ain KG Literacy focus sessions. A questionnaire on teacher beliefs was distributed to 231 teachers in 26 Al Ain kindergartens and the convenience sample was conducted for this instrument. A random sample of 17 English teachers employed at 4 of the kindergartens was then observed for their implementation of reading strategies in the classroom. The participants were all from Al Ain city with at …

Exploring The Role Of Direct Phonemic Awareness Instruction Of Decoding And Letter Naming On Reading Abilities Of Uae Kindergarteners, Eiman Abdulla Alkhlaifi

Theses

This study aimed at exploring the role of direct phonemic awareness of letter naming and decoding in the reading abilities of Emirati kindergartners. The mixed-method was adopted to achieve the purpose of this study. In the first phase of the study quantitative means were used by conducting a pre and post-test after implementation of the program for six weeks. The second phase of the study featured a collection of qualitative data means of document analysis which was randomly selected from the participant's performance during the program. The participants in this study were KG1 students who were selected conveniently (n=40) and …

A Sustainable Residential Community That Promotes Urban Dwellers’ Well-Being – New City Development In Nanjing China, Xingyan Wang

Theses

The process of rapid urbanization has brought not only opportunities for the development of urban areas but also challenges for the design of quality urban space, especially for residential neighborhoods and public spaces. For the past four decades, the most common housing option for urban dwellers in China has been an apartment in a high-rise concrete tower in a gated residential community. This type of housing model initially improved the living conditions for residents and helped to solve the land shortage issue; however, that model can no longer fulfill residents’ demand for well-being or maintain a sustainable way of living. …

Probability Of Naturalism And Metanormative Realism, Curtis Howd

Theses

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution can be mobilized to provide epistemological challenges to metanormative realism. It is argued that, since natural selection selects for behaviors adequate for survival and fecundity, our psychologies must be shaped by this same process. A-type challenges point to the improbability of the vast number of true normative beliefs given that they evolved to track survival and fecundity, not truth. B-type debunking arguments point to the improbability of the hypothesis that evolution would track truth given that there are a multitude of defeaters for this hypothesis. I will argue that both a-type and b-type arguments fail to …

An Analysis Of Happiness Meter Data Through Data Mining Tools And Sentiment Classification, Maitha Ahmed Hussain Alblooshi

Theses

Customer satisfaction in the organization's services can play a crucial role in reforming their business strategy for better productivity. Some organizations measure their customer satisfaction through the percentage of happiness rate, some through non-systematic surveys, and some through direct interviews with their customers. Customers’ feedbacks can be gathered in two formats; structured data (numeric ratings) and unstructured data (comments). Being able to have a comprehensive measure of the quality of government services by considering those two formats makes it a big challenge to make useful insights from data for customers and decision-makers. The work in this paper analyzes customers' votes …

Race Differences In Youths’ Attitudes Towards Arming Teachers: Investigating The Role Of Procedural Justice, Faraneh Shamserad

Theses

Over the course of the last two decades, anxiety over school shootings has continued to influence school safety reform. Due to prominent news coverage and growing fear over school shootings, school securitization in American public schools has expanded to include the arming of schoolteachers. While supporters advocate for the need to arm schoolteachers, little is known about the level of support the policy receives from the very people it is intended to protect - students. Although research examining students’ perceptions of school security is scant, existing research suggests that target-hardening measures may be counterproductive and that there are racial differences …

Up-Regulation Of Sexual Desire In Long-Term Relationships: Self-Report And Electrophysiological Data, Lauri L. Davis

Theses

Diminished sexual desire is a common in long-term relationships yet little research has examined strategies to promote sexual desire within healthy intact couples. This study focused on three regulation strategies: 1) positive reappraisal of the partner, 2) reappraisal of sexual desire decline, and 3) sexual imagery. These regulation strategies were used to test for an increase in sexual desire, infatuation, attachment, and relationship satisfaction for the partner. We additionally examined whether these strategies increased motivated attention to the partner as indicated by the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component. Participants (N=25, age=18-32 yrs, 6 men) …

Different Exercise Tendencies Modulate Behavioral And Molecular Changes To Opioid Or Exercise-Induced Reward, Amanda Titus

Theses

Reward changes were observed in rodents with different exercise tendencies by utilizing the conditioned place preference paradigm. Adult male Wistar rats with distinct phenotypes (low volume runners, high volume runners, and wild-type) were given access to a running wheel or an injection of morphine as a rewarding stimulus. There was no difference observed in the strength of conditioned place preference between the rewarding stimuli. Extinction was significantly more effective in low volume runners than high volume runners and wild-type animals, as was observed in the lower percentage of time spent in their assigned conditioning chamber. These findings suggest that low …

Speculative Fashion: A Spacesuit For Life Outside Earth, Lauren Miyoko Furushima

Theses

When Earth is no longer able to house living creatures, humans will need a new environment to inhabit. Space tourism companies are already looking toward building civilizations in outer space. In accordance, humans will need space wear that is able to support their bodies for long periods of time, therefore supporting life outside of Earth. NASA’s white spacesuits protect astronauts but are hard to move in and costly to manufacture. As designers, it is vital to envision different solutions for spacesuits because it will soon become our normal clothing. The importance of designing for future space travel for everyone may …

Toy Design For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Based On Existing Therapeutic Training Methods, Ye Wang

Theses

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) behave in different ways from other children as well as face enormous problems in their daily life. Previous research has found that physical treatment not only improves their body functions, but also benefits their mental development. Play therapy is a very effective way to help children with ASD since playing is the way children express themselves. However, after field research and benchmarking, I found that there are few toys helping them with their developmental coordination, which is necessary especially for children with ASD. In this paper, I have designed a series of devices for …

Shared Kitchen Design For Rental Spaces And Frequent Moving Populations, Qian Liu

Theses

With the frequency of population migration and moving increasing across the world, more people are living in shared rental places. It’s been reported that 17.2 % of people in China move across cities annually and about 15% of the population moves in the US and Korea annually (UNFPA, Statistics Korea, 2019).

With high residential mobility, connections and social networks are constantly cut off (Wang, 2019). In the long-term, people who move frequently become less committed or tied to their surroundings; they invest less effort on interaction and preservation or their environment behaviors. It has been reported that water and waste …

You Know That Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want To Feel That., Jin Chan

Theses

You Know that Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want to Feel That is an ongoing collection of photographic and sculptural components existing as found object mixedmedia such as oranges, wood, flowers, and inkjet prints held by T-pins. Through a surrealistic indulgence of abjection and uncanniness, with an implied bodily violence, this series of work comes to an understanding of time, identity, and existing between social boundaries creating a push and pull to define “in-betweenness”. This contradiction causes a psychic dissonance, or a mental contradiction of belonging; to exist in-between is to exist uncannily. “In-betweenness” is represented …

Dog Days On The Chaparral, Hugo Teixeira

Theses

Dog Days on the Chaparral is an installation comprised of three photographic sculptures made in response to the question “where are you from?” Although I define myself as both Portuguese and American, as someone who immigrated as a child, my identification as either ebbs and flows. The work embodies this slipperiness—a complicated emotional geography—in fabricated sculptures which collage images of two landscapes, the California chaparral and Portuguese montado, as proxies for these two homes and identities. I employ vernacular building materials and tools, such as lumber, engineered wood, common fasteners, house paint and steel clamps to create a literal and …

Reducing Global Demand On Conflict Minerals In Consumer Electronics And Lithium-Ion Batteries, Mosunmola Odulate

Theses

Advances in technology have led to increasing demand for more sophisticated electronic products, which, in turn, induces demand for raw materials essential for product performance. A class of such materials is mined in places in the world that are politically unstable – they are called Conflict Minerals (CMs) because profits from their mining and trade support human rights violations in their places of origin. They include Tantalum, Tin, Tungsten, and Gold (3TG). To reduce global reliance on 3TG, government policies from local and international communities are the only works in place, but what is still unclear is their efficacy towards …

In Praise Of Shadows, Jiageng Lin

Theses

In Praise of Shadows is a body of work that explores and pushes the boundaries and meanings of photographic materials, apparatus, and perception. This project started with the desire to challenge the traditional view of photography as a purely representational medium and reveal its hidden processes. Photographs have always been something to look through; what is shown in the image area matters. In Praise of Shadows utilizes basic photographic elements, camera, paper, and photo-sensitive materials as subjects to challenge the perception of photography as simply something to look through. Each work in In Praise of Shadows exhibits varying characteristics that …

The Vulnerability Of Chronic Stress: Implications For Feeling Like Giving Up, Miranda Jany

Theses

The feeling of learned helplessness has been associated with prolonged stress and trauma. Additionally, many previous studies have examined the relationship between stress and decreased feelings of control, such as self-efficacy and locus of control. However, these forms of control have been primarily self-reported. The present study aimed to investigate the relationships among learned helplessness, chronic stressors, and self-agency using a computer-based task. We also measured heart rate variability (HRV) during the self-agency task to assess psychophysiological correlates of these variables. Seventy-four participants completed a series of questionnaires that were used to assess lifelong stressors (e.g., exposure to natural disasters, …

Influences Of Salvinorin A And Sex Differences On Depressive- And Anxiety-Like Behaviors In A Chronic Mild Stress Paradigm, Sarah Mitchell

Theses

Kappa opioid receptors are colocalized with dopamine receptors and are frequently associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and drug use and abuse. KOR antagonism has widely been considered anti-depressive and anxiolytic in animal models while agonism is pro-depressive and anxiogenic. However, recent findings suggest that SalvA, a natural kappa agonist derived from a plant in the mint family, can reduce depressive- and anxiety-like behavior in rats. The current study investigated the effects of chronic mild stress on behavior, attenuation by SalvA, and sex differences. 52 Long-Evans rats, 26 males and 26 females, were exposed to six weeks of CMS. Animals received …

Meaning In The Noise: Neural Signal Variability In Major Depressive Disorder, Sally M. Pessin

Theses

Clinical research has revealed aberrant activity and connectivity in default mode (DMN), frontoparietal (FPN), and salience (SN) network regions in major depressive disorder (MDD). Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies suggest that variability in brain activity, or blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal variability, may be an important novel predictor of psychopathology. However, to our knowledge, no studies have yet determined the relationship between resting-state BOLD signal variability and MDD nor applied BOLD signal variability features to the classification of MDD history using machine learning (ML). Thus, the current study had three aims: (i) to investigate the differences …

Whispering Messengers: Everyone Has A Bunny, Tracy Shih-Tung Cheng

Theses

How can I connect people through my art? My research focuses on the “bonds” of relations. The intent is for my art to become a bond to connect people. Compared to just walking around and staring at the artwork, I believe that experience with touch and play can impact audiences more directly.

The idea of my work is based on the experience of passing notes to exchange messages When I was a student I wrote notes to friends, then folded the note to create an origami form before passing them to the recipient. The origami from transformed the note into …

Do Hardworking Role Models Lower Implicit Gender-Science Bias?, Christina Garasky

Theses

Prior research has demonstrated that implicit gender-science biases discourage women from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Gender-science biases promote the belief that women cannot be successful in STEM, which can affect women's sense of belonging and commitment to STEM. While women scientists serving as role models benefit women in STEM by decreasing implicit gender-science biases and increasing perceived belonging and performance in STEM, the influence of role model qualities on implicit bias has not been widely explored. The current study examined the influence role model qualities (hardworking, gifted) have on implicit gender-science bias. The research also …

A Social Game Design To Solve Young Peoples’ Loneliness Problem, Jiaxi Yuan

Theses

This project’s topic is helping solve young people’s loneliness problem. According to my research, young people are more likely to feel lonely than old people. Because young people need to work or study in other cities or countries, they have always been apart from their families and friends. Although loneliness is not a mental illness, it does have negative effects on young people’s mental health.

Therefore, I designed a warm and healing social game to help to solve young people’s loneliness problems. After the user research, I defined the major functions of this social game. The functions of this social …

The Impact Of Pocket Parks To Enhance Public Space And Realm In Ajman, Uae, Manal Abdalla Al Shamsi

Theses

Green spaces in urban life play an important role in maintaining healthy lifestyle and providing a calm and peaceful place for roaming around. Large new urban park projects are gradually decreasing in dense cities, and small green spaces like pocket parks are likely to become more important. However previous studies showed that multiple research studies on small urban green spaces have been conducted. On infill sites and other overlooked city corners, pocket parks are created. Apart from the obvious benefits of the ecosystem and the environment, they can be a small but important step towards a fair architecture. The project …

Designing A Mental Health Institute For Adolescents In Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia (Healing Architecture), Heba Bin Seddeq

Theses

The society in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia obstructs people who want to see a psychiatrist, especially adolescents. Based on the lack of mental health support in Saudi Arabia, this thesis will introduce a mental health institute project for adolescents that puts more attention on specific design factors, such as daylighting, color, and green roofs. These aspects provide help for the recovery process by supporting healing according to many psychological studies. This psychiatric institute will be specialized for teenagers 10-19 because the early intervention at this critical period has the possibility for the potential for making a lifelong difference. by …

Cognitive Reappraisal And Expressive Suppression: An Examination Of Their Associations With Seeking Social Support, Well-Being And Academic Performance, Khalid Abdulazem Mohamed Ahmed

Theses

This thesis examined individual differences regarding two prominent emotion regulation processes - cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression - and their associations with social functioning, psychological well-being, and academic performance. Six hypotheses were proposed. It was hypothesized that frequent use of cognitive reappraisal is positively correlated with seeking social support, psychological well-being, and academic performance, while the chronic use of expressive suppression is negatively associated with the three factors. Additionally, the differences between high reappraisers and low reappraisers, and between high suppressors and low suppressors, were investigated to confirm the results following the correlational analyses. An online survey was conducted …

Animal Testing Sentimental Analysis Using Twitter, Afra Naji Saeed Almansoori

Theses

This research explores attitudes towards the testing of cosmetics on animals, as pressure is increasing all over the world to stop animal testing and different countries have introduced policies to ban it. It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year. But because only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning use of animals for testing and research, the precise numbers are unknown. This research was designed to investigate whether awareness of the issue impacts whether or not people support animal testing. The research hypothesis is that the reason …

Investigating Emotion-Label And Emotion-Laden Words In A Semantic Satiation Paradigm, Ryan Hildebrandt

Theses

Current literature suggests emotion-label words (e.g., sad) and emotion-laden words (e.g., funeral) are processed differently.  The central focus of the present study was to investigate how valence and emotion word type influence how words are processed. A satiation paradigm was used to characterize the relationship between the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words of positive and negative valence. It was hypothesized that, in addition to the standard slowed response times to satiated words, emotion-label words would exhibit greater satiation and priming effects than emotion-laden words.  Analyses indicated expected priming and satiation effects across a range of other stimulus characteristics. Neutral …