Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Chronic Pain Interventions: Considering Hypnotherapy As A Viable Treatment Option, Madelyn Isom

Student Works

Chronic pain is a widespread and debilitating condition, demanding advancements in current interventions. Conventional medical paradigms have traditionally treated the mind and body separately, but advancement has advocated shifts toward more integrated mind-body approaches to address holistic health. Despite prevailing skepticism and friction within patient-doctor relationships surrounding hypnosis, there is substantial support for its use as a pain management tool (Declercq, 2023; Thompson et al., 2019). This analysis explores the potential of hypnosis as a viable treatment for chronic pain, highlighting its merits and addressing current research limitations. Noteworthy findings underscore hypnosis’ distinctive influence on the physical body through mental …

Positive Effects Of Conservative Religion On The Mental Health Of Sexual Minorities, Jaxon Jessup

Student Works

Sexual minorities often struggle to navigate their sexuality and conservative religious beliefs. Conservative religion is often thought to be toxic for sexual minorities because of the emphasis on traditional marriage (Anderton et al., 2012), and often, the LGBT community will reject sexual minorities that choose to remain in religion (O'Brien, 2007). Conservative religion, however, provides many resources that could benefit sexual (and other) minorities. Religion can help create a sense of identity through teachings and community involvement that may strengthen positive self-perception; it may also create a sense of belonging within a supportive community, especially when individuals are raised among …

Educational Funding Inequality In Southern Us High Schools, Emma Madeux

Ballard Brief

Educational funding budgets and sources vary from state to state, but in the southern United States, inequality in educational funding is a prevalent issue, especially in rural districts. The South’s economy has been historically behind when compared with other regions of the US; the South’s economic issues carry over into school funding and negatively affect students and teachers. Government policies concerning public school funding, systematic racial inequality, and economic inequality in the southern region contribute excessively to the problem of funding inequality. As a result, students in underfunded schools suffer a lack of access to much-needed mental health resources, higher …

Drop-Out Rates Among First-Generation Undergraduate Students In The United States, Rachel Alger

Ballard Brief

For first-generation college students, receiving an acceptance letter to an institution of higher education is a milestone: a means to secure economic and social opportunities not afforded to their family members. However, for many first-generation students, college acceptance does not equate to a college credential or degree, with only 27.4% graduating within 4 years. These lower attrition rates stem from a lack of familial financial resources and inadequate academic preparation in high school. Additionally, a different set of rules, jargon, and expectations between home life and institutions of higher education create a 'hidden curriculum' for first-generation students, making college completion …

High Suicide Rates Among Young Adults In The United States, Glory Thomas

Ballard Brief

The United States has a much higher suicide rate than other developed countries with an average of 14.5 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people per year. By contrast, the majority of countries across Europe, South America, and Asia report substantially lower rates, typically falling below 10 deaths per 100,000 people each year. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young adults in the United States. Suicide is a public health crisis and is caused by multiple factors like untreated mental illness, individual attitudes towards suicide, and socio-economic status. Suicide leads to the negative consequence of suicide copycats, or …

The Effects Of Medical Misinformation On The American Public, Jessica Ashby

Ballard Brief

Medical misinformation has always existed, but it has recently become more frequent due to the development of the internet and social media. Medical misinformation can cover a wide variety of topics, and studies show that some groups are more likely to be affected by medical misinformation than others, like those with less trust in health care, less health literacy, and a more positive attitude toward alternative medicines. Aspects of the internet, like echo chambers and algorithms, have contributed to the rise of medical misinformation, along with belief in anecdotal evidence and alternative remedies that are not backed by science. Some …

The Overconsumption Of Ultra-Processed Foods In The United States, Emily Grover

Ballard Brief

The consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in America is at an all-time high, with over 50% of daily calories eaten being sourced from UPFs. The increase of consumption of UPFs is due to the growing population, urbanization, and industrialization. UPFs lead to declines in the physical health and mental health of the US population, as those who consume higher amounts of UPFs are more likely to be depressed, overweight, and have a higher all-cause mortality risk. The production of ultra-processed foods also disrupts the health of the climate due to unsustainable farming and livestock practices. The best practices for alleviating …

The Link Between Social Media And Body Image Issues Among Youth In The United States, James Krzymowski

Ballard Brief

Social media has a pervasive impact on body image in the United States, influencing one’s mental, physical, and social health. Body image issues encompass negative feelings and experiences related to one's physical appearance and are characterized by a preoccupation with perceived physical defects. This occurrence is especially common among youth. The harmful effects of constant exposure to idealized images, unrealistic beauty standards, and the influence of social media influencers are wide-ranging and severe. This brief focuses on the United States because of the competitive culture, the high cosmetic surgery rates, and leadership in social media use. Contributing factors such as …

Obstetric Fistulas In Sub-Saharan Africa, Katie Whitcomb

Ballard Brief

An obstetric fistula is a hole in the vaginal canal, either to the bladder or the rectum. It is a childbirth complication caused by obstructed, prolonged labor. Sub-Saharan African mothers are particularly vulnerable to fistulas if they are poor, rural living, or young. Additionally, cultural barriers, distrust of Western health facilities, and birthing traditions play a role in the pervasiveness of obstetric fistulas in modernity. A hole in the bladder or rectum leads to loss of control over urination or defecation. However, there are secondary consequences, such as mental illness and social stigma, that cause just as much suffering as …

Lack Of Access To Quality Education For Rural Indigenous Communities In Chiapas, Mexico, Elizabeth Sanchez

Ballard Brief

The Mexican state of Chiapas has the highest indigenous population in the country and the least educated population of any state. The confluence of historical government neglect (in infrastructure and politics), gender inequality, language barriers, and low family income of these populations seriously hinders indigenous Chiapanecos from receiving a high-quality education—if any education at all. A history of indigenous marginalization and government unwillingness to recognize and remedy this creates a serious roadblock to any permanent change in indigenous education levels. These low levels of education lead to an increase in reproductive health illiteracy, lower occupational attainment and advancement, and decreased …

The Harmful Effects Of Living In Brick Kiln Communities In The South Asia Region, Cambrie Ball

Ballard Brief

Across South Asia, brick kilns pose significant health challenges, socioeconomic disparities, and environmental degradation due to hazardous air quality and exploitative labor practices. The poor infrastructure of kiln sites contributes to dangerous working and living conditions for laborers and their families, which remain unregulated due to the sector’s informal nature. These kilns emit substantial amounts of pollutants, including particulate matter and carbon dioxide, leading to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and premature deaths. Furthermore, indoor air pollution from burning solid fuels exacerbates health risks, particularly for women and children. Poverty and low wages persist among kiln workers, with many trapped in …

Inadequate Healthcare For American Indians In The United States, Brooke Grow

Ballard Brief

Key Takeaways+ Inadequate healthcare access for American Indians due to geographical barriers, historical trauma, and funding shortages results in higher rates of chronic diseases, financial burdens, and reduced quality of life. In some areas in the United States, the life expectancy of Native Americans can be 20 years less than the national average. Of the hospitals located on reservations in the United States, all but three have less than 50 beds, and most do not provide surgical or obstetric services. Only 33% of American Indians report having any form of insurance, compared to 80% of non-Hispanic whites and 52% of …

The Contracts Word List: Integral Vocabulary For Reading And Writing English Contracts, Elizabeth Hanks, Brett James Hashimoto, Jesse Egbert

Faculty Publications

Both Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) and Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF) users engage with legal contracts regularly. However, contractual language is notoriously complex, due in part to the vocabulary it contains. To help mitigate the challenges related to learning the vocabulary of contracts, this paper introduces a word list of American English contracts called the ContractsWord List (CWL).We describe the compilation of the Corpus of English Business Contracts (CEBC) that represents six major contract types in 48 million words. The extraction of prevalent and specialized words from the CEBC is described, following validation procedures in …

Nourishing Connections: Chinese Immigrant Identity In Tokyo Through Commensality And Hospitality, Sarai Brown

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

This paper explores how Chinese immigrants in Tokyo, Japan preserve their cultural identity through practices of commensality and hospitality in stark contrast to Japanese culture. In Chinese culture, hospitality – mainly acts of food sharing – is how kinship relations are built and maintained, eventually growing into an important hierarchy network that ultimately builds a fully realized identity created out of communal belonging. Japanese culture in this sense is not as hospitable, deeming food-sharing as an extremely private and high-risk affair that is considered low-risk in Chinese contexts.

Blame In The North Korean Famine, 1994-1998, Zoe Ngan

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

This paper intends to analyse blame for the North Korean famine through Amartya Sen’s entitlement theory, which suggests that the North Korean state was largely to blame. The collapse of the public distribution system (PDS), as well as the North Korean government’s misallocation of aid, were most significant in obstructing North Koreans’ ability to access food, and can be interpreted as severe entitlement ‘failures’ that were directly facilitated by the state.

Recent Trends In Corpus Design And Reporting: A Methodological Synthesis, Brett James Hashimoto, Kyra Nelson

Faculty Publications

Methodological design is a central issue for researchers in corpus linguistics. To understand trends in the reporting of important aspects of corpus design and the type of corpora being used in corpus linguistics research articles better, this study analyzes 709 descriptions of corpora from research published in corpus journals between 2010–2019. Each article was manually coded by two trained coders for aspects of corpus design, such as the population definition, sampling method, and sample size. Additionally, the study identifies missing information in corpus reporting. Our results show trends in corpus design, such as an increased use of spoken corpora. We …

Facilitating Digitization And Reformatting Via Committee Work, Nicole Lewis, Abby Beazer, Marissa Bischoff, Michael F. Gates, Benjamin Harry, Lindsey Memory, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

The Reformatting Committee at Brigham Young University Library actively manages and facilitates the digitization of library materials, playing a pivotal role in advancing larger digitization projects. The committee comprises various stakeholders in the digitization and reformatting workflow, each with unique concerns and requirements, allowing the committee to effectively navigate the complexities of the digitization process. This exploration of the committee includes motivations for its formation, an explanation of its documentation, and the benefits gained.

The Reformatting Committee exemplifies a balanced approach to meeting various stakeholders’ expectations and building bridges between departments, thereby advancing the library’s mission in the context of …

Where Do I Belong? : Creating An Inclusive Metadata Policy, Nicole Lewis, Karen Glenn, Jeremy Myntti, Sharolyn Swenson, Katie Yeo

Faculty Publications

Inclusiveness and honoring different cultures that reflect our patrons has been discussed in many different venues in the last few years. The staff of the Brigham Young University Library recognized the need for our metadata to demonstrate the commitment we have to honor others and to create a community of belonging. The staff also recognized that a policy would provide a roadmap for how to embark on fixing legacy metadata and how to move forward in creating metadata that reflects our core values in the library and at the university. This case study details how we developed an inclusive metadata …

Demographic Change, Migration, And The African American Vowel System In Georgia, Jon Forrest, Margaret E. L. Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley, Lelia Glass

Faculty Publications

The theme of this volume is generational trends in language change, with an emphasis on the Baby Boomer to Gen X transition as an important period of time. Many studies have found sharp changes in vowel systems in communities after the Baby Boomer Generation on the East Coast (Thiel and Dinkin 2020) and in the Midwest (Nesbitt 2021). Though we know a great deal about the geographic consistency of the Baby Boomer to Gen X transition, in all of these cases, the focus has been on White speakers and regional varieties. Besides the general importance of including a breadth of …

A Corpus-Based Comparison Of Keywords And Themes From The Book Of Mormon And The Bible, Brett James Hashimoto, Joshua Cowley

Faculty Publications

The Book of Mormon has been studied for its thematic, literary, and theological content using almost exclusively qualitative methods (e.g., Turley, 2019; Morrill, 2017). However, scholars have conducted little analysis comparing it to the Bible, even though those who view it as scripture consider it directly comparable in purpose. (e.g., The Book of Mormon, 2015; McConkie, 1985). The present study applies quantitative linguistic analysis to statistically derive the distinctive language from the two volumes of scripture and identifies the key themes and language from the two books. To accomplish this, corpora of The King James Version of the Bible (66 …

From Three-Pillars To Three-Environments: Shifting The Paradigm Of Sustainability In Civil And Construction Engineering, Xiaomei Wang, Andrew South, Clifton Farnsworth, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

This research explores the usage of sustainability in literature and presents ‘three environments’ for addressing sustainability in the Civil and Construction Engineering (CCE) disciplines. Scholars have increasingly studied sustainability and sustainable development across CCE disciplines as the importance of sustainability awareness and action in society has increased. However, the vastness of its conceptual breadth and depth in CCE research is difficult to holistically evaluate. As a result, CCE researchers often focus on specific aspects of sustainability applied to discrete contexts, or address sustainability in broad aspirational terms and guiding motivations. This research utilized a rigorous analytical corpus linguistics approach for …

Neurological Evidence For The Contextindependent Multisensorial Semantics Of Ideophones In Pastaza Kichwa: An Fnirs Study In The Ecuadorian Amazon, Dan Dewey, Jeffrey J. Green, Janis Nuckolls, Auna Nygaard, Tod D. Swanson

Faculty Publications

Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categorized as VISUAL, MOTION, and SOUND. Seventeen native speakers of Pastaza Kichwa listened to audio clips of ideophones extracted from sentential contexts. Subjects’ neural activity was assessed using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results demonstrate that these posited semantic categories activate areas …

Movement, Economy, Orientation 20th Century Shifts In North American Language, Monica Nesbitt, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

How are regional varieties of English faring in the US?

Ample evidence shows that canonical regional variables are undergoing _____

• “reversal” in Cincinnati and Philadelphia (Strassel & Boberg 1996, Fruehwald 2017)

• “decline” and “fall” in Michigan (Rankinen et al. 2019, Nesbitt 2021)

• “rejection” and “retreat” in Raleigh (Dodsworth & Kohn 2012; Dodsworth & Benton 2017)

Nesbitt (2021: 359) observes that “[T]he Baby Boomer–Gen X transition appears to be a pivotal transition throughout the country [and] appears to be of great importance to North American dialects in general.”

What Are University Students Doing With Language?: A Proportional Description Of University Student Mode And Register Use, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The extent to which university students read, write, speak, and listen in a range of registers is not completely understood, but such descriptions could lead to better designed curriculum for English learners. The purpose of this study is to estimate the proportions of time American university students spend reading, writing, speaking, and listening in various registers. The present study combines diary and survey techniques to describe the language use behavior for 53 university students. The results indicated that nearly half of university student language use time is spent listening (49.5 %), followed by reading (20.7 %), writing (18.2 %), and …

Teaching Positive Psychology Lessons In An Intensive English Program, Carolee Rogers, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

This article investigates the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) in an intensive English program for non-matriculated university students. Interventions based on the PERMA model were implemented through weekly 65-minute lessons given during the first class of each week. These were followed by short daily activities during the rest of the week. Using positive psychology topics as the content, students concurrently engaged in language learning activities. Each participant was asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of the semester consisting of five open-ended questions relating to the PPIs, the lessons, the activities, the topics, and how they felt the …

Here-, There-, And Every Where-: Exploring The Role Of Pronominal Adverbs In Legal Language, David Chandler, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

Many have claimed that pronominal adverbs, such as hereby, thereafter, and wherein, are a frequent, distinctive, and problematic in their use in legal language (Tiersma, 1999; Mellinkoff, 2004). The purpose of this study is to examine those claims empirically. In the present study, the prevalence of PAs in legal registers is compared to more general registers of contemporary American English to determine the extent to which these words are distinctly legal. The study will also explore why different types of PAs may be (in)frequent in specific legal registers to better understand their use. The frequency of PAs was extracted from …

Does Leaving Faith Mean Leaving Family? Longitudinal Associations Between Religious Identification And Parent-Child Relationships Across Adolescence And Emerging Adulthood, Justin J. Hendricks, Sam A. Hardy, Emily M. Taylor, David C. Dollahite

Faculty Publications

The present study investigated the parent-child relational repercussions of converting to religion, switching, or de-converting from religion. Qualitative research indicates that these religious changes may negatively affect parent-child relationship quality, however, few quantitative studies investigate this issue. Subsequently, we utilized structural equation modeling to test if changes in religious identification during adolescence and emerging adulthood predicted worse parent-child relationship quality using three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (N = 2,352). We found that deconversion between Waves 1–2 significantly predicted poorer parent-child relationship quality at Wave 2 and father-child relationship quality at Wave 3. Further, deconversion between …

Barriers To Higher Education Daca Recipients Face In The United States, Natalie Porter

Ballard Brief

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a policy that provides temporary relief from deportation to young undocumented immigrants, as well as social security cards and legal work authorization to qualifying individuals. Students with DACA encounter a variety of barriers to completing higher education due to the nature of the DACA policy. DACA places restrictions on access to federal resources and state resources, inhibiting access to financial aid opportunities. DACA does not provide lawful status to recipients—this breeds uncertainty about the future, preventing DACA students from scholastic planning. The uncertainty of the future is exacerbated by the fact that DACA …

Japan's Sacrificial Daughter: Sexual Exploitation In Post-War Okinawa, Kathryn A. Blau

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

This essay investigates the prolonged US occupation of Okinawa post-1952, uncovering hidden forms of violence, particularly sexual exploitation against women. Despite portraying Okinawa as a sacrificial entity for the greater good, the paper reveals historical patterns of abuse dating back to Japanese military brothels during World War II. Post-occupation, over 200 cases of rape and assault against Okinawan women were documented, with minimal legal support. The narrative juxtaposes revered wartime nurses with stigmatized sex workers, highlighting the persistent inequality, even after Okinawa's 1972 return to Japan.

The essay explores how international dialogue sidelines women's voices, shifting the focus from victims …

Volume 9 Full Issue

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

No abstract provided.