Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Simulating A Computational Biological Model, Rather Than Reading, Elicits Changes In Brain Activity During Biological Reasoning, Caron Clark, Tomáš Helikar, Joseph T. Dauer

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

The creation and analysis of models is integral to all scientific disciplines, and modeling is considered a core competency in undergraduate biology education. There remains a gap in understanding how modeling activities may support changes in students’ neural representations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of simulating a model on undergraduates’ behavioral accuracy and neural response patterns when reasoning about biological systems. During brief tutorials, students (n = 30) either simulated a computer model or read expert analysis of a gene regulatory system. Subsequently, students underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while responding to system-specific questions and …

Refocusing Loyalty Programs In The Era Of Big Data: A Societal Lens Paradigm, Valeria Stourm, Scott A. Neslin, Eric T. Bradlow, Els Breugelmans, So Yeon Chun, Pedro Gardete, P. K. Kannan, Praveen Kopalle, Young-Hoon Park, David Restrepo Amariles, Raphael Thomadsen, Yuping Liu-Thompkins, Rajkumar Venkatesan

Marketing Faculty Publications

Big data and technological change have enabled loyalty programs to become more prevalent and complex. How these developments influence society has been overlooked, both in academic research and in practice. We argue why this issue is important and propose a framework to refocus loyalty programs in the era of big data through a societal lens. We focus on three aspects of the societal lens-inequality, privacy, and sustainability. We discuss how loyalty programs in the big data era impact each of these societal factors, and then illustrate how, by adopting this societal lens paradigm, researchers and practitioners can generate insights and …

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

Hear For You: Engaging With Vocal Authority And Vulnerability Through Podcasting, Rowen Light-Wills

Scripps Senior Theses

Through applications of literary and film theory, cultural analysis, and historical context this thesis project will deconstruct the text of the physical and metaphorical gendered voice. The podcast medium allows for exploration of the physical voice in a spontaneous format, which makes it the ideal platform for hosting conversations between college-aged students that examine cultural conceptions of the voice. Focusing primarily on the feminized[1] voice as a site of cultural tension, participants can tell the story of their voices, talking about experiences that have shaped their auditory self-perception. The work of this project is to demonstrate that the medium …

Awareness, Empathy, And Intention: Creating Constructive + Responsive Structures Of Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion, Safa Arshadullah

Scripps Senior Theses

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are three concepts widely understood as integral to positive organizational development. In a capitalist world, these notions are purposefully ignored or superficially discussed for financial and social gain. Prioritizing empathy, compassion, equity, and inclusion as worthwhile endeavours resist those tokenizing and disingenuous systems. This thesis explores the current perfunctory treatment of DE&I in organizations and examines how to incorporate intentional and human-centered values into organizational culture through intersectional thinking, applied empathy, and organizational storytelling. Recognizing lived experiences and personal narratives as equally valuable to quantitative data, this study entrusts both the individual and the organization …

The Path To Pregnancy: Fertility Services And Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Olivia H. Gilbert

Scripps Senior Theses

The emergence of reproductive assistance like fertility treatments and assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in recent decades have provided new paths to pregnancy for many individuals. However, certain demographics in the US like low-income women and women of color are often excluded from utilizing these services on the basis of race, geography, and socioeconomic status. This in turn leads to significant disparities in access to and usage rates of such services. This research points out the perceived shortcomings in the current academic discussion surrounding fertility service disparities with the ultimate goal of expanding access to fertility assistance services for those who …

Retrieval-Induced Forgetting In Autism Spectrum: Combining Narrative Experience With Clinical Research To Explore Stress-Induced, Transitory Retrograde Amnesia, Elizabeth Willsmore-Finkle

Scripps Senior Theses

Currently, psychological research explores autism, a blanket term for a range of neurobiological and developmental differences, through a clinical, as opposed to an experiential, lens. Autism has only existed as formal diagnosis under that name since 1943 (Kanner); however, the advocacy of activists such as Temple Grandin, a slaughterhouse systems designer best known for documenting her life with autism in a series of autobiographic accounts, has begun to legitimize the incorporation of emic experiences of autism within clinical research. Researcher Dermot Bowler and colleagues (2011) have conducted extensive reviews of memory distinctions in autism, finding differences of varying degrees across …

Stationary Distribution Of Recombination On 4x4 Grid Graph As It Relates To Gerrymandering, Camryn Hollarsmith

Scripps Senior Theses

A gerrymandered political districting plan is used to benefit a group seeking to elect more of their own officials into office. This practice happens at the city, county and state level. A gerrymandered plan can be strategically designed based on partisanship, race, and other factors. Gerrymandering poses a contradiction to the idea of “one person, one vote” ruled by the United States Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims (1964) because it values one demographic’s votes more than another’s, thus creating an unfair advantage and compromising American democracy. To prevent the practice of gerrymandering, we must know how to detect a …

Reimagining Theories Of Nationalism: A Critical Examiniation Of Prevailing Nationalist Theories, Sarah Sanchez

Scripps Senior Theses

Traditional theories of nationalism tend to fall in one of two categories: 1) top-down, or official nationalism, which holds that nationalist sentiments are created by state actors, or 2) bottom-up, or popular, nationalism, which holds that nationalist sentiments originate with the people. However, there are major flaws in both of those theories, as well as a decent amount of overlap between them. This paper dismantles the supposed binary between these two theories, and looks for a way to view the theories in combination with one another. Looking at the places of overlap, as well as the elements of each theory …

Intercropping For Water Conservation: Environmental And Economic Implications Of A Sustainable Farming Practice In California's Central Valley, Sophie Baker

Scripps Senior Theses

California’s agricultural sector is the biggest water consumer in the state and faces intense pressure to reduce its overall water usage. Industrialized monoculture systems dominate the industry and often disregard long-term environmental and economic externalities for short-term profit maximization. To maintain longstanding food security and economic stability as well as protect the state’s water supply, it is critical that these systems transition to more sustainable and resilient production mechanisms. As an alternative to monoculture, intercropping affords greater potential to conserve water, protect soil quality, and increase crop yields, among other metrics of sustainability. However, there has been much controversy over …

Anti-Party, Pro-Politics: The Gilets Jaunes’ Challenge To French Representative Democracy, Anna Liss-Roy

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper aims to evaluate the implications of France’s Gilets Jaunes movement for French representative democracy. The Gilets Jaunes movement is unprecedented due to its durability and its resistance to institutional support, including political parties, labor unions and civil society organizations. This paper contextualizes the movement’s demands and particularities through a demographical analysis of its participants and an investigation of its characterization as “anti-system” to understand what changes in partisan identification foreshadow for French democracy.

Altered Speech: A Case-Study Of Identity-Driven Speech In A Dissociative Identity Disorder System, Sarah Domin

Scripps Senior Theses

The field of sociolinguistics has long been interested in how speech differs across groups. These studies have been focused on how demographic factors like class, race, and geographical region alter speech patterns. However, more recently, the agency of individuals to use language as a tool to construct a certain identity or persona has been highlighted (e.g., Podesva 2007; Eckert 1989; Eckert 2008). These studies are limited due to the nature of their methods, relying on either one individual with a limited scope of characteristics or on a larger group of people with many different variables at play other than identity. …

Career Funneling, Perceptions Of Success, And Their Impact On College Students At Scripps, Pitzer, And Claremont Mckenna Colleges, Carina A. Schick

Scripps Senior Theses

The U.S. News top college ranking lists have created a narrowing definition of collegiate and career success. Students are told an elite education is the ticket to a successful life, one filled with a high achieving career, meaning, and happiness. Through peer, familial, and media interfaces students are inundated with societal definitions of success such as fame, wealth, and status. Socialization primes adolescents to work towards these goals. This idealized type of success is only accessible to a select few, leading to dissatisfaction and creating pressures on students to work towards their college admission at early ages. This thesis examines …

The Impact Of California Senate Bill 826 On Employee Perspectives And Stock Performance On California Tech Firms, Kimberly M. Kaneshina

Scripps Senior Theses

On September 30, 2018, California Senate Bill 826 (CA SB 826) was passed. This Bill requires a quota for women to serve on California headquartered and public corporate boards. This study focuses on California tech firms, which I define as firms that are reliant on technology to create their main product or platform; but, are not aerospace or telecommunication firms. My thesis is a two-part analysis: exploring employees’, who worked at companies that were impacted by this Bill, perspectives, as well as, discovering if there is a relationship between percentage of female directors and stock price performance. Most employees were …

Childhood Obesity In California: The Impact Of School Lunch Options And Physical Education Standards In Public Elementary Schools, Audrey Connell

Scripps Senior Theses

Obesity is a biosocial phenomenon in that it is shaped by both biological and social processes. On the biological level, excess body fat increases one’s risk of placing the body in a non-homeostatic state that can weaken the immune response. On the social level, social inequalities are linked to obesity in the United States where racial and ethnic minority communities with low education and high poverty rates bear the largest burden of obesity. In various institutions, multiple actors such as food marketers, public health officials, policy makers, and school administrators dictate the opportunities available to children for them to reach …

Merde, Merde, Merde: The Testing Effect, Foreign Language Anxiety, And Their Impact On Foreign Language Learning, Priya Canzius

Scripps Senior Theses

This experiment examined the effect of foreign language classroom anxiety and assigned learning condition (repeated studying or repeated testing) on participant recall of newly-learned foreign language vocabulary word pairs. Previous research has identified a testing effect, which is a phenomenon where repeated testing is better for a learner’s long-term recall than repeated studying. The hypothesis for this experiment was that the testing effect would occur for students with lower levels of foreign language classroom anxiety but not for students with higher levels of foreign language classroom anxiety. Sixteen participants recruited from Introductory French and Introductory Arabic classrooms at the Claremont …

The Necessity And Detriment Of Shame As Presented In John Calvin's Institutes, Tova Cohen

Scripps Senior Theses

In this senior thesis, I aim to explore the presence of shame in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, via the excavation of the three main components that comprise of his edifice: original sin, grace, and predestination. Through a close reading of Calvin's Institutes, its application to Aristotelian ethics, and its consistencies (or lack thereof) with the biblical story of Genesis, I found that Calvin's theology not only suffers logical structure, but implores the Christian practitioner to embrace shame as a means to spiritually elevate the self. To conclude, I utilize Stephanie Arel's Affect Theory to uncover the …

Migration And Women’S Relationships To The Land And Food In Myanmar, Allison Joseph

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. To achieve its economic and political goals, the government has conducted extensive confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens. Under the new laws, rural women are disproportionately impacted and more vulnerable to the processes of dispossession, often lacking the rights or resources of their male counterparts to fight for the land of their ancestors. This has resulted in the wide-scale disinheritance of Myanmar’s rural women from their land and food, as …

Equity, Education, And Emergency: Examining Social Resilience Building Pilot Programs, Methods, And Successes In Massachusetts Communities, Mia Kania

Scripps Senior Theses

The concept of resilience and the methods and process of building it are as-of-yet undefined, set, or universally agreed upon. However, as the need to build resilience’s essential components, i.e. “the capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance,” increases, the urgency to understand the driving factors behind the concept and develop effective methods to foster these capacities grows as well. To gain insight into how climate change preparations can best facilitate resilience in their target communities, therefore, this thesis explores the concept of resilience as it is built, practiced, and …

The Impacts Of Migration On Myanmar Women’S Identity And Connectedness To The Land And Food, Allison Joseph

Scripps Senior Theses

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (Kusakabe & Pearson, 2010). To achieve its economic goals, the government has prioritized the confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens (Franco, Twomey, Ju, Vervest, & Kramer, 2015). This has resulted in the wide-scale process of Myanmar’s rural women’s disinheritance from the land and food, as they are expropriated from the home of their ancestors and forced to migrate to urban centers to earn a livelihood. The proposed study will examine and …

Consciousness Vis-À-Vis The Restraints Of Language, Angela-Maria Martinez

Honors Program Theses

In my work, I explore the overlooked complexities of linguistics within the languages I speak and I examine the philosophical ideologies that surround the different perspectives offered by those languages I do not understand. As a bilingual, I have often pondered about the languages I speak fluently and how their differences allowed me to understand my surroundings in distinctive ways. Through the use of peaceful colors and audio, a combination of abstract and minimalist imagery, and a time-based medium, I seek to reveal the undiscovered possibilities of spoken language. It is through tranquil imagery and audio that I attempt to …

The Next Step: A Guide To Framing And Designing Permanent Supportive Housing For Caritas Housing, Julianne Reno, Ryan Dyar, N. Janine Gates, Joshua Ollinger, Hugo Hamblin-Agosto

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Caritas Housing of Oregon develops affordable housing for persons experiencing homelessness across the state. In January 2020, staff reached out to students in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning Program seeking planning assistance. Caritas wanted help planning for the needs of future residents and navigating what is frequently an emotionally-fraught and politically-charged development process. Upstream Planning worked with Caritas Housing to create resident-informed development criteria and design a framework for public communication. The Upstream Planning team created two documents, Development Criteria Guide and Public Communication Guide, that work towards the singular goal of helping Caritas develop permanent supportive housing …

Language Transfer Between English And German: A Phonetics-Based Study Of Interactions Between Speakers' Native And Second-Language Vowel Systems, Emelia Bensonmeyer

Scripps Senior Theses

The present study addresses language contact processes in which the phonetic systems of the languages that bilinguals speak interact. Specifically, language transfer with respect to English and German was examined, focusing on native German speakers (L1) who learned English as a second language (L2). It employed as its central method an analysis of their vowel systems, both language-specifically and cross-linguistically. Extralinguistic variables were also considered, ranging from speakers’ age of acquisition (AOA) of English to their length of residence in an English-speaking environment to their consideration of home. Results indicated statistically significant differences between speakers’ production of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ …

The Potential Benefits Of Japanese Mmorpgs For Japanese Learning Motivation, Shuting Xu

Scripps Senior Theses

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has been found to have a negative impact on the motivation to learn foreign languages in many previous research studies. However, recent studies have found that massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in particular provided an environment that positively impacted English as a second language (ESL) acquisition. However, there is a lack of study on the Japanese language and Japanese MMORPGs. Therefore, the current study aims to look at Japanese FLA and integrative motivation in a Japanese MMORPG learning environment as compared to a Japanese classroom learning environment with a sample of 132 English native speakers …

Rural Prison Politics: The Impact Of Correctional Facilities On Community Voting Behavior In California, Corey Smith

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the building of a prison impacts local political behaviors and public opinion. Economic development during the late 20th century left agricultural and manufacturing based regions of the United States struggling to maintain a reliable sense of financial prosperity, thereby propelling rural regions into the prison-building business. In this thesis, I analyze the voting data of five rural Californian towns concerning Proposition 7 (1978) and Proposition 47 (2014). Through this data analysis and a synthesis of the literature on prison host communities, this thesis investigates whether the construction of a prison has influenced political action regarding prison …

Using Bourdieu In Communication And Forensics Research, Stephen P. Hagan

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

As norms in the forensics community are often unspoken and have few identifiable starting points, habitus and Bourdieu seems an apt place to begin an analysis. Further, such analysis can serve as a potential case study for broader applications of Bourdieu to communication studies. Thus, my goal is to provide an overview of Bourdieu’s work through his interconnecting ideas of habitus, field, and cultural capital and use those concepts to discuss college forensics as a case study of how communicative norms and attitudes are shaped in small collective social structures such as forensics. Building from that application, I explore ways …

Barriers To Utilizing Resources For The Dementia Caregiver, Rebecca L. M. Shanafelt

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The family caregiver of a person with dementia (PwD) provides valuable care and experiences negative health outcomes as a result. These negative health outcomes can be mitigated utilizing resources, however utilization rates remain low. While there is some research on barriers to accessing resources there is very little focused on caregivers of PwD. This study through semi-structured interviews with caregivers of PwD takes a deep look into the experience of first signs, diagnosis, and utilization of resources to better understand what those barriers might be. This study found that because of the healthcare structure caregivers do not learn about resources …

Relationship Between Economy, Education, Population, Healthcare And Prevalence Of Hiv/Aids In Nigeria, Bernard Odelola

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

HIV/AIDS has been described as one of the deadliest epidemics of our lifetime. With the global efforts to scale down the effect of this disease through innovative programs, scientific researches and medical advancement, little success has been recorded in least developed nations. Nigeria is still one of the nations that is yet to achieve huge success in the fight against HIV/AIDS and meet Millennium Development Goal on HIV. Arguably, government needs to intensify more efforts in searching for factors that increase the prevalence of the disease.

To further understand the epidemic, this thesis is designed to study and answer research …

A Systematic Review Of The Literature: Defining Child Sex Trafficking, Chelseanne Luella Davidson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Depression, anxiety, and other comorbid psychological conditions are commonly found in child sex trafficking victims (Basson et al., 2012; Cole et al., 2016; Cook et al., 2018; Hargreaves-Cormany & Patterson, 2016; Hossain et al., 2010; Hopper, 2017; Middleton et al., 2018; Pierce, 2012; Reid, 2018; Shaw et al., 2017). Given the likelihood that mental health professionals may encounter victims of child sex trafficking, it is necessary to have a comprehensive and universal understanding of sex trafficking in order to most effectively address victims’ needs through evidence-based practices and inventions. The purpose of this study was to gain a more informed …

A Photometric Study Of The South Polar Terrain Of Enceladus, Bereket Daniel Mamo

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Saturn's moon, Enceladus, is a unique body in the Solar System. It is an icy world with ongoing geologic activity that spews out jets of ice particles, water vapor, and other gases from active tectonic fractures (called sulci) near its south pole. Emission from these jets is the dominant source of particles for Saturn's diffuse E ring, which envelops other icy satellites. The south polar fractures are also sources of tidally generated high heat flow. Accurate determination of this endogenic thermal output requires knowledge of the thermophysical properties of the surface, which are reliably estimated by modeling the photometric behavior …