The Effect Of Increasing Number Of People, Rumor-Threshold, Liking-Factor, And Influence On The Spread Of Rumors: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach, Abdul Matloob Naweed

Senior Projects Fall 2023

This paper examines the effect of increasing the population density (number of people), rumor threshold, liking factor, and influence on the rate of the rumor spread in an agent-based model. A rumor is a piece of information disseminated without official verification and it is very difficult to stop it from propagation once it begins. Dissemination takes place when individuals of powerful influence are within a population and have close face-to-face interactions with other individuals. The nature of the rumor is such that it will survive even if the adoption percentage is minimal. Using two agent-based models and statistical tools such …

Teacher Diversity Training: Revealing Biases And Changing Practices, Deva Grumet Bass

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Black students are disciplined in K-12 schools at higher rates when compared to their White peers. Research has shown that this inequality in treatment can be traced back to the teachers' biases and prejudices against students of color. Lack of support from teachers can harm students’ academic achievement and overall success outside of school as well. In response, various programs have been implemented to help teachers better support all of their students. For example, Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has been successful at helping teachers facilitate learning in an emotionally sensitive way. This program began as an initiative to help teachers …

Myths And Fables Of Electroconvulsive Therapy: Knowledge, Attitudes, And Stigmas Of Ect In College Students, Madison Anne Brown

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This study builds upon extensive research on Electroconvulsive Therapy’s (ECT) effectiveness and advancements over time while providing insight into its continuous stigmatization as a psychotherapeutic treatment. The literature provided in this paper explores ECT’s historical background and its misrepresentations in society commonly perpetuated in the media. To further examine present day perceptions of ECT, this study evaluated Bard College undergraduate students’ (n = 24) knowledge, attitudes, and stigmas towards ECT. The data was collected using a five part questionnaire concerning the socio-demographic of participants (part 1), stigmas about ECT (part 2), knowledge about ECT (part 3), sources of knowledge of …

Black Women In Pwi: Cultural Taxation, Microaggressions, & Stress, Roxanna Delgado

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Racing To Math: Racial Identity, Math Anxiety, And Achievement Motivation Amongst College Students, Amanda A. Derrell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

A person’s racial identity can inform their choices in life as well as their perceptions. Existing literature typically investigates how racial identity is involved in the development of one’s overall self-growth throughout their childhood and adolescence and how it influences their adulthood. The aim of this present study was to see if racial identity is associated with the feelings college students hold towards math, specifically math anxiety, as well as achievement motivation. The study also explored the relationship between math anxiety and achievement motivation. The sample was made up of college students in their first year, ages 18-19 (N = …

Diversity In Diagnosis: A Comparative Relationship Between The Social Behavioral Effects And Timing Of Adhd Diagnosis In African American Adults, K. N'Kira Hailey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are first seen during childhood and can persist throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Symptoms of ADHD can differ between childhood and adulthood, and there can also be a difference in symptoms for African American adults compared to other groups. Childhood social support and mental health stigma can affect the probability of a person seeking professional help. In addition, the severity of their symptoms, especially if untreated, may lead to experiences of impostor syndrome. This study examined these three social behavioral effects in Black adults in three diagnosis conditions: diagnosed as (1) a child, (2) …

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 …

A Crossroads In The Us Opioid Epidemic: A Systematic Comparison Of Current And Novel Treatments Reveals Possibilities For Systemic Change, Emma N. Hancox

Senior Projects Spring 2022

The Opioid Crisis has claimed the lives of over 1 million Americans since the 1990’s. Rates of fatal opioid overdoses have risen dramatically due to the corrupted nature of Purdue Pharma and the increased prevalence of highly potent synthesized opioids. In the United States, nearly 2.5million individuals need treatment while only a fraction of them are able to receive treatment. Unfortunately, due to high dropout rates, the effectiveness of current Opioid Use Disorder treatment cannot be properly evaluated. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, states have been tackling the Opioid Crisis by implementing treatment initiation and retention strategies. These strategies aim at …

An Analysis Of Sexist Communications: Women’S Resistance To Harassment, Katherine M. Ritter

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This paper analyzes the nature of sexism, sexual harassment, and women’s resistance and coping strategies. Sexual harassment takes on many different forms, and the specific types of harassment impact how a women will respond to the perpetrator. Harassment consists of verbal and nonverbal interactions, microaggressions, and other forms of sexual objectification. Previous research has concluded that women’s imagined reactions to harassment vary from their real responses. In actual situations of sexual harassment, women feel fear more than anger. Psychological distress was a repeatedly reported repercussion of sexual harassment. The current study focuses on specific sentiments of insults, such as age, …

Is Transphobia Conditional? The Effects Of Coming Out Before Or After An Interaction, Cam R. Goldberg

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Knowing when to come out is an important decision in the lives of transgender people, especially as doing so can put them at great risk of hate crimes or aggressions. Coming out, however, can also bring a feeling of freedom and foster a community more openly. A friend or child coming out is different than a stranger coming out to you, and this may change how you feel towards this person’s queerness. A person you do not know is already in an out-group so you may be more likely to jump to negative conclusions about them. This is compounded if …

Cultural Taxation And College Students: Undergraduate College Students And Their Experiences With Unfair Cultural And Identity Taxation, Sherry Chowdhury

Senior Projects Spring 2021

A popular but burdensome commonality amongst minorities is the seemingly universal experience of bearing some mental or emotional burden as a result of our identities and membership in said minority group, where expectations are made of us to educate, endure, and explain culturally relevant issues. Amado Padilla (1994) initially coined this experience with the term “cultural taxation,” but specifically in relation to faculty of color and ethnic scholars who did double the work their White colleagues did in respective fields. As much past research on cultural taxation and identity taxation (Hirschfield & Joseph, 2012) has been conducted largely on faculty …

Fitting In: A Study On Adolescent Identity-Uncertainty And Group Entitativity, Isabela Ixchel Cruz-Vespa

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Uncertainty-Identity Theory hypothesizes that the more uncertain people are about themselves, the more likely they are to identify with groups as a way to define themselves and guide their behavior. Research has shown that this identification can happen to an extreme level when the group is highly entitative, or provides clear expectations for how group members should behave, think and feel, thereby resolving their uncertainty. Adolescence is a development period defined by self-uncertainty, and therefore also heightened vulnerability to highly entitative, extremist groups. This experiment tests the prediction that adolescents who are experiencing high self-uncertainty will be more likely to …

How Fast Are “Fast-Friends”? Do People Make Accurate Friendship-Relevant Judgements Of Strangers Within The First Minute Of Interaction, David Koehn Benson

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Impression formation involves the use of swift, automatic judgements in combination with slower controlled processing of incoming information to adjust those judgements. “Thin-slice” literature has also shown us that humans are capable of surprisingly accurate interpersonal judgements from small snippets of expressive behavior. Although friendship does take time to develop, assessing others along dimensions that seem to be related to friendship development during the acquaintance process often involves interpersonal judgements. This researcher sought to determine whether interpersonal judgements made in the first minute of zero-acquaintance interaction (strangers meeting) are accurate and resilient enough to resist adjustments made after a subsequent …

The Intersectionality Of Anti-Fat Prejudice, Lily Moerschel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Abstract

Anti-fat prejudice has received little to no attention in social justice discourse. Fat Americans are discriminated against in healthcare, education and in the workplace. This discrimination includes, but is not limited to, lowered salary, unexplained termination from a job, unsolicited medical advice, body scrutiny, bullying, social exclusion, and being denied in vitro fertilization. Situating anti-fat prejudice in an intersectional framework will facilitate the dismantling of weight-normative doctrines. In the present study, participants completed a race IAT and a weight IAT, as well as a demographic questionnaire and the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). Implicit racial bias was positively correlated …

The Way You Hear It, The Way You Judge It: Moral Decision-Making And Moral Reasoning In Accented Speech, Yifan Gu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

The previous studies have shown that people make different decisions not only after reading and also listening to moral dilemmas in a foreign language (L2) than in a native language (L1). This effect is named Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE). Emotion, which is considered to play a pivotal role in moral judgments, is also found to have a close interaction with sounds. The current research aims to (1) investigate whether the sound of different languages (i.e. accents) can also trigger the MFLE in listeners’ moral decision-making and (2) examine the foreign accent effect on listeners’ moral reasoning pattern. Chinese ESL …

Existing But Not Living: A Discussion And Proposal For The Acute Social Withdrawal Syndrome Hikikomori In Japan, Andrea Michelle Otey

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This senior project is a comprehensive discussion of hikikomori syndrome. It intends to offer a deeper knowledge of the complicated acute social withdrawal phenomenon that is impacting the lives of millions of people worldwide, with a specific focus on its relevance within the country of Japan. This project sets out to look deeper into hikikomori’s meaning and prevalence, its receival in the world of psychiatry, and its placement within modern Japanese society. This project also offers a proposal for a potential method of treatment for hikikomori syndrome, wherein the structure of modern Japanese households is explored and the possibility of …

The Cost Of Avoidance: Predicting Avoidant Behavior Versus Confrontational Behavior In Response To Interpersonal Conflict, Charlie Heath Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2020

When faced with an interpersonal conflict, people respond with avoidance or confrontation. Past research demonstrates that avoidance generally does more harm than good. The goal of this proposal is to investigate what causes an individual to be avoidant despite the negative consequences associated with avoidance. Supported by the extant literature, this proposal offers an argument for two specific factors that influence how a person responds to conflict, which are: 1) “need for social connection”, which describes the extent to which someone feels socially included or excluded, and 2) “modeled behavior”, which describes a person replicating a behavior they see someone …

They See Me Scrolling, And I'M Hating: Instagram Usage And Its Effect On Self-Esteem And Body Image, Keva Brianna Natalie Chang

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Research has consistently shown that exposure to thin-ideal media images negatively influences self-perception. Given the escalation of reliance on social media and the heavy online presence of young adults, particularly women, it is essential to identify ways that social media can influence perceptions of body image and self-esteem. This research proposal presents an exploratory investigation into the impact that social media, specifically Instagram, has on women’s views of themselves and their bodies. The aim of the present study is to examine the potential effects of celebrity images, compared with equally attractive peer images and scenery (control) images, on body image …

A Test Of Obedience Or Patience? A Modified Replication Of “Nothing By Mere Authority” By Haslam Et Al. (2014), John J. Machen

Senior Projects Spring 2019

After Milgram’s infamous experiments and their subsequent ethical critiques, social psychologists have been challenged to search for ways to learn more about the psychology of destructive obedience while still holding true to modern IRB standards of participant protection. One of the ways in which this has been attempted is through the invention of newer and safer paradigms of the Milgram task, perhaps the best known of which would be Jerry Burger's (2009) partial replication of Milgram’s voice-feedback experiment. Five years later, a team of researchers devised a completely new obedience task, the simplified premise of which was to have naive …

Not All Bad: Exploring The Link Between Psychopathy And Success, Lily Constance Harker

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

“Boys Will Be Boys”: Examining The Relationship Between Men’S Conformity To Masculine Norms And Perceptions Of Psychological Abuse, Aileen Lian

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Intimate partner abuse is a pervasive and destructive phenomenon in the United States (Breiding, Chen, & Black, 2014). Although previous research has attempted to define its components and dynamics, the study of psychological abuse is less developed in comparison to research on physical abuse. Some researchers have studied intimate partner abuse alongside American constructs of masculinity but have not adequately extended it to psychological abuse. The present study seeks to examine perceptions of psychological abuse in conjunction with conformity to traditional masculine norms among American cisgender men. Masculine ideology in the U.S. prescribes dominance and control, which is theorized to …

The Unwilling Spectator: How Secondary Exposure To Trauma Through Journalism Affects Our Emotional Processing, Chanya Riddick

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Police-brutality, especially directed towards black people, has been a hot-button issue in the media for the past few years. With the constant exposure to the death and brutalization of black bodies, however, some people, especially black people, have reported experiencing emotional defects as a result of these reports. The current study aims to see how exposure to police-brutality related journalism affects implicit emotional processes, such as approach-avoidance motivations. More specifically, the current study seeks to see if the race of the person whom police-brutality is directed towards in these journalistic reports further influences these effects. From a college-aged population, black …

Media And The Shooter Bias: Investigating The Relationship Between Implicit Racial Biases And News Coverage, Matthew Charles Phelps

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Abstract

Past research has suggested that the media is likely to depict Black individuals in a more negative and/or threatening manner than White individuals (Dixon & Linz, 2000; Sommers et al., 2006). Additionally, past research investigating the effect of race on the decision to shoot or not shoot in a simple shooter videogame suggests that people are both faster and more accurate when deciding to shoot armed Black targets and when deciding to not shoot unarmed White targets (Correll et al., 2002). This phenomenon is known as shooter bias. This study investigated the effect of media exposure, specifically exposure to …

The Effects Of Autobiographical Growth Narratives On Math Performance In Women, Eva Briana Frishberg

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Women suffer from the negative stereotype that they are innately worse at math compared to men, which contributes to a gender gap in math fields (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999). However, this stereotype has a greater negative impact on women with fixed mindsets, who believe that intelligence is inflexible and innate (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002). Mindset interventions thus far have sought to shift fixed mindset to growth mindset, characterized by the belief that effort can increase intelligence, through in-class workshops or lectures about the plasticity of the brain and the malleability of intelligence (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Dweck, 2000; …

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 …

Excluded From Humanity: The Effects Of Implicit Dehumanizing Views Toward Black Individuals In The Media, Joshua Velette

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Dehumanization—a process by which certain individuals and/or social groups are denied complete human status—has been researched extensively in psychology. Previous research on dehumanization has identified several social groups such as the poor (Haslam & Loughnan, 2014), immigrants, refugees (Esses, Medianu, & Lawson, 2013), women (Rudman & Mescher, 2012) and Black people (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). Through frameworks such as the Infrahumanization theory (Leyens et al., 2003) and the dual model for dehumanization (Haslam, 2006), it has been found that out-groups may be implicitly dehumanized. The social group of interest to the present study is Black individuals. This groups …

An Obsession Matched Intervention Improves The Facial/Emotional Recognition Deficit In Children With Asperger’S Syndrome, Aurora Claire Hoffman

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) falls on the high-functioning end of the Autism Spectrum. AS is often characterized by a deficit in social/emotional/facial processing, resistance to change, and routine and repetitive behaviors and interests. Prior research has uncovered that AS individuals process faces in a detail-oriented piecemeal fashion, rather than holistically. They are also found to pay less visual attention to faces and social stimuli. Theoretical explanations that account for this particular functioning and processing style include Weak Central Coherence Theory (WCC) and Hyper-Systemizing Theory. WCC implies that AS individuals do not process instances within context, which contributes to their inability to …

Remnants Of The Bodice Ripper: How Consent Is Characterized In Heterosexual And Lesbian Erotic Romance Novels, Audrey Miles Malloy

Senior Projects Spring 2017

The present study aims to better understand the relationship between gender role representation and characterization of sexual consent in erotic romance novels. To test this, two coders read the current best-selling heterosexual and lesbian romance novels listed on Barnes & Noble’s website and coded for both adherence to the Western Sexual Script and clarity of sexual consent. Western Sexual Script is the pervasive set of typical gender roles perpetuated in contemporary media. Statistical analyses found that there was a main effect of character’s gender identity on “gender typical traits” for wealth, sexual experience, dominance, and passivity, meaning that masculine characters …

Combatting The Core Of Sexual Assault: Training Youth To Become Transformational Leaders In Sexual Assault Perpetration Prevention, Sage Marissa Warner

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Sexual assaulters develop from a culture of learned norms, misunderstanding of consent, and inefficacy in bystander intervention. The most significant sexual assault prevention programs teach individuals to dissociate from this culture, by changing their perceptions, knowledge, and behaviors. However, the lack of long-term effects in these programs depicts a vital loophole in their design. In order to change the culture that breeds sexual assaulters, a program cannot focus solely on individuals’ growth, but must ensure a movement of change in the culture itself. Transformational Leadership (Bass, 1985), a style of leadership in which leaders inspire their followers to become leaders, …

The Effect Of Controllability Beliefs On Attitudes About Weight And Socioeconomic Status, Marna Nicole Dunne

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Many studies have shown that weight and socioeconomic status are related, such that people of low socioeconomic status are much more likely to be obese than people of high socioeconomic status (Drewnowski, 2009; Ljungvall & Zimmerman, 2012; Pudrovska, Reither, Logan, & Sherman-Wilkins, 2014; J Sobal & Stunkard, 1989; Jeffery Sobal, 1991). Additionally, people are biased against both the poor (John-Henderson, Jacobs, Mendoza-Denton, & Francis, 2013; Williams, 2009) and the obese (Puhl, Andreyeva, & Brownell, 2008). Through two empirical studies, I investigated the relationship between people’s attitudes about weight and people’s attitudes about socioeconomic status. In study 1, which was conducted …