Browse Exhibits (109 total)
Alijah Forbes | The Effects of Agreeableness and Political Orientation on Perceptions of Aggression in Media
Research on aggression in media is often focused on the aggression’s influence of later aggressive acts. One area that is often not researched is the perceptions of these aggressive acts, and how they are influenced. Prior research on influences on perceptions have shown that they can be influenced by ingroup bias (Hastorf & Cantril,1954; Kim, 2016) and differences in personality (Costa & McCrae, 1986). These areas of research can be tied together in order to look at the differences of perceptions of aggressive acts and how they are influenced, specifically looking at political ideology and agreeableness. This is the focus of the present study, by seeing how the differences of political ideology and agreeableness affect how individuals perceive acts of aggression. The acts of aggression that will be focused on are video media of interactions between police and protestors during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Thomas Holtgraves
Psychological Science
Undergraduate
Honors College
Allen Warren | Life's a Peach: The Convergence of Sexuality and Class in Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
Call Me by Your Name (2017) became famous for its “peach scene,” though the orchard around the Perlmans’ villa where this fruit thrives could not have grown on its own. Distinctions of class and a parasitism by the most affluent of their workers cultivate the paradise where director Luca Guadagnino sets the blossoming romance between Elio and Oliver. Apricots are a clear metaphor for desire here, yet their prolificacy is only possible through the invisibility and silent intervention of other food items, from peas to latkes to water. Critics have pointed out the beauty of the Italian setting and its use as a temporary escape from heteronormative surveillance, as well as the way domestic workers flow in and out of scenes almost wordlessly. What these critics have missed is the connection these occurrences have in explaining how the working class have built (butdo not benefit from) this heaven on Earth, where the young male lovers may permit their bodies to act without restraint. While queer and class theories inform this discussion, my primary vehicle for interpretation will be food, both for its prominent place in the movie and for the ways it parallels the class structure at the villa. I find the film quietly reflects on the levels of economic privilege and exploitation needed to experience the paradise it depicts, with the usurpation of food in many scenes helping to remind the audience of the inability of this space to be wholly subversive.
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Emily Rutter
Department of English
Undergraduate
Alyssa Shoults, Abbey Jessup | Conservation Tales
Conservation Tales is an immersive learning course that combines research and art to create a children's book series about conservation actions. The books are created by the students, with a combination of digital and traditional art, photography, writing, and graphic design. This project teaches skills of transforming the acquired scientific research into something simple and accessible that young readers can understand.
Faculty Mentor: Barbara Giorgio-Booher
School of Art
Undergraduate
Andrew Rattin, Austin Gustin, Cade Clinton, Alison Vielee, David Mitchell | Indianapolis International Airport Pre-Security
Cardinal Consulting, our capstone team, has been working with the Indianapolis International Airport to create a solution in response to COVID-19. The airport, like many other businesses, has undergone changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The problem that needs to be solved is that pre-security has not effectively demonstrated safe health practices to alleviate current and future passenger apprehension.
Faculty Mentor: Fred Kitchens
Information Systems and Operations Management
Undergraduate
Anna Himes | Trait Anxiety and Assessment of Ambiguous Emotions
The purpose of the current study is to examine whether trait anxiety affects participants’ ability to recognize facial emotions. Past research has supported the notion that high levels of anxiety may result in an inaccurate recognition of emotion. Specifically, possibly through mechanisms such as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis and Embodied Emotion Simulation, past research has supported the notion that individuals with anxiety are more likely to misclassify nonthreatening emotions as threatening. However, there has yet to be a robust set of studies that observe this relationship with the added factor of ambiguity created by surgical masks. In this study, college students completed a trait anxiety measure and emotion-recognition task consisting of 56 photographs of Black and White males and females who were expressing anger, fear, disgust, happiness, calm, sadness, or neutrality. Half of the photographs included surgical masks covering the bottom half of the person’s face. Three hypotheses were tested: Participants with higher trait anxiety will be less accurate at identifying masked and unmasked emotions than participants with lower trait anxiety overall; Participants with high trait anxiety will misclassify non-threatening masked and unmasked emotions (happy, calm, neutral) as threatening emotions (anger, disgust, fear) more often than participants with low trait-anxiety; and participants with high and with low trait anxiety will perform more accurately in assessing unmasked emotions than in assessing masked emotions.
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kristin Ritchey
Department of Psychological Sciences
Undergraduate
Honors College
Anya Eicher | Examining the effects of demographic and athletic variables on the retention of international student-athletes
The purpose of this study is to examine athletic and demographic variables to determine if any of these variables can predict the retention of international student-athletes. Retention is defined as the continuous enrolment in a college or university until graduation, typically in around four years. Eight independent variables will be used to evaluate retention among NCAA Division I international student-athletes; gender, location of home country (by continent), English proficiency, sport, sport type (individual or team), scholarship type (headcount or equivalency), coaching change, and average conference winning percentage. Correlation matrices and multiple linear regressions will be used to determine (1) if there is a correlation between the variables, and (2) if any of the variables can predict retention of international student-athletes. Ultimately, the results will have the potential to help college athletic personnel create best practices for developing and retaining international student-athletes.
Faculty Mentor: Dr. James Johnson
School of Kinesiology
Graduate
Ashra Wickramathilaka | Techniques for Mapping People’s Spaces
Land-use mapping is said to be the most popular among the spatial mapping techniques, as it visualizes the land-use pattern over the ground. However, four or five highly generalized large-scale land-uses determined by planners are unable to capture most urban activities of the ordinary people. This study employs new spatial mapping techniques to produce new spatial narratives.
Faculty Mentor: Nihal Perera
Department of Urban Planning
Graduate
Audrey Hasser | The Relationship of Parental Communication and Emerging Adulthood Risky Behaviors of Binge Drinking and Vaping
Past research regarding parental communication and risk-taking behaviors largely focuses on risk-taking behaviors happening during adolescence, more specifically, the focus has largely been on sexual risk-taking behaviors. The current research examines this relationship of quality parental communication and risk-taking behaviors but shifts the focus to risk-taking behaviors happening in a different developmental period—emerging adulthood. The risk-taking behaviors examined in the present study are risky drinking behaviors, such as binge drinking and the risk taking behavior of vaping, as they have not been extensively researched in the past. The present study’s objective was to determine whether quality parental communication happening during adolescence would be related to risk-taking behaviors happening in emerging adulthood. Specifically, it was hypothesized that quality parent-adolescent communication would have a negative relationship with both alcohol use and the use of electronic cigarettes during emerging adulthood. Participants completed measures of parent-adolescent communication as well as measures regarding their current drinking and vaping habits and correlation and regression analysis were conducted. The results of these analysis indicated that quality parental communication during adolescence had a significant negative correlation with alcohol use in emerging adulthood but no correlation was found for quality parental communication and vaping habits.
Faculty mentor: Anjolii Diaz
Department of Psychological Science
Undergraduate
Honors College
Bobbie Burton | The Effects of Moral and Pragmatic Reasons for Diversity on Institutional Trust and Organizational Commitment
This study examines how an organization’s decision to implement a diversity program affects people’s perceptions of the organization. More specifically, is a simple commitment to diversity enough to elicit institutional trust and organizational commitment from its members, or do trust and commitment depend upon the motive for adopting the initiative? Specifically, this study focuses on moral motives (“It’s the right thing to do”) as compared to pragmatic motives (“It’s the practical thing to do”). Adapted versions of the Affective Commitment Scale (Meyer & Allen, 1990) and the Trust in Organization Scale (Robinson, 1996) are used to measure organizational commitment and institutional trust. Participants are randomly assigned to one of three conditions in which they are tasked with reading 1) a hypothetical policy that supports diversity implementation for a moral reason, 2) a hypothetical policy that supports diversity implementation for a pragmatic reason, or 3) a hypothetical policy unrelated to diversity. Participants are asked to answer questions about their perceptions of the organization’s decision and motives, as well as their support for the proposed hypothetical policy. It is expected that a moral motive for diversity implementation will elicit greater organizational commitment and trust than a pragmatic motive.
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Andrew Luttrell
Department of Psychological Science
Undergraduate
Honors College
Brevin Wittmer, Collin Steiner, Evan Mitchell, Nick D'Agostino | Regalia Share Application
Regalia Share is a web-based application that allows Ball State University faculty to loan and borrow various pieces of Regalia to help foster a greater sense of community.
Faculty Mentor: Huseyin Ergin
Department of Computer Science
Undergraduate