2017 Honors Theses (Spring)

Have you ever felt an emotional, spiritual, or physical attachment to a certain place? It could be your home town, a favorite vacation spot, where you proposed to your spouse, or any area that has left an impact on how you live your life. That feeling or relationship that you have with a physical location is a sense of place. In this qualitative study I explore how my sense of place in the wilderness can help me make effective pedagogical decisions that will help my students develop a strong sense of place in the future. This study is focuses on my sense of place, but the outlets that I use to explore this phenomenon are common in the realm of qualitative research. The problem that I define, literature review, research method description, data collection, and data analysis provide real world examples of sense of place experiences and their characteristics, as well as a thorough study of my personal experiences with a sense of place and some ideas of how I will use those experiences to influence others' in the future.,Honors Thesis Advisor, Dr. J. William Hug.

The brown marmorated stinkbug (Halyomorpha halys) and the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) are Hemipteran insects that are prevalent pests in homes, gardens, and agricultural practices. Suggested pest control methods for pest population reduction include synthetic pesticides, organic pesticides, and dish detergents. Preference and avoidance behaviors to dish detergent were observed in A. pisum and the lethal effects of dish detergent were evaluated in H . halys. Behaviors and lethality were observed in arenas with different configurations of soaked and dried filter papers. Brown marmorated stink bug lethality tests were not choice-based, whereas the pea aphid preference/avoidance tests were choice-based. Pea aphids spent the most time in the dry locations of the arena. Direct physical contact of the treatment killed all of the stink bugs.Despite the preference of dry substrate, contact with the wet treatment were most commonly followed by fatalities. However, since dish detergent is a readily available household chemical, the option to use dish detergent for pest control could provide a faster and safer way to eliminate pests as opposed to synthetic pesticides that are associated with human health risk and environmental pollution.,Honors Thesis Advisor, Dr. Chadwick Hanna.

Video games often villainize mental illness as a means of explaining the behaviors of villains and other characters in the game (Shapiro & Rotter, 2016). Thus, the goal of this thesis is twofold: first, I analyzed a sample of 18 video games for their content concerning the stigmatization of mental illness. Second, I will then propose two alternative methods of presenting mental illness in video games: one method will be a suggestion aimed at the elimination of mental health stigma from video game content so that an alternative design to the current system is available. The second method is a suggestion aimed at educating players of video games on mental health in an effort to reduce mental health public stigma as a whole and improve knowledge about mental illness so that facts are more widely available than myth using Patrick Corrigan's analyses on the different ways mental health public stigma can be confronted and reduced.,Honors Thesis Advisor, Dr. Rebecca Regeth.