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  Substitution of Religiosity for Socioeconomic Status and its Correlation with Adolescent Drug Use

  Jordan Coburn and Mikaela Dufur

  Adolescents with higher socioeconomic status participate in fewer negative activities. Religiosity is correlated with more positive activities. Religiosity can help through socialization: interacting with people who influence pro-social norms.

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  Transcendent Matters: Family Relationships Associated With How One Experiences God

  Hilary Dalton

  For religious families, an important but understudied aspect of spirituality is

  how their perceptions of God influence their family lives. Most research

  addresses religious behaviors such as attendance, prayer, or degree of salience

  (how important/central is religion) or degree of literal belief (e.g., biblical

  inerrancy). Relatively little research has addressed both substantive beliefs about

  God as well as their potential impact on specific relational processes. Mahoney

  has called for more research on the influence of substantive, specific beliefs as a

  way to further our understanding of the religion-relationships linkage (Mahoney,

  2013). Specifically, she has used the concept of relational spirituality to connect

  religiosity with marriage and family relationships. This study will explore one

  aspect of relational spirituality: How perceptions of one’s experiences with God

  are related to family life.

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  To study or Not to Study: The Influences of Procrastination, Self-esteem, and Self-efficacy on Self-handicapping Among College Students

  Tiatia Filemoni

  Many college students have ambitions to succeed, graduate, and find a career. Despite their ambitions, many are choosing to replace study time with Netflix, social media, partying, drugs, alcohol, and other non-homework related activities. Approximately 30%-60% of college students report procrastination as a regular interruption of their undergraduate studies.

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  Fixation-Related fMRI and Syntactic Networks in the Brain

  Brent Foster, Ben Carter, and Steven Luke

  Humans comprehend language at varying levels of complexity. Syntax, in particular, deals with the arrangement of words and phrases into meaningful sentences. For instance, in English we expect most sentences to follow some variation of the order "Subject-Verb-Object: such as "The boy (Subject) ate (Verb) cake (Object)." On the surface, such grammatical rules seem simple. However, our understanding of how the brain implements these rules to understand sentences is incomplete.

  Syntax appears to be associated with Broca's area in the frontal lobe and various regions of the left temporal lobe. However, recent research has provided controversial data suggesting that the viewpoint of a specific "syntactic center" of the brain is oversimplified. In fact, when processing syntax, the brain appears to activate multiple areas not specific to syntactic tasks alone. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the network for neural syntactic processing via fixation-related fMRI and syntactic predictability.

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  Goal Setting and Goal Achievement in Marathon and Half-Marathon Runners

  Adam M. Fulton, Jared Richardson, and Kyler Griffith

  In this study, we looked at how different variables predicted goal specificity, goal achievement, and finish time for marathoners and half-marathoners. These variables had to do with experience, confidence, and motivation for running, as well as goal specificity. Among the results was the finding that goal specificity was predictive of finish time for half-marathoners and close to predictive for marathoners. These findings could help runners prepare better for races.

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  Between Citizens and Strangers: On Laïcité and Group Rights among Hmong in France

  Austin Gillett

  As the school year began in 1989, three Muslim girls, Samira S. and Fatima and Leïla A., started the ninth and tenth grades, insistent upon wearing their Islamic veils (Cardoso 2000). Problems arose when the girls refused to attend class at the beginning of the school year and on Saturdays, citing religious reasons. The girls were suspended from school, and eventually appealed the decision, prompting major upsets across schools in France. Schools began to act independently, issuing bans on the veils. In 1990, Jean-Juarés High School specified that “the wearing of all distinctive symbols, clothing or otherwise, religious, political, or philosophical, is strictly forbidden” (Philippe 1992). A national policy followed, which eventually banned the wearing of Muslim headscarves in French public schools. This measure that banned Muslim headscarves is one piece of a larger legislative project of secularism (laïcité). This study aims to contribute to scholarship on laïcité by providing an account of non-Muslim minority populations. I examined the experience of Hmong residents of France within the larger secular project to understand how their experiences have differed to those of Muslim immigrants in France.

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  Collision or Cohesion? Hmong Shamanism and Ontological Holism in France

  Madison Harmer and Telisha Pantelakis

  The Hmong are an ethnic group from Southeast Asia who’ve lived as forced migrants and political refugees for the past several hundred years. Current U.S. literature has attributed Hmong difficulties adapting to Western culture, specifically health care from shamanic practices. They claim that traditional and western healing practices are incompatible. (Franzen-Castle & Smith 2013, Fadiman 1997). While living in a small town in central France, we conducted an ethnographic study observing Hmong refugees and their interactions and beliefs between traditional healing practices and Western medicine to explore this claim.

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  It's No Accident: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Vehicle Safety Inspections

  Alex Hoagland and Trevor Woolley

  Traffic fatalities have fallen steadily over the past two decades, particularly those due to car failure. Many have attributed this fall to safer vehicle technology. This trend has led many states to reevaluate mandatory vehicle safety inspection programs. This study sought to answer the question, does the elimination of vehicle safety inspections have an effect on traffic fatalities?

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  Social Anxiety Disorder in College Students and its Differing Treatments

  Taylor Hubbert

  • Approximately one in six College Students report having anxiety or being treated for anxiety
  • Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is defined as anxiety that is caused by social experiences, and an individuals fear/ phobia of social situations
  • Research available to us on Social Anxiety Disorder is extensive. This review examined the symptomology and prevalence of SAD, and compared both individual therapy and group therapy as treatments for college students.

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  Neural Networks of Eye-Movements During Reading

  Trenton D. Jackman, Benjamin Carter, and Steven Luke

  Reading is an important part of normal life. We move our eyes 2-4 times per second. Each movement is called a saccade, and each pause is called a fixation. Progress has been made understanding saccade control during deliberate tasks. Not much is known about saccade control during more automatic tasks like reading. Using fMRI concurrently run with eye-tracking we looked at BOLD MRI response compared to amplitude of saccades, for 43 participants performing a simple paragraph reading task.

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  Do Municipal Officials Represent the Views of their Constituents?

  Steven Jamieson

  Municipalities make decisions that effect millions of Americans every day. Research has been done to assess the link between citizen’s preferences and municipal policy (Tausanovitchand Warshaw2014). However, the link between the policies and the officials who make them is missing.

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  Has Party Identification Changed in Utah?

  Devin Johanson

  Three weeks before the 2016 election, Utah was labeled as a swing state by most main-stream media outlets. The offensive rhetoric from both the Trump and Clinton campaigns and the rise of a popular independent candidate increased the potential for changes in the party identity of the Utah electorate. My research question is as follows: How has party identification changed in the state of Utah between the 2012 and 2016 elections?

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  Making Japan Great Again: The Imperial Rescript on Education

  Ayoung Kang, Alistor Skabelund, and Matthew Stephenson

  The Meiji government used the Imperial Rescript on Education in order to develop nationalism and respond against the dominating presence of Western Imperialism by standardizing Meiji education and interpreting it to justify militarism.

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  Depression, Religiosity, and Parenting Styles among Mormon Adolescents

  Courtney Kinneard and Mark Ogletree

  We examined how religiosity and the parent-child relationship are associated with depression in 12-14 yr old teenagers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint. A random sample of 493 revealed three correlations: girls who have a strong connection with their mother have a negative correlation with depression; daily spiritual experiences are negatively correlated with depression, and negative religious coping is positively correlated with depression symptoms.

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  Looking for Truth: Dissecting Tales of Fijian Cannibals

  Brandon Olsen, Sarah Jamarillo, and May Harrington

  After Europeans encountered Fiji in the eighteenth century, the islands quickly gained fame for having cannibal tribes. Captain James Cook, an early explorer of the Pacific islands, describes the Fijian natives as an “addicted people, eating their enemies, whom they kill in the battle”(Banivanua-Mar 26). The people had a culture of war rituals, rivalry, and conflict between tribes that inspired cannibalistic rumors. Those that visited Fiji spread wild tales that the westerners eagerly devoured. Under analysis, these stories lack compelling evidence to claim the Europeans and Americans met Fijian cannibals and instead tell more about the society the tales come from.

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  Second Generation Immigrants: Their Self-Esteem and Educational Aspirations

  Anika Price

  Immigrants experience unique stresses & discrimination, which leads to lower levels of self-esteem. (Stets & Burke, 2003; Kao, 1999; Gee et al., 2010). Do Second-Generation Immigrants experience the same thing? If so, will that affect their educational expectations for the future?

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  Town Hall Drama: What's all the Gossip About?

  McKay Randall

  When the new Congress took their seats at the beginning of 2017, Republicans were on a mission to replace Obamacare. To gear up for the legislative struggle, legislators took to the streets and towns of their districts to speak to constituents about Obamacare and other policies. During the first town halls in January and February, Republican legislators found themselves confronted with rowdy and raucous crowds who nearly shouted them down every time they had chance to speak. The News took note of this phenomena in late February and started reporting on the story. The popular headlines from The Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN all reported that Republicans were facing wild crowds in their home states. These same media outlets then discovered that Republicans were cancelling their town halls, presumably so they didn’t have to face the tough crowds. This issue gained a lot of media attention. I aim to test whether a pattern did develop where legislators, especially Republicans, backed down from town halls after the reports of bad crowds.

  Hypothesis: Republicans did do fewer town halls after the news coverage, but this trend will not be specific to the GOP and is due to other factors.

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  Consequences of Transgender Victimization

  Zach Reid

  This study reviewed 13 empirical and recent studies dealing with transgender victimization. It details the arc narrative of where bullying begins and what the result is. The study revealed transgender youth and young adults are at higher risk for being bullied which puts them into a statistically more likely category to experience physical harm, sexual harm, and long lasting mental health problems.

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  Git R Done: Analysis of Motivation in Relation to Exercise and Determining Factors

  Britton L. Rice

  Exercise provides many physical, emotional and mental health benefits (Facts about Physical Activity, 2014). Despite this, only 21% of American adults exercise regularly. One way of increasing this is to encourage better understanding of motivation and how to control it. Since intrinsic motivation towards exercise is not easily created or changed, most of the focus is placed on extrinsic motivation in its varying degrees. This summary isolates a few factors in exercise that play crucial roles in deciding motivation such as:

  • Climate and Goal Orientation

  • Influence of peers and teammates

  • Influence of coaches

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  Policy Reforms Amidst Corruption: Ukrainian Attitudes Toward Economic Development

  Eliza Riley

  This research examines what economic policies Ukrainians think should—and could– work in Ukraine to reform the economic system and combat widespread corruption. This study tests how region specific determinants and corruption perception levels influence attitudes toward democracy and optimism toward future reform possibilities in Ukraine.

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  Does Ideology Trump Party Loyalty

  Soren J. Schmidt

  Party affiliation and political ideology are typically paired together. It’s consequently difficult to disentangle their individual impact on vote choice. Utah’s 2016 election presented a rare exception to this trend with non-conservative Republican nominee (Donald Trump) and conservative independent candidate (Evan McMullin). Do voters prioritize party loyalty or personal ideology when casting a ballot? What are other predictors of party defection?

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  Literature Review of Animal Hoarding

  Corina L. Schroeder

  This paper reviews the characteristic features, origin, and treatment of animal hoarding. It evaluates the similarities and differences of hoarding disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, showing that it seems to be more closely related to object hoarding. This disorder often originates with a traumatic life event, which triggers a psychological vulnerability to compulsively collect animals. In some cases, the hoarder was neglected by parental figures at a young age, so he or she developed relationships with animals to cope. Other theories for the origin include addiction models, delusional disorders, and dementia models. Several theories are reviewed to explain the characteristic lack of insight in animal hoarding, including viewing the animals as self-objects, extensions of themselves, or dissociation. This paper also reviews ineffective methods of dealing with animal hoarders and the lack of treatment for animal hoarding, as well as implications and recommended solutions.

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  Exercise After Retirement: The Secret to Productive Aging

  Taradita Subiantoro, Erin Kaseda, Tyler C. Graff, Kristina Hall, Maren Wright Voss, Jerry Bounsanga, Lori L. Wadsworth, Man Hung, and Wendy C. Birmingham

  In this study, we interviewed and surveyed participants and attendees of the Huntsman Senior World Games in order to determine factors associated with successful aging post retirement on older adults who are highly active compared to average older adults in physical and psychological well-being.

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  Response Time Scores on a Reflexive Attention Task Predict a Child's Inattention Score from a Parent Report

  Erica Suh, Katherine Christensen, Sarah Kamhout, Kahala Thompson, Yoojin Kim, and Cooper Hodges

  ● Children with attention deficits have problems with sustained and reflexive attention tasks

  ● Few studies measure reflexive attention as a component of day-to-day attention in children

  ● Parents also have valuable insight into children’s behavior

  ● We want to identify associations between computer-based reflexive attention task performance and parent-rated attention-related problems.

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  The Effects of Extracurricular Activity and Physical Activity on Academic Success: A Literature Review

  Braden Tanner

  Due to an ever-increasing importance of education, it is important to understand how to foster an environment conducive to academic success. Extracurricular activity is one of many factors that influences the academic environment. This review examines literature published since 2010 concerning extracurricular activity's effect on academic success. Seeing that sports make up such a large portion of the extracurricular spectrum, the review also examines studies analyzing the effects of physical activity on academic performance.