The Honors College

This paper seeks to further the understanding of how capital gains tax policy can affect the realization of capital gains and have an impact on investment in the economy.  While there has been a substantial amount of research regarding capital gains policy, there has not been any research that seeks to analyze how an individual will react in an investment scenario where there is news of a new piece of tax legislation that will change the rate at which capital gains are taxed.  In this study, we developed two experiments that place individuals in an investment scenario and ask the

Organic anion transporters (OATs) are known to aid in the elimination of negatively charged xenobiotics from the body through excretory organs such as the liver, kidney, and intestine. The non-mammalian Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) nematode serves as a model to study mammalian OATs due to homologous amino acid sequences and similar substrate interactions in the conserved active site. Competition assays illustrate the inhibition of the negatively charged fluorescein uptake into the C.

The primary objective of this thesis was to ascertain respondents’ perceptions and knowledge of the United States federal income tax code for individuals. With citizens constantly forming their beliefs from media, reference groups, and varying political parties, I thought it would be interesting to unveil reactions to assorted questions via a survey. Disseminated using both Survey Monkey and paper copies to the accounting classes at Appalachian State University, I tallied a total of approximately 550 questionnaires.

Metabolomics is a method of elucidating the metabolic signature of biofluids. This process is useful in identifying and quantifying metabolites that shift in response to exercise, diseases, or drugs. With the growing number of overweight and obese adolescents of great concern, this study observed the effects of a play-based physical activity program over summer break on the metabolome of overweight adolescents.

Public art can be a powerful tool for creating dialogue, defining a community, and increasing art’s accessibility. One artwork in Chicago, the stainless steel sculpture Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor, represents one of the best examples of public art in the world because of its overwhelmingly positive reception. I was curious to uncover exactly which aspects of Cloud Gate make it so successful and how these findings can be used to propel future public art initiatives.

This thesis explores the international differences in defining happiness and how the definitions of happiness relate within the framework of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the emergent field of positive psychology, happiness and Subjective Well-Being (SWB) have been studied using quantitative measures. This qualitative study seeks to examine happiness from a phenomenological perspective to understand how participants themselves define what it means to be happy and what it means to have a good life.

In the spring of 2012 during my Living Routes semester in Costa Rica, I conducted research on rural families who participate in household chicken production. I used interviews and surveys to determine their chicken production practices and reasons for participating in this production system. I found that many of these people participated in this activity for food security and an increase in household income.

The present study examines the power of a play-based art space to reduce stress for a college student.  The researcher hypothesized that the play-based art space would be equally or more effective at reducing the participant’s stress than biofeedback.  Stress reduction was measured with blood pressure, heart rate, self-report questionnaires, and the participant’s score on the Cohen Perceived Stress Scale.  In order to do this, the female participant spent five, uninterrupted half-hour sessions within the art space over the course of 2.5 weeks.  This was then