The Honors College

Maternal mortality in an ongoing health crisis in Haiti. Indicators of reproductive health are among the worst in the world with a maternal mortality rate of 350 deaths per every 100,000 live births. The health services within Haiti only reach between 40-60% of the population. There are many factors that affect the dire status of pregnant women in Haiti such as the lack of access to prenatal care, distance to health facilities, and the inability to pay medical fees.

Differences in personalities similar to those in humans have been documented in wild animals; individuals differ consistently in suites of correlated traits within and across contexts. Little is known about how hormones profiles may be related to animal personality. Because animals face ecological challenges, how an individual’s endocrine system responds and adapts to stressors can affect their survivorship and reproductive output. Although stress hormones might mediate behavior, researchers have rarely tested whether stress hormone profiles are consistent within individual animals.

This thesis focuses on the methods hearing parents may employ to spur emergent literacy in their children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Children who are deaf or hard of hearing are naturally at risk for language and literacy delays. Children with hearing loss typically develop emergent literacy skills at a slower rate than their peers, and can fail to master these important skills. This may be due to communication barriers within the home. A full understanding of emergent literacy is critical for mastering reading and academic success.

Experiences, such as environmental enrichment (EE), that allow for exploration often lead to brain changes and alter novelty-seeking behaviors, and adolescence is a developmental period in which these behaviors increase. In this study, the effects of EE during adolescence on preference for familiar objects that have been rearranged using an object-in-place (OiP) task and on neural activation in the hippocampus, which is implicated in the detection of novel spatial relationships, was investigated. Adolescent Long-Evans rats (n=16) were exposed to EE between postnatal days (PND) 25 and 48.

King Richard III is perhaps best-known from his depiction in Shakespeare’s Richard III, but his monstrosity has been developed across hundreds of texts and five centuries. This thesis seeks to explore four of the texts that either confirm or deny Richard’s monstrosity, especially as they relate to the “monster theory” outlined by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

The Hospitality and Tourism Management industry is extensive and can be overwhelming for students to determine possible career paths. A survey of graduates of Appalachian State University's Hospitality and Tourism Management was conducted. This surveyed aimed to answer the questions what career paths can be pursued with a Hospitality and Tourism Management degree and how beneficial is having this degree in finding a job within this industry. The survey also analyzed graduates' perceptions of the program and what changes should be made.

Two experiments investigated the effects of study environment (music vs. silence) on academic memory retrieval. In both, participants were undergraduate volunteers. In the first experiment, 75 participants, 37 in music and 38 in silence, studied and were tested on recall of pairs of words and pairs of nonsense syllables. The 90 participants in the second experiment (music n = 42, i silence n = 48) studied and were tested on the nonsense syllable material only.