Annie Lin
Past research on the service sector indicates that workers often suffer from negative psychological consequences when forced by their managers to be friendly. Workers, workers’ rights advocates, businesspeople, and scholars alike have therefore searched for ways to set up the work environment such that workers will be friendly even without management coercion. Taking this search effort into an under-researched sector, Annie will join electronics retail teams this summer to examine how companies’ encouragement of relationship-building between employees and customers affects employees’ likelihood of providing “voluntary” friendliness. Annie will sell electronic […]
Cynthia Houng
This study seeks to understand how residents of the San Francisco Bay Area constructed definitions of Nature in the late 20th century, and how that construct in turn affected the development of the Bay Area landscape between 1940 and 1980, focusing specifically upon the construction and utilization of Bay Area parks. The dynamic interplay between designer and user reveals something of how humans relate to their environment as the park is physically adapted to shifting definitions of landscape and nature. Providing an entry point through which scholars can begin to […]
Mona Urbina
Mona’s proficiency as an environmental horticulturist and her interest in urban ecosystems led her to the Frankie lab, where she has been preparing pilot bee-gardens. Over time, urban sprawl has fragmented habitats necessary for the survival of California native bees and their natural host plants. Mona aims to document the most bee-attracting native plants to promote urban gardens that will provide new habitats and resources for native bees. She will survey bee-flower relationships at Mount Wanda at the John Muir National Monument (where exotic grasses are crowding out pollinator dependent […]
René Flores
Increasingly, Latino immigrants are steering away from large metropolitan areas, traditional immigration magnets, in favor of smaller, often rural communities. As Small Town USA is transformed by migration, the specter of xenophobia seems to lurk nearby. In recent months, dozens of towns have considered passing laws against undocumented immigrants ranging from criminalizing their labor (Escondido, CA) or penalizing their landlords (Hazleton, PA) to prohibiting their presence in public spaces (Springfield, TN). René will try to discover the factors that motivate the rise of xenophobic sentiments in small U.S. communities. He […]
Leila Yavari
Leila will travel to Iran this summer to research Iranian theater, in order to assess the extent to which live theatrical performances offer a location for the subversion of censorship laws–and with what repercussions. She will be investigating censorship guidelines, analyzing scripts, observing performances, attending theater classes at the University of Azad, and interviewing students, directors, actors and playwrights. Leila’s project is a particularly timely one, because of the new movement toward political reform in Iran and the resulting opening of academic exchange opportunities with the United States. Her research, […]
June L. Gruber
The primary objective of this project will be to examine the way in which patients diagnosed with schizophrenia use language to describe their subjective emotional experiences. Using a clinical interview, the Schedule for Deficit Syndrome, patients with schizophrenia will be asked to provide a brief narrative of salient emotional experiences in their lives (e.g. what makes you happy?). Trained research assistants will then transcribe and code the videotaped interview. Through the results of the study, the researcher hopes to shed light on the way in which emotion affects linguistic properties […]
Joseph Paul Scalice
Joseph’s interest in the Philippines is the product of over 16 years of residency in Manila. Joseph will investigate the origin and ramifications of recent debates within the Philippine left over modes of production. Over the past 15 years, the left in the Philippines has fragmented into two broad camps: those that claim that the Philippine mode of production is semi-feudal, and those that claim it is capitalist. Joseph will conduct research in the Southeast Asian library at Cornell, read archived tracts, fliers, and circulars published by the various groups […]
Vi Do
Vi will investigate the nature of state led health care reform in America, focusing on the instrumental political actors that shape the debate. As federal level attempts to solve the problem of the uninsured have failed time and time again, policy innovations to address America’s broken health care delivery system have emerged from the states. The two critical examples are Hawaii’s Prepaid Health Care Act of 1974, which established an employer mandate for health insurance provision and Massachusetts’s newest reform, Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006, which introduced an […]
Monica Swanson
Monica will study the little understood phenomenon of “death row volunteers,” inmates who give up the appeal process and “volunteer” to be executed. Seventy such “volunteers” have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In order to test existing theories about this group and to propose her own, Monica will use a mixed research design, beginning with statistical analysis and supplementing it with case studies and qualitative interviews with defense attorneys and other researchers. She will travel to New York to meet with staff members at “Death […]
Elizabeth Bremner
Localization of biologically relevant stimuli in the world is a basic feature of sensory systems and is well studied for visual and auditory stimuli. It is well known that mammals are very sensitive to odors and can trace them to their sources, but it is not well studied nor understood whether this localization can be accomplished egocentricallythat is, with the head kept stationary. For her Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, Elizabeth will evaluate the abilities of humans to egocentrically pinpoint odor sources in space. She will first address the behavioral […]