Defending the Environment: From Grassroots to a Business

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

A common practice through the waves of environmental movements is for grassroots organizations to eventually form a non-profit that continues to support the environment. This was clearly observed at the Environmental Protection Information Center in Arcata, California. The study of this nonprofit and others like it have painted a clearer picture about how environmental nonprofits organize and mobilize. EPIC follows the patterns of other organizations, being a 45 year old environmental nonprofit, it has seen a lot of changes from its original grassroots mobilization. The focus is now on how to best fulfill its mission statement and maintain a complex membership based business.

Define American

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

The purpose of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of the self-perceived identities of immigrant and first-generation community members in Humboldt County, particularly related to feelings of inclusion and exclusion. The research will help to identify the resources that are available and important to immigrant and first-generation members, to identify areas in which resources are lacking, and to provide an intimate understanding of their experiences related to their identities in this community. Through surveys and interviews we hope to bridge public discourse between the American identity and the immigrant and first-generation identity.

Del Norte County: A Look at Educational Achievement

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Rural communities like Del Norte County face additional challenges in obtaining a quality education compared with urban areas. According to the Rural Families Data Center, this achievement gap is due to excessive absence and truancy, low socioeconomic status, poverty, and high school dropout rates. Archival data from the last ten years was obtained from the CDE DataQuest website and analyzed to inform a report created by the California Center for Rural Policy for dissemination throughout the community. Generally test scores were lower for Del Norte and low-income students. These results show that more attention must be paid to education systems in rural communities to improve outcomes.

Deliberative Democracy for Climate Resilience: Can this Make a Difference?

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Considering how climate change is an ongoing issue, the basis of the project will explore the concept of deliberative democracy and it's potential effects on climate resilience. Deliberative democracy essentially focuses on how citizens engage with issues and the deliberation aspect of it can help make otherwise complicated political issues easier to comprehend. The research for this project will include a forum on this topic at HSU as well as an analysis of countries employing this strategy and its effectiveness.

Developing a Database to Understand Cannabis Compliance and Quantifying California's Certified Testing Labs Preliminary Results

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

The purpose of this research was to develop an understanding of the cannabis testing regulations in the state of California. Research was conducted identifying all Certified Cannabis Testing Labs currently doing product tests. We hoped to understand what these labs were discovering in their product safety tests. Because this was the first year of regulated certification and testing the research conducted was meant to create a baseline standard from which we can judge future years' progress against. This research will also hopefully be able to be utilized by growers in the future to find out which contaminants are most common and thus identify suitable alternatives to increase compliance.

Developing Interdisciplinary Anti-Violence Pedagogy

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

The Students for Violence Prevention first year experience program faculty cohort will present key strategies learned in developing interdisciplinary anti-violence pedagogy. The faculty will cover strategies for community building, how classroom work weaves with activist strategies, and tactics for supporting students in trauma.

Digitizing Stratigraphic Maps

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

This project is aimed at digitizing hand-drawn stratigraphic maps of excavations from the Dos Hombres to Gran Cacao (DH2GC) archaeological project in northwestern Belize. Archaeological illustration is a form of technical illustration that graphically records material derived from an archaeological context. Illustration is a powerful medium for disseminating knowledge, as it demonstrates the excavation process and captures history as it is unearthed. We use Adobe Illustrator CS3 software for the digitization process. Finished maps are used in the annual report for the Institute of Archaeology (IoA) in Belize.

Does Handedness Affect Lateralization of Facial Emotion Processing

Shairy Jimenez Delgado, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Behavioral and neuroimaging work on the visual processing of facial stimuli has consistently demonstrated a right hemisphere bias in face perception generally as well as in emotion perception. Research on lateralization of other cognitive functions such as language has found differential patterns of lateralization between right-handed and left-handed individuals. Several neuroimaging studies found evidence between handedness and degree of lateralization for face processing. The current study seeks to extend previous work by investigating the relationship between degree of handedness and degree of hemispheric lateralization for the processing of faces displaying positive and negative affect.

Does Having Siblings Affect The Recognition of Children's Emotional Displays?

Jasper Toledo, Psychology Undergraduate Student

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

This research study looks into whether participants with siblings are able to understand the emotional display in images of children more so than participants without siblings. We hypothesized that participants with younger siblings will have a greater likelihood to notice emotional responses in children due to alloparental caregiving behavior. Sixty images of children expressing six emotional displays were shown to participants. Overall, there was no difference in emotional recognition accuracy between participant groups. Specific emotional displays were recognized more than others for all groups, with the most recognized emotional display being happiness.

Dog World Dog Memes

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Memes, photographs or videos that are edited to be satirical and that makes fun of cultural ideologies, are passed rapidly through the internet and phone applications and can end up on hundreds of websites within hours. Methods employed included participant observation, literature review, and screenshot analysis from Facebook and Instagram. Patterns in the types of posts indicate that people of all ages actively seek out dog memes to reduce anxiety and that dog memes are more popular when they are humanized. Dog memes are an artifact of our generation that transcends age groups and allows us to research meme culture that reflects a virtual population.