After going to school in face masks during COVID-19, I began to contemplate their impact on human connection and how well people could recognize each other’s emotions behind the mask. My curiosity led me to investigate. In an online search, I discovered Dr. Felicity Bigelow’s study on facial emotion recognition in the scientific journal, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and I was immediately captivated. Her research aligned perfectly with my own interests, so I decided to reach out to her with my idea for an independent research project.

In a world with climate deniers, scientists have been trying to uncover the most effective way to present the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change to audiences. “Climate stories” are personal accounts that have been used in recent years to engage more people in the global issue of climate change from an emotional perspective. There are multiple ways in which “climate stories” are presented. The present study explored the effects of audio, written, narrative, and informational climate change passages on the environmental decision-making levels of individuals.

Music has been an integral part of my life. I began playing piano when I was two years old and percussion in fourth grade. As I progressed through elementary and middle school, I also developed a deep passion for math. When it came time to choose a research topic for the Al Kalfus Long Island Math Fair in eighth grade, I combined these two passions and investigated the connections between math and music theory.

The conditions of low-income living and the prevalence of discrimination have been long studied in African Americans; however, the Hispanic community has long been overlooked in this research, despite their parallel struggles with the pessimistic products of poverty. There is a knowledge gap in the study of adverse stimulation associated with incessant deprivation, bias, prejudice, and stereotypes applied to Hispanics/Latinos. This research focuses on how continuous struggles analogous to poverty affect the brain development and cognitive function of Hispanic children from Union City, NJ: the most densely populated city in the United States with the highest hispanic diaspora in the State of New Jersey.

I was never a STEM-oriented person. I like to think it was because I had talent in another subject that took my attention away from STEM, but it was more likely due to the humbling experience of going to an academically challenging high school that turned my love for science and math into the stress of finishing mountains of homework and fear of failing back-to-back assessments. I couldn’t picture myself pursuing a career in STEM when I obviously wasn’t good at it … I bounced from subject to subject, taking various non-STEM-related classes to find my interest.

Pain is tricky to study. Along with being the most prevalent chronic medical condition in the world, pain forces us to combine our understanding of physiology and the philosophy of the self and mind. This is because pain is considered a “subjective experience”, limited to the individual themselves … We can think of many examples where two different people are presented with the same stimuli or situation and produce a different response: stubbing a toe or holding a hot object, for example.

Cognitive distortions are individually generating thoughts or feelings that are negative, persuasive, and usually inaccurately based on reality. Cognitive distortions can also be referred to as types of thinking. Cognitive distortions all share the commonality of representing an individual’s private negative thinking about themselves and could cause an individual to interact negatively with others. For example, one cognitive distortion type is mental filtering. Mental filtering is when an individual focuses on the negative instead of the positive in a specific current situation.

I have always enjoyed science, ever since I was 7 and read that over 6 billion bacteria live in your mouth. For a 7 year old, this was a scary thought. I refused to eat during meals. I never closed my mouth, as to let the invaders out. I stopped breathing through my mouth and relied only on my nose. However, I am proud to say that I am no longer afraid of being a home to my microscopic friends.

During the winter of 2020, I was expecting to have a very different project for the summer. COVID was not something that was on everyone’s minds all the time, and I was spending time looking and applying for internships in a lab performing biological research. Biology has always been of great interest to me, and I want to pursue biomedical engineering in the future. When the pandemic hit, my summer plans were upended.

World Trade Center (WTC) disaster responders were exposed to psychological trauma due to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As a result, many continue to suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psychological distress which can worsen after exposure to subsequent traumatic events such as Hurricane Sandy. Preexisting data were obtained from a study group of anonymous WTC responders both before and after Hurricane Sandy. Statistical analyses concluded that higher levels of hurricane exposure were associated with increased symptoms of PTSD and distress following Sandy.

Last year, my father and I were displaced by a hockey puck the artificially intelligent Amazon Echo Dot. As my family was getting ready to go to my uncle’s house, my sister asked my father how cold it was outside. My father in response told her that it wasn’t too chilly out and that she wouldn’t need to wear her coat. Immediately afterwards, however, my sister asked the Amazon Echo Dot also known by her wake word “Alexa” what the temperature was.

The parents didn’t send their kids because there was a male teacher! Scoffing at the absurdity, my disgruntled father strolled into the house, booming with another story to share from his after-school program. As an elementary educator, he fills up our conversations at the dinner table about his daily interactions with the students and their parents; my usual routine consists of quiet nods and smiles. But this particular story got me curious.

The present study aims to investigate the impact of two types of pressure to conform on decision making in an online setting. Since there has been an increase in social media usage in the political realm, the present study investigates how viewing comments and likes that are present on various social networking sites can cause a significant change in people’s political opinions. Subjects received both an informational conformity condition and a normative conformity condition as participants served as their own control.

The first respect in which this paper breaks from much of the literature is that it rejects the notion that bullying behavior is carried out by a small, identifiable social group. Rather, bullying is regarded herein as a widespread social phenomenon, characteristic of the social interactions of those who would not be branded as bullies in the traditional sense. Bullying behavior is not emblematic of the mentally or emotionally disturbed bully, but rather is an inevitable result of the repeated convergence of motivating and enabling factors of bullying behavior (Zapf, 1999).

When one asks a group of students at any school in the country if they have ever been involved in and/or affected by bullying almost every hand shoots up into the air. Such instances demonstrate the rising incidence of bullying in each community, the country, and throughout the world. Although it is obvious that bullying occurs in schools, teachers, the adults closest to the problem, have been avoided by students. Prior studies already established statistics indicating that teachers are the last group to be approached, followed by family and friends, in cases of students who witness bullying.

In 1997, The New York Times quoted a Bronx High School of Science administrator regarding the then- surprising increase in behavioral science honorees in the prestigious Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Talent Search competition: ‘It [behavioral science] does provide another outlet for some students whose strength may not be in empirical science and math,’ said the chairwoman of the school’s biology department (A Fine Hour For Squishy Sciences, NYT 2/16/97). Oh really?

Autism is a mental disorder that impairs the mental and social development of children on their way to adulthood. Not everyone with autism has the same severity of symptoms and therefore researchers refer to the variance of the disorder as autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In recent years, there has been an increase in children diagnosed with autism (Groom, 2009). Reasons for such a peak in diagnoses range from a vaccine link to simply just more accurate methods of testing (Downs, 2009).

Most people, especially teenagers, do not know HIV as anything more than an STD and that we are to avoid being infected . . . Past research has shown that the highest percentage of HIV infected patients lies in East Africa. Research has also shown that the HIV population of the United States is rapidly growing. Like all humans, my childhood played a major role in the shaping of my current personality.

Most people cannot deny having procrastinated at some time; almost everyone can sympathize with the desire to delay working on an uninviting task. As a high school student, I have seen the extent to which both my peers and I postpone our work, putting off assignments until crunch time when we rush to get it done. Empirical studies have largely classified procrastination as a maladaptive trait, as it has been correlated with irritation, regret, self-condemnation, low self-esteem, despair, test anxiety, and lower GPAs (Burka & Yuen, 2008; Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995; Ferrari, 1998; Lay, Edwards, Parker, & Endler, 1989; Schouwenburg & Lay, 1995, Schraw et al, 2007, Tice & Baumeister, 1997) though I was well-acquainted with these findings long before I read about them in scientific journals.

First noted in the United States in 1980, the obesity epidemic has since increased twofold in recent decades. In the 21st century, obesity has become one of the leading health problems in the United States; over 34% of all adults age 20 years and over and 18% of all children age 6-11 years are obese (CDC Faststats, Obesity and Overweight). In fact, obesity is more prevalent in the United States than in other Westernized country.

I found David, in all his glory, on his bed, leaning on both elbows and knees, staring at the calendar on the wall next to his pillow. The calendar holds mystical powers for David. It lists all the activities he’s scheduled to do for the next day. David is my 15 year old brother. David has autism. While David stared at the calendar, I stared at him. That moment taught me what unconditional love means.

While reading this article, I noticed a number of faults in the setup of the experiment, which indicated the possibility that hypnopaedia was not impossible. The paper of the research, done by Emmons and Simon, never specified the nouns used in the study, so their results couldn’t be duplicated. The words in the study were learned by listening, but volunteers were tested in a written format. Read More