Like so many others, COVID-19 has had a major impact on my life. My home state, New York was caught unprepared for the pandemic, at great loss. The ensuing response from government and private entities was scattered at best, and at times dangerous. The immense impact COVID has had on my family, community and country inspired me to research it. As the shock of a pandemic began to wear off, and states began reopening, conjectures about the differences between parties and states were widely articulated in the media and public discourse, with little data to support it.

Starting from a young age, I had seen people in my life suffer as a result of domestic violence as well as seen and experienced firsthand the stress associated with financial instability. In 2020, the first case COVID-19 was reported in America, thus sparking the news to be flooded with stories of the toll this pandemic was taking on our well-being and the economy. Due to my understanding of the connection between relationship and economic instability from personal experiences, I became concerned about how the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic could affect marital relationships … For many individuals, being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck or based on future paychecks is their reality (Cecchetti et al.

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 interpersonal interaction, humans utilize complex language (Hari & Kujala, 2007). Humans utilize such language to cooperate, compete, imitate, help, inform, question, negotiate, bargain, lie, and vote. Until about 20 years ago, much of this communication was conducted in-person or through telephones. However, digital communication within the past 20 years has continued to rise, thus replacing these forms of interaction (Williams, 1977). Emerging adults, who report texting as their dominant daily mode of communication, comprise the largest proportion of texting and instant messaging users.

The public’s perception of the President of the United States has been a widely studied aspect in American politics since the birth of the nation in the eighteenth century. In recent years, with the inception of the 24-hour news cycle as a prevalent social characteristic, political scientists have deliberately analyzed the potential effects of the news media and its portrayal of the president on the public’s approval of him (Cohen, 2000; Wolf & Holian, 2006; Woessner, 2005; Schiffer, 2009; Cohen, 2004).

Last year, a friend of mine from camp was harassed over the Internet. Her “friends” tormented her online by sending a steady stream of emails and instant messages that threatened or insulted her. This occurred for months, and it became so extreme that she was too distressed even to go to school . . . Soon after I heard her story, I read about Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old girl who committed suicide after receiving hurtful messages online.

Even though, at that point, I had a feeling that pressure was the cause of Rodriguez’s failures, I still did not really know why such a thing would happen. How could somebody perform so well in unimportant game-situations and so poorly in the important ones? I was intrigued and was determined to find out. Yerkes and Dodson had found that there was a relationship between arousal and the performance of any task.

Both French and Spanish have masculine v. feminine grammatical gender, while English does not have grammatical gender. For example, the phrase ’the table’ in English has the gender-neutral ’the’ preceding the word ’table’, while in French and Spanish, the feminine article ’la’ precedes both ‘mesa’ in Spanish and ’table’ in French . . . These grammatical differences between the languages led me to wonder whether there is a difference in [gender] attitudes among countries were Spanish, French, and English are predominantly spoken (Spain, France, US).

America has become a country of excess, especially in regards to food. So, when I decided to narrow down my research interests to a branch of human psychology, obesity was the logical choice. In the last fifty years, the percentage of obese Americans has nearly tripled. And, now in 2008, more than half of all Americans are classified as being overweight (1) In this study, three possible causes of obesity were investigated.

When I was in 8th grade my cousin and many of my friends decided to attend private high schools, instead of public schools. I began wondering if the school that you attend influences the education that you receive. I especially wanted to know what factors influenced the education that I received. My interest in equity continued to grow as I noticed disparities in schools. Time after time the districts of the upper-middle class and wealthy would take home the prize from math and science competitions as my school rode slumped and glum faced in the bus back to school.

Personal Section “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes - height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability - there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means - which can be debated- there is a difference in standard deviation, and variability of a male and female population”. As soon as then-Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers made this statement on January 14th, 2005 as part of a speech during the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, a storm of controversy arose over his “sexist” pronouncement.

Section I Human beings have the natural inclination to ponder the things that frame their day to day lives. After all, isn’t it only natural to question the world around us? Some of the greatest inventions have arisen out of an individual’s sheer curiosity to explore something that fascinated them. Others have arisen after an attempt to simplify a task or improve everyday life. We can trace this idea back to a man who went by the name of Benjamin Franklin.

Many times I wondered why I had not been taught grammar earlier, like my friends who attended private schools. Why was it that my brother and my friends in the city spent so much time on direct grammar instruction, while my school and so many other public institutions considered it a non-priority? For that matter, why did our superintendent insist on calling primary schools, “elementary schools” rather than “grammar schools”? There was a distinct philosophical reason at work.

Outside the realm of sports, it was shown that participation in clubs increased social participation and therefore social self-esteem (Lindsay 1984). In a more recent study, Mahoney & Cairns (1997) found that participation in clubs increased school engagement, meaning that students were more comfortable at school and more likely to participate in school. Essentially such students felt better about themselves at school. Read More

ntel Science Talent Search, I wrote a paper entitled “Social Security Reform: A Model Combining Market and Non-market Solutions in Order to Achieve Political Consensus,” in the social sciences category. As the title states, I developed a mathematical model as well as incorporated concepts from both economics and political science. The first decision I made when I began my Intel research project was choosing what area of social science my project would entail.

As a Muslim-American female teenager, I have always found it difficult to balance the religious, traditional world with the modern, secular world. The extent of my conservatism on certain issues has been influenced by both these worlds. My desire to investigate my Muslim peers’ attitudes and reactions toward these differences gave me the idea for my research. However, it was my mother who gave me the strength and determination to actually go through with this experiment.

In 2003, the Napster craze was in full swing and the Recording Industry Association of America was beginning prosecution of individual kids who downloaded music. It seemed that there was an article about it in the New York Times almost daily. The Internet was giving rise to changes in behavior that could not be anticipated. I felt we were living through a type of revolution, a sea change in behavior and lifestyle not seen since the Industrial Revolution.