Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

This mixed-methods, cross-cultural exploratory research study investigates the construct of place attachment by integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches across diverse geographic and cultural contexts. Study 1 employed focus groups in the United States, Spain, and Singapore to identify core predictors of emotional bonds to place, including autonomy, psychological security, personal growth, and social belonging. Thematic analyses revealed autonomy in movement, safety, opportunities for self-development, and cultural fit as key factors shaping attachment to meaningful places. Study 2 quantitatively examined these predictors using a Place Attachment Scale and Place Attachment Predictors Scale in a sample of 150 U.S.-based adult participants, stratified by ethnicity and migration background. Results from correlational and regression analyses demonstrated moderate to strong associations between attachment and predictors such as self-sufficiency, cultural belonging, community belonging, personal memories, knowledge of place, and growth. Interaction effects indicated that relational mobility and autonomy influence place attachment differently by ethnic group. Broadly, the findings highlight the multifaceted nature of place attachment, suggesting a conceptual alignment with psychosocial attachment theory and underscoring the importance of sensorimotor interaction, community integration, and personal agency in fostering the development of the individual person-place bond.

A systematic literature review was conducted to examine existing studies pertaining to the impacts of chronic sleep deprivation on the quality of patient care delivered by medical residents. Several keyword searches were conducted using Google Scholar, evaluating the first 20 of each search based on established inclusion and exclusion criteria. Analysis of the 7 relevant studies revealed that those utilizing direct clinical evaluations provided the most extensive data. Findings suggested that chronic sleep deprivation impacted the quality of surgical and nonsurgical patient care differently. While impacts on surgical care were largely inconclusive, chronic sleep deprivation appeared to show a negative correlation with the quality of nonsurgical care. These results indicate the need for institutional regulations regarding medical resident working conditions to mitigate performance related effects of chronic sleep deprivation. With residents serving a critical role in the foundations of healthcare, ensuring they have work environments which enable them to provide quality patient care can greatly impact system-wide patient outcomes.

Grief is a complex emotion brought about by both perceived and actual losses that can profoundly shape an individual. In the context of politics, one’s experience, processing, and expression of grief has significant impacts on our understanding of disenfranchised grief and invisible loss. These dynamics affect individuals who experience grief outside the conventional frameworks of recognition, validation, and support. The present study uses in-depth interviews to gain insight into how college students experience and express their grief in relation to politics with those who both share and conflict in values. Findings suggest strong parallels between the experience of political grief and traditional grief while highlighting differences in how individuals navigate these conversations across a political divide. Participants’ willingness to express grief relating to the election with those that disagree with them politically varied depending on their perception of the permanence of the relationship. Ultimately, these expressions of political grief—when adding insight about others’ perspectives and experiences—can offer a path toward more productive and empathetic dialogue.

In this paper I consider how gender was expressed in ancient Mesoamerican figurines. I focus on a Nayarit figurine (300 BCE-300 CE) from UCSB’s Art, Architecture and Design Museum, considering its physical attributes, physique and clothing in reference to other Mesoamerican sculptures. The artwork’s gender ambiguity reflects a more dynamic role of gender in ancient Mesoamerica; one not confined to biological characteristics but rooted in broader cultural and societal values.

Maize has been a significant part of the North American diet for over 2000 years. Archaeological work has placed the origins of maize in the Midwest Native American diet at c. 900 CE; this timeline is based on the identification of maize kernels and cobs. Since humans began domesticating maize nearly 10,000 years ago, they have invented many ways to cook and process the plant. One of the many ways including a process called nixtamalization, which consists of soaking and boiling maize in a solution to enhance its nutritional value producing foods such as tortillas and hominy. To find evidence of this process, we apply the findings from archaeologists Johnson and Marston (2020) who conducted experimental analysis of nixtamalized maize to our analysis. The objective of this research project is to analyze ceramic samples from the pre-colonial Illinois site of East St Louis (ESTL) to identify the first direct evidence of nixtamalization in the Midwest region. The ceramics were washed with purified water, starches were extracted from this wash, and the sample was examined under a microscope. This research is the first step in establishing a timeline of nixtamalization use in the Midwest region, as well as deepening our understanding of the periodical depth of Indigenous cooking practices. This work supports existing indirect evidence of nixtamalization during the Mississippian period of the US Midwest and highlights the persistence of Indigenous foodways despite the impacts of colonialism.

Alcohol use disorder alters cognition, risk evaluation, and behavior across species. Drosophila melanogaster larvae are innately attracted to ethanol in nature, where moderate concentrations enhance fitness but higher levels increase mortality. Their conserved alcohol tolerance and withdrawal phenotypes make them a tractable model for studying how dependence alters survival-relevant decision-making. We investigated how alcohol dependence and withdrawal impact larval risk-taking using the dig-and-dive assay, where larvae explore agarose chambers under hypoxic conditions guided by odor gradients. We hypothesized that acute ethanol exposure would suppress exploration, while ethanol-dependent larvae in withdrawal would show hyperexcitability characterized by increased surfacing, decreased digging, and similar levels of diving. Canton-S larvae were chronically exposed to 5% ethanol food for six days to establish dependence, then either tested immediately (inebriated group) or after 1-2 days on ethanol-free food (withdrawal group). Control larvae were reared on standard food. Behaviors were quantified using automated tracking. Preliminary results suggest ethanol withdrawal alters exploration strategies, increasing surfacing frequency and reducing digging while leaving diving unchanged. These patterns are consistent with dopaminergic disruption, blunted threat perception, and impaired valuation of environmental risks. Findings highlight the value of larval Drosophila as a model for linking ecological decision-making with neural mechanisms of addiction.

Since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, India has seen a great shift in its political landscape. Under his rule, the BJP has quickly transformed into a dominant electoral force, drawing on support for the Prime Minister and promoting certain conservative values that echo Hindu Nationalist ideals. To observe and analyze how Modi’s rise to power has impacted other elements of the Indian government and its political communication, this paper analyzes primary sources that specifically relate to women in India. By analyzing differences in annual reports from the National Commission for Women before and after the rise of the current Prime Minister, legal provisions passed after his ascension to power, and other forms of online communication from the Prime Minister to the public, it is evident that the Prime Minister has been able to utilize these avenues of political communication to reconstruct conceptions of progress with his own image and the central government.

Sustaining attention has shown to be increasingly difficult over time, and it has become important to understand how task demands impact the maintenance of focus on any given task. Sustained attention tasks using both high and low target frequencies have measured declining performance over time. This project investigates, within a single task, how target frequency (high: 90%, low: 10%, intermediate: 50%) impacts different measures of sustained attention performance when subjects continuously monitor for subtle visual targets. As predicted, higher target frequencies showed higher false alarm rates, along with significant increases in participant responding and decreases in response times. Further, increases in target frequency predicted changes in attention, such as increased difficulty distinguishing targets from noise and a more liberal response bias. This suggests that the type of sustained attention task, in respect to target frequency, may influence subjects’ sustained attention. Future researchers should consider these differences when selecting tasks to study sustained attention. The field should incorporate tasks with a variety of target frequencies to form theories and draw conclusions about sustained attention.

This article recenters Napa Valley's rise by challenging the dominant narrative that defines its history through luxury, refinement, and economic success. Instead, I argue that Napa's transformation in the late nineteenth century can only be understood through an analytic framework that links three histories often examined separately: ecological change, working-class experience, and capitalist consolidation. Using the period between 1880 and 1905 as a critical window, the paper adopts a multispecies, history-from-below approach to show how phylloxera's disruption of grapevines, the social effects of widespread brandy consumption among immigrant laborers, and the creation of exclusive wine cooperatives formed the foundations of Napa's modern identity.Rather than treating environmental issues, public disorder, and business organization as separate developments, this article demonstrates that they worked together as interdependent forces that shaped the region's image, economy, and social order. By examining how wine industry leaders minimized the pest's impact, criminalized working-class instability, and strategically curated a polished image of Napa, the paper reveals that the success story typically told relies on both structural erasure and selective memory. Reconnecting fragmented strands of scholarship and overlooked archival evidence exposes a far more textured history-one defined as much by instability, exclusion, and adaptation as by prosperity and prestige. Ultimately, this argument recasts Napa's ascent not as a seamless path toward world-class recognition, but as a contingent process driven by the very actors and ecological relations that its celebrated identity has long concealed.

This project investigates relationships between parental attitudes toward classic hallucinogens (i.e., LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline) during adolescence, frequency of personal hallucinogen use, and current attitudes toward hallucinogens from the perspective of recreational psychedelic users. Previous literature highlights self-reported benefits, spiritual experiences, and less harm in comparison to other substances when reporting on recreational classic hallucinogen use. However, the associations of parental communication and level of familial religious affiliation with current relationships involving hallucinogens have seldom been investigated. 120 participants took a web-based survey on Qualtrics marketed on Prolific regarding the parental communication involving classic hallucinogens during adolescence, first age of use, current frequency of use, and personal attitudes toward legality, medical value, and safety of hallucinogenic substances. In comparison with infrequent hallucinogen users, frequent users held significantly higher scores of positive attitudes toward classic hallucinogens than infrequent users on all attitude scales. Additionally, participants who indicated a very religious familial identity demonstrated significantly higher scores of negative parental attitudes in the Parental Attitudes portion of the survey. Furthermore, perceived negative parental attitudes were associated with a younger age of their child's first use. The research aim is to explore potential differences between parental communication, lifetime use, and the current attitudes recreational users have toward psychedelics. This is integral to understanding how the usage of classic hallucinogens (regarding age during first use and frequency of use) is informed by familial upbringing.