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• “Can We Fix It?” reality of the glamorization of NYC through the sociological perspective and systems of inequality

  Yusupova, Laura (2025-05)

  Income inequality disproportionately impacts intersectional identities compared to white Americans. In the United States—and more specifically, in New York City—income inequality is closely correlated with race. It affects access to education, housing, food security, and resources, and contributes to homelessness. This paper aims to examine the urban experience from both sociological and psychological perspectives, focusing on disparities related to race and gender.
• Games to gains: exploring play as therapy for aphasia treatment

  Xie, Katarina (2025-05)

  Although play and game-based therapy is widely used in language intervention for children, games are an emerging therapeutic treatment used in speech therapy for adults (National Literacy Trust, 2024). Post-stroke aphasia is a language disorder that impacts an individual’s communication in expressive speech and receptive comprehension based on the location of their stroke (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2022). The current study investigates the effectiveness of game- and play-based therapy for adults with aphasia. A systematized review yielded ten peer-reviewed studies that met the inclusion criteria. Studies were analyzed according to participant characteristics, game modification, level of control, outcomes, and effectiveness. The combination of group control studies and single-subject designs demonstrates that incorporating language games can have positive impacts on expressive language post-stroke. By maximizing the impact of expressive language intervention, play and game-based therapy can potentially improve outcomes for clients with post-stroke aphasia. Keywords: Communication disorders, aphasia or aphasic or people with aphasia, group therapy, game, game rehabilitation, intervention, speech therapy, post-stroke aphasia, gamification
• Structural inequalities in food and healthcare: a sociological comparison of Upstate and Downstate New York

  Wood, Maighread (2025-05)

  In this thesis, I examine two counties in New York: the Bronx, a densely populated borough of New York City, and Franklin County, a sparsely populated rural county bordering Canada. Despite their demographic and geographic differences, both suffer from high rates of food and health insecurity. This comparison provides an opportunity to understand how structural inequities intersect with local conditions to influence health outcomes.
• The relationship between specific language background, stimulus modality, and false memory

  Wilson, Ruby M. (2025-05)

  Memory is extremely fallible. It is easy to create a false memory (i.e., a memory of something you did not experience) using the DRM paradigm. Research shows that the semantic priming is likely the source of the classic false memory effect that leads to misremembering a word like “shirt” after seeing a list of words like “dress, coat, and pants.” Semantic priming is also present cross-linguistically, such that in an English/French bilingual, dog in English primes chien (dog) in French or even related words like chat (cat). A second robust finding is that the DRM effect is larger when stimuli are presented auditorily vs. visually in languages that use alphabetic writing systems (e.g., English). However, it has been reported that the opposite effect was observed in Chinese, which has a very different writing system, such that false memories were recalled more visually than auditorily (Mao et al, 2010). The current study recruited bilingual participants who have the common language of English, but whose second language is either Chinese or a language that uses an alphabetic script (e.g., French or Spanish), to test if these modality effects also transfer cross-linguistically. Results did not support our hypothesis. Interestingly, the predicted modality x language group interaction was present in the memory for old words, where alphabetic bilinguals were more accurate for visually than auditorily presented words, but English-Chinese bilinguals were equally accurate for visually and auditorily presented words. These results suggest that the languages you know may influence how you use your memory.
• Why TV matters

  Sullivan, Caia (2025-05)

  Have you ever watched a TV show and had a moment where you realized, oh, maybe these characters are not as well represented as I thought? As a little girl, I started paying more attention to the rampant, harmful stereotypes in the TV shows that I was watching, such as Victorious and Jessie. My mother would make it a point to break down stereotyped characters in the shows I would watch, but not everyone had that same experience. For my thesis project. Why TV Matters, I explored complexities and nuance in character stereotypes and representation in TV. I interviewed faculty friends, and staff to create an interactive website prototype that explores three broad areas of representation: race, gender, and disabilities. What people see on the TV has an extremely significant impact on their perception of the world and different groups of people. Has representation in TV improved in the last 10-15 years? Absolutely. Has the representation gotten more diverse, or intersectional? Maybe it’s time you start watching through a different lens. Keywords: Graphic design Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Disability representation Race Gender Glee Television

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