Horizons, Volume 07

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/104737

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Front and Back Cover
(2022-12-17)
Editor's Foreword, Students' Foreword, and Cover Art Statements
(2022-12-17) Scally, Jayme
Religion’s Role in the Annexation of Hawai'i and Hawaiian Cultural Erasure: Native Hawaiian Religion and its Contrast with 1820s Protestantism
(2022-12-17) McCall, Maile
Protestant missionaries came to Hawai‘i in 1819, and with them they brought immense change to the islands, eventually playing a role in the annexation of the kingdom. This paper seeks to understand the true role of the Protestant missionaries in nineteenthcentury Hawai‘i, and how they were involved in the annexation and the subsequent Hawaiian cultural suppression. This cultural suppression is significant because when the United States took over the islands, an entire monarchy was overthrown. With the reignition of the Hawaiian culture revival, it is key to understand how it was dampened in the first place. The missionaries were eager to bring the people salvation in the eyes of the Protestant God, especially after disillusionment with their traditional religion. However, after economic hardship, they lost sight of that goal and, working with the merchant class, brought down the monarchy and suppressed the celebration of Hawaiian culture.
Between East and West: An investigation of Greek ethnic identity formation, European geopolitics, and migration
(2022-12-17) Davis, Julianna
In recent years, Greece has been shaped by the 2008 economic crisis and the Mediterranean refugee crisis. Compounded with Greece’s historical place as a crypto-colony of Europe, the Ottoman occupation (1453–1821) and neglect from the European Union (EU) in times of crises has put the nation in a precarious geopolitical situation. This may contribute to the negative stereotypes of ethnic Greeks and Greece itself evident in the EU media and public. My research investigates Greek ethnic formation in young adults who grew up experiencing or witnessing these crises. I conducted qualitative semi-s tructured interviews with young adults from Athens, Greece, between the ages of 18 and 30. A total of 11 interview participants were selected via a snowball sampling procedure, and grounded theory methodology was applied for data analysis using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Through interviews, I identified distinct relationships to terms such as ‘European’ and ‘white.’ Also explored were aspects of Greek identity, such as culture and language, and how it impacts their connection with Greek identity. A major finding of the interview data is the acute awareness of the negative stereotyping of ethnic Greeks. Participants most notably expressed that Northern Europeans view Greeks as ‘inferior,’ ‘lazy,’ and ‘exotic.’ Overall, this research adds to the existing literature regarding ethnic identity formation in Greece and Europe. It specifically aims to understand the impacts of Greece’s geopolitical crises on how young ethnic Greeks perceive themselves within the EU and identifies how geopolitical circumstances inform the persistence of negative stereotypes.
Experiential Learning of Geriatric Medical and Nursing Education and Training in Japan
(2022-12-17) Wilson, Seth
Experiential learning is the process by which we acquire and embed new knowledge from experience and subsequent reflection as theorized by David Kolb in 1984. In utilizing this concept to accommodate a growing population of elderly in Japan, Japanese medical and nursing schools have begun offering outpatient education programs in the homes of the elderly and community clinics that contrast more conventional inpatient clinical settings, like hospitals. The purpose is to engage students with novel patients, conditions, and experiences, to better prepare them for an older patient demographic in various settings. In each of the programs discussed, students were interviewed by researchers in Japan and provided qualitative data reflecting on their experiences. In analysis of the experiential learning value of each of these programs, most students reported that such experiences provided them with new perspectives regarding patient autonomy, the lifestyle of the elderly, the role of familial and communal support, and so on. Providing significance to these new perspectives is the gradual transition to home care and integrated community-based care models for the elderly in both Japan and the United States to mitigate the effects of a rapidly aging population.
Investigation of Cognitive Flexibility in Bilinguals Modulated by L2 Proficiency and Age of Acquisition
(2022-12-17) Oh, Yoojin
Bilingual advantage in cognition is a topic of debate in the field of psycholinguistics. Many studies report bilingual advantage in executive functions (EF) associated with goal-maintenance, distractor-inhibition, and task-switching. However, the field remains unclear with increased reports of contrasting results. Here, we take a multidimensional approach by accounting for second language (L2) proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. In the Stroop switching task, color words were presented in congruent (e.g., RED written in red ink) or incongruent conditions (e.g., RED written in green ink). Different cues required participants to either name the color or read the word. The two tasks were presented in randomized order, requiring participants to actively switch between the tasks. Main effect was reported for the congruency condition and trial transitions. While we initially hypothesized that bilinguals would outperform monolinguals on this task, no significant differences were found between the two language groups. L2 proficiency and age of L2 acquisition did not interact with the results. Limitations and future extensions will be discussed with the consideration of more homogenized bilingual and monolingual groups and controlling for other factors that may confound the bilingual experience. Despite the lack of significant findings, current findings contribute to the field’s current debate on the existence of bilingual advantage.
Relevant Ecological Theories on Urban Safety: A Literature Review For The Urban Planner
(2022-12-17) Shuping, Katrina
The fields of urban planning and urban sociology are closely intertwined. One creates the space the other studies how people interact in that space. I believe more explicit crosscommunication between these fields can help make sure our urban spaces are designed in ways that create safer, more fun, more sustainable, and healthier cities. Planners have the difficult task of having to be knowledgeable about a range of topics such as engineering, political science, sociology, sustainability, etc., because all of these disciplines play a role in urban planning. I believe that better urban planning can happen when these disciplines communicate relevant ideas in their field to the planners directly. In an attempt to set another example of this kind of communication, this paper is a literature review of four ecological theories on urban safety that are relevant to planners specifically. They reveal shared concepts that make communities safe: Natural surveillance, social cohesion, and taking care of the physical space around you.
Silent Threats
(2022-12-17) Khachik, Vanessa
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become increasingly prevalent in our global market, specifically in the United States, since they were first introduced in the 1990s. While genetic modification (GM) technology has the potential to increase shelf life, add nutritional value, and improve yield, it may also have negative effects on our environment or health. The key arguments amongst GMO debates include environmental protection and sustainability, as well as legislation and consumer understanding. While the US is an avid supporter of genetic engineering and is home to more genetically modified crops than anywhere else in the world, the European Union (EU) falls on the other end of the spectrum. This educational essay examines the different ways these two regions have been impacted as a result of their varying agriculture systems.
Research Reflections: Awakenings
(2022-12-17) Sabellano-Tsutsui, Tiare; Brenner, Noa; Espinoza, Aydya; Sanchez, Shannon; Slane, Kylah
During the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 semesters, our team of six research associates gathered once to twice a week and meditated before starting our qualitative duties. Our study, titled Interviewing Zen Buddhists on the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale Validity (Sabellano-Tsutsui et al., 2022), benefited from our practicing conscious awareness of our thought patterns and breathing. Our participants, Zen Buddhists of over 10 years, completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale—a scale aimed to measure mindfulness—while voicing aloud their thoughts on each item. Since they spoke about their experiences and awakenings in Zen mindfulness, we found it helpful practicing mindful awareness ourselves under a trained associate Zen teacher who is also a member on this research team. This personal practice allowed us to better understand and represent the nuances of mindful awareness. Our team found that meditating together helped us to better focus, be more productive, connect with participant interviews, build teamwork, enjoy our work, and realize our true selves.
The Boy Who Flew Too Close to the Sun
(2022-12-17) Kalabukhova, Anna
This creative writing piece is a nod to one of my favorite Greek myths—the tragedy of Icarus. This style of myth-based retelling was heavily influenced by one of my favorite authors—Madeline Miller, best known for her novel, The Song of Achilles. The combination of my past knowledge of Greek mythology and my imagination has allowed me to reanimate this myth in a prose-style work.
To My Mother
(2022-12-17) Kalabukhova, Anna
This is one of my first creative nonfiction pieces I’ve ever written, and when pressed to choose a topic I could think of nothing else to base it on than one of the most significant muses in my life: my mother. This piece explores topics such as generational expectation and the notion of going back to your roots, which I’ve learned can be useful as a shift of perspective. This work is essentially a reflection on visiting my mother’s hometown in Russia for the first time when I was thirteen years old, a place so rooted with both her and the rest of my family’s history that it not only changed my outlook on my lineage but also helped me better understand and appreciate it.
Enslaved Women in the Jamaican Internal Market System in the Late 18th to Early 19th Centuries
(2022-12-17) McCall, Maile
The goal of this research is to assess the roles that enslaved women took on as vendors in Jamaica’s internal market system. This includes, but is not limited to, spreading information to slaves about slave rebellions and assisting runaways. It is important to note that by “markets,” the research refers to what are essentially produce/farmer’s markets, and not the slave trade markets where slaves were auctioned. This research utilized secondary sources and collected information to contextualize the era and people involved. This research revealed that market women called higglers utilized the chaotic markets in order to escape slavery, blending in with all the different people. Their connections also allowed them to help other slaves. The higglers contributed substantially to the economy of Jamaica, especially during food shortages, and provided much needed nutrition to the community regardless of color. With Sundays becoming the designated market day, these women left their mark on the people of that time and thereby, history. This paper seeks to rectify the fact of the average person having little to no knowledge of these women’s contributions.
The Assessment of Bilingualism on Spatial Attention
(2022-12-17) Hasan, Faris
The ability to speak more than one language is considered advantageous for several reasons, including increased communication, networking, and professional and social opportunities. Beyond these practical advantages, there has been extensive research dedicated to understanding the cognitive effects associated with bilingualism. A growing body of work has largely employed paradigms to measure executive function (EF) in prefrontal areas of the brain, a system associated with goal maintenance, distractor-inhibition, and task-switching. In this investigation, we examined the possibility of increased attentional capabilities in bilingual participants by using a visual-attention-based paradigm that measures attentional capture. In each trial participants searched for a unique color target, and, in half of the trials, an additional non-target distractor abruptly appeared in the display that captured their attention. Based on previous literature that showed that bilinguals have greater inhibitory control, we predicted that the onset of the distracting item would distract monolinguals to a greater extent than bilinguals. In addition to a measure of inhibitory control, this paradigm also measures target disengagement (i.e., enhanced top-down guidance) from the distractor after their attention was captured by the distractor stimulus. Interestingly, bilinguals were on average 31ms faster to detect the target compared to monolinguals in both distractor present and absent conditions, showing that the distracting element did not capture attention to the same extent as it did for monolinguals. However, despite this relatively large response latency advantage the findings failed to reach statistical significance. Limitations and future extensions will be discussed with the consideration of more homogenized bilingual and monolingual groups and extending the study to measure oculomotor movements (saccades and fixations) to assess additional indexes of spatial awareness and visual search behavior.
Mentally Contagious: An Investigation of Parent and Child Anxiety During the COVID-19 Pandemic
(2022-12-17) Pensado Alvarenga, Migdalia
The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered anxiety in millions of people around the world, especially in parents and their children. These feelings of anxiety are even more prevalent in vulnerable groups such as nurses, doctors, young adults, racial and ethnic minorities, and unpaid caregivers for older adults. The goal of this study is to understand the relations between household income, economic pressure, parent perceptions of COVID-19, parent threat transmission to children, parent anxiety, and child anxiety during the ongoing pandemic. I hypothesized that household income, economic pressure, and perceived threat of the virus would all contribute to a rise in parental anxiety, which would increase child anxiety. To test these hypotheses, an online survey was administered using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to parents living in the state of Hawai‘i with at least one child between the ages of 1–16 (n = 108). All participants were invited to report their levels of anxiety, their child’s anxiety, household income, economic pressure, perception of COVID-19, and parent threat transmission. Using structural equation modeling, a measured variable path model was fit to the data, demonstrating excellent fit. The final structural model revealed that household income predicted parent anxiety, and economic pressure, which then predicted parent anxiety above and beyond income. In turn, parent anxiety strongly predicted child anxiety.
Influence of Video Game Playing on Change Detection: An Eye Tracking Study
(2022-12-17) Haverly, Christopher
Extensive video gameplay has been associated with enhanced cognitive abilities, specifically with respect to mechanisms of perception and attention. However, it is unclear if these enhancements are specific to video games, or if instead can be applied broadly. Furthermore, the underlying reasons for these effects are unclear. The present experiment focused on determining; (1) if video game players (VGPs) outperform non-video game players (NVGPs) in a non-video game based task (i.e., change detection), and (2) if superior oculomotor behavior is present in VGPs by assessing their number of fixations, fixation latencies, and response initiation after target fixation to determine if eye-movement patterns might be a possible reason for the associated behavioral enhancements. To that end, 36 participants (9 VGPs and 27 NVGPs) were recruited from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with the VGP criterion as someone who plays four or more hours of video games per week. Participants were presented with a stream of visual events where one target item changes in the scene while having their oculomotor movements tracked by a web-based eye-tracker. Participants were tasked with detecting the changing target item as quickly and accurately as possible. Results failed to show a significant difference between VGPs and NVGPs for change detection performance and oculomotor measurements. Limitations and future extensions will be discussed in context with the notion that video game experience associated differences could modulate spatial awareness and visual search strategies, as well as oculomotor behavior.
The Round Table: GMO Revolution
(2022-12-17) Khachik, Vanessa; Cendana, Marielle; Garcia, Preston; Nono, Kaye; Wong, Ariel
Genetic engineering (GE) technology has been around for decades and continues to undergo advancements over the years. This technology is commonly associated with agriculture in the form of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified crops. The purpose of GM (genetically modified) crops is to increase yields, and GE technology itself has appeared to be promising for the future of society. However, the use of such brings about the question of how it influences and connects every aspect of society. This includes its presence in government, regulation, agriculture, the environment, and the health of the people. The influence of big companies like Monsanto has a stronghold on the regulation of GMOs and GM crops. The spraying of herbicides and pesticides begs the question of how safe they are for the environment and public health. This article connects all these aspects as well as connects it back to Hawai‘i and what can be done regarding the use of GMOs within the islands.
Effects of invasive yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) on the distribution of Hawaiian ghost crabs (Ocypode spp.) on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi
(2022-12-17) Aljian, Julia
Sandy beaches are ecologically important coastal ecosystems that are susceptible to the impacts of invasive species, like the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes). On O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, many beaches are impacted by the presence of these invasive ants. There is a large population of these ants at the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge. This refuge is also home to the Hawaiian ghost crab (Ocypode spp.). This genus of crab demonstrates burrowing behavior, where locations of burrows are dependent on abiotic and biotic factors. This study examines the effect of A. gracilipes abundance on burrow distribution of Hawaiian ghost crabs. We conducted twenty-five transects along the north shore of Oʻahu, documenting ghost crab burrow abundance and location relative to the shore and berm. Populations of A. gracilipes were sampled to estimate the relative abundance. This study found no evidence to suggest that the abundance of A. gracilipes has any significant influence on the abundance or distribution of Ocypode spp. More sampling should be done to estimate the full effects of this invasive species on a larger scale. It is important to study the relationship between endemic and invasive species in coastal regions to inform effective management and conservation.
Salt, Motion & Transformation
(2022-12-17) Gomez, Dylan
Growing up on an island has given me the understanding the ocean and its tides dictate and sculpt the way we all live. Hawai‘i’s coastlines are experiencing a range of changes due to coastal erosion and sea-level rise. Salt and tides erode and change our coast over time, the site-specific installation is an artwork that engages these natural processes. The tool records decay and growth found in intertidal zones in Kāne‘ohe Bay.

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