Browsing by Subject "Affect"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Centering the Sonic: Sound Mediation in Holocaust Memory, Memorials, and Museums
    (2021-06) Huether, Kathryn
    While a great deal of scholarship has critically assessed Holocaust texts, films, and photographs for decades, scholars have largely overlooked music and sound. Musicologists and historians have made substantial contributions to understanding music during the Holocaust and how it functioned within the social makeup of the camps, yet on the role of sound and music within Holocaust memorial forms remains underexamined. In this dissertation, I examine the processes by which sound, music, and vocal affect are employed and ascribed to modes of Holocaust memory and how these applications in turn shape how that memory is received. A connecting thread throughout all my case studies is that these sonic elements are not necessarily considered the primary mode of mediation—at least by their curators—and that the sonic component is secondary to the overarching mode of memory. Overall, my findings demonstrate that despite largely being overlooked in scholarly discussions regarding Holocaust memorial representation, sound mediation is very present and drastically shapes a visitor’s engagement with each experience.
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    Depletion and replenishment: exploring self-regulation resource depletion, activities that replenish the resource, and the corresponding effects on mood.
    (2011-08) Klaphake, Sara L.
    The resource depletion model of self-regulation proposes that people's ability to perform deliberate, effortful thought and behavior is a limited resource, with earlier self-regulation depleting this resource, leaving less for subsequent tasks. The current research investigated the pervasiveness of self-regulation depletion, explored various tasks as potential means of counteracting depletion, and assessed how mood was impacted by both. In a series of seven studies, participants completed an initial task that required either high or low levels of self-regulation and subsequent self-regulation measurement tasks, along with pre- and post-task measurements of mood. Some participants also completed various intervening tasks to assess the potential of different activities to counteract depletion. Our research indicated that self-regulation depletion, while common, is not inevitable when one has completed an earlier self-regulation task. We also found little evidence that completing the various intervening tasks such as exercise, magazine reading, and drawing, replenished participants' self-regulation resources. We did, however, find clear evidence that mood, both in terms of mood valence and arousal levels, is impacted by self-regulation, and some indication that these mood effects played a small mediating role in depletion.
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    The Effects of Consumers’ Affect on Attention and Reaction to Ads
    (2019-06) Lu, Xinyu
    This dissertation examined (1) the influence of affective states on consumers’ selective attention to different types of ads that are categorized based on theoretically-derived attention-inducing characteristics; and (2) the influence of affective states on consumers’ ad processing style and evaluation of the ads that received attention. A computational research approach was used cross-analyzing proxy measures of real-time affective fluctuation of TV viewers during the 2018 and 2019 Super Bowl broadcast and their tweets regarding the ads aired during the Super Bowl broadcast. The results demonstrated some supports for the linkage between consumers’ temporary affective states, induced by the performance of the team they cheer for, and their selective attention to different types of ads even when they are exposed to the same set of ads during commercial breaks. Consistent with Mood Management Theory and prior psychology research evidence connecting affective states to visual attention, consumers in a negative affective state tend to pay more attention to positive ads and ads with emotional appeals than do those in a positive affective state. Furthermore, consumers in a positive affective state tend to pay more attention to exciting ads, compared to those in a negative affective state. However, this study’s data did not show significant relationship between consumers’ affective state and their selective attention to ads with different semantic affinity levels, nor any significant effects of affective state on ad processing style or evaluation of ads. The study contributes to advancing the ad attention and mood management research by testing the largely untested effects of consumers’ temporary affective states on selective attention and reactions to ads. The computational research approach developed in this study also offers significant methodological contributions to advertising scholarship, opening new avenue of research to apply the computational research approach to advertising theory building, especially theory regarding the role of consumers’ affective factors. Additionally, this study provides useful practical implications for ad targeting and ad placement strategies based on consumers’ temporary affective states. This study’s findings suggest a new promising way to target consumers and personalize ads based on individual consumers’ real-time, temporary affective states that can be captured by appropriate proxy measure data.
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    Emotion Regulation and Socialization in the Context of Cumulative Risk: Social-Emotional Adjustment in Children Experiencing Homelessness
    (2018-08) Labella, Madelyn
    The acquisition of emotion regulation skills is a key developmental task, largely socialized by caregivers, that lays the foundation for healthy social-emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, both parental socialization and children’s self-regulation are disrupted in contexts of high cumulative risk. The current dissertation evaluated emotion regulation and socialization during observed parent-child interaction as predictors of social-emotional adjustment in young children experiencing homelessness. Study 1 used linear regression and latent profile analysis to identify links among child reactivity and regulation, parental affect profiles, and teacher-reported adjustment in the context of risk and adversity. Children’s difficulty down-regulating anger during parent-child interaction was linked to more teacher-reported social-behavioral problems. Empirically-derived profiles of parent affect were related to child behavior during the interaction and in the classroom: the minority of parents showing elevated anger had children who were observed to struggle with anger down-regulation and were reported by teachers to have more social-behavioral problems at school. Sociodemographic risk additionally predicted more social-behavioral problems, controlling for child and parent anger expression. Study 2 built on these findings using dynamic structural equation modeling to investigate dyadic interplay between parent and child anger across the problem-solving discussion. Parents and children showed significant stability in anger from one interval to the next, as well as cross-lagged associations consistent with bidirectional feedback processes and significant novel anger reactivity. Individual differences in child anger stability were related to more social-behavioral problems at school. More observed anger contagion, particularly from child to parent, predicted more parent-reported externalizing problems, as did higher family adversity. Results are interpreted in light of theory and research and future directions are discussed.
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    Feeling Healthy: Media, Affect, and the Governance of Health
    (2016-05) Butler-Wall, Karisa
    This dissertation examines the role of media technologies in the emergence of new forms of health governance over the course of the past century. Even as “feeling healthy” has become a desirable affective state associated with wholeness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, discourses and practices of health continue to serve as the basis for regulating race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. In chapters on WWI-era sex hygiene films, midcentury women’s televised fitness programs, 1980s’ safer sex videos created by gay and lesbian AIDS activists, and contemporary interactive technologies designed to confront the obesity “epidemic,” I demonstrate how media technologies have enabled the management of bodies and populations by linking new techniques of health governance to individual desires to feel better. While important historical and sociological studies of health and medicine have brought attention to the role of public health in regulating race, gender, and sexuality, this work has rarely considered the relationship between popular media in not only reflecting but actively shaping individuals and populations around practices of health. I suggest that we need to look beyond institutional histories of public health as a site of discipline to explore the role of film, television, video, and new media in the emergence of what I call the “affective governance” of health: a system of biopolitical regulation that appeals to individuals’ desires for their own well-being, producing affective investments in normative practices of “healthy living.” Intervening in a larger set of theoretical and political debates that cross disciplinary boundaries to ask what makes a “livable life,” this project questions what is at stake in the pursuit of health as a normative ideal. I argue that “health” has historically been promoted as the condition of possibility for greater freedom, happiness, and fulfillment at the same time that it justifies ever more insidious forms of surveillance and control.
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    Individual’s Affective Responses to High Intensity Interval Training Relative to Moderate Intensity Continuous Training
    (2021-05) Dregney, Tyler
    Even though physical activity among adults is associated with several health benefits, the majority of adults do not meet physical activity recommendations. Examining if the type of physical activity has an impact on an individual’s affective and psychological responses is vital in potentially increasing the physical activity rates among young adults. The purpose of this study was to examine the affective responses among participants who completed a high intensity interval training (HIIT) class or a moderate intensity continuous training (MICT) class. Participants (n=41) were randomized to participate in either the HIIT or MICT class. There was no effect of group assignment on enjoyment, self-efficacy for physical activity, tranquility, positive engagement, or revitalization. There was an effect of group assignment on physical exhaustion and mid-class affect. HIIT resulted in more physical exhaustion and displeasurable affect during physical activity than MICT. However, group assignment did not impact participant’s enjoyment or post-class affect. These findings suggest that although HIIT requires more exertion and intensity relative to MICT, the affect and enjoyment experienced as a result of physical activity does not differ. Given the lack of physical activity in young adults, examining enjoyable avenues for physical activity is crucial. Further research is needed to examine the extent that affect before, during, and after a session of physical activity predicts future engagement in physical activity.
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    Influences of Affective Stimulus and Placement on Procedural Task Learning and Performance
    (2019-06) Birkholz, Samuel
    This study assessed how procedural memory task performance is influenced by affective tone and stimulus placement. Participants (n = 78) completed one of four conditions with timed practice and performance tests. Results demonstrate procedural memory tasks can be learned just as quickly under different affective conditions.
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    The measure of affective decision making: Modulatory circuitry as interface between emotion and decision
    (2019-12) Therior, Windy
    Decision making is influenced by modulatory processes that enable coordinated responses to environmental and emotional contexts. The measurement of modulatory processes is typically performed via biophysical metrics which carry only partial information on the unobserved processes. We provide an alternative, data-driven, methodology for the targeted measurement of the impact of modulatory processes on decisions. We apply directed dimensionality reduction to a large set of biometric measures including galvanic skin response, heart rate, pupilometry, facial emotion, and electroencephalography, to extract information predictive of human behavior in a standard two-alternative forced-choice decision making paradigm. Using a pre-existing model of decisions in this domain (i.e., the drift diffusion model) affords the ability to specify how the inferred modulatory process informs interpretable decision parameters. We validate this method with model comparisons together with cross validation. This method can be adapted to arbitrary decision domains to investigate how emotional state interacts with decision processes. We find an unexpected correlation between decision parameters, drift rate and decision threshold, when using this latent state extraction procedure not otherwise found when investigating behavioral responses alone. We interpret the correlation in parameters as evidence of their being both influenced by a common upstream modulatory process. We then systematically relax the constraints of the drift diffusion model and performed logistic regression to extract within trial weights on external information. We found that confidence acts as an internal representation of information reliability and adapts integration time to offset conditions of low information gain. Taken together, these findings support the interpretation that emotional state modulates decision making processes.
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    Red Father, Pink Son: Queer Socialism and Post-socialist Queer Critiques
    (2017-06) Ye, Shana
    The dissertation examines how the affect, memory and trauma of socialism have informed queer life and LGBT activism. Queer sexuality in China is often articulated through a teleological narrative of transition predicated on the dichotomy of socialist oppression vis-à-vis post-socialist liberation. It depicts queer subject as victim par excellence of state violence and pre- or anti-modern traditions, and renders queer practices as radical and embodying notions of progress to transform China from a backward socialist totalitarian “other” to a democratic neoliberal world power. Such making of “Queer China,” I argue, is ironically complicit with Cold War formation and its ongoing impacts on today’s neoliberal gay normalization. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including historical documents, oral histories, cultural productions and ethnographic research, the dissertation unpacks multifaceted impacts of socialist history, memory, trauma, and geopolitical struggles on shaping queerness in order to reframe dominant Cold War culture in the studies of transnational sexualities and to rebuild a radical queer politics freed of commercialism, middle-class assimilation and imperialism under the name of queer liberation. The dissertation reevaluates notions of sexual repression, state violence, progress, visibility and agency to shed light on theoretical and methodological debates on ethnocentrism, othering and normalization. The dissertation argues that a critical engagement with queer geopolitics and situated knowledge from the temporal, regional, ideological and epistemological margins can contribute to the provincialization of “Western” sexualities and decolonization of queer studies derived from US-inflicted modes of sexuality and a Western-based system of modernity.
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    Social influences and psychological and physical well-being among female adolescent gymnasts
    (2012-06) Kipp, Lindsay E.
    The purpose of the present studies was to examine relationships among social influences (coach and teammate behaviors), psychological need satisfaction, and psychological and physical well-being among female adolescent gymnasts, using self-determination theory (SDT) as a framework. Well-being indicators included self-esteem, positive affect, and disordered eating. Indicators were chosen based on gymnasts' risk of declining well-being due to demanding practice schedules and pressure to maintain a lean body. In Study 1, competitive gymnasts (N = 303) ages 10 to 17 (M = 13.0, SD = 1.9) completed valid and reliable measures assessing SDT variables and physical maturity. A model of relationships was specified and tested using structural equation modeling. Coach autonomy-support and mastery climate were indirectly related to positive affect through coach relatedness. Friendship quality was associated with all three well-being indices through perceived competence and teammate relatedness. Post-pubertal girls reported lower perceived competence, self-esteem, and positive affect, and greater disordered eating, compared to pre-pubertal girls. Findings support SDT and highlight the processes related to well-being among female adolescent gymnasts. Study 2 tested longitudinal relationships with a subset of girls from Study 1 (N = 174). Need satisfaction and well-being indices were assessed 6 to 8 months later. Study 2 employed the time lag necessary for a more accurate test of mediation, whereby social influences predict need satisfaction over time, and need satisfaction predicts well-being over time. Coach autonomy-support, mastery climate, and performance climate positively predicted girls' perceived competence, which in turn predicted higher self-esteem and lower disordered eating. Results provide evidence for coaches as an important source of influence over time and perceived competence as a mediator of the relationship between social influence and well-being. Together, the present studies extend the knowledge base by simultaneously examining coach and peer influence, assessing psychological and physical well-being, studying theoretical relationships with a population at risk for lower well-being (i.e., female adolescent gymnasts), and employing concurrent and longitudinal designs to determine strength and stability of relationships over time.
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    Struck stupid : 21st Century theatrical performance and the limits of a discourse.
    (2011-12) McConnell, George David
    This dissertation is a critically creative response to contemporary U.S. devised theatrical performance and the relationships it instantiates between artists and spectators, and artists and critics. In order to tease out the complexities of these relationships, I theorize stupidity as an integral element in the creation of devised performances, their reception by spectators, and the critical methods best used to engage with them. I develop the concept of stupidity seriously and paradoxically as thought that cannot be thought. Stupid thinking is thought that interrupts discursive structures such as conscious thought that is shaped like language and is grounded in our storehouses of knowledge. Stupidity sustains the affective possibilities of non-knowledge that would otherwise be foreclosed by the drive for knowledge production. I attempt to answer the questions: how do I write of devised performances rather than about them? How do I attend to the embodied complexity of devised performances as I transmogrify them into scholarly discourse? To answer these questions I performatively write alongside devised theatrical performances and deploy methods that take their cue from ethnographic practices. My writing also takes cues from the work of the artists I engage: Ann Liv Young (New York), Every House Has A Door (Chicago), and SuperGroup (Minneapolis). Together my chapters argue that by relying on stupid tactics--such as chance, incompetence, and obscenity--in their own creative processes these artists all instigate a reconfiguration of the relationship between artwork and viewer, and thereby a simultaneous reconfiguration of the relationship between spectators and their own presumed-to-be-stable subject positions.