Digital Commons Network^™

Affectionate Facsimiles, Julio C. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The paintings in Affectionate Facsimiles are journeys into the expansiveness of color and memory via the accumulation of gestural action. Sporadic freneticism is used to archive desire and time and their relationship to identity. Thin and translucent layers are built up in bursts of intensity as palimpsests of intentioned labor.

Using Motivation To Assess Affective States Of Captive Red Kangaroos (Macropus Rufus) In Response To Visitor Presence And Crowd Size In A Walk-Through Zoo Exhibit, Julia King

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates how visitor presence influences affective states of captive red kangaroos housed in a walk-through zoo exhibit by using motivation to consume a food reward in desired vs undesired locations and with/without an additional challenge feeder as a proxy for affective state, while considering individual variation and personality.

The Effects Of False Heartbeat Feedback On Moral Judgment, Scott Koenig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on human morality is at a crossroads, with one side claiming that moral judgment is the result of rational inference and the other side claiming that it is the result of emotion-laden intuition. This study investigated whether emotion drives moral judgment by manipulating a core component of the experience of emotion: physiological arousal. The sample consisted of 77 undergraduate students at Brooklyn College (57% women, 43% men; mean age = 20.1). One group of participants was led to believe their heart was beating quickly, and another group slowly, while they read and evaluated a series of text vignettes depicting …

Pupil Responses To Emotional Images And Relations With Alexithymic And Autistic Traits, Margaret Grinshtein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Comprehending emotional states in others and oneself is a complex cognitive process. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social communication and interaction difficulties. Autistic individuals often show socio-emotional difficulties specifically in emotion recognition and understanding. However, it has been posited that these emotion processing difficulties may be due to alexithymia, a distinct co-occurring phenomenon typified by difficulty in identifying and describing feelings. Autism, alexithymia, and emotion understanding have been studied through behavioral, neural, and psychophysiological methods, and the current study examines how these characteristics are related in a non-autistic sample. Pupil diameter was measured in response …

Uncovering The Layers Of Compassion: A Study In The Cultural Implications Of An Emotion, Suzan Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a study of compassion in American society and how it is conveyed in volunteerism based on ethnographic research conducted at a non-profit organization. I challenge the idea that compassion is a universal and instinctive emotion. Instead, I focus on the relationship between emotions, society, and power.

Emotion In Plato's Trial Of Socrates, Thomas W. Moody

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that Plato composed the figure of Socrates as a three-dimensional literary character who experiences and confronts emotions in ways that other studies have overlooked. By adopting a dramatic, non-dogmatic mode of reading the dialogues and emphasizing the literary elements of the texts and their dramatic connections, this dissertation offers a new and compelling portrait of Socrates in the dialogues that relate his finals weeks of life: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. This study in turn provides new insights into the genre of Plato’s texts and demonstrates how he exploited the dramatic …

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Semantic Network Activation Contributes To The Relationship Between Mood And Inhibition, James S. Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has identified several relationships between mood and executive functions. Very broadly, these findings generally suggest that positive moods are associated with enhanced cognitive performance, particularly in working memory and learning. However, recent studies note that there are some instances in which negative moods may benefit select executive skills, such as those involved in divided attention and inhibition. In sum, these findings indicate that positive moods favor top-down, heuristic, or relational processing, whereas negative trait moods favor bottom-up, detail-oriented processing. However, a clear mechanism by which these effects occur has yet to be identified.

The most compelling theories that …

Targeting Ampa Receptor Modulation During Early Life Adversity: A Mediator For Threat Associated Memories, Roseanna M. Zanca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Early life adversity (ELA) is the exposure to a single or to multiple traumatic events before the age of 18 that go beyond the child’s coping. These adverse events are often exacerbated during adolescence particularly when cognitive performance is compromised. Adolescents who experienced ELA may show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while not vividly recalling the early life trauma. These individuals show atypical connectivity between prefrontal-amygdala and hippocampus, all of which is associated with an increased risk of experiencing a traumatic event again later in life. While clinical research has increasingly stressed the importance in addressing the long-lasting consequences …

The Emotional Illusion Of Music: Contemporary Western Musical Aesthetics In Dialogue With Ancient Eastern Philosophy, Yin Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To …

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil? On The Interpersonal Effects Of Boredom Expression, Manuel F. Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored how people react to employees who express boredom at work. I consider boredom expression as a social signal that the current situation does not adequately stimulate the expresser. The expression may then propel others to help stimulate the expresser, depending partly on others’ initial appraisals and reactions to the expression, and on the surrounding context. In Study 1, using qualitative surveys, I uncovered various affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to employees who expressed boredom. In Study 2, using experimental vignettes, I manipulated the emotion expressed by a “subordinate” (boredom, enthusiasm, or no emotion) and the manager’s beliefs about …

We All Feel Feelings, Ben Ohene

Theses and Dissertations

Consisting of three illustrated books, We All Feel Feelings is designed as a vehicle for the discussion of emotional and mental health with young boys. These books will help foster a mindset of openness and acceptance through different methods of displaying and understanding emotions.

Revolutionary Joy: Affect, Expression, And Community In Milton's England, Stephen Spencer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

To express joy in revolutionary England was deeply paradoxical. English Protestants frequently described the experience as indescribable, owing more to the agency of God’s grace than the subject’s will. And yet, the public expression of joy was considered a Christian duty, an important means of affirming and galvanizing community. In Revolutionary Joy: Affect, Expression, and Community in Milton’s England, I argue that the constitutive paradox of Protestant joy renders its expression a potent form of political speech amidst mid-seventeenth century transformations to the English church, monarchy, and parliament. In an era where apocalyptic expectation put pressure on affective experience …

The Syndrome Of Romantic Love, Arina Pismenny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What kind of phenomenon is romantic love? Many philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folk think it is an emotion. I challenge this assumption and argue instead that romantic love is best characterized as a syndrome ⎼ a pattern comprised of different kinds of mental states and behaviors that tend to co-occur. An examination of major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology demonstrates that romantic love does not fit into any of them. Likewise, the commonly endorsed but increasingly controversial categories of basic and nonbasic emotions do not account for romantic love. While both culture and evolution have shaped the phenomenon of …

Event-Related Potential Studies Of Error Monitoring To Affective And Non-Affective Stimuli In Adolescents And Emerging Adults, Rebecca K. Reed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is hypothesized that prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) function may be still under development in adolescents. As the generator of the error-related negativity (ERN) and the N2, the ACC is expected to be sensitive to the degree of development with age. In adults, these top-down control areas ideally serve to direct attention to goal-relevant information, which can increase the likelihood of making a correct choice, even in fast-response laboratory based tasks. However, adolescents may show increased susceptibility in these top-down control areas when the stimulus is social and emotional. In the first study, event-related potentials were …

Activation And Habituation Of The Cingulate Cortex During Emotion Processing In Healthy Controls, Borderline, And Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Emily Balevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Disturbances in emotional functioning are central features of the clinical profiles of both borderline and schizotypal personality disorder (BPD and SPD, respectively). BPD is characterized by a high sensitivity to emotional stimuli and unusually strong and long-lasting reactions, indicative of impaired habituation to emotional stimuli (Linehan, 1993). Previous research suggests that SPD patients demonstrate limbic hyper-reactivity to unpleasant stimuli, at least initially, but intact habituation to repeated presentation of unpleasant stimuli (Hazlett et al., 2012). The cingulate cortex supports various aspects of emotion processing and regulation, and abnormalities of this region have been related to emotion dysfunction in SPD and …

Understanding The Role Of The Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex In Emotional Memory Using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation And Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, R. Rachel Weintraub-Brevda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emotional stimuli can have both beneficial and detrimental effects on memory, such that emotional stimuli can be distracting from current neutral working memory goals, while also leading to enhanced episodic memory for the distracting emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has multiple roles in the enhancing effects of emotion on memory through top-down/controlled processes, including 1) coping with negative distraction and 2) elaborative encoding of negative information. Additionally, previous research has alluded to hemispheric differences in the VLPFC (Chapter 1). However, previous research has been correlational, with no strong laterality tests of the VLPFC. Two …

Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter

Theses and Dissertations

Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …

Physiological And Subjective Aspects Of Positive Mood In Relation To Executive Functioning: The Potential Moderating Role Of Personality, Luz Helena Ospina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Positive affect has been demonstrated to improve aspects of cognition. However, recent studies reveal that positive affect may hinder the same cognitive processes, such as executive functioning, memory and creativity. These discrepant findings may be due to differing levels of physiological arousal, a component of the circumplex model of affect, which has been largely ignored in affective research. For example, one recent study suggests that positive valence coupled with varying levels of physiological arousal (i.e., low, moderate, and high) may differentially affect performance on tasks of verbal fluency and memory. Furthermore, one other explanation for these inconsistent findings may relate …

The Theoretical And Psychological Foundations Of Care In Environmental Ethics, Rachel Fedock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate the phenomenon of care, provide some of the theoretical and psychological framework for the ethics of care, and apply this framework to environmental issues. The neglected dimensions of care I explore are: the emotions of care, care as a virtue, and the caring person, respectively, while constructing possible conceptions of in what each dimension consists. I argue for the necessity of sympathy and concern within the ethics of care, while arguing against the necessity of empathy. Next, I explore the virtue of care as an ideal, where emotions, desires, reasoning, motive, duty and action all play an important …

Cognitive And Emotional Abnormalities In People With Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Philip Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a multi-system autoimmune disorder characterized by the production of autoantibodies (ABs). Approximately 30-50% of patients produce ABs directed against N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid receptors (NMDARs). Previous research with animals has identified these ABs as being associated with amygdala damage and a deficit in fear conditioning. People with SLE can have damage to the amygdala. This study aimed to determine if emotional processing deficits occur in people with SLE and to associate such deficits, if they exist, with anti-NMDAR AB presence, length of disease, cognition, and mood. Fifty-eight (11 AB+, 24 AB-, 23 healthy) women participated in tasks …

Constitutively Embodied Emotions, Daniel Shargel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My primary thesis is that emotions are partially constituted by bodily states. My view derives from the James-Lange tradition, but contrary to Neo-Jamesian theories, I claim that emotions are partially constituted by integrated peripheral bodily states and brain states, rather than bodily perceptions. This view may seem vulnerable to two obvious critiques: emotions, unlike bodily states, have intentional objects, and neuroscientists have already identified the neural basis of emotions, so there is no reason to look for constituents outside of the brain. I argue on the basis of social psychology research that emotions are not intentional states, since they do …

The Role Of Sleep In The Enhancement And Impedance Of Episodic Emotional Memories, Rafael De Jesus

Dissertations and Theses

"The current study examined whether sleep enhances the retention of emotionally arousing memories, and whether an emotional memory can be blocked with a single night of sleep deprivation. Using a modified version of a slide show varying in emotionality with respect to the narrative (participants' acting as either a mother or father experiencing the tragic death of their imagined child), 100 (healthy young adult student volunteer) subjects following the experience were randomly assigned to either a normal night of sleep or were variously sleep deprived (in laboratory). After having experienced the emotional event followed immediately by a night of sleep …