Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Love On - The Life Of A Suicide Survivor: A Performance Autoethnographic Study, Patricia R. Wheeler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Suicide touches the lives of millions of people each year in this country alone, yet conversations about suicide loss and survival after a loss remain taboo and often do not happen. The story I performed for this performance autoethnographic study centers on my life as a survivor of suicide. It provides a starting point for dialog regarding trauma, grief, and suicide loss. The narrative was constructed directly following the sudden death of my father, which had a direct effect on my ability to produce artistic work. The development, staging and performance of the story were altered to account for the …

Physiological Reactions To Uncanny Stimuli: Substantiation Of Self-Assessment And Individual Perception, Tatiana Ballion

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is abundant anecdotal evidence substantiating Mori’s initial observation of the "uncanny valley", a point at which human response to non-human entities drops sharply with respect to comfort (Mori, 1970), and the construct itself has a long-standing history in both Robotics and Psychology. Currently, many fields such as design, training, entertainment, and education make use of heuristic approaches to accommodate the anticipated needs of the user/consumer/audience in certain important aspects. This is due to the lack of empirical substantiation or, in some cases, the impossibility of rigorous quantification; one such area is with respect to the user’s experience of uncanniness, …

Constructing A Neuroscientific Pastoral Theology Of Fear And Hope, Jason C. Whitehead

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary therapeutic circles utilize the concept of anxiety to describe a variety of disorders. Emotional reductionism is a detriment to the therapeutic community and the persons seeking its help. This dissertation proposes that attention to the emotion of fear clarifies our categorization of particular disorders and challenges emotional reductionism. I propose that the emotion of fear, through its theological relationship to hope, is useful in therapeutic practice for persons who experience trauma and PTSD.

I explore the differences between fear and anxiety by deconstructing anxiety. Through this process, I develop four categories which help the emotion of fear stand independent …