Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-157).

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic musculoskeletal disorder characterized by widespread pain, fatigue, and a variety of other comorbid physiological and psychological characteristics, including a deficit of positive affect. Recently, the focus of research on the pathophysiology of FM has considered the role of a number of genomic variants. In the current manuscript, case-control analyses did not support the hypothesis that FM patients would differ from other chronic pain groups in catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and mu-opioid receptor (OPRM1) genotype. However, evidence is provided in support of the hypothesis that functional single nucleotide polymorphisms on the COMT and OPRM1 genes would be associated with risk and resilience, respectively, in a dual processing model of pain-related positive affective regulation in FM. Forty-six female patients with a physician-confirmed diagnosis of FM completed an electronic diary that included once-daily assessments of positive affect and soft tissue pain. Multilevel modeling yielded a significant gene X environment interaction, such that individuals with met/met genotype on COMT experienced a greater decline in positive affect as daily pain increased than did either val/met or val/val individuals. A gene X environment interaction for OPRM1 also emerged, indicating that individuals with at least one asp allele were more resilient to elevations in daily pain than those homozygous for the asn allele. In sum, the findings offer researchers ample reason to further investigate the contribution of the catecholamine and opioid systems, and their associated genomic variants, to the still poorly understood experience of FM. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2011

Proposing melodrama as an aesthetics of victimhood, my dissertation examines the intermedial itineraries of notable feminist Halide Edib’s Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut]. Originally serialized in 1923 and published as a novella in 1926 in Ottoman Turkish, Vurun Kahpeye was translated into modern day Turkish in 1946. The melodramatic story was then adapted for screen three times in 1949, 1964, and 1973, respectively, by Ömer Lütfi Akad, Orhan Aksoy and Halit Refiğ. With the circulation of these films on TV, the title Vurun Kahpeye has since the 90s morphed into an idiom designating the unjust treatment of the innocent. The persistent repetition of Vurun Kahpeye across media, I suggest, signifies melodrama’s aesthetic durability due to its affective excess: its efficacy in making a disaffected public experience its own victimhood. Thus, my dissertation provides an archeology of melodrama as a political technology through a reading of each of Vurun Kahpeye’s media iteration as embedded in its socio-historical context. In this account, the affective medium of cinema emerges as the main site for the formation of a secular mass public by linking secularism to structures of feeling rooted in victimization, suffering, and injury. And yet, the affective excess of melodrama, I demonstrate, renders Vurun Kahpeye’s normative project unstable and uncontainable with each iteration. At different moments in time, Vurun Kahpeye is a queer text exposing the heteropatriarchal nature of secular nationalism; lays the infrastructural, spectatorial, and aesthetic foundation of the classical cinema of Turkey; and serves as the project of a social realist, counter-populist, and anti- Western theory of cinema. Therefore, this dissertation traces the conflicting projections, aspirations, and feelings central to Turkish republican modernity that congeal and clash in, through, and around Vurun Kahpeye. / 2021-01-11

The concept of “national security” has been an essential part of the political lexicon of the United States since the aftermath of World War II. Although it could be said that security in one way or another has always been a concern for societies, and a central political concern for the western world at least since the seventeenth century, it took its full-fledged official form in the United States with the 1947 National Security Act which established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as shaping the direction of the post-World War II foreign policy. National security constitutes the frame through which many political practices attain their meaning and justification today. My dissertation is devoted to understanding precisely this process wherein there is a particular political rationality at work that not only renders certain kinds of political practices preferable, but also insists on their necessity and inevitability. I call this the politics of paranoia. I argue that the concept of paranoia has explanatory power in relation to an array of political decisions, processes, and practices. It is descriptive of a diagram of power that is operative in contemporary practices of securitization. It is not only that these decisions, processes, and practices produce paranoid effects (or affects), but that they themselves entail a paranoiac logic. To this end, I rethink Melanie Klein's account of paranoia through a Foucaultian decolonial feminist lens. I examine this paranoiac logic in four layers: expulsions, anticipatory temporality, masculinist politics, and paranoid affects.

This dissertation examines the function of shame within Christian texts and practice through the lens of affect theory and trauma studies. A focus on the deleterious effects of interred shame and shame’s role in attachment presses theology to name corporeal shame, understand it as distinguished from guilt, and recognize how it relates to attachment and human bonding. Distinguishing shame from guilt provides conceptual markers of shame, shifting the focus away from the image of the lonely, guilty sinner and toward a self both attached to others and to God. An analysis of classic theological texts along with an exploration of touch in Christian practice discloses that shame must be disinterred and faced in order to repair its negative effects and to restore its natural function in attachment. An analysis of Augustine’s The City of God reveals shame’s emergence in Augustine’s theology embodied by the notion of “covering-up,” which impedes attachment to God. In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr’s notions of sensuality and pride reflect shame, yet Niebuhr subsumes shame under other terms. Examining the place of shame in these major works and displaying the continual covering-over of shame in these theologian’s descriptions of the human condition exposes shame’s toxicity but also unveils shame as indicative of attachment. Augustine’s notion that the forehead serves as the seat of shame parallels affect theory’s location of affective emergence on the face and corporeally situates shame on the forehead. The final chapter displays what it would mean to take seriously the implications of affect in theological anthropology and practical theology. Both affect theory and trauma studies underscore the somatic and textual interactions that create a shamed self. This dissertation turns to the liturgical enactment of Christian practices, highlighting the importance of touch in both harm and repair. Exploring the moment of touch in the imposition of ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday develops touch as an affective encounter with shame. This interdisciplinary study of shame broadens insights about how Christian theologians interpret the human condition, as disinterred shame directs the self towards its greatest attachments: connection to others and to God.

In the context of early childhood education, in England and internationally, ideas and practices of ‘readiness’ have been of interest within research, policy and practice for some time. Much critical research, scholarship and activism has focused on exploring developmental aspects of this phenomenon arguing for: more ‘appropriate’ standards of ‘readiness’ against which to judge children’s learning and development; closer relationships between schools, preschools and communities that produce culturally responsive concepts of ‘readiness’; and the critical examination of the relationship between early childhood and compulsory school education. Within this body of work there is significant emphasis on developing and articulating alternative ideas and approaches that can unsettle dominant, normalizing practices of teaching and learning. Within these critical explorations of ‘readiness’ however, there is an avenue of scholarship that, seemingly, is as yet unexplored – one that addresses the concept of ‘readiness’ itself and asks how it may be possible to conceptualize ‘readiness’ in a way that is consistent with, and responsive to, complex processes of teaching and learning. This is not just a shift in practice, or in policy narratives, but is an ontological and epistemological change – a reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ that takes as its starting point a fundamental assumption of the positive and productive force of difference, in learning and in life. This thesis explores the ontological and epistemological shifts required to move away from ideas of ‘readiness’ that attach progression to a mechanistically linear movement. It develops and articulates an approach that embraces the emergent and unpredictable nature of learning, from which a concept of ‘readiness’ emerges which works with open, non-linear and emergent dimensions of education as necessary aspects of the complex systems within which we work. The thesis works with the concept of a ‘diffractive methodology’, exploring the concept of ‘readiness’ through ideas and theories drawn from complexity theory, from the immanent philosophy of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, and through onto-epistemological ideas of materiality and the entanglement of matter and meaning explored in particular by Barad. Methodologically, this study works within the space opened up by recent developments within ‘post-qualitative’ approaches to research. Working with concepts of ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ it engages critically with often taken for granted concepts and practices such as: assumptions concerning empirical/theoretical research; ideas of ‘data collection’ and ‘data analysis’; and the production of knowledge in and through experience. Deleuzian philosophy (among other influences) is approached in this methodological context as an open system, as opposed to a totalizing structure. Concepts including ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ are approached as potentialities, the methodological value of which is affirmed through the ways in which they have been productively put to work in the context of this study in order to produce spaces in which it is possible to think and act in ways that challenge conventional structures. What is developed in this thesis is a concept of ‘readiness’ as an ‘active-affective-ethical-relation’, as opposed to a fixed and normalizing identity. It is argued that, through this reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ as a central concept within early childhood education, other taken for granted concepts are unsettled, in particular ideas and practices of assessment. In exploring these concepts, the original ideas produced within this thesis, in relation to both early childhood education and research methodology, aim to contribute to the creation of more ethical and inclusive spaces of early childhood education and educational research.

This study investigated the effects of music choice on the ratings of attentional focus, affective valence, perceived exertion, and enjoyment during and after self-paced treadmill exercise of varied intensities. Thirty-four college-aged, healthy, active males and females volunteered to participate in the study. Participants completed 6 visits to the laboratory: the first visit was a medical screening to ensure safety of the participants. For the second visit, participants completed a maximal treadmill exercise test. On the third visit, participants completed the Brunel Music Rating Inventory-2 to determine their preferred and non-preferred music genres, and to self-select the low, moderate and high intensity exercise speeds that would be used in the experimental trials. During the last three visits, participants completed each of the three (preferred, non-preferred, no music) randomized and counterbalanced experimental trials. The Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale and the Feeling Scale were used to measure baseline and post-exercise ratings of enjoyment and affective valence. During exercise, the single-item Attentional Focus Scale, Feeling Scale, Borg 6-20, and Exercise Enjoyment Scale were used to measure attentional focus, affective valence, perceived exertion, and enjoyment, respectively. Results revealed a main effect for condition for affective valence and enjoyment (p < 0.001 for both interactions). A main effect was also found for intensity for attentional focus (p = 0.002) and perceived exertion (p < 0.001). Lastly, there was a main effect for activity revealed for affective valence (p = 0.047) and enjoyment (p = 0.012). Moreover, tests of between and within subjects factors revealed an interaction effect for condition by intensity for affective valence (p = 0.019) and for condition by intensity by activity for perceived exertion (p = 0.005). There was a general trend for thoughts to be more associative as intensity increased in both groups. In addition, there was a general trend for thoughts to be more dissociative during the preferred music condition compared to the non-preferred and no music trial. However, these differences were only found to be significant in the active group. Furthermore, there was a general trend in the active group for affective valence to be more positive regardless of exercise intensity or music condition when compared to the inactive group. Both groups showed the highest ratings of affective valence during the preferred music condition, followed by the non-preferred and no music condition. In-task enjoyment ratings were highest during the preferred music condition when compared to the non-preferred and no music condition regardless of exercise intensity or activity status. The results did not reveal significant differences for ratings of exertion across music conditions, which does not support previous findings. In conclusion, the perceptual responses in this study, which represent affective valence, attentional focus, and enjoyment, were generally more favorable during the preferred music condition and in the active participants. These results support previous findings to suggest exercising while listening to preferred music may lead to an increase in physical activity adherence.

This study examined the relationships among adult attachment, cognitive vulnerabilities for depression and anxiety, affect regulation strategies and psychological distress symptoms. To examine these questions, a total of 259 participants (150 females, 109 males) completed measures assessing the above mentioned variables. The structural equation modeling results indicated that attachment anxiety was related to emotional reactivity and emotional cutoff, as well as cognitive vulnerabilities for anxiety and depression. Attachment avoidance was associated with emotional cutoff and cognitive vulnerabilities for anxiety and depression. In turn, cognitive vulnerabilities for depression were related to both depression and anxiety symptoms, whereas cognitive vulnerabilities for anxiety were not related to either depression or anxiety. However, neither cognitive vulnerabilities nor affect regulation strategies mediated the relationship between adult attachment and psychological distress symptoms. Conceptual and measurement issues are addressed and clinical and treatment implications of these findings are discussed.

Previous research on symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has suggested clinically significant impairment is experienced below threshold for diagnosis. Recent studies have provided evidence that measures of hopelessness, negative affect, depression, and physical activity are independently related with increased PTSD symptoms and impairment. This constellation of variables has yet to be examined in a trauma-exposed population, so it is unknown whether these variables collectively predict significant impairment and PTSD. This study examined if: a) both clinical and subclinical symptoms of PTSD will be associated with significant impairment as measured by indices of hopelessness, negative affect, depression, and physical activity; b) measures of hopelessness, negative affect, depression, and physical activity will significantly contribute to the categorical diagnosis of Clinical PTSD in trauma-exposed populations; and c) Measures of hopelessness, negative affect, depression, and physical activity will significantly contribute to the categorical diagnosis of subclinical PTSD in trauma-exposed populations. Results indicate that the predictor variables are not associated with either of the outcome variables. The full model including hopelessness, negative affect, depression, and physical activity did not significantly contribute to the categorical diagnosis of clinical PTSD and subclinical PTSD in trauma-exposed populations. Limitations and further directions are explored in the discussion.