In the age of growing precarity and ongoing crises of longstanding political institutions, disaffection and disillusionment have become the norm in the millennial experience in Canada. What kind of humour arises in response to this condition? This project combines in-person and digital ethnography, with in-depth, semi-structured interviews to explore the connections between millennial humour and the making of generational political sensibilities. In response to the increasingly hollow political discourse, my millennial interlocutors—a self-selected group of young, Anglophone Canadians who come together in digital spaces dedicated to leftist politics— seek out internet humour that looks and feels authentic, and that resonates with their lived experience. However, as that humour often focuses on issues such as rising inequality, economic precarity, and environmental disaster, the content that resonates most, often feels “too real,” “gutting” and perhaps paradoxically—unfunny.

Corpses and disappeared bodies have become part of the Mexican landscape. Within the overall increase of violence, feminicide has become an urgent matter. Around ten women are murdered each day and most cases remain unsolved. As a response to this spectacle of violence, feminist protests and organized action are gaining prominence throughout the country. ‘Vivas nos queremos’ (‘We want to stay alive’) and ‘Ni una menos’ (‘Not one less’) are some of the chants that resonate among massive protests. Despite the growing numbers of feminicide cases and with the spread of activism, there is surprisingly little research that examines the affects and emotions engendered in the current normalization of violence. Much has been said about feminicide in relation to symbolic violence, and patriarchal structures, but not enough focus has been placed on how living bodies affect and are affected by their contact with the dead. Thus, this project utilizes affect theories (Brian Massumi, 2002) and the language of haunting (Avery F. Gordon, 2008) to unpack the complexity of feminicide, collective mourning, and normalization of violence. Through a close reading of literary fiction, I explore the affective forces engendered between living bodies and dead bodies. By thinking with Massumi and Gordon, I posit that theorizing affective forces should not assume a sharp cut between life and death. Then I follow the ghost of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) as her wails become the voice of grieving mothers and murdered women. Listening to La Llorona’s wails as they mingle with activists’ chants of resistance makes visible, audible, and palpable a larger haunting that hints towards unequal social structures. Thinking with the concepts of mourning and grief as well as affect and haunting opens new ways of thinking about the unresolved murders and disappearances of women as expressed by literature and artivism. / Graduate

People often use substances to cope with intense emotions, but more research is needed in this area. The scale we used to measure affect intensity was the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). The participants self-reported their substance use. Drawing from a sample of adults in substance use treatment (n=118), we used regression analysis to examine the relationship between affect intensity, drug use motivations, and polysubstance use. Having this information is crucial to understanding how emotional experiences can be related to substance use. By knowing this we can also alter treatment to be specific to the individual, in order to improve the success rate of treatment facilities. More research is needed examining the relationship between affect intensity, motivation for substance use, and substance use patterns among people who are receiving substance use treatment.

Researchers have reported mixed findings on the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and transformational leadership, leading many to suspect the presence of moderating variables. This study was conducted to address the problem by analyzing the moderating effect that affect intensity may have upon this relationship. Based on a theoretical framework consisting of ability-based EI and the full-range theory of leadership, it was hypothesized that EI would be positively correlated with transformational leadership. In addition, based upon the arousal regulation theory of affect, it was hypothesized that affect intensity would be a statistically significant moderator of that relationship. A convenience sample of leaders (N = 142) working in the hospitality industry completed the Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire form 5X, and the Affect Intensity Measure. Pearson's Product-Moment correlational analysis revealed that, consistent with expectations, total EI scores and the managing emotions branch scores of EI were positively correlated with transformational leadership; however, the branch scores for perceiving, using, and understanding emotion were not. Contrary to expectations, affect intensity was not a statistically significant moderator in this sample. Findings from this research support the proposition that EI may best predict transformational leadership within service-based environments where employees face intense emotional labor demands. A thorough understanding of the ways in which EI predicts leader behavior will not only help organizations improve leader selection and development, but also help to improve vital social outcomes, such as employee job satisfaction, engagement, and well-being.

abstract: With the growth of autonomous vehicles’ prevalence, it is important to understand the relationship between autonomous vehicles and the other drivers around them. More specifically, how does one’s knowledge about autonomous vehicles (AV) affect positive and negative affect towards driving in their presence? Furthermore, how does trust of autonomous vehicles correlate with those emotions? These questions were addressed by conducting a survey to measure participant’s positive affect, negative affect, and trust when driving in the presence of autonomous vehicles. Participants’ were issued a pretest measuring existing knowledge of autonomous vehicles, followed by measures of affect and trust. After completing this pre-test portion of the study, participants were given information about how autonomous vehicles work, and were then presented with a posttest identical to the pretest. The educational intervention had no effect on positive or negative affect, though there was a positive relationship between positive affect and trust and a negative relationship between negative affect and trust. These findings will be used to inform future research endeavors researching trust and autonomous vehicles using a test bed developed at Arizona State University. This test bed allows for researchers to examine the behavior of multiple participants at the same time and include autonomous vehicles in studies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Human Systems Engineering 2019

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Early sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne use the eighteenth-century notion of sentiment in very distinct manners. These novels demonstrate a perspective in transition regarding sentimentality in how they apply sentimental qualities to very specific character types. Some characters are extremely sentimental, whereas others appear completely void of emotion and are even described as automata. These sensation novels even feature sentimental journeys and objects, as well as allusions to sentimental novels such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. The occurrence of sentimentality in these sensation novels aligns characters into two categories: those that are controlled (and in some instances debilitated) by sentiment, and those that can control their feelings. Thus, the sensation novel calls into question the authenticity of emotional expression as it is represented in the sentimental literary tradition. Existing research on these novels tends to focus on gender and madness, a majority of which focuses specifically on madwomen. Instances of women being driven to madness, however, also coincides with a pattern of sentimental behaviors that male characters share. These overly sentimental characters rarely, if ever, demonstrate rational thinking, and are cast in a negative light. In contrast, the sensation novel casts non-sentimental characters of both genders as skeptics and investigators who generally meet felicitous ends. This thesis will contribute to existing scholarship on sensation fiction by taking into account how these novels treat excessive affect as a sign of generic critique rather than just a biological symptom of a pathologized woman.

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A great deal of research has been conducted in the last three decades to find the determinants of technology usage and adoption. Numerous models have been developed in the United States and other developed countries to enhance the understanding of this issue. However, two main questions remain as to what extent these models and conclusions based on their past usage can be applied to other countries, particularly less developed nations, and to what degree social influence affects consumers' decisions across cultures. Recently, Kulviwat et al. (2007) proposed a new model - Consumer Acceptance of Technology (CAT) - that was shown to significantly improve the prediction of intentions to adopt high-tech products compared to the immensely popular Technology Acceptance Model (TAM; Davis 1989) by integrating cognitive and affective factors. This study extends the CAT model by adding social constructs in order to account for the effects from others rather than from one's own thoughts and feelings. Because of the addition of social influences, this modified model was named CATS. The objectives of this dissertation were threefold. The first objective was to investigate the impact of social influence on adoption of technological innovations by including three social constructs: social influence, susceptibility to normative influence, and susceptibility to informational influence. The second objective was to examine cognitive, affective, and social influence in three countries (The United States, State of Kuwait, and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in order to determine if their relative roles in predicting attitudes and intentions are stable or if they vary in some predictable way. The third objective was to examine the effect of an extremely important cultural dimension, individualism/collectivism, on the relationships in the model. In general, the results provided empirical support for CATS across cultures by using structural equation modeling and path analysis. More specifically, the findings confirm what was found in previous studies about the important roles of cognition (percieved usefulness) and affect (pleasure, arousal, and dominance). Additionally, this research showed that social (social influence) also has a significant, direct, and positive effect on attitude toward adopting technology innovations. Also, as expected from previous studies, attitude had a significant, positive, and direct effect on adoption intention. Finally, the role of a culture's individualism/collectivism on the relationships in the model was surprising. The only factors that were significantly moderated by individualism/collectivism were related to affect: pleasure and dominance. This new finding suggests that consumers in individualistic cultures are more likely than consumers in collectivistic cultures to have their attitudes shaped by how enjoyable an innovation is and how much more "in control" it makes them feel. Overall, the analysis showed that the CATS model fit the data best. This means the incorporation of cognition, affect, and social into a model fit the data better than cognition (TAM) or cognition and affect (CAT) alone. These findings have valuable implications for marketing theory, methodology, and practice.

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