It is essential for individuals’ well-being and relationships that they have the ability to consciously experience, express and respond to their own and others’ affects. The validity of a new conception of affect consciousness (AC), incorporating consciousness of both own and others’ affects, was investigated in this thesis. The clinical usefulness of the new conception was explored and an interview (affect consciousness interview – self/other; ACI-S/O) intended to capture this new definition was validated. In study I the interrater reliability and the concurrent validity of the ACI-S/O were assessed and found to be acceptable. There were significant differences in all variables of ACI-S/O between the four groups that participated in the study. Joy and interest had the highest ratings in all groups and guilt and shame had the lowest. By means of a factor analysis, two factors, labeled “general affect consciousness” and “consciousness about shame and guilt,” were obtained. General affect consciousness was related to different aspects of relational and emotional problems and possibly protection against them. In study II the clinical implications of AC were further explored in relation to eating disorders (ED). The level of AC in the ED group was compared with a comparable non-clinical group. The relation between AC and aspects of ED pathology were explored, as well as whether AC should be seen as a state or trait in patients diagnosed with ED. ACI-S/O was not significantly related to ED pathology or general psychological distress. There were no significant differences in AC between the different sub-diagnoses of ED but there were between the ED group and the non-clinical group. Significant pre-post correlations for both factors of ACI-S/O were found, indicating that AC could be seen as a stable dimension that might be important for ED pathology but is unrelated to ED symptoms. In study III the relationship between AC and self-reported attachment style (ASQ) was explored in a non-clinical group and three patient groups. There were significant correlations between all scores on ACI- S/O and the ASQ, with the exception of consciousness about guilt. Multiple regression analyses showed that AC, and especially others’ affects, contributed significantly to the ASQ subscales. AC and in particular own joy and others’ guilt and anger seem to be of importance for attachment style. In study IV the importance of AC for the treatment process was explored. Patients’ AC before therapy was significantly correlated with patients’ positive feelings towards their therapists but not with their alliance ratings. Patients’ warm and positive feelings were related to pre-therapy AC, whereas negative feelings were related to low alliance ratings in the previous sessions. / Det är viktigt för människans relationer och välbefinnande att ha en förmåga att medvetet uppleva, uttrycka egna samt svara på andras affekter. I denna avhandling studerades användbarheten av en ny definition av Affektmedvetenhet (AM), omfattande medvetande om egna och andras affekter samt validiteten i en intervju (affektmedvetenhetsintervjun-själv/andra; AMI-S/A) som avser att fånga den nya definitionen. I studie I undersöktes interbedömarreliabilitet och den samtidiga validiteten hos AMI-S/A. De befanns vara godtagbara. Det fanns signifikanta skillnader på alla delsskalor i AMI-S/A mellan de fyra grupper som deltog i studien. Affekterna glädje och intresse hade de högsta skattningarna i alla grupper och skuld och skam hade de lägsta. En faktoranalys genomfördes där två faktorer föll ut. De beskrevs som "Generell affektmedvetenhet" och "Medvetenhet om skam och skuld". Generell affektmedvetenhet visade sig vara relaterad till olika aspekter av relationella och känslomässiga problem och antogs skydda mot dessa. I studie II genomfördes vidare undersökning av den kliniska betydelsen av AM för ätstörningar. Nivån av AM hos patienter med ätstörningar jämfördes med en demografiskt jämförbar icke-klinisk grupp. Förhållandet mellan AM och ätstörningspatologi undersöktes. Någon signifikant relation mellan AMI-S/A och ätstörningssymtom eller allmän psykisk ohälsa hos ätstörningspatienterna hittades inte. Det fanns heller inga signifikanta skillnader i AM mellan olika undergrupper av ätstörning men däremot mellan hela ätstörningsgruppen och den icke-kliniska gruppen. Frågan om AM kan betraktas mer som ett drag eller tillstånd hos patienter med ätstörning utforskades. Det fanns signifikanta korrelationer mellan före och eftermätning på båda faktorerna på AMI-S/A. Resultaten tyder på att AM kan ses som en stabil dimension i sig själv som tycks vara viktig för ätstörningar, men som inte har samband med ätstörningssymtom. I studie III undersöktes förhållandet mellan AM och självrapporterad anknytningsstil (ASQ) i en icke-klinisk grupp och tre patientgrupper. Det fanns signifikanta korrelationer mellan alla skattningar på AMI-S/A och ASQ, med undantag av medvetenhet om skuld. Regressionsanalyser visade att AM, och speciellt medvetenhet om andras affekter, bidrog signifikant till anknytningsstilen. AM och i synnerhet egen glädje och andras skuld och ilska verkar vara av betydelse för anknytningsstil. I studie IV undersöktes betydelse av AM för behandlingsprocessen i olika former av samtalsbehandling. Patienternas AM före behandlingen var signifikant korrelerad med deras positiva känslor gentemot sina terapeuter vid det tredje samtalet, men inte med deras alliansskattning vid detta samtal. Patienternas negativa känslor var inte relaterade till deras AM före behandlingen men däremot till låg alliansskattning vid de tidigare samtalen.

This study focused on the criterion-related validity of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). The IPANAT is thought to be a measure of automatic activation of cognitive representations of affects. In this study, it was investigated whether implicit affect scores differentially predict ratings of facial emotions over and above explicit affectivity. Ninety-six young female participants completed the IPANAT, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) as an explicit measure of state and trait affectivity, and a task for the perception of facial emotions. Implicit negative affect predicted the perception of negative but not positive facial emotions, whereas implicit positive affect predicted the perception of positive but not negative facial emotions. The observed double-dissociation in the correlational pattern strongly supports the validity of the IPANAT as a measure of implicit affectivity and is indicative of the orthogonality and thus functional distinctness of the two affect dimensions of the IPANAT. Moreover, such affect-congruent correlations were absent for explicit affect scales, which additionally supports the incremental validity of the IPANAT.

Master of Science / Department of Mathematics / Andrew G. Bennett / In recent years motivation research has emerged as an area of interest within educational research. Increasing student achievement is not the only aspect of education being studied. Improving the quality of the learning experience and investigating how this improvement affects student achievement is an area of growing interest. Additional investigations also consider what aspects of instruction and teaching affect the quality of the learning experience. Many mathematical organizations have voiced a concern that post-secondary mathematics courses should adapt curriculum and instruction based on results of this research. The current study is an investigation into the effectiveness of suggestions made by these organizations, as well as the effect instructional adaptations have on student attitude and achievement.

This thesis attempts to explore within what historical context and with what documented content, A Bite of China: Season I, a Chinese documentary television series that explores the history of food, eating and cooking garners widespread popularity. By theoretical analyses, Chapter 1 concludes the relationship between documentary and the "reality" is built upon representation and there is "something beyond reality" in documentary. Moreover, in documentary representation, affect helps the "reality" to transform into "documentary reality," and affect is the key to understand "something beyond reality." In order to analyze documentary in historical context, Chapter 2 reviews and analyzes western documentary film history, Chinese television documentary history and The New Documentary Movement in China. As conclusion shows, this movement changes Chinese documentary history and provides historical context for A Bite of China. In particular, it makes common Chinese people's lives and general Chinese society become main documented content, which constitutes a non-governmental power discourse. Chapter 3 turn the case study of A Bite of China. As it concludes, historical context is the integration between governmental discourse and non-governmental discourse. As for documented content, the intertwined representation between the representation of Chinese gourmet food and affective resonance among director, documented people and spectators makes A Bite of China popular. This thesis advances "affect" as an approach to further understand "documentary reality" and provides a new viewpoint on how A Bite of China becomes a popular Chinese television documentary.

In recent decades, the built environment has become a political device in new ways. To attend to these particularities, a broadly defined post-humanism has reshaped the way that geographers and other researchers think about what matters in everyday life and what those materials have to do with the question of subjectivity. The critical insights of the "cultural turn" have been updated with reference to the many ways that landscapes and built environments are always embodied experiences that emerge in relation to broader non-human and technological environments. The geographies of consumption, in particular, have been strongly impacted by new technologies that govern the flow of commodities into new spaces, including our everyday lives. This dissertation draws on recent theories of embodiment-including affect and emotion-to explore the politics of the new technological consumer landscapes that have proliferated world wide in the second half of the twentieth century. In Latin America, this expansion was made possible through militarized interventions during periods of dictatorship strongly linked to the geopolitics of the Cold War. Taking Chile as an exemplary case of a rapidly emerging mass consumer society, this dissertation charts the expansion of a dominant sector of society (retail) into new territory, the Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile. The embattled "Mall Paseo Chiloé" offers up an opportunity to explore how embodied feelings are implicated in the production of new consumer landscapes through affective, emotive and non-human interventions.

<p>Emotions guide the way individuals interact with the world, influencing nearly every psychological process from attention, to learning, to metacognition. Constructionist models of emotion posit that emotions arise out of combinations of more general psychological ingredients. These psychological ingredients, however, also form the building blocks of other affective responses such as subjective reactions to rewarding and social stimuli. Here, I propose a domain-general account of affective functioning; I contend that subjective responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli all depend on common psychological and neural mechanisms. I support this hypothesis with three independent studies using both a basic science approach and a clinical approach. In the first study (Chapter 2) I demonstrate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which has been implicated in encoding the value of primary, monetary, and social rewards, also encodes the hedonic value of emotional stimuli. In addition to showing that the mechanisms responsible for processing affective information are shared across reward and emotional processing, I also discuss the relevance of a domain-general constructionist account of affect for clinical disorders. In particular, I hypothesize that in anorexia nervosa (AN), affective disturbances should be manifest across responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I provide empirical evidence for this conclusion by demonstrating that when viewing social stimuli, women with a history of AN show disturbances in the insula, a brain region that is responsible for interoceptive and affective processing. This suggests that the interpersonal difficulties frequently observed in patients with AN may be due to biases in domain-general affective responses. In Chapter 5, I support this conclusion by showing that individual differences in harm avoidance in healthy women, women with a current diagnosis of AN, and women who have recovered from AN explain the relationship between disordered eating and social dysfunction. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective affective responses to rewarding, emotional, and social information all rely on common mechanisms as would be suggested by a domain-general theory of affect. Furthermore, the application of a constructionist domain-general account of affect can help to explain the fundamental nature of affective disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as AN.</p> / Dissertation

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

“The city of living garbage” tours private houses in Austin transformed by their inhabitants into quasi-public places – art environments and permaculture systems made possible by urban waste. The creators of these micro-utopias collect and improvise with salvaged materials like roadside junk, greywater, unwanted animals, and half-forgotten cultural forms to cultivate habitats where undervalued things flourish. They revalue waste through a variety of practices like caring for, teaching, learning, enjoying, and tinkering. Becoming part of these relational patterns is a way to slow down and find wonder and pleasure in the ordinary, but also to act on ecological problems in the larger world. The landscape patches that emerge are lively but vulnerable assemblages that artists, activists, and their nonhuman allies belong to as local characters. By being open for tours, the places loosely connect publics that share modes of attention set on urban natures, salvageable garbage, and vernacular aesthetics. These informal institutions, non-profits, and vulnerable for-profit businesses are caught up in Austin’s current sustainable and cultural development strategies, but also share in an informal economy through their use of valueless wastes. Some articulate with contemporary localization movements that seek to reconfigure water, food, and energy production to decrease their precarious dependence on globalized economies. Others refuse the boundary between art and everyday life by recasting houses as never-ending aesthetic projects. Similarly, as wildlife habitats and urban gardens, they are thriving examples of cultivated places that disrupt an assumed antithesis between cities and ecosystems. These embodied critiques or dreams are small-scale manifestations of what urban natures might become. Borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Latour, and Thrift, I attend to these places’ ecological and aesthetic relational dynamics that communicate directly through bodies, senses, and forms. This non-representational approach recognizes the contributions of nonhuman agents like plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing affective landscapes. The writing strives to be a mode of research that is isomorphic with the phenomena it describes. It is impelled by a love of the places, people, and beings it researches; it aspires to preserve a little bit of them by redoubling their presence in the world. / text

The current pair of experimental studies sought to further validate the role of positive urgency (acting rashly when in an extreme positive emotional state) as a risk factor for impulsive and maladaptive behavior. Previous research has supported the use of emotion-based dispositions to rash action in predicting a wide range of maladaptive acts. However, that research relied on self-reported behavior, thus lacking (1) tight experimental controls and (2) direct observation of risky behaviors. In the two experimental studies described here, I found that, among college students, (1) previous cross-sectional relationships between risk and positive urgency were supported (n = 104), (2) positive urgency significantly predicted negative outcomes on a gambling task following a positive mood manipulation (n = 94), and (3) positive urgency significantly predicted increases in beer consumption following positive mood induction (n = 33). Positive urgency's role was above and beyond previously identified risk factors; these findings combined with prior cross-sectional and longitudinal field studies provide strong support for the role of positive urgency in rash action.

This dissertation is a theoretically driven empirical analysis of instructional communication in academic advising. It explores the effects of perceived advisor accommodation on advisee learning. Specifically, it examines whether academic advisors employ accommodation communication that influence affect, cognitive learning, and behavioral learning outcomes in advisees. Four hundred and seventeen students were asked to report on their perceptions of learning through an online cross-sectional survey that addressed communication accommodation strategies employed in the advisor/advisee experience. Results show that behavioral learning (measured by intentions) was significantly predicted by advisor inquiry of school-related content (β = .391, p < .01); advisor attentiveness (β = -.169, p < .01); affect toward advising content (β = .154, p < .01); and cognitive knowledge (β = .244, p < .01)].