Thesis (M.A.)--University of Detroit, 1957. / "June 1957." Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-40).

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed April 14, 2010). Advisor: William Kalkhoff. Keywords: Affect Control Theory; attribution; emotions; agency. Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-28).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, March, 2001. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2004. / Typescript. Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 41 pages. Includes Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Music therapy has been recognized as a legitimate health practice in Canada since after the Second World War. While research shows the emotional, social and health benefits of music therapy, researchers have failed to agree on the reason music can be beneficial to health. I argue that affect could be the key to understanding the myriad ways in which music, and music therapy, can have a positive effect on health. Through the lens of affect theory, I explore embodiment, relationship-building and aesthetic creation as three areas in which music can allow the harnessing of affect towards health goals. I note music’s powerful affect on the human body and movement, and the ways in which these affects are mobilized towards specific clinical goals. I explore the various human-to-human and human-to-sound relationships that are mobilized, created or strengthened through music therapy interventions, and how they relate to health and to the affect of “becoming”. Finally, I note the strong evidence for musical and aesthetic creation as a part of self-care, both by music therapists and by their clients, and argue for a broader understanding of how creativity impacts health, by allowing people to affect their environments and “become themselves”.

The generation of predictions shapes our experience of the world around us. By making inferences about what is likely to happen within a given scenario, we can conserve cognitive resources and enhance our prospects of survival. Predictive coding accounts of perception indicate that this is achieved by minimally processing information that is consistent with our expectations, and prioritising the processing of unexpected or meaningful information. Predictions are also beneficial in situations where accurate perception is difficult, and clues like contextual information allow expectations to ‘fill in the blanks’ when sensory information is noisy or ambiguous. This comes at a cost, however, and a reliance upon expectations can lead to perceptual biases, and in certain cases misperceptions. According to Assimilation Contrast Theory (ACT) and the Affective Expectation Model (AEM), when we attempt to judge affectively ambiguous stimuli, our judgements are biased by expectations in a similar manner. If stimuli are within an acceptable range of an existing expectation, minor discrepancies will be ignored and judgements of those stimuli will fall in line with expectations (assimilation). Alternatively, if the affective discrepancy between expectation and stimulus is so large that it is acknowledged, the extent of that discrepancy will be exaggerated instead (contrast). This thesis aimed to investigate the boundaries and time-course of these effects. A series of behavioural experiments were conducted to investigate: (i) whether predictive cues promoted a state of affective readiness, where judgements across a range of stimuli were biased based upon the assumption that they were broadly part of a positive or negative category (chapters 3 and 4); (ii) whether affective biases (assimilation effects) persisted over time (chapters 5 and 6); and (iii) whether the boundaries of affective and perceptual assimilation effects remained consistent over time (chapter 6 and 7). Psychophysical measures of affective bias indicated that predictive cues influenced participants to judge the same stimuli differently, according to whether they expected those stimuli to be positive or negative. Furthermore, after expectations were learned, judgements of the same stimuli continued to be biased toward expectations after a period of one week. When stimuli from affectively or perceptually distinct categories were manipulated slowly over time, to the point where they became identical, judgements of those stimuli continued to be influenced by the expectation that they should remain distinct. These findings indicate that the boundaries of perceptual and affective assimilation effects may not be static, and if deviations from expectation are small enough to go generally unnoticed, people may update their internal representations of items over time, and the boundaries of acceptance which surround those representations.

Longstanding political, social, and academic debates surrounding women’s anger have followed a distinct pattern. On one hand, critics disparage women for writing and speaking in an angry voice, casting them as bitter, irrational, or they assign them the pejorative “angry feminist”. Women often respond to these critiques by defending their anger, and reframe this emotional response as a legitimate response to oppression. Despite the utility of this intervention, this debate has given rise to a binary structure where a woman’s anger is either a legitimate response to oppression, or an irrational emotional response. As a result, the alternative functions to women’s anger remain largely unexplored. Working against binary logic, this dissertation aims to reframe this debate, and answer the following questions: what are the alternative functions for women’s anger outside of the binary terms of this debate? How can literary representations of anger complicate this conversation? Drawing from affect theory, intersectional feminist theory, discourse analysis, feminist discourse analysis, philosophical discussions about emotion, feminist literary theory, and ongoing debates surrounding nostalgia, this dissertation explores the function of anger within contemporary Canadian and American women’s literature. Before undertaking literary analysis in subsequent chapters, this dissertation first develops a methodology of “imperfect alignment” to account for the tensions between affect theory and discourse analysis, the theories and methods that guide this research project. The second chapter explores the ways anger allows liminal subjects to come into view in Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Morris’s A Dangerous Woman. Chapter three explores the ways anger can interrupt and complicate compassionate reader responses to gender based abuse in Sapphire’s Push and Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree. Chapter four explores the ways anger and nostalgia allow subjugated groups to link anger to domestic violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire and We Were the Mulvaneys. Finally, this dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of feminist critiques of reason, and locates the findings of this project in relation to this scholarship. Ultimately, this research project nuances debates surrounding anger, and poses alternative readings of this emotional response.

This thesis examines the performance of affect in relation to gender identity across some of the major works of Willa Cather’s and John Steinbeck’s careers. Throughout this discussion, I contend that Steinbeck—an author not often thought of as projecting feminist concerns—indeed approximates the feminist themes of Cather in his creation of characters who embody nonnormative castes of gender identity, even if Cather does perhaps exceed Steinbeck’s feminist vision in her optimism for the potential of people of nonnormative gender identity to find peace, happiness, and acceptance in an often xenophobic early-twentieth-century America. Over the course of this thesis, I build on the work of affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Anu Koivunen by demonstrating the power of affect theory as a tool for understanding gender politics and gender identity.

Robert Agnew’s (1992) General Strain Theory significantly revitalized traditional scholarship in the anomie/strain tradition by offering a general theory of crime; purported to account for both criminal and analogous behaviors. GST specifically extends anomie/strain theory by introducing new sources of strain (i.e. loss of positively valued stimuli, presentation of noxious stimuli) into the theoretical framework, as well as elucidating the causal pathways (including mediating and moderating effects) leading from the experience of strain to deviant coping mechanisms. An emerging trend within GST is the identification of previously untapped sources of strain (e.g. victimization, discrimination) that ostensibly have deviancegenerating properties. Concerning the latter trend, recent empirical iterations of GST have also introduced internal (e.g. self-esteem) and external conditioning factors (e.g. social control) that have been found to exert a mediating effect on the relationship between strain-generated negative emotions and deviant coping responses. Jang and Johnson-in a recent series of studies (2003, 2005)-offered a crucial extension to the General Strain Theory (GST) literature by finding that religiosity at least partially moderates the deviance-generating effects of strain-induced negative affect among a sample of African Americans. The current study offers a key extension to the Jang and Johnson thesis by offering the most comprehensive examination of the central tenets of their research to a nationally-representative, longitudinal sample of adolescents. Results from Waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reveal support for GST in general, and qualified support for the Jang/Johnson thesis in particular. Strain was found to be a significant, positive predictor of depression and anger. With regard to the fundamental hypothesis of the current research, partial support was garnered for the Jang and Johnson hypothesis. In particular, religiosity only offered direct protective effects when predicting drug use, and failed to condition the relationship of strain on deviance across any of the deviance measures. Consequently, religiosity failed to moderate the effects of strain on deviant coping strategies among the full sample, although significant conditioning effects were observed for female deviance. Consequently, these results largely attribute the Jang and Johnson findings to elevated levels of religiosity in their sample.

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