From March 2006 until March 2008 I worked and did research with young people in El Salvador. I coordinated a local youth participation project in the capital, where, at the same time, I conducted fieldwork for my PhD research. The youth project aimed at empowering young people through participatory action research (PAR) and, together with the young participants, I critically reflected on the empowering impact of this participatory process. While participatory researchers and practitioners traditionally stress the importance of critical consciousness and critical discourse as the principal motors for individual and social transformation, my research with the young people particularly confronted me with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges. This research focuses in particular on the politics of emotions; their role in confirming exclusion and oppression and in facilitating empowerment and resistance. In this thesis, I bring together different bodies of theory. I start from the critical literature on PAR and from a poststructuralist account of power and empowerment. I build on an understanding of emotions as socio-culturally constructed and, at the same time, as deeply embodied phenomena. I look into emotional geographies considering emotions as relational and as always functioning within power relations and I use non-representational theory to challenge the privilege of cognition by focussing on practical and embodied knowledges and explicitly recognising their political and empowering potential. I conclude that although participatory researchers have increasingly extended and refined their understanding of power and empowerment, they still focus too much on critical reflection, discourse and conscious/linguistic representation as key to personal and social change. This focus has distracted their attention from the way power works through emotions and embodied knowledges. I believe that participatory researchers should become more sensitive still to the subtleties of power by paying more explicit attention to how emotions and embodied knowledges function within power relations to reproduce or challenge the existing status quo. Such a focus also opens new doors to new ways of empowerment (and politics) by considering alternative methods and media directly engaging with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges to shape the social world.

The present study is a preliminary investigation assessing the associations between socioemotional adjustment and executive functioning problems in a low-income, high-risk sample of elementary students who participated in a mindful yoga practice. Mindfulness is a concept that encompasses attention within the present moment and requires acceptance and nonjudgment. Rather than being an outcome-reliant principle, it emphasizes the individual’s present state of mind and being (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). Recently, mindfulness has become a popular phenomenon in research. It has shown to be a highly effective coping strategy and mediator for cognitive, emotional, and behavioral problems (Flook, 2010; Hayes & Feldman, 2004; Broderick & Metz, 2009; Mendelson et al., 2010). However, little research has been done to assess the role mindfulness plays in children. The objective for this study was to investigate the associations between contextual stress, mindfulness, executive functioning difficulties, emotion dysregulation, and aggression. Data for these variables was reported via self-report (n=21), parent-report, and teacher-report at one time towards the end of the yoga curriculum. Mindfulness was not associated with executive functioning or emotional dysregulation. However, parent and teacher reports did reveal significant links among more aggression, executive functioning difficulties, and emotion dysregulation. Discussion notes the limitations of the current study and recommendations for improving the study design to improve the study of positive interventions for children experiencing high-stress lifestyles.

The aim of this thesis is to extend the social identity model of crowd behaviour (Reicher, 1984, 1987, 1996) by exploring the experience of collective participation, with an emphasis upon quality of within-crowd social relations (‘relatedness') and collective emotionality. A multi-method research strategy is employed to study these topics at a variety of crowd events. Studies 1 and 2 use ethnography and retrospective interviews at a student protest and public screenings of football matches to generate hypotheses for subsequent testing. Study 3 then tests these hypotheses by means of questionnaire data collected during Study 2. Using an experimental ‘visualisation' paradigm, Study 4 demonstrates the role of shared identity (and not simply self-categorization) in generating relatedness. Studies 5 and 6 present evidence that groups of high relatedness participants experience identity-relevant stimuli as more emotionally intense than low relatedness groups. Study 7 concludes the empirical work by using questionnaire data collected at political protests to test a model of collective experience based upon the findings of the previous studies. The thesis argues that a perception of shared identity with co-present others can positively transform social relations towards relatedness (connectedness, validation and recognition). Relatedness may then be experienced emotionally, and facilitate the realisation of group goals which may also have emotional consequences. Strength of social identity is also noted as an antecedent to group-based emotion. In this way the analysis offers three ways in which social identity may lead to emotionality of collective experience, contradicting ‘classic' crowd psychology in which crowd emotion was rooted in a loss of identity. Preliminary evidence is also presented suggesting that the experience of collective participation may have a role to play in determining future social identification and participation in co-action.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Feldman Barrett / A current debate ensues between the bivalent and the bipolar views of affect. This study has attempted to further support the side of bipolarity. The bipolar model of affective experience explains that affect is experienced along a single continuum and therefore a person processes only one feeling of affect at a time and cannot experience opposite states of affect simultaneously. I predicted that, in accordance with the bipolar model, participants would be unable to process semantic information from both positive and negative narratives at the same time in a dichotic listening. This inability would cause the participants to make shadowing errors when their attention shifted to the unattended channel as well as causing a vocal delay when the narratives switched auditory channels midway through the experiment. They would rate themselves in bipolar space throughout the experiment, but to then rate themselves in bivalent space when they made a summary judgment at the end of the experiment, since they are asked to combine their entire experience into a discreet rating. Twenty-one undergraduate students participated in a dichotic listening task while using the CTVG to continuously record their current state of affect in real time. The percent of errors made in shadowing, vocal delay, position on the grid for the summary judgments and the placement on the grid surrounding attention shifts were all measured. Results suggest that the structure of the affective experience follows the bipolar model. Implications of this research are discussed. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Cahill / This dissertation investigates the relationship between religious aesthetics and justice in the pursuit of the societal common good. The orienting problem of the work is the tensive relationship between maintaining political stability and meaningful engagement with religious particularity in order to foster robust democratic participation, especially among communities that have been historically marginalized in American public life. This project interrogates the relationship between religion in public life through the specific locus of religious aesthetics: what role ought religious symbols—including images, narratives, music, liturgical practices—play in cultivating justice, or the minimum level of solidarity required for promoting basic human dignity in society? Each chapter illuminates the significance of a particular discourse in support this project. Chapter one exposes the relevance of Guadalupe as a religious symbol in public life. Chapter two forges a dialogue with John Rawls’s political philosophy, reiterating the necessity of an adequate framework for religion in public life that prohibits the ascent of particular comprehensive doctrines to inordinate influence over society’s basic structure while critiquing his framework for religion in public life as lacking adequate viability in a public context where limitation on religion in democratic speech about the most salient societal issues hinders participation of ethno-racially marginalized groups. Chapter three engages Martha Nussbaum’s response to these issues, highlighting her arguments pertaining to political emotions and aesthetics as crucial contributions to this framework. Nussbaum argues persuasively for a central relationship between emotions and cognition and, further, makes a convincing statement of the significance of aesthetics—primarily literature—in the cultivation of political emotion. Yet, Nussbaum’s work makes an unnecessary demand on religion in public life: that it be viewed as “civic poetry.” While this framework is less restrictive than Rawls’s framework, it does not yet articulate a robust appreciation of the positive meanings of religious pluralism, especially among individuals and communities for whom religious and public arguments are intertwined. Chapter four offers Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics as a crucial component to an adequate framework for forming community across difference. García-Rivera offers the basis for a more inclusive framework for religion in public life, however, his lack of substantive engagement with ethical issues pertaining to justice demands attention. With these pieces in place, the fifth chapter knits together this set of insights toward a more adequate framework for engaging religious pluralism in liberal context: aesthetic solidarity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth A. Kensinger / Although healthy young and older adults remember emotional information better than neutral, emotion does not confer the same benefit upon memory for those experiencing memory impairments due to Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is poorly understood at what stage of processing these deficits occur--are they due to declines in memory storage and retrieval processes, or to a decline in earlier stages of attention allocation, which then impact memory storage and retrieval? It remains an open question how attention and memory processes may interact in aging and age-related disease. The goal of this research was to examine the effects of aging on the neural mechanisms underlying selective memory for emotional information in visual scenes, and to compare memory between healthy older adults and patients with very early AD pathophysiological changes. Experiment 1 examined young and older adults' encoding-related neural activation associated with selective memory for emotional items within visual scenes and with successful memory for emotional items and the scene background. There were few regions showing significant interactions between age and memory for positive and negative scenes. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that aging significantly affected the neural networks underlying selective emotional item memory and successful memory for emotional items and backgrounds. The results indicate that older adults require greater connectivity among prefrontal regions than young adults to encode all elements of a scene, rather than just encoding the emotional item. Experiment 3 showed that despite poorer memory overall, patients showing very early AD pathophysiological changes have relatively well preserved memory, especially for positive information. Dividing older adults' attention during encoding did not significantly alter their pattern of selective emotional item memory, suggesting that encoding of emotional items may be an easier or relatively automatic task compared to encoding of the background. In conclusion, there are significant age-related changes in the underlying neural networks, but not activation patterns, for selective memory for positive and negative scenes. Patients with early AD pathophysiological changes have impaired memory overall, however they may be able to recruit a similar neural network of prefrontal regions as healthy older adults for encoding of scenes with positive information. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

Cerebrovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death among persons aged 50 and above and when a stroke does not result in death, it can cause residual cognitive, motor and behavioural disabilities. Emotional effects of brain injury range from reduced quality of life to various neuropsychiatric disturbances and are of great interest in the South African context and throughout the world as they pose a major obstacle to the rehabilitation process. This study explored the relationship between emotion processing, neuropsychiatric symptoms and quality of life specifically, how they operate following a cerebrovascular accident. In order to achieve this, an adult population of high functioning stroke survivors completed the emotion processing scale (EPS), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) and comprehensive quality of life inventory (ComQOL-A5) and a factor analysis provided statistical evidence suggestive of intercorrelations among the variables. The results lent support to this theoretical relationship and determined the structure of this relationship as follows: The satisfaction with quality of life after a stroke that relates to traditional masculine or feminine roles, when not fulfilled, related to neuropsychiatric symptoms of general maladjustment i.e. schizophrenia and psychopathic deviate. The second factor encompassed symptoms of general anxiety both internally and externally directed: Internally directed anxiety included symptoms of hypochondriasis and hysterical conversion, while externally directed anxiety included neuropsychiatric symptoms of paranoia. The third factor was associated with mood modulation in that elevated mood connected to neuropsychiatric symptoms of hypomania and depressed mood connected to symptoms of depression and social introversion. Finally, emotion processing and psychasthenia made up the last principal component, namely emotion modulation. This meant that avoidance of emotional iv content, suppression of emotion, unprocessed emotion etc. related to neuropsychiatric symptoms of obsessions or compulsions. High functioning stroke survivors’ behaviours were thus characterised by general maladjustment, anxiety, and symptoms related to mood and emotion modulation. This study underlies the importance of diagnosing, treating and monitoring stroke survivors’ emotional alterations and suggests the usefulness of its application in clinical settings to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments or more general interventions to improve the neuropsychiatric sequelae and quality of life of stroke survivors. Improved understanding of these constructs from the stroke survivor’s perspective has obvious impact for the therapeutic interventions inherent in stroke rehabilitation and as such, contributes towards the fields of neuropsychology, neuropsychotherapy and the social sciences.

Thesis advisor: James A. Russell / Theories in moral psychology propose a link between emotions and moral judgments. This dissertation presents a series of studies examining whether different discrete emotions are each linked to a different discrete moral content. Some of the studies tested a proposal called CAD: an acronym for the theory that contempt is linked to violations in the community domain (C), anger is linked to violations in the autonomy domain (A), and disgust is linked to violations in the divinity domain (D). Other studies further focused on the emotion disgust: Whether acts or issues that remind humans of their animal nature elicit disgust and whether the English concept of disgust refers to a single emotional experience pan-culturally. In most of the studies we recruited participants both from America and from India (N = 3893). The findings challenged any clean mappings between different discrete emotions and different contents of moral violations. Instead, moral violations were associated with a range of negative emotions rather than with a specific one. There was no support for the hypothesis that acts or issues that remind us of our animal nature elicit disgust, and the English concept disgust, as referring to unclean substances and moral violations, is equivalent to similar concepts in two Indian languages. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / This dissertation addresses a specific problem, which is that the Catholic ethical tradition lacks an adequate normative approach to social anger as a potentially constructive resource in the pursuit of social justice. In response to this issue, this dissertation advances the thesis that social anger is a cognitive interruption of the ideologies and structures of oppression, which is to say, an evaluative judgment that the members of a vulnerable social group suffer systemic deprivation of one or more of the social goods constitutive of basic human flourishing. I propose that the civic virtues of justice, solidarity, and prudence may be used as a normative anthropological heuristic for determining whether agents have rightly realized their social anger in regard to particular instances of structural participation, such as political resistance and institutional reform. In order to defend this thesis, the argument first diagnoses the main causes of the problem. In attempting to address social justice concerns, Catholic ethicists have generally retrieved the Thomistic virtue ethic of temperance or moderation in anger, which was designed for damaged interpersonal relationships in a premodern context, and applied it to the contemporary context of structural injustice in sociopolitical and socioeconomic relationships. This normative ethic, however, fails to observe the qualitative difference between the moral agency of individuals in relation to one another and the agency of structural participation. Moreover, this anthropological issue is exacerbated by an uncritical characterization of anger as impulsive and non-cognitive in itself, a problem that can be traced to the lack of an adequate philosophical psychology of emotion. In light of this diagnosis, I argue that Catholic ethicists should critically engage with the cognitive theory of emotion offered by Martha Nussbaum as well as her feminist account of universal human capabilities. Once combined with the contextual anthropology of human agency in history found in modern Catholic social thought, these resources can provide the basis for an inductive natural law methodology appropriate to the task of understanding social anger in relation to the pursuit of social justice. Employing this methodology, I explicate the moral significance of social anger as cognitive interruption and offer a critically reconstructed normative ethic appropriate to the contemporary context of political resistance and institutional reform in public life. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth A. Kensinger / Neural and behavioral responses to emotional stimuli often are discussed within an evolutionary framework. Although some of the information that elicits an emotional response is likely to have had evolutionary significance (e.g., snakes, spiders), many other stimuli would not have been evolutionarily relevant (e.g., guns, grenades). The present study re-analyzed data from two fMRI studies (Kensinger et al., 2007; Kensinger & Schacter, 2008) to examine whether the neural systems that respond to emotional stimuli differ depending upon whether those stimuli were of phylogenetic or ontogenetic significance. The results revealed that when stimuli were ontogenetic, activity was increased in regions of the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices. By contrast, when stimuli were phylogenetic, activity was increased in a region spanning the lingual and fusiform gyri. These results suggest that there can be differences in how emotional stimuli are processed, and those differences can depend upon the stimuli’s evolutionary significance. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology.