published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Surprisingly enough, while it is generally acknowledged that emotion plays a vital part in the negotiation of every day life, there has been until recently a scarcity of communications scholarship directly concerned with its study. To date, those examining this variable have largely relied for the theoretical and methodological support on models imported from psychology. While their studies have arguably had a positive impact on our understanding of some aspects of emotion, this dissertation contends that an over-dependence on psychological theories and methods has resulted in a blinkered approach to its study. In general, the focus of research and scholarship has been on either display and recognition of facial expression, physiological response to environmental stimuli, subjective verbal labeling, and behavioral manifestation. On closer inspection, a positivist discourse which considers emotion in methodologically individualistic and empirically behavioral terms has informed much of this work. Building on behaviorism, intentionalist analytical philosophy, and phenomenology, emotion research in Communication Studies has tended to neglect the social. More sophisticated approaches to grasping this latter variable, found in Sociology and Anthropology, consequently have had little impact, leading communications scholars to consistently define emotion in terms of individual motivations, drives, desires, wants, and dispositions rather than as a process located in a social world. / In light of this, this dissertation strove not only to assemble a history and provide a critique of emotion study in psychology, but to relate it to advances being made in Sociology and Anthropology, especially those pertaining to communication and postmodernity. Alongside this, it endeavored to: (1) furnish a theory and methodology for explaining those relationships; (2) illuminate a way in which emotion can be reconceived as a formative and independent social variable integral to the reproduction of postmodernity; and (3) analyze the practices and discourses that have contributed to the historically changing, oftentimes, inconsistent and disputed, study of emotion. After the principle issues were introduced in the opening Chapter, the second Chapter outlined the relationships between emotion, the everyday, media, and postmodernity, with the everyday representing a key theoretical construct necessary for understanding our time. This Chapter closed with an exploration of so-called postmodern emotion. Using several theoretical frameworks, Chapter 3 tracked historical, discursive, and disciplinary interests in emotion and Chapter 4 relations between theories of emotions through pre-modern (5thC B.C.-1890), modern (1890-1960), and postmodern (1960-) periods. Next, Chapter 5 charted the etymologies of the primary emotion terms, while Chapter 6 explored approaches to the study of emotion in Communication Studies, or Communicology. After an initial analysis of 'bibliometric' data, the three primary traditional approaches were then systematically identified and examined. A fourth postmodern approach, the constructionist, was presented and assessed in the last Chapter. There it was argued that, from this perspective, communication constitutes reality and not merely provides a conduit for preformed intentional and emotional states. There, the concept of social emotion was advanced, the idea of emotion as socio-culture performance developed, and a rules based theoretical f

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This dissertation deals with the understanding of policies and interventions that foster human development, with a focus on children and youth, and to build a link between human development and a learning society by using an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis studies how individuals develop their learning capabilities as well as their creative, entrepreneurial, and socio-emotional skills. The dissertation is structured in three main chapters in addition to this brief introduction. The first chapter, "Affective Neuroscience meets Labor Economics: Assessing Non-Cognitive skills on Late Stage Investment on at-Risk Youth,” studies the role of a program designed to foster entrepreneurial and self-confidence through learning by failure using insights from micro-econometric, behavioral economics and applied neuroscience. The second chapter, "How Much Should We Trust Self-reported Measures of Non-cognitive Skills?,” explores the relation between transient emotional states and self-ratings on self-reported measures of socio-emotional skills using a behavioral and a neuro-physiological experiment. This chapter also works as a “proof of concept” of the methods —e.g. emotion-detection theory and lab-in-the-field experiments implemented on chapter 1. The third chapter, “Can Art-based Programs Nurture Human Capital? Evidence From Public Schools in Chile,” studies the impacts of an art-based program in high school in Chile following a quasi-experimental design using propensity score matching techniques.

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The problem of the investigation was to ascertain the contributions of various sociological theorists to a sociology of emotions. Emphasis was to be placed on the symbolic interactionist school. The method employed was that of a literature review, with an evaluative analysis of each of a number of writers as each contributed to a sociology of emotions. The study had the purpose of remedying the long-standing neglect of emotions by sociologists. This purpose was accomplished by indicating the distinctive contributions of each theorist and areas of convergence among theorists. The investigation was organized according to groups of theorists. Each theorist was examined for conceptions of human nature and of the relationship between the individual and society. Chapter I discussed the problem in general; the remaining chapters analyzed the theorists. Chapter II discussed the classical theorists Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Talcott Parsons. Chapter III presented the views of the symbolic interactionists George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley, Herbert Blumer, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, and Erving Goffman. Chapter IV treated contemporary theorists: Arlie Hochschild, Theodore Kemper, Susan Shott, and Norman Denzin.

This dissertation explores the nexus of joy and power in the lived experience of the ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (first to fourth centuries CE). The study brings together affect theory and history of emotion to reimagine a phenomenological approach to classical rabbinic texts, a phenomenology that is historically and philologically grounded and attuned to embodied aspects of emotional experiences. By applying this method, this work situates the rabbis of Palestine within the “imperial economy of emotions,” in which provincial subjects utilized a surplus or shortage of collective emotions to assert or resist their place within the dominant political system of the Roman empire. It argues that, within this economy, the rabbis’ engagement with public joy—construed as a somatic and relational experience —was key to their negotiation of Roman imperialism. The dissertation thus makes three chief contributions to the study of ancient Judaism, cognate areas of research, and the field of Religious Studies more broadly. First, it demonstrates how joy, an emotion that is habitually thought of as politically inert, was a potent force in the world of the rabbis and other provincial subjects of the Roman empire. Second, through the case study of the ancient rabbis, the dissertation shows that the minority-majority interface in asymmetric power systems must be understood not only in terms of discourse and ideology but also as a product of the affective forces of daily life. Third, by performing a historically grounded phenomenology of joy, “Affect in Power” pushes back on the wholesale rejection of “experience” as an analytical category in contemporary scholarship.

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The purpose of this study was to compare nonverbal emotional expressiveness between substance users and nonsubstance users.