Breast cancer is associated with significant disruption in social support, social cognition, and depression. This study seeks to explore social and emotional factors using the integrative model for social reward processing. To better understand these relationships, 103 women with breast cancer (e.g., stage I – IV; mean age = 58.74, SD = 11.48; range 25 - 82) completed the Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale, Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System - Depression Scale, Medical Outcomes Study- Social Support Survey, and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. Path analysis, controlling for current breast cancer stage and history of a depressive disorder, was used to examine relationships between social pleasure, social support, social cognition, and depression severity. A significant moderated mediation was found with reduced social pleasure related to increased depression severity through (i.e., mediated by) reduced social support. Further, analyses revealed the relationship between reduced social pleasure and reduced social support was moderated by reduced social cognition. Findings suggest unique relationships between reduced social pleasure and social support as they relate to depression severity. Further, reduced social cognition may serve as a risk factor for increased depression severity though its influence on social pleasure and social support. Additionally, findings suggest high social cognition may serve as a protective factor in the relationships between depression severity through its influence on social pleasure and social support. The current study suggests the need for future research focused on integrating strategies for improving social cognition into the treatment of depression in individuals with breast cancer. Future research is needed to explore other domains as potential mechanisms of social reward processing such as social skills, effort, and motivation.

Denna uppsats går igenom skapandet av ett konstruktionsförslag av en postlåda för montage på säkerhetsdörrar. Projektet genomfördes i samarbete med ett företag som tillverkar säkerhetsdörrar i stål. Syftet med arbetet har varit att på uppdrag av företaget utarbeta ett designförslag för en postlåda med ett flertal nya funktioner samt med en innovativ estetisk formgivning. Designen får inte kompromissa med gällande säkerhetskrav samt bör inkludera en bredare målgrupp. Enligt Frenchs modell har en metod använts där användarstudier, tester och fokusgrupper gett viktig information. Designprinciperna inclusive design, pleasure design och gamification har varit ledstjärnor i designprocessen. En funktionsanalys gjordes på en vanlig postlåda som visade vilka funktioner som kan förbättras. Denna analys utgjorde grunden för den efterföljande konceptgenereringsfasen där olika designalternativ utforskades. Konceptgenereringen utmynnade i postlådan Droppen, där redan existerande funktioner har vidareutvecklats. Droppen-konceptet utmanar genom att exempelvis introducera LED-lampor som kommunicerar med användaren samt har ett tidningsställ, som är starkt nog att kunna bära tunga matkassar. Den har också en mjuk droppform som tilltalar många och som gör det lätt att ta upp posten. Postlådan är gjord i zinklegerat stål, vilket gör den tung men hållbar. Möjligheten till individuell anpassning av produkten ökar kundvärdet samt minskar indirekt dess miljöpåverkan / This thesis is about the process of creating a design proposal of a letterbox for mounting on security doors. The project was developed in cooperation with a manufacturer of security doors made of steel. The purpose of this work has been to develop a concept for a mailbox with several new functions and an innovative aesthetic design, at the request of the company. This new design has to be in line with existing security demands and should also include a wide group of users. According to French’s model, a method has been used where user studies, tests and focus groups provides essential information. The three design principles inclusive design, pleasure design and gamification has been the guiding star throughout the process. A function diagram was used on a regular letterbox to find functions with potential for improvements. The focus of the concept development was based on the findings from this diagram. The concept generation resulted in the letter box Droppen, containing innovative functions that have been developed from the existing ones. This letterbox is challenging by expanding old functionalities such as LED lamps as a mean of communication or using the magazine holder as a form of unloading zone. The distinguished and soft form of a drop is a design that appeals to many people and at the same time makes it easy to pick up the mail. The box is made from zinc alloyed steel, which makes it heavy but durable. The many options for individual design not only increase the customer value but also indirectly reduce the impact on the environment.

La schizophrénie (SZ), maladie psychiatrique invalidante, est caractérisée par des symptômes positifs, négatifs, cognitifs, désorganisés, affectifs et moteurs. De par l’absence de résultats positifs dans la prise en charge des symptômes négatifs, nous avons décidé de nous intéresser à l’apathie dans la SZ. Elle se définit par une baisse des comportements dirigés vers un but ayant une origine cognitive, émotionnelle ou comportementale. Notre objectif est d’apporter un éclaircissement sur le concept d’apathie en s’intéressant aux liens entre apathie, anhédonie et BIS/BAS. Le protocole 1 porte sur la validation de la Lille Apathy Rating Scale (LARS), outil multidimensionnel de l’apathie validée dans la maladie de Parkinson, dans la SZ, auprès de 112 patients. Le protocole 2 (étude transversale) s’intéresse aux liens entre apathie, plaisir consommé, anticipatoire, sociale et BIS/BAS, auprès de 112 patients. Enfin, le protocole 3 (étude longitudinale d’un an) porte sur l’évolution de l’apathie et explore les déterminants émotionnels et comportementaux qui pourraient la prédire, auprès de 61 patients. Nos résultats ont mis en évidence une LARS à quatre facteurs avec de bonnes qualités psychométriques dans la SZ. Le facteur 1 est associé au BAS, à l’anhédonie sociale et anticipatoire. Le facteur 2 corrèle avec le BIS et l’anhédonie sociale. Trente-six pourcent des patients ont une apathie trait. Enfin, seul leplaisir anticipatoire prédit le facteur 4. L’apathie nécessite donc pour sa compréhension une approche multidimensionnelle. L’anhédonie et le BIS/BAS ne peuvent expliquer à eux seuls l’apathie émotionnelle et comportementale. D’autres pistes méritent donc d’être explorées. / Schizophrenia (SZ) is a chronic psychiatric disease characterized by positive, negative, cognitive, disorganized, emotional and motor symptoms. The lack of positive results in the treatment of negative symptoms led us to be interested in apathy. Apathy is defined as a multidimensional psychopathological state (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) manifesting as a reduction of voluntary behaviors directed toward one goal. Our aim is to provide a clarification of the concept of apathy by focusing on the relationship between apathy, anhedonia and BIS/BAS. The first study deals with the validation of the Lille Apathy Rating Scale (LARS), which is a multidimensional tool of apathy validated in Parkinson’s disease, in 112 SZ patients. The second study (cross-sectional study) focuses on the link between apathy, consummatory and anticipatory pleasure, social pleasure and BIS/BAS, in 112 SZ patients. Finally, the third study (one year longitudinal study) deals with the evolution of apathy and explores the emotional and behavioral derminants that could predict it. Ours results have shown that the LARS is structured in four factors and has good psychometric properties in SZ. The factor 1 is associated to the BAS and the social and anticipatory anhedonia. The factor 2 is linked to the BIS and the social anhedonia. Thirty-six percent of the patients have an apathy trait. Finally, only anticipatory pleasure predicts the factor 4. Therefore, apathy requires for its understanding a multidimensional approach.Anhedonia and the BIS/BAS cannot by themselves explain the emotional and the behavioral apathy. Consequently, others lines of research need to be explored.

The interest in designing interactive systems is going beyond their functionality and more towards their aesthetics. Often, research fails to address how qualities of the interaction as a medium can actually create pleasurable experiences. However, it points out the importance of understanding temporal aspects of interactions to understand their aesthetics. The aim for this thesis is to address this by the creation and evaluation of an interactive artwork working as a platform to explore relations between Interaction attributes and Pleasures, as well as how temporal aspects in interactions can affect these Pleasures. This to help interaction designers think more clearly around and make better design choices regarding interactions within interactive systems. The results of this showed that there can be many such relations, but also that they are complex. Additionally, it is discussed that Pleasures might also partly be experienced before or after the interaction with the artwork.

Thesis (MA (Psychology))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud‟s ideas are presented with specific emphasis on the themes presented in Freud‟s (1920a) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud‟s Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950) provides important clues to describe the pleasure principle in terms of Quantity (Q), facilitations [Bahnung] and contact-barriers. Therefore, the implications of the pleasure principle relate greatly to 1) Freud‟s notion of the unconscious, 2) Lacan‟s explanation of das Ding, 3) the difference between jouissance and plaisir, and 4) the relationship between das Ding and the Law. Lacan‟s understanding of the death drive is consequently the culmination of all the topics mentioned and repeated throughout. Lacan‟s description of the death drive is twofold: firstly, the mechanical explanation of the pleasure principle, and secondly, how desire features within the pleasure principle. Lacan‟s description of the death drive encompasses libido, desire, economy, Linguistics, and the Oedipus complex, which illustrates why Freud‟s (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle is not only an important text in Freud‟s oeuvre, but also in Lacan‟s. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Jacques Lacan en Sigmund Freud se idees word nagegaan met spesifieke beklemtoning van die temas in Freud (1920a) se Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud (1950) se Project for a Scientific Psychology verskaf belangrike wenke vir die beskrywing van die pleasure principle in terme van kwantiteit (Q), fasilitasies (Bahnung) en kontak-versperrings [contact-barriers]. Gevolglik het die implikasies van die pleasure principle betrekking tot 1) Freud se begrip van die onbewussyn, 2) Lacan se verduideliking van das Ding, 3)die verskil tussen jouissance en plaisir, en 4) die verhouding tussen das Ding en die Wet. Lacan se begrip van die doodsdrang (death drive) is gevolglik die toppunt van al die onderwerpe wat deurentyd genoem en herhaal is. Lacan se beskrywing van die doodsdrang is tweedelig: eerstens, die meganiese verduideliking van die pleasure principle en tweedens, die rol van begeerte in die pleasure principle. Lacan se beskrywing van die doodsdrang behels libido, begeerte, ekonomie, Linguistiek, en die Oedipus-kompleks, wat wys hoekom Freud (1920) se Beyond the Pleasure Principle nie net „n belangrike teks in Freud se werke is nie, maar ook in Lacan s‟n.

In many musical cultures, people synchronise their bodies to the rhythmic patterns of the music, and such embodied engagements are one of the most overtly enjoyable forms of musical appreciation. However, the ways in which rhythmic structure, body-movement and pleasure are related remains unclear. The present thesis directs a broadly psychological, yet multi-methodological and interdisciplinary, approach towards this relationship, centring on the rhythmic structure of syncopation in groove-based funk music. Through perceptual experiments, computational modelling, rating surveys, neuroimaging and motion-capture recording, syncopation was found to relate, in primarily negatively linear and inverted U-shaped ways, to finger-tapping performance, perceptions of stability, subjective desire to move and feelings of pleasure, neural activity in motor and reward areas, and force, synchrony and periodicity in body-movements. These relationships also depended on individuals’ musical training, dancing experience and groove familiarity. Ecological and embodied theories of perception and a phenomenology of groove provide a backdrop to the empirical findings, on the basis of which it is suggested that the different relationships between syncopation in groove and perceptual, subjective, neural and corporeal attributes interact in reciprocal ways. It is proposed that syncopation invites the body to physically enact the musical structure and directly participate in the rhythms of groove, due to the perceptual tension and ‘open spaces’ afforded by the perception of metric events in syncopation. In groove, body, mind and music extend into each other and this distributed musical process has affective significance. Since the physical pleasures of dancing to music are such a historically and culturally ubiquitous phenomenon, the empirical findings and theoretical proposals of this thesis make significant contributions towards a much-needed coupling of affective and embodied theories of music.

This thesis investigates reading for pleasure in Britain from a variety of perspectives, in the context of popular concerns surrounding levels of readership, particularly among young people, and consists of four substantive chapters. The first chapter reports how book sales and library circulation have changed, and what predicts readership in the Taking Part survey. I show that claims surrounding changes in reading in Britain may be overstated, although the number of issues from British libraries has fallen, and that while the predictors of readership are largely as expected, there are some important results surrounding social status, and ethnic differences in children. The second chapter investigates changes in young people’s reading behaviour, using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. I show that changes in young people’s reading cannot be explained through a displacement effects account, and that socioeconomic differences in readership do not increase as panel members get older. In the third chapter, I investigate whether the relationship between reading for pleasure and educational attainment can be explained through cultural capital, and extend this with occupational attainment, using the 1970 British Cohort Study. I show a relationship between reading for pleasure and occupational attainment net of education, and I show that this relationship seems to have a cultural dimension beyond a cognitive effect account. In the fourth chapter, I show that the relationship between leisure in adoles- cence and educational and occupational attainment is not driven purely by highbrow activities, as on a certain understanding of Bourdieu: in particular, I show a relationship between occupational attainment and middlebrow activities.

De multiples plaisirs sont présents dans À la recherche du temps perdu. Ils sont importants pour les personnages en ce que, bien souvent, ils dirigent leur vie, mais aussi parce qu’ils participent à la constitution de portraits : observer les plaisirs d’un personnage permet de le peindre. L’importance du plaisir dépasse le niveau individuel pour atteindre celui du récit (diégèse et narration). Malgré une présence qui tend à l’omniprésence, le plaisir peine à être vécu au présent par des personnages qui le conjuguent plus facilement au passé ou au futur, et en ont une image très négative. C’est que les sens ne sont pas aptes à véhiculer le plaisir, et n’apportent que culpabilité, punition et déception. Il faut alors explorer d’autres voies : apparaissent artifices et perversions, qui finissent aussi par échouer à procurer un plaisir pur. Le héros proustien le trouve dans l’imaginaire, notamment la création littéraire. Paradoxalement, de l’échec du plaisir vient la fertilité créatrice. / Pleasure appears in various guise in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It often directs the characters’ lives or serves to define them: the objects and forms of pleasure enjoyed by the characters constitute indirect portraits of them. Pleasure is not only to be observed on an individual level, but can be analysed on the narrative level. Although it is everywhere to be found, it fails to be actually experienced by characters who more often than not reject it into the past or the future, and entertain a very negative vision of it. The senses indeed appear unable to provide pleasure, and only become sources of guilt, disappointment and retribution. Other paths to pleasure must then be discovered, but artificial paradises or perversions fail to yield real pleasure. The Proustian hero ultimately finds it in the world of imagination, especially through literary creation. Paradoxically, it is from the failure of experiencing pleasure that creative power derives.

This artistic, practice-based thesis has been developed based on the idea that design creates social and ideological change. From this perspective, Body Acts Queer — Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity introduces an artistic way of working with and exploring the performative and ideological functions of clothing with regard to gender, feminism, and queer. The thesis presents this program for experimental fashion design—exemplified through a series of artistic projects—while also discussing the foundations of such an approach and the different perspectives that have affected the program and its artistic examples. Working with clothing and fashion design through artistic projects using text and bodies, this thesis transforms queer and feminist theory into a creative process and, by looking into bodily experiences of clothing, Body Acts Queer investigates its performative and ideological functions, with a focus on cultural, social, and heteronormative structures. Body Acts Queer suggests a change in the ways in which bodies act, are perceived, and are produced within the fashion field, giving examples of—and alternatives to—how queer design practice can be performed. In this thesis, queer design is explored as an inclusive term, containing ideas about clothing and language, the meeting point between fiction and reality, and the ability to perform interpretation and bodily transformations—where pleasure, bodily experiences, and interaction create a change.

Inutile de rappeler la prééminence du regard dans les oeuvres d’Alain Robbe-Grillet etparticulièrement dans Le Voyeur, La Jalousie et Instantanés qui forment le corpus du présenttravail. En apparence, l’auteur se contente de formuler très objectivement la subjectivitéhumaine. Et voilà que l’oeil de la concupiscence charnelle vient entamer cet ordre parfait,géométrique que l’on aurait cru inaltérable. L’objectif de ce travail est justement de montrerque l’oeil de l’arpenteur géomètre dissimule celui du pervers, à la recherche de la jouissance àtravers le regard.La première partie de ce travail, « Montage du regard », analyse les sujets regardantset les sujets/objets regardés dans leur diversité. La volonté de maintenir la distance entreregardeur et regardé et d’instaurer un regard distant est remise en question par tous lesprocédés textuels confirmant la présence d’une subjectivité qui regarde. Une subjectivité quiregarde, mais qui est aussi perverse. C’est ce que tente de montrer la deuxième partie,« Regard pervers et jouissance ». Il s’agit en fait non seulement d’étudier la présence effectivedu voyeur dans ces trois oeuvres, mais aussi de l’approcher dans sa diversité. La troisièmepartie, « Répétition et jouissance », vient confirmer la présence du voyeur pervers, toujours àla recherche de la jouissance par la ressaisie du spectacle convoité, d’où la présence de figuresobsédantes en leitmotiv.Notre approche sera une pure recherche formelle : analyser le regard, c’est mettre enévidence son fonctionnement textuel, par le moyen de la linguistique et de la stylistique. Ellecontribuera à élaborer une nouvelle lecture du regard chez Robbe-Grillet. / It is needless to mention the supremacy of one particular feature in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s works; namely, the look as it is particularly found in Le Voyeur, La Jalousie andInstantanés. These 3 works serve as the corpus for the research at stake. In appearance, andquite objectively, the author seems to be simply expressing human subjectivity. But therecome along eye of lust, altering every perfect geometrical order one could have noticed upuntil now. The goal of this work is to actually unveil the fact that the eye of the surveyor, thegeometer, is only an artifact dissimulating a perverted eye constantly in search of carnalpleasure through the look.The first part of this work, titled “Montage du Regard” ‘The optic setting’, is ananalysis of the observer and of the elements which are observed as diverse as they may be.The will to keep a distance between the observer and the element which a observed isconstantly questioned through the presence of textual elements that clearly reveal asubjectivity in the act of looking at a particular element. A subjectivity that observes, butwhich is also perverted. This is fully analyzed in the second part of the research, “Regardpervers et jouissance” ‘A perverse eye and a sensual pleasure’, which not only analyses theactual presence of the voyeur in the three works mentioned earlier, but also attempts toapproach him and tackle all his diverse aspects. The third part of this study “Répétition etjouissance” ‘Repetition and sensual pleasure’ reaffirms the presence of a perverted observer,always in search for carnal pleasure through the recapture of the coveted show. This furtherexplains the presence of obsessive scenes in a leitmotiv.Our approach in this study is based on a formal analysis of the look. Its goal is tohighlight its textual functioning thanks to linguistic and stylistic means, which will lead theway to a new reading and reconsideration of the look in Robbe-Grillet’s works.