Ce mémoire offre une solution au paradoxe de la musique triste. Il défend la thèse selon laquelle l’écoute de musique triste n’est jamais réellement problématique, dans la mesure où, lorsque ce type de musique engendre des états affectifs négatifs, personne ne s’y expose volontairement pour des raisons intrinsèques. En d’autres mots, certes, la musique triste peut engendrer des expériences affectives négatives comme la tristesse, mais personne n’apprécie de telles expériences affectives en soi. Plutôt, les individus s’exposent à ces dernières à des fins de régulation émotionnelle, c’est-à-dire qu’ils espèrent ultimement obtenir des bénéfices affectifs et/ou cognitifs de telles expériences. Il est également défendu que certains individus écoutent de la musique triste pour des raisons qui n’ont absolument rien à voir avec une quelconque induction d’états affectifs négatifs. Ils l’écoutent tout simplement, car ils apprécient ce genre de musique en soi pour une multitude de raisons. Il est notamment mis de l’avant que dans certains cas, une de ces raisons serait que la musique triste engendre de la quasi-tristesse – soit, une forme de tristesse à valence neutre dépourvue d’objet intentionnel spécifique – qui devient positive du fait d’être associée à d’autres phénomènes et facteurs eux-mêmes positifs faisant également partie de l’expérience d’écoute de musique triste. / This thesis offers a solution to the paradox of sad music. It defends the idea that listening to sad music is never problematic, insofar as, when this type of music generates negative affective states, no one voluntarily exposes themselves to these states for intrinsic reasons. In other words, sad music can lead to negative emotional experiences such as sadness, but no one appreciates such emotional experiences in themselves. Rather, individuals expose themselves to these experiences for the purposes of emotional regulation, that is, they ultimately hope to obtain emotional and/or cognitive benefits from such experiences. This thesis also defends the idea that some individuals listen to sad music for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with any induction of negative affective states. They just listen to it because they enjoy this kind of music in itself for a multitude of reasons. In particular, it is argued that in some cases, one of these reasons is that sad music generates quasi-sadness – that is, a form of sadness with a neutral valence devoid of a specific intentional object – which becomes positive because it is associated with other phenomena and factors that are themselves positive and are also part of the experience of listening to sad music.

Les « maladies de l’âme » ont existé de tout temps et l’homme s’est employé à les nommer, à en rechercher les causes dans un déséquilibre organique, ou encore un mauvais usage de la raison qui le priverait de la félicité, celle-ci étant reconnue comme tranquillitas animi ou salut éternel. L’aspect le plus fécond de ce mal de vivre, d’un point de vue artistique et littéraire, repose sur le concept de mélancolie, tandis qu’aujourd’hui, sa forme diffuse en est la dépression. Lacan dans Télévision, décrivant cette dernière comme « une faute morale, comme s’exprimait Dante, voire Spinoza : un péché, ce qui veut dire une lâcheté morale », place la question sur un plan décidément éthique et incite à reconsidérer la subtile réflexion des Pères de l’Eglise et de Saint Thomas, concernant la relation entre péché et « maladie de l’âme », soit encore l’acédie dans ce contexte. Dante, cité explicitement par Lacan, et puis Pétrarque vivent et écrivent durant une période cruciale, qui voit coexister diverses conceptions médicales, philosophiques et artistiques de l’acédie, la mélancolie, l’aegritudo, toutes présentes dans leurs œuvres. Si Dante semble s’appuyer sur la conception médiévale de la maladie de l’âme, essentiellement engendrée par un usage incorrect de la raison et donc une perversion de l’amore di natura, Pétrarque reste, bien que de manière non déclarée, un poète « mélancolique », de fait : il souligne en premier lieu l’irréductible antagonisme entre savoir et félicité et puise dans l’ignorance et l’insatiable désir sa définition de l’essence de la nature humaine. Il fait de ce désir, incarné par la figure éternelle et inaccessible de Laura, la matière même de son chant. / “Maladies of the soul” have always existed, and so humanity seeks to define them and to find their cause and a cure. Over the course of time they have been given many names and their origin has been identified, at different times, in an organic imbalance or in a faulty use of reason, one that drives away happiness, identified in turn as tranquillitas animi or eternal salvation. The most fertile aspect of this malaise from the artistic and literary viewpoint consists in the concept of melancholy, while the form it most commonly takes today is depression. Lacan, defining the latter in Television as a moral failing, as Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness, places the question on a declaredly ethical plane and prompts us to re-examine the penetrating reflection of the Fathers of the Church and St Thomas on the relationship between sin and ‘malady of the soul’, embodied, in this context, by sloth. Dante, cited explicitly by Lacan, and Petrarch both lived and wrote in a crucial era, in which different medical, philosophical and artistic conceptions of sloth, acedia, melancholy and aegritudo coexisted, and figured in their works. If Dante still appears bound to the mediaeval conception of the malady of the soul, stemming essentially from the faulty use of reason and thus from a perversion of the ‘love of nature’, Petrarch is, not declaredly, but in effect, a ‘melancholic’ poet: he was the first to point out the rift between knowledge and happiness, and to grasp that the essence of human nature lies in ignorance and in insatiable desire. And he makes this desire, embodied in the eternal and unattainable image of Laura, the subject of his poetry.

abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine whether dispositional sadness predicted children's prosocial behavior, and whether empathy-related responding (i.e., sympathy, personal distress) mediated this relation. It was hypothesized that children who were dispositionally sad, but well-regulated (i.e., moderate to high in effortful control), would experience sympathy versus personal distress, and thus would engage in more prosocial behaviors than children who were not well-regulated. Constructs were measured across three time points, when children were 18-, 30-, and 42-months old. In addition, early effortful control (at 18 months) was investigated as a potential moderator of the relation between dispositional sadness and empathy-related responding. Separate path models were computed for sadness predicting prosocial behavior with (1) sympathy and (2) personal distress as the mediator. In path analysis, sadness was found to be a positive predictor of sympathy across time. There was not a significant mediated effect of sympathy on the relation between sadness and prosocial behavior (both reported and observed). In path models with personal distress, sadness was not a significant predictor of personal distress, and personal distress was not a significant predictor of prosocial behavior (therefore, mediation analyses were not pursued). The moderated effect of effortful control was significant for the relation between 18-month sadness and 30-month sympathy; contrary to expectation, sadness was a significant, positive predictor of sympathy only for children who had average and low levels of effortful control (children high in effortful control were high in sympathy regardless of level of sadness). There was no significant moderated effect of effortful control on the path from sadness to personal distress. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of sadness in empathy-related responding and prosocial behavior as well as the dual role of effortful control and sadness in predicting empathy-related responding. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Psychology 2012

L’élégie chez Rousseau rassemble les époques, elle rend le sens étymologique [l’élégie thrène], celui de l’époque romaine [l’élégie d’amour] et le sens moderne [l’élégie tendre de l’amitié] où on parle plutôt de tonalité élégiaque. Elle rappelle à plusieurs égards le genre classique illustré principalement par Tibulle, Properce et Ovide. Rousseau semble emprunter des motifs à l’héritage antique sans pour autant s’y assujettir. Le ton de la plainte ou du chant est dicté par des personnages vertueux. L’élégie chez Rousseau échappe au stéréotype et à la « spécialisation » : elle n’est pas dans le sillage du modèle pour lequel elle fut réputée, et dont la matière est purement funèbre ; elle n’est pas, également, un paradigme de l’élégie romaine qui s’est associée presque exclusivement à l’expression de la passion amoureuse, elle n’est pas limitée à l’expression tendre de l’amitié. Elle n’est pas seulement une esthétique. L’élégie chez Rousseau est l’ensemble de toutes ses manifestations. C’est l’expression d’une attitude. / Rousseau’s elegy deals with the themes of the lament for the death, of the absence and of the loss of one beloved. Rousseau seems to be influenced by the latin poets such as Tibulle, Propers and Ovide. Nevertheless, he is distinguished from them by the way, with which he treats the motifs. These are submitted to the nature of the characters in the novel of Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. In addition, Rousseau uses these motifs in different other contexts. Then, elegy becomes a source of "tools" to say an idea or a point of view. Rousseau’s elegy is more than a statement of complaints or a sad love story: it is an art of writing.

This paper researches the use of conceptual metaphors in rap and country song lyrics. It looks specifically at conceptual metaphors for the concepts of LOVE and SADNESS, focusing on what source domains are proposed in each genre, what similarities there are in source domains between the genres and the style of language found in the linguistic expressions in the two genres. Song lists and lyrics were obtained from internet sites and then, using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), linguistic expressions were identified which were then subjected to a qualitative analysis. Those relating to SADNESS and LOVE were grouped according to proposed source domains for comparison. The results show that there are similarities, and some differences in the source domains identified within the genres and that they have a wide variety of sub-domains. Concrete concepts common to both genres do not exhibit the same mapping of correspondences to the target domains. There is no discernible difference in the style of language used in the linguistic expressions of the two genres. Nevertheless, the rap expressions tend to be more in the present, dynamic and at times sexually provocative whereas in country expressions they tend to be more reflective, virtuous and at times, depressing.