Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-122).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-103). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-140).

It is not uncommon to hear people speak of their worlds coming undone during traumatic events of existential crisis or catastrophe. Yet, human geographers have largely neglected to attend to the phenomenal nature of this unbounded sense of 'unworlding' disintegration, as well as the wild material forces, agencies and passions at loose in the world that carry the unlimited potential to wreck the integrity of our worlds. This dissertation dedicates itself to critically thinking through the human experience of suffering to live through, confront and respond to unworlding disasters of sense that are materially capable of disrupting the functional and relational composition of our worlds. More concretely, in this dissertation I explore unworlding disasters of sense through the specific experiences of agoraphobic sufferers. While social scientists, including human geographers, have long been interested in what is sociologically, spatially and clinically exceptional about agoraphobia as a static predicament of being spatially bounded due to fear of public space, little to no consideration has been given to how agoraphobia primitively and phenomenally manifests itself as an eventful disordering of sense that unsettles not just one's situated place in the world, but the entire relational order of the world itself. By critically attending to agoraphobia as an eventful disordering of sense that improperly deforms the structure of a human world, I seek to develop new ways to account for affective disasters of unworlding that carry the potential to overturn a proper sense of the world. Furthermore, I also speculate on the finite human ability to affirmatively respond to, make sense of, and impose limits on unworlding disasters that exceed one's subjective ability to grasp, yet improperly and materially affect the entire scope of one's lifeworld. In terms of its greater contribution to the discipline of geography, in this dissertation I strive to develop new understandings about the human condition of being in an eventful, material world that infinitely exceeds our ability to subjectively control or understand. By doing so, this dissertation aims to reaffirm the humanistic perspective as a theoretically valid and ethically critical way of practicing geography after the non-representational turn. / text

Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009) and the work of LGBTQ activists in the U.S. I argue that the act consolidates the U.S. nation-state’s monopoly on violence by relying on criminal law as a cognitive apparatus and stifles the work of LGBTQ activists and cultural labor to expand or challenge sensibilities regarding violence. I look to the work of trans and queer activists and how they frame “minor” hate crime cases in relationship to space and systems of criminalization. The activism surrounding Sakia Gunn, the New Jersey 7, Chrissy Lee Polis, and CeCe McDonald broaden theoretical account of violence provided by hate crime protections by attending to affect, the body, and space, and make political demands that move beyond criminal law. This thesis attempts to follow those trajectories and provide alternative grammars and methods for addressing violence. / text

<p>There are an unlimited number of ways a person may respond to someone sharing pain-related thoughts or feelings. Understanding what types of responses may result in positive outcomes for individuals with pain is important, yet limited research has been conducted in this area. The purpose of this dissertation was to understand how validation as a response to verbal disclosures about pain influences positive and negative affect, pain intensity, and pain tolerance as compared to other responses. To examine this question, an experimental design with best friend dyads was used. Participants engaged in a pain induction task and were asked to verbally share about their pain, and either their friend or a research assistant delivered validating, neutral, or invalidating responses. Results found that receiving validating was related to greater positive affect and reduced negative affect as compared to receiving in validating responses, and some group differences emerged between participants who received responses from friends as compared to research assistants.</p> / Dissertation

In animals, humans and robots, imitative behaviours are very useful for acting, learning and communicating. Implementing imitation in autonomous robots is still a challenge and one of the main problems is to make them choose when and who to imitate. We start from minimalist architectures, following a bottom-up approach, to progressively complete them. Based on imitation processes in nature, many architectures have been developed and implemented to increase quality (essentially in terms of reproducing actions with accuracy) of imitation in robots. Nevertheless, autonomous robots need architectures where imitative behaviour is well integrated with the other behaviours like seeking for stability, exploration or exploitation. Moreover, whether to express imitative behaviours or not should also depend on the history of interactions (positive or negative) between robots and their interactive partners. In this thesis, we show with real robots how low-level imitation can emerge from other essential behaviours and how affect can modulate the way they are exhibited. On top of proposing a novel vision of imitation, we show how agents can autonomously switch between these behaviours depending on affective bonds they have developed. Moreover, with simple architectures, we are able to reproduce behaviours observed in nature, and we present a new way to tackle the issue of learning at different time scales in continuous time and space with discretization.

Affect plays a central role in perception and action. We register how good or bad we feel about objects in our environment at the moment of perception. These associations can guide decisions between different courses of action. And how we feel about those decisions influences subsequent affective states, and therefore subsequent decisions. A consistent set of brain regions has been implicated in affect and decision-making – including regions of medial prefrontal cortex, striatum, and insula – but their respective roles in interfacing between affect, valuation and choice are debated. One region in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex/medial orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/mOFC), finds itself at the center of both affective and seemingly non-affective phenomena, in ways that can be either central or peripheral to the decision at hand. The current studies use functional MRI to explore the role of these different circuits during the process of generating automatic affective associations (Parts 1 and 3), integrating those affective associations into value-based decisions (Parts 2 and 3), and then integrating the experience of choosing into its own affective association (Part 3). Part 1 shows that the same region of vmPFC/mOFC automatically tracks the associations an object has with an affective valence (i.e., how unpleasant/pleasant it is) as well as with other objects in memory. Part 2 shows that affective associations for abstract but morally salient outcomes (hypothetical lives saved vs. sacrificed) can be integrated into a common value to guide moral judgments. The neural circuits involved in this process were consistent with those that have played similar roles when decisions were instead between food or monetary rewards. Part 3 shows that decisions between multiple rewarding options (i.e., "win-win" choices) activate separate neural circuits involved in evaluating (a) expected rewards and (b) the difficulty of making a choice, with the consequence being a simultaneously (a) positive and (b) anxiety-provoking affective experience. The vmPFC/mOFC played an important role in each of the three studies, in a manner consistent with a proposed role in integrating affective experience with other representations in memory in order to inform feelings and behavior. Together, these findings help to better elucidate the roles of different neural circuits in translating affective experience into choice and choices into affective experiences. / Psychology

The thesis describes and reflects on a middle-manager’s experience of a market-led economic based restructuring project in a New Zealand public sector organisation. The thesis takes the form of an autoethnography, a reflexive account of the writer’s personal experience while acting in a professional capacity. The use of autoethnography as a research social science methodology has been subject to criticisms relating validity and relevance. However, the value of this methodology is the potential to ‘situate’ the reader inside the events, providing a rich understanding of the lived experience of the emergence of a restructured organisation. The thesis shows how a hierarchical organisation, celebrating the primacy of management and the financialization of all transactions, required middle-managers to put aside their professional / vocational commitments to work and enter into and endorse fealty / loyalty relationships with senior executives. It shows how both the language and silences of organisational change served to rationalise a new ‘ordering’ of the ‘moral mazes’ of the organisation that not only demanded commitment be demonstrated through loyalty, but also positioned middle-managers, who were rendered as insecure as their colleagues / team members, as the mediators / controllers of the restructure project. The thesis argues that the negative affect exhibited by team members involved in the restructuring project was a direct consequence of the intervention methodology and communication style deployed by senior management.

This study argues for the need of a testable general symbolic interactionist theory of criminal behavior. I look to affect control theory, a structural symbolic interactionist theory of behavior focused on the cybernetic maintenance of affective meanings shared within a linguistic group and extrapolate from its statements and equations using a large hypothetical event simulation. Employing a novel story-telling interview method to uncover the process of definition of the situation, I interview twenty-five paroled offenders and describe a typical view of criminal actions in both violent and property crime events. I examine this view for criminogenic potential. Next, I investigate the popular view that identity controls behavior in interaction by asking parolees about themselves, and comparing their self perspectives to those of undergraduate students. No support for this view is found. Implications of different culturally-based meaning systems are then examined by measuring affective meanings of criminal events as they are perceived by three different aggregate groups: paroled offenders, probationary offenders, and undergraduate student non-offenders. Affect control predictions about the likelihood of criminal events given these perspectives are found to be in accordance with the relative surmised likelihood of criminal behavior for these groups, as extrapolated from their past behavior. This supports arguments of a culturally based explanation of criminal behavior. I argue that affect control theory presents criminology with the novel potential for a generative theory of crime that integrates micrological and macrological levels of analysis. Finally I outline a proposed affect control theory of crime for further testing.