Second Life, a 3-D virtual world, has evolved as a shopping channel for both consumers and retailers. This channel of retailing offers interactive environment, allows designing atmospherics, and provides enjoyable shopping experience as compared to website stores. The purpose of the study was: (1) to identify the key features of Second Life stores and (2) to determine the relationship of the Second Life store features with consumer purchase intentions. The online survey was administered in Second Life by an external research agency, and 249 usable surveys were collected. The data were analyzed utilizing factor analysis and regression. Three key features of Second Life stores were explored in this study. These three features were: (1) interactivity via the two components of two-way communication and active control, (2) store atmospherics, and (3) shopping enjoyment. Regression analysis showed that shopping enjoyment and two-way communication (i.e., the presence of an avatar sales representative) were significant predictors of purchase intention in Second Life stores, while active control and store atmospherics did not influence purchase intentions.

Thesis advisor: Stephen F. Brown / The dissertation explores Bonaventure’s understanding of the doctrine of image and likeness in terms of analogy, spirituality and the beatific enjoyment of God. The concept had a patristic background, and there were two trends in interpreting the concepts of image and likeness: one which distinguished the concepts of image and likeness, and one which identified both. Irenaeus made a distinction between the image and likeness of God, whereas Augustine identified them. The monastic authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, and Richard of St. Victor contributed to develop the doctrine of image and likeness. In this period, monastic theologians constructed the idea that the image is a natural and inseparable endowment from God, while likeness is a supernatural gift. In his De sacramentis, Hugh articulates an important and influential statement: Imago pertinet ad figuram, similitudo ad naturam. Many of the medieval theologians, including Bonaventure, considered Hugh’s concept useful to interpret the distinction between image and likeness. Also, the affective reading of Dionysius by Hugh and Richard inspired Bonaventure to construct the spiritual theology in terms of affective ideology: Assimilation to God is more a matter of love than knowledge. Peter Lombard’s composition of The Book of the Sentences opened the possibility to talk about the image-likeness doctrine in terms of ‘uti’ and ‘frui,’ and of ‘res’ and ‘signa.’ Bonaventure further developed Lombard’s ideas, and he explicitly connected the idea of uti and frui, i.e., fruitio Dei, with the doctrine of image and likeness, i.e., the doctrine of analogy. In the scholastic era, the doctrine of image and likeness of God nuanced a new tone in that the schoolmen discussed the doctrine in terms of causal similarity between Creator and creatures, or of the metaphysics of causation. In this theological atmosphere, Bonaventure now relates visio beatifica to the theological argument of whether there is any convenientia between radically unlike things, such as God and creatures. According to Bonaventure, there is a convenientia between God and human beings in terms of comparatio duorum ad invicem. God as the formal object of the human soul “expressed/imprinted” God’s divine nature in the created order, that is, similitudo expressa. This divine likeness is the efficient cause for the human beings’ aspiration/capacity for God. It is important to notice that Bonaventure’s doctrine of analogy is a ‘theological instrument’ that plays between the doctrine of analogy and the spiritual life. Itinerarium is a fine theological and spiritual treatise that shows how Bonaventure sketches the course of the soul’s journey in terms of the godlikeness in the order of creation: vestige, image and likeness. For Bonaventure, St. Francis, a vir hierarchicus, is an ‘exemplar’ of a person who completes this assimilative/ascending process of the journey into God, and he becomes a ‘divine exemplar’ or a ‘similitudo expressa,’ benefiting others to ascend the ladder into the enjoyment of God. As an angelic person, Francis “descends” to the created order reality and participates in God’s providential care for the well beings of creatures including human beings. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

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Little is known about the mechanisms underlying the relation between perceived teacher emotional support and intrinsic motivation to learn English. The primary purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional correlation study was to examine the mediating effects of foreign language enjoyment, anxiety, and self-efficacy on the relationship between Chinese college students’ perceptions of teacher emotional caring and intrinsic motivation in EFL classrooms. Undergraduates (N = 1,464) enrolled in six public four-year universities in mainland China completed five student self-report questionnaires. Data were analyzed using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression-based path analysis with the PROCESS macros for SPSS and utilizing the Amos program version 26.0 for structural equation modeling (SEM) with maximum likelihood method. Five specific indirect effects of emotional support from teachers on intrinsic motivation to learn English were tested. Specifically, the five indirect effects (or mediating) pathways were hypothesized as: (1) teacher emotional support to enjoyment to intrinsic motivation, (2) teacher emotional support to anxiety to intrinsic motivation, (3) teacher emotional support to self-efficacy to intrinsic motivation, (4) teacher emotional support to enjoyment to self-efficacy to intrinsic motivation, and (5) teacher emotional support to anxiety to self-efficacy to intrinsic motivation. Results of mediation analyses revealed that foreign language enjoyment and anxiety independently mediated the relationship between teacher emotional support and intrinsic motivation to learn English. However, self-efficacy did not independently mediate the effect of teacher emotional caring on intrinsic motivation. Further, there was evidence of mediating pathways from teacher emotional support to intrinsic motivation through enjoyment then to self-efficacy as well as anxiety then to self-efficacy. Additionally, when estimating the mediation model, the results are the same whether SEM or an OLS regression is used. The findings of the present research make a contribution to the SLA motivation literature and add additional support for the Self-Determination Theory (SDT). I discuss implications and limitations as well as recommendations for future search.

Psychologue dans l'Éducation Nationale, nous avons observé les effets de la mutation actuelle du lien social sur l'école. Chacun peut constater l'émergence des signes d'une conflictualité accrue : décrochage scolaire, phobie scolaire, augmentation du nombre de journées d'exclusion, appel pressant à un retour de l'autorité, épuisement des enseignants, multiplication des projets d'accueil individualisé ou inflation des demandes d'interventions d'auxiliaires de vie... Quelle lecture pourrait faire la psychanalyse de ces symptômes contemporains ? En quoi sont-ils l'expression du dépassement du complexe d'OEdipe pour couvrir d'un nouvel habillage symbolique l'impossible du rapport sexuel au XXIe siècle ? C'est là toute l'orientation de notre travail de thèse qui tente de mieux comprendre les enjeux cliniques et aussi les mécanismes psychiques convoqués dans un lien social désormais organisé par un "maître-capitaliste." / As a psychologist within the National Education system, I bear witness to the changes taking place in social links over schools. Everyone is able to note the emergence of signs of increasing conflicts : drop-out rate, school phobia, increase number of days of expulsion, calls for a return to more authority, exhausted teachers, growing need for individual remedial tuition, and expanding requests for help from carers. How could psychoanalysis interpret these contemporary symptoms ? In which way are they expressions of putting aside the Oedipus complex in order to symbolically fake the impossible nature of relationships between the sexes in the 21st century ? This is the aim of our current work to try and better understand the clinical issues and also the mental processes that arisenowadays in social links increasingly organised by a "capitalist master."

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More than one-half of university students in the United States and Canada are not active enough to gain health benefits. Enjoyment of exercise proposes a feasible solution to the absence of motivation surrounding physical activity. The purpose of this study is to compare the differences in reported enjoyment between upper and lower body cycling graded exercise to exhaustion (GXT). Seven university students (23 ± 3 years old; 26 ± 4 kg/m2) performed two randomized graded exercise tests on different days: one for upper body, one for lower body. Feeling Scale (FS) measured the affective response during exercise. Post-exercise enjoyment values were recorded 15 minutes after concluding GXT using the Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale (PACES), which has been shown to be a valid and reliable measure of physical activity enjoyment. Paired t-tests were used to evaluate mean differences between upper and lower body GXT enjoyment scores. Rank biserial correlations and Cohen's d values were used to evaluate effect size for the non-parametric and parametric analyses. Alpha level was set a priori at p < 0.05. Means and standard deviations were calculated for PACES, age, and BMI. No significant differences were found for enjoyment (p=0.162) between upper (104.3 ± 12.6) and lower-body cycling (97.8 ± 15.3). Notable effect sizes were found for the PACES Total and several subscales (Enjoy/Hate, Pleasant, and Contentment). No significant differences were found for the FS at ventilatory threshold (p=0.586) or at maximal aerobic power (p=0.670) between the upper and lower body GXT trials. More research is needed to explore exercise enjoyment across different exercise modes and provide a more particular evaluation of PACES subscales. Further research should aim to compare enjoyment levels across different physical activity levels (e.g., low, moderate, high), between sexes and within diverse populations.

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Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are complex and interesting objects of study. They are quite popular among both casual and connoisseur gamers, and they are often played continuously over many years. Despite a reasonable amount of existing research on MMORPGs, no clear explanation has emerged to explain what particular game features encourage so many players to enjoy these games for so long. In this thesis, I contend that the most important elements in the success of an MMORPG are meritocratic play and managed player efficiency (MPE). This contention is proved by examining the existing literature on player enjoyment and game design, surveying popular MMORPGs, and building and testing a simple, browser-based game that implements meritocratic play and managed player efficiency. While existing research and my survey of popular MMORPGS provide good support for the importance of meritocratic play and MPE, participants in my study provided much stronger support by reporting particular enjoyment of game tasks that displayed the clearest meritocratic play and the best opportunities to manage player efficiency.

Many online learning technologies grant students great autonomy and control, which imposes high demands for self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. With the fast development of online learning technologies, helping students acquire SRL skills becomes critical to student learning. Theories of SRL emphasize that making problem selection decisions is a critical SRL skill. Research has shown that appropriate problem selection that fit with students’ knowledge level will lead to effective and efficient learning. However, it has also been found that students are not good at making problem selection decisions, especially young learners. It is critical to help students become skilled in selecting appropriate problems in different learning technologies that offer learner control. I studied this question using, as platform, a technology called Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), a type of advanced learning technology that has proven to be effective in supporting students’ domain level learning. It has also been used to help students learn SRL skills such as help-seeking and self-assessment. However, it is an open question whether ITS can be designed to support students’ learning of problem selection skills that will have lasting effects on their problem selection decisions and future learning when the tutor support is not in effect. ITSs are good at adaptively selecting problems for students based on algorithms like Cognitive Mastery. It is likely, but unproven, that ITS problem selection algorithms could be used to provide tutoring on students’ problem selection skills through features like explicit instructions and instant feedback. Furthermore, theories of SRL emphasize the important role of motivations in facilitating effective SRL processes, but not much prior work in ITS has integrated designs that could foster the motivations (i.e., motivational design) to stimulate and sustain effective problem selection behaviors. Lastly, although students generally appreciate having learner control, prior research has found mixed results concerning the effects of learner control on students’ domain level learning outcomes and motivation. There is need to investigate how learner control over problem selection can be designed in learning technologies to enhance students’ learning and motivation. My dissertation work consists of two parts. The first part focuses on creating and scaffolding shared student/system control over problem selection in ITSs by redesigning an Open Learner Model (OLM, visualizations of learning analytics that show students’ learning progress) and integrating gamification features to enhance students’ domain level learning and enjoyment. I conducted three classroom experiments with a total of 566 7th and 8th grade students to investigate the effectiveness of these new designs. The results of the experiments show that an OLM can be designed to support students’ self-assessment and problem selection, resulting in greater learning gains in an ITS when shared control over problem selection is enabled. The experiments also showed that a combination of gamification features (rewards plus allowing re-practice of completed problems, a common game design pattern) integrated with shared control was detrimental to student learning. In the second part of my dissertation, I apply motivational design and user-centered design techniques to extend an ITS with shared control over problem selection so that it helps students learn problem selection skills, with a lasting effect on their problem selection decisions and future learning. I designed a set iv of tutor features that aim at fostering a mastery-approach orientation and learning of a specific problem selection rule, the Mastery Rule. (I will refer to these features as the mastery-oriented features.) I conducted a fourth classroom experiment with 200 6th – 8th grade students to investigate the effectiveness of shared control with mastery-oriented features on students’ domain level learning outcomes, problem selection skills and enjoyment. This experiment also measured whether there were lasting effects of the mastery-oriented shared control on students’ problem selection decisions and learning in new tutor units. The results of the experiment show that shared control over problem selection accompanied by the mastery-oriented features leads to significantly better learning outcomes, as compared to full system-controlled problem selection in the ITS. Furthermore, the mastery-oriented shared control has lasting effects on students’ declarative knowledge of problem selection skills. Nevertheless, there was no effect on future problem selection and future learning, possibly because the tutor greatly facilitated problem selection (through its OLM and badges). My dissertation contributes to the literatures on the effects of learner control on students’ domain level learning outcomes in learning technologies. Specifically, I have shown that a form of learner control (i.e., shared control over problem selection, with mastery-oriented features) can lead to superior learning outcomes than system-controlled problem selection, whereas most prior work has found results in favor of system control. I have also demonstrated that Open Learner Models can be designed to enhance student learning when shared control over problem selection is provided. Further, I have identified a specific combination of gamification features integrated with shared control that may be detrimental to student learning. A second line of contributions of my dissertation concerns research on supporting SRL in ITSs. My work demonstrates that supporting SRL processes in ITSs can lead to improved domain level learning outcomes. It also shows that the shared control with mastery-oriented features have lasting effects on improving students’ declarative knowledge of problem selection skills. Regarding using ITSs to help students learn problem selection skill, the user-centered motivational design identifies mastery-approach orientation as important design focus plus tutor features that can support problem selection in a mastery-oriented way. Lastly, the dissertation contributes to human-computer interaction by generating design recommendations for how to design learner control over problem selection in learning technologies that can support students’ domain level learning, motivation and SRL.