327 research outputs found

    Atmosphere & Challenge: An Exploration of Dissonant Player Experiences

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    Dissonance means an unusual combination of any two things. Two dissonant experiences in video games which could lead to undesirable player states are thematic dissonance and difficulty dissonance. Thematic dissonance potentially annoys players by breaking the atmosphere, and difficulty dissonance by preventing players with low skill from progressing past unbalanced challenges, resulting in rage-quits. This thesis seeks to deepen the understanding of dissonant experiences in video games through two experiments measuring the player experience as affected by different audio and practice conditions respectively. Results indicate that the experience colloquially referred to as a rage-quit is directly affected by avatar death events and game-specific skill and is related to lower levels of heart rate variability (HRV) and higher levels of electrodermal activity (EDA), which implicates feelings of stress. This project successfully advances the definition of video game atmosphere as the level of subjective thematic fit or association between the audio and visual components of a game’s setting, and indicates that musical thematic dissonance may lead to higher intensity negative valence facial events

    A Poetics of Time and Timing in the Moving Image

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    Time is an aesthetic feature of film and the moving image that we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Beyond music, it is difficult to imagine an artform that places more importance on time as an aesthetic feature, yet questions surrounding how time affects the emotions in film and other moving images such as television and video have largely been overlooked. Taking an analytic-cognitive approach, my original contribution to knowledge aims to fill this gap by uncovering the ways in which time and the temporal relations between and among images, sounds, actions, and events (or what I will generalise as the 'audio-visual makeup' of film) affect our emotions during film engagement. The general claim of this dissertation is that emotional engagement with a film is not solely the domain of sound and picture, but of time as well. Filmmakers can manipulate the temporal relations within and throughout the audio-visual makeup of a film through cinematic means involving the mise-en-scène, cinematography, and sound. Through a close analysis of examples from predominantly contemporary narrative film with some relevant references to television and video, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that time and the temporal relations within and throughout the audio-visual makeup of film influence emotional engagement with narrative films. By focusing mainly on three emotion-driven genres, including horror, suspense-thriller, and comedy, my analyses will seek to demonstrate that manipulating the temporal relations within and throughout the audio-visual makeup helps generate emotions. Refining and expanding Susan Feagin's (1999) conceptualisation of timing in film, which she defines as the duration and durational relations between and among images, I develop a theory of affective timing, which aims to explore the ways in which cinematic timing affects viewers emotionally by generating or enhancing affects such as suspense, surprise, and humour. This dissertation argues that just as it matters what happens on screen or in the soundtrack, so too it matters when something happens on screen. In my view, timing is affective when the duration and durational relations within and throughout the audio-visual makeup of a film help generate emotional responses in viewers, which makes affective timing the art of when. By adopting and adapting certain terms from the study of music such as pacing, beats, and rhythm, this dissertation also seeks to advance a productive lexicon for the further discussion of the relationship between the temporal nature of film and emotion or what I call affective temporality

    Studying individual differences and emotion regulation effects on PTSD-like responding and recovery: A psychophysiological VR-trauma paradigm

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    Despite a high proportion of the population experiencing traumatic events within their lifetime, the number of individuals who go on to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is comparatively small; herein highlighting the importance of individual differences in imparting risk and resilience towards the development and maintenance of PTSD. Existing literature illustrates that biological and ecological factors are important in predicting PTSD development, with pathological vulnerabilities excepting their effects at pre- peri- and post trauma stages. Whilst cognitive and emotion based models of PTSD account for the role of a minority of known pre-trauma risk factors, individual differences in peri- and post trauma processes are held as critical to the development of PTSD. The broad range of risk factors implicated in the empirical literature, and necessity of traumatic exposure to PTSD, implicates the utility of a diathesis-stress conceptualisation of PTSD development. The current thesis employed an analogue VR-trauma paradigm to investigate the respective importance of vulnerability factors at each stage, in the prediction of analogue PTSD symptoms (memory problems, startle responses, re-exposure fear habituation), whilst measuring affective and electrophysiological concomitance. Findings supported the importance of peri-traumatic responses in the prediction of PTSD, where present, showing increased predictive capacities over pre- and post-trauma factors. Biological and ecological factors also illustrated important predictive associations, with genetic SNPs implicated in reflex startle and cardiac responses towards intrusive memories. Moreover, peri-traumatic HR decelerations and accelerations mediated the association between pre-trauma factors and cued recall inaccuracy and intrusion severity respectively. Results support existing cognitive and emotional models in their emphasis on peri-traumatic processes but suggest the added utility of a diathesis stress conceptualisation of the development of PTSD, in highlighting the importance of pre-trauma biological and ecological risk and resilience factors.Gerald Kerkutt TrustExeter Graduate Fellowship from University of Exete

    The Montclarion, November 15, 1990

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    Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/1602/thumbnail.jp

    Missouri showme, vol. 27, no. 01 (September 1949)

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    Ethics as Harmony and Improvisation in Responsive Equilibrium: the Core Psychophysical Process as a bio-logical foundation for ethical engagement

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    In this thesis I address the ethics of corporeal being at a foundational level. Rather than starting the discussion of ethics at an abstract level founded in propositions and logical arguments about principles, I offer an holistic view of human engagement that recognises sensori-motor processes and our embodied engagements with the world as foundational to and integral with cognition and higher functions and social skills. I propose that the capacity of human beings to act in an ethically responsible way is built into our biological, psychosocial natures, and that ethical interaction is informed and enhanced by intentionally cultivating a particular psychophysical process. The Core Psychophysical Process (the CPP) that I have identified naturally underlies our interactions in the world as vertebrate creatures, grounds our primary and ongoing developmental and learning processes, and is integral with the process of developing our ethical ‘second nature.’ The CPP is expressed at a fundamental level in a reflexive neuro-musculo-skeletal expansive and contractive process that is integral with an experiential sequence of perception, reaction, and reflection leading to choice of action. There is a constant ebb and flow of contraction and expansion throughout the body which resonates with, in and through all of our experiences. It is integrated into processes of reasoning, interpretation, intentionality, emotion, valuing and habit, all of which, along with the abilities to inhibit, deliberate, and choose, are foundational to ethical action. Elements of the CPP are active at every level of corporeal being, from the fluent maintenance of equilibrium at neuronal level through to the dynamics of ethical deliberations and negotiations between people in society. In this thesis the Alexander Technique and processes in the Arts provide exemplars wherein the foundational intrinsic aspects and expressions of the CPP can be understood. In order to fully explore the impact of the CPP in human experience, I examine both theoretical and practical experimental experience with the CPP in relation to: historical and contemporary readings from different cultures in bioethics, ethics, philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of mind; empirical investigations in cognitive science, physiology, and neuroscience; and Susan Hurley’s Shared Circuits Model. This is a phenomenological study, from a feminist and arts-based perspective. Arts Phenomenology starts with the question: ‘What is the experience of being with, acting with, with the intention to?’ That perspective leaves behind subject/object, mind/body dualities to understand human experience as extended and grounded in the embodied interactions of social being. I offer alternate conceptions of embodiment, and explore Bodily ‘I’dentity that reflects multi-sensory meaning-making grounded in experience

    Consuming Mutilation : Affectivity and Corporeal Transgression on Stage and Screen.

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    This thesis suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, I propose a new affective corporeal model that accounts for the impact of recent films such as Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). I also explore how such a theoretical approach exceeds cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on phenomenology, Pain Studies and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'body without organs'. This thesis finds the seed for spectatorial affect in the dramatic tradition and its corporeal instantaneity. It thus also offers a brief genealogy of affective mutilation as it is evolves in Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, the Gothic stage, the theatre of the grand guignol and Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Case studies of representative texts shed light on the affective innovations that cinema draws from in order to convey similar participatory experiences. I consider how contemporary horror appeals directly to the somatic body through a focus on moments of extreme mutilation. I therefore find it necessary to complicate traditional views of the genre as sadistic, and offer a more nuanced conceptualisation of visual mutilation that allows for fluid, organic and non-representational connections between on-screen bodies and spectators. Issues of cinematic identification and alignment are addressed in relation to key texts of the 'torture porn' and 'snuff films' subgenres. Ultimately, I show that the affective corporeal model may be used to analyse a number of texts which utilize and manipulate the organic aspects of human embodiment. Precisely because the chosen texts have not been traditionally studied under an affective lens before, the results render an innovative re-evaluation of their cultural and spectatorial dimensions

    Bodily sensation in contemporary extreme horror film

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    Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film provides a theory of horror film spectatorship rooted in the physiology of the viewer. In a novel contribution to the field of film studies research, it seeks to integrate contemporary scientific theories of mind with psychological paradigms of film interpretation. Proceeding from a connectionist model of brain function that proposes psychological processes are underpinned by neurology, this thesis contends that whilst conscious engagement with film often appears to be driven by psychosocial conditions – including cultural influence, gender dynamics and social situation – it is physiology and bodily sensation that provide the infrastructure upon which this superstructure rests. Drawing upon the philosophical works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Alain Berthoz, the argument concentrates upon explicating the specific bodily sensations and experiences that contribute to the creation of implicit structures of understanding, or embodied schemata, that we apply to the world round us. Integrating philosophy with contemporary neurological research in the spheres of cognition and neurocinematics, a number of correspondences are drawn between physiological states and the concomitant psychological states often perceived to arise simultaneously alongside them. The thesis offers detailed analysis of a selection of extreme horror films that, it is contended, conscientiously incorporate the body of the viewer in the process of spectatorship through manipulation of visual, auditory, vestibular, gustatory and nociceptive sensory stimulations, simulations and the embodied schemata that arise from everyday physiological experience. The phenomenological film criticism of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks is adopted and expanded upon in order to suggest that the organicity of the human body guides and structures the psychosocial engagement with, and interpretation of, contemporary extreme horror film. This project thus exposes the body as the architectural foundation upon which conscious interaction with film texts occurs
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