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Background:Those in treatment for substance use disorder (SUD) face significant challenges and express the need for enhanced support for comfort to be successful. There is growing interest in integrative modalities such as aromatherapy using essential oils to support health. Purpose: The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, to see if there was an increase in comfort and ease, and a decrease in stress in those who used an aroma inhaler with Citrus bergamia (Bergamot) essential oil. Second, to determine the feasibility of the intervention. Method: This study was founded upon an integrated theoretical framework combining the theory of comfort (Kolcaba, 2003) and the concept of welcoming ease (Reven, 2022a). This study used two aims to answer the research question. Aim 1 was designed to see if using an aroma inhaler (Aethereo®Stick) with bergamot essential oil for three inhalations, three times a day for seven days compared to those who did not use the aroma inhaler could increase scores for comfort and ease and decrease scores for stress in those in the intervention group. Aim 2 was designed to evaluate feasibility and acceptability. An experimental pretest posttest design with random assignment and an intention to treat design was used. The CONSORT guideline and the TREATS checklist were used to promote clear and complete reporting. Three valid and reliable instruments were used including the generalized comfort questionnaire (GCQ), the ease measure, and the depression, anxiety, and stress scale (DASS-21). Recruitment and enrollment took place between August 2022 and January 2023. Results: The relationships and findings were coherent with concepts of the integrated theoretical framework. A sample size of 57 participants including 25 in the intervention group and 32 in the control group was obtained. There were no statistically significant changes shown in the intervention group. However, post test scores compared to baseline showed mean scores increased for comfort and ease and decreased for stress in the intervention group. In the control group, both ease and stress showed statistically significant worsening (p = < .001; p = .047) respectively. Ease increased after the intervention in both statistical significance (p = .044) and in effect size eta squared = .093. Recruitment, enrollment, and retention rates were good with 57 volunteers in five months. Fidelity was shown with one hundred percent of participants completing the study correctly as shown by data from the logbooks. The intervention was cost effective and relatively easy to do. Conclusions: Those in treatment for SUD face substantial challenges in everyday life and are looking for ways to help manage stress and succeed. This study showed that the use of an aroma inhaler with bergamot essential oil three times daily for one week improved scores for comfort and ease and decreased scores for perception of stress. These findings are encouraging and warrant further investigation.

This dissertation examines the musical practices and experiences of honnêtes gens, a large and influential community of amateur musicians active in seventeenth-century Paris. I first undertake a complete review of the dozens of treatises that make up the honnêteté discourse to position music within the constellation of pursuits deemed essential or worthy of honnêtes gens. I show that French theorists praised music above all for its social utility, for they understood it to be an ingratiating practice beneficial to ambitious men and women drawn to the newly centralized court in Paris. I then reconstruct the social choreography underpinning musical performances by honnêtes gens, which allows for a clearer understanding of music as an agent in the construction of performed identity. The final chapters explore the significance of honnêtes gens for vocal performance and the development of amateur repertoires. From Bertrand de Bacilly’s treatise L’art de bien chanter I recover the lost performance practices endemic to French amateur singers during the seventeenth century. As I demonstrate, a fear of grimacing marred the pronunciation of text by honnêtes gens and affected the vocal quality of their singing. The final chapter situates Francesco Corbetta’s final two publications for baroque guitar within a broader discourse of ease prevalent in Paris. Honnêtes gens, who constituted a large portion of guitar players at this time, cloaked their engagement with music in an “easy air.” For these musicians, music that required practice, persistence, and concentration proved antithetical to pleasure or social distinction. I argue that Corbetta’s work and nearly the entirety of the French baroque guitar tradition demonstrate an increasing awareness of honnêtes gens and their musical practices.

Recent research in social cognition indicates that not only can semantic information be used for judgments; phenomenal experiences such as ease or difficulty of recall are often used as well. For example, when people lack the ability or motivation to think carefully about judgments, they can rely on the phenomenal experience of ease (i.e., the availability heuristic). By contrast, when the judgment topic is personally relevant and motivation to process systematically is high, people rely on recalled content instead. This dissertation tested alternative hypotheses regarding the effect of expertise on use of experienced ease or difficulty of recall. On the one hand, research on expertise regarding a personality trait (i.e., self-schematicity) suggests that schematics (experts) should be resistant to contextual influences such as experienced ease or difficulty of recall or recalled content, while aschematics (novices) should be susceptible to those influences. On the other hand, research on expertise in other domains indicates that experts often rely on heuristics while novices must engage in systematic processing to arrive at sufficiently confident judgments on the same task. The latter prediction seems especially likely regarding experienced ease or difficulty of recall. Novices about a topic should find recalling information difficult regardless of the topic's actual frequency or likelihood. Relying on the experience of ease or difficulty of recall under those circumstances would mean risking judgments that reflect their own lack of knowledge. By contrast, experts should be able to assume that the sense of ease or difficulty of recall reflects the topic's actual frequency or likelihood. Three experiments tested these hypotheses, and findings supported the latter hypothesis. In the first experiment, experts (self-schematics) with regard to assertiveness or unassertiveness relied on the experience of ease or difficulty of recall for related self-judgments, while novices (aschematics) systematically processed recalled content. The second and third experiments replicated and extended these findings regarding expertise about Detroit, showing that true aschematics (not knowledgeable enough to be novices) rely on neither recalled content nor the experience of ease or difficulty of recall, probably due to insufficient judgmental confidence, and that experts' judgment strategies are flexible in light of the personal relevance of the judgment task.