This research examines dismemberment in early modern drama to explore how cultural systems shape human responses to violence. By analysing plays such as Titus Andronicus, the project argues that fear and disgust are historically conditioned rather than purely instinctive, revealing how societies teach audiences to interpret violent imagery across different historical periods

This PhD defense presents computational approaches to human behavior across two domains. First, a construct-mining pipeline uses open-ended responses, sentence embeddings, debiasing, HDBSCAN clustering, and intrusion validation to derive a data-driven taxonomy of emotion regulation strategies. Second, mixed-methods and classifiers analyze German Twitter, linking counter-speech styles to hate reduction at scale.