Browsing by Subject "Emotion"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access A Study of Aristotelian Demands for Some Psychological Views of the Emotions(2009) Santiago, Ana CristinaThis dissertation identifies 5 mayor demands regarding the role of the emotions in Aristotelian virtue theories and examines how well some contemporary psychological views of the emotions deal with these issues. The discussion of the role of emotion in Aristotelian virtue theory draws on Aristotle's texts and the works of Terence Irwin, Nancy Sherman, Martha Nussbaum, John Cooper, Rosalind Hursthouse and Arash Abizadeh. The discussion of the contemporary psychological views of the emotions is based on the work of Paul Griffiths in What Emotions Really Are, and focuses on his division of the study of emotion into affect programs and higher cognitive emotions.
The dissertation is divided in three chapters. The first chapter discusses Aristotelian definitions of emotion and outlines the following demands that psychological theories of emotion should be able to explain: (1) plausibility, (2) psychological harmony, (3) motivational support, (4) perception of moral salience and (5) training. The second chapter explains the psychological views that Griffiths focuses on, the affect program theory and the higher cognitive view, and highlights the areas relevant to the Aristotelian demands. The third chapter compares the contemporary theories of emotion discussed with Aristotelian views of emotion by taking the Aristotelian demands outlined in the first chapter and examining how the contemporary theories handle these issues. I conclude that the contemporary views do not adequately meet the Aristotelian demands and need to pay more attention to the Aristotelian view of emotion to achieve a more complete view. I argue that how a theory distinguishes between basic and higher cognitive emotions impacts the compatibility with Aristotelian notions of emotion and how it can meet its demands.
Item Open Access Binding the Strong Man and the Outpost of Grace: A theological investigation of fear in young adults(2021) Davis, Preston AndrewsThis work unfolds in three moves to explore the rise in fear and anxiety in young adults and to provide a theological response from a chapel office on a college campus. The first move involves an exegetical reading of the Markan parable (adapted in Matthew) of “Binding the Strong Man”. This parable serves as an overarching metaphor for the nature of both the fearful realities many young adults find themselves in and the nature of the God who seeks to break into that reality and remind us of our innate value and worth in God. The parable asks us to think about whom we follow and call our leader, for whom we follow will form us at the deepest levels individually and collectively.
The second move of this thesis examines frameworks for understanding the anxious lives of young adults today: neurological, psychological, philosophical, and finally theological through an Augustinian lens. Through these frameworks we learn we need a renewed appreciation for the emotional life as the primary place of meaning making. Emotions are intelligent, that is, they have something to tell us about our deepest loves and desires. In particular, it investigates Augustine’s exploration of sophistry and philosophy as guides for constraining fear. Ironically, the deeper he found himself in those fields and frameworks the more disordered his inner life became. His personal experience and the values of ancient Rome serve as a warning for what happens when fear is allowed to run the lives of the ambitious individually and collectively.
The final move of the thesis is to take us into the outpost of grace, a location and people retraining their desires in the direction of Christ. This section highlights one prescriptive piece–that of retraining in belonging—to address the rise of loneliness and its interrelationship with anxiety. The outpost of grace provides new liturgies and habits to replace the cultural norms that disorder our inner lives.
Item Open Access Binding the Strong Man and the Outpost of Grace: A theological investigation of fear in young adults(2021) Davis, Preston AndrewsThis work unfolds in three moves to explore the rise in fear and anxiety in young adults and to provide a theological response from a chapel office on a college campus. The first move involves an exegetical reading of the Markan parable (adapted in Matthew) of “Binding the Strong Man”. This parable serves as an overarching metaphor for the nature of both the fearful realities many young adults find themselves in and the nature of the God who seeks to break into that reality and remind us of our innate value and worth in God. The parable asks us to think about whom we follow and call our leader, for whom we follow will form us at the deepest levels individually and collectively.
The second move of this thesis examines frameworks for understanding the anxious lives of young adults today: neurological, psychological, philosophical, and finally theological through an Augustinian lens. Through these frameworks we learn we need a renewed appreciation for the emotional life as the primary place of meaning making. Emotions are intelligent, that is, they have something to tell us about our deepest loves and desires. In particular, it investigates Augustine’s exploration of sophistry and philosophy as guides for constraining fear. Ironically, the deeper he found himself in those fields and frameworks the more disordered his inner life became. His personal experience and the values of ancient Rome serve as a warning for what happens when fear is allowed to run the lives of the ambitious individually and collectively.
The final move of the thesis is to take us into the outpost of grace, a location and people retraining their desires in the direction of Christ. This section highlights one prescriptive piece–that of retraining in belonging—to address the rise of loneliness and its interrelationship with anxiety. The outpost of grace provides new liturgies and habits to replace the cultural norms that disorder our inner lives.
Item Open Access Cognitive Processes in Response to Goal Failure: A Study of Ruminative Thought and its Affective Consequences.(J Soc Clin Psychol, 2013-05-01) Jones, NP; Papadakis, AA; Orr, CA; Strauman, TJFailure to make progress toward personal goals can lead to negative affective states, such as depression and anxiety. Past research suggests that rumination in response to goal failure may prolong and intensify those acute emotional responses, but that process remains unclear. We examined ruminative thought processes following experimentally manipulated exposure to past failures to attain advancement (promotion) goals and safety (prevention) goals. We predicted that priming of past promotion and prevention goal failures would lead individuals to think repetitively about these failures and that negative affect would be evoked by their recognition of their failures. Further, we predicted that when people experience a sufficient magnitude of negative affect, ruminative thought would intensify and prolong the negative affect associated with that type of goal failure. Results yielded strong support for our predictions regarding promotion goal failure and modest support for those regarding prevention goal failure.Item Open Access Cultural Concepts of Negative Emotion: A Mixed-Methods Study Among Nepali Adolescents(2017) Berg, MarthaBackground: Emotions are shaped through the internalization of culturally relevant values. Contextualized systems of meaning influence an individual’s experience of emotion, the consequences of a given response, and their connection to long-term functional outcomes. The present study aims to explore the socioemotional world of Nepali adolescents, in order to understand emotional needs and identify opportunities for psychosocial intervention. Methods: A tablet-based battery of quantitative assessments was administered to 102 students in grades 7-9 (age 12-18) in an earthquake affected region of the Kathmandu Valley. Assessments included measures of anxiety, PTSD, functional impairment, and a local idiom of distress (problems in the heart-mind). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 students and explored the emotional experience of a recent stressor. Results: Three domains of emotion experience emerged: cognitive, physical, and social. While key differences in emotional distress across gender and cultural groups emerged, similarities in the overarching model suggest a shared understanding of negative emotion among Nepali adolescents. Of particular note is the social domain, involving both interpersonal and communal elements, which included the local idiom of distress, which has previously been linked to depression risk. Conclusion: This tripartite conceptualization of emotion is a critical step toward understanding cultural meanings of emotional wellbeing, and the connection between socially experienced emotion and psychopathology underlines the importance of psychosocial integration in future interventions.
Item Open Access Data-driven investigations of disgust(2019) Hanna, EleanorDisgust features prominently in many facets of human life, from dining etiquette to spider phobia to genocide. For some applications, such as public health campaigns, it might be desirable to know how to increase disgust, whereas for things like legal and political decision-making it might be desirable to know how to suppress disgust. However, interventions in neither direction can take place until the basic structure of disgust is better understood. Disgust is notoriously difficult to model, largely due to the fact that it is a highly individually variable, multifactorial construct, with a great breadth of eliciting stimuli and contexts. As such, many of the theories which attempt to comprehensively describe disgust come into conflict with each other, impeding progress towards more efficient and effective ways of predicting disgust-related outcomes. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the possible contribution of data-driven methods to resolving theoretical questions, evaluating extant theories, and the generation of novel conceptual structures from bottom-up insights. Data were collected to sample subjective experience as well as psychophysiological reactivity. Through the use of techniques such as factor analysis and support vector machine classification, several insights about the approaching the study of disgust emerged. In one study, results indicated that the level of abstraction across subdivisions of disgust is not necessarily constant, in spite of a priori theoretical expectations: in other words, some domains of disgust are more general than others, and recognizing as much will improve the predictive validity of a model. Another study highlighted the importance of recognizing one particular category of disgust elicitors (mutilation) as a separate entity from the superordinate domains into which extant theories placed it. Finally, another study investigated the influence of concurrent emotions on variability in disgust physiology, and demonstrated the difference in the representations of the structure of disgust between the level of subjective experience and the level of autonomic activity. In total, the studies conducted as part of this dissertation suggest that for constructs as complex as disgust, data-driven approaches investigations can be a boon to scientists looking to evaluate the quality of the theoretical tools at their disposal.
Item Embargo Dispassion and the Good Life: A Study of Stoicism and Zhuangism(2021) Ren, SongyaoAlthough the notion of dispassion has played an important role in many different traditions, such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Daoism, and eastern Christianity, it does not seem to hold much appeal to people today. To the modern ear, dispassion is often associated with apathy, which refers to a lack of feeling, motivation, or concern. Because of this association, dispassion carries a negative connotation and is frowned upon by many. In this dissertation, I hope to do justice to the notion of dispassion and identify a version of it that can be attractive as an ethical ideal. To do so, I focus on Stoicism and Zhuangism, the traditions of dispassion with which I am most familiar. After discussing Stoic dispassion and Zhuangist dispassion respectively, I argue that dispassion as they conceive it bears little resemblance to apathy. That is, dispassion does not extirpate all emotions, but simply takes us away from emotional upheavals in search of emotional peace. I also argue that Zhuangist dispassion is more plausible than Stoic dispassion through a comparison of their notions of the self. In particular, the Stoics in identifying the self with the self-sufficient virtue or reason not only fails to do justice to our patiency but also renders the self formalized and empty. By contrast, the Zhuangists in identifying the self with the plurality of daos makes possible a kind of self-sufficiency that is more appropriate to our embodied and relational existence.
Item Open Access Domain-General Affect: Neural Mechanisms and Clinical Implications(2014) Winecoff, Amy AileenEmotions guide the way individuals interact with the world, influencing nearly every psychological process from attention, to learning, to metacognition. Constructionist models of emotion posit that emotions arise out of combinations of more general psychological ingredients. These psychological ingredients, however, also form the building blocks of other affective responses such as subjective reactions to rewarding and social stimuli. Here, I propose a domain-general account of affective functioning; I contend that subjective responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli all depend on common psychological and neural mechanisms. I support this hypothesis with three independent studies using both a basic science approach and a clinical approach. In the first study (Chapter 2) I demonstrate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which has been implicated in encoding the value of primary, monetary, and social rewards, also encodes the hedonic value of emotional stimuli. In addition to showing that the mechanisms responsible for processing affective information are shared across reward and emotional processing, I also discuss the relevance of a domain-general constructionist account of affect for clinical disorders. In particular, I hypothesize that in anorexia nervosa (AN), affective disturbances should be manifest across responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I provide empirical evidence for this conclusion by demonstrating that when viewing social stimuli, women with a history of AN show disturbances in the insula, a brain region that is responsible for interoceptive and affective processing. This suggests that the interpersonal difficulties frequently observed in patients with AN may be due to biases in domain-general affective responses. In Chapter 5, I support this conclusion by showing that individual differences in harm avoidance in healthy women, women with a current diagnosis of AN, and women who have recovered from AN explain the relationship between disordered eating and social dysfunction. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective affective responses to rewarding, emotional, and social information all rely on common mechanisms as would be suggested by a domain-general theory of affect. Furthermore, the application of a constructionist domain-general account of affect can help to explain the fundamental nature of affective disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as AN.
Item Open Access Effects of Mindfulness Training on Emotion Regulation and Attention(2008-01-01) Ekblad, Andrew GriffinThe effect of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training on experimental measures of attention and emotion regulation was assessed. Two laboratory based measures of attention and emotion regulation were employed. Amongst a number of hypotheses, the effect of MBSR on return to emotional baseline was assessed. Analyses indicated that MBSR training had no effect on physiological indices of emotion regulation. Self-report measures indicated that MBSR training led to faster return to baseline negative emotional experience following a stressor. Implications and future directions are discussed.
Item Open Access Emotion and Identity in the Transition to Parenthood(2018) Weed, Emi-LouThough families come in all shapes and sizes, many people recognize the birth of their first child as the start of their new family. The transition to parenthood that expectant parents experience has important implications for their future health and the health of their children. This dissertation investigates the experiences of new and expectant parents as they develop their new roles. The findings draw on publicly-available conversations from parenting forums. Investigative phenomenology, descriptive phenomenology, and quantitative analysis are used to explore three research questions: 1) How do people experience perinatal loss? 2) What are parents’ experiences of working with nurses when their infant is in a neonatal critical care unit? 3) What emotions do men experience on their journey to fatherhood? The findings of this dissertation indicate that the transition to parenthood is a time of ambiguity, stress, and potentially, great joy for new parents. During this transition, people take on new identities, perform new roles, experience a broad range of emotions, and develop new relationships. The impacts of this transition are lifelong, so support is vital to promoting the formation of healthy, well-adjusted families. For healthcare providers and researchers, there is a great deal that can be done to help new and expectant parents feel supported and respected. A few of the many potential tools providers and researchers can use include mindfulness, non-judgement, and therapeutic communication.
Item Open Access Emotional Modulation of Cognitive Skill Learning.(2007-12-13) Thomas, Laura AndersonIn this set of studies the modulation of feedback-based cognitive skill learning was investigated by modulating a probabilistic classification learning (PCL) task to be either emotional or neutral. In the current task, based on the weather prediction task, cue cards were presented on the screen and subjects were asked to predict what they would come across while walking in the woods, in the emotional condition a snake/spider or in the neutral condition a flower/mushroom. Chapter 1 is a review of the animal and human literature of multiple memory systems, amygdala modulation of multiple memory systems, and sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation.Chapter 2 examined how emotional arousal affected performance, strategy use, and sympathetic nervous system activation in our manipulated PCL task. Subjects highly fearful of the outcomes in the emotional condition showed overall greater skin conductance responses compared to the other groups, as well as retardation in initial cue-outcome acquisition. Individuals who were not fearful of the outcome stimuli used more complex (optimal) strategies after a 24-hr period of memory consolidation relative to the other groups, reflecting greater implicit knowledge of the probabilistic task structure.The purpose of the experiment in Chapter 3 was to examine consolidation-based stabilization and enhancement in an emotional cognitive skill task. There was no effect of sleep on retention or savings on percent correct or strategy use in both the emotional and neutral PCL task. These results conform to recent evidence that probabilistic learning does not show sleep-dependent performance enhancements.Chapter 4 investigated the neural correlates of emotional PCL with functional magnetic resonance imaging. There was greater amygdala and striatal activity in the emotional versus neutral group on Day 1. There was also increased activity in the striatum on Day 2, suggesting an early and lasting bias of emotion on procedural learning. Additionally, there were differences in neural recruitment by subjects using complex versus simple implicit strategies.The findings from this series of experiments have implications for the assessment of psychopathologies that show dysfunction in affective and striatal areas, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's syndrome, and for the development, eventually, of optimal therapies.Item Open Access Emotional Modulation of Time Perception(2014) Lake, JessicaOur perception of time is not veridical but rather is consistently modulating by changing dynamics in our environment. Anecdotal experiences suggest that emotions can be powerful modulators of time perception; nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying emotion-induced temporal distortions remain unclear. Widely accepted pacemaker-accumulator models of time perception suggest that changes in arousal and attention have unique influences on temporal judgments and contribute to emotional distortions of time perception. However, such models conflict with current views of arousal and attention and their interaction from the perspective of affective and cognitive science. The aim of this dissertation was to more clearly examine the role of arousal and attention in driving emotion-induced temporal distortions by explicitly manipulating and measuring these constructs using well-established timing procedures within the context of affective manipulations induced via classical conditioning and drug administration. Measures of physiological arousal and subjective measures of top-down attention to emotional stimuli were assessed both within and across subjects. The findings reported here suggest that current models of time perception do not adequately explain the variability in emotion-induced temporal distortions. Instead these findings provide support for a new theoretical model of emotion-induced temporal distortions proposed in the current manuscript that emphasizes both the unique and interactive influences of arousal and attention on time perception, dependent on temporal dynamics, event relationships, and individual differences. Collectively, these findings may point to plausible neurobiological mechanisms of emotion-induced temporal distortions and have important implications for our understanding of how emotions may modulate our perceptual experiences in service of adaptively responding to biologically relevant stimuli.
Item Open Access Examining Multiple Routes to Emotional Memory Bias(2023) Faul, LeonardEmotions play a fundamental role in how we remember the past. Decades of neuroscience research have uncovered the neural mechanisms that help explain why we selectively remember emotional experiences, often at the expense of more neutral ones. What remains less understood, however, are the factors that govern biased access to certain emotional memories over others. Discerning such effects can provide insight to aberrant memory biases that perpetuate psychopathological symptoms in a wide range of clinical disorders. Here I present three different routes to emotional memory bias, stemming from factors at encoding, consolidation, or retrieval that selectively influence what we remember from the past and how we remember it. First, I tested the influence of spatial proximity during initial exposure to threatening stimuli, finding that threats encountered in near space activate a distinct neural fear circuit that predicts enhanced reinstatement the next day. Second, I tested the influence of mood during consolidation, finding that mood after encoding retroactively strengthens mood-congruent content into long-term memory. Third, I tested how memories can be modified at retrieval by manipulating conceptual and perceptual features of the remembered event, finding that these two forms of reconstruction recruit distinct neural profiles. Finally, I summarize how these studies inform memory biases in mood disorders, while also discussing related work on emotion representation and dispositional biases in retrieval tendencies.
Item Open Access Expressive Control and Emotion Perception: the Impact of Expressive Suppression and Mimicry on Sensitivity to Facial Expressions of Emotion(2008-05-28) Schneider, Kristin GraceRecent studies have linked expressive suppression to impairments in interpersonal functioning, but the mechanism underlying this relationship has not been well articulated. One possibility is that the individual who engages in expressive suppression is impaired in perceiving the emotions of others, a critical ability in successful interpersonal functioning. In the current study, participants were presented with a series of photographs of facial expressions that were manipulated so that they appeared to "morph" from neutral into full emotion expressions. As they viewed these images, participants were instructed to identify the expression as quickly as possible, by selecting one of the six emotion labels (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust) on the screen. Prior to this task, participants were randomized to one of three groups: instructed to mimic the expressions on the screen, instructed to suppress all emotion expressions, or not given specific instructions on how to control expressions (the control group). The speed with which participants accurately identified emotional expressions (emotion sensitivity) was the primary variable of interest. Overall, participants in the suppression condition were found to be slower to accurately identify emotions, while no statistically-significant differences were found between the mimicry and no-instructions conditions. The decreased emotion sensitivity in the suppression group could not be accounted for by impulsive responding, decreased sensitivity at full expression, or perceived difficulty of task.
Item Open Access From Fratricide to Forgiveness: the Ethics of Anger in Genesis(2008-12-05) Schlimm, Matthew RichardIn the first book of the Bible, every patriarch and many of the matriarchs have significant encounters with anger. However, scholarship has largely ignored how Genesis treats this emotion, particularly how Genesis functions as Torah by providing ethical instruction about handling this emotion's perplexities. This dissertation aims to fill this gap in scholarship, showing both how anger functions as a literary motif in Genesis and how this book offers moral guidance for engaging this emotion.
After an introductory chapter outlining the goals, methods, and limitations of this study (ch. 1), this dissertation draws on works in translation theory, anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology to lay a theoretical framework for analyzing emotion described in another language by another culture (ch. 2). Next, it appropriates the findings of cognitive linguistics to analyze the terminology, conception, and associations of anger in the Hebrew Bible (ch. 3). The following chapter evaluates the advances that have taken place in the field of Old Testament ethics in recent decades, supplementing them with insights from philosophical, literary, and critical theorists to formulate an understanding of ethics and narrative that aligns with the contours of Genesis (ch. 4). The next chapter employs a rhetorical-literary approach to examine how texts in Genesis provide a conversation with one another about anger and its moral perplexities (ch. 5). Various themes from this study are then collected and summarized in the concluding chapter (ch. 6).
This dissertation concludes that understanding Genesis' message about anger requires laying aside traditional Western assumptions about both emotion and ethics. Genesis does not, for example, provide a set of ideal principles for engaging anger. Rather, readers who experience Genesis' narratives view anger from a variety of perspectives and in different lights, gaining wisdom for diverse encounters with anger they may face. They acquire a deep sensitivity to human frailty, an acute awareness of anger's power, and a realistic range of possibilities for engaging this emotion.
Item Open Access Integrating Channels of Emotion: Individual Differences in Subjective Experience, Psychophysiology and Neural Activity(2021) Burr, Daisy AlmaEmotions infuse each individual’s life with meaning, informing their memories and guiding their future decisions. Previous research has emphasized three important channels of emotion: subjective experience, psychophysiology and neural activity. In addition, research has found that individuals manage their emotions across channels in a diversity of ways. However, most of this research narrowly focuses on a single channel of emotion and misses key aspects of these individual differences. Across 4 studies, this dissertation highlights the immense variability in emotional experiences by integrating channels of emotion. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 2) focuses on subjective channels of emotion and reveals a fundamental aspect of emotion previously unknown—that positive events are actually less complex than negative events, and that individuals evaluate positive events more similarly than negative events. The next chapter (Chapter 3) uses a novel computational approach to identify a whole-brain biomarker of the tendency to suppress negative emotion. The following chapter (Chapter 4) focuses on psychophysiological channels of emotion and investigates the effect of anxiety on how individuals manage their emotions naturally versus when following instructions in the laboratory. Participants report managing their emotions in ways that did not did not reflect how they regulated in the lab—highlighting the importance of conducting research outside the laboratory. Based on this, the final empirical chapter (Chapter 5) uses experience sampling to leave the confines of the laboratory and study people in the wild. Participant responses show that multiple components of emotional health improve with age, including emotional stability, affect, and the ability to resist desire—a finding missing from laboratory-based research. No two individuals are alike in how they experience and manage their emotions. This research emphasizes the vast variability in how individuals experience and manage emotion depending on their goals and the larger context. This holistic framework enhances our understanding of the full spectrum of emotional functioning and brings the field closer to a personalized account of emotion.
Item Open Access Investigating the Effects of Fantasy Proneness and Instructions to Fantasize(2011) Cuper, Prudence FrancesFantasy prone individuals spend much of their time fantasizing, focusing on a rich internal world of imaginary people or stories, vivid memories, or dreams. Fantasy proneness has been linked to psychological distress and psychiatric disorders. However, few experimental studies have been conducted with fantasy prone individuals; therefore, little is known about the behavioral correlates of fantasy proneness. The current study investigated associations between self-reported fantasy proneness, as measured by a frequently used questionnaire, the CEQ, and behavior during a laboratory task of attention, the SART. A potential mood regulating function of fantasy also was explored. Results of the study support the assertion that fantasy proneness is associated with variations in behavior that can be observed in the context of the laboratory. Specifically, fantasy proneness correlated with fewer instances of on-task thought and more frequent instances of mind wandering without meta-awareness during the attention task. It also correlated with more task errors and higher levels of self-reported fantasy thought during the task (though not with higher levels of other types of off-task thought). Finally, fantasy thought was found to have a protective effect on positive affect during the mundane task. There was no relationship between fantasy thought and negative affect.
Item Open Access Molecules to Mind: the Construction of Emotion(2009) Perlman, Susan BethIn recent years, there has been increasing scientific interest in the biological basis of emotion. By characterizing the neural and genetic basis of affective functioning, new research has the potential to contribute to our scientific understanding of both typical social development and aberrant trajectories for emotional disorders. The four studies detailed here investigated the biological substrates of affective functioning from a multiple-levels-of-analysis perspective in order to understand potential interactions of genes, the brain, personality and behavior in emotion. The first study examined the relationship between personality and the ways in which individuals look at faces. Results indicated a robust positive correlation between the personality trait of neuroticism and the amount of time spent looking at the eyes of faces, especially the eyes of fearful faces. A follow up study found that subjects high in neuroticism also fixated most on fearful faces placed within an array of objects. This effect remained strong even when controlling for negative mood state. The second study involved an experimental manipulation of activity in the face processing system of individuals with autism. The results showed that by manipulating visual scanpaths to involve increased fixation on the eye region of a face, the hypoactivation of the amygdale and fusiform gyri, an established characteristic of social brain functioning in autism, was temporarily reversed. A third study investigated the neural correlates of emotion regulation across development using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Results revealed increases in anterior cingulate to amygdale connectivity during episodes of regulatory demand. Magnitude of ACC activity was correlated with both age and levels of fearful temperament in children. Finally, the last study integrated the results of previous experiments and illustrated interactions among a common polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (5HTTLPR), brain activity, personality, and visual scanpaths. Results contribute to the growing body of literature characterizing the development of individual differences in the perception, feeling, and regulation of emotion. In addition, these findings have the potential to inform our understanding of abnormal emotional development by detailing a complex system in which genetic vulnerability produces increased attention to emotionally arousing aspects of the environment through differential brain activation.
Item Open Access More Than a Feeling: How the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Reformed the Passions(2020) Rogers, Hannah LeeBy the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, however, the passions returned with a vengeance — as indicated by the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the Brontë sisters. What we now call “the emotions” had suddenly slipped out from under the control of individual reason and become a force of nature. As such, they could be held responsible both for keeping the individual alive and for the species’ ability to prosper and expand in number. Michel Foucault has offered perhaps the clearest articulation of how the century that followed developed new forms of government that both taught individuals to manage themselves by observing disciplinary regimens and regulated the unruliness of entire populations by means of biopolitical policies. But while, like Hirschman, Foucault links the redefinition of sexuality and how behaviors and effects were classified and managed directly to the emergence of industrial capitalism, neither he nor Hirschman consider the novel instrumental in their respective accounts of the passions. Novels, as the self-anointed discourse of personal experience, were ideally positioned to respond both critically and creatively to the disruptions of daily life that began in the late eighteenth century. In the decades that followed, I will show, the novel successively updated the causes and effects of emotional experience to accommodate the transition to an industrial society from an agrarian way of life supported by commerce and early colonization.
From Jane Eyre to Daniel Deronda, the novel features a protagonist whose biographical destiny depends on a form of yearning well in excess of the prevailing social classification system. This unnamable sense of belonging elsewhere is indeed so in excess of then existing codes of conduct and self-expression that it escapes the confines of the individual and pervades each habitat it enters with a sense of lack and constriction. The natural principles Charles Darwin first discovered during his landmark Voyage of the Beagle gave him the grounds, by 1872, to conclude that just as any species, man or animal, must physically adapt to its environment, so too must its feelings. Darwin understood that these affects — a term I use for feelings that have not been codified as one of the then recognized emotions — allow the species to develop new relations among themselves to enable survival. Over the century, the novel followed this same principle perhaps more so than any other form of writing, as it sought to alter the basis of human feeling to accommodate the material conditions of existence. My introduction explains how the novel carried out this project by capturing and reforming feelings in excess of accepted social roles and reworked both feelings and roles to form emotional ties capable of sustaining domestic life: first, during the early decades of the nineteenth century as inherited land lost its status as the coin of the realm, then in the economic crisis called the Hungry Forties, and finally during the period when England’s economy shifted from the English countryside to the imperial metropole.
Item Embargo Shaping affect regulation: from trait influences to learning experiences(2024) Wright, Rachael NadineThe ability to influence how we feel – affect regulation – is a fundamental psychological process essential for everyday functioning and maintaining well-being. To ultimately develop interventions for improving affect regulation abilities, research investigating the diverse influences that determine individual variability in affect regulation are needed. I focus on two forms of affect regulation of particular importance for mental health outcomes and goal-driven behavior – the downregulation of negative affect and the upregulation of motivation. I approach this challenge by examining how trait factors predict affect regulation outcomes and how affect relation may be learned over time. More specifically, in Chapter 2 I investigate how beliefs about motivation relate to goal-oriented behavior, reward experiences, and motivation regulation through the development of a novel self-report questionnaire. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that individuals can learn to use motivation regulation strategies to engage brain activity in the VTA (a region critically involved in motivated behavior), when presented with real-time fMRI neurofeedback, and characterize a functional brain network that underlies this process. In Chapter 4, I investigate how trait intolerance of uncertainty influences situational appraisals and coping behaviors to predict anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. And lastly in Chapter 5, I reviewed evidence for learning in emotion regulation and proposed a novel conceptual model for investigating how specific learning processes may support components of the emotion regulation process to produce learned changes in regulatory behavior. Collectively, this body of work demonstrates specific ways that affect regulation is shaped through trait characteristics and learning experiences.