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Copestake, Sonja. "Emotional processing in psychopathic offenders." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2011. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54451/.
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Psychopathy is a disorder that is characterised by significant emotional deficits. The aim of this thesis was therefore to continue to explore emotional processing in a sample of offenders who were assessed as having different levels of psychopathic traits using the PCL-R and a self-report measure the PPI-R. Central to Blair, Mitchell & Blair's (2005) neurocognitive theory of psychopathy is the idea that psychopathic individuals experience specific difficulty identifying fear and sadness in others. Kosson, Suchy, Mayer & Libby (2002) have made an interesting distinction between being able to recognise/label and demonstrate appropriate physiological responsiveness to emotional material. Kosson et al. (2002) concluded that psychopathic individuals do not appear to experience difficulty recognising and labelling fear but they may not experience appropriate physiological responses to such stimuli. One aim of this thesis was to test the theories of Blair et al. (2005) and Kosson et al. (2002). Two different measures of emotional intelligence were therefore administered during this study, an ability EI measure, the MSCEIT and a trait EI measure the TMMS. A facial recognition task (DEFT task) was administered to examine the idea that psychopathic individuals are impaired in their recognition of sad and fearful expressions. An emotional priming task (EPT) was also administered to measure participants' reactions to the emotional valence of slides. Overall, my results are mixed and appear to provide some support for both Blair et al.'s (2005) and Kosson et al.'s theories (2002). In support of Blair et al.'s (2005) theory I found that psychopathic individuals experience difficulty identifying sadness in others. In support of Kosson et al.'s theory (2002) I found no evidence at all that participants with high levels of psychopathy demonstrated poorer performance at detecting or labelling fear. I also found that participants with high scores on PPI-I of the PPI-R demonstrated superior performance at recognising and labelling anger. In the EPT, I also found that Factor 2 of the PCL-R was related to poor responsiveness to the emotional content of negative slides. One finding, which is of particular interest, is the significant negative correlation between MSCEIT and TMMS total scores. One possible explanation for these results is that they provide evidence that the TMMS and MSCEIT may be tapping different underlying constructs associated with EI. However, these results suggest that participants who rated themselves as having high levels of EI on the TMMS actually demonstrated poor performance on the MSCEIT. This result may reflect the fact that participants lacked insight into the difficulties they experienced in accurately identifying and managing emotions. These results also provide support for Patrick & Bernat (2009) and Patrick's (2010) ideas that the PPI and PCL-R are measuring different underlying constructs of psychopathy. I found that the underlying factors of the PCL-R were related but this was not the case for the PPI-R. I also found that Factor 1 of the PCL-R was related to the Coldheartedness scale of the PPI-R but not PPI-I. The PCL-R and PPI-R also demonstrated different relationships with the tasks used in this research.
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Rock, Philippa L. "Emotional processing and bipolar disorder." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f4a311fe-3bda-40cc-852a-11dbde8f436c.
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The aetiology of bipolar disorder remains unclear and investigation to date has focussed largely on bipolar patients. Whilst ultimately of huge value, such studies may also be confounded by current mood or experience of repeated illness episodes or current or past medication; using at-risk samples may bypass some of these problems. The current research therefore assessed the efficacy of the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) as a screening tool for vulnerability to bipolar disorder. The MDQ was used with two sets of criteria to identify two sub-groups of medication-naïve young bipolar phenotype subjects who were at risk for bipolar disorder by virtue of experience of mood elevation. Analysis of data from the Student Stress Survey was carried out to characterise the bipolar phenotype. Compared to a control group with no experience of mood elevation, the two bipolar phenotype sub-groups showed a gradient of prevalence of bipolar diagnosis and associated co-morbidity. Behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques were employed to investigate emotional processing, decision-making, and sleep and circadian rhythmicity in bipolar phenotype students. Analyses revealed that positive emotional processing biases, disrupted decision-making, and increased activity during sleep were associated with the bipolar phenotype and, therefore, may represent vulnerability markers for bipolar disorder. Finally, a psychopharmacological investigation of quetiapine, which stabilises mood, was carried out in healthy volunteers. One-week quetiapine administration resulted in biases away from both positive and negative emotional stimuli (i.e. a mood-stabilising effect), reduced discrimination between different magnitudes of gains and losses during risky decision-making (consistent with an antidepressant effect), and increased sleep duration. In sum, this research has developed our understanding of vulnerability markers associated with the bipolar phenotype and provided a first step towards uncovering the psychological mechanisms through which quetiapine’s clinical effects may be mediated.
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Howells, Glen. "Emotional processing and episodic memory." Thesis, Bournemouth University, 2013. http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/20965/.
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The research reported within this dissertation investigates how individuals’ capacity to assimilate emotionally disruptive events is associated with particular features of episodic and autobiographical memory formation. It is inspired by Rachman’s (1980, 2001) formulation of emotional processing, and his subsequent proposals to explore the general mechanisms by which emotional disruptions are overcome. The specific rationale is informed by multilevel emotion theories, theories of post-traumatic stress disorder, and models of emotional processing. The research considered whether individuals who exhibit signs of a poor emotional processing style tend to encode events generally in a sensory-perceptual manner, with comparative deficits in their capacity to conceptually process data. Methodologically, the studies identify poor and effective emotional processors by using Baker et al.’s (2009) emotional processing scale as a grouping measure. The studies explore differences between groups of poor and effective emotional processors’ performance over a range of memory tasks drawn from episodic and autobiographical memory studies to detect evidence for a sensory- perceptual style of event and stimulus processing which is presumed to be indicated by a surfeit of perceptual details, heightened reported vividness, and a relative lack in conceptual ordering, narrative coherence and verbal indexing. Three general categories of memory are explored: memory for experimentally presented item lists, memory for extended narrative presentations and memory for naturally occurring events retained in long-term autobiographical memory representations. The evidence suggests a tendency to process in a sensory-perceptual manner amongst poor emotional processors for both experimental item lists, as well as in long term autobiographical memory investigations, whereas few differences between groups emerged for the study of narrative recollection. There was little evidence, by contrast, that effective emotional processors were superior at the conceptual processing of events or data. These results are discussed in terms of providing confirmation for information processing accounts of emotional disruptions and disorders which stress the aetiological significance in psychopathological conditions of how events are encoded, rendering such events accessible to broader autobiographical memory bases and conceptual elaboration. Furthermore, the importance of establishing more robust and testable definitions of conceptual processing is stressed.
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Fox, John R. E. "Emotional processing in eating disorders." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29107.
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Research into emotional processing in eating disorders (ED) is still very much in its infancy. Milligan and Waller (2000), Waller et al (2003) and others have shown that there is difficulty with the emotion of anger, especially in its expression. Whilst others (e.g. Troop et al, 2000) have demonstrated an increased sensitivity for disgust with an ED population. In recent years, there has been significant development in CBT models of eating disorders; in particular, bulimia nervosa and these models have started to suggest that eating disorder symptomatology acts as an emotional regulator (e.g. Cooper et al, 2004; Waller et al, 2007). Although these models are a useful start in understanding emotions in eating, there is a lack of a theoretical understanding of why people with eating disorders have particular difficulties with certain emotions. This thesis presented a detailed consideration of the literature that has attempted to understand the relationship between emotions and eating disorder symptomatology by proposing a new model of eating disorders that is based upon the recent theoretical developments in emotional processing (i.e. SPAARS model, Power and Dalgleish, 1997, 1999). This SPAARS-ED model was used as the theoretical backdrop for the thesis, and the data from the four studies were designed to test some of the key hypotheses stemming from the model. The first study was a grounded theory study that investigated perceptions of the basic emotions and the developmental histories of emotions within a group of 11 people with severe anorexia nervosa. The results highlighted themes of anger and sadness being suppressed, and were often regarded as being 'toxic'. Furthermore, themes were also explored that focused on metaemotional skills and participants recollections of how their parents, peers and caregivers used to respond to their emotions. The second study directly tested the theoretical idea of 'coupled emotions', and this study found data that demonstrated increased levels of disgust following an anger induction for people with bulimic symptoms, in comparison to control participants. The third study was a survey based study that quantitatively looked at both the predictive power of each of the basic emotions for disordered eating patterns, and also how certain emotion response styles from carers (e.g. punitive, dismissive, etc towards an emotion) were related to disorder eating. The results showed that anger and sadness predicted eating disorder symptoms, and the effect was large. However, there were no significant associations between emotion response styles and disordered eating. The final study was a hybrid study that was based on the two quantitative studies in this thesis. In a cross sectional study, a group of participants with anorexia nervosa were compared to control participants. This study had two parts, with the first part focusing on emotion regulation styles and core beliefs, whilst the second part repeated and developed the experimental methodology from study 2. The results showed that people with anorexia nervosa had significantly more internal dysfunctional emotion regulation style, and significantly more negative beliefs about the self and others when compared to controls. Interestingly these core beliefs patterns were significantly correlated with state emotions, with negative other beliefs being correlated to state anger, whilst negative internal beliefs were significantly correlated to state emotions of disgust and sadness. The second part of this study showed that, following an induced anger emotion, people with anorexia nervosa showed significantly higher levels of disgust, and estimation of body size. This was taken as further evidence of a potential coupled emotion effect, between anger and disgust within eating disorders. These findings were then discussed, in relation to both the SPAARS-ED model, and the general literature.
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Gray, Katie L. H. "Unconscious processing of emotional faces." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2011. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/341583/.
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Due to capacity limits, the brain must select important information for further processing. Evolutionary-based theories suggest that emotional (and specifically threat-relevant) information is prioritised in the competition for attention and awareness (e.g. Ohman & Mineka, 2001). A range of experimental paradigms have been used to investigate whether emotional visual stimuli (relative to neutral stimuli) are selectively processed without awareness, and attract visual attention (e.g. Yang et al., 2007). However, very few studies have used appropriate control conditions that help clarify the extent to which observed effects are driven by the extraction of emotional meaning from these stimuli, or their low-level visual characteristics (such as contrast, or luminance). The experiments in this thesis investigated whether emotional faces are granted preferential access to awareness and which properties of face stimuli drive these effects. A control stimulus was developed to help dissociate between the extraction of emotional information and low-level accounts of the data. It was shown that preferential processing of emotional information is better accounted for by low-level characteristics of the stimuli, rather than the extraction of emotional meaning per se. Additionally, a robust ‘face’ effect was found across several experiments. Investigation of this effect suggested that it may not be driven by the meaningfulness of the stimuli as it was also apparent in an individual that finds it difficult to extract information from faces. Together these findings suggest that high-level information can be extracted from visual stimuli outside of awareness, but the prioritisation afforded to emotional faces is driven by low-level characteristics. These results are particularly timely given continued high-profile debate surrounding the origins of emotion prioritisation (e.g. Tamettio & de Gelder, 2010; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010).
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Le, Gal Patricia Margaret. "Cognitive aspects of emotional expression processing." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1772.
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This thesis investigates the hypothesis that emotions play an influential role in cognition. Interference between facial emotional expression processing and selected tasks is measured using a variety of experimental methods. Prior to the main experimental chapters, the collection and assessment (Chapter 2, Exp. 1) of stimulus materials is described. Experiments 2-11 then concentrate on the likelihood of interference with other types of information from the face. Findings using a Garner design suggest that, although identity processing may be independent of expression variation, expression processing may be influenced by variation in identity (Exps. 2-4). Continued use of this design with sex (Exps. 6-7) and gaze direction (Exps. 9-10) information appears to support the (mutual) independence of these facial dimensions from expression. This is, however, in contrast to studies that indicate the modification of masculinity judgements by expression (Exp. 5), and the interaction of gaze direction and expression when participants rate how interesting they find a face (Exp. 8). Further to this, a search task (Exp. 11) shows that slower responses to an angry (cf. happy) face looking at us, may be due to the presence of an aversive mouth. Experiments 12-15 test for interference in the field of time perception: complex interactions between expression and encoder and decoder sex are indicated. Finally, Experiments 16-17 find that exposure to a sequence in which the majority of faces are angry depresses probability learning, and that prior exposure to varying quantities of angry and happy faces affects our later memory for them. Overall, there is evidence that exposure to emotional expressions may affect other (selected)c ognitive processesd ependingu pon which expressionsa re used and which experimental methods are chosen. It is suggested that future investigations would benefit from techniques that describe the temporal profile of an emotional response.
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Bradbury, Katherine E. "Information processing biases in emotional disorders." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.368153.
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Chan, Stella Wing Yan. "Vulnerability to depression and emotional processing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4d472e39-81f4-4b2d-a230-977425dd01d0.
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Risk factors for depression have long been identified. However, it remains unclear what are the mechanisms whereby these risk factors lead to depression. Therefore the current research examined cognitive and neurophysiological functioning in a sample of high risk vs. low risk never-depressed young adults. Risk for depression was defined by high neuroticism (N) scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). Results indicated that, compared to low N volunteers, high N volunteers show widespread negative biases across emotional processing tasks, including self-referent words categorization and memory, facial expression recognition, and emotion potentiated startle. The neural substrates of these negative biases were further illustrated by our brain-imaging experiments using fMRI. In these studies, high N is associated with increased neural signals for negative self-referent personality attributes and fearful facial expressions in a distributed network known to be involved in emotional processing, including the fusiform-amygdala circuitry, anterior cingulate, and the superior parietal cortex. By contrast, these neurocognitive biases did not seem to be accompanied by impairments in more global executive function or disturbances in biological response to stress measured by awakening salivary cortisol. Consistent with the idea that emotional processing biases represent key mechanisms underlying vulnerability to depression, our final longitudinal study showed that depression symptoms in high N volunteers were well predicted (up to 91%) at an 18 month follow up by a combination of these negative biases and stressful life events. Taken together, the current investigations therefore suggest that neurocognitive biases in emotional processing are trait vulnerability markers for depression prior to illness onset.
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Schafer, Molly Clark. "Emotional Processing Deficits in Parkinson's Disease." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/3687.
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Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is known to cause detrimental effects to motor function and cognition. The motor effects of the disease in turn impact emotion expression in patients with PD. There is conflicting evidence in research, however, as to whether PD also affects emotion comprehension, and if so, what emotions in particular are affected and across what modalities. This study aimed to investigate the effects of PD on a broad range of skills involved in basic and complex emotion comprehension. Whether these effects extend into other areas associated with emotion processing, such as social cognition and autobiographical memory, was also explored. Methods: Sixteen patients with PD participated in the study along with sixteen control subjects who were matched for age, gender, education level and estimated premorbid intelligence. The PD participants, on average, were in the moderate phase of the disease and taking PD medication, including dopamine. Participants were tested on a range of recognition measures including prototypical and morphed facial expressions with reduced intensity (40 and 80%), emotion prosody, written emotion vignettes, emotional imagery, pictures of emotion, social cognition, and a cued autobiographical memory task. A mood inventory was given, and disease severity and duration were noted. Results: The PD group did not show pervasive deficits in emotion recognition overall. Deficits were demonstrated in prosody recognition, specifically with fearful tones, and in an incongruent prosody task, specifically with angry and neutral tones. The PD group was not able to recognise facial expressions of disgust (mixed intensities) as well as controls, with the result showing a trend toward significance. PD participants were also significantly worse in Theory of Mind (TOM) reasoning but not at another social cognition measure involving recognising social emotions through expressions from the eyes only. There were no differences between the groups across all other tests. Discussion: PD is thought to cause subtle deficits in emotion comprehension which are only elucidated through complex tasks. The effects of PD on complex processing also impact TOM performance, which relies on skills involved in complex emotion recognition. Effects of mood and disease factors on performance were circumscribed. Evidence suggested that the basal ganglia and fronto-striatal connections play a role in emotion comprehension.
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Schafer, Molly Clark. "Emotional Processing Deficits in Parkinson's Disease." University of Sydney, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/3687.
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Doctor of Clinical Neuropsychology/Master of ScienceIntroduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is known to cause detrimental effects to motor function and cognition. The motor effects of the disease in turn impact emotion expression in patients with PD. There is conflicting evidence in research, however, as to whether PD also affects emotion comprehension, and if so, what emotions in particular are affected and across what modalities. This study aimed to investigate the effects of PD on a broad range of skills involved in basic and complex emotion comprehension. Whether these effects extend into other areas associated with emotion processing, such as social cognition and autobiographical memory, was also explored. Methods: Sixteen patients with PD participated in the study along with sixteen control subjects who were matched for age, gender, education level and estimated premorbid intelligence. The PD participants, on average, were in the moderate phase of the disease and taking PD medication, including dopamine. Participants were tested on a range of recognition measures including prototypical and morphed facial expressions with reduced intensity (40 and 80%), emotion prosody, written emotion vignettes, emotional imagery, pictures of emotion, social cognition, and a cued autobiographical memory task. A mood inventory was given, and disease severity and duration were noted. Results: The PD group did not show pervasive deficits in emotion recognition overall. Deficits were demonstrated in prosody recognition, specifically with fearful tones, and in an incongruent prosody task, specifically with angry and neutral tones. The PD group was not able to recognise facial expressions of disgust (mixed intensities) as well as controls, with the result showing a trend toward significance. PD participants were also significantly worse in Theory of Mind (TOM) reasoning but not at another social cognition measure involving recognising social emotions through expressions from the eyes only. There were no differences between the groups across all other tests. Discussion: PD is thought to cause subtle deficits in emotion comprehension which are only elucidated through complex tasks. The effects of PD on complex processing also impact TOM performance, which relies on skills involved in complex emotion recognition. Effects of mood and disease factors on performance were circumscribed. Evidence suggested that the basal ganglia and fronto-striatal connections play a role in emotion comprehension.
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Johnson, Patricia Lynn. "The Influence of Individual Differences on Emotional Processing and Emotional Memory." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5245.
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Emotional material is better remembered than neutral material and some suggest this is reflected in different Event Related potentials (ERPs) to affective stimuli by valence. Inconsistent results may be due to individual differences, specifically the behavioral inhibition/behavioral activation (BIS/BAS) motivational system. This study sought to examine the relationship between motivational systems, emotional memory, and psychophysiological response to emotional pictures. While using EEG recording, subjects were shown 150 affective pictures and given a recall and yes/no recognition task after a 20 and 30-minute delay, respectively. Overall, differences were found by valence, but not consistently based on individual trait. Controlling for arousal and mood, results did not support previous research that suggested high BIS was more responsive to negative pictures while higher BAS was more responsive to positive images. The role of ERP methodology and arousal are discussed, along with future directions.
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O'Leary, Kimberly. "Does emotional processing mediate the link between disordered sleep and depression?" Scholar Commons, 2015. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5554.
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Disordered sleep is strongly linked to depression, but reasons for this are not well understood. One possibility is that this link is partially explained by deficits in the emotional processing system. This model is substantiated based on the strong link between sleep and emotions, as well as ties between affect and depression. Therefore, this study tested whether various emotional and non-emotional deficits mediated the link between poor sleep quality and depression. Two hundred undergraduate students were recruited via an online university system. Participants completed self-report scales of depression, sleep quality, emotion recognition, and affective response to pre-tested pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. Mediation models were tested for viable emotion and non-emotion mediators, as well as using other mediators as covariates. The indirect effect for all models was tested using bootstrapping. Only affective response to unpleasant stimuli emerged as a significant mediator of the relationship between sleep quality and depression and accounted for 5% of the variance in that relationship; it remained a mediator after controlling for non-emotion related mediators. Recently, sleep problems have gained attention due to serious consequences for public health, including a strong association with psychological disorders. This study was a first step in testing pathways by which disordered sleep leads to increases in depression symptoms. In our sample, blunted emotional responding to unpleasant images partially accounted for the link seen between sleep and depression. Future research may aim to extend the study of process and pathway-related models, particularly in the realm of emotional responding in the relationship between sleep and depression.
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Shin, Mija. "Emotional message processing a dual system approach /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3223075.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Telecommunications, 2006."Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 27, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 1964. Adviser: Annie Lang.
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Alba-Ferrara, Lucia Monserrat. "Emotional prosody processing in the schizophrenia spectrum." Thesis, Durham University, 2011. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3185/.
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THESIS ABSTRACT Emotional prosody processing impairment is proposed to be a main contributing factor for the formation of auditory verbal hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia. In order to evaluate such assumption, five experiments in healthy, highly schizotypal and schizophrenia populations are presented. The first part of the thesis seeks to reveal the neural underpinnings of emotional prosody comprehension (EPC) in a non-clinical population as well as the modulation of prosodic abilities by hallucination traits. By revealing the brain representation of EPC, an overlap at the neural level between EPC and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) was strongly suggested. By assessing the influence of hallucinatory traits on EPC abilities, a continuum in the schizophrenia spectrum in which high schizotypal population mirrors the neurocognitive profile of schizophrenia patients was established. Moreover, by studying the relation between AVH and EPC in non-clinical population, potential confounding effects of medication influencing the findings were minimized. The second part of the thesis assessed two EPC related abilities in schizophrenia patients with and without hallucinations. Firstly, voice identity recognition, a skill which relies on the analysis of some of the same acoustical features as EPC, has been evaluated in patients and controls. Finally, the last study presented in the current thesis, assessed the influence that implicit processing of emotional prosody has on selective attention in patients and controls. Both patients studies demonstrate that voice identity recognition deficits as well as abnormal modulation of selective attention by implicit emotion prosody are related to hallucinations exclusively and not to schizophrenia in general. In the final discussion, a model in which EPC deficits are a crucial factor in the formation of AVH is evaluated. Experimental findings presented in the previous chapters strongly suggests that the perception of prosodic features is impaired in patients with AVH, resulting in aberrant perception of irrelevant auditory objects with emotional prosody salience which captures the attention of the hearer and which sources (speaker identity) cannot be recognized. Such impairments may be due to structural and functional abnormalities in a network which comprises the superior temporal gyrus as a central element.
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Bonnar, Charlotte Jane. "Behavioural Inhibition and Emotional Processing in Preschoolers." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.525707.
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Sharma, Aditya Narain. "Neurocognition and emotional processing in bipolar offspring." Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2283.
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Background/aims: Recent evidence suggests that the psychosocial function for patients with Bipolar Disorder (BD) may not always be as favorable as originally proposed by Emil Kraeplin. This dysfunction has been statistically associated with neurocognitive measures (on tasks assessing working memory, learning and executive function) and emotional processing (on tasks assessing facial emotion labeling). Studies of Offspring of Bipolar Parents (OBP) in comparison with Offspring of Healthy Controls (OHC) demonstrate elevated risk for development of BD and limited evidence of impairment in neurocognitive function and emotional processing. The identification of an endophenotype for BD could help in early identification of BD, institution of early appropriate intervention and thereby perhaps limit this psychosocial dysfunction. The aims included the recruitment of a matched sample of OBP and OHC and investigation of neurocognitive function and facial emotion labelling in these two groups. The hypotheses were: OBP will show impairment in the domains of memory, learning and executive function, OBP will demonstrate more errors on facial emotion labeling tasks and the deficits in facial emotion labelling will not be related to impairments demonstrated on the domains of memory, learning and executive function. Results: OBP showed deficits in IQ, spatial working memory, visual and auditory working memory as compared to OHC. OBP also made more errors on tasks of facial emotion labeling; particularly on ‘fearful faces’ in comparison to OHC. The novel finding from this project was the lack of significant association between the reported neurocognitive deficits and facial emotion labeling deficits in OBP. Conclusion: The study identified deficits in neurocognitive function and facial emotion labeling in OBP which appear to be independent. These deficits met some criteria for being considered an endophenotype for BD. The study was limited by a small sample size, lack of blinding and low specificity of these deficits for BD. Further longitudinal research to study the evolution of these deficits would be the next step in confirmation of these deficits as a potential candidate endophenotype for BD. In addition research should focus on factors that might contribute to these deficits such as severity of parental BD (‘nature’) and family environment (‘nurture’).
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Citron, Francesca M. M. "Neural correlates of emotion word processing : the interaction between emotional valence and arousal." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6320/.
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Emotion is characterised by two-dimensions: emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, and arousal represents its intensity. Emotional content of verbal material affects cognitive processing, although research on word recognition has only recently taken emotion into account, primarily focusing on valence, while neglecting arousal. The present work aimed to disentangle the effects of valence and arousal during a lexical decision task, using reaction times (RTs), event-related potentials (ERPs) and BOLD responses in an event-related fMRI design. These methods were chosen to determine when affective features have an effect, and which neural systems are involved. The material for three experiments was based on a word corpus created by collecting ratings for emotional and lexico-semantic features. A first and novel finding was that arousal interacted with valence. Specifically, lexical decision times were slower for high-arousal positive stimuli (PH) and low-arousal negative ones (NL) compared to low-arousal positive (PL) and high arousal negative (NH) stimuli. ERPs also showed an interaction between 200-300 ms on the early posterior negativity (EPN), a component which is sensitive to emotional stimuli. At this processing stage people access their mental lexicon. Its amplitude was greater for PH and NL words, suggesting a higher processing load for conflicting stimuli. Positive valence and low arousal elicit an approach schema, whereas negative valence and high arousal elicit an avoidance schema (Robinson, Storbeck, Meier & Kirkeby, 2004). BOLD responses showed a similar interaction in the insula bilaterally, with increased activation for PH and NL words. This region is associated with integration of information on visceral states with higher-order cognitive and emotional processing, suggesting higher difficulty in integrating conflicting stimuli. Taken together, these studies indicate that emotion affects word processing during lexical access, and models of word recognition need to take into account both valence and arousal.
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Rose, Anita Elizabeth. "Emotional processing and language functioning in Alzheimer's disease." Thesis, Bangor University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.417256.
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Orgeta, Vasiliki. "Age differences in the processing of emotional information." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.446568.
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The present PhD examines age-related differences in the processing of emotional information. Consistent with neuropsychological perspectives of ageing, a number of studies have demonstrated that age exerts a detrimental influence on the ability to recognise facial emotion. The present PhD presents the results of three individual experimental studies conducted to assess age-related differences in the ability to decode facial affect. Age-related differences were observed in the ability to label both high and low intensity of specific facial expressions of emotion, which were partly explained by age-related variance in processing speed (Study 1). Manipulating the number of labels available in an emotion labelling task influenced older adults’ ability to label facial emotion. Age-related decrements in labelling facial affect were limited to 4- and 6- choice labelling conditions, providing support for the hypothesis that age-related emotion recognition deficits vary as a function of type of task used (Study 2). Age-related deficits in recognizing facial emotion do not extend beyond tasks that do not require labelling, such as matching facial emotion, providing further support for the hypothesis that they are task specific (Study 3). In line with socio-cognitive perspectives, a number of studies demonstrate that older adults exhibit a tendency to direct their attention away from negative facial expressions. The present PhD presents data of two individual experimental studies, demonstrating that the effects of age on the selective attention to emotion reflect conscious control (Study 4) and efforts to regulate emotion (Study 5). Overall the results provide evidence that age-related differences in the processing of emotional information are more likely to be observed when deliberative processes are required. On the other hand measures of affect that are less demanding are more likely to show a positive trajectory with increasing age.
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King, Joanna Rachel. "Challenges of a therapist : processing the emotional taboo." Thesis, City, University of London, 2016. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18076/.
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Talking about sexual feelings within a therapeutic setting can prove extremely challenging for therapists. Indeed, such a dialogue appears to be absent in literature, with the exception of psychoanalytical theory exploring this phenomenon. Across all theoretical models, previous literature has failed to explore the occurrence and experience of therapists’ sexual feelings when working with male sex offenders. Using an interpretative phenomenological method, this research explored six therapists’ experiences of sexual feelings when working therapeutically with male sex offenders. Analysis revealed three superordinate themes and a range of subordinate themes within each superordinate theme. The therapists described a need to protect the self in their work with sexual offenders in order to feel safe. Hence this theme is conceptualised as ‘protecting the self’. The theme ‘polarisation’ focuses on the therapists’ divided and at times opposing experiences of specific events. The last theme ‘disturbance’ highlights the therapists’ experiences of feeling both seduced and victimised during their work with male sex offenders. These findings are discussed in relation to the existing literature. One of the major implications of this research relates to the need for greater training around this phenomenon in order to aid therapists who avoid the exploration of sexual feelings with male sex offenders. The importance of using supervision and creating a dialogue around sexual feelings is discussed. Subsequently, recommendations are made for future research in this area.
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Wilson, Paul Andrew. "Processing effective stimuli : cognitive processes and emotional responses." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.393693.
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Nicol, Katie. "Social and emotional processing in borderline personality disorder." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19537.
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Objective Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a common and serious mental illness, associated with severe emotional dysregulation, a high risk of suicide and self-harm. Those with a diagnosis of BPD often display difficulties with social interaction, making daily life problematic, and sufferers can struggle to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. Childhood trauma is believed to contribute to the development of BPD, however the mechanism by which childhood trauma increases risk for specific symptoms of the disorder is not well understood. Here, we investigate the ability of participants with a diagnosis of BPD to make social judgements and recognise emotions from facial stimuli. We also explore the relationship between childhood trauma, brain structure, and brain activation in response to emotional stimuli. Methods Individuals with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, as well as matched healthy controls, were recruited to take part in a neuropsychology study of emotion recognition and social judgement from faces. Participants also underwent a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, during which data was collected for analysis of brain structure, and brain function in response to emotional faces. In addition, all participants completed a structured clinical interview and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Results Individuals with a diagnosis of BPD were less well able to correctly identify facial emotions than healthy control participants (p < 0.001), with a particular deficit in the recognition of disgust (p = 0.001). Those with BPD also had difficulty making appropriate social judgements about others from their faces, and between group differences were greatest for judgements of approachability (p = 0.004) and trustworthiness (p = 0.014). Significant correlations were identified between CTQ scores and performance on both tasks in the BPD group. Although no structural brain differences were noted between the BPD group and healthy controls, we found that brain activation correlated to childhood trauma in midbrain, pulvinar and medial frontal gyrus to fearful (versus neutral) faces. There was a significant association between incidence of abuse in childhood and psychotic symptoms in adulthood. In addition, there was a significant correlation between midbrain activation and reported psychotic symptoms in the BPD group, suggesting a potential relationship between childhood trauma, midbrain activity and the development of psychotic symptoms in those with a diagnosis of BPD. Conclusion Abuse in childhood is associated with impaired social and emotional function, as well as increased activation of a network of brain regions in response to emotional stimuli in BPD. Brain abnormalities in BPD appear to be confined to functional activation changes, rather than structural changes, in regions associated with emotional and social information processing. In addition, childhood trauma is correlated with increased psychotic symptoms in adulthood. These results provide striking evidence for the involvement of childhood adversity in the development of symptoms of BPD, and suggest a possible mechanism by which psychotic symptoms may occur.
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Cooper, Charlotte. "Investigating the effects of inflammation on emotional processing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f5e956e4-fa87-450b-b382-571f589e39b3.
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Elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines are implicated in the pathogenesis of major depression. Human and animal studies have shown that pro-inflammatory cytokines can induce a behavioural repertoire of symptoms collectively referred to as 'sickness behaviours', which include cognitive and mood symptoms, social withdrawal and sleep disturbance. When likened to clinical depression, these symptoms appear to be strikingly similar. Moreover, subsets of depressed patients have raised inflammatory markers, 30-50% of patients receiving cytokine treatment in the form of interferon-α (IFN-α) therapy develop depressive symptoms, and significantly higher rates of depression are associated with chronic inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Converging evidence has led to the hypothesis that chronic, low-grade inflammation could lead to more persistent alterations in neuropsychological function that might be instrumental in the pathophysiology of depression. However, the mechanisms for this potential modulation of mood and cognitive function are unclear. The current thesis therefore aimed to enhance understanding of the neuropsychological underpinnings of the link between inflammation and depression. Negative emotional processing biases are well-recognised in the aetiology of depression; however potential inflammation-induced alterations in emotional processing remain unexplored. Thus, a series of studies were conducted using human models of immune system activation to examine neuropsychological function. The first study demonstrated that IFN-α treatment in patients with hepatitis C produced negative biases in emotional categorisation, attentional vigilance and a specific effect of enhanced recognition of disgust. The subsequent study found a specific effect of false discrimination of disgusted faces in a healthy volunteer model of inflammatory challenge with typhoid vaccination, however further effects on emotional processing were limited. Typhoid vaccination was also shown to disrupt sleep continuity in ways that may be relevant to depression in the third study. Negative biases were not evident, however, in patients with RA. The final study found that neuropsychological effects of the atypical antidepressant tianeptine were similar to effects following IFN-α, which may be of interest considering tianeptine's purported serotonergic re-uptake enhancing properties and the effects of cytokines on serotonin metabolism. This thesis provides intriguing, yet preliminary, evidence that inflammatory pathways may modulate emotional processing - a mechanism which, if supported, may have future implications for improved identification and treatment of subgroups of depressed patients.
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Corus, Canan. "Emotional Certainty and Health Communications." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/27133.
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At risk individuals tend to avoid information that might perturb their sense of security. I propose certainty appraisal as an important emotional dimension that affects health message processing and persuasion. Specifically, I suggest that emotions high on certainty appraisal can provide confidence to cope with the insecurity instigated by threatening health communications.
Five studies are proposed to demonstrate the interaction of certainty appraisal with two health message characteristics: vulnerability to threat and response efficacy. Studies 1-3 provide evidence that when a health threat is highly self-relevant uncertainty related emotions impede processing whereas certainty related emotions facilitate it. Studies 4-5 show that individuals who are feeling uncertain prefer to attend a high efficacy message as it offers reassurance via useful recommendations.
The findings extend affect regulation theories to involve emotional uncertainty as a state to be "repaired" by avoiding further deterioration or striving for restoration.Ph. D.
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Tsang, Pui-shan, and 曾佩珊. "Mediating effect of emotional processing on the relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and negative emotional states." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/209537.
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This study aimed to investigate the interrelationship between dysfunctional attitude, emotional processing difficulties, and negative emotional states using a cross-sectional design. Data were gathered from 140 participants (n = 140) completing a self-reported questionnaire including measures of dysfunctional attitude scale form A (DAS-A), emotional processing scale (EPS-25), and the depression anxiety stress scales (DASS). Multiple mediation results indicated that the association between dysfunctional attitude and negative emotional states, including stress, anxiety and depression, could be explained by different domains of emotional processing. In stress emotion state, having signs of unprocessed and unregulated emotion acted as the mediators. As for anxiety state, having impoverished emotional experience mediated the relationship between dysfunctional attitude and negative emotion. In terms of depression, suppression and having unregulated emotion mediated the association. To conclude, apart from the dysfunctional thoughts, the styles in which individual process their emotions were influential in regulating their emotional distress. These findings could serve as pointers for therapy, and treatment program focusing on appropriate emotional processes could be developed to facilitate the regulation of distressing emotional experiences.published_or_final_version
Clinical Psychology
Master
Master of Social Sciences
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Briesemeister, Benny B., Markus J. Hofmann, Lars Kuchinke, and Arthur M. Jacobs. "The BAWL databases in research on emotional word processing." Universität Potsdam, 2012. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2012/6237/.
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Inhalt:
Introduction
A two-dimensional affective space: Valence and arousal effects in word processing
Higher dimensional affective space: a role of discrete emotions in word processing?
A direct comparison of the affective space models
References
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Rohr, Michaela [Verfasser]. "Masked processing of emotional information beyond valence / Michaela Rohr." Aachen : Shaker, 2014. http://d-nb.info/1060621762/34.
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Kemp, Andrew H., and kempa@psych usyd edu au. "Emotional processing in humans a neurophysiological and psychopharmacological investigation." Swinburne University of Technology, 2003. http://adt.lib.swin.edu.au./public/adt-VSWT20050608.123955.
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Examination of how the brain mediates emotional experience is now an area of significant and intense research interest. This is an important endeavour considering that emotion is a key component in vulnerability factors governing risk for mood and anxiety disorders. Recent neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies are also beginning to explore the effects of antidepressants on the processing of emotional
stimuli in healthy participants to help understand the role of neurochemicals in
affective behaviour more broadly. Unfortunately the literature is fraught with contradictions and complications resulting from the technique used, task instructions, selection of stimuli and gender differences. The aim of the current thesis therefore, was to investigate emotional processing in healthy participants and to examine the impact of serotonergic augmentation on this processing through the presentation of
visual emotional stimuli and examination of self report, peripheral- and neurophysiological measures of emotional responsiveness. Seventy five images low in arousal content, selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and categorised as pleasant, neutral and unpleasant, were presented to participants
in four experimental studies. Findings support previous literature suggesting that there is substantial overlap in frontal neural circuitry when the brain processes emotional images of different valence. Gender differences in the processing of visual emotional stimuli were also
observed however suggesting the need for future studies to take such factors into account. In particular, females unlike males displayed right-sided, frontal, neurophysiological activations in response to unpleasant relative to neutral images. Emotional valence was also found to modulate heart rate (HR) thereby confirming the
reliability and validity of the task-viewing paradigm. Augmentation of serotonin was found to suppress any differences in HR across the three differently valenced categories of images, while neurophysiological responses were potentiated during pleasant valence but suppressed during unpleasant valence. In summary, the studies
included in this thesis provide evidence for neurophysiological modulation by emotional content and gender. In addition, the studies employ a more systems-based approach to the study of antidepressant action, through examination of the neurophysiological responses to visual emotional stimuli. This approach may lead to greater understanding of the functional consequences of neurochemical modulation
on cortical networks involved in emotional processing.
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Martin-Kratzer, Renee. "The emotional and cognitive processing of negative news photographs." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/4181.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on October 18, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Joseph, Stephen A. "Attributions and emotional processing in victims of major disaster." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327117.
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Drury, H. M. "Social-emotional processing and executive functions in Tourette's syndrome." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2011. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1318075/.
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Tourette’s syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder often associated with social difficulties and inappropriate behaviours (e.g. Kurlan et al., 1996). These behavioural difficulties may indicate impairment on aspects of social-emotional processing, but may also be related to impairments in executive functions which have been reported in TS, particularly for aspects of inhibition. This thesis aims to examine different aspects of social-emotional processing and executive functions in TS, and to assess the possible contribution of executive processes. A series of experimental studies was conducted to compare those with TS to healthy matched control participants. With respect to social-emotional processing, ability to decode social-emotional cues, to regulate emotional experience, and to regulate social behaviour according to context, and possible executive contributions to these processes were examined. Further studies extended previous research by examining inhibitory functions not previously assessed in TS, and explored the contribution of task complexity to inhibitory performance. The findings of the experimental studies are considered in the context of recent models of social-emotional processing (Ochsner, 2008), executive functions (Miyake et al., 2000) and inhibition (Nigg, 2000). Several alternative explanations of the findings of this thesis were identified: selective inhibitory impairment, level of executive task demands, or multiple deficits in executive and social-emotional processing. The applicability of these different explanations to the findings is discussed, and the implications of the findings are reviewed.
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LICHT, VICTORIA. "Processing social and emotional actions and gestures in infancy." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/10281/370630.
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A partire dalla nascita, osserviamo e sperimentiamo quotidianamente le interazioni sociali, ad esempio il contatto visivo, l'essere abbracciati o il sorriso altrui. A volte, i bambini non sono direttamente coinvolti nelle interazioni sociali, ma osservano le interazioni sociali che popolano l'ambiente che li circonda. Utilizzando misure neurofisiologiche (potenziali evocati, ERP; elettromiografia, EMG) e comportamentali (preferenza visiva), ci siamo proposti di indagare le risposte dei bambini nel primo anno di vita ai segnali sociali osservati, esaminando: i) i correlati neurali elicitati dall'osservazione di azioni prosociali e azioni antisociali (Capitolo 1), ii) la capacità dei bambini di cogliere le informazioni emotive veicolate da un gesto che implica un contatto tattile (Capitolo 2) e iii) la modulazione esercitata dal tocco della madre sull'attenzione del bambino agli stimoli emotivi (Capitolo 3).
I risultati delle nostre ricerche dimostrano che l'attività neurale dei bambini di 5-6 mesi differenzia le azioni prosociali rispetto a quelle antisociali: l'elicitazione di specifiche componenti ERP ha mostrato che i bambini prestano maggiore attenzione alle interazioni antisociali, dedicando invece maggiori risorse cognitive all’elaborazione delle interazioni prosociali (Capitolo 1). Inoltre, i nostri risultati indicano che, a 11 mesi di vita, l’attività dei muscoli facciali è congruente alle interazioni tattili positive osservate (carezze), poiché è stata riscontrata una attività più accentuata del muscolo zigomatico (ZM, che si attiva quando sorridiamo), ma nessuna attività differenziata dei muscoli facciali in risposta alle interazioni tattili negative osservate (graffio) (Capitolo 2). Infine, abbiamo dimostrato che l’esperienza del tocco materno è in grado di modulare l'attenzione dei bambini agli stimoli emotivi. I bambini che hanno ricevuto un tocco affettivo e hanno avuto una maggiore frequenza di esperienze tattili passate hanno mostrato in minor misura un pattern di evitamento verso i volti arrabbiati; al contrario, coloro che hanno avuto la stessa esperienza passata con il tatto ma hanno ricevuto un tocco non affettivo tendevano ad evitare i volti arrabbiati (Capitolo 3). Nel complesso, questi risultati approfondiscono le nostre conoscenze circa la cognizione sociale precoce, gettando nuova luce circa le modalità attraverso le quali i bambini in età infantile elaborano le interazioni sociali che osservano.Starting from birth, we daily observe and experience social interactions - i.e., eye contact, being held, or being smiled at. Frequently, infants are not directly involved in social interactions, but they observe the social interactions that populate their surrounding environment. Using neurophysiological (Event Related Potentials, ERP; electromyography, EMG), and behavioral measures (preferential looking procedure), we aimed to further investigate infants’ responses to observed social signals, examining: i) the infants’ neural electrical activity elicited by the observation of prosocial and antisocial actions (Chapter 1), ii) infants’ ability to extract emotional information from an observed touching gesture (Chapter 2), and iii) the modulation exerted by their mother touch on infants’ attention to emotional stimuli (Chapter 3). Our research results found that neural activity of 5-6 months old infants differentiate observed prosocial vs antisocial actions: the elicitation of specific ERP components showed that more allocation of attention was given to the antisocial action, while more cognitive resources were devoted to the processing of the prosocial action (Chapter 1). Additionally, 11-month-olds’ facial muscles activity was congruent to the observed positive tactile interactions (caress of an arm), as shown by increased activity of the ZM muscle (activated in smiling). Conversely, no differential facial responses to observed negative tactile interactions (scratch of an arm) emerged (Chapter 2). Lastly, we demonstrated that experiences of maternal touch modulate infants’ attention to emotional stimuli. Infants who received affective touch and had a greater frequency score of past touch experience had a diminished avoidance of the angry faces; conversely, those in the non-affective touch condition and a higher touch frequency score tended to avoid angry faces more (Chapter 3). Overall, these findings add insights to the topic of early social cognition, shedding new light on how infants process social interactions.
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Dendle, Jac Rhys. "Socio-emotional processing in children, adolescents and young adults with traumatic brain injury." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/26354.
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Objective: Research has demonstrated deficits in socio-emotional processing following childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI; Tonks et al., 2009a). However, it is not known whether a link exists between socio-emotional processing, TBI and offending. Drawing on Ochsner’s (2008) socio-emotional processing model, the current study aimed to investigate facial emotion recognition accuracy and bias in young offenders with TBI. Setting: Research was conducted across three youth offender services. Participants: Thirty seven participants completed the study. Thirteen participants reported a high dosage of TBI. Design: The study had a cross sectional within and between subjects design. Main Measures: Penton-Voak and Munafo’s (2012) emotional recognition task was completed. Results: The results indicated that young offenders with a TBI were not significantly worse at facial emotion recognition compared to those with no TBI. Both groups showed a bias towards positive emotions. No between group differences were found for emotion bias. Conclusion: The findings did not support the use of Ochsner’s (2008) socio-emotional processing model for this population. Due to the small sample size, inadequate power and lack of non-offender control groups, it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions from the results of this study. Future research should aim to investigate whether there are any links between TBI, socio-emotional processing and offending.
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Buxton, Sharon L. "Shadows of emotion: emotional processing deficits in Parkinson's disease and their impact on social relationships." Thesis, University of Auckland, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/6582.
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Evidence suggests individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) may be impaired at production and recognition of affective prosody and facial expressions of emotion. When united with social psychology's assertion that nonverbal cues, including facial expressions and voice tone, facilitate effective communication within social relationships, it suggests that these impairments impact negatively on quality of life for individuals with PD. This thesis aimed to investigate emotional processing deficits in PD, systematically, and their possible affect on social relationships. Thirty PD and 30 closely-matched control participants participated in three studies. Study 1 found that raters were less able to recognise emotional expressions from facial expressions and affective prosody in the PD group than the Control group. Study 2, using the Aprosodia Battery (Ross et al., 1997), found PD participants were impaired at recognition of affective prosody. A novel task was developed to assess recognition of facial expressions, comprising prototypical facial expressions and more subtle facial expressions. The PD group was impaired at recognition of subtle facial expressions but not prototypical facial expressions. Positive associations were found between performance on some recognition and production tasks in the PD group, providing support for an overall impairment in emotional processing in PD. When the PD group was subdivided based on side of symptom-onset, the group who developed right-sided symptoms first were more impaired compared to the Control group, than those who had left-sided onset of symptoms, suggesting a possible left-hemispheric lateralisation of emotional processing. Study 3, using a semi-structured interview, found that individuals with PD were less satisfied with their relationships with close others and acquaintances than the Control group, and that this was associated with how well the PD participants felt that others understood their facial expressions and affective prosody. Findings support the contribution of the basal ganglia to emotional processing, possibly as part of the thalamo-cortical loops, specifically, the skeleto-motor circuit, the lateral orbitofrontal circuit and the anterior cingulate circuit.
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Cornew, Lauren A. "Emotion processing in the auditory modality the time course and development of emotional prosody recognition /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2008. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3330854.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed December 11, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Muir, Karin. "A Comparison of the Recognition of Facial Emotion in Women of Low Body Weight, Both With and Without Anorexia Nervosa." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Psychology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/5456.
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Facial expressions can be reliable markers of emotion, and represent an important source of social information. Consequently, the ability to judge facial expressions accurately is essential for successful interpersonal interactions. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder in which social difficulties are common. Past research has suggested that facial emotion recognition may be disturbed in AN, although the precise nature of this disturbance is unclear. The current study aimed to further investigate emotion recognition in AN by comparing 12 women with AN to 21 women who were constitutionally thin (CT) on the Facial Expression Recognition Test, an established computerized test of facial emotion recognition. Still photographs of faces displaying different emotional expressions and neutral expressions were presented to participants via computer screen. Participants were required to decide which emotion each face displayed from several choices. AN subjects responded faster than CT subjects to the facial emotion stimuli, regardless of which emotion was displayed. However, AN subjects did not differ from CT subjects on overall accuracy, accuracy for different emotion categories or misclassifications. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive style of individuals with AN, recent models of socio-emotional processing, and issues of methodology.
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Stanley, Sally M. "Attachment and prefrontal emotional reactivity : an EEG study of emotional processing in the context of attachment /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2005. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Shostak, Lisa. "Social information processing, emotional face recognition and emotional response style in offending and non-offending adolescents." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2007. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/social-information-processing-emotional-face-recognition-and-emotional-response-style-in-offending-and-nonoffending-adolescents(15ff1b2d-1e52-46b7-be1a-736098263ce1).html.
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Walther, Mireille, and Anja Hilbert. "Emotional openness in overweight and normal-weight adolescents." Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2016. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-206041.
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Obesity is common in adolescence and associated with medical complications. As maladaptive emotional processing is assumed to influence obesity, this research investigated emotional openness (EO), a general model of emotional processing, in normal-weight versus overweight adolescents, with consideration of gender differences, in order to determine whether a particular EO profile is characteristic of overweight adolescents. This research also explored the psychometric characteristics of the Dimensions of Openness to Emotions Questionnaire (DOE-20), a comprehensive multifactorial instrument that assesses emotional processing. The DOE-20 and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) short form were completed by 160 adolescents (mean age: 14.36 ± 0.61 years), 39 of which were overweight. A multivariate analysis of variance showed no difference with respect to overweight status, but better ability to recognize and regulate emotions in boys than girls. The original five-factor structure of the DOE-20 was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis; however, internal consistency was modest. As this research did not replicate the EO profile previously found in obese adults, we discuss the adequacy of the DOE-20 to evaluate EO in adolescents as well as the ability of the construct of EO to assess emotional processing in obesity. Further research should examine the links between EO, problematic eating behaviors, and obesity.
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Chandra, Manik. "Analytical study of a control algorithm based on emotional processing." Thesis, Texas A&M University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/4914.
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This work presents a control algorithm developed from the mammalian emotional processing network. Emotions are processed by the limbic system in the mammalian brain. This system consists of several components that carry out different tasks. The system level understanding of the limbic system has been previously captured in a discrete event computational model. This computational model was modified suitably to be used as a feedback mechanism to regulate the output of a continuous-time first order plant. An extension to a class of nonlinear plants is also discussed. The combined system of the modified model and the linear plant are represented as a set of bilinear differential equations valid in a half space of the 3-dimensional real space. The bounding plane of this half space is the zero level of the square of the plant output. This system of equations possesses a continuous set of equilibrium points which lies on the bounding plane of the half space. The occurrence of a connected equilibrium set is uncommon in control engineering, and to prove stability for such cases one needs an extended Lyapunov-like theorem, namely LaSalle's Invariance Principle. In the process of using this Principle, it is shown that this set of equations possesses a first integral as well. A first integral is identified using the compatibility method, and this first integral is utilized to prove asymptotic stability for a region of the connect equilibrium set.
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Davies, David R. T. "Selective processing of emotional information in subclinical depression and hypomania." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0011/MQ33359.pdf.
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Ashley, Christy A. "Information processing in consumer relationships : the effect of emotional commitment /." View online ; access limited to URI, 2006. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.helin.uri.edu/dissertations/dlnow/3225310.
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Filmer, Hannah. "Processing of emotional expression in subliminal and low-visibility images." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/4045.
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This thesis investigated the processing of emotional stimuli by the visual system, and how the processing of emotions interacts with visual awareness. Emotions have been given ‘special’ status by some previous research, with evidence that the processing of emotions may be relatively independent of striate cortex, and less affected by disruption to awareness than processing of emotionally neutral images. Yet the extent to which emotions are ‘special’ remains questionable. This thesis focused on the processing of emotional stimuli when activity in V1 was disrupted using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and whether emotional properties of stimuli can be reliably discriminated, or affect subsequent responses, when visibility is low. Two of the experiments reported in this thesis disrupted activity in V1 using TMS, Experiment 1 with single pulses in an online design, and Experiment 2 with theta burst stimulation in an offline design. Experiment 1 found that a single pulse of TMS 70-130 ms following a presentation of a body posture image disrupted processing of neutral but not emotional postures in an area of the visual field that corresponded to the disruption. Experiment 2 did not find any convincing evidence of disruption to processing of neutral or emotional faces. From Experiment 1 it would appear that emotional body posture images were relatively unaffected by TMS, and appeared to be robust to disruption to V1. Experiment 2 did not add to this as there was no evidence of disruption in any condition. Experiments 3 and 4 used visual masking to disrupt awareness of emotional and neutral faces. Both experiments used a varying interval between the face and the mask stimuli to systematically vary the visibility of the faces. Overall, the shortest SOA produced the lowest level of visibility, and this level of visibility was arguably outside awareness. In Experiment 3, participants’ ability to discriminate properties of emotional faces under low visibility conditions was greater than their ability to discriminate the orientation of the face. This was despite the orientation discrimination being much easier at higher levels of visibility. Experiment 4 used a gender discrimination task, with emotion providing a redundant cue to the decision (present half of the time). Despite showing a strong linear masking function for the neutral faces, there was no evidence of any emotion advantage. Overall, Experiment 3 gave some evidence of an emotion advantage under low visibility conditions, but this effect was fairly small and not replicated in Experiment 4. Finally, Experiments 5-8 used low visibility emotional faces to prime responses to subsequent emotional faces (Experiments 5 and 6) or words (Experiments 7 and 8). In Experiments 5, 7 and 8 there was some evidence of emotional priming effects, although these effects varied considerably across the different designs used. There was evidence for meaningful processing of the emotional prime faces, but this processing only led to small and variable effects on subsequent responses. In summary, this thesis found some evidence that the processing of emotional stimuli was relatively robust to disruption in V1 with TMS. Attempts to find evidence for robust processing of emotional stimuli when disrupted with backwards masking was less successful, with at best mixed results from discrimination tasks and priming experiments. Whether emotional stimuli are processed by a separate route(s) in the brain is still very much open to debate, but the findings of this thesis offers small and inconsistent evidence for a brain network for processing emotions that is relatively independent of V1 and visual awareness. The network and nature of brain structures involved in the processing of subliminal and low visibility processing of emotions remains somewhat elusive.
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Eracleous, Eleni. "Body image, disordered eating and emotional processing in adolescent females." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2299/2448.
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Eating disorders can be viewed on a continuum, with disordered eating not reaching clinical diagnostic criteria but having potentially negative effects including increasing the risk of an eating disorder or obesity. This study investigated disordered eating in relation to emotional processing from an Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) perspective. Body image dissatisfaction is recognised as a risk factor in eating disorders and was therefore included in this study to investigate whether the ACT concept of inflexibility was associated with ‘less acceptance’ of body image and an increased eating disorder risk as well as general mood disturbance (i.e. depression and anxiety). A non-clinical sample of 96, 12-15 year old females at secondary schools in London was used. Eating disorder risk, inflexibility as well as depression and anxiety were measured. When comparing high, low and moderate eating disorder risk groups it was found that the low and moderate eating disorder risk groups had lower levels of inflexibility and the low eating disorder risk group had a higher body image acceptance than the moderate and the high risk groups as predicted. Inflexibility was also associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression and a negative association was found between depression and anxiety in relation to acceptance of body image. Thus providing supporting evidence for the transdiagnostic significance of ‘inflexibility’. Clinical implications of these findings in relation to prevention and treatment are discussed.
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Dunn, B. "Emotional suppression when processing trauma : consequences for mood and memory." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2004. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1446742/.
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The thought suppression literature (Wegner et al. 1987; Wegner and Erber, 1992) illustrates that there are secondary costs of suppressing the cognitive content of conscious experience. A 'thought rebound' effect has been demonstrated in both healthy populations and psychopathology (Purdon, 1999), whereby the harder a thought is pushed out of mind the more likely it is to subsequently return. It is increasingly realised that people try to control affect as well as cognitions (Gross, 1998; 2001), but as yet the secondary consequences of different forms of emotion regulation have not been studied in detail. In particular, whether an 'emotional rebound' effect occurs following suppression of emotions rather than thoughts during processing of distressing material has not been investigated. 'Emotional rebound' could potentially help explain some of the secondary symptoms seen in PTSD and related conditions. This thesis examines the concurrent and subsequent impact of attempting to suppress (both internally experienced and externally expressed) emotion while processing traumatic information, and is intended as a preliminary investigation of whether emotion suppression contributes to PTSD. Healthy participants were asked to watch a video trauma induction, either under emotional suppression (n = 21) or control (n = 23) conditions. The consequences of emotional suppression on mood, emotional response to novel material, episodic memory, and occurrence of intrusive memories were then measured, using both self-report and psychophysiological methods. Results found that emotional suppression did not alter self-reported emotional experience, lead to a more variable heart response, and did not change electrodermal response while watching the trauma induction. This suggests that emotional suppression is a largely ineffective way of regulating emotional experience and that it alters psychophysiological activity, although exactly what the change in heart rate means at a psychological level is unclear. Subsequently, emotional suppression impaired free recall but not recognition memory of the trauma material, suggesting there is a slight mnemonic impact of this form of affect regulation. There was also a trend for suppression to lead to a reduction in the experience of intrusive memories about the trauma content, although this did not reach statistical significance. There was no change in self-reported experience of emotion following suppression, either in terms of background mood or when processing novel emotional material. There was, however, an increased heart rate deceleration when viewing subsequent emotional material and a slight increase in depression scores at one week follow-up, perhaps indicative of ongoing emotional costs of suppression. These findings, replicating and extending work from the normative emotion regulation literature (Gross, 1998; 2001), suggest that emotional suppression is not an effective form of emotion regulation at the time of encoding and that it leads to some subsequent emotional and mnemonic changes. A provisional clinical implication is that clients should perhaps be discouraged from using emotional suppression as form of mood control. In terms of understanding PTSD, it seems plausible to tentatively suggest that emotional suppression could contribute to the hyper-arousal and impaired recall of trauma seen in PTSD. It is important, however, to replicate and extend these findings to clinical populations to support these conclusions. While emotional suppression has been found not to lead to a 'rebound' effect directly analogous to that seen following thought suppression, it does appear to have some unexpected secondary costs that could perhaps contribute to symptoms of PTSD.
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Plonski, Jared. "Psychopathic personality traits and semantic processing of emotional Stroop stimuli." Tallahassee, Fla. : Florida State University, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/lib/digcoll/undergraduate/honors-theses/341786.
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Mastria, Serena <1986>. "Emotional engagement and brain potentials: repetition in affective picture processing." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2014. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/6428/4/Mastria_Serena_tesi.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
The present thesis addresses several experimental questions regarding the nature of the processes underlying the larger centro-parietal Late Positive Potential (LPP) measured during the viewing of emotional(both pleasant and unpleasant) compared to neutral pictures. During a passive viewing condition, this modulatory difference is significantly reduced with picture repetition, but it does not completely habituate even after a massive repetition of the same picture exemplar. In order to investigate the obligatory nature of the affective modulation of the LPP, in Study 1 we introduced a competing task during repetitive exposure of affective pictures. Picture repetition occurred in a passive viewing context or during a categorization task, in which pictures depicting any mean of transportation were presented as targets, and repeated pictures (affectively engaging images) served as distractor stimuli. Results indicated that the impact of repetition on the LPP affective modulation was very similar between the passive and the task contexts, indicating that the affective processing of visual stimuli reflects an obligatory process that occurs despite participants were engaged in a categorization task.
In study 2 we assessed whether the decrease of the LPP affective modulation persists over time, by presenting in day 2 the same set of pictures that were massively repeated in day 1. Results indicated that the reduction of the emotional modulation of the LPP to repeated pictures persisted even after 1-day interval, suggesting a contribution of long-term memory processes on the affective habituation of the LPP. Taken together, the data provide new information regarding the processes underlying the affective modulation of the late positive potential.
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Mastria, Serena <1986>. "Emotional engagement and brain potentials: repetition in affective picture processing." Doctoral thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2014. http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/6428/.
Full textAbstract:
The present thesis addresses several experimental questions regarding the nature of the processes underlying the larger centro-parietal Late Positive Potential (LPP) measured during the viewing of emotional(both pleasant and unpleasant) compared to neutral pictures. During a passive viewing condition, this modulatory difference is significantly reduced with picture repetition, but it does not completely habituate even after a massive repetition of the same picture exemplar. In order to investigate the obligatory nature of the affective modulation of the LPP, in Study 1 we introduced a competing task during repetitive exposure of affective pictures. Picture repetition occurred in a passive viewing context or during a categorization task, in which pictures depicting any mean of transportation were presented as targets, and repeated pictures (affectively engaging images) served as distractor stimuli. Results indicated that the impact of repetition on the LPP affective modulation was very similar between the passive and the task contexts, indicating that the affective processing of visual stimuli reflects an obligatory process that occurs despite participants were engaged in a categorization task.
In study 2 we assessed whether the decrease of the LPP affective modulation persists over time, by presenting in day 2 the same set of pictures that were massively repeated in day 1. Results indicated that the reduction of the emotional modulation of the LPP to repeated pictures persisted even after 1-day interval, suggesting a contribution of long-term memory processes on the affective habituation of the LPP. Taken together, the data provide new information regarding the processes underlying the affective modulation of the late positive potential.
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MERMIER, JULIA. "PROCESSING EMOTIONAL FACES WITHIN CONTEXT: EVIDENCE FROM INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/10281/370570.
Full textAbstract:
Le espressioni facciali svolgono un ruolo importante nelle interazioni sociali, comunicando informazioni sullo stato d’animo e le intenzioni di chi le esprime. La maggioranza della letteratura sulla percezione delle emozioni ha preso in esame i volti emotivi isolandoli dal contesto, assumendo che essi siano di per sé sufficienti a veicolare, in maniera non ambigua ed indipendente dal contesto, le manifestazioni emotive (Calder et al., 1996; Smith et al., 2005) . Tuttavia, nella vita reale è assai raro osservare espressioni emotive isolate da un contesto e molti studi recenti che coinvolgono partecipanti adulti indicano che il contesto nel quale le espressioni emotive sono inserite svolge un ruolo essenziale nella loro percezione (Aviezer et al., 2017; Wieser et al., 2014). In particolare, negli adulti, è stato mostrato come varie forme di contesti emotivi e sociali (ad esempio, emozioni espresse tramite gestualità corporee e scene visive, fattori sociali intrinseci o precedenti esperienze sociali) modulano il riconoscimento, la valutazione e l’elaborazione neurale delle espressioni facciali (Aviezer et al., 2017; Iidaka et al., 2010; Jack et al., 2012; Pickett et al., 2004; Righart & De Gelder, 2006). Alcuni studi suggeriscono che anche nei primi anni di vita i fattori contestuali svolgano un ruolo nella percezione delle emozioni (citazioni). Tuttavia, la ricerca in questo ambito è estremamente scarsa e prende in esame una gamma di contesti fortemente limitata e selettiva.
Questa tesi di dottorato ha quindi l’obiettivo di fornire un quadro più completo sull’influenza del contesto nell’elaborazione delle espressioni facciali nel corso dello sviluppo, esaminando gli effetti di diversi contesti sulla percezione, e sul riconoscimento delle espressioni facciali nei bambini in età infantile prescolare e scolare. La prima parte di questa tesi prende in esame i segnali emotivi contestuali, verificando come la presenza di altre emozioni nel contesto possa modulare la percezione emotiva. I risultati mostrano che, in bambini di 12 mesi, sia i volti emotivi (Capitolo 1), sia le espressioni emotive cinematiche (Capitolo 2) presenti nel contesto influenzano la percezione delle emozioni, modulando il comportamento visivo e l’attività neurale dei bambini. La seconda parte della tesi si concentra sugli effetti contestuali suscitati da circostanze sociali nei bambini in età infantile, prescolare e scolare. I risultati mostrano che le situazioni contestuali di inclusione ed esclusione influenzano l’elaborazione neurale delle espressioni facciali negli infanti di 13 mesi (Capitolo 3), e il loro riconoscimento nei bambini di 5 anni, ma non nei bambini di 7 e 10 anni (Capitolo 4).
La tesi nel suo complesso fornisce evidenze empiriche che dimostrano gli effetti contestuali generati da diverse situazioni emozionali e sociali (ad esempio, volti e azioni che esprimono una emozione nel contesto, inclusione ed esclusione sociale) in infanti e bambini, ed agiscano a diversi livelli dell’elaborazione delle espressioni emotive facciali (ad esempio, neurale e comportamentale). Inoltre, i risultati suggeriscono che questi effetti contestuali varino in funzione dell’età dei bambini(ad esempio, il Capitolo 4 mostra come gli effetti contestuali fossero presenti solo in bambini di 5 anni). Riassumendo, nelle prime fasi dello sviluppo il contesto sembra svolgere un ruolo chiave nella percezione delle espressioni facciali.Facial expressions, by conveying information on individuals’ internal state and intentions, play an important role in social interactions. The idea that faces alone convey all the necessary information about the expresser’s emotional state in an unambiguous manner and independently of contextual factors was prevalent in the past decades (Calder et al., 1996; Smith et al., 2005) and drove the majority of literature on emotion perception to examine faces in isolation. Nonetheless, facial expressions are very rarely encountered in isolation in real life, and many recent adult studies indicate that the context in which they occur plays an essential part in their perception (for a review, see Aviezer et al., 2017; Wieser et al., 2014). Specifically, various forms of emotional and social context (e.g., emotional bodies or visual scenes, intrinsic social factors or past social experiences) were shown to have a significant influence on adults’ recognition, evaluation, and neural processing of facial expressions (Aviezer et al., 2017; Iidaka et al., 2010; Jack et al., 2012; Pickett et al., 2004; Righart & De Gelder, 2006). However, research investigating the influence of context on the processing of emotional faces in developmental populations is extremely scarce, and although it suggests that contextual effects are also present in infancy and childhood, only a small subset of contextual cues have been examined so far. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation aimed at providing a more comprehensive view of the influence of context on the processing of facial emotions at different developmental stages, by examining the effects of different contextual cues on the perception, neural processing and recognition of facial expressions in infants and children. The first part of this thesis focused on contextual emotional signals. Results indicated that the surrounding facial emotional context (Chapter 1) as well as emotional kinematics cues (Chapter 2) influenced 12-month-olds’ attention and neural processing of emotional faces. The second part focused on contextual effects elicited by social cues in infants and children. They showed that contextual cues of social inclusion and exclusion affected 13-months-old infants’ neural processing of emotional faces (Chapter 3) as well as 5-, but not 7- nor 10-years-olds’ recognition of facial expressions (Chapter 4). Altogether, this thesis provides evidence that contextual effects can be elicited by various types of emotional and social cues (i.e., surrounding emotional faces, emotional kinematics, social inclusion and exclusion) in infants and children, and affect different levels of the processing of emotional faces (i.e., neural and behavioral). In addition, it suggests that these contextual effects vary as a function of the developmental stage of the perceiver (e.g., contextual effects were present only in 5-year-olds in Chapter 4). In sum, context seems to play an essential role in the processing of facial expressions in infancy and childhood, and should be granted particular attention in future developmental studies.
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Child, Scarlett. "Overcome with emotions : understanding the effects of emotional information in text on reading comprehension and processing." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/80550/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the effects of emotional information about characters in text on processing. In five chapters presenting nine experiments in total, readers were presented with emotional characters that occurred either in small texts or in sentences. In the second chapter, it was investigated whether mental representations of entities in sentences are more salient and easier to retrieve due to emotional information. In the third chapter, the effects of emotional information about multiple different characters on processing were explored. The forth chapter presents experiments on perspective taking and how perspective affects the way emotional information is processed. Building up on that, in chapter 5, it was investigated how the mood of the reader influences perspective taking when reading about emotional information. All experiments in the first four chapters used a self-paced reading method to explore effects on reading speed (reading times). Chapter 6, however, presents an eye-tracking experiment set out to explore the effects of perspective on reading behaviour in more detail and to determine where perspective differences arise in the text. Hence, pronoun regions (including perspective cues) across the text were analysed. The findings presented in this thesis gave evidence that readers focus more on emotional characters (that emotional characters are more salient), and that readers also engage more with (emotional) texts when they experience the situation from a personal perspective. All experiments gave evidence that readers track and use emotional information to form a coherent representation of the text.