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The Influence Of Beliefs About Emotion On Avoidance Behaviors, Elise Warner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The beliefs individuals hold about emotions have been shown to influence their tendencies to avoid distressing situations. While much of the work to-date has been on beliefs about whether emotions can be changed (i.e., malleability beliefs), there is research suggesting that the belief that emotions last for long periods of time (i.e., longevity beliefs) have important implications for emotion regulation (Veilleux et al., 2020). Thus, our aim was to examine the relationship between longevity beliefs and experiential avoidance. We predicted that greater longevity beliefs would be associated with greater avoidance tendencies, and that stronger beliefs in the moment would also …

Assessing Subjective Well-Being: A Review Of Common Measures, William Tov, Jun Sheng Keh, Yan Qiang Tan, Qin Ying Joanne Tan, Indra Alam Syah Bin Aziz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Subjective well-being (SWB) consists of affective components (frequent positive feelings, infrequent negative feelings) and cognitive components (evaluations of life and judgments of satisfaction). We review four commonly used measures of SWB: the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Cantril’s ladder, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experiences (SPANE). We conducted a meta-analysis of the reliability and validity of each measure based on studies published from 1999 to 2019. The SWLS, PANAS, and SPANE generally exhibit acceptable levels of reliability (alphas > .80) across most samples, time frame instructions, and age groups. All measures were …

The Role Of Autobiographical Memory Recall In Reappraisal Efficacy And Effort Across Age, Irina Orlovsky

Masters Theses

Socioemotional theories posit that the experience of overcoming unique life challenges over a lifetime enhances self-efficacy and emotional resilience among older adults. Older adults demonstrate greater emotional well-being and motivation to regulate emotions than younger adults, but specific regulatory mechanisms supporting late-life emotional resilience remain unclear. Cognitive reappraisal is an effective but cognitively demanding emotion regulation strategy and shows mixed efficacy in later-life. While a growing repertoire of autobiographical memories may be a resource with age, the role of autobiographical recall in momentary reappraisal has never been tested empirically. In this online study, older and younger adults were trained to …

Social Stressors, Emotional Responses, And Nssi Urges And Behaviors In Daily Life, Lauren A. Haliczer

Doctoral Dissertations

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent among young adults, and is associated with myriad negative outcomes, including heightened suicide risk. The defective self model of NSSI theorizes that individuals who are highly self-critical and who feel they are deserving of punishment are more likely to choose NSSI over other emotion regulation strategies. This empirically-supported model has a number of under-examined implications. Specifically, individuals who engage in NSSI may be more prone to experiencing self-conscious emotions in response to negative social feedback, and this may place individuals at heightened imminent risk for NSSI in everyday life. Few studies have examined self-conscious emotional …

The Effects Of False Heartbeat Feedback On Moral Judgment, Scott Koenig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on human morality is at a crossroads, with one side claiming that moral judgment is the result of rational inference and the other side claiming that it is the result of emotion-laden intuition. This study investigated whether emotion drives moral judgment by manipulating a core component of the experience of emotion: physiological arousal. The sample consisted of 77 undergraduate students at Brooklyn College (57% women, 43% men; mean age = 20.1). One group of participants was led to believe their heart was beating quickly, and another group slowly, while they read and evaluated a series of text vignettes depicting …

Examining The Impact Of Attachment And Parent Socialization Of Emotion In Childhood On Emotion Regulation In Maltreated Adults, Nikki Major

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

Objectives: The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between child maltreatment and adult emotion regulation by examining parenting processes of emotion socialization and attachment security as possible mechanisms accounting for this relationship. It was hypothesized that maltreated adults would retrospectively report more unsupportive responses from parents/caregivers, greater attachment insecurity, more difficulty with emotion regulation, and using expressive suppression more than cognitive reappraisal. It was also hypothesized that unsupportive responses to emotions and attachment security would both indirectly effect the relationship between child maltreatment and adult emotion dysregulation.

Method: A sample of 226 participants from Amazon Mechanical …

Linking Creativity To Psychological Well-Being: Theoretical Insights From Instrumental Emotion Regulation, Angela K. Y. Leung, Brandon Koh, Riyang Phang, Sean T. H. Lee, Tengjiao Huang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research has recognized that people regulate their emotions not only for seeking pleasurable experiences but also for receiving instrumental gains. We draw on the theoretical framework of instrumental emotion regulation (IER; Tamir, 2005, 2009) to shed new light on the relationships among creativity, emotion, and psychological well-being. We outline propositions that explain why there are concurrent creative and well-being benefits when people experience emotional states that are consistent with their personality trait (e.g., worrisome emotions being consistent with trait neuroticism) even if such trait-consistent emotions are negative. The IER perspective offers new interpretations of the creativity—well-being relationship through motivating a …

Sorrow, Healing, And Hope: A Braided Narrative, Abigail Maggi

Honors Projects

This project is a creative nonfiction essay about sadness. In the form of a braided essay, I weave personal narrative with insight and guidance from therapists, psychologists, and friends. In this essay, I share my experience of sadness and how I have processed my emotions during challenging times. The essay is split into three sections – sadness, feeling a little better, and hope – to share my story, the skills I learned that helped me move through sadness, and my decision to choose hope despite and amidst the struggles.

Examining The Impact Of Political Identification And Morality On Compliance With Covid-19 Public Health Measures, Jessica Stump

Honors Theses

COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to study the influence of individual and group differences on beliefs and behavior. In the present work, we examine COVID beliefs and behavior as a function of morality, ideology, and emotion. Data were collected in the spring of 2021 and the fall of 2021, allowing for distinct snapshots of an undergraduate sample at two periods of the pandemic. Of primary interest was the relationship between political ideology, moral foundation endorsement, and COVID-19 behaviors and beliefs. The results reveal that ideology drives COVID-19-related beliefs and behaviors. The results from Study 2 suggest that political liberals were …

Moderating Effects Of Parental Feeding Practices And Emotional Eating On Dietary Intake Among Overweight African American Adolescents, Mary Quattlebaum

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of parental feeding practices and adolescent emotional eating (EE) on dietary outcomes among overweight African American adolescents. Based on Family Systems Theory, it was hypothesized that parental feeding practices, such as parental monitoring and responsibility, would buffer the effects of EE on poor dietary quality, whereas practices such as concern about a child’s weight, restriction, and pressure-to-eat would exacerbate this relationship. Adolescents (N = 127; Mage = 12.83 ۫.74; MBMI % = 96.61 ± 4.14) provided baseline data from the Families Improving Together (FIT) for a Weight Loss trial and an ancillary study. Dietary outcomes …

Behavior Or Diagnosis? Effects Of Irritable Patient Behavior And Diagnostic Labels On Mental Illness Stigma, Nathan R. Huff

Masters Theses

Although research demonstrates significant stigma towards individuals with mental illness, the relative importance of observed behavior and a psychiatric diagnosis in eliciting stigma remains poorly understood. Using video vignettes, three experiments (ns = 195, 749, and 791) examined the effect of irritable (vs. calm) behavior and the presence (vs. absence) of a psychiatric diagnosis (schizophrenia in Studies 1 and 2; schizophrenia and depression in Study 3) on attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral dimensions of stigma towards a fictitious emergency room patient seeking migraine treatment. In line with labeling theory, irritable behavior resulted in greater blameworthy attributions for behavior, greater fear and …

Psychophysiological Predictors Of Change In Emotion Dysregulation 6 Months After Traumatic Injury, Jacklynn M. Fitzgerald, Sydney Clare Timmer-Murillo, Claire Sheeran, Hailey Begg, Morgan Christoph, Terri A Deroon-Cassini, Christine L. Larson

Psychology Faculty Research and Publications

Emotional dysregulation that occurs after trauma conveys risk for multiple disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Psychophysiological data (e.g., skin conductance level [SCL]) may be a useful biomarker for quantifying emotion dysregulation given that autonomic nervous system (ANS)-mediated arousal may underlie this feature. In this longitudinal study, we tested whether SCL collected following a single-incident traumatic injury could predict changes in emotion dysregulation over 6 months. Sixty-six adults were recruited from the emergency department; SCL was quantified during an active trauma narrative, in which participants re-told their traumatic event to a research staff member, as well as a …

Ethics Of Interaction: Levinas And Enactivism On Affectivity, Responsibility, And Signification, Edward A. Lenzo

Middle Voices

In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to connect enactivism with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. This essay is such an attempt. Its major theme is the relationship between affectivity and ethics. My touchstones in enactivist thought are Giovanna Colombetti and Steve Torrances’ “Emotion and Ethics: an (inter-)enactive account” (2009) and the influential concept of participatory sense-making developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). With respect to Levinas, I deploy major insights from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I first show that enactivist thought (thus represented) and Levinas roughly agree on …

Mental Construal And Alterations In Emotional Memory, Olivia D. Beers

Dissertations

Psychological distancing refers to a shift from a psychologically immersed perspective that involves thinking about the details of an event (concretely) or stepping back from it and watching the event from an outside point of view (abstractly)––this can help individuals change how they feel about the experience. Investigating how construal levels affect emotional memories may provide more insight into how individuals may potentially alter the recall of their memories. The current study reflects a new examination of the effect of primed high and low construal levels on the recall of positive and negative arousing stimuli. This study included a pilot …

Plea To Professors: A Passionate Approach To Controversy In The Classroom, Adrianna Meredith

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Scholars have warned of a student-driven movement to turn campuses into comfort zones free from any material that may be seen as controversial (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Despite this movement, the notion that professors ought to shelter their students as opposed to exposing them to challenging ideas is anti-intellectual and counterproductive to the development of critical thinking (American Association of University Professors, 2014). If the goal of education is indeed to foster critical thinking, it is crucial for professors to be willing to discuss controversial subjects (Schneider, 2013). Such openness in the classroom requires students to analyze the origin and …

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …

Time To Stop Pretending We Don’T Know Other Animals Are Sentient Beings, Marc Bekoff

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al.’s target article is an outstanding review of some of the history of the science of sentience, but one would have liked to see a much stronger “call to action.” We don’t need any more data to know that many other animals are sentient beings whose lives must be protected from harm in a wide variety of contexts. It is not anti-science to want more action on behalf of other animals right now.

Emotional Component Of Pain Perception In The Medicinal Leech?, Brian D. Burrell

Animal Sentience

Crump et al. have provided a series of criteria to assess animal sentience that is focused on the perception of pain, which is known to have both sensory and emotional components. They also provide a qualitative scoring system to assess data that address the eight criteria and apply this paradigm to decapod crustaceans. The criteria laid out have the potential to be applied to other invertebrates typically thought to have sensory response to tissue damage, but no emotional component to pain perception.

Interrupting Holistic Processing May Improve The Detection Of Deceptive Emotional Facial Expressions, Christopher A. Gunderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although a growing body of evidence suggests that genuine and deceptive facial expressions differ, previous work is mixed as to whether observers can discern between them. One explanation is that cues to deception on the face are subtle and not readily perceived by observers. I argue that the way people process faces may obscure these cues, making them ‘unseen’ by observers. In the current work, I pit two hypotheses against each other to test whether interrupting holistic processing improves or impairs the ability to identify deceptive emotional expressions. Since people process faces holistically, one region of the face may interfere …

Political Identity Biases Americans’ Judgments Of Outgroup Emotion, Ruby Basyouni, Nicholas R. Harp, Ingrid J. Haas, Maital Neta

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Social group identity plays a central role in political polarization and inter-party conflict. Here, we use ambiguously valenced faces to measure bias in the processing of political ingroup and outgroup faces, while also accounting for interparty differences in judgments of emotion at baseline. Participants identifying as Democrats and Republicans judged happy, angry, and surprised faces as positive or negative. Whereas happy and angry faces convey positive and negative valence respectively, surprised faces are ambiguous in that they readily convey positive and negative valence. Thus, surprise is a useful tool for characterizing valence bias (i.e., the tendency to judge ambiguous stimuli …

Walking On Thin Ice: Exploring Demands And Means Of Coping During An Extreme Expedition, Tracey J. Devonport, Carla Meijen, Juliette Lloyd

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

The present exploratory study was undertaken with two experienced explorers in order to examine daily events, perceived demands, coping strategies, and mood during a unique 636–675 km ‘‘double solo’’ crossing of Lake Baikal, a frozen lake in Siberia. A 59-year-old female explorer and a 49-year-old male explorer completed a daily survey and written diary during the expedition to collect situational data. Two semi-structured interviews were also completed, one within 24 hours and a second within four months of their return. These interviews sought to identify demands and coping efforts perceived as being most pertinent during their expedition. Guided by the …

Mindfulness Training To Enhance Emotion Regulation In A Polarizing Political Context: A Multimethod Investigation, Hadley Rahrig

Theses and Dissertations

The U.S. continues to show an upward trend in political polarization, perceived as a moral divide between liberal and conservative ideological groups. This moralization of political identity has contributed to the escalation of negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and hatred) directed towards political outgroup members. Although negative emotions are potent motivators of political intolerance, these emotions are nevertheless subject to regulation. Mindfulness offers a promising yet understudied emotion regulation strategy which may facilitate open receptivity towards opposing partisans. The present randomized controlled trial (RCT) examines the effects of short-term mindfulness training (MT) vs structurally equivalent Cognitive Reappraisal training (CT) on …

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …