Digital Commons Network^™

"A Nice, Beautiful, Active, & Faithful Friend": Horses & Emotion In The Civil War Letters Of Two Union Officers, Allen F. Horn Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Horses are the unsung heroes of the American Civil War. Both armies relied heavily on equines for a variety of tasks. They carried cavalry soldiers on the battlefield and pulled wagons for artillery and military supply chains. Horses could also serve as companion animals. Soldiers formed friendships with their horses as a way to heal from the trauma of combat and stave off the monotony of camp life. Writing about animals in letters to their families enabled soldiers to explain their experiences in more palatable terms to their families. As over 1.2 million horses and mules died in the conflict, …

Do Individuals With Functional Gastrointestinal Symptoms Experience Emotions Differently? An Examination Of Emotional Responding During A Series Of Emotion Induction Tasks, Sara Witcraft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) are disorders of the brain-gut axis characterized by physiological and emotional disturbances, including heightened comorbidity with psychiatric disorders. Individuals with FGIDs experience difficulties with emotional processing, including the awareness, identification, and regulation of emotions. Although emotional processing is implicated in the maintenance and exacerbation of FGID pathology, literature examining these associations is limited. The current study aimed to enhance understanding of the emotional processing of individuals with FGIDs. We recruited individuals with and without FGID symptoms and examined the: (1) association between gastrointestinal distress and psychopathology; (2) association between gastrointestinal distress and emotional and physiological responsivity; …

Leading Through Music: A Comparative Case Study On The Effects Of Military Band Performance, Jessica A. Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the emotional impacts of military band performance, as well as the result of military band support loss on individuals in surrounding communities. The primary objectives of this qualitative comparative case study were to discover the value of military bands perceived by audiences and musicians. A critical, qualitative examination was implemented to assess how the atmospheres created by military bands influence their audiences and how communities react to reduced opportunities to interact with military band members. Community members of the 329D and TRADOC Army Bands were surveyed and interviewed in this study to compare the morale and sense …

Finding The Silver Lining: The Role Of Affect And Adversity In Entrepreneurial Venturing., Lauren A. Zettel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Motivated goal pursuit is a foundational concept in entrepreneurial venturing. Entrepreneurs set goals for their ventures, and their persistence in pursuing these goals ultimately impacts the success of their venture. Many of the explanations of motivation in goal pursuit have focused on the benefits of steady progress and positive emotions. However, entrepreneurs inevitably face adversity and setbacks which, in turn, beget negative emotions. It is yet unclear what role adversity and the ensuing negative emotions may have in motivating entrepreneurs. In order to extend our theoretical understanding of affect and adversity in entrepreneurial venturing, this dissertation draws on the existing …

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 …

Working Through Lingering Anger Following Interpersonal Grievances: Examining Mechanisms Of Change In Rumination, Reappraisal, And Identification Of Unmet Needs, Michael Arend Strating

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many clients present to psychotherapy with lingering feelings of anger, bitterness, or resentment in response to interpersonal grievances. The current project sought to compare the effects of cognitive reappraisal and needs identification interventions on lingering anger while determining whether intervention effects occur through shared or distinct mechanisms of change. Using an experimental, therapy-analogue design, 197 undergraduate participants (Study 1) completed a brief, self-guided online intervention involving either anger rumination (comparison condition), cognitive reappraisal, or needs identification. This design was replicated in a clinical sample of 31 participants (Study 2) who were recruited from local mental health clinics using the same …

Individual Differences And Ecological Validity Of Emotion Regulation In Response To Sadness, Colin M. Bosma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of research on emotion regulation processes has been restricted to controlled laboratory settingsthat use experimental paradigms to investigate short-term outcomes (Berking & Wupperman, 2012). A true understanding of emotion regulation requires an unobtrusive, ecologically valid assessment of the construct as it naturally unfolds in the environment. Digital phenotyping, or moment-by-moment quantification of individual-level human behavior using data from smartphone sensors (Torous & Onnela, 2016), is a novel method for evaluating human behavior in naturalistic settings. The present project is the first to implement digital phenotyping in the investigation of emotion regulation.

The central aim of the study was …

Database Of Picture-Based Cognitive Reappraisal Experiments: Analyses Of Trial-Level Factors, Damon Abraham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cognitive reappraisal is widely recognized as an effective emotion regulation strategy for managing negative emotions. In laboratory research, reappraisal has been shown to attenuate self-reported negative affect as well as physiological and neurological markers of emotion and arousal. In these experiments, emotionally evocative images are frequently used to induce negative affect in participants. Depending on the trial condition, participants are instructed to either look and react naturally or to change their experience using reappraisal. Data are typically aggregated within trial condition, and the average difference in reported negative affect between conditions serves as the behavioral measure of reappraisal success. While …

Working Memory Capacity Among College Students: The Role Of Gender And Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms, Lydia R. Bickham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Among college students, 81.8% report experiencing at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, and approximately one third report experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS) (Overstreet, Berenz, Kendler, Dick, & Amstadter, 2017). Individuals who experience PTSS may have impaired cognitive functioning when processing trauma-relevant material (Blanchette, Rutembesa, Habimana, & Caparos, 2018). An example of this is working memory capacity (WMC), which can be disrupted by affective distractors (Vytal, Cornwell, & Letkiewicz, 2013). In addition to impaired daily functioning (American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013) those with lower cognitive performance also respond less effectively to clinical treatment options for PTSS (Wild & Gur, …

Surface, Depth And The Ephemeral Experience, Naghmeh Hachempour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Music has long been an important medium for fulfilling and expressing emotional needs. In fact, music can become a powerful tool to create emotional responses in humans, such as happiness, sadness, awareness, as we see in recent decades in cinema, social media and advertisement. Today, a combination of different media is used to arouse our emotion and feeling, but often music has been used to accompany a visual realization, rather than vice versa. In my work I explore new modes of communication between people and sound by transfiguring music notation to a visual graphic. The scope and scale of my …

Urban School Leaders And Community Partners In Support Of Arts Education: A Narrative Study, Monica L. Elmore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of school leaders and community partners with arts education in three K-12 urban public school districts in Northern New Jersey that have implemented and sustained arts education programs. This narrative study explored each participant's journey, how the arts first came into their lives, and what they have done in their careers to promote arts education in urban schools. Commonalities include advocacy, funding, exposure, learning equality, value, and emotion. The participants in this study shed light on their successes and challenges with advocacy. They also shared their leadership path and the …

Emotional Appeals In Nonprofit Advertising: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Print Ads By The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation And The American Cancer Society, Dominique N. A. Harrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emotional appeals are frequently employed in strategic messaging by nonprofit organizations. In this study, I identify instances of emotional appeals in select print adverts of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society, and use rhetorical analysis to explore how each organization’s tactics are strategic in their appeal to target audiences’ emotions. In doing so, I identify several reoccurring emotional themes—including hope, love, and unity—that engage their target audiences and persuade them to respond to diverse calls-to-action. In order to make these appeals to audience emotion, the adverts employ rhetorical devices such as personification, metaphor, repetition, …

Are Emotions Influenced By Their Sequence? An Experimental Study Of Emotional Processing, Stephanie Nardone

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined whether resolution of lingering anger and sadness about an interpersonal interaction depends on the sequence in which anger and sadness are experienced. Within a total sample of 104 participants, two groups were identified based on presenting emotional concern: individuals with predominantly lingering anger about an interpersonal interaction (n = 26), and individuals with predominantly lingering sadness about an interpersonal interaction (n = 56). Participants completed a written emotional processing intervention in one of two randomly assigned conditions (i.e., anger-before-sadness condition or sadness-before-anger condition), which differed only by the order in which participants were guided to feel …

Resolving Distressing Autobiographical Memories: The Role Of Perspective In Imagery, Writing, And Self-Reflection, Chantal M. Boucher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This program of research consists of three studies centered on the development and validation of a measure of psychological closure along with an investigation of how different strategies for recalling and writing about unresolved autobiographical events inform attributions of closure and aspects of emotion (valence, intensity, and reaction). Study 1 (Ntotal =601) centered on the construction of the Psychological Closure Scale (PCS). This began with a multifaceted conceptualization based on a thorough review of definitions and theoretical contexts. Factor analyses revealed a robust, good-fitting, and reliable structural solution. The PCS contains 42 items that assess seven facets of event resolution: …

Emotion Regulation And Social Competence In Middle Childhood: The Role Of Parental Emotional Competence, Personality, And Emotion Socialization Beliefs, Attitudes, And Practices, Jennifer Leigh Scammell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Much of what children know about emotions is learned from their parents, so it is important to examine parental beliefs, attitudes, and practices that contribute to emotion socialization. Little is known about how parents’ own emotional competence skills and personality contribute to these beliefs, attitudes, and practices. The purpose of this study was to examine the relations among parent emotional competence (i.e., positive expression, negative expression, empathy, reappraisal, and mature defense mechanisms), parent personality (i.e., openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), emotion-related parenting style (i.e., emotion coaching) and practices (i.e., supportive reactions to children’s negative emotions), and parent-reported …

How Is Shame Resolved? An Experimental Study On The Roles Of Anger And Sadness, Tsubasa Sawashima

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: The aim of the current study was to explore emotional sequences involved in resolving shame, with a primary focus on comparing the effects of facilitating anger vs. facilitating sadness in the context of shame activation. The main hypothesis posited that facilitating anger, as opposed to sadness, would better promote emotional recovery from shame. This was inspired by an emerging line of research suggesting that facilitating an emotion that is incongruent (e.g., anger), as opposed to congruent (e.g., sadness), in its action tendency with the emotional distress presenting (e.g., shame) might better promote emotional outcome. Method: A randomized experimental design …

Designing Interactive Virtual Environments With Feedback In Health Applications., Yi Li

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the most important factors to influence user experience in human-computer interaction is the user emotional reaction. Interactive environments including serious games that are responsive to user emotions improve their effectiveness and user satisfactions. Testing and training for user emotional competence is meaningful in healthcare field, which has motivated us to analyze immersive affective games using emotional feedbacks. In this dissertation, a systematic model of designing interactive environment is presented, which consists of three essential modules: affect modeling, affect recognition, and affect control. In order to collect data for analysis and construct these modules, a series of experiments were …

Binocular Rivalry Of Emotional Expressions, Daniel Stephen Lumian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A central debate in defining emotional space is whether emotions are organized categorically (e.g., fear, happy, disgust) or continuously (i.e., along the independent dimensions of valence and arousal). Emotional facial expressions are one tool often leveraged in trying to define emotional space. Faces are rich sources of social and emotional information. Faces, like emotions, can be organized in either categorical (e.g., happy, sad) or continuous (e.g., open-closed) ways. Therefore, understanding the relatedness of emotional facial expressions to each other may shed light on the underlying structure of emotions. Binocular rivalry (BR) is a tool which can be leveraged to measure …

The Fear Factor: Developing A Framework Of Emotional Cognition For Understanding Muslim Americans' Voting Behavior In 2016, Joanna Boudreaux

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Following voting for George W. Bush in 2000, research shows that Muslim Americans moved away from the Republican Party in 2004 in unprecedented numbers and continued to support the Democratic Party in subsequent elections. To explain Muslim Americans' shifting voting preference most studies employ quantitative survey methods and examine associations between religious variables and partisanship. In this study, with a focus on the 2016 Presidential election, I analyze qualitative data gathered from 22 in-depth interviews in Memphis and develop a theoretical framework of emotional-cognition to interpret Muslim Americans' voting behaviors. I find that emotion played an important role in Muslim …

Gender Differences In Attributions Of Shame, Guilt, Pride, And Being Unafraid Of Criticism Among Chinese Children, Charles Matthew Stapleton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children not only experience shame, guilt, pride, and a sense of being unafraid of criticism themselves, but they also make attributions concerning other children’s experiences of these emotions. This dissertation tested the hypothesis that children’s attributions of shame, guilt, pride, and being unafraid of criticism would be influenced by the gender of the perceiver and the gender of the target of the attributions. Three hundred and twenty-four children living in rural and urban China nominated classroom peers to whom they attributed normatively appropriate shame, guilt, and pride. They also nominated children who they thought were unafraid of criticism. Generalized mixed …

Defining A Role For Affect In Decision-Making, Pareezad Cyrus Zarolia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent theories of decision-making have hinted that affect might be useful during some decision-making processes. I propose a model, the affective evaluation model, which defines the role of affect in decision-making as helpful when affect is decision-relevant and unhelpful when it is not. In three studies, I manipulate the decision-relevance of affect to test this central component of the affective evaluation model. Study 1 demonstrates that emphasizing decision-relevant affective signals facilitates optimal decision-making as compared to emphasizing purely cognitive evaluations. Study 2 tests the hypothesis that creating the expectation that affect is useful can facilitate decision-making. Finally, Study 3 tests …

The Influence Of Emotion On Memory For A Crime, Taylor Langley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have reported errors in recall or recognition of witnessed events, accounting for the most common cause of false convictions of innocent people. Tiwari (2010) indicated that 25% of suspects who were identified in a line-up were actually innocent. Jurors are strongly influenced by eyewitness testimony and this can lead to false convictions. The validity of eyewitness identification is critical in cases in which it is used as evidence. In the current study we examined specific emotion states by inducing fear, surprise, and neutral moods. We hypothesized that participants in the Fear group would be least susceptible to the effects …

Emotional Responses Following Sports-Related Concussion; A Pilot Study With Controls, Eva Keatley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mild traumatic brain injury is associated with new onset emotional symptoms (Caroll et al., 2014; Konrad et al., 2011). This study will address a gap in the literature by examining the relationship between mTBI, autonomic arousal, and emotional symptoms in the acute phase of a concussion in athletes. In this pilot study, skin conduction and heart rate changes in response to emotional stimuli were measured in 25 undergraduate controls. Results indicate that emotional valence of facial expressions did not elicit the expected differential physiological responses as suggested by previous research, but habituation to an acoustic startle over repeated exposures was …

A Constructive Account Of Children's Moral Agency Drawing On Thomas Aquinas's Theory Of Emotions, Ann Vinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation makes the case that children are moral agents engaged with the morality of their communities without being morally accountable as adults. Contemporary Christian theological anthropology holds that children are fully human and in the image of God, and that they are already encountering good and evil in the world. Childhood is viewed as an essential part of human life and as something that perdures throughout a person's existence. Through their emotions, children are able to engage with, make meaning of, and respond to their surroundings, and these early emotional experiences help to shape each person for the whole …

Young Adult Children’S Communicative Management Of Emotions About Divorce And Divorce Disclosures: Creating And Applying A New Measure, Jenna Shimkowski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although scholars have examined the impacts of divorce on children, there has been little research focused on how children communicatively manage and make sense of their emotions following the divorce. Theoretically, the communication field is lacking in the knowledge of ways in which children of divorce handle the emotions that can arise in their new family system. This dissertation consists of two studies. Study 1 included identifying the strategies that young adult children report using to manage their emotions regarding parents’ divorce and creating a new measure based on children’s reports of these management strategies. Young adults reported using verbal …

Emotion Regulation To Facilitate The Process And Products Of Learning In Online Learning Environments, Amber Chauncey Strain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emotional experiences occur often during online learning and need to be successfully regulated. In this dissertation, three interventions were tested to gauge their effects on engagement and performance. These interventions used or combined elements of cognitive reappraisal and situated context construction. Ethnically diverse adult learners ranging from 18 to 68 years of age (N = 209) used one of these strategies or no strategy (control) in an online learning environment. It was predicted that participants who used these interventions would experience more engagement and higher learning outcomes than a control condition. It was also predicted that the combined use of …

Uncovering The Sub-Text: Presidents' Emotional Expressions And Major Uses Of Force, Elias Assaf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The global context of decision making continues to adapt in response to international threats. Political psychologists have therefore considered decision making processes regarding major uses of force a key area of interest. Although presidential personality has been widely studied as a mitigating factor in the decision making patterns leading to uses of force, traditional theories have not accounted for the emotions of individuals as they affect political actions and are used to frame public perception of the use of force. This thesis therefore measures expressed emotion and cognitive expressions in the form of expressed aggression, passivity, blame, praise, certainty, realism, …

Examining Emotional Responses To Effective Versus Ineffective Virtual Buddies, Kathleen Ingraham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to explore the impact of virtual character design on user emotional experience and user behavior in a simulated environment. With simulation training increasing in popularity as a tool for teaching social skills, it is essential that social interactions in virtual environments provide authentic opportunities for practice (Swartout et al., 2006). This study used Interactive Performance Theory (Wirth, 2012) to examine the effect of designing a virtual buddy character with ineffective traits instead of effective or expert traits. The sample population for this study (n = 145) consisted of first year university students enrolled …

Emotional Processing In Self-Narratives As A Predictor Of Outcome In Emotion Focused Therapy For Child Abuse Trauma (Eftt), Shayna Hannah Nussbaum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study is the first to test a model of emotional change processes in self-focused sessions of emotion-focused therapy for trauma (EFTT), whereby early expressions of distress (e.g., fear, shame) shift to Advanced Meaning Making (AMM) states (e.g., assertive anger, grief) in later sessions. Archival data (videotaped sessions, self-report measures) from a previous study (Paivio, Jarry, Chagigiorgis, Hall, & Ralston, 2010) were utilized. Emotional processing was rated using the Classification of Affective Meaning States (CAMS; Pascual-Leone & Greenberg, 2007). Result of odds ratio analyses revealed increases in expression of AMM in late sessions compared to early sessions. Results of …

The Effect Of Mood On Set-Switching Abilities In Younger And Older Adults, Olivia Chu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research shows that changes in our moods can affect our performance on cognitive tasks. Most studies to date have used young adults and the interaction between mood, cognitive performance and age have rarely been examined. There are age-specific changes in executive functions and mood regulation. This study examined the effect of mood on set switching and inhibitory control by comparing performances in young and older adults after neutral, positive and negative mood inductions using forced cued based switching tasks. In a neutral mood, older adults showed reduced set switching abilities and inhibitory control compared to young adults. Consistent with the …