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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 …

"It's Like Walking On Eggshells": The Lived Experiences Of Workplace Bullying Bystanders In Academia, Jenilee Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Over 60 million working adults in the U.S. report bullying experiences (Namie, 2017). However, many organizations fail to actively intervene. Workplace bullying becomes a detrimental process riddled with emotional trauma, confusion, and depleted organizational productivity. Workplace bullying bystanders are pivotal as they impact the trajectory of these issues. Bystanders can either be a target-ally (e.g., offer support or actively intervene), bully-ally (e.g., act as a henchman), or silent-bystander (e.g., ignore the situation). Bystanders contend with their own complex sensemaking processes when witnessing bullying happen to others. Researchers have often examined this role through a post-positivistic lens in the quest to …

Seneca, The Humors, And Revenge Tragedy, Andrew Stesienko

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that moral and religious authorities of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods adapted rules for emotional governance from Senecan philosophy. These Senecan rules helped institute a performance-based approach to managing emotion, which relied on programmatic meditation, rhetoric, and behavior to change one’s emotional state. This approach ostensibly offered more personal control over affective inclination, which according to the period’s Galenic paradigms, was heavily influenced by environmental and physiological factors. My project examines revenge tragedy to highlight Senecan-inspired affect management as practiced by aspiring avengers. Because revenging hopefuls must amplify and then mobilize their feelings in order to achieve …

Face And Feeling: An Examination Of The Role Of Facial Feedback In Emotion, Nicholas Alvaro Coles

Doctoral Dissertations

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that an individual’s experience of emotion is influenced by their facial expressions. Researchers, however, currently face conflicting narratives about whether this hypothesis is valid. A large replication effort consistently failed to replicate a seminal demonstration of the facial feedback hypothesis, but meta-analysis suggests the effect is real. To address these conflicting narratives, the Many Smiles Collaboration was formed. In the Many Smiles Collaboration, a large team of researchers—some advocates of the facial feedback hypothesis, some critics, and some without strong belief—collaborated to specify the best ways to test this hypothesis. Two pilot tests suggested that …

Emotional Manipulation And Cognitive Distraction As Strategy: The Effects Of Verbal Insults On Motivation And Performance In A Competitive Setting, Karen C. P. Mcdermott

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explored the effects of verbally aggressive insults on an opponent’s performance in a competitive setting, i.e. ‘trash talk.’ Bringing together literature from a number of fields, a model was tested which hypothesized that the perception of verbal insults would increase cognitive distraction, elevate levels of emotional arousal, and affect motivation to perform, such that competitive performance would decrease. Anger and shame were posited as the primary manifestations of emotional arousal. The study was operationalized through a video game racing competition as a true experiment with control and verbal insult conditions. Both groups received an auditory treatment delivered by …

Using Computational Methods And Experimentation To Understand The Persuasiveness Of Vaccine Messages, Zhan Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

In the digital age, true and false information can influence health-related decisions differently. It is important to monitor the dissemination of misinformation, understand public interests and develop persuasive messages. Two studies were conducted in order to meet these goals. Study 1 used computational methods to explore topic evolution and popularity in vaccine-related online messages. Topic modeling identified 14 topics in pro-vaccine messages (PVMs) and 12 topics in anti-vaccine messages (AVMs). PVMs that used personal stories received the highest number of shares, reactions, and comments. Pure scientific knowledge received the least attention. The most frequently appearing topic in AVMs was about …

Developing A Broader Understanding Of Subjective Age: A Mixed Methods Investigation, Gretchen A. Petery

Doctoral Dissertations

Subjective age (SA), a self-construal of age often measured by asking how old a person feels (e.g., felt age, FA), has been proposed as an alternative to chronological age (CA) in organizational research. Indeed, prior research reveals that SA has predictive abilities above and beyond CA on work relevant outcomes such as stress, retirement intentions, and health. Younger adults tend to report feeling older than their CA; this switches to feeling younger than CA sometime around mid- to late-twenties, although there is considerable variability in the size and direction of FA-CA differences at all ages. Yet, relatively little is known …

Assessing The Long-Term Sequelae Of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Janna Mantua

Doctoral Dissertations

A mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), also known as a concussion, is defined as an injury that results in an alteration of consciousness or mental status. Previous studies have shown mTBI populations experience a number of chronic (> 1 year) symptoms, such as sleep disturbances (e.g., sleep stage alterations), mood alterations (e.g., depressive symptoms), and cognitive alterations (e.g., poor concentration). The three chapters of this dissertation sought to explore these long-term sequelae and the possible interrelations between them. In the first experiment, sleep-dependent memory consolidation of neutral stimuli was probed in a chronic mTBI sample and a control, uninjured sample. …

Cuteness And Appeals: Unleashing Prosocial Emotions, Katherine (Kivy) Weeks

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the implications of cuteness in marketing communication. It uses babyfacedness research as the basis for evoking a cuteness response, and introduces a nurturance scale to measure the emotional outcome of exposure. In the process, it uncovered problems with existing conceptualizations of attractiveness, and demonstrated how using nurturance, aesthetic judgement and sexual judgement measures better explains aggregate emotional outcome (e.g. positive/negative emotion) from exposure to facial images. In particular, it shows how nurturance and sexual judgements have antagonistic effects on aggregate emotion. Additionally, it details how babyfaced manipulations influence both the perceived age …

Efficacy Of Short-Term Emotional Regulation Training On Interference During Cognitive Tasks, Kerry Margaret Cannity

Doctoral Dissertations

The experience of emotion and attempts to regulate it are universal human phenomena. Emotion regulation is used to alter the affective intensity or tone, behaviors, and consequences associated with an emotional experience. This study examined how two common emotional regulation strategies (mindfulness and distraction) affect attentional performance following a negative mood induction via film. While previous literature has compared emotional regulation strategies’ effects on a variety of outcomes, the efficacy of these strategies to reduce cognitive interference caused by negative mood has not been examined. Both mindfulness and distraction are hypothesized to occur through the Attention Deployment mechanism of the …

Parents’ Perceptions And Responses To Infant Emotions, Lauren Renee Bader

Doctoral Dissertations

Parents respond to their infants’ emotions in ways they believe are most appropriate. These reciprocal interactions make up the infants’ social-emotional environment and appear to guide future development and relationship formation; this trajectory is supported mostly from research in Western industrialized contexts. This dissertation consists of three studies and addresses the following over-arching research questions: How have parents’ perceptions of infant emotions been studied? How do Gamo mothers in rural Southern Ethiopia perceive their infants’ emotions and what do they believe are appropriate responses to emotions? Do Gamo mothers vary in their feelings about their infants’ negative emotions and is …

How It Feels To Be Coached: Teacher Perception Of Coaching And Emotional Response To The Coach, Margaret Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Coaching is a strategy employed by districts to improve teacher skill and advance student learning. Despite widespread adoption of coaching, research has not yet explored teachers' emotional responses to coaching, which may impact the success of the coaching practice. This study examines teacher emotions by examining teacher perception of coaching and coinciding emotional response to those perceptions. Using the qualitative case study method, I examined 9 teachers across 3 schools. I found that perception and emotional response were shaped by more than the current coaching practice. Instead, teachers engaged in a mental bookkeeping process, in which perceptions of prior coaching …

Are People Motivated To Experience Emotions For Their Cognitive Impacts? The Motivational Implications Of Cognitive Appraisal Theories Of Emotion, Daniel R. Rovenpor

Doctoral Dissertations

I propose a novel framework for understanding why people want to feel different emotions. I argue that people may be motivated to experience emotions for the cognitive appraisals they are associated with. In an effort to lay the foundation for an appraisal-based model of emotional preferences, I drew upon research on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, emotional preferences, and basic human motivation. I tested my proposed model by either measuring (Study 1) or manipulating (Studies 2-7) appraisals and measuring emotional preferences, using anger (Studies 1-6) and guilt (Study 7) as specific test cases. I predicted that uncertainty appraisals would lead …

The Development And Validation Of The Emotion Knowledge And Awareness Test, Catherine A. Rossi

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop, test, and pilot a general outcome measurement tool that will allow educators to test young children’s knowledge of factors of emotional development: emotional identification and fluency, understanding situations where multiple emotions are present, understanding that others may feel differently in situations, and emotional regulation (CASEL, 2014). There are few assessments that reliably measure emotion knowledge in early elementary grades. The Emotion Knowledge and Awareness Test (EKAT) has been developed for kindergarten through second grade students to measure emotion awareness across two domains: knowledge and management. It was developed as a pre/posttest assessment …

The Family Ties That Bind: Essays That Examine And Extend The Microfoundations Of Socioemotional Wealth Theory, David Scott Jiang

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine and extend the microfoundations of socioemotional wealth (SEW) theory. While burgeoning research finds that a focus on SEW, or a controlling family’s stock of nonfinancial and affective utilities in a firm, predicts unique family firm outcomes, we know surprisingly little about emotion and family dynamic’s assumed causal roles in these unique outcomes. I address these theoretical needs with five related essays. In the first essay, I review the extant SEW literature, identifying unexamined cognitive, affective, motivational, and social assumptions in theoretical arguments and integrating psychological research to offer new directions for studying the microfoundations of …

Multi-Modal Outcomes From Interpersonal Need (Un)Fulfillment: The Emotional, Cognitive And Behavioral Derivatives Of Consecutive Social Contingencies, Kyle Steven Hull

Doctoral Dissertations

The current study assessed the relationship between the core dimensions of interpersonal communication and relationships, power and intimacy, on the activation of individualistic-prosocial affect systems and subsequent interpersonal outcomes. Despite extensive research examining each dimension, mixed findings are prevalent and few have investigated their potential interaction. This study addressed these issues based on current trends in interdisciplinary research. Specifically, manipulated social triumph-defeat was followed by social inclusion-exclusion to examine their combined effect on interpersonal outcomes. Results indicate that the power and intimacy manipulations were successful, however, the relationship between them was not interactive. The current findings contradict the logical expansion …

Cognitive Malleability: Does Disgust Act As A "Stop" Signal On Currently Accessible Cognitive Processing Styles In Perceptual And Conceptual Tasks?, Elicia C. Lair

Doctoral Dissertations

Much of the research on feeling and thought supports the notion of a fixed relationship between affect and cognition, specifically that particular affective experiences promote particular ways of thinking (i.e., information processing styles). Surprisingly, little is known about the relationship between disgust and cognition, and this dissertation sought to rectify this omission. The recently proposed Cognitive Malleability approach (Clore, et al., 2001; Huntsinger & Clore, 2007; Isbell, 2010; Isbell, Lair, & Rovenpor, 2013) calls the fixed nature of the affect-cognition relationship into question, and instead argues that affect confers value on whatever information processing style is currently dominant. This new …

Emotion In Adoption Narratives: Links To Close Relationships In Emerging Adulthood, Holly A. Grant-Marsney

Doctoral Dissertations

An adopted person develops a narrative or story to help make sense of his or her adoption. This narrative provides a window into how the adoptee understands the role of adoption in his or her life and articulates feelings and thoughts about it. Adolescent and emerging adult adoptees’ data from the Minnesota-Texas Adoption Research Project (MTARP) were examined. MTARP longitudinally followed 190 adoptive kinship networks, with varying levels of openness in the adoption, from childhood to emerging adulthood. The current study sought to understand how emotion (affective valence and specific emotions), as identified in the adoption narratives during adolescence and …

"My Gut Has To Feel It": A Participatory Action Research Study Of Community College Educators Navigating The Emotional Terrain Of Human Rights Education, Lindsay Padilla

Doctoral Dissertations

Informed by feminist theories of emotion and the concept of critical emotional praxis, this PAR study highlights the emotional terrain of four Northern California community college teachers who teach human rights. The following meta-question guided this research: "Given the role of emotions in challenging injustice, as well as in engaging in personal and societal change, what role do emotions play when teaching in a community college?" Data sources included journals, monthly meetings, final reflection narratives, and exit interviews, which were culled for emergent themes. The findings indicate that the co-researchers in this study experienced emotional ambivalence (the simultaneous experience of …

Emotional Labor And Authentic Leadership, John E. Buckner V

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizational research has begun to once again focus on the importance of emotions in the workplace. In particular, the concept of emotional labor, the management of emotions at work to influence clients and customers, has recently received much attention. While research has addressed the impact of emotional labor on both employees and clients or customers, research has not examined emotional labor within the context of leadership.

Authentic leadership, an emerging construct in the study of leadership, is proposed to relate to emotional labor. Leaders' authentic behavior has been shown to positively impact followers, such as increasing trust in their leader …