Ways to reduce the impact of worry in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) have received little experimental research attention. Previous research has found that those with GAD are vulnerable to negative emotionality immediately following periods of worry; emotion regulation strategies could be useful to mitigate reactivity following worry. One promising strategy is mindfulness, defined as sustained attention toward the present moment with an attitude of curiosity and acceptance. Experimental research has found that mindfulness reduces negative affect and improves emotion regulation. This strategy is likely more effective than thought suppression, a common strategy used in GAD. This online study recruited 300 individuals with analogue GAD who completed several self-report measures of worry severity, emotion dysregulation, mindfulness, and experiential avoidance and underwent experimental inductions of worry (versus no-worry control) and regulation strategy (mindfulness versus thought suppression versus no-strategy control) before watching a sad film clip and reporting state affect and emotion dysregulation. Contrary to hypotheses, the mindfulness manipulation did not have a buffering effect on the relation between worry and negative affect or emotion dysregulation. The only predicted significant finding indicated that the mindfulness manipulation had a main effect on negative affect, with visual trends indicating that this effect was driven by those who did not worry. An exploratory analysis indicated that a mindfulness manipulation increased positive affect following worry, however. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.

Background: This study examined whether levels of parental reflective function (RF), parental expressed emotion (EE) and children’s attachment styles are significantly related in a sample of children with high levels of conduct disorder (CD) symptoms. Method: The sample (n = 143) consisted of children aged 5-7 years at risk of behaviour problems. Participants were recruited from a borough of London and a unitary authority in the south west of England. Data for the three main variables and confounders were collected using semi-structured interview, direct observation and questionnaires from both parents and children. The Parent Development Interview (PDI) was used to assess RF; the Five-Minute Speech Sample to assess EE and the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST) to assess child attachment. Results: Global levels of maternal RF did not significantly differ between the securely and insecurely attached groups of children. Mothers of securely attached children, however, had higher RF ratings on the negative interactions and anger subscales of the PDI compared to mothers of insecurely attached children. No significant difference was found in parental EE between secure and insecurely attached children. High EE-warmth was associated with high global RF, but there was no significant relationship between EE-criticism and RF. Multiple logistic regression found no significant relationships between parental RF, parental EE and child attachment. Conclusions: These findings may suggest that attachment classification influences the levels of maternal RF in specific negative situations. Conversely it is possible that high maternal RF in such situations enables mothers to respond more sensitively to their child, leading to more secure attachment. The finding that maternal RF and EE were not associated with child attachment may suggest these variables are not strongly related, the sample is too small to detect any effect or that the specific sample lacks variability in scores. To the author’s knowledge this is the first study to test for these relationships with confounders included in the model, which may explain the null findings.

Evidence from multiple studies suggests that regulation of emotions and intensity of affect may be relevant to understanding disordered eating. Emotion regulation concerns the ways in which emotions are managed in daily life, whereas Affect Intensity (Larsen et al., 1986) refers to individuals‟ typical emotional reactivity. The thesis examines emotion regulation and affect in females with eating pathology (subclinical as well as clinical), and looks at ways dysfunctional regulatory strategies may be improved. The main objective of the present research was to look at the influence of experimentally-induced positive affect on the choice of emotion management strategies. Study 1 looked at typical Affect Intensity and emotion regulation in a sample of subclinically eating-disordered University of Edinburgh students. This study examined functionality of regulatory strategies, typical intensity of affect, and the effects of experimentally induced happiness and sadness on the two. Study 2 introduced the construct of creativity into the discourse on emotions and psychopathology, and looked at creative tendencies in relation to Affect Intensity, emotion regulation and psychopathology (anxiety, depression and sub-clinical eating pathology). Study 3 looked at the effects of Positive Psychology Interventions (PPIs) on emotion regulation, life satisfaction, anxiety and depression in a subclinically eating-disordered group and controls. Studies 4 and 5 were carried out in order to test and extend the results of Studies 1 and 3 with a clinical sample. In Study 4, emotion regulation, Affect Intensity and the immediate post-test effect of happiness on emotion regulation and life satisfaction were examined in females clinically diagnosed with eating disorders (i.e. anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and EDNOS). Study 5 looked at how longitudinal happiness induction influenced emotion regulation, eating behaviours and life satisfaction in eating-disordered individuals. One of the main findings across the studies was that females with subclinical and clinical forms of eating pathology tended to experience negative emotions of high intensity, and used predominantly dysfunctional regulatory strategies to manage them. Another important finding was that experimentally-induced positive emotions improved emotion regulation, and encouraged participants to choose healthier affect management strategies. The studies, their implications and contribution to theory and treatment of eating disorders are discussed.

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Infants and toddlers who experience physical abuse and/or neglect are at a severe risk for disruptions to emotion regulation. Recent prevention and treatment efforts have highlighted center-based child care as an important setting for providing support to the needs of these children, as child care centers are already an existing point of entry for reaching high-risk families. Guided by ecological theory, this review draws on the maltreatment and child care literatures to consider the opportunity for child care centers, specifically teacher-child interactions within the classroom, to support the unique regulatory needs of maltreated infants and toddlers. Existing research on the effects of child care for children facing other types of risk, as well as research with maltreated preschool children, provides a foundation for considering the role child care may play for infants and toddlers, whose emotion regulation skills are just emerging. More research is needed regarding teachers' roles in facilitating effective emotional experiences in the classroom that meet the unique needs of maltreated children. Additionally, early childhood teacher training that focuses on infant/toddler mental health and a trauma-informed perspective of care, as well as structuring child care centers as communities of support for high risk families, all may aid child care centers in better serving this vulnerable population. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This thesis reviews the role of emotions in one’s choice of information, information processing, and political attitudes. Theoretical and empirical endeavors to date have focused primarily on how emotions influence attitudes and information processing, leaving the actual processes guiding these outcomes in the margins. Specifically, it has been largely unexplored how emotions influence individuals’ information search behavior and then attitudes and information processing. Noting that the purposeful selection of likeminded information, often referred to as selective exposure, is commonly enacted when an individual first initiates information processing, and is also likely influenced by emotions, this study explores how emotions may affect people’s tendency to seek out congruent information. In addition, this study examines how the relationship between emotions and selective exposure in turn may affect aspects of information processing and attitudes. By designing an online experiment, I first tested how certain negative emotions (anger/fear) affected one’s pursuit of certain types of information (consistent/inconsistent) and second, I investigated how these emotions and information selections influenced subsequent information processing and attitudes. Results showed that while anger motivated more likeminded exposure for Republicans than fear, fear promoted more likeminded exposure for Democrats than anger. Further, anger prompted people to process messages more closely and to develop more polarized attitudes compared to fear. In addition, pro-attitudinal exposure produced more message-relevant thoughts for Republicans than counter-attitudinal message exposure, while it was counter-attitudinal exposure that yielded more message-relevant thoughts for Democrats. No such effect, however, was shown for attitudinal polarization. / text

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether computer-based cognitive bias modification (CBM) procedures could alter appraisal style toward viewing events from a big picture perspective and thereby influence emotional reactivity. Big picture appraisal entails viewing difficult situations and one's reactions to them in terms of a larger context. Appraisal training was implicit in that participants completed a series of vignettes, framed as a reading comprehension task, which trained either a big picture perspective or a personal/evaluative focus. When subsequently confronted with novel vignettes, participants produced interpretations that were consistent with assigned training condition. In addition, participants trained in big picture as compared to personal/evaluative appraisal subsequently demonstrated less emotional reactivity to a stressful task. / text

When people interact with each other, they not only listen to what the other says, they react to facial expressions, gaze direction, and head movement. Human-computer interaction would be enhanced in a friendly and non-intrusive way if computers could understand and respond to users’ body language in the same way. This thesis aims to investigate new methods for human computer interaction by combining information from the body language of the head to recognize the emotional and cognitive states. We concentrated on the integration of facial expression, eye gaze and head movement using soft computing techniques. The whole procedure is done in two-stage. The first stage focuses on the extraction of explicit information from the modalities of facial expression, head movement, and eye gaze. In the second stage, all these information are fused by soft computing techniques to infer the implicit emotional states. In this thesis, the frequency of head movement (high frequency movement or low frequency movement) is taken into consideration as well as head nods and head shakes. A very high frequency head movement may show much more arousal and active property than the low frequency head movement which differs on the emotion dimensional space. The head movement frequency is acquired by analyzing the tracking results of the coordinates from the detected nostril points. Eye gaze also plays an important role in emotion detection. An eye gaze detector was proposed to analyze whether the subject's gaze direction was direct or averted. We proposed a geometrical relationship of human organs between nostrils and two pupils to achieve this task. Four parameters are defined according to the changes in angles and the changes in the proportion of length of the four feature points to distinguish avert gaze from direct gaze. The sum of these parameters is considered as an evaluation parameter that can be analyzed to quantify gaze level. The multimodal fusion is done by hybridizing the decision level fusion and the soft computing techniques for classification. This could avoid the disadvantages of the decision level fusion technique, while retaining its advantages of adaptation and flexibility. We introduced fuzzification strategies which can successfully quantify the extracted parameters of each modality into a fuzzified value between 0 and 1. These fuzzified values are the inputs for the fuzzy inference systems which map the fuzzy values into emotional states.

Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a significant role in human emotional well-being, personal growth and life satisfaction. Self-awareness is said to be a key to the development of this form of intelligence. It has also been claimed by art therapists and educators that the expressive arts can assist people in self-expression and emotional awareness. In accordance with this belief, the motion picture (a movie) as a form of expressive product has been used to help people become aware of their own hidden feelings and thoughts (i.e. viewing or making an autobiographical movie can promote emotional awareness). However, there has been little research that specifically addresses how the process of making (one particular form of expressive art) may help a person to engage with their emotions. Therefore the central aim of the research was to show firstly how the development of autobiographical animations may engender therapeutic opportunities for greater reflection thereby facilitating personal development of, and emotional awareness in the artist and secondly, to demonstrate that the viewing of such animations may prompt viewers to gain the understanding of the feelings of the animator and be stimulated to reflect on their own experience, followed by the subsidiary goal of demonstrating that making animation could provide additional opportunities to the growth of greater emotional awareness in therapeutic and school education settings. To achieve these aims, a practice-led research approach was adopted. The thesis presents the reflective journey undertaken in creating the final installation ‘A residual cleft in my beautiful life: childhood’ based on childhood memories, showing how reflection-on-practice and in-practice formed key components in shaping the research and accompanying artistic endeavours. The development of the installation confirmed that the processes undertaken in producing an animation provided opportunities for self-knowledge and personal growth (in the artist), and that the audience were stimulated to consider their own childhoods as well as the childhood presented to them. The evidences of the animation installation production and the audience’s responses to the artefact further support the positive feedback on the values of animation to assist in increasing self-awareness from interviews with art therapists, and an online survey with school teachers. Observation of s three month animation teaching placement is also reported to invite further study to explore animation practice and school education. In conclusion, this research contributes to knowledge firstly, by providing a practice based account of the researcher’s exploration of, and development of emotional insight through her therapeutic art; secondly by evidencing the potential of a new form of expressive art - animation – to be used as an expressive arts technique to engage the emotional intelligence of individuals and audiences.

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