Cognitive functioning has historically been used to predict adaptive outcomes of individuals with autism spectrum disorders; however, research shows that it does not adequately predict these outcomes. Therefore, the current study explored the role of emotion perception in the adaptive functioning of individuals with ASDs. Emotion perception was assessed using the DANVA-2, which has audio and static face stimuli, and the DAVE, dynamic, audio-visual emotion movies. Adaptive functioning was assessed using the Vineland-II Socialization, Communication, and Daily Living domains. Results indicated that individuals with ASDs demonstrated significant impairments in both adaptive functioning and emotion perception compared to typical individuals. Findings did not demonstrate a relationship between emotion perception and adaptive functioning, controlling for IQ. Future research should broaden the approach when investigating possible mechanisms of change for adaptive outcomes to include exploration of social perception more broadly, of which emotion perception is one component, and its relationship with adaptive outcomes.

Smärta är ett komplext fenomen och upplevelsen av smärta är högst subjektiv. Hur smärta upplevs påverkas av en rad faktorer där bland annat emotionella och kognitiva processer spelar en central roll för smärtupplevelsen. I sitt arbete möter sjuksköterskan både patienter med smärta, men också patienter som ska genomgå smärtsamma behandlingar. Av denna anledning ses det som betydelsefullt att lyfta fram den psykologiska aspekten av smärta. Syftet med litteraturstudien var att belysa psykologiska aspekterna av smärta med fokus på kognitioners och emotioners inverkan på smärtupplevelsen, i relation till patientens omvårdnad. Studien genomfördes som en litteraturstudie där 15 vetenskapliga artiklar granskades och analyserades. Resultatet visade att känslor som ängslan, rädsla och oro, liksom tankar, förväntningar och tolkningar hade betydelse för hur patienter upplevde smärta. Av hänsyn till detta resultat ses det som viktigt att sjuksköterskan känner till och tar dessa faktorer i beaktande vid mötet med patienten då de är av stor betydelse för hur patienten kommer att uppleva sin smärta. Forskningen bör i vidare utsträckning undersöka sambandet mellan psykologiska faktorer och smärtupplevelse. Det är även önskvärt att studier utförda med kvalitativ metod implementeras i forskningen, då detta kan skapa en djupare förståelse för fenomenet smärtupplevelse. Att få ökade kunskaper om individens tankar, uppfattningar och erfarenheter är av största intresse eftersom smärtupplevelsen är subjektiv. / Pain is a complex phenomenon and the experience of pain is highly subjective. How pain is experienced is influenced by a number of factors that include emotional and cognitive processes, proved to be crucial for the perception of pain. In their everyday work, nurses meet both patients with pain, as well as patients about to undergo painful treatments. For this reason, it is important to highlight the psychological aspects of pain. The purpose of this study was to elucidate psychological aspects of pain, focusing on cognitive and emotional effects of pain perception in relation to patient care. The study was conducted as a literature review where 15 scientific articles were reviewed and analyzed. The results showed that emotions such as anxiety and fear, as well as thoughts, expectations and interpretations were factors contributing in how patients explained pain. Considering these results, it is important that nurses take these factors into account when interacting with patients, as they are of great importance for the experience of pain. Research should further examine the relationship between psychological factors and pain perception. It is also desirable that qualitative studies are implemented in research, as this may gain a deeper understanding about the phenomenon of pain perception. As the perception of pain is subjective, an increased knowledge in an individual's thoughts, perceptions and experiences are of great interest.

In the present study possible associations between driver characteristics and aggressive driving were examined. 210 participants responded to a questionnaire consisting of self-report measures of emotion regulation ability, personality traits, and attitudes towards traffic behaviours in a Swedish translation of the Propensity for Angry Driving Scale (PADS). The main results showed that females, older age, agreeableness, openness, and social desirability were negatively correlated with angry driving behaviour as measured by the PADS. Impulsivity, attention seeking, trait irritability, verbal trait aggression, positive attitude towards speeding, and a high self-reported car manoeuvring ability were positively correlated with angry driving. Partial correlations showed that social desirability, trait irritability, and a positive attitude towards speeding explained most of the unique variance. Multiple regression analysis showed that trait irritability, positive attitude towards speeding, and a high self-reported car manoeuvring ability were the most important predictors of angry driving.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of positive and negative symptoms, and duration of illness on emotion processes / ability to understand emotion related cues, experience of emotion, and expression of emotion. A total of 46 schizophrenia patients from Ankara Oncology Hospital Psychiatry Clinic / 23 of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia for at least 10 years, and 23 of them were diagnosed for less than 10 years, participated in the study. Besides, a total of 23 non-clinical subjects / which were similar to the clinical group in terms of educational information, participated to the study. A video-clip which consists of scenes that elicited four types of emotions (fear, disgust, sadness, happiness) was presented to the participants. Understanding of emotion related cues and the experienced emotion were rated through self-report. Facial expressions of the participants were rated through their recorded faces by three psychologists, who were specifically trained for emotional facial expression rating. Symptomatology was assessed by Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS), and Calgary Depression Scale for schizophrenia patients. Presence of any psychopathology of healthy group was measured through Brief Symptom Inventory. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed that chronic patients presented more understanding of context impairments than acute patients and non-clinical group. In addition to these findings, positive symptoms assessed by PANSS were found to be positively correlated with the understanding context impairment. Therefore, It was suggested that positive symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions interfere with understanding context task. The results were discussed in the light of the literature and clinical and research implications of the study presented. Finally, necessity of using neurological, biological and cognitive assessment methods for further studies was suggested in order to understand deficits in emotional processes.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of a brief psycho-educational intervention for the key relatives of schizophrenic patients, on perceived expressed emotion of patients, and the expressed emotion and burn out of their key relatives. Seventy five schizophrenic patients and their key relatives were included in the study. They were assigned into three groups randomly. The key relatives in the first experimental group were given a one-day psychoeducational workshop and written material package about schizophrenia were provided for them. In the second experimental group, key relatives were only given the written material package about schizophrenia which was the same as that of the Experimental Group I. The third group was the control group received no intervention or any material. All of the participants including patients and key relatives were given the instruments of the study as pre-test. Two weeks after pre-test, the relatives in Experimental Group I and Experimental Group II were invited to the hospital without their patients. The first group participated in the psychoeducational workshop and they were given written material package and the second group was only given the written material package. Pre test was given to Control Group without any intervention. Two months later, the post&ndash / tests were applied to all of the key relatives and their patients. Overall the results indicated that a one day intensive psycho-educational workshop enriched with audiovisual components, written material package about schizophrenia and an interactive discussion part has a positive impact on the key relatives&rsquo / burnout levels, expressed emotion levels and knowledge about schizophrenia. Furthermore, although no direct intervention was conducted with the patients, the results showed that patients&rsquo / perceived expressed emotion levels were reduced as well. The results also showed that simply providing written material about schizophrenia does not have an effect on burnout levels, expressed emotion levels and knowledge of relatives and the perceived expressed emotion of their patients.

From recent year(2008), restaurant, retailing, credit card services industry have began focusing on frequency reward promotion activity to increase business and customers¡¦ loyalty. How do consumers like the activities? Actually, not all customers can be rewarded from their accumulated frequency. Failure of the accumulated frequency to obtain reward may cause consumers negative emotions. And, eventually the bad feeling impacts on their attitude toward the store. The current research developed two types of consumer emotional scale in adjective and in Chinese idioms . Through a 3x2x2 factorial design, 84 participants, 42 students and 42 rank-and -file people, took parts in the experiment, while 3 situations of frequency activities, 2 types of reward, and 2 kinds of business were manipulated, and two categories of criterion measure, emotion and attitude towards store, were implemented. ¡]1¡^Customers who get reward promotion will have higher positive emotions than who failed to redeem. ¡]2¡^People with high degree of loss, in the activities have much negative emotions, comparing to these without. ¡]3¡^Consumer emotions will affect the consumer's willingness to repeat purchase, likening and emotional attitude towards the store. ¡]4¡^Different industry will moderate the effect of redemption situations on consumer emotion. ¡]5¡^The original product type frequency rewards, in certain condition, may solicit more positive emotion than other type of product reward. Keywords: frequency promotion activities, redemption situations in promotion, consumer emotion, measurement for emotion

Die zentrale Frage der Arbeit „Wie beeinflussen Emotionen kognitive Prozesse?“ wurde in den letzten Jahrzehnten intensiv erforscht. Dabei stellte sich heraus, dass entgegen der alltagspsychologischen Annahme, Emotionen nicht ausschließlich negative Effekte auf die kognitiven Leistungen haben. So fand zum Beispiel Bower (1981) sehr spezifische Einflüsse von Stimmungen auf das Gedächtnis und Isen (1999) berichtete Verbesserungen der kognitiven Leistungsfähigkeit unter positivem Gefühlseinfluss in unterschiedlichen Aufgaben. Fasst man die aktuelle Befundlage insgesamt zusammen, so ist es jedoch unmöglich ein eindeutiges Fazit zu ziehen, so heterogen sind die Ergebnisse der unterschiedlichen Studien (Rusting, 1998). Zunächst werden in dieser Arbeit daher zwei mögliche Ursachen für das heterogene Befundmuster diskutiert. Zum einen führt die Dominanz des dimensionalen Ansatzes (Russell, 2003; Bradley und Lang, 2000; Davidson et al., 2003) in der Emotionspsychologie dazu, dass spezifische Basisemotionen mit derselben Valenz und Erregung nicht unterschieden werden (Ekman, 1999; Izard, 1977; Plutchik, 1962). Zum anderen werden Emotion und Kognition meist als separate Prozesse betrachtet (Lazarus, 1984; Zajonc, 1980). In letzter Zeit mehren sich jedoch die Stimmen, die sich für eine integrative Perspektive auf die Interaktion von Emotion und Kognition aussprechen (Gray, 2004; Lewis, 2005; Scherer, 2000). Daher wird in dieser Arbeit vorgeschlagen, Emotionen nicht als separaten Elemente der menschlichen Psyche zu betrachten, sondern als spezifische Muster, die sich aus verschiedenen Komponenten zusammen setzen: u.a. Physiologie, Kognition, Motivation. Entsprechen einige dieser Komponenten einem bestimmten Emotionsmuster, so können in der Folge die übrigen Komponenten durch das Muster selbst angeregt werden und zur vollen Entfaltung des Emotionsmusters führen. Um dieses Modell zu testen, sollte in dieser Arbeit die Hypothese geprüft werden, ob für spezifische Emotionen spezifische Muster der Ausprägung kognitiver Parameter existieren. Die empirischen Untersuchungen dieser Arbeit konzentrierten sich dabei auf drei spezifische Basisemotionen (Angst, Ärger, Traurigkeit) und auf zwei ausgewählte kognitive Parameter, die an Arbeiten von Dörner (1999, Dörner und Bartl-Storck, 2002) angelehnt sind: Wechselbereitschaft (Flexibilität) und Assoziationsbreite (Kreativität). Die Stimmungsinduktion erfolgte neben dem Lesen von Geschichten vorwiegend mittels der Methode der Imagination eigener Erlebnisse. Um die beiden kognitiven Parameter Wechselbereitschaft und Assoziationsbreite zu messen, wurden zwei Paradigmen eingesetzt. Bei dem ersten handelte es sich um ein Aufgaben-Wechsel-Paradigma nach Dreisbach und Goschke (2004). Ärgerliche Probanden zeigten darin Schwierigkeiten beim Aufgabenwechsel, was auf eine verringerte Wechselbereitschaft schließen lässt. Das zweite Paradigma war ein Assoziations-Erkennungs-Paradigma, das in dieser Arbeit neu entwickelt wurde, um beide Parameter innerhalb ein und desselben Paradigmas zu messen. Es fand sich darin konsistent eine Erhöhung der Assoziationsbreite in ängstlicher Stimmung. Die Stimmungen zeigten im Gegensatz zum ersten Paradigma keine Unterschiede in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Wechselbereitschaft. Zusammenfassend geht aus der Arbeit hervor, dass es spezifische Effekte spezifischer Stimmungen gibt, es also nicht genügt, Valenz und Arousal zu unterscheiden. Allerdings sind auch die in dieser Arbeit gefundenen Effekte nicht immer stabil. Dies wird zum Teil auf zu schwache Stimmungsveränderungen, zu geringe Stichprobengröße und Stimmungsregulationsprozesse zurückgeführt. Bezogen auf die allgemeine Frage nach dem Einfluss von Emotionen auf kognitive Prozesse präsentiert diese Arbeit einen neuen Forschungsansatz, der sowohl eine theoretische Präzisierung der abstrakten Konzepte als auch eine methodische Integration der vielfältigen Befunde erlaubt. Dies geschieht mittels der Idee von einer Emotion als einen das gesamte System Mensch erfassenden Prozess. Damit legt diese Arbeit eine Basis, auf der sich zukünftige Forschungsarbeiten weiter der Frage annähern können, ob und wie unsere Gefühle zu unseren oft so beeindruckenden Verstandesleistungen beitragen.

Emotions are thought to be one of the key factors that critically influences human decision-making. Emotion regulation can help to mitigate emotion related decision biases and eventually lead to a better decision performance. Serious games emerged as a new angle introducing technological methods to learning emotion regulation, where meaningful biofeedback information communicates player's emotional state. Games are a series of interesting choices, where design of those choices could support an educational platform to learning emotion regulation. Such design could benefit digital serious games as those choices could be informed though player's physiology about emotional states in real time. This thesis explores design and evaluation methods for creating serious games where emotion regulation can be learned and practiced. Design of a digital serious game using physiological measures of emotions was investigated and evaluated. Furthermore, it investigates emotions and the effect of emotion regulation on decision performance in digital serious games. The scope of this thesis was limited to digital serious games for emotion regulation training using psychophysiological methods to communicate player's affective information. Using the psychophysiological methods in design and evaluation of digital serious games, emotions and their underlying neural mechanism have been explored. Effects of emotion regulation have been investigated where decision performance has been measured and analyzed. The proposed metrics for designing and evaluating such affective serious games have been extensively evaluated. The research methods used in this thesis were based on both quantitative and qualitative aspects, with true experiment and evaluation research, respectively. Digital serious games approach to emotion regulation was investigated, player's physiology of emotions informs design of interactions where regulation of those emotions could be practiced. The results suggested that two different emotion regulation strategies, suppression and cognitive reappraisal, are optimal for different decision tasks contexts. With careful design methods, valid serious games for training those different strategies could be produced. Moreover, using psychophysiological methods, underlying emotion neural mechanism could be mapped. This could inform a digital serious game about an optimal level of arousal for a certain task, as evidence suggests that arousal is equally or more important than valence for decision-making. The results suggest that it is possible to design and develop digital serious game applications that provide helpful learning environment where decision makers could practice emotion regulation and subsequently improve their decision-making. If we assume that physiological arousal is more important than physiological valence for learning purposes, results show that digital serious games designed in this thesis elicit high physiological arousal, suitable for use as an educational platform.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a complex and dangerous set of behaviours that has been gaining increased research attention in recent years. Although existing research indicates that NSSI is prevalent among both adolescent and young adult clinical and community samples, few studies have empirically examined models of factors involved in the etiology and maintenance of these behaviours, particularly the role of social factors. Further, although existing research supports the use of NSSI for emotion regulation purposes, less research attention has focused on the impact of emotion reactivity. The focus of the current project was to examine the role of emotional, interpersonal, and subcultural factors in NSSI. Utilizing a sample of 397 university students, Study 1 presents a psychometric re-evaluation of the Emotion Reactivity Scale (ERS; Nock et al., 2008), used to inform the most appropriate use of the measure in the subsequent studies. Results supported the reliability and validity of the ERS and suggested that the ERS is best utilized as a unidimensional measure of emotion reactivity. Study 2 examined an intra- and inter-personal model of NSSI among the same sample of 397 university students. Support was obtained for the Experiential Avoidance Model of NSSI (Chapman et al., 2006) as well as for the mediational influence of interpersonal relationships on NSSI via emotion regulation. Preliminary support was also provided for the influence of identification with more deviant subcultures, including Goth and Emo groups. Finally, Study 3 aimed to replicate support for the model among a sample of 178 members of self-injury internet forums. Contrary to hypotheses, little support was demonstrated for the model, and fewer significant associations were demonstrated for the influence of subcultural identification. Examination of the characteristics of the sample suggested that the online forum members represent a unique group in regard to the severity of their NSSI experiences that has been understudied in the existing literature. Alternative hypotheses to account for the observed findings are presented. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

The goals of the present study were: 1) to describe and provide initial support for the validity of the Future Scenarios Questionnaire (FSQ), a new self-report questionnaire designed to measure parental responding to anticipated children’s negative emotions; and 2) to examine how maternal responses on the FSQ related to young children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors with peers. Further, this study examined whether the temperamental trait of negative affect moderated the relation between maternal responses on the FSQ and children’s social adjustment outcomes. Participants were 92 mothers of preschool-age children (43 boys and 49 girls; M age 61.5 months). Mothers provided ratings on the FSQ and child temperament ratings on the Child Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Hershey, 1994). They also completed a range of measures which were included to assess the construct validity of the FSQ. These included measures of attachment representations, maternal mind-mindedness, perceived control, and alexithymia. Sixty-nine teachers provided ratings on the Child Behavior Scale (CBS; Ladd & Profilet, 1996) for children’s aggressive, asocial, and prosocial behaviors in the peer context. Factor analysis of the FSQ revealed two subscales: Encourage Emotion Expression (EEE) and Discourage Emotion Expression (DEE). Patterns of correlations among these subscales and the additional mother measures suggested that the FSQ demonstrates some construct validity. Further, the results of the moderation analyses showed that maternal responding on the FSQ interacts with negative affect in the prediction of child behaviors, however not in the hypothesized ways. In particular, encouraging emotion expression significantly predicted more asocial behavior and less prosocial behavior (approached significance), but only for children rated high in negative affect. Similarly, discouraging emotion expression significantly predicted less aggressive behavior only for high negative affect children. None of these relations was significant for children rated low in negative affect. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the importance of considering child temperament in emotion socialization processes.