The overarching purpose of this study has been to problematise how visual practices and the mediation of affect is linked to the capacity to produce (new) perceptual realities, sensations and imaginaries, ultimately aiming to legitimate or counter-legitimate the hegemonic discourses and practices mobilised in the name of security. The first part of my thesis approaches this matter through an analysis of media cultures and discursive systems circulating within the court and the state military. Here, I discuss the impact of affect in the judicial-policial production of visible evidence (paper 1; published in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law) and the state military (visual) narrative of threat (paper 2; published in MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research). Additionally, as affect runs counter to hegemonic power relations as well as reinforces them, the second part of my thesis focuses on the way in which different resistance collectives cultivate affective dimensions through aesthetic practices in order to foster political attitudes that contest the established discourses of the (in)secure. Here, I examine the online activist group Anonymous’ visual political communication (paper 3; published in TripleC - Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society), and the Spanish movement Podemos’ visual and verbal discursive strategies (paper 4; forthcoming in Cultural Studies). In terms of theoretical and methodological approaches, I have my roots in, among others, Mouffe’s (2005) notion of conflict and (political) affect, Foucault’s (1980) concept of power/knowledge, and Thompson’s (1984; 1990) three-dimensional framework of ideology- analysis. In paper 1, my findings suggest that camera-produced images and technical and dramaturgical elements may have unintentional judicial consequences when they are read as evidence. I detail how this production of visible evidence can potentially stimulate and elicit emotional reaction, as well as discussing the degree to which pictorial crime evidence fails to be an instrumental and neutral representation of truth. In paper 2, my findings point in the direction where the military representation of the ‘Other as threat’ connects to aspects of economic globalisation and the (inter)national production of defence materiel. In article 3 (co-authored with Lindgren 2014) my findings suggest that citizen participation in public matters can be made engaging through the mobilisation of that which Anonymous calls ‘the lulz’; a tickling joy/pleasure (also, a sense of meaningfulness) of standing against power abuse through, for example, online direct action and culture jamming practices. Paper 4 explores the relationship between the affective and the visual using a broader security framework. Here, my findings indicate that Podemos’ discursive battle for social protection and economic security in a context of the crisis of political representation, is no longer framed through the traditional left-right conflict, but within the post- ideological (affective) articulation of ‘the new’ versus ‘the old’ and/or other discursive differences. I show how affect works as a potential for social change, by analysing the strategic production of a ‘We-Them’ discourse using Podemos’ take on social media and the media logic of mainstream television.

Inflammation appears to play a major role in the pathogenesis of Major Depression, and understanding the relationship between the immune system and mood disorders is a growing area of research. Patients undergoing cytokine therapy frequently develop depressive-like signs which cease upon termination of treatment. In addition, depressed patients often present with high levels of circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines. There are also significant behavioural correlates between inflammation-associated sickness behaviours and Major Depression, suggesting there is a bidirectional relationship between the immune system and central systems regulating behaviour. Both sickness behaviours in animals and cytokine-induced depression in humans can be reversed with antidepressants targeting the serotonergic (5-HT) system. Against this background, this thesis sought to investigate the role of inflammation in the development of certain specific characteristics of depressive-like states in animal models. Specifically, a single systemic endotoxin challenge (LPS) was used to model acute sickness behaviour and to study the behaviour and molecular effects of this challenge on the 5-HT system. These studies indicated that a single systemic challenge changed the function of the 5-HT system, as well as increasing expression levels of a number of 5-HT-related genes, and markers of inflammation in the CNS. A rodent chronic stress paradigm was employed to investigate whether these changes also occur in animals displaying depressive-like signs. Chronically stressed mice were shown to display significant features of rodent depression; decreased sucrose preference and increased forced swim immobility. These changes were also accompanied by increased expression of 5-HT-related genes and inflammatory markers within the CNS. Importantly, many of the molecular changes observed in LPS-induced sickness behaviour were conserved in the model of stress-induced Major Depression. In particular, increased TNF expression within the CNS was highlighted as a feature in both models. Novel anti-inflammatory agents were used to study the role of TNF in the development of sickness behaviours. Anti-TNF therapy, specifically the fusion protein etanercept, ameliorated sickness behaviour induced by LPS. Together, these data demonstrate that inflammation is capable of significantly changing the 5-HT system, and that stress per se is capable of inducing an inflammatory state within the CNS, which support the thesis that sickness and Major Depression are closely related at a molecular level.

This thesis aims to present and defend an account of affective perception. The central argument seeks to establish three claims. 1) Certain emotional bodily feelings (and not just psychic feelings) are world-directed intentional states. 2) Their intentionality is to be understood in perceptual terms: such feelings are affective perceptions of emotional properties of a certain kind. 3) These ‘emotion-proper properties’ are response-dependent in a way that entails that appropriate affective responses to their token instances qualify, ipso facto, as perceptions of those instances. The arguments for (1) and (2) appeal directly to the phenomenology of emotional experience and draw heavily from recent research by Peter Goldie and Matthew Ratcliffe. By applying Goldie’s insights into the intentional structure of psychic feelings to the case of emotional bodily feelings, it is shown that certain of the latter—particularly those pertaining to the so-called ‘standard’ emotions—exemplify world-directed intentionality analogous to the perceptual intentionality of tactile feelings. Adapting Ratcliffe’s account of the analogy between tactile feelings and what he terms ‘existential feelings’, it is argued that standard emotional bodily feelings are at the same time intrinsically intentional world-directed perceptual states (affective perceptions) through which the defining properties of emotional objects (emotion-proper properties) are apprehended. The subsequent account of these properties endorses a response-dependence thesis similar to that defended by John McDowell and David Wiggins and argues that tokening an appropriate emotional affective state in response to a token emotion-proper property is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for perception of that property (Claim (3)). The central claim is thus secured by appeal both to the nature of the relevant feelings and the nature of the relevant properties (the former being intrinsically intentional representational states and the latter being response-dependent in a way that guarantees the perceptual status of the former).

Purpose - This paper aims to explore how children's developing ability to effectively regulate their emotions influences their consumer behavior. Design/methodology/approach - Working with 80 children and one of their parents, this study used direct observations of child behavior in a task where they needed to regulate their emotions and a survey of parents about their child's emotional development and consumer behavior. The research used quantitative methods to test whether children's emotion regulation predicted parent reported consumer behavior (e.g. purchase requests, parent-child purchase related conflict) via multiple regression analyses. Findings - After controlling for children's age and linguistic competence, the study found that children's ability to control positively valenced emotions predicted consumer behavior. Specifically, children who had more difficulty suppressing joy/happiness were more likely to ask their parents for consumer goods and were more likely to argue with parents about these purchases. Practical implications - Content analyses of commercials targeting children have shown that many of the persuasive appeals used by advertisers are emotionally charged and often feature marketing characters that children find affectively pleasing. These findings suggest that these types of marketing appeals may overwhelm younger children which can lead to conflict with parents. Consequently, marketers and policy makers may want to re-examine the use of such tactics with younger consumers. Originality/value - While the potential link between children's emotional development and consumer behavior has been suggested in theoretical work, this is the first known study to empirically test this theorized relationship.

Quality of appearance is important in nature and individuals have a basic need to establish the normality of appearance to confirm their acceptability to others. In daily inter-relationships of the same species, for instance, normal-appearing members of a species group reject or kill other members who appear abnormal. In human society, appearance is considered as one of the most direct sources of information about other people, and unattractiveness is often accompanied by negative judgments, which can cause emotional distress and isolation. Accordingly, humans tend to pay great attention to their personal appearance and make improvements to enhance their self-representations. The growth of the beauty and cosmetic surgery industries is an indication of an increasing willingness to enhance physical appearance. However, despite the growing demand for cosmetic procedures, the consumer research literature on this topic is extremely sparse. In fact, little is known about the attitudinal and motivational drivers that facilitate undergoing such procedures. This dissertation enriches our understanding of factors that affect consumers’ motivation to pursue cosmetic procedures and examines the role of emotions in such decisions. To that end, objective self-awareness (OSA) theory is applied and the interplay between the state of public OSA, beauty standards, and self-conscious emotions of shame and pride is explored. The results of two experimental studies indicate that access to beauty standards coupled with the state of public OSA generates self-standard comparison thoughts that may yield self-standard discrepancies. Negative emotions experienced due to such discrepancies move individuals into a self-regulatory cycle with the purpose of discrepancy reduction and impact their motivation to undergo cosmetic procedures. Pride and shame, two central self-conscious emotions, influence self-regulatory strategies and differently impact the approach to discrepancy reduction. These findings contribute to the research advocating the role of emotions in decision making and provide more insights about self-conscious emotions and their role in regulating goal pursuit behavior. The findings provide practical implications for marketers of cosmetics products and services, social marketers trying to encourage or discourage certain behaviors, and public policy makers. Moreover, the results have wide-ranging implications for structuring programs designed to contribute to consumer welfare.

Women have greater incidence and prevalence of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) than men during the reproductive life phase when ovarian hormones fluctuate, suggesting that ovarian hormones have a significant role in MDD etiology in women. As the core symptoms of MDD are indicative of alterations in stress responding, emotional processing, and mood regulation, examining the effects of the estrogen on these processes in women may provide a better understanding of the role of estrogen in the sex difference in MDD rates. The general aim of this dissertation was to examine neural, emotional, and attentional processes related to stress response alterations and cognitive bias in MDD in women. To examine menstrual phase and estradiol level effects on the neural and mood response to psychosocial stress, healthy, normally cycling women were examined at either the high or low estradiol phase of the menstrual cycle. Participants were exposed to the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST), with brain activity measured through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and behavioral response assessed with subjective mood and stress measures. We found that women during the high estradiol phase showed significantly less hippocampal deactivation during psychosocial stress compared to women during the low estradiol phase. Additionally, women with higher estradiol levels also had less subjective distress in response to the MIST than women with lower estradiol levels. These results suggest that high estradiol may be protective against the shifts in brain system activity and negative mood responses associated with psychosocial stress. Periods of low estradiol may enhance the negative impact of psychosocial stress on neural activity and mood and thus contribute to MDD risk in vulnerable women. The relation of cognitive bias to depression history in women was examined in postmenopausal women with and without a history of major depression using an emotion dot probe task during fMRI. Women with remitted MDD showed greater attentional facilitation for negative images than women with no history of MDD that was directly correlated with amygdala activity for negative images and amygdala-hippocampal connectivity in a resting scan. These findings provide evidence that differences in activity and functional connectivity in emotional processing networks may provide a neurobiological basis for continued cognitive bias in remitted MDD. Preliminary data indicate that estradiol treatment reduces amygdala-hippocampal connectivity specifically in women with a history of MDD and has interactive effects with MDD history on the mood response to psychosocial stress following the MIST such that women with a history of MDD appear to benefit from estradiol treatment while women without such history do not. Women with a history of or vulnerability to MDD may be particularly sensitive to the positive effects of estradiol on brain systems important to regulating emotional responses to psychosocial stress. The findings presented in this dissertation suggest that estrogen fluctuations across the menstrual cycle and at other reproductive events may contribute to depression risk through effects on brain systems integral to emotional evaluation and response with potential cognitive consequences.

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating without the use of compensatory behaviors. Functional accounts of BED propose that negative affect is an antecedent to binge eating because binge eating serves to alleviate negative affect. However, previous studies investigating the association between negative affect and binge eating have yielded inconsistent findings, perhaps due to individual vulnerability factors that moderate the effects of negative affect on binge eating behavior. As one candidate, the current study investigated emotion regulation strategies that may be implicated in the maintenance of binge eating in BED, particularly under conditions of negative affect: brooding rumination, distress tolerance, and mood-related expectancies for eating. These emotion regulation strategies were: a) compared in 38 women with BED vs. 36 non-eating disordered female controls, b) examined in relation to markers of current binge eating severity among BED women, and c) used as predictors of caloric intake and urge to eat in response to a personally-relevant dysphoric mood induction upon presentation of snack foods in a "taste task." Results revealed that women with BED endorsed higher brooding rumination, more positive expectancies that eating serves to ameliorate negative affect, and lower distress tolerance than controls. Among women with BED, higher brooding rumination was associated with greater binge eating severity, and stronger expectancies that eating reduces negative affect were associated with more frequent binge eating episodes and greater urge to eat in response to depression. Surprisingly, better distress tolerance was associated with more frequent binge eating episodes. Women with BED consumed more calories and reported greater loss of control as well as a greater sense of guilt in response to the taste task relative to control participants. Contrary to hypothesis, there were no direct or indirect effects of any of the three emotion regulation strategies on change in urge to eat or calories consumed on the taste task following sad mood induction in BED women. In controls, better distress tolerance and stronger expectancies that eating alleviates negative affect were associated with decreased caloric intake on the taste task after mood induction. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of considering trans-diagnostic processes in BED as well as the need to identify other theoretically-relevant factors that contribute to the cognitive and behavioral features of BED. Limitations and directions for future studies are discussed.

In this study I examined the moderating effect of three profiles of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA at baseline, in response to a stressor, and in recovery from a stressor) on the relationship between parental emotion socialization during an emotion-related discussion and parental report of child internalizing symptoms 6 months later. Parents were observed during an emotion discussion task and coded for their use of emotion encouragement and general positive involvement. A total of 65 families with children between the ages of eight and ten years old completed this task while RSA scores were obtained from children during baseline, task, and recovery phases. Regression analyses were conducted to test for main effects of parental emotion socialization and RSA, as well as two-way emotion socialization x RSA interactions, in the development of internalizing symptoms 6 months following the initial interview. Interactions were further examined for the degree they statistically conformed to either a diathesis-stress or biological sensitivity to context framework (BSC). Hypotheses were partially supported: main effects were found for RSA baseline and recovery, whereas RSA reactivity moderated the association between parental emotion encouragement and child internalizing symptoms, such that parents of children exhibiting RSA withdrawal reported greater internalizing symptoms in the context of low emotion encouragement and lesser internalizing symptoms in the context of high emotion encouragement. This study highlights the importance of considering child psychophysiology, particularly reactivity to stress, in the study of the effects of parental emotion socialization on the development of psychopathology during childhood.

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating without the use of compensatory behaviors. Functional accounts of BED propose that negative affect is an antecedent to binge eating because binge eating serves to alleviate negative affect. However, previous studies investigating the association between negative affect and binge eating have yielded inconsistent findings, perhaps due to individual vulnerability factors that moderate the effects of negative affect on binge eating behavior. As one candidate, the current study investigated emotion regulation strategies that may be implicated in the maintenance of binge eating in BED, particularly under conditions of negative affect: brooding rumination, distress tolerance, and mood-related expectancies for eating. These emotion regulation strategies were: a) compared in 38 women with BED vs. 36 non-eating disordered female controls, b) examined in relation to markers of current binge eating severity among BED women, and c) used as predictors of caloric intake and urge to eat in response to a personally-relevant dysphoric mood induction upon presentation of snack foods in a "taste task." Results revealed that women with BED endorsed higher brooding rumination, more positive expectancies that eating serves to ameliorate negative affect, and lower distress tolerance than controls. Among women with BED, higher brooding rumination was associated with greater binge eating severity, and stronger expectancies that eating reduces negative affect were associated with more frequent binge eating episodes and greater urge to eat in response to depression. Surprisingly, better distress tolerance was associated with more frequent binge eating episodes. Women with BED consumed more calories and reported greater loss of control as well as a greater sense of guilt in response to the taste task relative to control participants. Contrary to hypothesis, there were no direct or indirect effects of any of the three emotion regulation strategies on change in urge to eat or calories consumed on the taste task following sad mood induction in BED women. In controls, better distress tolerance and stronger expectancies that eating alleviates negative affect were associated with decreased caloric intake on the taste task after mood induction. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of considering trans-diagnostic processes in BED as well as the need to identify other theoretically-relevant factors that contribute to the cognitive and behavioral features of BED. Limitations and directions for future studies are discussed.

Music plays a crucial role in everyday life by enabling listeners to seek individual emotional experiences. To explain why such emotions occur, we must understand the underlying process that mediates between surface-level features of the music and aroused emotions. This thesis aimed to investigate how musical emotions are mediated by psychological mechanisms from a cross-cultural perspective. Study I manipulated four mechanisms by selecting ecologically valid pieces of music that featured information relevant for each mechanism. The results suggested that listeners’ emotions could be successfully predicted based on theoretically based manipulations of target mechanisms. However, Study I featured only listeners from a single culture, neglecting the possible role of contextual and individual factors. Study II investigated the prevalence of emotions, mechanisms, and listening motives in a web survey featuring listeners from both individualist and collectivist countries. Results indicated that patterns of prevalence of emotions and mechanisms were quite similar across cultures. Still, Study II found that certain emotions such as nostalgia and the mechanism episodic memory were more frequent in collectivist cultures. In contrast, sadness and the mechanism musical expectancy were more frequent in individualist cultures. Study II also suggested that listening motives were country-specific, rather than subject to the individualism-collectivism dimension. Study III explored how particular mechanisms are manifested within a collectivist cultural setting with great potential for deeply felt emotions: fado music in Portugal. Interviews with listeners provided in-depth information on how the cultural context might shape listening motives and emotions. The results revealed that listeners strived for musical experiences that would arouse culturally valued emotions. Music-evoked nostalgia and contextual factors were regarded as important and contributed to an enhanced sense of wellbeing. Study IV tested the influence of lyrics on the emotions induced by Swedish and Portuguese pieces of music. The results revealed cross-cultural differences in how lyrics influenced emotions. The differences were not related to the music’s origin, but to the listener’s origin, suggesting that the impact of lyrics depends on the cultural background of the listener. In conclusion, the thesis suggests that cultural factors serve as moderators of effects of biologically based mechanisms for emotion induction.