Much of the research examining emotion induction, regulation, and suppression considers solely the visual modality (e.g., pictures of faces) for emotion elicitation. In reality, emotions are cued, expressed, and interpreted through multiple modalities by employing the extensive use of auditory stimuli in addition to visual stimuli. There have been some recent efforts to offset this imbalance in modality preference by using emotional auditory stimuli alone or in addition to visual stimuli. This project aims to further investigate emotional and autonomic responding to auditory stimuli with the added component of examining differential responding across social (nonlinguistic vocal expression) and non-social auditory (music) emotional stimuli. We found mixed support indicating that our auditory stimuli induced physiological changes compared to a neutral condition. We also found that participants reported experiencing emotions congruent with those expressed by the stimuli. Most interestingly, increased autonomic activation was found in vocalizations compared to music possibly indicating more salient emotional responding to voices expressing nonverbal emotions compared to other types of less social emotional stimuli such as music. We discuss these findings through a lens that is not only interested in these potential differences as being driven by vocalizations, but also the unique nature of musical stimuli. This project presents a novel way to further our scientific understanding of the salience of auditory emotional information and the possible differences and similarities in processing more instinctive vocalizations and instrumental music.

Selective attention is a specific area of executive control that declines in older adulthood and may be amenable to cognitive rehabilitation. This study explored background music as an accessible and typically enjoyable tool that may exogenously facilitate attention. Two particular properties of a musical piece – (1) mode (i.e., major, minor, or atonal), and (2) tempo (i.e., stimulative or sedative) – influence affect, arousal, and cognitive function, ultimately enhancing or hindering cognitive performance on attention-demanding tasks. Six musical pieces were selected to represent different combinations of mode and tempo. Older adults (i.e., 65-80 years-old; n=16) were recruited from Victoria, BC. Participants completed the Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) assessing selective attention at baseline and under the six counterbalanced musical conditions. In each condition, participants reported motivation and task-difficulty, as well as affect and arousal on the Activation-Deactivation Checklist (AD ACL). Musical affect impacted reaction times on MSIT control and interference trials for the first block, but had no influence during the last block. Musical arousal did not significantly impact attention. AD ACL responses, as well as task-difficulty and motivation to succeed on the task did not vary as a function of the music. The results illuminate older adults’ allocation of executive resources between competing goals of regulating musical affect and succeeding on an attention task. Implications are discussed for selecting music specifically to facilitate older adults’ attention in everyday life. / Graduate / 2017-09-22

Thesis advisor: James Russell / Adults' gender stereotypes of emotion have been investigated with a variety of methods, but those methods do not provide a strong test of the stereotype: The participants were presented only with cues to the gender or to the emotion; or when both cues were available, gender was confounded with poser. This study examined the effects of attributed gender on adults' perception of emotion in facial expressions and stories when presented with clear versus ambiguous cues to both emotion and gender. College students (n = 90) were first asked to label the emotion of either a man (Timothy) or a woman (Sophia) with identical prototypical and “mixed” facial expressions and, separately, to Free Label stories about emotions. The same students were then to choose from a list of ten emotion labels the one that best described the protagonist's emotion for the same stimuli. Results showed that, for ambiguous cues to emotion, participants labeled facial expressions according to gender stereotypes. However, for the stimuli with clear cues to both emotion and gender of the poser, a reverse effect of gender stereotypes was observed for anger, fear, shame, and compassion due to an expectancy violation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: James A. Russell / Prior research showing that children recognize emotional expressions has used a choice-from-array style task; for example, children are asked to find the fear face in an array of several expressions. However, these choice-from-array tasks allow for the use of a process of elimination strategy in which children could select an expression they are unfamiliar with when presented a label that does not apply to other expressions in the array. Across six studies (N = 144), 80% of 2- to 4-year-olds selected a novel expression when presented a target label and performed similarly when the label was novel (such as <italic>pax</italic>) or familiar (such as <italic>fear</italic>). In addition, 46% of children went on to freely label the expression with the target label in a subsequent task. These data are the first to show that children extend the process of elimination strategy to facial expressions and also call into question the findings of prior choice-from-array studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

The ability to collaborate has been identified as an essential learning outcome for the 21st century. However, if group members lack the skills, abilities, and attitudes to work in a team, these groups may work inefficiently or fail to achieve what they set out to do. To achieve success, group members need to engage in productive regulatory processes to manage cognitions, behaviors, motivation, and emotions as needed to attain desired outcomes. One area of regulation that has been underemphasized in collaborative contexts is the regulation of emotions. Therefore, the purpose of this multi-paper dissertation was to examine the emotional experiences of undergraduate students working collaboratively on two online time-limited problem-solving tasks. Using a regulation of learning framework, the research unfolded over four studies drawing from a variety of data sources and building upon one another to explore the socio-emotional aspect of online collaboration. Study 1 (Webster & Hadwin, 2018) provides an overview of students’ emotions and plans for emotion regulation, self-reported during two collaborative tasks, offering an in-the-moment picture of how students feel and how they respond to those feelings. Study 2 (Bakhtiar, Webster, & Hadwin, 2018) consisted of a comparative case study to examine differences in regulation and socio-emotional interactions between two groups with contrasting socio-emotional climates. Findings revealed differences between these groups in terms of planning and preparation; therefore, the final two studies examined emotions and emotion regulation strategies reported during groupwork under different levels of planning and preparation at the individual or group level. Study 3 (Webster & Hadwin, 2019) documented the types of strategies students recalled using individually and as a group to regulate a salient emotion during collaboration and compared strategies between groups who were given different types of collaborative planning support. Finally, Study 4 (Webster, Davis, & Hadwin, 2019) compared emotions, emotion regulation strategies, and evaluations of strategy effectiveness for a purposeful sample of students who were well-prepared versus underprepared for the first of two collaborative working sessions. Four overarching factors emerged from this research as important for productive emotion regulation in online collaboration: (a) planning and preparation, (b) regulating both negative and positive emotions, (c) regulating at both individual and group levels, and (d) providing support for selecting and enacting helpful strategies. With further research, tools and interventions can be improved and utilized to support students to productively regulate in collaborative groups. / Graduate

Vi ville undersöka om det fanns några skillnader mellan äldre således yngre människor och hur de själva upplever emotionerna stolthet och skam. Åldersgruppen som representerade äldre var 60-70 åringar och den yngre åldersgruppen var 20-30 åringar. Undersökningen bygger på tio kvalitativa intervjuer som analyserats utifrån både emotion och interaktionsinriktade teorier. Studiens resultat visade att det fanns både likheter och olikheter bland de två åldersgrupperna som jämförts.  Vad gäller likheter så hade samtliga informanter en gemensam bild av hur en stolt respektive skamsen person såg ut. Informanterna menade att en stolt person är glad och energisk medan en skamsen person är ledsen, tillbakadragen och ihopkrupen. Den största olikheten bland de äldre och yngre var att den äldre åldersgruppen relaterade till stolthet utifrån deras välmående, hälsa och självständighet. För att nämna några exempel så relaterade den äldre åldersgruppen till stolthet när de klarade av att på egen hand ta sig ner för en trappa utan sin käpp, likaså var de stolta när de inte behövde någon annans hjälp. Den yngre åldersgruppen relaterade till stolthet när de hade gjort en bra uppgift inom ett skolsammanhang, när de uppfyllt sina personliga mål, eller när de tilldelats en högre position inom arbetet. Sammanfattningsvis så relaterade de yngre inte till hälsan som de äldre, utan mer till skola och karriär. / We wanted to investigate if there were any differences between older and younger people and how they experienced the emotions pride and shame. The age group that represented the elderly was 60-70 year olds and the younger age group was 20-30 year olds. The survey is based on ten qualitative interviews that have been analyzed based on both emotion and interaction-oriented theories. The study's results showed that there were both similarities and differences among the two age groups compared. As for similarities, all informants had a common picture of how a proud and ashamed person looked. The informants said that a proud person is happy and energetic while a shameful person is sad, withdrawn and confused. The greatest difference among the elderly and younger was that the older age group related to pride based on their well-being, health and independence. To name a few examples, the older age group related to pride when they managed to get down on a staircase without their cane, as well as being proud when they didn't need someone else's help. The younger age group related to pride when they had done a good job in a school context, when they fulfilled their personal goals, or when they were assigned a higher position in the work. In conclusion, the younger did not relate to the health of the elderly, but more to school and career.

The time of adolescence is marked by enhanced emotional experiences and difficulties with regulating one’s emotions. One way to improve the adolescent’s ability to regulate their emotions is to let them practice mindfulness meditation. The motivational drive behind this thesis is the question of what forms of mindfulness meditation are needed to give the highest increase in their emotion regulation-abilities. One problem is that while there exist neural studies on mindfulness meditation for adults, the research field of adolescent meditation lacks them. Because neural studies are needed to adequately answer this question, and the lack of brain imaging tools for this thesis, the focus here was to conduct some groundwork for this discussion. The first aim was to investigate the neural effects of mindfulness meditation on emotion regulation in adults and the second aim was to investigate to what extent we can generalize these neural effects to adolescents. To be able to theoretical discuss the second aim, neural and psychological studies on mindfulness meditation and emotion regulation were used as a base. The studies were grouped into five sub-categories based on age group and research field and then discussed with the help of developmental studies. Adult meditators had stronger functionality in regulatory brain regions than non-meditators during meditation and during the perception of negative stimuli. The discussion about the generalization of the adult neural patterns to adolescents showed that the findings were too diverse to come to any useful conclusions. Empirical and conceptual improvements, along with neural meditation studies on adolescents, are needed to improve the research field in both age groups.

Esta dissertação tem por escopo a questão das emoções - ?à ???? - na obra de Aristóteles, principalmente nos livros I e II da Retórica e da Ética Nicomaquéia. A definição aristotélica de como ????? \'emoção\' foi compreendida de diversas formas, porém sempre a partir dos seguintes elementos: como integrante da porção não-racional da alma, habituável à tutela da razão, como manifestação psicofísica, como causada por cognições. O problema é, portanto, reencontrar e reunir todos esses elementos na obra do Estagirita. / This thesis aims at the question of emotions - ?à ???? - in the works of Aristotle, mainly in the first and second books of Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics. The Aristotelian definition of ????? as \'emotion\' was understood in different ways, but always from the following elements: as part of the nonrational portion of the soul; as something that can grow accustomed to reason; as a psychophysic manifestation; as caused by cognitions. The problem is to find and gather all these elements from the works of Aristotle.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Barrett / Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques in the early 1990's and a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent years, scientists are now poised to answer this question. In this paper, I present the most up-to-date and statistically advanced meta-analytic summary of the human neuroimaging literature on emotion. I compare the locationist approach (i.e., that emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological construction approach (i.e., that emotions are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to emotions) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. I begin by outlining the set of brain regions consistently activated across all studies of emotion experience and perception. I next report findings from two sets of analyses probing the brain basis of discrete emotion categories. The first types of analysis demonstrates the brain regions that are consistently associated with the experience and perception of anger, disgust, fear, happiness and sadness across studies. The second type of analysis demonstrates the mental states (e.g., emotion experience or perception, cognitive load, locus of attention, mental response to methods, etc.) that are consistently associated with activity in given brain locations across studies. Overall, there was little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be localized consistently and specifically to individual brain regions. Instead, I found evidence that is consistent with a psychological construction approach to the mind: a set of common processes corresponding to interacting brain networks constitute emotion experience and perception across a range of emotion categories. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Feldman Barrett / The aim of the present study was to examine whether individual differences in Time Insensitivity are related to subjective experiences of emotion and cognitive performance. Sixty-five undergraduates (52% female) completed self-report measures of cognitive flexibility and provided subjective self-reports of emotions following two time pressured cognitive tasks. As predicted, Time Insensitivity was related to self-reported cognitive flexibility, better cognitive performance during a time pressured task, as well as less negative subjective experience in response to these tasks. The results of the present study suggest that Time Insensitivity may have some beneficial outcomes. Limitations and implications for future directions are discussed. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology. / Discipline: College Honors Program.