Eating disorders remain a phenomenon that escapes full comprehension, resulting in frustration for those who suffer from the disorders, their families, and their therapists. It is becoming increasingly necessary to describe the mechanism by which eating disorders develop, in order to effectively treat and prevent these disorders. The aim of this study was to illuminate factors that contributed to the development of eating disorders within the individual contexts of the lives of the participants, as well as how those factors interacted in context to culminate in the development of an eating disorder. This qualitative study was conducted from an interpretive perspective. The findings show how individual contextual factors interact to produce a marked fear of gaining weight, which is driven by fear of negative evaluation, and that the eating disorder behaviour serves specific functions that are related to coping with stress within the lives of the participants. / Psychology / M. Sc. (Psychology with specialisation in Research Consultation)

Externalizing behaviors have been shown to exhibit within-individual changes, increasing the need to identifying factors that influence such behavior to be more or less likely to occur in any given moment. The current study aimed to contribute to the understanding of mechanisms that influence externalizing behavior using an intensive longitudinal design. Demographic variables and personality traits were measured at baseline. Momentary personality states, situational context, affect, decision-making processes, and externalizing behaviors were measured three times per day for seven days in a university sample (N = 170). Results: A new measure of momentary externalizing—Momentary-Externalizing Spectrum Inventory—was created as a practically feasible measure to administer multiple times per day and its psychometric properties were investigated. Trait disinhibition-versus-constraint predicted mean levels of externalizing behaviors. Results supported the incremental utility of personality states, such that they appear to offer additional predictive power for momentary externalizing behavior over and above personality traits. Candidate proximal mechanisms such as situational factors, momentary affect, and delay discounting were shown have the ability to predict momentary externalizing behavior in an ongoing temporally varying manner. Personality traits moderated some of these relationships between candidate proximal mechanisms and momentary externalizing behavior. Implications for the understanding of externalizing behaviors were discussed while hypotheses for future research were generated.

Previous studies have shown that the experience of negative emotions is rarer, while experience of positive emotions is more frequent in the elderly, suggesting an overall improvement in emotional well-being as people age. However, most research did not account for the dynamic characteristics of emotions (e.g. peak intensity, latency, duration) and the levels of emotional challenges. In addition, since most previous studies have focused on studying the experience, expression, and psychophysiological response of emotion, it is still not fully understood how performance in cognitive or behavioral tasks (e.g., automobile driving) can be affected by emotions in older age. To address this gap, the current study examined the effect of normal aging on the dynamic processes of emotion during different levels of emotional challenge (aim 1), and the effect of emotion on driving in older adults as compared to middle-aged adults (aim 2). Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disease that shares similar pathological characteristics with the process of normal aging (i.e., reduced dopamine), but to a much higher degree. In addition to investigating the effect of normal aging, the current study also examined the effect of “abnormal aging” on emotion and driving using PD as a model (aim 3). Participants included 16 older (65 - 79 years old), 16 middle-aged (38 - 55 years old) neurologically normal adults, and 16 patients with mild PD (56 - 80 years old). This study focused on fear and anger, the two negative emotions that are most likely to be elicited by driving experiences and to disrupt driving behaviors. Low-level and high-level fear and anger challenges were created using simulated driving scenarios: 1) Low fear task, participants drove in fog and frequently encountered static obstacles on the road; 2) High fear task, participants drove at nighttime and frequently encountered deer running across the road; 3) Low anger task, participants drove following a slow-moving vehicle; 4) High anger task, participants followed a slow vehicle and were honked at by a tailgating vehicle. Participants rated the intensity of fear and anger experiences at 1- minute intervals when they were driving. Comparing older adults against middle-aged adults, it was found that 1) fear intensity was lower in older adults in the low fear task. In contrast, latency and duration of fear were similar between groups in both fear tasks. 2) Anger intensity was lower in older adults in both anger tasks. Anger latency and duration were similar between groups in the high anger task, but anger took longer to develop and was of shorter duration in older adults in the low anger task. 3) In the low fear task, older adults exhibited more cautious driving behaviors (e.g., more frequent uses of brake). In the high anger task older adults were less able to control the acceleration and brake pedals smoothly (e.g., higher forces for brake and acceleration). These results suggest that age differences in the dynamic processes of emotion and the effect of emotion on driving may depend on the type of emotion and level of emotional challenge. When comparing PD patients against age- and education-matched neurologically normal participants (n = 18), it was found that the PD patients reported experiencing similar degrees of fear and anger as the normal comparisons. However, in the high fear task PD patients were less responsive to deer running across the road (e.g., mean and variation of force for brake was lower in PD patients). This finding suggests an impaired ability in PD patients to respond to the sudden appearance of driving hazards. Collectively, the findings of this study provide a window into how the moment-to-moment experience of negative emotions in response to environmental challenges may contribute to the overall emotional well-being of older adults. They also suggest that both the type of emotion and the level of challenge may be important factors in determining the experience of emotion and the effect of emotion on driving during “normal” and “abnormal” aging.

Scholars have recently begun to reconsider the importance of emotions, suggesting that they are cultural constructions integral to human identity and social life. Most of these studies, however, have ignored the medieval period, focusing instead on the "civilizing process"--that is, the supposed development of social etiquette and self-restraint--that is assumed to have begun in the early modern period. This dissertation demonstrates that emotion was in fact a complex identity discourse well before the Renaissance and was fundamental to the construction of pre-modern social categories like gender. Exploring four masculine communities--clergymen, knights, university students, and merchants--I show that each community was shaped and constrained by a particular emotional ethos. Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints and their work often challenged the culture's emotional regimes. I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries because they were created during a time of heightened emphasis on the role of the emotions in shaping selves and communities. In the years after the Black Death, England witnessed significant demographic shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic transformations in the nation's social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages, migrant clergy, and an influx of foreign merchants radically altered the structure of English society during these years. As a result, the institutions and ideologies that defined English masculine identity began changing in ways not seen before. Poets not surprisingly turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate these disruptions; in so doing, they offered English men new ways of understanding themselves in the face of rapid cultural change. The chapters examine a range of Middle English poems--the Alliterative Morte Arthure, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, and Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache--that illuminate particular emotions (anger, compassion, grief, and sorrow) and their significance to codes of masculinity. I argue that these four texts radically revised the forms and meanings of masculine emotional identity and community. This dissertation demonstrates that Middle English poets recognized the transformative potential inherent in the lexicon of emotion and used it to reshape their audiences' understanding of critical cultural problems. The years from the 1350s to the 1450s were important not only in the emerging tradition of poetry in English, but also for the development of the language and psychology of emotion. As poets tried to come to terms with great social changes, they molded and manipulated the discourse of emotion to interrogate what it meant to be a man in late medieval England. Affective Communities reveals the importance of emotions as markers of gender and community and shows literature's role in responding to and imagining social change.

Integrating existing models of emotional expressivity, the 3-level hierarchical model contains a general factor of emotional expressivity vs. inexpressivity at the highest level; relatively independent factors of positive and negative expressivity at the second-order level; and discrete expressivity factors of sadness, hostility, guilt/shame, fear, joviality, confidence and amusement at the lowest level. The bottom-up analytic strategy consisted of identifying first the structure of the discrete affects; subsequent second-order factor analyses supported the existence of the higher order factors. The Iowa Scales of Emotional Expressivity (ISEE)--a hierarchical set of scales--systematically incorporate the level of abstraction of the items to assess each level of the hierarchy. Structural analyses replicated across college student (N = 387) and young adult (N = 344) samples with strong comparability coefficients. Striking differences existed in comparisons of the nomological relations of the general factor level vs. second-order level--Positive and Negative Expressivity demonstrated differential relations with Extraversion and Neuroticism and incremental predictive validity beyond Positive and Negative Affect, respectively. The ISEE demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity with existing scales and through multi-trait multi-method analyses of self-other agreement and test-retest data. Although test-retest correlations were less than optimal, the ISEE improve upon existing measures of emotional expressivity by extending the assessment to the discrete affect level and by creating Positive and Negative Expressivity scales with improved discriminant validity and clearer differential relations.

My dissertation focused on understanding how different areas of the brain coordinate in networks to drive higher cognitive functions, and how damage, changes the brain’s synchronized activity (or functional connectivity) in the short and long term. In this dissertation, I studied the functional connectivity of brain networks that are thought to underlie emotion and decision-making, and how these networks change in the face of neurological injury. In my first set of experiments, I studied participants with chronic focal brain damage to determine how damage to brain areas which have been identified as important in emotion and decision-making behaviors (amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, & insula), affected connectivity of brain networks, and how changes in connectivity following damage to these areas related to emotion and decision-making behavior. Supporting my predictions, I found evidence that damage to the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and insula all result in significantly weaker connections between a network of areas important for assigning value to stimuli. Additionally, I found that stronger connectivity in this valuation network was significantly positively associated with performance on ratings of disgusted faces, while stronger connectivity in a network important for processing emotional salience was significantly positively correlated with decision-making performance. In the second set of studies in this dissertation, I utilized a population of epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to treat their seizures to investigate how a brain network related to emotional salience changed from before to after surgery. This approach allowed me to study how the connectivity and associated behavior of this network changed from preoperative baseline, to the weeks and months after part of this network was removed. While I expected a decline in this network in the weeks following surgery, instead I found a significant positive correlation between preoperative and acute postoperative connectivity in a subset of this network. However, my hypothesis that there would be a significant increase in the connectivity of this network between acute and chronic postoperative epochs was supported. I only have partial evidence for a significant correlation between the change in salience network connectivity between preoperative and acute postoperative assessments and the associated change in decision-making behavior. This correlation was in the opposite direction of my hypothesis, with increased change in connectivity being positively associated with change in risk-taking behavior. I did not observe a significant correlation between the change in network connectivity and change in behavior across acute and chronic measurements. These findings provide important insight on how measures of network connectivity can inform theories of neuroplasticity and reorganization following brain damage. Understanding how these networks change over time, and how changes in these networks relate to behavioral outcomes, are critical for the development and effective deployment of therapeutic interventions. Together, these studies provide a foundation for further study, demonstrating that these networks change over time with damage, and the residual network strength is associated with performance on measures of emotion and decision-making.

A large body of evidence has accumulated which indicates that infants of postpartum depressed mothers are at risk for negative sequelae including later psychopathology. However, methodological difficulties including discordant definitions of postpartum depression and the use of paradigms which used the mother-infant relationship to assess infant emotional expression and regulation have decreased the ability to reach a consensus regarding the nature and transmission of that risk. This study sought to address those methodological difficulties by employing an established paradigm designed to elicit emotionality in infants, the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB; Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1999). Participants were 30 women who met DSM-IV criteria for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), 50 women who did not meet MDD criteria, and their 8-13 month old infants. The women were recruited from five counties within Iowa which contain both rural and urban centers. Consistent with state demographics the sample was predominantly Caucasian (76%). Mother-infant dyads were assessed approximately five months after the mother had completed a diagnostic interview. At that time six episodes from the Lab-TAB designed to elicit fear, anger, and positive affect were conducted. Emotional reactivity was coded used the AFFEX (Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1988) and composite scores were generated for each emotion. Infants of depressed mothers exhibited less intense pleasure to stimuli designed to elicit that emotion. There was also a slight, non-significant, trend for infants of depressed mothers to display more intense fear and to remain fearful longer. There was not a difference between the groups in anger expression. Emotional regulation was examined using a set of procedures set-forth by Buss and Goldsmith (1998) to determine effective regulation. These procedures involve calculating the change in affect from the coding epoch in which a "putative regulatory behavior" is displayed to the epoch immediately after the behavior. Change scores which involved no change in affect or a decrease in negative affect were considered effective regulation. Playing with clothing or an object and interacting with the stimulus were effective at regulating both fear and anger. In addition, averting gaze (disengaging with the task) was effective in regulating anger. Follow-up analysis revealed that infants of depressed mothers used gaze aversion more frequently than infants of nondepressed mothers. In addition, they were less likely to engage in social referencing (looking toward the mother) during episodes designed to elicit fear. The findings of this study are consistent with a growing body of evidence which documents the significance of considering low positive affect in examination of diagnosis and risk for depression and suggests that fear expression may be central to anxiety. Furthermore, results from the emotional regulation paradigms underscore the need for continued examination of the construct of "effective regulation." In addition, these results highlight disruptions in the mother-infant relationship which have implications for developing efficient regulatory mechanisms.

My dissertation, Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England, claims that the act of rejoicing--expressing religious joy--was a crucial rhetorical element of literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England. The expression of religious joy in literature functioned as a sign of belief and sanctification in English Protestant theology, and became the emotive articulation of a hopeful union between earthly passion and an anticipated heavenly feeling. By taking into account the historical-theological definitions of joy in the reformed tradition, I offer new readings of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts, including the Sidney Psalms, Donne's sermons, Spenser's Epithalamion, Richard Rogers's spiritual diaries, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I suggest that much of early modern poetics stems from a desire, on behalf of writers, to articulate the ineffable joy so often described by sermons and tracts. By establishing Renaissance emotional expression as a source of religious epistemology and negotiating the cognitive and constructive understandings of emotion, I show that religious rejoicing in Elizabethan Protestantism consists of a series of emotive speech acts designed to imitate the hoped-for joys of heaven. Finally, these readings emphasize the ways in which rejoicing not only functions as a reaffirmation of belief in and commitment to the state church but also becomes the primary agent for spiritual affect by bestowing grace on an individual believer.

Throughout the empirical psychological literature on emotion, the general consensus is that shame is maladaptive, while guilt is the adaptive moral emotion. Conversely, evolutionary psychology concludes that all emotions serve adaptive functions. Specifically, shame serves an appeasement function in social relationships. In order to investigate the true nature of shame, the current study used an experimental design. Specifically, a 2 (high shame, no shame) X 2 (high guilt, no guilt) design with a no-mistakes control group was implemented, and shame and guilt were operationalized through an evolutionary lens (i.e., shame as a nonverbal display, guilt as verbalizations of apology). Participants (n = 110) were told they would be assisting psychology faculty members with interviewing candidates for a research position. During the interview, the candidate made three mistakes, and showed shame and/or guilt according to the 2 X 2 design. Participants then rated how well the candidate performed. Results were analyzed using a 2-way ANOVA and independent samples t tests, and it was found that participants rated the candidate more favorably in both shame conditions. Importantly, there were no significant differences between those participants who viewed the candidate who made no mistakes (control condition) and those that viewed the candidate showing shame after multiple mistakes. Thus, apparently saying 'sorry' is not quite enough.

This study uses the father-child activation theory, which identifies the father-child relationship as a source for self-regulation learning. Father-child play behaviors during toddlerhood were examined for their contribution to self-regulation skills, specifically emotion regulation and aggression. This study examined father-child play behaviors of emotion amplification, intrusiveness, positive regard, and child emotion regulation seeking in the National Early Head Start (EHS) Evaluation. Fathers who used more emotion amplification at 24 months were less intrusive, showed more positive regard, and had children who sought more emotion regulation at 24 months than fathers who used less emotion amplification. Fathers who were more intrusive during play had children who were less likely to seek emotion regulation with them than fathers of children who were less intrusive. Correlational results indicate gender differences in fathers’ intrusiveness. Children who sought emotion regulation demonstrated greater emotion regulation at 24 and 36 months than children who sought less emotion regulation during play. Furthermore, children with fathers who showed more emotion amplification and positive regard demonstrated better emotion regulation at 36 months. The regression models predicting child emotion regulation at 24 and 36 months accounted for 21% and 22% of the variance, respectively. However, only paternal positive regard and child emotion regulation-seeking during play were significant predictors at 24 months and no pathways were significant in the 36-month model. Regression models predicting child aggression were not significant. Results suggest that father-child play may be an important context for child emotion regulation development in young children.