The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact white affect toward African Americans has on whites' racial policy opinions. The study also identifies the difficulty of measuring affect in the traditional feeling thermometer. Moreover, the study introduces and tests a new method for measuring affect that improves interpersonal comparability of reported affect by anchoring the respondents' self-placements. The study investigates the changes in the relationship between white affect toward African Americans and racial policy opinions of presidential election years between 1964 and 2008. Furthermore, the study tests a new method for measuring affect by having respondents rate where they believe groups representing points on an ordinal scale would belong on the scale. The method allows for an adjustment of the respondents' self-placement in relation to where the respondent places the group. The findings contained here show that affect can be an important predictor of white racial policy opinion and the strength of affect can vary over time. In addition, the measurement of affect can be improved by utilizing anchoring objects in a survey to clarify the ordering of the scale for the respondents, as well as allowing for a reallocation of scores.

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The mechanisms accounting for how negative mood, intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and low problem-solving confidence (PSC) increase worrying are poorly understood. One possibility is that these variables result in a detailed, analytical, and cognitively demanding form of information processing, known as systematic processing. This thesis examines whether worry promoters (negative mood, IU, and low PSC) increase an individual's likelihood of deploying systematic processing. Furthermore, the impact of these variables on threat perception and coping beliefs – factors affecting both worry and systematic processing – is explored. Six studies were conducted. The first five utilised experimental manipulations of mood, IU and PSC, whilst the sixth used questionnaires. Systematic processing deployment was indexed by sufficiency threshold measures (confidence that processing goals are satisfactorily accomplished) and a questionnaire. Participants induced into a negative mood had raised sufficiency thresholds; they were more likely to deploy systematic processing High IU and low PSC manipulations did not cause an increase in the likelihood of using systematic processing, but these variables correlated with an increased likelihood of deploying systematic processing Only negative mood correlated with increased threat perception when regression analyses were conducted controlling for each of the worry promoters All three worry promoters correlated with decreased threat coping beliefs A small negative correlation was found between worry and systematic processing PSC showed some construct overlap with systematic processing Consequently, negative mood states may encourage individuals to systematically process threats that they perceive. But worry is also defined by IU and low PSC, factors which diminish self-efficacy appraisals in the form of coping beliefs. These low coping beliefs may serve to dissuade the individual from typically deploying cognitively demanding systematic processing. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the role of systematic processing as a mechanism of perseverative worry.

I argue that emotion is an ontologically emergent and sui generis. I argue that emotion meets both of two individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for ontological emergence. These are, (i) that emotion necessarily has constituent parts to which it cannot be reduced, and (ii) that emotion has a causal effect on its constituent parts (i.e. emotion demonstrates downward causation). I argue that emotion is partly cognitive, partly constituted by feelings and partly perceptual. 1) I argue that both the type and the intensity of an emotion supervene on cognitive factors. But emotion cannot be reduced to cognition because emotions are paradigmatically valenced and cognitions are not. 2) I argue that the phenomenal properties of emotion are determined by bodily feelings, thus emotion necessarily requires feelings. But emotion cannot be reduced to feelings because emotion has rational properties not held by bodily feelings. 3) I argue that the intentional objects of emotion are perceptual objects, and hence emotion necessarily requires perception. But emotion cannot be reduced to perception because emotion has second orders (as evidenced by metaemotion) and perception does not. Thus emotion meets the first necessary condition for ontological emergence; emotion has constituent parts to which it cannot be reduced. I go on to argue that emotion has a causal effect on its 4) cognitive, 5) feeling, and 6) perceptual parts, both as a faculty and at the level of the individual emotion. Emotion meets the two individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for ontological emergence: (i) emotion has composite parts to which it cannot be reduced, and (ii) emotion has a causal effect on its composite parts. Thus emotion is ontologically emergent. Being ontologically emergent, emotion is sui generis.

This thesis investigates how particular psychological motivations operate in different social and physical contexts. Through a series of four papers, it both extends and empirically tests some of the theoretical claims made by motivated identity construction theory (MICT, Vignoles, 2011), which proposes that people construct their identities in ways to maximise or maintain the satisfaction of identity motives for self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging, efficacy, and meaning. Although these identity motives been found to influence identity construction at individual, relational and collective levels of self-representation (e.g. Vignoles, Regalia, Manzi, Golledge, & Scabini, 2006), Paper 1 extends this by showing not only that identification with novel groups tracks the satisfaction of identity motives over time, but also, crucially, that different motives are related to identification with different types of groups. MICT further proposes that each of the motives can be satisfied in various ways, and that particular contexts promote and emphasise certain ways over others. Paper 2 extends this theorising to the belonging motive, showing that there are different ways that people can gain feelings of belonging from their group memberships, and that this depends on the type of groups involved. Paper 3 examines the effects of the built environment on the belonging motive, showing that physical features within flats that encourage the use of common areas increase the frequency with which flatmates coincidently meet each other. This increases their feelings of belonging associated with the group, leading, in turn, to increases in well-being. Paper 4 focuses on the distinctiveness motive and, using a large cross-cultural dataset, finds support for MICT's claims that the way the distinctiveness motive is satisfied varies according to the level of urbanisation in an individual's surrounding environment, in addition to their cultural context. The importance of incorporating social and physical contexts into psychological theories is discussed.

The thesis explores the impacts of being exposed to hate material online, so called cyberhate, using social psychological theories of group identity as a framework to explore victimisation experiences when targeted directly or witnessing others from the same identity group being targeted, known as indirect victimisation. Three papers examine these impacts with two commonly stigmatised groups; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people (LGB&T) and Muslims. Paper 1 reports the results from two online surveys about the nature of cyberhate experienced by these two groups. Results indicate it is a common and frequent problem occurring over a range of internet platforms and mediums and there are a number of negative emotional reactions and behavioural intentions similar to those reported by Intergroup Emotions Theory after group identity challenges. Paper 2 uses qualitative interviews with victims of cyberhate to gain a detailed understanding of the impacts of being victimised. Participants indicated that there is a level of resilience to being targeted as bad behaviour is expected online, but being exposed to hateful material causes many to take avoidance action, avoiding certain parts of the internet. Paper 3 presents the results of an innovative experimental study exposing members of the stigmatised groups and a control to hate material. Those viewing group specific hate material felt angrier than when just viewing generally unpleasant material. The current research finds that being targeted online has similar negative impacts to offline hate crime, both to those who are targeted directly but also those who are indirectly victimised.

Vicarious pain refers to the processes and experiences that arise from observations of other people in pain. Due to the interpersonal and multi-modal nature of these processes, research into the field is highly relevant for a number of key concepts in social cognitive neuroscience, such as empathy, multi-sensory processing and social cognition. The dominant approach in the field has been to focus on normative samples with little focus being given to inter-individual differences. The discovery of a subsample of the population who report conscious experiences of pain when observing it, so called 'mirror-pain responders', presents a significant opportunity for developing our understanding of the neural processes and characteristics associated with vicarious pain. The present thesis aims to extend understanding of this group who appear to lie on an extreme end of a spectrum of vicarious pain perception. Although past research has highlighted this group and made some attempts to identify their prevalence, few formal attempts have been made to stringently discover the prevalence and identify the characteristics of their qualitative experience. As such, ARTICLE I developed a questionnaire, named the Vicarious Pain Questionnaire (VPQ), which characterises mirror-pain responders based on their subjective experiences of pain. The results showed a surprisingly high prevalence rate for the condition, ~30%. In addition through the use of a cluster analysis, the VPQ identified subgroups within mirror-pain responders, which included a group who experienced sensory and localised mirror-pain, and a group that experienced affective and generalised mirror-pain. ARTICLE I and ARTICLE II both aimed at assessing the neural basis for the experiences and successfully highlighted the role of hyperactivity in vicarious somatosensory processing, through the use of electrophysiological (EEG) neuro-markers for somatosensory processing (mu rhythm) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation in the somatosensory cortex during pain observation. Additionally, these articles highlighted the role of self-other processing regions through the use of voxel-based morphometry (VBM) which revealed reduced grey-matter volume in the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), and psycho-physiological interactions (PPI) of fMRI processing which revealed connectivity networks between pain matrix regions and self-other processing regions (rTPJ and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)). Characteristics of the mirror-pain were further assessed in ARTICLE III which in a battery of behavioural and physiological tests were administered to mirror-pain responders and controls. This study showed abnormal autonomic nervous system processing for Affective/General mirror-pain responders and confirmed the link between the condition and questionnaire measures of empathy. Finally, ARTICLE IV failed to provide a causal link between self-other processing regions (rTPJ) and somatosensory activation in response to pain observations through the use of theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in non-responders. This calls into question the direct causality of neural mechanisms associated with self-other theories of mirror-pain. This thesis demonstrates the importance of studying inter-individual differences in vicarious pain by reporting a set questionnaire and neuroimaging results which contribute to debates in the field and raises questions for future research. This work, its implications, and contributions to the wider literature are reviewed in the DISCUSSION chapter.

The extent to which motivational mechanisms contribute to reward seeking processes is crucial to our understanding of certain abnormal behaviours, including addiction. Pavlovian conditioning endows reward-associated stimuli with the ability to modulate goal-directed actions for that same reward (Pavlovian-to-Instrumental transfer; PIT). Learning and motivational theories attempt to describe the processes by which stimuli in the environment acquire incentive properties, attract attention and drive reward-seeking behaviours and bear many resemblances, but there are also important differences. This thesis uses a general PIT model in humans to further our understanding of these discrepancies and investigates the effect mood has on these processes. Firstly, altering the value of the reward affected the rigor of instrumental performance, but the same changes in outcome value did not affect the expectancy of, attention to, or emotional reactivity to the cues suggesting that in Pavlovian learning, apart from the nature of outcomes, the value of outcomes is encoded such that changes in outcome value prevent transfer of a Pavlovian cue's incentive properties to alter goal-directed action. Secondly, the further papers assess the extent to which mood modulates this same action. When under negative mood a general reduction in motivation, driven by an attenuated sensitivity to the reward was observed, as well as a dissociation between aversive and appetitive outcomes. The remaining study explored whether mood altered Pavlovian learning and revealed that those under state negative mood take longer to express their knowledge explicitly and that those under positive mood showed altered attention and emotional responses towards the same stimuli. The approach used in this thesis shows the merits of both motivational and learning theories, and further demonstrates the link between mood and motivation. Additionally, a dissociation between punishment and reward prediction when under negative mood was demonstrated and builds upon this important distinction.

Music has been used to evoke emotions for centuries. The mechanisms underlying this effect have remained largely unclear. This thesis contributes to research on how music evokes emotions by investigating two mechanisms from the model of Juslin and Västfjäll (2008) - musical expectancy and emotional contagion. In the perception studies the focus is on how musical expectancy violations are detected by either musically trained or untrained individuals. In the music-making studies, we concentrate on mood change brought about by cheerful music in healthy and depressed individuals and factors which could modulate this change like personality, musical preference and general emotional state. The results indicate that the subtlest scale violations are detected at the level of brain electrical potential while the task remains behaviourally difficult. This suggests that scale information is processed using music-syntactic analysis and in memory existing representations of tonal hierarchies, instead of auditory sensory memory as previously believed. Music-making decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue in both depressed and healthy participants whereas arousal and positive mood increased. This suggests that musicmaking could be beneficial for depressed individuals in terms of improving their mood on a short-term basis, even though a reliable music-related decrease of depression symptoms was not found. Among healthy participants, intraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, musical training and liking of the music predicted positive changes in mood following a music-making session. Taken together, these studies indicate that subtle musical scale violations are detected even if they are not consciously perceived as deviants and could therefore be used to evoke emotions, and music-making improves the mood in both healthy and depressed individuals and could serve as a temporary relief in case of depression.

Kant’s idea of the person and its place within his so-called “Formula of Humanity” has taken on an important role in contemporary discussions of normative ethics. Yet, despite its popularity, confusion remains as to what Kant really means by person and personality in his exposition of the moral imperative. This confusion has led to the attribution of positions to Kant that he clearly does not hold. My concern in this thesis is to engage the texts of Kant’s moral philosophy in an effort to clarify his idea of person/personality. Accordingly, my concerns are primarily exegetical, though I do engage some contemporary trends in Kant scholarship and Kantian ethics. I have divided the thesis into three main sections, which comprise Sections II, III, IV. In Section II, I look to Kant’s precritical ethics, examining his initial discovery of the formal and material principles of morality and his interest in the role feeling plays in the moral life. Of particular interest is Kant’s first introduction of a connection between the feeling of respect for persons and moral duties. In Section III, I suggest that reading Kant’s critical moral philosophy in continuity with the precritical ethics brings into relief Kant’s move from popular morality to an analytic demonstration of the connection of the moral imperative to the will of a rational being. I argue that respecting Kant’s analytic move helps to prevent us from (i) conflating the idea of humanity and personality, which is commonly done in contemporary Kant scholarship and (ii) attributing a strict “two-world” ontology to Kant’s moral philosophy. Finally, in Section IV, I return to Kant’s conception of moral feeling as respect for persons, and I briefly discuss its motivating force in the fulfillment of the demands of morality. Together, these three sections display the importance of understanding Kant’s idea of personality for any project aiming to faithfully interpret his moral thought.