Studies of affective forecasting examine people’s ability to predict (forecast) their emotional (affective) responses to future events. Affective forecasts underlie nearly all decisions people make and the actions they take. However, people engage in systematic cognitive errors when making affective forecasts and most often overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional responses. Understanding the mechanisms that lead to affective forecasting errors (e.g., immune neglect) and examining the utility of methods for improving affective forecasting errors (e.g., surrogation) can provide highly valuable information for clinicians as they assist clients in determining their goals both for therapy and for life. The first purpose of the current study was to determine if affective forecasting errors due to immune neglect lead to misjudgments about the relative emotional impact of minor versus moderate negative experiences (i.e., trauma severity). The second purpose was to examine the utility of surrogation for improving affective forecasts. Potential interaction effects between these two variables were also examined. The current study utilized a 2 (Trauma Severity: minor, moderate) X 3 (Prediction Information: surrogation information only, simulation information only, both types of information) experimental design. Undergraduates were recruited via the SONA system and randomly assigned to one of the six experimental conditions. A preliminary study was conducted to obtain surrogation information for use in the main study. All participants in the main study predicted how they would feel 10 minutes after receiving negative personality feedback, using a 10-point scale ranging from (1) very unhappy to (10) very happy. These predictions constitute their affective forecasts. All participants then actually received the negative personality feedback (ostensibly from another participant, a peer, in a nearby room) and reported their actual affective states ten minutes later, using the same scale. These ratings constitute their affective reports. Affective forecasting error was calculated as the difference between affective forecasts and affective reports. Results showed the affective forecasts of participants in the moderate trauma severity condition were significantly less accurate than those of participants in the minor trauma severity condition, providing evidence of immune neglect. Surrogation information significantly improved the accuracy of affective forecasts when participants were deprived of simulation information. Limitations of the current study and implications of the findings are discussed.

The thesis focuses on the issue of spatial neglect and its neuropsychological diagnostics. The theoretical part of the thesis first summarizes recent knowledge about the neglect and offers its classification, which maps the heterogeneous nature of the disorder. Furthermore, two areas of diagnostic methods aimed at neglect detection are discussed, which are the classic "paper-pencil" tests and functional tests. Finally, these methodological areas are put into relationship, the work discusses their possible complementarity and also their use in clinical practice. In the empirical part we focus on selected classic methods and their ability to diagnose mild neglect in the Czech population. For 64 patients, we compared the sensitivity of the Bells test, the line bisection test, and the scene copying test using different criteria. We also examined double dissociations and relationships between tests, and then the relationships between the ability of instruments to detect neglect and the characteristics of probands. The results mostly confirmed the findings of the theoretical part of the thesis. The sensitivity of the methods was low and variable, there were double dissociations between the line bisection test and the other tests, and there were practically no statistically significant correlations...

Objectives: To determine if emotion regulation mediates the link between emotional maltreatment and disordered eating behaviour in a community sample of adolescents. Design and method: Participants were 222 secondary school pupils (aged 14-18 years) from a state high school in a rural area in Scotland. Standardised questionnaire measures were used to gather data on history of emotional abuse and neglect using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), emotion regulation strategies using the Regulation of Emotions Questionnaire (REQ) and subclinical disordered eating behaviour using the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) and the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ). Pearson correlation and multiple mediation analyses were conducted to determine significant relationships and to identify whether dysfunctional emotion regulation was a mediator of the relationship between emotional maltreatment and disordered eating behaviour. Results: Multiple mediation analyses found both emotional abuse and emotional neglect to have a significant direct relationship with EAT-26 total score and DEBQ restraint scores - mediated by internal dysfunctional emotion regulation (with external dysfunctional emotion regulation also being a significant mediator in the analysis with emotional neglect and EAT-26 total). The direct relationship between emotional abuse/neglect and DEBQ emotional eating scores was non-significant, although a specific indirect effect through internal dysfunctional emotion regulation was observed. Conclusions: To the best of the author‟s knowledge, this is the first study which has looked at history of emotional maltreatment and disordered eating behaviour focussing on the influence of emotion regulation in particular. Results were indicative of significant indirect effects between emotional abuse and neglect and all measures of disordered eating through internal dysfunctional emotion regulation. Findings suggest the role of emotion regulation warrants further study in the research on childhood maltreatment and disordered eating behaviour.

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Thesis advisor: Ann Burgess / Child abuse and neglect in the United States is a highly sensitive issue. According to federal statistics, 1,640 children died from child abuse and neglect in the United States during the fiscal year 2012 (U.S. DHHS et al., 2013). There are multiple theories on how to prevent abuse and protect children from maltreatment. Experts in the field of child welfare believe a critical element in the prevention of child abuse and neglect is parenting education and support services for at-risk populations.The twofold purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a parenting education program offered at Saint Joseph Parenting Center (SJPC) in Stamford, CT in promoting positive parenting behaviors through parenting education and to assess the level of client satisfaction with the teachers, staff, and overall experience at SJPC. The study analyzed data from surveys given to SJPC clients between April 19, 2010 and February 13, 2013. The sample consisted of 63 registered clients who completed at least ten classes before February 13, 2013. All 63 clients completed the client survey after completing ten classes and 42 clients completed the same survey a second time after completing twenty classes. Results from frequency analysis of the data indicated a reported increase in positive parenting behaviors since beginning the program and a reported decrease in negative parenting behaviors. An analysis of variance failed to reveal a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the 10-class and 20-class surveys. Frequency analysis of the surveys indicated a positive review of the teachers, staff, and overall experience at SJPC by clients. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are discussed. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Nursing.

Hemispatial neglect, is a major cause of post-stroke disability and poor functional recovery. Hence, identifying sensitive methods to assess and rehabilitate neglect is important. Chapters 3 and 4 focused on development of novel assessment techniques for representational neglect. The 'Shopping Mall' and 'Clock Cueing' tasks improved upon previous tests and were useful in identifying dissociations in representational neglect based on type of stimuli (topological, non-topological) and time of assessment (pre-stroke, post-stroke) in chronic stroke patients. Chapters 5 and 6 investigated the efficacy of offline inhibitory repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in producing short (<1 month) and long term (>6 months) changes in visual neglect behaviour. Overall, the findings from these chapters were limited due to lack of sufficient power. After controlling for the effect of baseline performance, the Intervention group's Activities of Daily Living scores significantly improved in the short-term post rTMS, as compared to the Control group. The fMRI task attempted to recruit attention-based top down modulation of sensory activity. It revealed relative hypoactivation of the right occipital lobe in the four left neglect patients tested, both pre and post rTMS, when compared to elderly controls. Chapter 7 explored cognitive predictors of spatial and object neglect in the sub-acute stage after controlling for demographic and stroke related factors, using multivariate blocked logistic regressions. Cognitive performance indicative of spatial attention and selective attention to local features predicted both spatial and object neglect. In addition, coding of spatial relations between features also predicted spatial neglect. Suggestions for combining neglect rehabilitation techniques to target these cognitive processes are discussed. Overall, this thesis provides novel methods to improve representational neglect assessment and highlights the importance of ancillary cognitive domains in contributing to both representational and visual neglect. The rTMS research provides study design-related insights to incorporate in future studies with larger patient samples.

There is a large range of models of working memory, each with different scopes and emphases. Current interest focuses strongly on the interaction of working memory with long-term memory, as it has become clear that models of working memory alone are incapable of capturing some of our complex cognitive abilities. Most models have contrasting views on how this interaction is implemented. In this thesis, three classes of models are defined, each proposing a different type of interaction. The first model proposes that working memory acts as a gateway for perceptual input on its way to long-term memory. In the unitary model, working memory is seen as comprising the activated portion of long-term memory. The workspace model views working memory as a workspace that is separate from, and deals with the activated contents of long-term memory. The main aim of this thesis was to address the differences between these three models experimentally. Experiments 1 – 7 employed a dual-task paradigm to investigate the effects of irrelevant visual input on visuo-spatial working memory tasks. Two main findings emerged: (1) maintenance of images in working memory was largely insensitive to the effects of concurrent perceptual input; (2) mental imagery was susceptible to interference from irrelevant visual input. This interference effect was selective, as demonstrated by a lack of disruption of imagery by other secondary tasks. Experiment 8 further tested the three models by investigating implicit processing of visual information by neglect patients. It was found that implicit processing is mediated by the activation of long-term memory, in the absence of a conscious representation in working memory. These results together converge to support the workspace model, and suggest a view in which perceptual input activates the contents of long-term memory, prior to these activated representations being made available in a functionally separate working memory system for further processing. The gateway model and unitary model are unable to accommodate all findings. The implications of these results for existing theories about working memory are discussed.

Spatial neglect has mainly been described through its spatial deficits (such as attentional bias, disengagement deficit or exploratory motor behavior), but numerous other studies have reported non-spatial impairments in patients suffering from this disorder. In the present thesis, non-spatial deficits in neglect are hypothesized to form a core impairment, which can be summarized as a difficulty to learn and benefit from regularities in the environment. The different studies conducted and reported in the present thesis have converged to support this hypothesis that neglect patients have difficulty to interact with environmental statistics. The two first studies, which tested the visual modality (Chapters 2 and 3), have demonstrated that neglect patients have difficulties to become faster to respond to targets that appear successively at the same location (position priming). This difficulty is also more generic, as neglect patients do not learn that some things occur more often than others, such as for example that a target has a high probability to be repeated at a specific region. Those two studies have shown that neglect patients are impaired in position priming and statistical learning, which corresponds to difficulties benefiting from regularities presented in the visual domain. This difficulty may be explained by patients’ impairment in working memory or temporal processing. Several studies have reported the implication of those two mechanism in statistical learning: if patients tend to underestimate the time that a target is presented on the screen and have difficulties keeping in memory its precedent location, this translates into a difficulty to benefit from the repeats of the target position as well as a difficulty to benefit from transition probability. In order to verify if priming and statistical learning impairments were specific to the visual modality or if neglect patients present a multimodal difficulty to learn the transition probability in general, brain damaged patients were tested in the auditory domain (Chapter 5), with a paradigm that has shown statistical learning in infants. This study confirmed that for the auditory modality too, brain damaged patients are impaired in statistical learning. The different results of the studies reported in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 converge to support the hypothesis that spatial neglect patients have difficulties benefiting from regularities of their environment. Nevertheless, this impairment is not irreversible, as it was demonstrated by a chronic neglect patient who was trained with three sessions distributed over three days (Chapter 2). Although having similar results to the other patients for the first session, this patients’ performance improved over the sessions to show a faster reaction time for the targets presented on the high probability region (his contralesional side). Therefore, priming and statistical learning investigated in this thesis are worth exploring further for their potential outcome in the rehabilitation domain.

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This study investigated the relationship between maternal childhood experience of emotional abuse (CEA) and/or emotional neglect (CEN) and subsequent second-generation parenting outcomes. A systematic review of the literature was carried out, with twelve studies included for review. Evidence was found of a relationship between maternal experience of CEA/CEN and a negative impact on the subsequent parent-child relationship and parenting behaviours; including greater dysfunctional parent-child interactions, lower empathy, greater psychological control, greater child maltreatment potential and punitiveness. Evidence in relation to the impact on parenting competence was less robust. For practitioners, these findings highlight the importance of considering maternal childhood experiences when working with parents and when attempting to make sense of children's difficulties. Methodological weaknesses were highlighted and recommendations for future research made. Secondly, a cross-sectional study was carried out which explored whether early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) mediated the relationship between maternal CEA/CEN and attributions of perceived control over failure (PCF) in child care-giving interactions. Mothers (N=111) completed five self-report questionnaires in relation to the above. Multiple mediation analyses using bias corrected bootstrapping were carried out. In line with expectations, significant relationships were found between both CEA and CEN and EMSs. CEN also demonstrated both a direct and indirect effect on PCF score, via the EMSs Social Isolation/Alienation. However, the indirect effect was in the opposite direction to that predicted. No other indirect effects were found. CEA demonstrated neither a direct effect on PCF, nor an indirect effect via any of the EMSs. Results are discussed in the context of current research.