Traditional theories of emotion have emphasised the automatic and unconscious nature of emotion generation and hence emotion regulation via antecedent and response focused strategies. Response strategies either inhibit the expression of an emotional response or modulate it via cognitive reappraisal. Antecedent strategies involve avoidance behaviour i. e. avoiding situations in which the emotional response is likely to occur. Recent evidence has now demonstrated, however, that the cognitive and emotional systems are highly interactive and that conscious attention may be necessary to generate emotion. Conscious attention can be controlled via executive functioning and the requirements of immediate goals. This evidence opens up the possibility of regulating emotions by executive functioning on-line i. e. as they occur. The aim of this thesis was to investigate on-going emotion generation and the mechanisms and processes that regulate it. A series of experiments manipulated cognitive functioning via direct instructions to Feel and Not Feel emotional responses to negative and neutral pictures and, indirectly, by manipulating cognitive resources available for processing the pictures. Participants in the latter experiments were required to maintain visual attention to the stimuli in order to rate the strength of their emotional responses to them whilst simultaneously holding in mind pictures or words requiring a subsequent same-different decision to a following item. It was believed that depleting cognitive resources could attenuate emotional responses. Results from the experiments showed that emotional responses can be attenuated by depleting cognitive resources available for processing emotional stimuli; an explanation that can explain both direct and indirect manipulations of cognitive functioning. It was not clear, however, whether emotion generation is not automatic or whether automatic processing requires some input from cognitive resources. Further research is also required to discover whether the cognitive resources required to generate emotions involve executive functioning for visual attentional processing, to maintain conscious attention for higher order processing, or for low level cognitive appraisals.

The ability of music to stir human emotions is a well known fact (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom. 2001). However, the manner in which music contributes to those experiences remains obscured. One of the main reasons is the large number of syndromes that characterise emotional experiences. Another is their subjective nature: musical emotions can be affected by memories, individual preferences and attitudes, among other factors (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). But can the same music induce similar affective experiences in all listeners, somehow independently of acculturation or personal bias? A considerable corpus of literature has consistently reported that listeners agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece or even in particular moments or sections (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). Those studies suggest that music features encode important characteristics of affective experiences, by suggesting the influence of various structural factors of music on emotional expression. Unfortunately, the nature of these relationships is complex, and it is common to find rather vague and contradictory descriptions. This thesis presents a novel methodology to analyse the dynamics of emotional responses to music. It consists of a computational investigation, based on spatiotemporal neural networks sensitive to structural aspects of music, which "mimic" human affective responses to music and permit to predict new ones. The dynamics of emotional responses to music are investigated as computational representations of perceptual processes (psychoacoustic features) and self-perception of physiological activation (peripheral feedback). Modelling and experimental results provide evidence suggesting that spatiotemporal patterns of sound resonate with affective features underlying judgements of subjective feelings. A significant part of the listener's affective response is predicted from the a set of six psychoacoustic features of sound - tempo, loudness, multiplicity (texture), power spectrum centroid (mean pitch), sharpness (timbre) and mean STFT flux (pitch variation) - and one physiological variable - heart rate. This work contributes to new evidence and insights to the study of musical emotions, with particular relevance to the music perception and emotion research communities.

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I argue that shame is an essential moral emotion, and that the capacity to feel shame is vital to allow us to pick out certain types of moral value. I do this by sketching out a general role for moral emotions, distinguishing shame from other moral emotions, notably guilt, and then arguing that shame has a distinctive role to play as a moral emotion that cannot be played by guilt. By marking out a key role for the emotions in moral life, I am able to address two key concerns about moral judgement. First, I am able to explain how we overcome frame problems, allowing us to notice and appropriately conceptualise moral concerns, against a backdrop of everyday life. Second, I can give an account of the apparent intrinsically-motivating nature of moral judgements. Shame, in central cases, is based on self-assessments of inadequacy; we judge ourselves to be less than we should be. This is contrasted with guilt, which centres on judgements of transgression against moral norms. It is also contrasted with embarrassment and humiliation, neither of which are primarily moral emotions. Shame has a distinctive role to play as a moral emotion. It is capable of picking out cases of moral value that guilt cannot; in particular, supererogatory value and cases of wrongdoing by collectives, in the absence of individual culpability. Pace the claims of numerous psychologists and philosophers, shame is not necessarily a dangerous emotion; rather, only certain types of shame have the potential to do damage to those experiencing them. Situationist arguments threaten the role of shame as a moral emotion, by suggesting that there are no robust character traits; these claims are mistaken. Therefore, I am able to sustain the conclusion that shame has a vital role to play in moral life.

Implicit attitudes have recently been distinguished from explicit attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Implicit attitudes have been characterised as introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, p8). Moreover, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the techniques used in implicit memory and learning research can be applied to research into implicit social cognition and, in particular, implicit attitudes. The aim of this thesis was to examine the cognitive functioning of implicit attitudes. In particular, the development of implicit knowledge and the relationship between implicit and explicit processes was an underlying theme. In order to address these issues, attitudes towards fictitious groups were created and assessed in a series of eight experiments. Implicit attitudes were assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT: Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Results from chapter two indicated that implicit attitudes towards novel groups could be successfully created, and that these persisted after a delay of one week. In addition, explicit attitudes developed prior to implicit attitudes towards the groups. Chapter three indicated that explicit motivation to control prejudice, or the introduction of a relatively strong attitude prior to attitude assessment, attenuated implicit attitudes towards the fictitious groups. Chapter four indicated that, while many judgements are made about objects that are singularly categorisable, it is likely that objects are categorisable by many dimensions. The results of chapter four revealed that individual components of attitudes towards multiply categorisable objects can affect our responses towards social stimuli. The results have implications for the malleability of implicit attitudes, which have previously been assumed to be fixed or infallible, and for the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes.

The present thesis addresses the role of maternal interpretations of infant facial expressions in the development of emotions. Emotion theories explain emotionality in terms of implicitly intra-individual processes resulting in serious conceptual and empirical limitations. In contrast, social constructionist theories reflect the inherently socio-cognitive nature of emotions and propose inter-individual processes to explain emotional development. Using the hitherto neglected perspective of interactional others, a social theory is developed which rejects the Cartesian dualism inherent in current theories of emotional development by assigning a central place to the perspective of caregivers in the development of emotions. An observational cross-sectional study examining the effect of age and context on mothers' perceptions of their infants was conducted. Twelve normal, primiparous, white, English, middle class mothers, aged between 25 and 35, were filmed interacting at home with their infants (aged 4-6 months (range 4;l-6;3), 7-9 months (range 7;0-9;l), and 10-12 months (range 10;1-11;3)). Mothers were asked to select and describe infant acts they found meaningful in a face to face play, a prohibitive, and a toy play condition. Facial expressions were coded using a standardised coding frame. Maternal interpretations of infant behaviour were collected and analysed. Two further experiments assessed differences between mothers' and observers' selections and interpretations of infant behaviour. Mothers' selections of infant facial expressions differed between age groups and situations. As infants got older, mothers selected fewer positive expressions in face to face play, more negative expressions in the prohibitive episode and more positive expressions in toy play. Differences in maternal interpretations, reflecting situational and age related specificity, were also found. While mothers perceived emotions and intentionality in infants of all ages, mothers of the oldest infants accompanied these attributions with descriptions of cognitive and communicative skills. A relationship between selected facial expressions and attributions of emotion states was found to be dependent on situational context. Mothers also differed from observers in both the number of meaningful acts they selected and the types of interpretations they made, demonstrating the divergence in perspective between caretakers as knowledgable participants in interaction and external observers. This thesis demonstrates the dynamics of caregivers' perceptions in expressive interaction and discusses the implications of these perceptions for understanding the process of emotional development.

The sudden arrival of wealth in China - more specifically, the arrival of wealth for some people but not for others- offers anthropologists a good opportunity to revisit and modify their theories of envy. While most anthropological studies of envy have focused on slow-changing societies and/or on the question of reducing inequality as a way of reducing envy, in the Chinese case we find rapidly growing inequality and, it seems, a striking increase in the prevalence of envy. Certainly, the arrival of windfall wealth due to mining activity in the three villages in North-east China where I conducted fieldwork for this dissertation generated a wide and rich range of envy-related discussions and practices. However, unlike other ethnographic contexts where witchcraft, sorcery, the "evil eye", etc. are well-known ways of articulating and dealing with the problem of envy, no such cultural forms have up to now been identified and analysed for the case of China. Three key findings are presented in this thesis. First, at the conceptual level I argue that red-eye (yanhong), a Chinese term/concept related to malicious envy (relevant to cases where people feel: "I strongly wish you did not have what you have"), is a unique cultural product in that it expresses a desire to destroy what others have, in that it implies an orientation towards acting upon this desire and in that it is intertwined with particular forms of political and discursive power. Second, in contrast with cultures where strategies to control envy focus primarily on the enviers (i.e. on those who envy others), in China the people who are themselves envied appear to bear a high degree of moral responsibility for this situation. That is, they may be held responsible for the improper actions of others that result from them having provoked envy in these other parties. Third, Foster's (1972) theory of envy argues that it is the perceived scarcity of desirable goods that makes the deprived most envious. In my study, I argue that what breeds envy in situations of windfall wealth is not the scarcity of desirable goods, as such, but rather the perceived scarcity of opportunities for upward mobility.

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The research reported within this dissertation investigates how individuals’ capacity to assimilate emotionally disruptive events is associated with particular features of episodic and autobiographical memory formation. It is inspired by Rachman’s (1980, 2001) formulation of emotional processing, and his subsequent proposals to explore the general mechanisms by which emotional disruptions are overcome. The specific rationale is informed by multilevel emotion theories, theories of post-traumatic stress disorder, and models of emotional processing. The research considered whether individuals who exhibit signs of a poor emotional processing style tend to encode events generally in a sensory-perceptual manner, with comparative deficits in their capacity to conceptually process data. Methodologically, the studies identify poor and effective emotional processors by using Baker et al.’s (2009) emotional processing scale as a grouping measure. The studies explore differences between groups of poor and effective emotional processors’ performance over a range of memory tasks drawn from episodic and autobiographical memory studies to detect evidence for a sensory- perceptual style of event and stimulus processing which is presumed to be indicated by a surfeit of perceptual details, heightened reported vividness, and a relative lack in conceptual ordering, narrative coherence and verbal indexing. Three general categories of memory are explored: memory for experimentally presented item lists, memory for extended narrative presentations and memory for naturally occurring events retained in long-term autobiographical memory representations. The evidence suggests a tendency to process in a sensory-perceptual manner amongst poor emotional processors for both experimental item lists, as well as in long term autobiographical memory investigations, whereas few differences between groups emerged for the study of narrative recollection. There was little evidence, by contrast, that effective emotional processors were superior at the conceptual processing of events or data. These results are discussed in terms of providing confirmation for information processing accounts of emotional disruptions and disorders which stress the aetiological significance in psychopathological conditions of how events are encoded, rendering such events accessible to broader autobiographical memory bases and conceptual elaboration. Furthermore, the importance of establishing more robust and testable definitions of conceptual processing is stressed.