It has been demonstrated that emotion regulatory goals can be successfully accomplished using implementation intentions (e.g., Schweiger Gallo, McCulloch, Gollwitzer, 2012) or mental imagery (e.g., Davis, Ochsner, Gross, 2011) as emotion regulatory strategies. The effectiveness of these strategies was assessed by examining changes in subjective reports of experienced emotion. In the present thesis these findings are explored and extended in five experiments in which the impact of forming either an implementation intentions or an Observer visual imagery perspective on self-reports and on physiological arousal, measured by changes in Electrodermal and Heart Rate responses. Study 1 was designed to examine whether an implementation intention would be effective in realizing the emotion regulatory outcome specified in the 'then' component of this 'if-then' plan to the picture type specified in the 'if component ("If! see a weapon, then 1 will stay calm and relaxed! "), in the absence of an additional goal intention. To control for an attentional bias towards negative content, in addition to neutral pictures the participants viewed two types of negative pictures: ones depicting a weapon (then component I cue) or non-weapon negative pictures. These were viewed after either an Implementation Intention (IMP), or a Goal Intention (GI, "1 will stay calm and relaxed! "), or no self-regulatory (Control) instructions. The effectiveness of the IMP instructions was determined by comparing participants' arousal ratings to the negative pictures between experimental conditions and to the non-weapon pictures within the experimental conditions. The results showed that only participants in the IMP condition reported feeling calmer after viewing the non-weapon pictures and the weapon pictures (relative to Control and GI conditions). These findings provide a replication of Schweiger Gallo et al.'s (2009) observation that the emotion regulatory goals can be accomplished using an implementation intention, and extend them by demonstrating the effectiveness of an implementation intention in the absence of a prior goal intention. These effects are thought to reflect the benefits of forming an "if-then" plan by increasing cue (weapon picture) accessibility and enhancing the association between this cue and the emotion regulatory outcome (staying calm and relaxed).

Objective: This thesis will explore and test whether conceptualization of emotive differences in transactional (T) and relational (R) psychological contract types can be supported empirically whilst also exploring how employee's perceptions of their relationship with the organization are linked to their experiences of emotion in the workplace. Background: Definitions of T and R contracts differ in terms of their 'focus'. T contracts are described as having an economic focus, whilst R contracts are described as having both an economic and emotional focus. This presumed emotive difference between the contracts has not, as yet been empirically tested. Additionally, much of the literature has focussed on emotion as a reaction to an event within the workplace. Method: Qualitative diaries (n=20) were used in an exploratory, theory building study of the links between contract type and emotion tone over a 10 day period. Quantitative diaries (n=l04) were used to test the relationships elicited from Study One, again over a 10-day period. Qualitative interviews (n=30) were used to gain an in-depth understanding ofthe processes involved in the proposed links from the two previous studies. Quantitative surveys were completed (n=413) to test the hypotheses developed from the three previous studies. Results: Current conceptualization of emotion within T and R contracts was not supported. Emotion was linked to both contract types, but differed in specific valence; R contracts were linked to positive emotional experiences, whereas T contracts were linked to negative emotional experiences. Contract type and the associated emotion influenced perceptions of experiencing certain events, the emotion employees attended to, and the emotions that were actively managed. Conclusion: Enhancing knowledge of the link between emotion and psychological contracts can only be done once the role of emotion is more clearly understood at a conceptual level.

Throughout history, people have held beliefs about the blessings or curses that may result from coming into contact with certain objects or people, and many of these beliefs have a moral component to them. From a cognitive psychological point of view, cultural beliefs about "moral contagion" share common ground in universal human cognitive processes such as neurological threat-processing systems. These systems engage evolutionarily older areas of the brain which function in part to avert us from disgusting biological entities which may carry disease. It is not clear, however, if and how evolutionarily newer .social cognitive factors, such as individuals' concerns about their moral reputations, interact with these lower-level processes. This type of interface may explain why contagion concepts outside the realm of disease are so prevalent. The five studies presented in this thesis tested if social cues affected individuals' implicit reasoning about contagion in the moral domain. The results of these studies have important implications for understanding , how our cognition shapes and constrains explicit cultural beliefs about human moral identity.

Negative emotions associated with event memories fade in intensity to a greater extent over time than positive emotions (Fading Affect Bias or F AB). Frequent social disclosure of event memories has previously been found to enhance the FAB, with frequent social disclosure associated with increases in positive and decreases in negative emotional intensity. In this thesis, two pilot studies and a major experimental study (N "" 140) combined a novel experimental paradigm and qualitative analysis to explore mechanisms underlying the effects of social disclosure on the FAB. Results indicated that verbal emotional expression alone was not sufficient to enhance the FAB, but the presence and behaviour of a listener is an important factor. Socially disclosing positive events increased affect intensity, regardless of the behaviour of the listener. Whilst social disclosure of negative events to an interactive listener decreased affect intensity, social disclosure to a non-responsive listener led to an increase in affect intensity. The effects of socially disclosing positive events lasted for a week, but only if listener feedback had been received. Moreover, the individual difference measures of alexithymla and neuroticism moderated the effects of social disclosure. Qualitative analysis of social disclosure transcripts using conversation analysis principles identified three main types of listener responses characteristic of the beneficial effects of social disclosure: the development of rapport, expressions of empathy, and encouraging cognitive reappraisal. Finally, lexical analysis of written event descriptions before and after social disclosure revealed social disclosure to an interactive listener is associated with an increase in the emotionality of written descriptions. This thesis provides original evidence that listener behaviour during social disclosure is an important factor in enhancing the F AB. The use of a novel mixed methods approach has further increased our understanding of the mechanisms by which social disclosure and listener behaviour influence the fading affect bias.

Theoretical perspectives (ATF, Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001) on emotion and risk- taking posit that differences in risk-propensity and risk choice between angry and anxious individuals can be predicted on the basis of the appraisal dimensions which define these emotions. The thesis aimed to test these predictions across three studies of trait emotions, incidental affective states and integral emotions. Study one examined differences in reported risk-taking between trait angry and trait anxious individuals. A large scale study (N = 1961) was conducted which saw the development and validation of the General Risk Accessibility and Behaviour scale (GRAB); differences between trait angry and trait anxious were then assessed in terms of current risk-taking behaviours. Findings indicated a reliable and stable factor structure as well as strong construct validity of the GRAB. Hypotheses were partially supported insofar as trait anger was found to be more strongly associated with risk- taking than trait anxiety. However, trait anxious individuals were found to take greater dietary risks than trait angry individuals and were also found to demonstrate positive associations with risk-taking with regards to health-threatening behaviours. Study two focused on the manipulation of immediate anger and anxiety during an emotional Stroop task in order to assess whether angry and anxious individuals differed in their attentional bias towards risk-related stimuli. No Stroop effect however, was demonstrated. Possible explanations were offered in terms of distraction effects caused by the manipulation techniques. Difficulties encountered with the emotion manipulations during study two, prompted the need for a more naturalistic method for inducing emotions. The final study therefore aimed to test ATF predictions in a more naturalistic context. The use of the Leeds Advanced Driving Simulator (LADS) enabled manipulations of immediate integral emotions based upon other driver behaviour. Findings from the final study demonstrated that angry drivers drove at faster speeds and demonstrated shorter time headway and shorter time to collision compared to fearful drivers during the lane drop and contraflow scenarios. However, fearful drivers were found to drive faster throughout the narrow lanes scenarios. Overall the thesis provides partial support for the Appraisal Tendency Framework (Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001) in predicting differences in risk-taking between angry and anxious individuals. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

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In series of fundamental attempts, a recent account of attentional changes in depressed mood is examined, addressing a defocused mode of attentional processing in depressed mood. Firstly, the general explanatory power of the defocused attention concept across all stages of the processing continuum was assessed. Secondly, the possible empirical constrain of the defocused attention notion are tested. Results in general gave support to the notion of a defocused mode of attention, whereby depressed people allocated more attention to peripheral word stimuli than nondepressives. In addition, depressives demonstrated greater sensitivity to peripheral, irrelevant, and non-central aspects within the environment, as compared to people in the nondepressed group. Finally, depressed people showed a norm-deviant performance in ranking typicality as a measure of semantic proximity. The examination of possible empirical constrain of defocused attention showed support for factors including the type of response that is required in a task, (e.g., RT, accuracy and typicality), involved strategies (automatic vs. effortful) and task characteristics. The first experiment yielded strong support for defocused attention, i.e., equal speed on processing of word stimuli from different eccentricities, and also for even-handedness in attentional processing, that is, equal performance levels with respect to word stimuli from different valences. Experiment two on processing of nonword perceptual signals showed support for a control motivated performance, that is, a greater sensitivity to focal stimuli as displayed by the depressed as compared to the nondepressed individuals. Striking support for defocused attention was found in experiment three with regards to processing of a focal task and the perception of peripheral non-targets, in which depressed people showed greater sensitivities than nondepressives to the peripheral environment, except when the recognition of peripheral objects required more effortful processing. The findings from experiments 4a and 4b showed that depressive's defocused attention was present at the semantic level, where the task required the ranking of typicality for given exemplars of a category label (typicality rating task), a task that is assumed to require non-recall based processing, but not on tasks requiring the active retrieval of exemplars from long term memory for a given category label (exemplar generation task).

This thesis aimed to address two separate issues: 1) the effect of fixation and smooth pursuit eye-movement on motion sensitivity and 2) the effect of age on motion sensitivity. Speed, direction and motion coherence thresholds were measured in older and younger observers during fixation and smooth pursuit. Observers of all ages found it more difficult to discriminate direction during smooth pursuit compared to fixation. An age-related decline in direction discrimination was evident during fixation and smooth pursuit at slow speeds only (Experiment 1). An age-related decrease in retinal luminance failed to explain the decline in direction sensitivity in older observers (Experiment 2). The effect of relative motion was assessed and was found not to influence the threshold difference between eye-movement conditions (Experiment 3). Similar effects of speed and eye-movement condition were found in the trajectory-matching task (Experiment 4). Speed discrimination thresholds were also higher during pursuit compared to fixation (Experiment 5). No age effects were found in either eye-movement condition for speed discrimination. Classification analysis demonstrated that in speed and direction discrimination, old and young observers combined retinal and extra-retinal motion cues to make motion judgements regardless of instructed eye-movement. Overall, the discrimination results support the idea that performance in these tasks is limited by internal noise associated with retinal and extra-retinal motion signals that feed into a combination stage responsible for estimating head-centred motion. Motion coherence thresholds were higher for pursued stimuli compared to fixated stimuli (Experiment 6). In addition, observers of all ages found it more difficult to detect collinear signal motion compared to orthogonal signal motion during pursuit. This pattern was significantly worse in older observers. There was no age-related decline in motion coherence for fixated stimuli. Retinal slip due to inaccurate eye-movements could explain the motion coherence findings.