This study examined the effects of racial insult on the propensity to either categorize or individuate outgroup members. Reaction times and self-reports measures were employed to gauge reactions to an insulting video. White and African American participants heard an insult, and then completed the Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT), as well as the Internal Motivation to Control Prejudice Scale (IMS) and the External Motivation to Control Prejudice Scale (IMS), the Motivation to Control Prejudice Scale (MCPRS) the Social Distance Scale (SDS), and made ratings on a feeling thermometer about the people in the insult video. African Americans showed more negative responses to outgroup members than Whites on the explicit measure, but Whites showed more negative responses to outgroup members than African Americans on the implicit measure.

This thesis examines whether the interrelationship of family and gay identity in South Korea is best understood as one of conflict, pitting a traditional, national, and filial constraint against a presumed global, progressive, and individualistic freedom, or whether it requires (or perhaps, in the narratives themselves, already provides) a different, more recursive understanding. This thesis explores the recursivity between gay identity and filial piety among college students in contemporary Korea while also providing a critique of a global gay paradigm that others may argue infiltrates Korean gay discourse. The aim of this ethnography is not just to collect the stories that these young South Korean college men tell about their experiences of being gay and a son, but to trace how my position as a researcher and a friend are shaped by my experiences with other gay Korean men and how those positions are intimately tied to this ethnography as a whole.

In the scientific study of the emotions the goal is to find natural kinds. That is, to find categories about which interesting scientific generalizations and predictions can be formed. Core affect is dimensional approach to the emotions which claims that emotions emerge from the more basic psychological processes of valence (pleasant/unpleasant) and arousal (activation/deactivation). Lisa Feldman Barrett (2006b) has recently argued that the discrete emotion approach has failed to find natural kinds and thus should be dismissed as a failed paradigm. She offers core affect as an alternative theory that will better capture natural kinds in emotionally salient phenomena. In this thesis I evaluate Barrett’s claim on the basis of a philosophically robust understanding of natural kinds and a careful assessment of the empirical evidence. I argue that while core affect is not a natural kind, subsets of core affect space may be natural kinds.

Syftet med detta arbete är att undersöka huruvida vissa didaktiska tillvägagångssätt kan öka motivationen hos gymnasieelever inför studier av äldre texter samt i vilken utsträckning valfrihet och medbestämmande är viktigt inför arbetet med dessa. Könsrelaterade jämförelser görs. Tidigare forskning presenteras och en empirisk kvantitativ undersökning med enkäter genomförs, baserad på SCAS (Swedish Core Affect Scale) i reducerad form. Ett 1500-talsepos presenteras medelst olika didaktiska metoder för elever som löpande noterar graden av motivation på en niogradig skala bestående av adjektivpar.Studien visar att vissa didaktiska tillvägagångssätt ökar elevers motivation. Berättande samt rörliga bilder i kombination med tal och musik visar sig vara de mest stimulerande metoderna, gärna anknytning till universella teman och perspektiv. Studien visar även att endast vissa elever upplever valfrihet och medbestämmande i samband med arbetet med texten som något positivt.

Psychological attachment to an entrepreneurial opportunity may motivate the entrepreneur to persevere but can also bias decisions made in the entrepreneurial process, especially on market entry. This thesis investigates how psychological attachment to an entrepreneur’s idea influences decision making at the commercialization stage with special emphasis on control tendencies. Data collected from 106 fourth-year students from the Engineering Design Program at a top engineering-focused Canadian university revealed some interesting results. In the model estimated, the higher the subject’s psychological attachment to the opportunity, the more control oriented the subject was. Interestingly, psychological attachment is a strong predictor of control tendency even when subjects’ perceptions of projected returns (value) are statistically controlled in the analysis. Furthermore, psychological attachment correlates with proxy measures of the level of cognitive evaluation: the indication, affective constructs like psychological attachment elicit affect-laden evaluation of outcomes in a way that is divergent from the cognitive evaluation of commercialization situations. Within a framework of financial decision making, even as subjects generally acknowledged outside investor expertise in a potential commercialization partnership, the main finding was that high levels of attachment are more likely to lead to control-oriented funding preferences over optimal financing preferences. Further, alternative research explanations for control tendency failed to hold, as individual personality-type factors were not significant in explaining the variability in control tendency. Therefore, control tendency may be dependent on attachment to the creative process as opposed to an individual’s personality construct. The results provide insight into the role that affective constructs like psychological attachment and control tendency may play in important decision making in the entrepreneurship process.

Beginning with a series of several self-report questionnaire studies I examine the potential for everyday attention lapses to create an inability to form connections to the external world, particularly through the experience of chronic boredom, and to subsequently lead to depression. In the first study I examine this process through the intermediate role of memory failures in the onset of boredom and depression, while in the second I examine the role of self-efficacy and in the third I add psychological stress as a further intermediate step between attention lapses and depression. For each study significant associations are found between self-report measures of attention lapses and attention-related cognitive errors, as presumed causes, and boredom proneness and depression as presumed outcomes. Structural equation modeling is then used to show these associations are well explained by an Attention-to-Affect model in which the attention lapses and attention-related errors predict the onset of boredom and depression, in part through their effects on memory failures (Chapter 1), perceived self-efficacy (Chapter 2), and psychological stress (Chapter 3). That these Attention-to-Affect models provide much better fit for the data runs contrary to the typical conception of attention and memory problems as consequences of emotional distress. Following from these models I examine in more specific terms the disconnect experienced as a result of attention lapses, through a laboratory study employing the Sustained Attention to Response Task. This study (Chapter 4) revealed a significant influence of attentional challenges on blinking behaviour, suggesting that whenever our attentional capacity is tested we have a tendency to momentarily direct our thoughts inwardly, perhaps to re-evaluate our attentional performance, and that the timeframe of this redirection is expanded following lapses of attention, and the commission of attention-related errors.

The focus of this thesis is to explore the impact of positive affective state and mood salience on intertemporal decision making. We found that positive affect significantly influence intertemporal preference. We also found that when current mood becomes salient to the decision maker, the direction of preference changes. Specifically, we hypothesized and found that individuals with positive mood are more likely to choose the later larger (long term) rewards than the individuals with a neutral mood. We discuss three factors that could explain choice behaviour in such situations. These factors are the willingness to maintain positive mood, temporal orientation and risk perception, and increase in the level of dopamine in brain. Moreover, our results indicate that when current positive mood is salient, individuals become more concerned about their affective state, and are more likely to engage in affect regulation, and as a result, more likely to prefer the sooner smaller (immediate) rewards. These findings suggest that experiencing positive affect would increase patience and self-control. However, this is the case when the level of mood salience is not high. When individuals’ attention is directed to their emotional states, they tend to choose sooner smaller rewards that could assist them in keeping their good mood and avoiding negative feelings.

Vocational psychologists have theorized that the congruence between self and occupations is the key to find fulfilling careers for individuals (Vondracek & Porfeli, 2011). However, the typical use of vocational interests to capture information about the self has been limited because it does not disentangle identity and work preferences in people’s responses in vocational assessments. People cannot be fully informed of careers most fitting to them if the vocational assessment does not capture distinct information about their identity. In this study, we strive to disentangle identity from preferences by including affective identity, which is sentiments that people hold towards themselves, as a predictor for career intent. Focusing on the context of entrepreneurship as a career, we examine how the congruence of affective identity and affective ratings of entrepreneurs provide additional information in predicting entrepreneurial intent beyond work preferences congruence. We invited undergraduate students from a Canadian University to complete an online-survey for an extra credit in their psychology course. We examined the impact of different congruence form of intent by including linear and polynomial terms of self and entrepreneur ratings when conducting a hierarchical linear regression. In general, we found support for the validity of our developed measure and demonstrated that contemporary congruence forms based on factors of affective identity brings new information in career choice perception. Affective identity accounts for unique predictability of self perception beyond vocational preference, which suggests the potential use of affective identity for career search feedback.

Abstract As a young offender in Sweden today you can be sentenced to juvenile care within the social services. Within the juvenile care it may be an option for these young offenders to undergo an affect program. That is a collective name for several types of structured programs that can include everything from conversations to visits. The purpose of this study was to create an understanding of which arguments there are for why these affect programs for young offenders is being used in three municipalities in southern Sweden. We authors found this interesting because of the lack of evidence for these affect programs. We do not know how effective these programs are for the young people that are undergoing them. We have interviewed employees at three different affect programs and the research questions that we have answered are: What arguments, for using these affect programs, do the concerned operators have? What do the concerned operators think about the lack of evidence for the affect programs? To achieve the aim of this study, we have implemented a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews. The analysis of our collected empirical work was based on the term isomorphism. The results of the study show that the reasons why the employees at the three studied affect programs chose to start these affect programs was because they had the requirement to be able to offer a legible, predictable and proportionate penalty. In the absence of evidence about how programs should be built the employees were inspired by other municipalities. The employees do not put much emphasis on different theories but instead they rely on their own experiences and on what they think is effective. The employees at the three programs think that it would be good if it existed evidence about the affect programs, but it is not crucial. Local resources set limits for how good the affect programs can become and the staff involvement also has a great significance.

While a vast amount of research in marketing has examined how information prior to purchase helps consumers to make purchase decisions, relatively little work has considered how marketers can increase the value consumers derive from subsequent experiences using this information. This dissertation develops a construct called "experiential preparation" that describes how consumers can increase the hedonic benefit of their experiences. This dissertation defines "experiential preparation" as any mechanism that allows consumers to familiarize themselves with upcoming experiences in advance of consumption, while the "preparation effect" refers to the increase in liking for an event due to experiential preparation.In a series of ten experimental studies this dissertation demonstrates that experiential preparation increases satisfaction, particularly where the respondent is in a positive mood. It also identifies the primary mechanism through which experiential preparation works, showing that increased satisfaction is fully mediated by fluency. These effects occurred across a range of experiences and modes of preparation. In all the studies, participants viewed feature-length and short, films and read short stories. Participants who engaged in experiential preparation received previews in the form of plot summaries or actual excerpts from the films and stories. In all studies, participants reported their enjoyment for the experiences, and, in several studies additional preference measures were collected. Finally, measures were developed to test for the ways in which fluency mediates and positive moods moderate the preparation effect.This dissertation is organized in three chapters. In Chapter One, experiential preparation and the preparation effect are defined, and background literature is discussed. Chapter Two analyses the results of the ten studies thematically around various mechanisms, some of which have a significant impact on the preparation effect, and some, little impact. Chapter Three presents the studies' results in detail. / Dissertation