System justification theorists have proposed that people are motivated to view their political, economic, and social circumstances as desirable, necessary, and fair (e.g., Jost, Nosek & Banaji, 2004). Despite more than 15 years of system justification research, the meaning of fairness within this context has not been investigated directly. Over the past several decades three major criteria have been identified as contributing to people's perceptions of fairness: distributive justice, procedural justice, and one's own idiosyncratic set of personal values. Focusing on the last two, we reasoned that values are represented more abstractly than is information about procedural fairness, and that the relative weight of values versus procedures should increase at higher levels of mental construal. Whereas information about procedures is often seen as providing a basis for the acceptance of undesirable outcomes, judgments based on personal conceptions of right and wrong are considered to be independent from "establishment, convention, rules, or authority" (Skitka & Mullen, 2008, p. 531), and are therefore unlikely to be used in a motivated defense of the status quo. We therefore hypothesized that system justification would be most likely to occur in conditions where procedures are most salient (i.e., at low levels of construal). However, despite using manipulations of the system justification motive that have previously been successful, and working with issues similar to those used in previous work, we were unable to produce the typical system justification pattern of results. Possible reasons for this are discussed. / by Nicholas Martens. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study examined the empirical relationship between narcissism and self-esteem in an attempt to evaluate competing conceptualizations of narcissism. Participants were 236 children (mean age 11.3 years) in the fourth through eighth grades. Counter to earlier conceptions, which characterized narcissism as very high self-esteem, narcissism and self-esteem were slightly negatively correlated. Also, narcissism predicted several adjustment variables, including aggression. None of these relationships was mediated by self-esteem. Lastly, self-esteem moderated the relationship between narcissism and aggression in boys. Taken together, these lines of evidence point to a new conceptualization of narcissism, modeled after self-discrepancy theory, in which narcissism is conceptualized as grandiosity in the ideal self. Implications of this proposal and directions for future research are discussed. / by Rachel Evans. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study investigates affect coding within the therapeutic relationship, by exploring the client's and therapist's perception of the relationship and the facial and vocal affect expressed by both parties. A sample of 14 therapy sessions each having 1800 data points was collected. The Working Alliance Inventory Short Form (WAI-S) and Real Relationship Inventory (RRI) were completed after each recorded session. The participants were therapists and clients at a university counseling center in South Florida. Data were analyzed using one-tailed t tests, descriptive statistics, scores from RRI and the WAI-S and percentages of negative, neutral and positive affect. Statistically significant relationships were found between seconds of therapist negative affect (t(13)= -2.065, p. <.05) and seconds of therapist neutral affect (t(13)= -1.959, p. <.05) for clients who dropped out of therapy. The seconds of negative affect coded for clients (t(13) = -1.396, p. >.05) was approaching statistical significance for clients who drop out of therapy. This study provides theoretical and empirical support for linking the presence of facial affect in the first session and its effects on the therapeutic relationship and thus client retention or drop out. The clinical implications of these findings are also discussed. / by Ashley J. Luedke. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

A quasi-experimental, between groups design was used to evaluate differences in emotional behavior, as measured by the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), between professional therapists and their clients and a master therapist and his client. This coding system also was used to determine how emotional behavior shown by a master therapist changes over the course of six psychotherapy sessions. The research team recorded counseling sessions at a university counseling center in the southeastern United States and coded this video data using SPAFF in real time. Data were analyzed quantitatively to determine whether significant differences in SPAFF codes exist between the master therapist, professional therapists at the university counseling center, and their respective clients. Results indicated that the master therapist showed significantly more neutral and less negative affect than his counterparts at the university in both sessions one and four. The master therapist’s client showed significantly more neutral affect and less negative in session one and significantly more positive affect and less negative affect in session four. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The present study investigates the affectual interaction of three highly competent therapists using different theoretical approaches with a shared male client and female client in a professionally recorded video series. The interactions of clients and therapists in a total sample of six psychotherapy sessions were coded using the twenty code version of Gottman, Woodin, and Coan’s (1998) Specific Affect Coding System. Coded data were analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis tests which found no significant differences between the mean ranks of therapists’ codes between therapists. Significant effects among some affective behaviors were noted in therapists’ codes when compared by client. Coded data were also used to create mathematical models using ordinary differential equations for each of the six sessions. Kruskal-Wallis tests did not reveal significant effects in the mean ranks of the parameters of the mathematical models, and visual similarities and differences of these models were discussed. Additional analyses were conducted to examine clients’ affective behaviors as well and significant effects were revealed in the Kruskal-Wallis tests amongst many coded behaviors. The results support the presence of common factors and similarities in the therapeutic relationship among different theoretical approaches. The findings also add to the growing body of literature dedicated to the use of observational coding and dynamic nonlinear modeling in psychotherapy research. The implications for psychotherapy practice, education, and research are discussed. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-07-27T13:30:12Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Patricio de Almeida.pdf: 1337156 bytes, checksum: 8624a6c1aa16f114cf9727d0d549037d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-27T13:30:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Patricio de Almeida.pdf: 1337156 bytes, checksum: 8624a6c1aa16f114cf9727d0d549037d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-06-08 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Much is discussed about the contributions of psychoanalysis to the most diverse areas of knowledge. Freud was able to produce a science that could rethink the formation and the constitution of a subjective knowledge, focused on the essence of the subject and the affective relations that surround it. The school is a great example of this paradigm. It is in school that many children spend most of their time learning to deal with external conflicts in an attempt to mature their own inner struggles. This interiority was so well explored by Melanie Klein. Its vast theoretical framework, based on the exploration of the infantile inner world and its respective constitutive fantasies, is a great watershed for the understanding of the human being within psychoanalytic epistemology. This research will start from the experiences of the author as an educator and clinical psychoanalyst, in an attempt to articulate the kleinian concepts to the emotional situations witnessed in this professional and personal journey. It is not an instruction manual on how to put Melanie Klein s theory into practice, but rather a broad understanding of its general concepts in order to facilitate an understanding of the complex affective situations that permeate the field of school education. Given the character of this dissertation, there is no way to present closed conclusions, but rather to open the way to educational practices that follow an ethics of the subject, considering children and educators as subjective beings, consisting of emotional experiences, irremediably incomplete and with a character incredibly broad and comprehensive that can not (and should not) be simplified by a theory that sees it simplistically / Muito se discute a respeito das contribuigoes da psicanalise para as mais diversas areas do conhecimento. Freud foi capaz de produzir uma ciencia que pudesse repensar a formagao e a constituigao de um saber subjetivo, voltado a essencia do sujeito e as relagoes afetivas que o circundam. A escola e um grande exemplo desse paradigma. E na escola que muitas criangas passam a maior parte de seu tempo, aprendendo a lidar com conflitos externos, na tentativa de amadurecer seus pr6prios embates internos. lnterioridade essa que foi tao bem explorada por Melanie Klein. Seu vasto arcabougo te6rico que teve como embasamento a exploragao do mundo interno infantil e suas respectivas fantasias constituintes, e um grande divisor de aguas para a compreensao do ser humano dentro da epistemologia psicanalftica. Essa pesquisa partira das vivencias do autor como educador e psicanalista clfnico, na tentativa de articular os conceitos kleinianos as situagoes emocionais presenciadas nesse percurso profissional e pessoal. Nao se trata de um manual de instrugoes sobre como colocar em pratica a teoria de Melanie Klein, mas sim de uma compreensao ampla de seus conceitos gerais com o objetivo de facilitar o entendimento das complexas situagoes afetivas que permeiam o campo da educagao escolar. Dado o carater dessa dissertagao, nao ha como apresentar conclusoes fechadas, mas sim de abrir caminhos para praticas educacionais que sigam em diregao a uma etica do sujeito, considerando criangas e educadores como seres subjetivos, constitufdos de experiencias emocionais, irremediavelmente incompletos e com um carater incrivelmente amplo e abrangente que nao pode (nem deve) ser simplificado por uma teoria que o enxergue de maneira simplista

In recent years, Affective Computing has arisen as a prolific interdisciplinary field for engineering systems that integrate human affections. While human-computer relationships have long revolved around cognitive interactions, it is becoming increasingly important to account for human affect, or feelings or emotions, to avert user experience frustration, provide disability services, predict virality of social media content, etc. In this thesis, we specifically focus on Affective Computing as it applies to large-scale visual multimedia, and in particular, still images, animated image sequences and video streams, above and beyond the traditional approaches of face expression and gesture recognition. By taking a principled psychology-grounded approach, we seek to paint a more holistic and colorful view of computational affect in the context of visual multimedia. For example, should emotions like 'surprise' and `fear' be assumed to be orthogonal output dimensions? Or does a 'positive' image in one culture's view elicit the same feelings of positivity in another culture? We study affect frameworks and ontologies to define, organize and develop machine learning models with such questions in mind to automatically detect affective visual concepts. In the push for what we call "Big Affective Computing," we focus on two dimensions of scale for affect -- scaling up and scaling out -- which we propose are both imperative if we are to scale the Affective Computing problem successfully. Intuitively, simply increasing the number of data points corresponds to "scaling up". However, less intuitive, is when problems like Affective Computing "scale out," or diversify. We show that this latter dimension of introducing data variety, alongside the former of introducing data volume, can yield particular insights since human affections naturally depart from traditional Machine Learning and Computer Vision problems where there is an objectively truthful target. While no one might debate a picture of a 'dog' should be tagged as a 'dog,' but not all may agree that it looks 'ugly'. We present extensive discussions on why scaling out is critical and how it can be accomplished while in the context of large-volume visual data. At a high-level, the main contributions of this thesis include: Multiplicity of Affect Oracles: Prior to the work in this thesis, little consideration has been paid to the affective label generating mechanism when learning functional mappings between inputs and labels. Throughout this thesis but first in Chapter 2, starting in Section 2.1.2, we make a case for a conceptual partitioning of the affect oracle governing the label generation process in Affective Computing problems resulting a multiplicity of oracles, whereas prior works assumed there was a single universal oracle. In Chapter 3, the differences between intended versus expressed versus induced versus perceived emotion are discussed, where we argue that perceived emotion is particularly well-suited for scaling up because it reduces the label variance due to its more objective nature compared to other affect states. And in Chapter 4 and 5, a division of the affect oracle along cultural lines with manifestations along both language and geography is explored. We accomplish all this without sacrificing the 'scale up' dimension, and tackle significantly larger volume problems than prior comparable visual affective computing research. Content-driven Visual Affect Detection: Traditionally, in most Affective Computing work, prediction tasks use psycho-physiological signals from subjects viewing the stimuli of interest, e.g., a video advertisement, as the system inputs. In essence, this means that the machine learns to label a proxy signal rather than the stimuli itself. In this thesis, with the rise of strong Computer Vision and Multimedia techniques, we focus on the learning to label the stimuli directly without a human subject provided biometric proxy signal (except in the unique circumstances of Chapter 7). This shift toward learning from the stimuli directly is important because it allows us to scale up with much greater ease given that biometric measurement acquisition is both low-throughput and somewhat invasive while stimuli are often readily available. In addition, moving toward learning directly from the stimuli will allow researchers to precisely determine which low-level features in the stimuli are actually coupled with affect states, e.g., which set of frames caused viewer discomfort rather a broad sense that a video was discomforting. In Part I of this thesis, we illustrate an emotion prediction task with a psychology-grounded affect representation. In particular, in Chapter 3, we develop a prediction task over semantic emotional classes, e.g., 'sad,' 'happy' and 'angry,' using animated image sequences given annotations from over 2.5 million users. Subsequently, in Part II, we develop visual sentiment and adjective-based semantics models from million-scale digital imagery mined from a social multimedia platform. Mid-level Representations for Visual Affect: While discrete semantic emotions and sentiment are classical representations of affect with decades of psychology grounding, the interdisciplinary nature of Affective Computing, now only about two decades old, allows for new avenues of representation. Mid-level representations have been proposed in numerous Computer Vision and Multimedia problems as an intermediary, and often more computable, step toward bridging the semantic gap between low-level system inputs and high-level label semantic abstractions. In Part II, inspired by this work, we adapt it for vision-based Affective Computing and adopt a semantic construct called adjective-noun pairs. Specifically, in Chapter 4, we explore the use of such adjective-noun pairs in the context of a social multimedia platform and develop a multilingual visual sentiment ontology with over 15,000 affective mid-level visual concepts across 12 languages associated with over 7.3 million images and representations from over 235 countries, resulting in the largest affective digital image corpus in both depth and breadth to date. In Chapter 5, we develop computational methods to predict such adjective-noun pairs and also explore their usefulness in traditional sentiment analysis but with a previously unexplored cross-lingual perspective. And in Chapter 6, we propose a new learning setting called 'cross-residual learning' building off recent successes in deep neural networks, and specifically, in residual learning; we show that cross-residual learning can be used effectively to jointly learn across even multiple related tasks in object detection (noun), more traditional affect modeling (adjectives), and affective mid-level representations (adjective-noun pairs), giving us a framework for better grounding the adjective-noun pair bridge in both vision and affect simultaneously.

Social connection is important to one's health and longevity. However, not only do people need others to survive, we need others to thrive. Researchers call for deeper examination of the functions and processes through which our social partners help us to prosper and thrive, such as through increased physical health and well-being. Over three studies, I examined phenomena theorized to contribute to long-term thriving including positive emotions (i.e., gratitude and positive affect fluctuation), responsive support, affectionate touch, and physical health (i.e., sleep) within the context of nursing work (Study 1) and military relationships (Study 2 & 3). Study 1 provides support for the benefits of received gratitude expressions, an understudied component of gratitude interactions. Specifically, nurses receiving more thanks within their work week were associated with feeling more satisfied with their patient care and in turn positive physical health outcomes including higher sleep quality, for example. Thus, not only is feeling grateful important to well-being but receiving thanks from others benefits one's physical health as well. Study 2 extended research describing the impact of the dynamic and fluctuating nature of emotion and physical health to close relationships by examining how positive affect variability (intra-individual standard deviation) and instability (differences between each successive day's mood) promotes or hinders intimacy. The second study found that greater fluctuations in positive affect over time were associated with greater reports of closeness within military couples. Recent research indicates that variability in positive and negative mood contributes to reduced psychological and physical well-being; however, when applied to the study of close relationships, Study 2 suggests that variation in positive mood may instead benefit military couples. Finally, Study 3 investigated the degree to which affectionate touch enhances the interrelationships among negative event support, gratitude, and sleep within Veterans and their partners over time. Results offer limited support; however, one key finding indicates that Veteran daily reports of affectionate touch were associated with increased sleep quality for their spouses. In addition, Veteran reports of affectionate touch strengthened the degree to which spouses' perceived responsive support predicted Veteran grateful mood. Study 3 supports research showing that positive interactions with one's partner, such as physical touch and responsive support, contribute to sleep and positive relationship maintenance emotions, such as gratitude. Taken together, these studies offer support for the integral role our social connections play in thriving, particularly within the contexts of nursing and military relationships.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-104).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-91). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38821