The central question of my thesis is how different positive emotions affect inhibition. Katzir, Eyal, Meiran, and Kessler (2010) addressed this question using an antisaccade task and found that happiness decreased inhibition compared to pride, which they attribute to the links between pride and long-term goals and happiness and short-term goals. I attempted to generalize their results to a color-naming Stroop task and predicted that their results would not generalize because their study had little supporting research and their method had several limitations. I tested 45 students of the Claremont Colleges and found partial support for Katzir et al. Participants in the pride condition showed better inhibitory function than participants in the neutral condition, but I was unable to find differences in inhibitory function between participants in the pride and happiness or happiness and neutral conditions. The results suggest that pride improved inhibitory function compared to neutral emotion, but happiness had no effect. I conclude that further research is needed to confirm the supposed distinction between pride and happiness, the strength of the links between happiness, pride, and different goals, and the motivational role of emotion in inhibition.

Real-world perception of emotion results from the integration of multiple cues, most notably facial expression and affective prosody. The use of incongruent emotional stimuli presents an opportunity to study the interaction between sensory modalities. Thirty-seven participants were exposed to audio-visual stimuli (Robins & Schultz, 2004) including angry, fearful, happy, and neutral presentations. Eighty stimuli contain matching emotions and 240 contain incongruent emotional cues. Matching emotions elicited a significant number of correct responses for all four emotions. Sign tests indicated that for most incongruent conditions, participants demonstrated a bias towards the visual modality. Despite these findings, specific incongruent conditions did show evidence of blending. Future research should explore an evolutionary model of facial expression as a means for behavioral adaptation and the possibility of an “emotional McGurk effect” in particular combinations of emotions.

The expansion of Internet promotes the rise of social media. The appeal of social marketing leads the enterprises start to set up fanpage on Facebook to interact with their members.This study discusses whether the messages¡¦ emotion or the managers¡¦ emotion result in members¡¦ emotion in fanpage,and furthermore to find out the connection between members¡¦ emotion and brand attitude. This research adopts experimental method and distributes on-line questionnaire, retrieving 384 samples and analyze the data with SPSS 17.0. The results shows that the display of messages and the menagers¡¦emotional expression certainly affect menbers¡¦ positive emotion, and directly affect the menbers¡¦ brand attitude to the enterprises.This study points out the importance influence of emotion in marketing research,and provides some practical suggestions to enterprises to develop a new strategy.

Although theorists, researchers, and therapists alike emphasize emotional intimacy as an important aspect of a couple’s relationship, empirical data to understand the underlying processes behind this concept are lacking. The purpose of this study is to examine Reis and Shaver’s interpersonal process model of intimacy in a community sample of couples and to contribute to the current understanding of constructs that may moderate the process of intimacy. Reis and Shaver’s model suggests that vulnerable self-disclosure by one partner, coupled with empathic responding by the other partner, results in greater subjective emotional intimacy. Previous studies have examined this interpersonal process model in a sample of community couples in committed romantic relationships. The present study aims to contribute to the extant literature by testing emotion dysregulation as a potential moderator in Reis and Shaver’s interpersonal process model of intimacy. Multilevel modeling was used to analyze data from 108 community couples. Couples completed measures and were asked to participate in videotaped interactions in which each partner discussed a time that someone other than the partner hurt their feelings (low threat condition) and a time the partner hurt their feelings (high threat condition). For each interaction, partners were assigned to a designated role (speaker or listener). Results lend support to Reis and Shaver’s interpersonal process model of intimacy suggesting that both vulnerable self-disclosure and empathic responding by the partner are key components to one’s subjective experience of emotional intimacy. Results also lend support to the idea that emotion dysregulation moderates the relation between self-disclosure, empathic responding, and resulting post-interaction intimacy; however, when measuring how emotion dysregulation affects post-interaction intimacy within this study, results varied based on whose intimacy was being measured (speaker or listener) and based on the condition (low or high threat.) Clinical implications as well as directions for future research were discussed.

Emotions play an important role for everyday communication. Different methods allow computers to recognize emotions. Most are trained with acted emotions and it is unknown if such a model would work for recognizing naturally appearing emotions. An experiment was setup to estimate the recognition accuracy of the emotion recognition software SHORE, which could detect the emotions angry, happy, sad, and surprised. Subjects played a casino game while being recorded. The software recognition was correlated with the recognition of ten human observers. The results showed a strong recognition for happy, medium recognition for surprised, and a weak recognition for sad and angry faces. In addition, questionnaires containing self-informed emotions were compared with the computer recognition, but only weak correlations were found. SHORE was able to recognize emotions almost as well as humans were, but if humans had problems to recognize an emotion, then the accuracy of the software was much lower.

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This dissertation describes an emotion knowledge intervention which was designed and conducted with four year old children with behaviour problems. The children’s parents and preschool teachers kept daily records of the children’s noncompliances to determine if there was any change in behaviour throughout the duration of the study. The children’s emotion knowledge and vocabulary ability were assessed and their parents completed a child behaviour checklist both before and after the intervention. The emotion knowledge intervention consisted of six sessions over a three week period. During the sessions the emotions angry, happy, sad and scared were discussed with the use of storybooks and games were played that involved identifying the emotions on faces of emotion cards and the children also practiced making the faces themselves. Results indicated that the intervention did not result in an increase in the children’s level of emotion knowledge or result in a change the children’s behaviour. Possible reasons for this lack of effect may have included an insufficient number of sessions to result in a change of emotion knowledge or the intervention may have been ineffective at increasing the children’s level of emotion knowledge.

This study analyzed racial differences in the way African Americans and Caucasians perceive emotion from facial expressions and tone of voice. Participants were African American (n=25) and Caucasian (n=26) college students. The study utilizes 56 images of African American and Caucasian faces balanced for race and sex from the NimStim stimulus set (Tottenham, 2006). The study also utilized visual and auditory stimuli form the DANVA2. Participants were asked to judged emotion for each stimulus in the tasks. The BFRT, the WASI, and the Seashore Rhythm test were used as exclusionary criteria. In general the study found few differences in the way African Americans and Caucasians perceived emotion, though racial differences emerged as an interaction with other factors. The results of the study supported the theory of universality of emotion perception and expression though social influences, which may affect emotion perception, is also a possibility. Areas of future research were discussed.

Denna studie undersökte kulturella skillnader i emotionella och kognitiva aspekter av subjektivt välbefinnande, mer specifikt uttryckt; nivåer av positiva, negativa och balanserade känslor och hur dessa påverkar välbefinnande. Studien innefattar 212 infertilitetsdrabbade kvinnor i det individualistiska landet Sverige och det kollektivistiska landet Iran. Korrelationsanalys, regressionsanalys och One-way ANOVA användes för att besvara forskningsfrågorna. Resultaten visade ingen kulturell skillnad i kognitivt välbefinnande; men Svenska kvinnor uppgav högre känslonivåer, medan de Iranska i större utsträckning kunde uppleva motsatta känslotillstånd samtidigt. Balanserad affekt var huvudsaklig prediktor för välbefinnande i båda grupper. Resultaten diskuterades utifrån teori om individualism, kollektivism och infertilitet i relation till subjekivt välbefinnande. / This study examined cultural differences in the cognitive and emotional aspects of subjective well-being, more specifically the levels of positive, negative and balance affect and how these affect cognitive well-being. It involves 212 infertile women in the individualistic country Sweden and the collectivistic country Iran. Analyses of correlation, stepwise and linear regression as well as One-Way ANOVA were used to answer the research questions. The results showed no cultural difference in cognitive well-being, and Swedish women reported higher levels of affect while the Iranian to a higher extent experienced positive and negative emotions simultaneously. Balance affect was the best predictor for well-being in both samples.

Studies were conducted to investigate relationships between trait emotion regulation variables (including reappraisal and suppression) and selective attention to negative emotional information. Correlation analyses of data in experiment 1 showed that trait-suppression was related to early attentional avoidance of angry faces, while reappraisal showed no relationship to attention. Experiment 2 directly compared selective attention to angry faces in groups of high trait-suppressors and high trait-reappraisers. Since reappraisers are also low trait-anxious and suppressors are high trait-anxious, low emotion regulating high- and low-anxious control groups were included. Contrary to findings from experiment 1, trait-suppressors did not have lower selective attention to angry faces than low-regulating high anxious controls. Trait-reappraisers in experiment 2 showed pronounced vigilance for angry faces compared to both trait suppressors and low-regulating low anxious controls. These results suggest that trait-suppression may reduce attentional threat biases. Conversely, trait-reappraisal combined with low anxiety may allow individuals to prioritize threat in attention.