Early sensitive caregiver (typically mother)-infant interactions form an important foundation for infant development. When sensitive, mothers behave with the apparent goal to keep their infants happy and engaged. Mutual enjoyment is thought to motivate proximity and continued interactions. The main focus in the literature has been on the influence of stable/pathological maternal negative emotions on parenting, with parenting often assessed on one occasion, in an unnatural setting, or with a researcher present. The primary objective of this research was to explore what accounts for the variability in typical mothers’ sensitivity with their 15- to 28-week-old infants across interactions. Specific goals were to develop a novel methodology to increase the ecological validity and acceptability of assessments by having mothers themselves videotape their infant interactions in their homes, to explore the effect of mothers’ emotion states and fatigue on their ensuing sensitivity, and to evaluate if infant engagement determined whether mothers felt better (i.e., were reinforced) the more sensitively they behaved. A feasibility study was conducted with 9 mother-infant dyads, and a main study with an additional 40 dyads. Mothers completed a brief emotion and fatigue rating scale (Profile of Mood States – 15; Cranford et al., 2006) before and after each interaction, twice daily, over five to seven days. Interviews with feasibility study mothers indicated that most found the procedure acceptable, though not representative of their typical interactions. Little data were missing or uncodeable. Methodological changes are proposed to enhance the representativeness of observed interactions and to further minimize data loss. Contrary to predictions, pre-interaction emotion and fatigue states did not individually or jointly account for the significant within-subject variability in sensitivity across interactions. Mothers felt better after interacting and, the more sensitively they behaved, the more engaged their infants were, and the more positive mothers felt thereafter. However, infant engagement did not account for the relationship between sensitivity and how mothers then felt. Results suggest mothers can behave sensitively irrespective of how they feel; then, upon behaving sensitively, feel better regardless of their infants’ engagement. Interacting effects of maternal stress, cognitions, specific emotion behaviour relations, and methodology remain to be further investigated.

Die Kombination von Eyetracking und fMRI in den Neurowissenschaften ist eine relativ neue Methode, die einerseits eine technische Herauforderung darstellt, andererseits neue Möglichkeiten des Zugangs zu neuronalen Prozessen darbietet. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurden durch Kombination beider Methoden Prozesse der neuronalen und visuellen Verarbeitung von Emotionen untersucht. Zunächst wurde die Rolle von verschiedenen Gehirnregionen innerhalb des emotionalen Netzwerks sowie die Frage nach der Lateralität der emotionalen Verarbeitung untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass die neuronale Antwort in den unterschiedlichen Regionen in erster Linie die Anforderungen an die jeweilige funktionelle Einheit spiegelt. Im Rahmen der Untersuchungen von visueller Verarbeitung wurden die einzelnen spezifischen Blickbewegungsmuster für Emotionen Angst, Ekel und Freude erstmals charakterisiert. Es wurden auch Habituationseffekte auf die beschriebenen Blickbewegungsmuster untersucht. Die gemeinsame Analyse beider Datensätze zeigte, dass zwischen visuellen und neuronalen Prozessen eine enge qualitative Interaktion besteht. Es wurde ein Zusammenhang zwischen der Betrachtungsdauer und der tiefe der Verarbeitung nachgewiesen.

Recent developments in emotion and EI research have introduced new ways of measuring emotional abilities, including performance based tests. The current study aimed to examine the associations of three emotional abilities, using three objective measures. The study consisted of a survey and an experiment, where 89 participants completed performance based multimodal emotion recognition and emotion understanding tests, and a conditioning task using social aversive and appetitive stimuli. The results showed that individuals who are more proficient in emotion understanding were more accurate in emotion recognition and more effective in extinguishing fear-evoking responses. In addition, individuals proficient in emotion recognition were shown to have stronger general responding during fear acquisition. Furthermore, various findings related to emotion understanding and emotion recognition modalities, including item difficulty and specific emotions. Implications of current findings support the notion of separate but related emotional abilities while also highlighting a potentially underlying mechanism or core emotional competence.

abstract: The first half-year of infancy represents a salient time in which emotion expression assumes a more psychological character as opposed to a predominantly physiological one. Although previous research has demonstrated the relations between early parenting and later emotional competencies, there has been less of a focus on differentiating positive and negative emotion expression across the early infancy period. Thus, the current study investigates the growth of positive and negative emotion expression across early infancy in a low-income, Mexican-American sample, and examines the development of emotion expression as a function of early maternal emotion socialization and prenatal stress. Participants included 322 mothers and their infants. Data were collected in participants' homes prenatally and when the infants were 12-, 18-, and 24-weeks old. Mothers were asked to interact with their infants in a semi-structured teaching task, and video-taped interactions of mother and infant behaviors were then coded. Data for mothers was collected at the prenatal and 12-week visits and data for infants was collected at the 12-, 18-, and 24-week visits. Prenatal stress was measured via two questionnaires (Daily Hassles Questionnaire and Perceived Stress Scale). Maternal socialization at 12 weeks was represented as a composite of four observational codes from the Coding Interactive Behavior coding system. Infant emotion expression was also globally rated across the 5-minute teaching task. Findings suggest that the normative development of emotion expression across early infancy is complex. Positive emotion expression may increase across the early infancy period whereas negative emotion expression decreases. Further, at 12 weeks, greater maternal emotion socialization relates to more infant positivity and less negativity, in line with current conceptualization of parenting. However, across time, greater early socialization predicted decreased positivity and was unrelated to negative emotion expression. Findings also suggest that prenatal stress does not relate to socialization efforts or to infant emotion expression. A better understanding of the nuanced development of positive and negative emotion development as a function of early parenting may have implications for early intervention and prevention in this high-risk population. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2015

Emotions are among the most pervasive aspects of human experience. They have long been of interest to social and behavioural sciences. Recently, emotions have attracted the attention of researchers in computer science and particularly in computational linguistics. Computational approaches to emotion analysis have also focused on various emotion modalities, but there is less effort in the direction of automatic recognition of the emotion expressed. Although some past work has addressed detecting emotions, detecting why an emotion arises is ignored. In this work, we explore the task of classifying texts automatically by the emotions expressed, as well as detecting the reason why a particular emotion is felt. We believe there is still a large gap between the theoretical research on emotions in psychology and emotion studies in computational linguistics. In our research, we try to fill this gap by considering both theoretical and computational aspects of emotions. Starting with a general explanation of emotion and emotion causes from the psychological and cognitive perspective, we clarify the definition that we base our work on. We explain what is feasible in the scope of text and what is practically doable based on the current NLP techniques and tools. This work is organized in two parts: first part on Emotion Expression and the second part on Emotion Stimulus. In emotion expression detection, we start with shallow methodologies, such as corpus-based and lexical-based, followed by deeper methods considering syntactic and semantic relations in text. First, we demonstrate the usefulness of external knowledge resources, such as polarity and emotion lexicons, in automatic emotion detection. Next, we provide a description of the more advanced features chosen for characterizing emotional content based on the syntactic structure of sentences, as well as the machine learning techniques adopted for emotion classification. The main novelty of our learning methodology is that it breaks down a problem into hierarchical steps. It starts from a simpler problem to solve, and uses what is learnt to extend the solution to solve harder problems. Here, we are learning emotion of sentences with one emotion word and we are extending the solution to sentences with more than one emotion word. Next, we frame the detection of causes of emotions as finding a stimulus frame element as defined for the emotion frame in FrameNet – a lexical database of English based on the theory of meaning called Frame Semantics, which was built by manually annotating examples of how words are used in actual texts. According to FrameNet, an emotion stimulus is the person, event, or state of affairs that evokes the emotional response in the Experiencer. We believe it is the closest definition to emotion cause in order to answer why the experiencer feels that emotion. We create the first ever dataset annotated with both emotion stimulus and emotion class; it can be used for evaluation or training purposes. We applied sequential learning methods to the dataset. We explored syntactic and semantic features in addition to corpus-based features. We built a model which outperforms all our carefully-built baselines. To show the robustness of our model and to study the problem more thoroughly, we apply those models to another dataset (that we used for the first part as well) to go deeper than detecting the emotion expressed and also detect the stimulus span which explains why the emotion was felt. Although we first address emotion expression and emotion stimulus independently, we believe that an emotion stimulus and the emotion itself are not mutually independent. In the last part, we address the relation of emotion expression and emotion stimulus by building four cases: both emotion expression and emotion stimulus occur at the same time, none of them appear in the text, there is only emotion expression, or only the emotion stimulus exists while there is no explicit mention of the emotion expressed. We found the last case the most challenging, so we study it in more detail. Finally, we showcase how a clinical psychology application can benefit from our research. We also conclude our work and explain the future directions of this research. Note: see http://www.eecs.uottawa.ca/~diana/resources/emotion_stimulus_data/ for all the data built for this thesis and discussed in it.

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This thesis deals with the emotion regulation. The author presents a theoretical concept of emotion regulation and deals with the theoretical development of emotion regulation across the human lifespan. In the empirical part, the author presents three papers. The first deals with the emotion regulation in relation to the health of the individual. The study shows that unhealthy individuals suppress significantly more emotions and affective phenomena compared to healthy individuals. The second study deals with the display rules of basic emotions in a sample of Czech undergraduate students. The last paper is a cross-cultural survey comparing the frequency of emotions experienced by its participants and the emotion regulation strategies in the group of Czech and Slovak undergraduate students. Emotion regulation in this study appears to be a significant factor of cultural differences: Slovak participants access open and authentic expression of emotions significantly more often than the Czech participants. The presented thesis is a contribution to the existing understanding of emotion regulation with regard to the development, health and culture of the individual. Keywords Emotion Emotion regulation Development of emotion regulation Health Culture

Social networking has become an integral part of daily communication and information sharing. Although researchers continue to explore the fields of social networking and emotion regulation separately, there is a lack of research bridging these areas of interest, particularly in the adolescent population. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive relationship between the environmental and social variables of Facebook use, online social connectedness, and quality of parent-child relationship with adolescent emotion regulation. Fogel's social process theory of emotion provided the framework for this study and allowed for examination of the social networking environment. Research questions addressed independent variables of Facebook use, online social connectedness, and quality of parent-child relationship as well as interactions. Hypotheses were directed at different facets of emotion regulation including emotional control, emotional self-awareness, and situational responsiveness. A sample of 80 adolescents 13- to 18-years old was gathered through snowball sampling of Facebook groups and pages targeting parents of adolescents. Individual multiple regressions were used to examine prediction and interaction among variables. Results showed greater Facebook use predicted decreased emotional self-awareness and greater quality of parent-child relationship predicted improved emotional control in adolescents. The findings of this study promote positive social change by implicating the role of social networking use in predicting maladaptive adolescent emotional development and well-being. Future research will benefit from a larger sample size and include various social networking platforms along with gender and age-specific data.

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