Obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21^st century, associated with a range of adverse physical, psychological, social and economic consequences. The aetiology of obesity is complex; however, the psychological factors associated with overweight and obesity remain poorly understood. The first paper critically appraises evidence for three of the most developed psychological theories of obesity. Based on these findings, literature from the fields of emotion regulation and attachment are reviewed, and a novel developmental theory of obesity based on an integration of these theoretical constructs is proposed. Recommendations for future research based on a theoretical framework of emotion regulation are made, and implications for clinical practice including a focus on enhancing caregiver sensitivity are highlighted. The second paper explores the applicability of an established cognitive model of Bulimia Nervosa (BN) and binge eating to an overweight and obese sample. Findings support the relevance of cognitive aspects of the model in an overweight and obese sample, and highlight the potential role of early attachment relationships in the formation of cognitions that make an individual vulnerable to overweight and obesity in later life. Theoretical and clinical implications based on the established cognitive model are considered. Limitations include reliance on self-report and the correlational nature of analyses used. Recommendations for future research with larger, more representative samples to address these limitations are made. Overall, this dissertation makes a unique contribution to the psychological understanding of overweight and obesity, which has the potential to enhance treatment outcomes and suggests useful avenues for further research.

This experiment was designed to investigate the effect of emotion on an individual's ability to bind actors and actions in memories for events. Binding is the process of creating associations among features of a stimulus in order to represent that they belong together; however, errors can occur when a feature from one stimulus is incorrectly associated with a feature from another stimulus. Participants viewed a series of video clips, each depicting an actor performing a simple emotional or non-emotional action. One week later, they viewed a series of retrieval video clips consisting of old, (previously seen), conjunction (previously seen action performed by a different actor) and also new video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old clips the most, followed by both conjunction clips, and then new clips. Participants also responded "yes" more often to emotional items and also displayed higher confidence ratings to "yes" responses for emotional items. / by Leslie A. Butler. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Cognitive impairment is a key characteristic of schizophrenia and is a clear predictor of functional outcome. This thesis explores the relationship between cognitive ability relating to social and non-social processing. Schizophrenia patients demonstrate an impaired ability to recognise, label and discriminate emotional expression within the face. The underlying mechanisms behind this social cognitive impairment are not yet fully understood. This thesis explores the notion that a basic perceptual impairment in processing facial information adversely impacts on the perception of more complex information derived from faces, such as emotional expression. Face perception relies on processing the featural characteristics of a face as well as the relationship between these features. Information pertaining to the spatial distances between features is referred to as configural information. / A group of schizophrenia patients and healthy control participants completed a battery of tasks that assessed basic neurocognition, facial emotion processing and configural face processing. A model of face processing was proposed and used to systematically pinpoint specific deficits that may contribute to impaired face processing in schizophrenia. The results indicated that schizophrenia patients show impairments on three broad constructs; basic neurocognition, facial emotion processing, and most pertinently, deficits in configural processing. It was revealed that although neurocognitive and face processing both explained a significant proportion of the variance in facial emotion processing, the effect of neurocognition was indirect and mediated by face processing. / To investigate the diagnostic specificity of these findings, a group of bipolar disorder patients was also tested on the task battery. The results indicated that bipolar disorder patients also show social and non-social cognitive impairments, however, not as severe as that demonstrated by the schizophrenia patients. Furthermore, the effect of neurocognitive performance on facial emotion processing appeared more direct for bipolar disorder patients compared to schizophrenia patients. Although deficits in face processing were observable in bipolar, they were not specific to configural processing. Thus, deficits in emotion processing were more associated to neurocognitive ability in bipolar disorder patients, and more associated to configural face processing in schizophrenia patients. The configural processing deficits in schizophrenia are discussed as a lower-order perception problem. In conclusion, the results of this thesis are discussed in terms of their implication for treatment.

Child abuse and neglect is a significant social issue with long term consequences for affected children and young people, including increased risk of emotional and social difficulties. Models of the impacts of maltreatment outline a developmental process in which maltreating parent-child relationships affect the development of neural networks, which in turn undermine developing cognitive processes, including emotion regulation and social understanding, thereby increasing risk of emotional and social difficulties. This study explores a subset of these cognitive processes in a sample of adolescents in long-term out-of-home care as a result of maltreatment, relative to a sample of non-maltreated peers, including situation selection (conditioned avoidance and risk-taking), attentional deployment (attention biases and attention control) and cognitive change (interpretation bias), as well as aspects of social understanding (mentalising, emotion understanding and prosocial responding). Further, the relative effects of maltreatment factors, and the relationship between emotion regulation and social understanding with adolescent adjustment was also explored. Results demonstrated maltreatment-related effects in conditioned avoidance, risk-taking, attention processes and social understanding, and explored the relative effect of exposure to physical abuse on the development of these processes, differences in such processes did not appear to significantly predict poor or normative adjustment of maltreated adolescents. These results are discussed with respect to models of maltreatment, emotion regulation and social understanding, with implications for the development and implementation of interventions.

Hautveränderungen und Hautkrankheiten können bei betroffenen Personen Gefühle von „Entstellung“ auslösen. Die Beobachtung eines veränderten Betrachtungsverhaltens von Interaktionspartnern oder anderen Personen aus dem persönlichen Umfeld ist in vielen Fällen maßgeblich an der Entstehung solcher Gefühle beteiligt. In dieser Studie wurde mit Hilfe des Restricted Focus Viewer (RFV) Blickverhalten registriert und detailliert untersucht. Durch eine Analyse von Veränderungen des Blickverhaltens wie auch Korrelationen mit den dazugehörigen Bewertungen sollte das automatisch als abwertend empfundene Betrachtungsverhalten kritisch überprüft werden. Als Grundlage hierfür diente in dieser Arbeit allerdings ein Schema-bezogenes Konzept, wonach etwaige Unterschiede beim Erfassen von Veränderungen im Gesicht stärker auf kognitiven als auf emotionalen, wertenden Faktoren beruhen. Um den Einfluss möglicher Störvariablen, wie Geschlecht oder Alter, zu verhindern und damit fundiertere Aussagen machen zu können, wurde das Untersuchungs- und Probandenkollektiv u.a. in diesen Kategorien gezielt eingegrenzt. Die Erwartungen an die Untersuchung wurden insgesamt bestätigt. So zeigte sich zunächst in der Analyse der Ergebnisse sowie den Auswertungen des Fragebogens, dass der RFV für Untersuchungen auf diesem Gebiet ein geeignetes Verfahren darstellt. Darüber hinaus konnten aus den Daten dieser Arbeit einige neue Erkenntnisse im Bereich der Entstellungsforschung hautkranker Personen gewonnen werden. Viele Aspekte vorausgegangener Studien auf diesem Gebiet, wie beispielsweise ein left gaze bias konnten bestätigt werden. Als wichtiges stützendes Argument für einen Schema-Konzept-Ansatz konnten „Kognition“ und „Emotion“ als zwei voneinander unabhängige Dimensionen bei der Betrachtung und Bewertung der Portraitbilder herausgestellt werden, wobei sich die verlängerten Blickzeiten deutlich stärker kognitiven Faktoren zuordnen ließen. Dieser Zusammenhang bestätigte sich darüber hinaus bei Korrelationen von Fixationszeiten (FZ) und Attributen. Hier zeigte sich erwartungsgemäß ein deutlich stärkerer Zusammenhang von FZ und dem Attribut Auffälligkeit (kognitiv) gegenüber der Korrelation von FZ und Attraktivität (emotional). Zusammenfassend liefern die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchung zahlreiche Anhaltspunkte dafür, Veränderungen des Blickverhaltens im Sinne kognitiver Prozesse zu deuten. Zusätzlich können die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse unter anderem bei der (Psycho-) Therapie von Hautkranken wertvoll sein. Die Studie gibt zudem Anreize für zukünftige Forschung und eine noch effektivere Nutzung des RFV.

This thesis focuses on the acquisition of emotional competence (EC) skills in adults and its impact on well being. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to the definition of EC, including a review of EC in order to better understand and operationalize its main dimensions and correlates. We also present a systematic review of EC intervention studies on adult populations in order to assess their outcomes and make recommendations for the development and implementation of future interventions. We then provide a theoretical and practical framework for emotional competence (EC) based interventions. We describe the main components of an EC intervention, underline the important characteristics of the intervention pedagogy and discuss theoretical and practical implications of this framework.In a second part we investigate whether a sustainable improvement in emotional competencies is possible in adults, and what are the conditions and effects of this improvement on well-being (e.g. on mental and physical health and quality of interpersonal relationships). Results of three empirical studies confirm that EC can be significantly increased following an intervention (and compared to a control group) and that this intervention impacts favourably personal and interpersonal well-being as measured by psychological health, quality of relationship and employability.A last part of the thesis explores the mechanisms underlying this improvement of competencies and well-being. We focus on emotional acceptance, self-compassion, self kindness and behavioural flexibility. Because there was no scale measuring self-compassion or self kindness in French, we validate two scales and assess the relationships between these constructs and well-being.We then examined the possible benefits of emotional acceptance and behavioural flexibility in a randomized controlled study, showing how increasing emotional competence can enhance these change processes and how these processes can, in turn, enhance well-being.This research helps to further elucidate the role of active change processes in EC increase related to the promotion of well-being. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Les conséquences à la fois physiques et psychologiques du diagnostic de cancer et de ses traitements ont rendu nécessaire le développement et l’adaptation en oncologie des interventions psychologiques existantes. Parallèlement à cet intérêt est apparue la nécessité d’évaluer l’efficacité des interventions proposées. L’objectif de ce travail de thèse est d’optimiser l’évaluation et la prise en charge de la régulation émotionnelle des patientes durant le début de la période de rémission d’un cancer du sein à travers l’élaboration et la réalisation d’une étude cas-témoins et d’une étude randomisée contrôlée. L’étude cas-témoins a pour objectif d’identifier et de mieux comprendre les facteurs psychologiques qui contribuent à des niveaux cliniques de peur de la récidive du cancer. Les résultats de cette étude nous invitent à être attentifs à l’intolérance à l’incertitude et à l’inquiétude dans l’évaluation et dans la prise en charge de la peur de la récidive du cancer des patientes. L’étude randomisée contrôlée a pour objectif d’évaluer l’efficacité d’une brève intervention psychologique de groupe promouvant la régulation émotionnelle et l’autorégulation et reposant sur des techniques cognitivo-comportementales, d’hypnose et de psychologie positive chez des patientes qui présentent des niveaux cliniques de symptômes psychologiques. Les résultats de cette étude mettent en évidence l’efficacité à court terme et à moyen terme de l’intervention sur la régulation émotionnelle et sur les symptômes psychologiques des patientes. Face à des déclencheurs liés au cancer, les patientes rapportent des émotions négatives d’intensité moindre. Elles présentent également une réduction de leurs niveaux de détresse émotionnelle, de pensées intrusives et d’inquiétude. Les résultats démontrent par ailleurs que l’intervention psychologique de groupe, même brève, permet de promouvoir l’acquisition et l’utilisation de stratégies de régulation émotionnelle plus adaptatives face à des déclencheurs liés au cancer et de se confronter attentionnellement à ces derniers tout en expérimentant moins d’inconfort psychologique. L’utilisation de stratégies de régulation émotionnelle adaptatives, la capacité de se confronter à des déclencheurs liés au cancer et la diminution de l’inconfort psychologique face à ces derniers sont associées à des processus actifs qui se reflètent par une activation physiologique. Les résultats démontrent la faisabilité, l’acceptabilité et l’efficacité d’une telle intervention et nous encouragent à poursuivre le développement d’interventions psychologiques intensives de groupe visant à améliorer la régulation émotionnelle et l’autorégulation des patientes présentant des niveaux cliniques de symptômes psychologiques en début de période de rémission d’un cancer du sein. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

No description available.