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For offenders returning to society at record levels, securing work looms as one of the most crucial factors in successful reentry. Work hope is a construct that seeks to measure the relative presence of goals of securing desired work, thoughts about how to achieve those goals, and agency to achieve those goals, even in the presence of obstacles. This study sought to examine relationships among work hope, the socioemotional variables of attachment, emotion regulation, physical, relational, and workplace victimization, and coping, and the career-related variables of perceptions of career-related barriers and complexity level of career goals. The sample comprised cohorts from eight different correctional centers (N = 111, 72.1% male, M = 37.97, SD = 10.02), who participated in three waves of a longitudinal study. Four path models were run to model the relationship among work hope and the socioemotional variables, but none of the models satisfied all designated fit indices. The model with the combination of the most adequate fit and theoretical support found significant direct effects from Time 1 anxious attachment, but not avoidant attachment, to Time 1 difficulties with emotion regulation. Significant direct effects were found from Time 1 avoidant attachment and difficulties with emotion regulation, but not anxious attachment, to Time 3 avoidant coping. Significant direct effects were also found from Time 3 avoidant coping to Time 3 work hope. Relational, physical, and workplace victimization were not significantly related to work hope or other socioemotional variables. This study also found that work hope was significantly related to perceptions of career-related barriers (r = -.30). Overall, study findings add to the construct validity of work hope and highlight the importance of addressing socioemotional variables such as attachment, emotion regulation, and coping in preparing offenders for successful reentry and obtaining work.

Early social interactions are important to developing and maintaining positive social relationships in childhood. It is well understood that the social development is dependent on a number of developmental changes in both cognition and emotion. While most research has focused on cognitive and emotional models of social behaviors separately, a consideration for research investigating social behaviors is to examine cognitive processing and emotional processing concurrently. The current work focuses on the relationship between the executive processes involved in cognition and emotion regulation, and the influence on adaptive (social skills) and maladaptive (aggressive behavior) social behaviors. Specifically, the reformulated social behavioral model developed by Lemerise & Arsenio (2000) , as well as integrative model of social-cognitive-affective behavior (Beauchamp & Anderson, 2010) will guide this work and help specify the relationship between specific executive functions (working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), emotion regulation, and children’s social behaviors in middle childhood.

The social and emotional lives of people are highly interdependent. Incipient evidence suggests that attention may also play an essential role in determining one’s social and emotional well-being. Mindfulness, as a manner of attending, entails greater moment-to-moment awareness to internal and external events, and is thought to have both intra- and inter-personal benefits. Here a study of mindfulness training (MT) examined whether training mindful attention would improve emotion regulation in social contexts as indexed by neural, behavioral, and experience sampling measures. More specifically, 60 participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to either four brief (20 min.) MT sessions or a structurally-equivalent control procedure. Romantic partners of these participants also completed questionnaires and experience sampling measures. Findings across the variety of measures supported hypotheses that MT would benefit social emotion regulation. Relative to control participants, those in MT demonstrated greater early attention to facial expressions on an Emotional Go/No-Go task, as indexed by the N200, a neural marker of conflict monitoring. Response time and accuracy during this task revealed more sustained efficient discrimination of facial expressions for MT participants. During day-to-day social interactions, MT participants reported more positive and less negative emotion as well as less negative emotion lability from one interaction to the next. A mediation analysis found improved accuracy on the Emotional Go/No-Go task mediated the relation between MT and more positive emotion during daily social interactions. Given that social emotion regulation places unique demands on attention for which mindfulness appears well-suited, research on both topics can build from these findings to better understand both intra- and inter-personal benefits of MT.

The aim of the theoretical part of the thesis is emotional intelligence and the overview of changes in understanding this construct since its establishment. Furthermore, the thesis provides a summary of two significant models of emotional intelligence as well as a survey of existing means of its measurement and enumeration of studies focused on the connection between emotional intelligence and particular aspects of life. Finally, the theoretical part of the thesis explores the possibilities of developing emotional intelligence. The practical part uses quantitative research to analyse individual differences in emotional intelligence by comparing the levels of emotional intelligence between homosexual and heterosexual population. The findings revealed a significant difference between trait emotional intelligence of homosexual and heterosexual men. Moreover, the results also verify the difference in overall emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategy of emotion suppression between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The findings also support the claim that women have higher emotional intelligence than men and that the individuals who regard themselves as physically healthy have higher emotional intelligence than those who consider themselves as seriously ill. Keywords: Emotional intelligence,...

Toddler-aged children are expected to shift from being solely dependent on parents to regulate their emotion (e.g., Fox & Calkins, 2003) to being able to independently regulate their emotions (Calkins & Johnson, 1998). Mothers' responses to children's negative emotions are expected to influence this development. Children's temperamental negative reactivity was found to moderate the effect of mothers' socialization attempts on children's regulatory behaviors, as suggested by previous theoretical and empirical work (e.g., Putnam, Sanson, & Rothbart, 2002; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Specifically, highly negatively reactive children showed no correspondence between their mothers' attention-shifting strategies and their own attentionshifting regulation behaviors. This finding is consistent with the proposed process by which temperamentally reactive children become overaroused and unreceptive to mothers' socialization efforts (Hoffman, 1983; Scaramella & Leve, 2004). Lastly, children's reactivity did not moderate the effects of mothers' emotion-intensifying socialization on children's emotion-intensifying regulation behaviors, a finding which deserves further study.

In this study of preschool children and parents (N=64), we examined relations between two facets of parents' emotion socialization: direct and indirect socialization; three facets of children's emotional competence: emotion expression, regulation, and understanding; and their relations with children's social and emotional adjustment. Few associations were observed between indicators of parents' emotion socialization and among indicators of children's emotional competence, suggesting that these constructs are better understood as multi-faceted, rather than unitary processes. Additionally, aspects of children's emotional competence linked--both directly and indirectly--parents' emotion socialization behaviors and children's social and emotional adjustment. Results are discussed with regard to the role of parents' emotion socialization and children's emotional competence, especially emotion regulation, in children's adjustment during preschool.

The perception of and actual ability to control emotional responses during stressful, taxing situations are important to an individual’s well-being. Studies have shown that both low perceived control and a low actual ability for emotional control are related to internalizing and externalizing problems in youth. However, significant gaps in research exist in terms of testing theoretical predictions about how perceived and actual emotional control are associated with anxiety and aggressive behavior problems, particularly among adolescents. The first goal of this study was to examine two objective measures of actual control (i.e., vagal tone and vagal regulation) and their link with anxiety and aggressive behavior problems in youth ages 11-17 years. The second goal was to examine individual differences in youths’ ability to voluntarily control their heart rate and its association with youths’ perceived control and/or anxiety and aggressive behavior. The final goal was to expand upon Scott and Weems’ (2010) recent work by testing an adapted model of control using these two measures of actual emotional control. Eighty youth (aged 11-17 years; 51% female; 37.5% African American) and their primary caregivers participated in this study. Youth completed a physiological assessment in which they watched a relaxing video, rested quietly, increased and decreased their heart rate, and performed a mildly challenging cognitive task while their heart rate, skin conductance and body temperature were measured. Youth and their caregivers also completed questionnaires measuring youths’ anxiety, aggression, and perceived control. The results indicated that resting vagal tone (i.e., high frequency – heart rate variability) was negatively associated with anxiety symptoms (and perceived anxiety control) in this adolescent sample but not aggression. Conversely, anxiety (child-reported) and aggression (parent-reported) were both associated with a maladaptive vagal augmentation in response to a challenging cognitive task. The findings also suggested there were individual differences in youths’ heart rate control (but were better at increasing it) and that less change in increasing heart rate was related to more child-reported anxiety symptoms. However, the results did not provide support for differential of prediction of anxiety symptoms versus aggressive behavior problems between control profiles.

La thèse a pour objectifs d’étudier les liens entre les mécanismes de régulation émotionnelle (RE) et les psychotraumatismes de type I et II. Elle s’intéresse également aux indicateurs physiologiques caractérisant ces processus de RE et leurs éventuelles modifications dans les cas de Stress Post-Traumatique (SPT) ou d’exposition à des événements aversifs (trauma complexe). Pour cela nous avons mené trois études. La première étude s’intéresse à mettre en évidence des prédicteurs du développement d’un SPT complet ou subsyndromique, suite à un accident de la voie publique. Les résultats font apparaître que plus d’un quart des participants présente un subsyndrome traumatique ; pour 7,7% de patients avec un SPT complet. Parmi de nombreuses variables, le meilleur prédicteur est la perception d’une menace vitale. Des liens forts sont également observés entre d’une part, la détresse péritraumatique et les symptômes de reviviscence et d’hyperactivité neurovégétative, et d’autre part entre la dissociation traumatique et l’évitement. La seconde étude s’intéresse à évaluer la variabilité du rythme cardiaque (VRC) comme biomarqueur des difficultés de régulation émotionnelle (DRE) en population non-clinique. Les résultats montrent que le groupe qui a peu de DRE présente une diminution de la VRC durant une phase d’induction émotionnelle puis une augmentation jusqu’à un niveau statistiquement équivalent à sa ligne de base en phase de récupération post-induction. Cette réponse sympathoexcitatrice adaptative est modifiée dans le groupe avec beaucoup de DRE : la VRC n’augmente pas en récupération. Ces données suggèrent que la VRC est un biomarqueur pertinent des DRE. Enfin, la dernière étude cherche à évaluer l’impact d’un trauma complexe (TC) sur plusieurs processus émotionnels. Les DRE et la dissociation somatoforme discriminent le mieux les groupes d’adolescentes présentant un TC des adolescentes contrôles. De plus, les mesures physiologiques montrent que le niveau de VRC au repos est plus faible dans le groupe TC et que le pattern typique de réaction sympathoexcitatrice est absent, à la différence du groupe contrôle. Les analyses de régressions précisent que le manque de conscience émotionnelle prédit le niveau de VRC au repos alors que c’est le niveau de dépression qui prédit le mieux la diminution phasique de VRC. Ajoutée à un taux d’erreur plus important pour évaluer subjectivement les stimuli émotionnels dans le groupe TC, les événements aversifs répétés semblent perturber à la fois des processus liés à l’évaluation des signaux émotionnels et leur intensité, mais aussi les processus psychologiques et physiologiques liés à la régulation des émotions. Ces résultats qui confirment le rôle important des DRE dans les psychotraumatismes seront discutés par rapport à la littérature actuelle pour proposer des pistes thérapeutiques spécifiques. / This thesis aims to explore the links between emotion regulation (ER) mecanisms and type 1 and 2 psychotrauma. We also investigate physiological marker of those ER processes and the potential disturbances caused by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and adverse life events (complex trauma). Three studies were carried out. The first study assesses some predictors of the development of a complete or subsyndromic PTSD following a motor vehicule accident. Results reveal that more than one quarter of the sample exhibits subsyndromic PTSD and 7.7% was diagnosed with complete PTSD. Among several variables, the strongest predictor is the perceived life threat. Also, strong correlations are observed between 1) peritraumatic distress and persistent re-experiencing or hyperarousal and 2) dissociation score and avoidance strategy. The second study evaluates Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a potential biomarker of emotion regulation difficulties (ERD) in a non-clinical population. Results for the low ERD group show that HRV decreases from baseline to elicitation and then increases from elicitation to recovery (no difference between recovery and baseline levels). This adapatative sympato-excitatory pattern is altered in the high ERD group in which HRV do not increase from elicitation to recovery. Those data suggests that HRV could be an unbiased biomarker of ERD. The last study examines the effects of complex trauma (CT) on several emotional processes. ERD and somatoform dissociation best discrimate between CT and control teenagers. Moreover, physiological measures show that HRV level at rest is lower in CT than control and typical sympato-excitatory response is not observed in CT contrary to control group. Regressions analyses further reveal that the lack of emotional awareness predicts HRV level at baseline whereas the level of depression best predicts phasic HRV decrease. Added to greater errors in the subjective assessment of emotional stimuli in the CT group, adverse life events seem to disrupt processes involved in the labelling of emotions and intensity as well as psychological and physiological processes linked to ER. These results which confirm the importance of ERD in psychotrauma are discussed in regard to contemporary literature in order to suggest some specific therapeutic approaches.

Apesar das evidências a favor da automaticidade no processamento de estímulos aversivos, especialmente na amígdala, a sua resposta parece ser dependente da disponibilidade de re- cursos atentivos. Dessa forma, a atenção pode atuar como um mecanismo de regulação emocional, importante para a compreensão de uma série de distúrbios psiquiátricos em que este mecanismo está prejudicado. Nesse estudo, investigamos o processo do regulação e- mocional pela atenção sob uma condição de grande demanda atentiva e com estímulos altamente aversivos. Imagens funcionais por ressonância magnética foram adquiridas de 22 voluntários saudáveis enquanto figuras emocionais (IAPS - International Afective Picture System), neutras e aversivas (corpos mutilados) eram apresentadas enquanto eles realiza- vam três tarefas diferentes, em que a atenção era manipulada. As imagens foram apresenta- das no centro do campo visual, enquanto apareciam duas barras, uma de cada lado da figu- ra. As três tarefas atentivas correspondiam a reconhecer: (1) a valência emocional da figura, (2) a semelhança na orientação das duas barras com diferenças de 0º ou 90º (tarefa fácil) e (3) a semelhança das mesmas com diferença de 0º ou apenas 6º (tarefa muito difícil). Nas análises de regiões de interesse (ROIs) observamos um padrão de regulação emocional, com dimuição da amplitude do sinal BOLD estimado, nas regiões da amígdala, ínsula ante- rior, cíngulo posterior e córtex pré-frontal medial, ventrolateral e orbitofrontal na tarefa fácil. Já na tarefa difícil, esse comportamento se manteve, com excessão do sinal da ínsula e do orbitofrontal, que voltou a subir, talvez, por um efeito de estresse. Verificamos uma maior amplitude do sinal BOLD na região dos córtices pré-frontal dorsolateral, parietal superior e área motora suplementar quando a atenção foi alocada para as tarefas de barras, supostamente, por um efeito da demanda maior de atenção. Nestes resultados, todo um conjunto de estruturas envolvidas no processamento emocional foi regulado pela manipu- lação da atenção nas tarefas. Também observamos uma correlação entre o traço de afeto positivo dos sujeitos e a estimativa do sinal BOLD da amígdala sob a regulação emocional. Estas evidências indicam que, mesmo para estímulos extremamente negativos, a disponibi- lidade de recursos de atenção e, talvez, mecanismos inibitório de controle cognitivos sobre a amígdala sejam fatores condicionantes da resposta emocional. / Because of the biological significance of motional stimuli, their processing is considered largely automatic. However, there are also evidences that processing of emotional stimuli requires some level of attention. Higher attention demands in a task may limit emotional processing which can be interpreted as an emotion regulation strategy. Our experiments utilized highly demanding attention task while also highly aversive and arousing visual stimuli comprising mutilated bodies is presented. The experiment employed a single task, which consisted of determining whether two peripheral bars were like oriented or not, such to evaluate further brain mechanisms involved in emotion regulation by functional mag- netic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our results revealed that task-irrelevant unpleasant images slowed reaction time during the performance of the main easy task, but not at highly de- manding one which is suggesting of emotion suppression. Such modulatory effect was also revealed by ROI analysis showing that many brain regions, including regions of amygdala, anterior insula, posterior cingulate, and medial, ventrolateral and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex have their processing of emotional visual stimuli reduced by attentional manipula- tions while there were BOLD signal increases in dorsolateral prefrontal and superior parie- tal cortex respective to attention demand. These results suggest that attentional manipula- tions that more fully consume attentional resources in order to demonstrate that the proc- essing of emotional stimuli is limited.