The purpose of this study is to uncover the principles that inform a teacher’s dialogic behaviour, and shape her feelings, and to understand the implications of these principles for multiple aspects of pedagogic practice. I investigate the principles that underpin an emotional practice for two teachers, Julia and Lydia, and their Year 10 science lower band learners. Towards this goal, I approach the theory and empirical data in this study in ways that create opportunities for researching teachers’ emotions that other approaches do not: I examine patterns, commonality and relationships across conditions and over time to reveal within-person differences, and differences between persons, for Julia and Lydia’s emotional practice. In addition, I outline discursive models of analysis that open up the space for investigating the role of teachers’ emotions in ways that other conceptual and methodological frameworks do not: I expand models of analysis to different descriptive and classificatory systems to maintain the integrity of the object. I bring together multiple theoretical perspectives to build a multilevel theory that provides comprehensive insight into teachers’ emotions. I also specify the nature of interactions between levels, for the multilevel theory, to enable cross-validation and cumulative evidence building. The research findings for this study coincide with and expand upon the findings for previous studies on teachers’ emotions. Julia’s emotions interact with her science teaching in powerful ways and realize an emotional practice of strong feelings, and ‘grand’ narratives. In contrast, Lydia’s emotions interact with her science teaching in ways that promote solidarity and realize an emotional practice of graded feelings, and multiple narratives. I extend upon the language of description in this study to take into account the teachers’ meaning-making relevant to their appraisal processes and emotions. The potential for research into teachers’ emotions is expanded in this study through the synthesis of different descriptive and classificatory systems, and categories. In addition, the research findings provide insight into the relative costs and benefits of different models of emotion for multiple levels of pedagogic practice.

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Older adults improve in emotional well-being, and this may be a product of changes in motivation to regulate emotions or emotion regulation effectiveness. However, there are cognitive changes in old age that could make regulation harder in some contexts. The current set of studies sought to determine whether there were age-related improvements or deficits in ability to use distraction in two contexts. The first study examined use of distraction in a recovery context and found no age differences in emotional recovery when 1) using spontaneous self-distraction, 2) intentionally self-distracting, and 3) being distracted by another task. There was, however, evidence that the distracting task was the most effective way to recover from the negative induction. There was also some evidence that cognitive changes with age made it more difficult for older adults to limit negative thoughts in certain conditions. The second study contrasted use of distraction, positive reappraisal, and detached reappraisal by looking at success in terms of emotion regulation and impact on a subsequent cognitive task and later memory for the emotional stimuli. No age differences were found in emotion regulation success in this study either, but interesting differences in consequences of the three regulation strategies did emerge.

The aim of this thesis work is to investigate the algorithm of speech emotion recognition using MATLAB. Firstly, five most commonly used features are selected and extracted from speech signal. After this, statistical values such as mean, variance will be derived from the features. These data along with their related emotion target will be fed to MATLAB neural network tool to train and test to make up the classifier. The overall system provides a reliable performance, classifying correctly more than 82% speech samples after properly training.

Stroke is one of the most prevalent chronic illnesses in Canada. Family caregivers can make a significant contribution toward patients’ recovery. Caregivers’ emotions can impact their motivation to engage in empathy-related helping behaviours. The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among functional deficits of post-stroke individuals, family caregivers’ emotions, and caregivers’ ability to empathize with post-stroke individuals. As guided by Davis’s organizational model on empathy, a correlational descriptive methodology was employed. Participants were requested to complete four questionnaires. Study found that caregiver fatigue was the only factor associated with caregiver empathy-related behaviour. Analyses also found that communication deficits had a linkage with caregivers’ negative emotions. Study results will contribute to the current state of the literature on post-stroke care at home by understanding of the impact of caregivers’ psychological experiences on their empathy-related responses toward post-stroke individuals. Recommendations for clinical practice and future research were made based on this study’s results.

Laughter is a socioemotional cue that is characteristically positive and historically served to facilitate social bonding. Like other communicative gestures (e.g., facial expressions, groans, sighs), however, the interpretation of laughter is no longer bound to a particular affective state. Thus, an important question is how basic psychological mechanisms, such as early sensory arousal, emotion evaluation, and meaning representation, contribute to the interpretation of laughter in different contexts. A related question is how brain dynamic processes reflect these different aspects of laughter comprehension. The present study addressed these questions using event-related potentials (ERP) to examine laughter comprehension within a cross-modal priming paradigm. Target stimuli were visually presented words, which were preceded by either laughs or environmental sounds (500 ms versions of the International Affective Digitized Sounds, IADS). The study addressed four questions: (1) Does emotion priming lead to N400 effects? (2) Do positive and negative sounds elicit different neurocognitive responses? (3) Are there laughter-specific ERPs? (4) Can laughter priming of good and bad concepts be reversed under social anxiety? Four experiments were conducted. In all four experiments, participants were asked to make speeded judgments about the valence of the target words. Experiments 1-3 examined behavioral effects of emotion priming using variations on this paradigm. In Experiment 4, participants performed the task while their electroencephalographic (EEG) data were recorded. After six experimental blocks, a mood manipulation was administered to activate negative responses to laughter. The task was then repeated. Accuracy and reaction time showed a small but significant priming effect across studies. Surprisingly, N400 effects of emotion priming were absent. Instead, there was a later (~400–600 ms) effect over orbitofrontal electrodes (orbitofrontal priming effect, OPE). Valence-specific effects were observed in the early posterior negativity (EPN, ~275 ms) and in the late positive potential (LPP, ~600 ms). Laughter-specific effects were observed over orbitofrontal sites beginning approximately 200 ms after target onset. Finally, the OPE was observed for laughs before and after the mood manipulation. The direction of priming did not reverse, contrary to hypothesis. Interestingly, the OPE was observed for IADS only prior to the mood manipulation, providing some evidence for laughter-specific effects in emotion priming. These findings question the N400 as a marker of emotion priming and contribute to the understanding of neurocognitive stages of laughter perception. More generally, they add to the growing literature on the neurophysiology of emotion and emotion representation.

Much like unpalatable foods, filthy restrooms and bloody wounds, sociomoral transgressions are often described as “disgusting”. This linguistic similarity suggests that there is a link between sociomoral disgust and more rudimentary forms of disgust associated with toxicity and disease. Critics have argued, however, that such references are purely metaphorical, or that sociomoral disgust may be limited to transgressions that remind us of more basic disgust stimuli. My aim was to provide more direct evidence that sociomoral transgressions do genuinely evoke disgust, and to explore factors that may influence how much disgust is evoked. I first searched for similarity in the facial expressions evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), physical disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). I found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oral-nasal rejection response and consistent with an origin of sociomoral disgust in oral disgust. I next investigated whether individual differences in the tendency to experience physical disgust are related to variability in sociomoral judgement and emotion. In two different populations, heightened sensitivity toward physical disgust was related to more severe sociomoral judgements. A complementary neuroimaging study showed overlap between the neural correlates of physical disgust and sociomoral judgement, as well as highlighting brain regions that may underlie sociomoral hypersensitivity. Finally, I tested the idea that perceived differences in the causal stability of sociomoral transgressions may specifically affect levels of disgust. Although it was not possible to dissociate disgust from anger, the transgressions that were presented did evoke reliable self-reports of disgust. Taken together, these findings converge to support the conclusion that sociomoral transgressions can in fact elicit disgust, and accordingly that references to the disgusting nature of wrongdoing reflect biological reality rather than metaphor.

Much like unpalatable foods, filthy restrooms and bloody wounds, sociomoral transgressions are often described as “disgusting”. This linguistic similarity suggests that there is a link between sociomoral disgust and more rudimentary forms of disgust associated with toxicity and disease. Critics have argued, however, that such references are purely metaphorical, or that sociomoral disgust may be limited to transgressions that remind us of more basic disgust stimuli. My aim was to provide more direct evidence that sociomoral transgressions do genuinely evoke disgust, and to explore factors that may influence how much disgust is evoked. I first searched for similarity in the facial expressions evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), physical disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). I found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oral-nasal rejection response and consistent with an origin of sociomoral disgust in oral disgust. I next investigated whether individual differences in the tendency to experience physical disgust are related to variability in sociomoral judgement and emotion. In two different populations, heightened sensitivity toward physical disgust was related to more severe sociomoral judgements. A complementary neuroimaging study showed overlap between the neural correlates of physical disgust and sociomoral judgement, as well as highlighting brain regions that may underlie sociomoral hypersensitivity. Finally, I tested the idea that perceived differences in the causal stability of sociomoral transgressions may specifically affect levels of disgust. Although it was not possible to dissociate disgust from anger, the transgressions that were presented did evoke reliable self-reports of disgust. Taken together, these findings converge to support the conclusion that sociomoral transgressions can in fact elicit disgust, and accordingly that references to the disgusting nature of wrongdoing reflect biological reality rather than metaphor.

High elaborative parent-child reminiscing plays a significant role in preschoolers??? development of autobiographical memory, and, given the emotional salience of many past events, may also contribute to the development of emotion knowledge and other socio-cognitive skills. Additionally, whilst research has traditionally focused on reminiscing style, emotional content may also be important for child outcomes. In Study 1, a naturalistic paradigm was employed to examine associations of parents??? reminiscing style and emotion references with children???s emotion knowledge. Twenty-five parent-child dyads each discussed four emotionally salient past events. It was found that high elaborative parents more often discussed emotions causes than did other parents; in turn, a high elaborative style and discussion of emotion causes were each uniquely associated with children???s emotion knowledge. In Study 2 an experimental paradigm was used to examine the impact of emotion-oriented reminiscing on 88 children???s memory for a staged, emotion-rich event. Two days after participating in the event, children reminisced with an experimenter in one of four ways. Emotion-cause, emotion-expression, and no-emotion reminiscing were all high elaborative but differed in emotion content. Minimal reminiscing was low elaborative. Children who participated in emotion-cause reminiscing and, to a lesser extent, emotion-expression reminiscing, recalled significantly more emotional and non-emotional information about the event than did children who participated in no-emotion or minimal reminiscing. Study 3 aimed to extend the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by training mothers to reminisce using a high elaborative style and emotion content. 80 dyads initially participated; 44 completed all stages. After training, mothers and children in the reminiscing condition each used a more elaborative style and discussed emotions more than did their counterparts in a powerful ???child directed play??? control condition. These differences were sustained across six months, at which time children in the reminiscing condition also showed better emotion cause knowledge than did children in the control condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that children???s autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge may each develop via shared reminiscing interactions in the preschool years. In each case, the role of high-elaborative, emotion-rich reminiscing is highlighted.

The programme of research described in this dissertation examines the potential prejudicial impact of gruesome evidence on mock juror decision making. The dissertation provides a model of the cognitive and emotional processes by which gruesome evidence can influence mock juror judgments. Five studies will be presented which have examined the influence of gruesome verbal (written) and visual evidence. Four studies utilised mock trial or simulation methodology utilising written trial transcripts and undergraduate students as mock jurors. Results suggest that gruesome evidence can cause emotional reactions in mock jurors and that mock jurors who are exposed to gruesome evidence are more likely to find the defendant culpable (in criminal cases) and liable (in civil cases). The studies evaluated a model which outlines the cognitive and affective processes by which gruesome evidence might influence juror emotion and decision making. Gruesome evidence presented verbally, such as verbal descriptions of the victim??s injuries, may bias juror decisions toward conviction. Increased estimates of the guilt of the defendant may result when gruesome information is present, especially when the inculpatory evidence is weak overall. Photographic evidence, irrespective of whether this evidence is neutral or gruesome, can increase the likelihood of conviction. Admitting gruesome photographic evidence, rather than excluding this evidence, may increase the inculpatory value that jurors ascribe to prosecutorial evidence via the influence of gruesome evidence on the emotional state of jurors. Further, although exposure to any photographs had similar effects on mock juror affect, emotional reactions to gruesome photographic evidence appeared to lead to changes in the assessment of evidence and to an increased likelihood of conviction or liability when compared with neutral and no photographs. The implications of the results for policy, practice and research are discussed.