The aim of this thesis is to offer up a structure of what I call Emotional Self-Knowledge—roughly, knowledge of one’s own emotions. I begin with a broad understanding of an emotion event, according to which emotion events include a set of bodily feelings in response to some object. I then argue that knowledge of the object and the feeling of the emotion are required parts of knowing one’s own emotions if we expect emotional self-knowledge to be prudentially useful. I then outlining three levels of emotional self. The first requires knowledge of the feeling on is experiencing; the second requires that knowledge plus knowledge of the emotionally-salient object. The final level is knowledge of one’s emotional dispositions, and as such is the most robust form of emotional self-knowledge. I conclude by examining some cases in which emotional self-knowledge can be usefully applied towards an agents own prudential goals.

Emergency call takers listen to callers expressing mundane errands, but also to callers who describe severe accidents, agony and deaths. The emergency setting is further complicated by having to perform triage under time-pressure, but without possibilities of seeing the patient. The setting rests on an imperative of speedy management—there are few or no possibilities to postpone or reconsider decisions. At the same time, the mode of communication (telephone) may cause overflow or insufficient information, resulting in an uncertain and ambiguous decision setting. A focal point for the organization is therefore the individual capability of conducting triage. However, call takers are also helped by organizational routines, which are manifested in decision support systems, in order to navigate this uncertain and ambiguous setting. Taken together, the emergency setting brings a tension to the fore—how does this emotional setting, with features of vivid and interruptive experiences that possibly detour normative decisions, interact with routines that are supposed to provide for both stability and that recurrent decisions can be made under similar conditions? Drawing on the fields of psychology, decision making, organization theory and communication theory the tension is investigated by a series of four studies. The first study is a field study of the emotional landscape of emergency call taking. Emergency call takers rated callers’ emotional expressions in authentic emergency calls, the level of intensity and expressed need for help. The second study is an experiment, using a speech sample from authentic emergency calls in order to find out whether expressed emotion and intensity contribute to perceived need for help. The third study focuses on management strategies of call takers. More specifically, how do emergency call takers manage double-faced emotional management—i.e., their own and the caller’s emotions—simultaneously? The fourth study focuses on how call takers make decisions, more specifically how call takers use intuitive and emotional capabilities to complement or challenge rational aspects of the decision support systems. The studies reveal that certain emotions occur more often than others and that the level of intensity of expression contributes to perceived help need. Call takers have also developed specific emotional management strategies in order to cope with both callers’ and their own emotions. Finally, call takers were found to use rational and formal routines as well as non-formal, intuitive and emotionally based individual routines in order to derive their decisions. These findings are put into organizational context in terms of implications for emergency call taking. Limitations to the development of situation-specific expertise and obstacles for organizational learning are identified. Also, emergency call taking would benefit from drawing on knowledge found outside of the medical domain. However, the most important finding is that interpretation of emotional expressions in callers’ voices can trigger modifications of the triage routine in use. / <p>Disp. June 12</p>

Parent education programs were introduced nearly 30 years ago with a primary focus on teaching parents strategies to identify and reduce incidences of noncompliance in their children, and have been the single most successful treatment approach for reducing problem behavior. However, few parent education programs address emotion regulation and its role in children's development despite the fact that research has consistently demonstrated that children who are unable to successfully regulate emotions are more likely to develop behavioral problems. Specifically, most programs fail to address the concepts of effortful control and negative affectivity, two important components of child temperament, and their effects on children's behavior. Research has suggested that children who are emotionally regulated develop greater social competence, resulting in better, more positive, relationships. Thus, parents who teach their children to express and regulate their emotions in socially appropriate ways promote the development of prosocial behaviors in their children. In response, the goal of this study was to examine whether adding an emotion component aimed at teaching parents successful strategies for socializing children's emotions would affect overall parenting and children's emotion regulation above and beyond a traditional behavioral model. Twenty-five parents participated in a three-week parent education program. Parents learned strategies for managing their children's misbehavior. Moreover, parents learned about temperament, how these dispositional traits affect children's behavior, and successful strategies for aiding children in emotion management. At each session, parents completed measures designed to assess their children's temperament and behavior. Additionally, parents completed measures regarding their parenting practices and styles as well as feelings of parental efficacy. Repeated measures ANOVAs were run to determine whether changes in children's temperament or parenting emerged over time. Hierarchical multiple regressions were also computed to determine the effects of parents' practices, styles and efficacy on change in children's levels of effortful control and negative affectivity. Results suggest that parents' choice of disciplinary strategies affects children's ability to regulate their emotions, and that participation in the emotion module positively affected overall parenting and children's emotion regulation.

The current investigation examines the relationship between parenting, emotion regulation, and symptoms of psychopathology in maltreating and non-maltreating parent-child dyads. The participants in this study were 114 children (67 maltreated and 57 non-maltreated) from ages 1 to 4. Child affect and effortful control along with parent affect were observed during a parentchild interaction procedure. Symptoms of psychopathology were measured using the Child Behavior Checklist. The maltreated children in this study exhibited more irritability/anger, affect lability, and internalizing symptomatology, along with less positive affect than their non-maltreated peers. These data also suggest that parental affect is related to internalizing symptomatology; but this relationship is stronger for the maltreated group. Contrary to expectations emotion regulation did not fully mediate the relationship between parenting and psychopathology. Clusters of maladaptive affect, "angry" and "labile", emerged in the maltreated group along with a more "resilient" group characterized by positive affect, positive parental affect, and lower levels of psychopathology.

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.

Using the appraisal theory of emotion, I hypothesized a process model that depicts the effects of four negative emotions – boredom, anger, sadness, and anxiety – on two types of deviant behavior, rule-breaking and interpersonal aggression. I predicted that anger and anxiety would increase deviance in comparison to boredom, while sadness would decrease it. In addition, I argued that these effects would be mediated by physiological arousal, sensemaking, and attentional focus. I tested my model across three experiments (total N = 430), each of which used a different emotion induction. Overall, there was general support for the findings that anger and anxiety increase, while sadness decreases, deviant behavior. In addition, I found support for the hypothesized effects of emotion on arousal and sensemaking. However, there was no support for predictions regarding attentional focus or any indirect effects. Thus, the most significant finding was that sadness decreased deviant behavior, which emphasizes the importance of differentiating among different negative emotions when examining deviant behavior. Further implications are discussed.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth A. Kensinger / Though people tend to remember emotional information with extreme vividness, this vividness often comes at the cost of memory for surrounding information. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate this memory trade-off and how it is influenced by focused attention, trait anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In each study, participants were shown composite pictures that included an emotional or neutral item placed on a neutral background. Later, they were shown the same items and backgrounds separately. A memory trade-off occurred when participants were more likely to remember emotional items and forget the associated backgrounds as compared to equivalent memory for neutral items and backgrounds. The results from the first chapter revealed that the amount of overt visual attention on an emotional item did not predict the presence of the memory trade-off. However, when it was task relevant to disengage one's attention from the emotional item, the memory trade-off was dampened. Further, dividing attention had no effect on the memory trade-off. The results of the second chapter demonstrated that the memory trade-off was enhanced for emotional items with high levels of arousal as compared to low arousal items. This enhancement was especially strong for individuals with high trait anxiety, when this information was negative and arousing, and when the scene was remembered with a sense of familiarity. Further, for items and backgrounds that were vividly recollected, individuals with higher levels of anxiety were less likely to be able to modulate the memory trade-off, even when it was task relevant to attend to background information. The third chapter revealed that people with PTSD have a larger memory trade-off for both positive and negative information, despite the lack of overall item memory differences. These studies reveal that attention may not be the only factor that influences the memory trade-off and that the memory trade-off may be influenced by trait anxiety and PTSD. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

This manuscript addresses an important empirical regularity: Why are revolutionary leaders more likely to initiate conflict? With the goal of explaining this regularity, I offer an identity-driven model of decision making that can explain why certain leaders are more likely to take risky gambles. Broadly, this manuscript provides a different model of decision making that emphasizes emotion and identity as key to explain decision making. I offer a plausibility probe of the identity-driven model with four in-depth case studies: The initiation of the Iran-Iraq War, the initiation of the Gulf War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the start of the Korean War. I use the congruence method and process tracing to test the plausibility probe. I find strong support in two cases—the initiation of the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War—and mixed support for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Korean War.

Older adults are worse than young adults at perceiving emotions in others. However, it is unclear why these age-related differences in emotion perception exist. The studies presented in this thesis investigated the cognitive, emotional and motivational factors influencing age differences in emotion perception. Study 1 revealed no age differences in mood congruence effects: sad faces were rated as more sad when participants experienced negative mood. In contrast, Study 2 demonstrated that sad mood impaired recognition accuracy for sad faces. Together, findings suggested that different methods of assessing emotion perception engage the use of discrete processing strategies. These mood influences on emotion perception are similar in young and older adults. Studies 3 and 4 investigated age differences in emotion perception tasks which are more realistic and contextualised than still photographs of facial expressions. Older adults were worse than young at recognising emotions from silent dynamic displays; however, older adults outperformed young in a film task that displayed emotional information in multiple modalities (Study 3). Study 4 suggested that the provision of vocal information was particularly beneficial to older adults. Furthermore, vocabulary mediated the relationship between age and performance on the contextual film task. However, age-related deficits in decoding basic emotions were established in a separate multi-modal video-based task. In addition, age differences in the perception of neutral expressions were also examined. Neutral expressions were interpreted as displaying positive emotions by older adults. Using a dual-task paradigm, Study 5 suggested that working memory processes are involved in decoding emotions. However, age-related declines in working memory were not driving age effects in emotion perception. Neuropsychological, motivational and cognitive explanations for these results are evaluated. Implications of these findings for older adults' social functioning are discussed.

This thesis explores the effects of emotional information about characters in text on processing. In five chapters presenting nine experiments in total, readers were presented with emotional characters that occurred either in small texts or in sentences. In the second chapter, it was investigated whether mental representations of entities in sentences are more salient and easier to retrieve due to emotional information. In the third chapter, the effects of emotional information about multiple different characters on processing were explored. The forth chapter presents experiments on perspective taking and how perspective affects the way emotional information is processed. Building up on that, in chapter 5, it was investigated how the mood of the reader influences perspective taking when reading about emotional information. All experiments in the first four chapters used a self-paced reading method to explore effects on reading speed (reading times). Chapter 6, however, presents an eye-tracking experiment set out to explore the effects of perspective on reading behaviour in more detail and to determine where perspective differences arise in the text. Hence, pronoun regions (including perspective cues) across the text were analysed. The findings presented in this thesis gave evidence that readers focus more on emotional characters (that emotional characters are more salient), and that readers also engage more with (emotional) texts when they experience the situation from a personal perspective. All experiments gave evidence that readers track and use emotional information to form a coherent representation of the text.