The present investigation involved the development of a psychobiologic profile of individuals who experience exercise-related mood-enhancement and those who do not. The sample (N=301) consisted of students participating in 10-week exercise classes at North Texas State University. All subjects completed pre-test inventories assessing various psychological (i.e., trait anxiety and depression, attitude toward physical activity, self-estimation of physical ability and attraction to physical activity, expectancies of health benefits from exercise, and self-motivation) and biological (i.e., aerobic capacity and body fat percentage) variables. Trait anxiety and depression were also assessed before and after the 10-week exercise program and state anxiety and depression were assessed on an acute basis on two separate occasions during the program. Multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant function analysis were employed to determine which variables maximally discriminated between individuals who experienced mood-elevations following exercise and those who did not enjoy such rewards. The hypothesis that these two groups of individuals differ significantly from each other was not upheld by the results; thus, an overall psychobiologic profile could not be developed. However, the data did reveal that individuals who held a more positive attitude toward physical activity for the purpose of health and fitness reduced their state anxiety and depression following exercise significantly more than individuals who held more neutral attitudes. The results also confirmed previous research that individuals initially high in trait anxiety and depression showed a significantly greater decrease in these traits than subjects scoring in the low-moderate range at the outset of the exercise class. Recommendations for future research are discussed.

The present investigation examined the relationship between elated and depressed moods and dissociation, association, and positive self-talk strategies on endurance performance. Results showed a significant mood main effect with elated subjects performing longer than depressed subjects. Results also revealed a significant cognitive strategy main effect with positive self-talk and dissociation groups producing longer endurance times than association and control groups. A significant interaction between mood and cognitive strategy found that subjects in the positive self-talk and dissociation groups increased their performance time to a greater extent from the depressed to the elated condition than did subjects in the association and control groups. Results are discussed in terms of previous investigations of mood and cognitive strategies on physical performance.

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Studiens syfte var att undersöka motivationshöjande frågeställningars eventuella koppling till det subjektiva välbefinnandet. Det var 47 deltagare i interventionsgruppen och 37 i jämförelsegruppen. Dessa fyllde i en självskattningsenkät, Mood adjectiv checklist scale, före och efter en 14 dagar lång interventionsperiod. Studiens motivationshöjande frågeställningar utformades med utgångspunkt i dels den positiva psykologin, som lägger fokus på att ta vara på det positiva hos människan, dels utifrån den kognitiva psykologin som menar att människan formas utifrån hennes tankesätt.  Resultatet visade att studiens motivationshöjande frågeställningar kan ha en viss positiv inverkan på sinnesstämning. Slutsatsen blev därför: att föra en inre dialog utifrån särskilt utformade frågeställningar kan öka det subjektiva välbefinnandet. Studiens resultat bidrar till teorin om att positiva psykologiövningar kan förbättra det subjektiva välbefinnandet.

This thesis is a qualitative study of mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, a Nilotic language spoken in western Kenya. It also examines the content of the verb phrase (VP) and the role of tone in the expression of mood in Dholuo. Specifically, the study set out to find out how mood is expressed and how ambiguity is resolved in Dholuo, the modal structure of the language and how it can be explained within Chomsky’s Minimalist Programme (1995), particularly regarding feature checking. The thesis comprises six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction and focuses on background information to set the scene for this study. Specifically, it considers the context and the research methodology, which is mainly qualitative. The researcher’s knowledge of the language is of great importance in this study of mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, and native speakers of Dholuo were consulted to avoid bias. In addition, desk research is carried out. The chapter outlines the objectives, discusses the research problem, motivation, scope and limitations of the study. It explains the language situation in Kenya, the number of languages and their families, dialectal variations, the status of the languages and their use in education and parliament, including the recent provisions made in the 2010 constitution. Chapter One also presents the challenges concerning the language situation. Lastly, a synopsis of each chapter is provided. Chapter Two comprises the literature review. The study is based on mood in Dholuo, but the review first deliberates on how mood is expressed in English, as well as types of ambiguity and interpretations in English language studies. In order to determine how mood is expressed in an African language, the chapter discusses a study on tense, aspect and mood as expressed in Kihavu, a Bantu language spoken in the Kalehe district in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Rusizi/Nyamasheke districts in the Republic of Rwanda. Next, Dholuo descriptive grammars, research and related works are discussed. Presented in Chapter Three is the theoretical framework, the main tenets of the Minimalist Programme (MP) and its aims. The theory is adopted as a tool to handle the data in Dholuo. The chapter also discusses how MP differs from Generative Grammar (GG) and Government and Binding (GB) (Chomsky, 1981), including the problems it aims to resolve that could not be properly addressed by GG and GB. How the theory accounts for the data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo and its challenges is also discussed. The study hopes to contribute to the Minimalist Programme’s further development and refinement, as most linguistic theories including the MP are informed and inspired by Indo-European languages, particularly English. Chapter Four presents Dholuo's basic morphosyntactic structures, phonology, the morphology of nouns, personal pronouns and verbs, since some of the features in these domains have a bearing on mood. The language known to many as Luo is actually called Dholuo; ‘Dho’ serves as a noun class prefix in Bantu languages, as in ‘ki-‘ for Kiswahili and ‘gi-‘ for Gikuyu. It is a prefix referring to language: ‘the language of’ the Luo people. Mood and ambiguity in Dholuo are discussed in Chapter Five. Types of Dholuo modal auxiliaries are described and instances where there is ambiguity between modal auxiliaries and words belonging to other word categories are mentioned. How MP theory accounts for data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, and the problems encountered in the application of this theory, are considered. The label ‘mood’ is adopted for the study as a syntactic/grammatical category. The categories of Dholuo mood and possible word formation processes of inflection and derivation realised on the auxiliary are also discussed. Ambiguity is seen through conversion as a word formation process where there is derivation with no morphological marking, but there is functional shift. The modal auxiliary, which precedes the main verb in a construction, is inserted into its base position in the VP. The inflectional nodes are for feature checking. Chomsky (1993) states that morphology plays an important role in the new theory. The operations in the computational system are driven by morphological and lexical necessity. The amount of movement that takes place in the structure building depends on how rich or weak the morphology of a language is. Chapter Six summarises how mood is expressed in Dholuo, how it is affected by ambiguity in terms of accessing the meaning and the role tone plays in resolving ambiguity so that meaning becomes accessible. The study concludes that this theory is adequate in accounting for the data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, although modifications have to be made to cater for the feature checking of Dholuo mood and ambiguity in terms of the creation of some heads. Such modifications include heads for mood and aspectual tone for the auxiliary that derives from a noun or tonal distinction where an auxiliary is used together with the verb from which it derives. This is in line with the idea that the Minimalist Programme is based on feature checking and structure building; both processes are morphologically or lexically driven. The features build the structure. Morphemes are moved out of the lexicon to build the structure. Suggestions for further research based on the limitations of the study are presented. The study focuses only on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo as spoken in western Kenya, although Dholuo is a cross border language. There is an opportunity for further research into Dholuo as it is spoken in Uganda and Tanzania. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent and often comorbid disorders that cause significant personal and economic burdens (Lépine, 2001). Because a significant number of people with depression do not respond to therapy (Fava, 2003), the development of alternative treatment methods may lessen the burden of such mental disorders. Recent research has focused on brain stimulation methods, many of which require invasive surgery or have limited precision in targeting specific areas. Transcranial ultrasound (TUS) is an alternative, noninvasive brain stimulation method that has greater spatial precision than existing methods (Tufail, 2011). TUS has been found to excite neurons in animal brains (Tufail et. al, 2010) and increase positive mood in humans (Sanguinetti et al, 2013). The present study examined TUS, for the first time, as a potential mood intervention. Twenty-four college students with mild to moderate depressive symptoms were randomly assigned to TUS stimulation or TUS sham (no power administered). Participants completed one TUS session each day for five days. Although depression scores did not change differentially for TUS/Sham, trait worry decreased in the stimulation but not the sham condition. Additionally, those in the stimulation condition rated themselves significantly less tense ten minutes after stimulation compared to those in the sham condition. TUS stimulation did not impact a brain electrical activity index associated with approach motivation, frontal asymmetry. These results have significant implications for the potential utility of TUS as an intervention for anxiety disorders or worry-related psychopathology, warranting future investigation of implicated brain electrical activity and mood changes.

<p>The aim of this study was to examine the relations between sense of coherence (SOC), perceived social support and mood, the study also included gender and civil status in the analysis. In the analysis mood was the dependent variable. The study included 81 respondents, all students from Växjö university, who answered a survey with three parts: SOC 13, Mood Adjective Checklist (MACL), and an own constructed instrument that measured perceived social support. The result showed that those with a high SOC tended to have a greater mood. High scores on perceived social support also were related to a greater mood. No significant interaction effects was found between SOC and perceived social support. In the whole sample SOC was the strongest predictor for MACL. Women reported higher social support from friends than men, but this variable had no effect on women’s MACL. Among men the perceived social support from friends was the strongest predictor for MACL.</p>

Empirical evidence suggests that complex cognitive processes such as decision-making can be influenced by incidental affect (i.e. emotional states unrelated to the decision), which may have importance implications for furthering our understanding and treatment of mood disorders. Following up on previous behavioral findings suggesting that sad mood leads to biases in social decision-making, the present research first investigated how such biases are implemented in the brain. Nineteen adult participants made decisions that involved accepting or rejecting monetary offers from others in an Ultimatum Game (a well known economic task), while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Prior to each set of decisions, participants watched a short video clip aimed at inducing either sadness or a neutral emotional state. Results indicated that sad participants rejected more "unfair" offers than those in the neutral condition, thereby replicating our previous findings. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that receiving unfair offers while in a sad mood elicited activity in brain areas related to aversive emotional states and somatosensory integration (anterior insula) and to cognitive conflict (anterior cingulate cortex). Sad participants also showed a diminished sensitivity in neural regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum). Importantly, insular activation uniquely mediated the relationship between sadness and decision bias, demonstrating how subtle mood states can be integrated at the neural level to bias decision-making.In a second study, we assessed to what extent such affect infusion in decision-making may translate to clinical depression, a mood disorder involving chronic sad affect. Fifteen depressed and twenty-three nondepressed individuals made decisions to accept or reject monetary offers from other players in the Ultimatum Game. Like transiently sad, but healthy, individuals, depressed participants reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair offers. However, unlike sad healthy individuals, they accepted significantly more of these offers than did controls. A positive relationship was observed in the depressed group, but not in controls, between acceptance rates of unfair offers and resting cardiac vagal tone, a physiological index of emotion regulation capacity. These findings suggest distinct biasing processes in depression, which may be related to higher reliance on regulating negative emotion.

本研究從心情修復觀點出發，探討不同性別消費者在正負面心情狀態下對於零食類型的選擇差異。從各種心情修復與商品享樂性相關文獻可知，消費者會藉由消費各種商品或服務來改善不好的心情，本研究鎖定零食為心情修復的商品，將零食的鹹、甜口味既存喜好與熱量高、低納入判斷零食享樂性高低之依據，並嘗試用心情修復理論（mood-repair）與補償性消費（compensatory consumption）來解釋零食作為心情修復商品的原因。 本研究將消費者對於鹹、甜口味的個人既存喜好納入考慮，發現零食的享樂性確實會受到消費者個人偏好所影響。研究結果發現，熱量高的零食帶給消費者較高的享樂性感受，而個人對於鹹、甜口味的偏好，也會直接影響消費者對零食的享樂性高低感受，因此不能概括論定甜（鹹）一種口味就具有較高的享樂性。此外，本研究也發現男、女消費者在零食的選擇上是有所差異的，表示在消費者需要用零食進行心情修復時，性別差異其實也可能影響其零食選擇。本研究也針對熱量資訊，探討熱量呈現的有無是否有調節消費者選擇的效果，發現心情不好時，消費者的零食選擇會有受到熱量資訊影響的趨勢。 因為消費者可能會在「享樂、放縱自己」與「健康、愛護自己」之間加以取捨，所以如果想要在市場上推出新零食，可考慮消費者日益重視的健康因素，在零食產品面朝向低卡、低脂或低糖、低鹽等方向加以調整，而且，健康的零食老少咸宜，不限於年輕族群，未來將可能會有更大的市場。

This investigation proposes to employ the use of the mood management theory to examine the role of emotions in the entertainment experience, and how the emotions an audience member experiences while watching a movie can influence their overall ratings of it. Researchers will separate the components of the mood management theory into two experiments: one to explore how the difference in the experience of positive and negative affect influences audience ratings and the other to explore how the degree to which an individual experiences positive emotion influences their ratings for a movie. Using two movies of differing quality, researchers will measure the experience of emotion in participants and examine how it influences their ratings of the movie they watched. Researchers should expect to find significantly higher results across the board from participants who watched the movie Argo, which would indicate that higher quality movies adhere to the mood management theory in that they elicit both more instances of positive affect than negative affect and stronger emotional experiences in audience members.