published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Empathy for others’ pain is an important human capacity. Despite this, little is known about how children develop or express their empathy for another individual’s pain. Thus, this dissertation aimed to accomplish two primary objectives: 1) to describe and compare children’s expressions of empathy toward others’ pain and others’ sadness, and 2) to examine whether developmental (i.e., age and sex) or interindividual variables of interest (i.e., temperament, social-emotional variables, language abilities) predict children’s expressions of empathy for pain and empathy for sadness. To this end, 120 children (60 boys, 60 girls) between the ages of 18 and 36 months (M = 26.44 months; SD = 5.17 months) were assessed for their empathy-related behavioural responses to lab-based simulations of pain and sadness. Children’s responses were coded for: prosocial behaviours (e.g., sharing), attempts to understand the distress (e.g., hypothesis testing), self-distress behaviours (e.g., self-soothing), unresponsive/inappropriate responses (e.g., ignoring, showing anger), and miscellaneous responses (e.g., imitation). Children were also given an overall rating of global concern. Differences emerged when individual behavioural codes were compared between pain and sadness simulations. Specifically, children were more likely to be distressed by, but also more likely to be prosocially responsive to, another’s sadness. Interestingly, children were more likely to actively play during another’s pain. Two principal component analyses were conducted: one for the pain simulations and one for the sadness simulations. Three components emerged both for pain (Empathic Concern for Others’ Pain, Personal Distress to Others’ Pain, and Unresponsiveness to Others’ Pain) and for sadness (Empathic Concern for Others’ Sadness, Personal Distress to Others’ Sadness, and Social Referencing in Response to Others’ Sadness). While there was some overlap in the conceptualization of the first two components for both pain and sadness, the behaviours that loaded onto these components were different. Additionally, the third component for each analysis described very different phenomena. For pain, this final component described general unresponsiveness to the other’s distress. For sadness, the final component described a tendency to gauge one’s response on the reaction of a parent. Hierarchical regression analyses examining the influence of developmental (i.e., age and sex) and interindividual variables of interest (i.e., temperament, social-emotional variables, and language abilities) in children’s empathy-related responses were also conducted for each pain and sadness component. In general, age or sex differences only emerged for empathy-related responses to pain. Temperament, and to a certain extent social-emotional variables, showed some predictive value in how children would respond to another’s pain or sadness. Language showed very little predictive value in children’s expressions of empathy. While the findings of the current study indicate some conceptual similarities across children’s empathic responses to pain and sadness, they also show interesting and important differences in the behavioural expression of children’s empathic responses to pain and sadness. Additionally, developmental and interindividual variables predictive of children’s empathic responses to pain and sadness emerged. A developmentally appropriate model of empathy is proposed highlighting all of these influences on children’s expressions of empathy. / An examination of toddlers' expressions of empathy for pain versus sadness.

Depression is a condition characterized by sadness and other symptoms, which are implicated in a persistent style of thinking referred to as depressive rumination. The analytical rumination hypothesis argues that depression is an adaptive response to complicated, personal problems, and that rumination involves an analysis of these problems. This analytical rumination has two stages: first, depressive symptoms promote causal analysis (i.e., considering why the problems happened). Causal analysis then leads to problem-solving analysis (i.e., finding ways to deal with problems), which in turn reduces depression. The empirical studies in this dissertation collectively test whether the nature of depressive thinking is consistent with the analytical rumination hypothesis. In Chapter 2, I investigated the temporal order of sadness and the stages of analytical rumination by asking participants to write about their personal problems. This writing paradigm promoted sadness and causal analysis, but not problem-solving analysis, suggesting that depressive symptoms coincide with causal thinking. In Chapter 3, I explored whether emotions during writing were related to analytical thinking by modifying the paradigm to isolate the impact of other factors (i.e., personal experience with the problem and its valence). These factors could not fully account for emotional changes during writing, suggesting that analytical thinking played a role. Analytical rumination is one of several theories of depressive thinking, so in Chapter 4, I conducted a joint factor analysis of four rumination questionnaires and compared the prevalence of the emerging factors. Factors reflecting causal thoughts and problem-solving were most frequently endorsed, even when they were measured in the presence of sadness induced by the writing paradigm in Chapter 5. Furthermore, associations between these factors and depressive symptoms were consistent with the stages of analytical rumination. Overall, my findings suggest that depressive thinking focuses on understanding and solving problems, and it may have functional implications for depression. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Depression is a mental health condition in part characterized by sadness and changes in thinking. One evolutionary perspective argues that depression is a response to complicated, personal problems, and that symptoms of depression, like sadness, help individuals think through their problems. According to this perspective, depressive thinking is analytical, and it involves causal thinking to identify why the problems happened and problem-solving to find potential solutions. In my dissertation, I examine whether individuals engage in causal thinking and problem-solving when they are sad or depressed. My experiments assess whether writing about personal problems promotes sadness and causal thinking, and they examine the impact of analytical thinking on changes in sadness during writing. Because the evolutionary perspective is one of several theories on depressive thinking, I also use a psychometric method to integrate these theories and to examine how causal thinking and problem-solving are linked with sadness and other depressive symptoms.

This paper presents my Masters project Sadness and Repetition. The project is centered around artistic expression and repetitive processes serving a journal-keeping. This process is inspired partly by ancient traditions of prayer beads and partly by modern cultural practices of documenting everyday life through diaries. Drawing from previous work on other people’s feelings of sorrow, this project focuses on my own personal experience of everyday sadness. The journal-keeping consists of handmade steel links, connected into chains, on the one hand, and the deconstruction of a rag rug on the other. The work is framed in a wider context of personal trauma, societal mental health issues as well as female perspective.

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.

The current study investigated whether positive emotion eliciting activities facilitate the physiological, as well as subjective emotional, recovery from feelings of sadness and grief. Results indicated that participants who read a funny or neutral article after writing about the death of someone close had greater decreases in sadness and increases in positive emotion than participants who read an article about coping with grief. The funny and neutral articles were also associated with greater decreases in corrugator supercilii muscle activity. Positive emotion eliciting activities had no effect on zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi muscle activity, heart rate, or respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

The risky behavior of males has been proposed to be a strategy to display the relative quality of men’s genes and increase their competitiveness in gaining access to a mate. Low mood, a constellation of depression symptoms with less severity than to warrant a Major Depressive Disorder diagnosis, has been proposed to be an adaptive strategy to reduce harm and conserve energy in the face of competition. It is hypothesized in this study that males’ strategy of gaining access to a mate through displaying risky behavior will result in higher perceptions of their own value as a mate and the value of their short-term and long-term mates. It is also hypothesized that men who engage in risky behavior to increase their competitiveness will display fewer low mood symptoms than those who do not engage in risky behavior. Two hundred forty men between the ages of 18-36 years completed decision problems assessing risk preference and aversion, the Mate Value Inventory, and the Depression-Dejection subscale of the Profile of Mood States-Short Form. The results of a MANOVA analysis suggest that there were no significant differences between risky and non-risky males on their perception of their own mate value, the value of their short-term or long-term mates, and on low mood. The discussion focuses on the possible reasons for the pattern of responses displayed by the participants and methodological concerns. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Thesis (Ph.D.) in Psychology--University of Maine, 2008. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-190).