Depression in adolescents is a ubiquitous mental health problem presenting ambiguities, uncertainties, and diverse challenges in its conceptualization, presentation, detection, and treatment. Despite the plethora of research on adolescent depression, there exists a paucity of research in regards to obtaining information from the adolescents themselves. In a mixed method, cross-sectional study, adolescents (N= 332) in grades 8 and 11 provided their conceptions of depression. Adolescents' self-recognition of depression was examined in association with depressive symptomatology and reported pathways to talking to someone. Adolescents' social and emotional competence was also examined in association with severity of their depressive symptomatology. Developed categories and subcategories of adolescent depression were guided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) criteria for Major Depressive Episode (MDE) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). Adolescents' definitions of depression were dominated by subjective, holistic interpretations and add new information and depth to the previous research on adolescent depression. Depressed Mood and Social Impairment were the core categories, both contained intricate subcategories. The frequencies of these constructs provide a map of the themes and subthemes that pervade adolescents' personal philosophies regarding adolescent depression. About half of the adolescents who self-recognized depression within two weeks (45%),qualify into screened depression (Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale -2" version [RADS-2];Reynolds, 2002) criteria based on the DSM-IV-TR for MDE (APA, 2000). However, this study's findings showed that the mean for screened Depression Total Score (RADS-2; Reynolds, 2002)was significantly higher in those adolescents who self-recognized versus those who did not self-recognize depression. The majority of lifetime self-recognizers of depression thought that they needed to talk to someone and reported that they talked to someone when feeling depressed. Poor Emotion Awareness was a strong contributor to increasing vulnerability to depressive symptomatology. This study provides new theoretical insights regarding the concept and detection of adolescent depression, and links between social and emotional competence and depressive symptomatology. These findings extend previous research (APA, 2000), provide new understanding to guide future research, and have direct implications for research, policy, and practice strategies aimed to better communicate with and help young people with and without depression.

Depression in adolescents is a ubiquitous mental health problem presenting ambiguities, uncertainties, and diverse challenges in its conceptualization, presentation, detection, and treatment. Despite the plethora of research on adolescent depression, there exists a paucity of research in regards to obtaining information from the adolescents themselves. In a mixed method, cross-sectional study, adolescents (N= 332) in grades 8 and 11 provided their conceptions of depression. Adolescents' self-recognition of depression was examined in association with depressive symptomatology and reported pathways to talking to someone. Adolescents' social and emotional competence was also examined in association with severity of their depressive symptomatology. Developed categories and subcategories of adolescent depression were guided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) criteria for Major Depressive Episode (MDE) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). Adolescents' definitions of depression were dominated by subjective, holistic interpretations and add new information and depth to the previous research on adolescent depression. Depressed Mood and Social Impairment were the core categories, both contained intricate subcategories. The frequencies of these constructs provide a map of the themes and subthemes that pervade adolescents' personal philosophies regarding adolescent depression. About half of the adolescents who self-recognized depression within two weeks (45%),qualify into screened depression (Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale -2" version [RADS-2];Reynolds, 2002) criteria based on the DSM-IV-TR for MDE (APA, 2000). However, this study's findings showed that the mean for screened Depression Total Score (RADS-2; Reynolds, 2002)was significantly higher in those adolescents who self-recognized versus those who did not self-recognize depression. The majority of lifetime self-recognizers of depression thought that they needed to talk to someone and reported that they talked to someone when feeling depressed. Poor Emotion Awareness was a strong contributor to increasing vulnerability to depressive symptomatology. This study provides new theoretical insights regarding the concept and detection of adolescent depression, and links between social and emotional competence and depressive symptomatology. These findings extend previous research (APA, 2000), provide new understanding to guide future research, and have direct implications for research, policy, and practice strategies aimed to better communicate with and help young people with and without depression.

Schadenfreude is a German word, which describes the pleasure that people take in someone else's misfortune. The aim of the present research was to investigate the social functions of intergroup schadenfreude. Chapter 2 presents Studies 1-3, focusing on the social functions of experiencing intergroup schadenfreude in the context of football tournaments, using both concurrent and retrospective methods. Study 1 did not find any relation between change in perceived relative status and intergroup schadenfreude, possibly because of the sample's low domain interest and identification. However, schadenfreude was positively associated with change in status in Study 2 and with change in performance evaluation in Study 3 as expected. Also, across all three studies, intergroup schadenfreude was associated with consequences corresponding to its social distancing (e.g., distance from or dislike of the outgroup and intention to humiliate its members) and social affiliation functions (e.g., intention to celebrate with ingroup members). Importantly, schadenfreude mediated the effects of change in status (Study 2) and performance evaluation (Study 3) on these consequences. Chapter 3 presents Studies 4 and 5, which investigated whether social status is specifically associated with intergroup schadenfreude, and examined whether this social concern helps to differentiate intergroup schadenfreude from victorious joy (i.e., happiness about a third-party's victory). I developed a new experimental paradigm to manipulate participants' concern for status to elicit feelings of intergroup schadenfreude. I also manipulated participants' concern for external rewards associated with the third-party's victory to prompt victorious joy. However, in both studies, the concern for external rewards was the main influence on both intergroup schadenfreude and victorious joy, although a multivariate interaction between the two motives affected these emotions in Study 4. Hence, these studies suggest that status may be only one of the many motives underlying intergroup schadenfreude. Chapter 4 presents Study 6, which was a vignette-based study investigating the social affiliation functions of sharing intergroup schadenfreude as a function of ingroup identification. Participants read tweets from an ingroup member expressing either intergroup schadenfreude or victorious joy. Identification was also manipulated. However, results showed that recipients of intergroup schadenfreude messages formed more negative impressions of the tweeter and intended to distance themselves from him/her more than recipients of victorious joy messages. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the findings, contributions, and limitations of these six studies and discusses directions for future research. Overall, this thesis went beyond the current focus on the antecedents of schadenfreude and took steps towards the development of a social-functional account of intergroup schadenfreude.

Depression in adolescents is a ubiquitous mental health problem presenting ambiguities, uncertainties, and diverse challenges in its conceptualization, presentation, detection, and treatment. Despite the plethora of research on adolescent depression, there exists a paucity of research in regards to obtaining information from the adolescents themselves. In a mixed method, cross-sectional study, adolescents (N= 332) in grades 8 and 11 provided their conceptions of depression. Adolescents' self-recognition of depression was examined in association with depressive symptomatology and reported pathways to talking to someone. Adolescents' social and emotional competence was also examined in association with severity of their depressive symptomatology. Developed categories and subcategories of adolescent depression were guided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) criteria for Major Depressive Episode (MDE) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). Adolescents' definitions of depression were dominated by subjective, holistic interpretations and add new information and depth to the previous research on adolescent depression. Depressed Mood and Social Impairment were the core categories, both contained intricate subcategories. The frequencies of these constructs provide a map of the themes and subthemes that pervade adolescents' personal philosophies regarding adolescent depression. About half of the adolescents who self-recognized depression within two weeks (45%),qualify into screened depression (Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale -2" version [RADS-2];Reynolds, 2002) criteria based on the DSM-IV-TR for MDE (APA, 2000). However, this study's findings showed that the mean for screened Depression Total Score (RADS-2; Reynolds, 2002)was significantly higher in those adolescents who self-recognized versus those who did not self-recognize depression. The majority of lifetime self-recognizers of depression thought that they needed to talk to someone and reported that they talked to someone when feeling depressed. Poor Emotion Awareness was a strong contributor to increasing vulnerability to depressive symptomatology. This study provides new theoretical insights regarding the concept and detection of adolescent depression, and links between social and emotional competence and depressive symptomatology. These findings extend previous research (APA, 2000), provide new understanding to guide future research, and have direct implications for research, policy, and practice strategies aimed to better communicate with and help young people with and without depression. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

Patients with schizophrenia have extremely high levels of depression and suicide (Carlborg et al., 2008), thus, a better understanding of factors associated with poor quality of life (QoL) for this population is sorely needed. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive functioning in schizophrenia may be a strong predictor of overall QoL (Green et al., 2000), but individual domains of QoL have not been examined. Indirect evidence also suggests that emotion perception may underlie the relationship between neurocognition and QoL, but this hypothesis has also yet to be tested. Using a sample of 92 clinically stable schizophrenia patients, the current study explores the relationship between neurocognition, namely attention and working memory, and the following sub domains of QoL: social, vocational, intrapsychic foundations and environmental engagement. The current study also examines whether emotion perception mediates this relationship. In partial support of hypotheses, patients with more deficits in working memory reported decreased Occupational QoL and, although only marginally significant, decreased Total QoL. There was also a trend for poorer working memory to be associated with poorer Intrapsychic Foundations QoL. Contrary to hypotheses, emotion perception was not found to mediate the relationship between working memory and QoL. Current findings suggest that interventions that specifically target working memory may also improve many other aspects of schizophrenia patients? QoL.

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is associated with robust social deficits, which have been shown to precede illness onset and predict functional outcome. As a result, social functioning is an important developmental domain affected by SCZ, which likely has a downstream negative impact on other functional abilities, such as interpersonal relationships and vocational capacity. Patients with SCZ also demonstrate significant visual perceptual deficits; however, a remaining question is whether basic impairment in visual processing gives rise to the deficits observed in social perception. In this context, previous research has shown that biological motion contains relevant social information, such as emotional states and intention, which is easily interpreted by healthy observers. Given that biological motion perception is an important source of social information, and that patients with SCZ have known visual perceptual impairment including motion processing deficits, it is possible that poor biological motion perception meaningfully impacts social perception among individuals with SCZ. While previous studies have documented preliminary evidence of biological motion processing deficits in this population, there is a current lack of understanding regarding the basic visual perceptual mechanisms that may underpin this impairment, including the importance of basic visual motion processing with respect to biological motion. Moreover, the ability of individuals with SCZ to extract relevant social information from biological motion, and its relationship with social perception more generally, have yet to be investigated. Thus, the specific aims guiding the current thesis were to examine whether basic visual motion processes may give rise to biological motion deficits and to examine the ability of individuals with SCZ to extract social information, in the form of emotion, from biological motion. Several experimental tasks were used to examine these aims. Overall, the results from this thesis confirm that individuals with SCZ have difficulty perceiving biological motion; however, this deficit was not specific to biological motion, but instead reflected more widespread visual motion processing deficits, including impairment in global coherent motion perception. Additionally, results from this thesis suggest that individuals with SCZ demonstrated disproportionate difficulty extracting social cues, in the form of emotion, from biological motion, and that this deficit was related to perceiving unambiguous expressions of emotion. In contrast, the discrimination of more subtle or ambiguous emotion was relatively preserved. Moreover, impairment in biological motion processing was found to be unrelated to social perceptual abilities among individuals with SCZ. These experiments provide interesting suggestions regarding clinical approaches to treatment and remediation, although further research is needed to fully understand the brain- behaviour mechanisms underlying SCZ-related deficits in biological motion processing. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / As people navigate though day-to-day life, they encounter many objects in the world that move, such as other people. Research has shown that humans are adept at discriminating human movement and accurate in discerning the emotional states of other people based on this movement. These observations have lead researchers to speculate that, because biological motion is both easy to discriminate and emotionally informative, it plays an essential role in social processing among humans. Research has shown that individuals with Schizophrenia have difficulty understanding social environmental cues, such as the emotions of others. As such, this thesis aims to determine first, whether people with Schizophrenia have difficulty identifying human motion, and second, if they are able to identify emotions embedded within human motion. This thesis will help researchers understand and explain deficits in social perception among people with Schizophrenia.

No description available.

Although a growing number of scholars suggest that the construction of identity is an important form of institutional work, the complex interactions between identities and institutions remain under-explored. In particular, few studies consider how the affective aspects of identities may inform institutional work. This thesis examines the experiences of lawyers who volunteered to create and support a legal charity. As these volunteers grew to more than twenty thousand over fifteen years, the charity gradually centralized charitable work across law firms for the first time. In this way, it transformed the institution of pro bono work within the English legal profession. Drawing on this case study, this thesis employs a grounded theory methodology to generate a conceptual framework that connects emotion work, identity work and institutional work. This framework suggests that some professionals work to re-assert and ‘remember’ aspects of their traditional identities that compete with some contemporary demands. This can prompt identity contradictions that inspire reflection on professional practices. This identity work may also encourage professionals to evoke emotions of guilt that can imbue contradictions with enough significance to create a purpose for remedial institutional work. When enabled by meso-level processes, such micro-level work can reinvigorate traditional practices and accomplish institutional change.

Habitual suppression of emotions has been linked to adverse consequences such as avoidant attachment, lower social support, and reduced relationship closeness (e.g. John & Gross, 2004). However, accumulating evidence that expression and suppression can be both adaptive and maladaptive in different contexts suggests the importance of flexibility in emotional regulation. The present study examined the mechanisms underlying the only laboratory measure of emotional flexibility: the Expressive Flexibility (EF) task (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004). This measure has been linked to adjustment over a one-year period, especially in the context of social threat, and among people who have experienced higher levels of life stress (Westphal, Seivert & Bonanno, 2010). We sought to test whether EF is related to physiological recovery from stress in the immediate term. Participants completed questionnaire measures, the EF Task and a stressful public speaking task. In the EF task, participants were filmed suppressing, exaggerating, and not altering facial reactions to negative and positive pictures. A “balanced EF” score was calculated reflecting their ability to suppress and exaggerate with equal success. Regression analyses used EF scores as predictors for psychophysiological indices of stress (SCR and HR) during and after the public-speaking task. The interaction of EF and social safeness (SSPS) was predictive of the magnitude of SCR recovery, such that for people with lower EF, higher SSPS is predictive of greater SCR recovery. These results converge with previous findings on the suggestion that EF is related to resilience, especially in the context of adversity.

The Republic of Nauru, a small Pacific island nation, has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Obesity emerged rapidly in Nauru during the 1970s, a period characterised by political independence and unprecedented economic growth resulting from lucrative phosphate mining. In the mid-1970s, the Nauruan population was one of the first in the world in which obesity, diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease – co-morbidities associated with obesity – were identified as significant public health concerns. Such ‘lifestyle diseases’ continue to have debilitating effects on the Nauruan community. Obesity is generally understood to result from an energy imbalance; that is, people eat and drink more calories over time than they expend. This biomedical paradigm is implicit in the majority of research relating to obesity, such that the lifestyle to which obesity is attributed is limited to diet and activity. Yet in practice, lifestyle is much more than this. The lifestyle of a particular group is related to political, legal, religious, economic and value systems, modes of education, communication, transport and healthcare, and styles of art, music and entertainment. In this thesis I draw on ethnographic participant observation carried out in the Republic of Nauru during 2010-11, life history interviews, and diverse historical materials to answer three questions. First, what characterises the Nauruan lifestyle? Second, in what ways did the Nauruan lifestyle change over the second half of the twentieth century, the time period during which obesity and diabetes rapidly escalated? Finally, how might these changes be linked to the emergence and persistence of ‘lifestyle diseases’ in Nauru? I focus on one characteristic that stood out prominently in many different aspects of Nauruan life: ‘island time’, or the suggestion that there is ‘No Action Unless Really Urgent’. In theorisation of obesity, such living for the moment has been interpreted as laziness, pleasure-seeking or lack of self-control. However, a deeper analysis reveals that island time emerged gradually in the latter half of the twentieth century as Nauruans incorporated market-derived moral values into their everyday lives. This has led to profound changes in the way people feel when engaged in social exchanges, and is linked to temporally-shorter and more spatially dispersed social networks. I thus recast living for the moment as representative of a social trend rather than individual self-interest, and obesity as a phenomenon associated with the space between bodies rather than within each one. This leads me to consider more closely the links between social relationships and health. In Nauru, as in many societies, it is difficult to disentangle the biological and the social; the same feeling of unhealthiness, for example, is associated with being clinically ill and having a fight with a loved one. Yet many activities that are associated with tightening social networks, and which are prominent in the lifestyle characterised by island time – eating, drinking, or sitting and gossiping, for example – are also associated with obesity emergence. As a result, being biomedically healthy and feeling healthy are now somewhat incompatible in Nauru. In concluding, I argue that the adoption of economic rhetoric into everyday life has re-shaped moral values, everyday social relationships, and the demographic health profile on Nauru.