Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Despite the anecdotal evidence of social difficulties in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and the risk for secondary disabilities as a result of these social difficulties, very little research has examined social-emotional functioning in children with FASD. The majority of the research conducted thus far has relied on parent and teacher reports to document social impairments. These parent and teacher reports provide a broad measure of social functioning but are unable to elucidate the specific aspects of social functioning that this group of children might find difficult. As a result, it has been very difficult to develop effective social interventions for children with FASD because it is unclear what aspects of social functioning should be targeted. The current study aimed to examine emotion recognition abilities in children with FASD, as recognition of emotions is an important precursor for appropriate social interaction. The study included 22 participants with diagnosed FASD (ages 8-14), with age- and gender- matched typically developing controls. Participants were assessed using computerized measures of emotion recognition from three nonlinguistic modalities: facial expressions (static and dynamic, child and adult faces), emotional tone of voice (child and adult voices), and body positioning and movement (postures and point-light walkers). In addition, participants completed a task assessing emotion recognition in real-life scenarios. Finally, caregivers completed measures of behavioural functioning, adaptive functioning, FASD symptomatology, and a demographics questionnaire. Overall, findings suggest that children with FASD do have more difficulties than age-matched typically developing peers in aspects of emotion recognition, with particular difficulties in recognizing emotions from adult facial expressions and adult emotional prosody. In addition, children with FASD had more difficulty perceiving differences in facial expressions. When the effect of age was examined, it was found that some aspects of emotion recognition were more impaired in children with FASD between age eight and ten years compared to same-age typically developing peers and compared to children with FASD age 11-14. This finding suggests that younger children with FASD may demonstrate a delay in the acquisition of some aspects of emotion recognition or may be more vulnerable to the information processing demands of some tasks compared to older children with FASD. The types of emotion recognition difficulties found in the current study supported a pattern where children with FASD make more errors on emotion recognition tasks when the complexity of the task is increased and consequently demands greater information processing. As such, it is anticipated that children with FASD would be likely to have the most difficulty with emotion recognition abilities embedded within complex, rapidly changing, real-world social situations, and in recognizing more subtle emotional displays. Caregivers, teachers, and professionals living and working with children and youth with FASD should be aware of possible emotion recognition difficulties in complex social situations and should help foster stronger emotion recognition skills when difficulties are detected.

Despite the anecdotal evidence of social difficulties in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and the risk for secondary disabilities as a result of these social difficulties, very little research has examined social-emotional functioning in children with FASD. The majority of the research conducted thus far has relied on parent and teacher reports to document social impairments. These parent and teacher reports provide a broad measure of social functioning but are unable to elucidate the specific aspects of social functioning that this group of children might find difficult. As a result, it has been very difficult to develop effective social interventions for children with FASD because it is unclear what aspects of social functioning should be targeted. The current study aimed to examine emotion recognition abilities in children with FASD, as recognition of emotions is an important precursor for appropriate social interaction. The study included 22 participants with diagnosed FASD (ages 8-14), with age- and gender- matched typically developing controls. Participants were assessed using computerized measures of emotion recognition from three nonlinguistic modalities: facial expressions (static and dynamic, child and adult faces), emotional tone of voice (child and adult voices), and body positioning and movement (postures and point-light walkers). In addition, participants completed a task assessing emotion recognition in real-life scenarios. Finally, caregivers completed measures of behavioural functioning, adaptive functioning, FASD symptomatology, and a demographics questionnaire. Overall, findings suggest that children with FASD do have more difficulties than age-matched typically developing peers in aspects of emotion recognition, with particular difficulties in recognizing emotions from adult facial expressions and adult emotional prosody. In addition, children with FASD had more difficulty perceiving differences in facial expressions. When the effect of age was examined, it was found that some aspects of emotion recognition were more impaired in children with FASD between age eight and ten years compared to same-age typically developing peers and compared to children with FASD age 11-14. This finding suggests that younger children with FASD may demonstrate a delay in the acquisition of some aspects of emotion recognition or may be more vulnerable to the information processing demands of some tasks compared to older children with FASD. The types of emotion recognition difficulties found in the current study supported a pattern where children with FASD make more errors on emotion recognition tasks when the complexity of the task is increased and consequently demands greater information processing. As such, it is anticipated that children with FASD would be likely to have the most difficulty with emotion recognition abilities embedded within complex, rapidly changing, real-world social situations, and in recognizing more subtle emotional displays. Caregivers, teachers, and professionals living and working with children and youth with FASD should be aware of possible emotion recognition difficulties in complex social situations and should help foster stronger emotion recognition skills when difficulties are detected.

Abstract Animals live in a heterogeneous world where threats and abundance and quality of resources vary across space and time. Heterogeneity induces uncertainty in decisions that animals must make, e.g., where to breed. Adaptive decisions may be facilitated by personally collecting information on the quality of the environment and by observing the behaviour and success of other individuals. Such social information use is common in nature. I investigate information use in relation to ecological threats (brood parasites, nest predators) and long-term information use in breeding site choice in the wild. Moreover, I examine the genetic basis of social cue use in breeding site choice. I demonstrated experimentally that open-nesting hosts of a brood parasite, the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), can cue on cuckoo vocalizations to estimate cuckoo abundance and avoid breeding sites with high perceived parasitism risk. Another experiment showed that pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) derive predation risk information from the fates of heterospecific nests, can associate the information with a nest site characteristic and generalize the association to own nest site choice. However, apparently only young females that made their choice quickly used the information in nest site choice. Pied flycatchers were further observed to collect habitat quality information based on the old nest contents during the post-breeding period. Use of the information in breeding site choice in the following spring varied between sex and age groups as well as geographically. Some birds integrated the post-breeding period information with the information available during settlement suggesting sequential social information use. Finally, quantitative genetic analyses revealed low additive genetic variances and genetic heritabilities of social cue use in breeding site choice in a collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) population. These results demonstrate new aspects of informed habitat choice in wild animals which have important implications for species coexistence and community ecology, parasite-host coevolution, between-species niche dynamics and evolution. Between-individual variation in information use is highlighted throughout the thesis and warrants further research. The evolutionary potential of information use appears low, but more studies in other populations and species are needed. / Tiivistelmä Eläimet elävät ympäristössä, jossa resurssit ja uhat vaihtelevat ajallisesti ja alueellisesti. Tämä vaihtelu aiheuttaa epävarmuutta eläinten päätöksentekoon, kuten pesimäpaikan valintaan. Hyödyllisten päätösten tekoa voi edesauttaa keräämällä tietoa ympäristön laadusta itsenäisesti tai seuraamalla muiden yksilöiden käytöstä ja menestystä. Tällainen sosiaalisen informaation käyttö on yleistä eläinkunnassa. Tutkin informaation käyttöä ekologisten uhkien (pesäloiset, -pedot) suhteen ja pitkäaikaista informaation käyttöä pesimäpaikan valinnassa luonnonpopulaatioissa. Lisäksi selvitän pesimäpaikan valintaan liittyvän informaation käyton geneettistä periytyvyyttä. Selvitin kokeellisesti, että pesäloisen, käen (Cuculus canorus), isäntälajit voivat käyttää käkien ääntelyä vihjeenä alueellisesta loisintauhasta ja siten välttää korkean uhan alueita pesimäpaikan valinnassa. Toisessa kokeessa havaittiin kirjosieppojen (Ficedula hypoleuca) keräävän tietoa pesäpetouhasta toisen lajin pesätuhojen kautta, kykenevän yhdistämään tiedon erilliseen pesäpaikan ominaisuuteen ja käyttämään tätä assosiaatiota omassa pesäpaikan valinnassa. Kuitenkin vain nuoret naaraat, jotka tekivät valintansa nopeasti, käyttivät kyseistä informaatiota valinnassaan. Lisäksi havaitsin kirjosieppojen keräävän tietoa ympäristön laadusta pesinnän jälkeen vanhojen pesäsisältöjen avulla. Kyseisen tiedon käyttö pesimäpaikan valinnassa seuraavana keväänä vaihteli lintujen sukupuolen ja iän suhteen, kuin myös alueellisesti. Osa linnuista yhdisti pesimäpaikan valinnassaan aikaisempaa, pesinnän jälkeen kerättyä tietoa ja keväällä saatavilla olevaa sosiaalista informaatiota. Geneettinen analyysi viittasi pesimäpaikan valintaan liittyvän informaation käytön alhaiseen additiivisen geneettisen varianssin määrään ja siten alhaiseen geneettiseen periytyvyyteen sepelsiepolla (Ficedula albicollis). Väitöskirjani tulokset kuvaavat uudenlaisia informaation käytön muotoja eläinten pesimäpaikan valinnassa. Havainnot auttavat ymmärtämään pesälois-isäntä rinnakkaisevoluutiota, lajien välisiä vuorovaikutuksia, lajiyhteisöjen toimintaa ja evoluutiota. Yksilöiden välinen vaihtelu informaation käytössä näyttää olevan yleistä, ja lisätutkimuksen tarpeessa. Informaation käytön evolutiivinen potentiaali näyttää rajalliselta, mutta lisätutkimukset eri populaatioilla ja lajeilla ovat tarpeen.

Users in social networking sites, such as Facebook, are increasingly receiving friend requests from strangers and accepting strangers as friends. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of the Big Five personality traits and strangers' gender in affecting Facebook users' decisions to accept the stranger's friend request by adopting a 2 (gender of the stranger: male vs. female) x 5 (stranger's personality: Neuroticism vs. Extraversion vs. Openness vs. Conscientiousness vs. Agreeableness) factorial design. Results revealed that participants were more likely to accept the stranger's friend request when the participant's and stranger's personalities matched. This effect was more pronounced when the stranger was a female. Participants accepted female stranger's friend request due to the inflated perception of stereotypical female characteristics, which supported the hyperpersonal effect. Majority of the participants accepted the stranger's friend request based on textual cues that were displayed in the friend request message, which supported social information processing theory, suggesting that impression formation of the stranger was not constrained to the lack of nonverbal cues setting.

This study investigates the role social information and personal dispositions play in the development of attitudes of unionized employees towards employee involvement programs. A theoretical model was developed in order to understand how social information and dispositions form union member attitudes towards employee involvement programs. This was designed from models of employee involvement and attitude formation. Data were collected from employees at electrical power generation facilities. Measures of organizational and union commitment, locus of control, participativeness, social information provided by the company, social information provided by the union, and employee involvement attitudes were gathered through a survey distributed at the facilities. General affect and satisfaction towards four types of employee involvement programs union members are most likely to encounter were measured. Specific hypotheses were developed in order to test and analyze parts of the theoretical model. While the results were at times contrary to the hypothesized relationships within the model, the data fit with the theorized model well enough to provide support for it. This model effectively demonstrated how employee involvement attitudes are formed from such data, and the relationships between the variables measured. / Ph. D.

More research is needed to be able to fully understand the role that social media plays in elections, specifically in local elections. Candidates need to understand how it works and how they can effectively use this new communication medium. By exploring Diffusion of Innovation Theory, Social Information Processing Theory, and the Two-Way Symmetrical Model of communications this study sought to answer one overarching question: how should a candidate employ social media in a local election? This qualitative, single case study explores the 2014 recall and general election in Yorba Linda, California. Councilman Tom Lindsey and candidate Matt Palmer are the primary subjects of study. Observations were made through analysis of documentation, interviews, and participant and direct observation. The researcher was employed as the campaign manager for both Lindsey's and Palmer's campaigns. The findings support the use of social media in local campaigns on a case by case basis. Determining use depends on the demographics of the voters and the abilities of the candidate. The data suggests that social media needs to be part of comprehensive strategy that includes traditional communication tools. Observations from the case study illustrate the need for candidates to engage in two-way communication that is monitored and regulated. This study begins to establish social media as a tool that candidates can use to inexpensively reach voters in a way that showcases the candidate's personality and allows them to connect on a personal level with constituents. Social media will play a role in politics at all levels.

The effects of childhood exposure to parental intimate partner violence (EPIPV) on dating violence (DV) were examined through two layers of mediations. Based on attachment theory, individuals who are exposed to parental intimate partner violence are less likely to experience secure parent-child attachment, which in turn transfers to insecure adult attachment that is prone to perceive significant others as less trustworthy and less reliable as well as higher likelihood of over-reacting and/or staying in an unhealthy relationship. In the second layer of mediation, insecure adult attachment would lead to biased SIP which in turn, would result in an increase of DV. A total of 327 university students participated in the study by voluntarily completing the research questionnaires. Among them, 253 reported having experienced mild to severe DV and were included in the final data set. The data analyses procedures included examinations of the measurement models and structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses. Findings from the final models best supported by the data indicated that EPIPV predicted both dating violence perpetration and victimization and that EPIPV predicted adult attachment anxiety and avoidance, both of which are consistent with existing literature. However, findings revealed that EPIPV did not predict SIP and SIP was not predictive of DV perpetration. In addition, neither adult attachment anxiety nor attachment avoidance was predictive of DV perpetration and victimization. For DV victimization SEM model, adult attachment anxiety predicted SIP, however, SIP did not predict DV victimization. Findings are discussed based on DV literature and attachment theory. Limitations, clinical implications, and future research directions are also outlined.

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