ABSTRACT Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is characterized by annual recurrence of clinical depression in the fall and winter months. The importance of SAD as a public health problem is underscored by its high prevalence (an estimated 5%) and by the large amount of time individuals with SAD are impaired (on average, 5 months each year). The specific cause of SAD remains unknown; however, researchers have identified possible chronobiological and psychological vulnerabilities to SAD. The study aimed to clarify psychological and chronobiological correlates of SAD in the first test of an integrative model of SAD. The project used a longitudinal design to test the respective contributions of the chronobiological and cognitive vulnerabilities on winter depression severity in 31 SAD patients and 33 never-depressed controls at sites in Burlington, VT and Pittsburgh, PA. The measures selected for the cognitive vulnerability were established measures of vulnerability to nonseasonal depression with empirical support for their relevance to SAD: brooding rumination, dysfunctional attitudes, cognitive reactivity to an induced sad mood, and season-specific cognitions. The chronobiological vulnerability was measured as Phase Angle Difference (PAD) and deviation from PAD of 6 hours. All measures were completed once in the summer, when the SAD patients were remitted, and once in the winter, when patients were clinically depressed. Patients were distinguished from controls on most cognitive vulnerability measures (brooding, as well as rumination, dysfunctional attitudes, and seasonal beliefs). SAD patients exhibited shorter PAD than controls, but did not exhibit greater deviation from PAD-6. Results provide further support for specific cognitive, but not chronobiological, vulnerabilities in prediction of SAD. Limitations of the current sample are discussed. Results hold implications for future SAD research bridging the chronobiological and psychological disciplines with the ultimate aim of improved understanding, assessment, treatment, and prevention of SAD.

This quantitative study intends to identify how collective meaning-making elaborates on social media in terms of a rather new swedish concept, klimatsmart. User generated content, gathered under the hashtag #klimatsmart, is analyzed through quantitative content analysis and the study focuses on which climate friendly representations is created and further maintained on the social media platform Instagram. The approach combines an understanding of climate communication as well as how affective communities is formed in social media. The results show that commercial actors and individuals contribute with most content and that visual content of food and items of everyday use are the most common. A consumptionand recycling aspect often is mentioned along with this visual content. This indicates that the ideological negotiation in terms of the hashtag #klimatsmart is focused mainly to small lifestyle changes such as behavior linked to environmentally friendly consumption.

Recent advances in multimedia technologies have helped create extensive digital video repositories. Users need to be able to search these large video repositories in order to find videos that have preferred content. In order to meet the needs of users, videos in these repositories need to be indexed. Manual indexing is not an appropriate method due to the time and effort involved. Instead, videos need to be accurately indexed by utilizing computer-based methods. Automatic video indexing techniques use computer technology to analyze low-level video features to identify the content that exists in videos. The type of indexing used in this study is automatic affective video indexing, which is an attempt to index videos by automatically detecting content that elicits an emotional response from individuals. The specific affect-related content of interest in this proposed study is slapstick comedy, a technique that is used in videos with humor. The methodology of this study analyzed the audio stream as well as the motion of targeted objects in videos. The relationship between the changes in the two low-level features was used to identify if slapstick comedy was present in the video and where the instance of slapstick could be found. There were three research questions presented in the study which were associated with the two goals. Research Question 1 determined whether or not the targeted content could be identified using low-level features. Research Question 2 measured the relationship between the experimental results and the ground truth in terms of identifying the location of the targeted content in video. Research Question 3 determined whether one type of low-level feature was more strongly associated with the target content than the other. Goal 1 was to utilize sound and motion to predict the existence of slapstick comedy in videos. Goal 2 was to utilize sound and motion to predict the location of slapstick comedy in videos. The results of the study showed that Goals 1 and 2 were partially met, prompting an investigation into methodology improvements as part of this research. The results also showed that motion was more strongly related to the target content than sound.

Medical educators, clinical trainers, and professional organizations that have responded to the need to humanize medicine have not explored prospects for affective development in distance education. In this dissertation, the author explored narrative as an affective learning technique. Medical fiction, lay exposition, autobiography and other written forms of patient narratives, as well as multimedia presentations, movies, music, song, and visual arts were explored and analyzed for use in teaching medical professionalism to online health science students. A collection of narratives and learning activities for teaching medical professionalism in an online class were presented. Finally, a comparison study evaluated the use of narrative medicine to foster professional development in an online class. The use of narrative to introduce professionalism and help online students internalize the humanistic values of empathy and compassion was grounded in affective theories of moral development. Quantitative evaluation of medical professionalism was performed using the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE), a psychometrically sound instrument designed to measure empathy in the context of patient care. Comparisons of mean changes in empathy suggest that the treatment group experienced significant changes in total empathy, reflected by increased scores in all elements of the JSPE. These results were validated by a qualitative review of student discussion posts, course evaluations, and instructor feedback. The goal was to explore affective development and the educational value that narrative brings to teaching medical professionalism in the online class. The study helped to clarify the role of narrative in transformative learning. The implication is that online students can benefit from exposure to narrative. The relationship between narrative and medical professionalism may have applications for educational theory, medical and allied health practice, public policy, and future research.

Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo realizar uma análise da entoação de voz de pacientes com esquizofrenia para, a partir dessas variantes linguísticas examinar dados que caracterizem a prosódia como um possível indicativo diagnóstico. A esquizofrenia é uma doença mental grave sem sintomas patognomônicos, caracterizada por um misto de sinais e sintomas disformes. A prosódia afetiva é definida como o processamento e o reconhecimento de elementos emocionais e afetivos provindos das informações da entoação vocal. Pesquisas realizadas anteriormente apontam déficits singulares na verbalização das emoções contidas na fala desses pacientes, o seu discurso é considerado vago, com poucos ou quase nulos sinais emocionais entoacionais. Para a realização desta pesquisa, inicialmente, 16 clientes e frequentadores do Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, uma das alas do hospital psiquiátrico Instituto Nise da Silveira (SEIs) e mais 16 pessoas sem transtorno mental que compuseram um grupo de controle (SCs), tiveram sua voz gravada em quatro etapas: entrevista de anamnese que segue um roteiro semiestruturado; relato empírico de experiências felizes e tristes; descrição de seus trabalhos artísticos; por fim, a leitura de um trecho de uma história infantil sem conotação afetiva. Na sequência, os mesmos procedimentos foram aplicados em usuários do CAPS II Espaço Vivo, um dos serviços de saúde mental que compõe o Centro de Atenção Integral à Saúde (CAIS) Prof. Cantídio Moura de Campos. A análise dos dados coletados foi possibilitada pela rotina ExProsodia (FERREIRA-NETTO, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2016), aplicativo elaborado para examinar automaticamente os elementos constituintes da prosódia. Através desses procedimentos foi possível identificar que houveram diferenças significativas nas variáveis acústicas da assimetria e dispersão do Tom Médio e da frequência fundamental (F0) nas etapas de fala espontânea e na leitura narrativa. Em especial, nessa última etapa, destaca-se o comportamento adverso da curtose de foco/ênfase que possibilitou a individualização dos grupos. Por fim, este trabalho de cunho quantitativo exploratório, corrobora a perspectiva de diferenciar pessoas acometidas pela esquizofrenia de sujeitos sem histórico anterior de transtornos psíquicos baseado na análise de parâmetros acústicos de voz. Em suma, tais apontamentos poderiam indicar pistas salutares para a constituição de um diagnóstico mais acurado para a esquizofrenia, assim como podem ser propriedades relevantes para colaborar para organização do tratamento individual. / This research aimed to perform an analysis of the patients voice intonation with schizophrenia to examine the data that characterize prosody as a possible diagnostic indication. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness with no pathognomonic symptoms, characterized by a mix of misshapen signs and symptoms. The affective prosody is defined as the processing and recognition of emotional and affective elements from voice of the intonation. Previous studies point to singular deficits in the verbalization of the emotions contained in the speech of these patients, their discourse is considered vague, with few or almost no intonational emotional signals. In order to carry out this research, initially, 16 clients and visitors of the \"Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente\", one of the departament of the psychiatric hospital \"Instituto Nise da Silveira\" (SEIs) and 16 people without mental disorder who composed a control group (SCs) had their voice recorded in four stages: anamnesis interview that follows a semi-structured script; empirical report of happy and sad experiences; description of your artwork; finally, the reading of an excerpt from a children\'s story without affective connotation. Subsequently, the same procedures were applied to users of the \"CAPS II Espaço Vivo\", one of the mental health services that make up the \"Centro de Atenção Integral à Saúde (CAIS) Prof. Cantídio Moura de Campos \". The analysis of the collected data was made possible by the routine ExProsodia (FERREIRA-NETTO, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2016), an application designed to automatically examine the constituent elements of prosody. Through these procedures it was possible to identify that there were significant differences in the acoustic variables of the asymmetry and dispersion of both the Middle Tone and the fundamental frequency (F0) in the stages of spontaneous speech and narrative reading. In this last stage, we highlight the adverse behavior of the focus / emphasis kurtosis that allowed the individualization of the groups. Finally, this quantitative exploratory study corroborates the perspective of differentiating people affected by schizophrenia from subjects without previous history of psychic disorders based on the analysis of acoustic parameters of voice. In short, such notes could indicate salutary clues for the constitution of a more accurate diagnosis for schizophrenia, as well as they may be relevant properties to collaborate for the organization of individual treatment.

Thesis advisor: Jean M. Bartunek / Thesis advisor: Myeong-Gu Seo / My dissertation builds theory about gratitude at work. Drawing from Affective Events Theory, I suggest two different forms of gratitude: state gratitude and job gratitude. State gratitude refers to grateful moods or emotions which tend to last short term, whereas job gratitude refers to employees’ grateful attitudes particularly toward their jobs that tend to last longer. Empirically, I conducted three related studies. In the first study, I developed and validated the 7-item measure of job gratitude using a series of surveys that confirmed a satisfactory content and construct validity of the measure. Using an experience sampling procedure, in the second study I suggested and tested a theoretical model of state gratitude at work. A series of longitudinal surveys with 135 employees showed that state gratitude that is captured by a 3 week long daily survey is positively associated with in-role behaviors through the desire to reciprocate benevolence. My analyses also showed that the availability of extrinsic job rewards negatively moderates the positive impact of state gratitude on helping behaviors through the desire to reciprocate benevolence. Employees’ job dependency also negatively moderates the positive impact of state gratitude on both helping and in-role behaviors through the desire to reciprocate benevolence. The third study proposed and tested a theoretical model of job gratitude. My analyses showed that through the mechanism of intended help, job gratitude is positively associated with extra-role behaviors including helping behaviors, organizational citizenship behaviors directed to an organization, and voice behaviors. Taken together, my dissertation enriches theories in emotion literature by exploring a particular type of discrete, social, and moral emotions. My dissertation also contributes to gratitude literature outside of organizational studies, as it broadens the scope of impacts of gratitude in work contexts. Lastly, this dissertation contributes to Organizational Positive Scholarship by shedding light on the experiences of the recipients’ of prosocial behaviors. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

An ecological approach to space allows human constructs to become the primary prism through which to view workplaces (Nespor, 2000; Urry, 2005; Murdoch 2006). Human beings create meaning in their environments via the unity of symbolic actions and generalized meaning fields that gain their social usefulness via their affective tone. The resulting personal system becomes projected onto the world via the personal arrangement of things that are important for each person (Valsiner, 2000; Valsiner, 2005). Consequently, individual human beings constantly order parts in their environments through an affective-emotional lens when they encounter ideas, objects and spaces (Hochschild, 2003; Thrift, 2008; Boys, 2011). I use the emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) concepts of display rules (expectations for emotional display) and feeling rules (expectations for internal affect) together with an ecological approach to space to investigate the existence of affective-emotional zones in schools. My research questions were: How do participants in a school make sense of their work environment through the lens of affective-emotional zones? How are affective-emotional zones characterized in terms of display rules and feeling rules? What challenges do teachers face when they are in particular affective-emotional zones and why? I broadly utilized a case study approach with a European international school to interview six experienced teachers using an active interview technique with open coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) and critical event coding (Webster and Mertova, 2007) as the principle methods of analysis. I was able to label and describe four zones that I argued are products of teacher rituals, habits, feelings (feeling rules) and emotions (display rules); the communal zone, the school zone, the student zone and the teacher zone. I further the notion of heretical feelings and emotions and describe how they constitute elements of the teacher condition. I found school affective-emotional zones are temporal as school spaces have the potential to shift from one affective-emotional zone to another as a consequence of time changes in the school day. I outline questions for future research based on my findings.

The thesis addressed whether there are developmental differences in the effects of auditory distraction on short-term memory among children and adults. The theoretical accounts and research addressed in the thesis highlight how rehearsal and attentional control play a role in the observed developmental differences. Rehearsal and attention do not work in isolation but rather interact with one another to enable successful execution of many different tasks (Elliott et al., 2016). One such instance of the interaction between rehearsal and attentional control is when short-term memory tasks are performed in the presence of auditory distraction (Hughes et al., 2007). Developmental research within the irrelevant sound paradigm has shown how rehearsal and attention can be affected by task-irrelevant sounds in different ways, how the efficiency of the two can determine distraction effects, and that the study of distraction is a window into the development of rehearsal and attentional control in children. Although there are different perspectives on the effects of auditory distraction, two accounts have dominated recent understanding. The duplex-mechanism account suggests there may be at least two functionally different types of distraction, one that is the result of interference with rehearsal and the other that is the result of attentional capture (Hughes et al., 2007). This account leads to predictions about the nature of the sounds and the characteristics of tasks that exhibit the most disruption (Hughes, 2014). The unitary account proposes that distraction is only the result of attentional capture and thus attributes less significance to the type of distracting material and task used (Elliott, 2002; Cowan, 1995). The weight of evidence so far is in favour of a duplex account of distraction (Jones, 1994; Jones & Macken, 1993; Jones, Hughes, Marsh, & Macken, 2008; cf. Bell et al., 2012; Körner et al., 2017). Rehearsal supports verbal serial short-term memory and is more vulnerable to auditory distraction wherein each token is different to the one preceding it (changing-state sounds such as A-B-A-B-A) than a steady-state sequence where the tokens are the same (e.g., A-A-A-A). This type of distraction is called the changing-state effect and manifests only when rehearsal is involved (Jones et al., 1992). Attention is needed for the maintenance of items in memory and can be captured by sounds that are unexpected (deviant sounds such as A-A-A-B-A-A-A; e.g., Hughes et al., 2013; Vachon et al., 2016). This is the deviation effect and it occurs regardless of processes involved in the task (Vachon et al., 2016; Hughes et al., 2007). The present empirical studies make use of changing-state and deviant sounds to investigate how distraction effects vary among children and adults. The experiments herein are the first to assess the deviation effect, ‘token set-size effect’ and ‘dose effect’ among children — token set-size and dose effects are findings that disruption to rehearsal increases when the number of irrelevant auditory tokens and rate of transition between tokens increase (Bridges & Jones, 1996; Tremblay & Jones, 1998). Results from each of the three empirical studies (and from a joint analysis of data from all three studies) suggest that overall, children and adults are especially vulnerable to distraction stemming from the interference of rehearsal as evidenced by the changing-state effect in serial and probed recall tasks but there was no difference in the magnitude of disruption between age groups. The results also suggest that the deviation effect may manifest more frequently for children than adults and this could be attributed to their poorer attentional control relative to adults. In addition, the combined analyses revealed a greater deviation effect for children compared to adults in serial recall. Taken together, the results suggest that developmental differences are more likely to emerge as a function of differences in attentional control rather than the efficiency of rehearsal. Implications of these results for theories of short-term memory, attention, and distraction are discussed. Practical applications of these findings for learning environments such as schools are also addressed.

Background: There is increasing concern that as students move through to adolescence, motivation toward reading declines. When there is limited desire to read, less time is spent with text, which can eventually impact on literacy acquisition. A systematic synthesis of research which has measured outcomes relating to motivation and/or engagement as part of a reading intervention was conducted. Despite the wealth of literature surrounding adolescent literacy, only six studies met the inclusion criteria. The review highlighted a number of affective factors that may contribute to effective reading interventions. However, to date there has been no research on how Educational Psychologists (EPs) might work with students to address affective factors in reading. Methods/participants: An affective reading programme structured around a Motivational Interviewing (MI) based intervention was implemented with three Year 8 students in one high-school. Students were identified as having a primary reading difficulty and perceived to be disengaged or low in motivation toward reading. Five- 50-minute sessions were facilitated on a fortnightly basis by the researcher. Analysis/ findings: Quantitative outcomes from pre-, post- and three-month follow-up indicated positive outcomes for two of the three students in relation to motivation and engagement toward reading. However, for one student, quantitative data were not indicative of self-report improvements across motivation domains. Qualitative data on the other hand suggested that all three students perceived the intervention to have a range of benefits. Four super-ordinate themes emerged from thematic analysis of the qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews, suggesting a perceived increase in motivation and engagement toward reading, in addition to increased self-efficacy. The current findings identified key factors in addressing reading motivation with adolescent students. Conclusion/implications: The present study adds a valuable contribution to current theory and research within adolescent literacy. It raises awareness in acknowledging and addressing the needs and complexities of addressing motivation to read amongst reluctant readers. A structured dissemination strategy is discussed, along with some of the potential implications for EPs. Further, a discussion with regards to evidence-based and practice-based evidence in the context of this study is presented.

The analysis and automatic affect estimation system from human expression has been acknowledged as an active research topic in computer vision community. Most reported affect recognition systems, however, only consider subjects performing well-defined acted expression, in a very controlled condition, so they are not robust enough for real-life recognition tasks with subject variation, acoustic surrounding and illumination change. In this thesis, an artificial intelligence system is proposed to continuously (represented along a continuum e.g., from -1 to +1) estimate affect behaviour in terms of latent dimensions (e.g., arousal and valence) from naturalistic human expressions. To tackle the issues, feature representation and machine learning strategies are addressed. In feature representation, human expression is represented by modalities such as audio, video, physiological signal and text modality. Hand- crafted features is extracted from each modality per frame, in order to match with consecutive affect label. However, the features extracted maybe missing information due to several factors such as background noise or lighting condition. Haar Wavelet Transform is employed to determine if noise cancellation mechanism in feature space should be considered in the design of affect estimation system. Other than hand-crafted features, deep learning features are also analysed in terms of the layer-wise; convolutional and fully connected layer. Convolutional Neural Network such as AlexNet, VGGFace and ResNet has been selected as deep learning architecture to do feature extraction on top of facial expression images. Then, multimodal fusion scheme is applied by fusing deep learning feature and hand-crafted feature together to improve the performance. In machine learning strategies, two-stage regression approach is introduced. In the first stage, baseline regression methods such as Support Vector Regression are applied to estimate each affect per time. Then in the second stage, subsequent model such as Time Delay Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory and Kalman Filter is proposed to model the temporal relationships between consecutive estimation of each affect. In doing so, the temporal information employed by a subsequent model is not biased by high variability present in consecutive frame and at the same time, it allows the network to exploit the slow changing dynamic between emotional dynamic more efficiently. Following of two-stage regression approach for unimodal affect analysis, fusion information from different modalities is elaborated. Continuous emotion recognition in-the-wild is leveraged by investigating mathematical modelling for each emotion dimension. Linear Regression, Exponent Weighted Decision Fusion and Multi-Gene Genetic Programming are implemented to quantify the relationship between each modality. In summary, the research work presented in this thesis reveals a fundamental approach to automatically estimate affect value continuously from naturalistic human expression. The proposed system, which consists of feature smoothing, deep learning feature, two-stage regression framework and fusion using mathematical equation between modalities is demonstrated. It offers strong basis towards the development artificial intelligent system on estimation continuous affect estimation, and more broadly towards building a real-time emotion recognition system for human-computer interaction.