Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2007.

Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2007.

There is much evidence that people are inaccurate in predicting the impact of future situations on their emotions. At the same time, affective forecasts have important implications for behavior, decision-making, and current mood, and may play an important role in the maintenance of emotional disorders. This study investigated two factors that influence affective forecasting: (1) Whether affective forecasting is associated with depressive symptoms and (2) Whether strategies people use to regulate their current affect influence their predictions of future emotional responses. Participants ruminated or reappraised in response to a sad mood and completed a measure of depressive symptoms (BDI). Results indicated that severity of depression symptoms was related to forecasts of greater sadness and anger to positive scenarios, as well as negative appraisals of future negative events. As expected, both BDI score and habitual use of emotion regulation strategies were correlated with participants' predictions about use and effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies in response to future scenarios. Results reinforced the usefulness of examining future-oriented cognitive processes in depression, providing insight into the role of hopelessness in the disorder. This study also shed light on the relationship between depression and predictions about the use and effectiveness of various emotion regulation strategies.

Studien undersöker huruvida människor minns tidigare stressrelaterade händelser utifrån vilken affektiv personlighetsgrupp de tillhör. Även den möjliga inverkan av kön och ålder studeras. Studien bygger på en dagbokstudie (MacDonald, et.al, 2009) innehållande 72 deltagare som under 28 dagar fyllt i en enkät innehållande frågor om upplevelsen av stress och därefter skattat minnet av den upplevda stressen under perioden. Hypotesen är att det kommer finnas skillnader mellan de affektiva grupperna, det kommer inte finnas några skillnader mellan könen, och ålder kommer inte att påverka. Resultatet visar på att det inte finns några signifikanta skillnader mellan de affektiva grupperna, könen, eller ålder. Dock utmärker sig ihågkommandet av sömnkvalitet och ihågkommandet av smärta som prediktorer när det kommer till ihågkommandet av stress. / This study examines if people remember earlier experienced stress different depending on which affective group they belong to. It also looks into if gender and age has any influence. The study is built on an earlier diary study (MacDonald, et.al, 2009), which contained 72 participants whom each filled a questionnaire every day for 28 days. The questionnaire included questions about the experienced stress under the 28day period. We expect to find differences between the affective groups, we won´t find any differences regarding gender, or age. The result shows that there are no differences between the groups, between genders or when it comes to age. How the participants remembered earlier sleep qualities and pain were the predictors of the remembrance on stress.

Many people who sustain traumatic brain injuries (TBI) have poor psychosocial outcomes. Previous research has indicated that poor outcomes are related to the use of avoidant coping following TBI, although the mechanisms of this relationship are not clear. The major pathological consequence of TBI is damage to the frontal lobes and/or their connections, resulting for most people in executive and/or affective dysfunction. The purpose of this dissertation study was to delineate the neuropsychological, psychiatric, personality and physiological mechanisms of avoidant coping following TBI. Controls and people with TBI completed the Baycrest Psychosocial Stress Test (BPST), where coping behaviour was observed directly, and physiological measures were recorded. Participants also completed a neuropsychological test battery, and a series of questionnaires assessing coping, psychiatric status, personality and outcomes. There were no significant differences between groups in self reported coping. However, the control and mild TBI group engaged in more planful than avoidant behaviour on the BPST. As a group, individuals with moderate-to-severe injury, in contrast, engaged in more avoidant than planful behaviour. However, analysis of individual differences in coping behaviour within the moderate-to-severe group revealed a bimodal distribution, allowing classification of people in this group as ‘planners’, or ‘avoiders’ (this distribution was not evident in the mild TBI group). Within the moderate-to-severe group, planners had better executive function, were more reactive to stress (psychologically and physiologically), performed better on the speech task during the BPST, and had greater return to productivity. However, planners also had worse psychosocial outcomes as compared to the avoiders. This was the first study, to the author’s knowledge, to examine coping behaviour during a simulated real-world stress test. Results indicate that behavioural measures of coping, such as the BPST, are more sensitive to changes in coping post TBI than are self and significant other reported questionnaires. Results also demonstrate that executive function and psychological and physiological reactivity are important factors that contribute to coping following moderate-to-severe TBI. These data raise important questions about the challenges of targeting coping through rehabilitation.

With the rise of mobile computing and an ever-growing variety of ubiquitous sensors, computers are becoming increasingly context-aware. A revolutionary step in this process that has seen much progress will be user-awareness: the ability of a computing device to infer its user's emotions. This research project attempts to study the effectiveness of enabling a computer to adapt its visual interface to counter user frustration. A two-group experiment was designed to engage participants in a goal-oriented task disguised as a simple usability study with a performance incentive. Five frustrating stimuli were triggered throughout a single 15-minute task in the form of complete system unresponsiveness or delay. An algorithm was implemented to attempt to detect sudden rises in user arousal measured via a skin conductance sensor. Following a successful detection, or otherwise a maximum of a 10-second delay, the application resumed responsiveness. In the control condition, participants were exposed to a “please wait” pop-up near the end of the delay whereas those in the adaption condition were exposed to an additional visual transition to a user interface with calming colours and larger touch targets. This proposed adaptive condition was hypothesized to reduce the recovery time associated with the frustration response. The experiment was successfully able to induce frustration (via measurable skin conductance responses) in the majority of trials. The mean recovery half-time of participants in the first trial adaptive condition was significantly longer than that of the control. This was attributed to a possibility of a large chromatic difference between the adaptive and control colour schemes, habituation and prediction, causal association of adaptation to the frustrating stimulus, as well as insufficient subtlety in the transition and visual look of the adaptive interface. The study produced findings and guidelines that will be crucial in the future design of adaptive affective user interfaces.

Vi ställs dagligen inför väldigt många val och beroende på vilka val vi väljer att göra kommer dessa till stor del att påverka hur vi lever vårt liv och även hur tillfreds vi kommer att vara med livet. Vi baserar många av våra val på känslomässiga förutsägelser som är våra antaganden om hur framtida händelser kommer att påverka oss känslomässigt. Våra känslomässiga förutsägelser är dessvärre ofta påverkade av olika bias som gör att vi missbedömer hur starkt och under hur lång tid vi kommer att reagera känslomässigt på kommande händelser, vilket i sin tur påverkar vilka val vi kommer att göra. Den här uppsatsen kommer att undersöka hur våra känslomässiga förutsägelser påverkar vårt subjektiva välbefinnande och även hur förståelse för detta skulle kunna användas i psykologisk coachning i form av interventioner för att hjälpa människor att göra fler val som leder till ett ökat subjektivt välbefinnande.

Many people who sustain traumatic brain injuries (TBI) have poor psychosocial outcomes. Previous research has indicated that poor outcomes are related to the use of avoidant coping following TBI, although the mechanisms of this relationship are not clear. The major pathological consequence of TBI is damage to the frontal lobes and/or their connections, resulting for most people in executive and/or affective dysfunction. The purpose of this dissertation study was to delineate the neuropsychological, psychiatric, personality and physiological mechanisms of avoidant coping following TBI. Controls and people with TBI completed the Baycrest Psychosocial Stress Test (BPST), where coping behaviour was observed directly, and physiological measures were recorded. Participants also completed a neuropsychological test battery, and a series of questionnaires assessing coping, psychiatric status, personality and outcomes. There were no significant differences between groups in self reported coping. However, the control and mild TBI group engaged in more planful than avoidant behaviour on the BPST. As a group, individuals with moderate-to-severe injury, in contrast, engaged in more avoidant than planful behaviour. However, analysis of individual differences in coping behaviour within the moderate-to-severe group revealed a bimodal distribution, allowing classification of people in this group as ‘planners’, or ‘avoiders’ (this distribution was not evident in the mild TBI group). Within the moderate-to-severe group, planners had better executive function, were more reactive to stress (psychologically and physiologically), performed better on the speech task during the BPST, and had greater return to productivity. However, planners also had worse psychosocial outcomes as compared to the avoiders. This was the first study, to the author’s knowledge, to examine coping behaviour during a simulated real-world stress test. Results indicate that behavioural measures of coping, such as the BPST, are more sensitive to changes in coping post TBI than are self and significant other reported questionnaires. Results also demonstrate that executive function and psychological and physiological reactivity are important factors that contribute to coping following moderate-to-severe TBI. These data raise important questions about the challenges of targeting coping through rehabilitation.

Research gap: Reputation is seen as an important asset for companies and can create competitive advantages. Within business-to-business the reputation of the company is argued to affect the relationship between buyers and suppliers and although the area is stressed to be important, it is still under-researched. Previous literature is not aligning when it comes to the importance of reputation and the duration of the relationship and it also states trust to have impact on important parts of the relationship, such as affective commitment and the willingness to invest. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis was to measure to what extent the duration of a buyer-supplier relationship affects trust, and to what extent trust affects the affective commitment and willingness to invest, when the reputation of the supplier was negative as the outcome of adverse publicity. Hypothesis: H1a; H1b: The duration of buyer-supplier relationship has a positive impact on Trust (integrity or benevolence) if the reputation of the supplier is negative H2a; H2b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on affective Commitment, if the reputation of the supplier is negative H3a; H3b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on willingness to invest if the reputation of the supplier is negative Method: The study had a quantitative approach and collected the data by a questionnaire sent to manufacturing business-to-business companies by email. 462 companies were contacted which resulted in 72 usable answers. Conclusion:The buyer-supplier relationship was not to a significantly extent affected by negative reputation and the duration of the relationship was not differing to a substantially extent. The different trust increased the buyers’ affective commitment and willingness to invest which demonstrates the importance of trust in the relationship due to negative reputation.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether upper-secondary school students, studying English as a foreign language (EFL) in Sweden, prefer to learn from Native English speaking teachers (NEST) as opposed to Non-native English speaking teachers (NNEST). Furthermore, the present study seeks to identify, from the EFL learners’ perspective, why certain characteristics of both NNEST and NEST are felt to be more prestigious than others which in turn might affect the students’potential to acquire a desired identity.