<p>I två studier undersöktes skillnader I empati beroende på målpersons kön. I</p><p>studie 1 fick 72 psykologistudenter läsa fyra berättelser där målpersonerna</p><p>befann sig i besvärliga situationer och upplevde känslorna ilska, skam,</p><p>rädsla och sorg. Därefter fick deltagarna skatta sin empati. Resultatet</p><p>öppnade för möjligheten att sorg medförde mer empati för männen och ilska</p><p>mer empati för kvinnorna. I studie 2 fick därför 101 psykologistudenter läsa</p><p>en berättelse där målpersonen upplevde ilska eller sorg i en svår situation</p><p>och därefter skatta sin empati. Resultatet visade en stark tendens att män</p><p>som känner sorg väcker mer empati än kvinnor och att kvinnor som känner</p><p>ilska väcker mer empati än kvinnor som känner sorg. Majoriteten av</p><p>deltagarna var kvinnor. Målpersonens kön, känsloupplevelse och grad av</p><p>empati verkar ha ett samband då en känsla kan medföra skillnader i empati</p><p>mellan kön och olika känslor medföra skillnader i empati för kvinnor.</p> / <p>In two studies differences in empathy depending on target person’s gender</p><p>was examined. In study 1 72 psychology students read four stories</p><p>describing target persons in troublesome situations who experienced anger,</p><p>shame, fear and sadness. Thereafter participants estimate their empathy. The</p><p>results opened for the possibilities that sadness evoke more empathy for men</p><p>and anger more empathy for women. Therefore in study 2 101 psychology</p><p>students read a story where a target person experienced sadness or anger in a</p><p>difficult situation and thereafter estimate their empathy. The result showed</p><p>strong tendency that men who experiencing sadness evoke more empathy</p><p>than women and women experiencing anger evoke more empathy than</p><p>women experiencing sadness. The majority of participants where female.</p><p>Target persons, gender, emotion and degree of empathy seem to be related</p><p>when an emotion can bring difference in empathy between gender and</p><p>different emotions can bring difference in empathy for women.</p>

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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness characterized by emotion dysregulation. Symptoms related to emotion are thought to contribute to difficulties in perceiving emotional expressions. Individuals with BPD and demographically matched healthy controls completed a task assessing the recognition of happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions at two intensities. Patients with BPD demonstrated comparable performance on the recognition of very happy and very sad facial expression but were significantly less accurate on neutral expressions. Patients with BPD were also significantly worse in recognizing mildly happy facial expressions, however the severity of current depressive symptoms intervened this relationship. There was evidence that perceptual biases within BPD are unique from mood-congruent biases typically found in major depressive disorder. The findings advance research on the topic of emotion perception in BPD and suggest important new lines of investigation that may be useful for delineating the nature of emotion dysregulation in BPD.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness characterized by emotion dysregulation. Symptoms related to emotion are thought to contribute to difficulties in perceiving emotional expressions. Individuals with BPD and demographically matched healthy controls completed a task assessing the recognition of happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions at two intensities. Patients with BPD demonstrated comparable performance on the recognition of very happy and very sad facial expression but were significantly less accurate on neutral expressions. Patients with BPD were also significantly worse in recognizing mildly happy facial expressions, however the severity of current depressive symptoms intervened this relationship. There was evidence that perceptual biases within BPD are unique from mood-congruent biases typically found in major depressive disorder. The findings advance research on the topic of emotion perception in BPD and suggest important new lines of investigation that may be useful for delineating the nature of emotion dysregulation in BPD.

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Previous research on the relationship between emotion and attention has focused primarily on attention to emotionally valenced stimuli; trait anxiety and attentional biases for threat; or the relationship between emotion and attention in clinical contexts. Few studies have investigated the effect of emotion on attentional processing irrespective of the valence of the stimuli that is being attended. However, such studies are important as they shed light on issues central to emotions theory such as whether the experience of discrete emotions is associated with distinct patterns of attentional processing. In this thesis six experiments and one correlational study are described. The experimental studies investigate whether the experience of discrete emotions - specifically amusement, happiness, sadness and fear - influence attentional processing in comparison to a neutral condition. Film clips, emotional images and music were used to elicit a target emotional state. A modified version of the Attention Network Test (ANT) was used to assess three forms of attention – phasic alerting, covert exogenous orienting and executive attention. The correlational study required participants to complete a set of emotion-related questionnaires including the Basic Emotion Scale (BES) and to perform the ANT. The results suggest that: i) fear reduces executive attention costs, ii) sadness reduces intrinsic alerting, but does not influence alerting, orienting or executive attention, iii) amusement and happiness do not differentially influence alerting, orienting or executive attention, iv) individual differences in the tendency to experience high arousal negative emotions are associated with phasic alerting, i.e. faster mobilisation of attentional resources in response to an impending stimulus and v) exogenous orienting of attention may be impervious to the influence of emotion, at least in context of neutrally valenced stimuli. Results relating to anxiety, emotion regulation and attention network performance are also discussed. Taken together these findings provide only limited support for the broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998) of positive emotions. Amusement and happiness did not result in broadening (as assessed by executive attention costs) in the present studies. An attentional narrowing effect was found for fear but not for sadness. It is proposed that fear, but not sadness, facilitates inhibition and reduces executive attention costs, indicative of more focused attention. The results here also suggest a relationship between negative emotions characterised by high arousal and phasic alerting – an aspect of attention which has received little coverage in emotions research to date. Implications relating to the use of the ANT as a measure of attentional performance, and the challenges associated with manipulating emotion in a lab setting are discussed.

An aim of this research was to gain prevalence rates of emotional abuse (EA) and emotional neglect (EN) in a community based adolescent sample. This exploratory research also attempted to determine the impact of EA, EN and a combination of the two (emotional maltreatment; EM) on adolescent’s emotion regulation (ER). The impact of temperament, gender and age was also considered, along with the adolescent’s subsequent quality of life ratings. Method: A total of 540 adolescents (mean age 14 years) were recruited through their secondary schools, and completed the following questionnaires: the EN and EA subtests of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein & Fink, 1994); the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire – Short Form (EATQ – SF; Ellis & Rothbart, 1999); the Basic Emotions Scale (BES; Power, 2006); the Regulation of Emotions Questionnaire (REQ; Phillips & Power, 2007) and the Kid Screen -10 item Health Questionnaire for Children and Young People (Ravens-Sieberer et al., 2005). Results: Prevalence rates of EA and EN were reported. Differences were detected between EA and EN in terms of how they affect experiences of basic emotions and how they impact on ER, even after controlling for temperament. Only EA was associated with aggression, whereas both EA and EN were associated with depressive mood and reduced quality of life. Conclusions: EA and EN are different maltreatment experiences which have different detrimental effects on the individual, therefore requiring different interventions.

This thesis examines the role of emotion in face recognition, using measures of the visual scanpath as indicators of recognition. There are two key influences of emotion in face recognition: the emotional expression displayed upon a face, and the emotional feelings evoked within a perceiver in response to a familiar person. An initial set of studies examined these processes in healthy participants. First, positive emotional expressions were found to facilitate the processing of famous faces, and negative expressions facilitated the processing of novel faces. A second set of studies examined the role of emotional feelings in recognition. Positive feelings towards a face were also found to facilitate processing, in both an experimental study using newly learned faces and in the recognition of famous faces. A third set of studies using healthy participants examined the relative influences of emotional expression and emotional feelings in face recognition. For newly learned faces, positive expressions and positive feelings had a similar influence in recognition, with no presiding role of either dimension. However, emotional feelings had an influence over and above that of expression in the recognition of famous faces. A final study examined whether emotional valence could influence covert recognition in developmental prosopagnosia, and results suggested the patients process faces according to emotional valence rather than familiarity per se. Specifically, processing was facilitated for studied-positive faces compared to studied-neutral and novel faces, but impeded for studied-negative faces. This pattern of findings extends existing reports of a positive-facilitation effect in face recognition, and suggests there may be a closer relationship between facial familiarity and emotional valence than previously envisaged. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to models of normal face recognition and theories of covert recognition in prosopagnosia.