abstract: Previous studies have established a link between parenting style (e.g. authoritarian, authoritative, permissive) and depression in children and adolescents. Parenting factors are also implicated in the development of emotion regulation. There is a gap in the literature, however, concerning perceptions of parenting in relation to adult depression. The current study examined the effect of parenting on reported adult depressive symptoms. Of interest was the role of emotion regulation strategies in this relationship. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, and the sample consisted of 302 adults (125 males, 177 females) ranging in age from 18 to 65. Measures of how participants were parented by their mothers and fathers, emotion regulation strategies most frequently utilized, and current depressive symptoms were collected using an online survey. The emotion regulation strategy, positive reappraisal, was found to moderate the relation between maternal authoritative parenting and depression. Permissive parenting was also significantly predictive of depression, but catastrophizing fully mediated only the relation between maternal permissive parenting and depressive symptoms. Authoritarian parenting was unrelated to depression and emotion regulation in this study. The findings of this study indicate that the effects of how an individual was parented may persist into adulthood. Implications of these findings and future directions for further research are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Psychology 2013

abstract: Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security has become an increasingly invasive, cumbersome, and expensive process. Fraught with tension and discomfort, "airport security" is a dirty phrase in the popular imagination, synonymous with long lines, unimpressive employees, and indignity. In fact, the TSA and its employees have featured as topic and punch line of news and popular culture stories. This image complicates the TSA's mission to ensure the nation's air travel safety and the ways that its officers interact with passengers. Every day, nearly two million people fly domestically in the United States. Each passenger must interact with many of the approximately 50,000 agents in airports. How employees and travelers make sense of interactions in airport security contexts can have significant implications for individual wellbeing, personal and professional relationships, and organizational policies and practices. Furthermore, the meaning making of travelers and employees is complexly connected to broad social discourses and issues of identity. In this study, I focus on the communication implications of identity and emotional performances in airport security in light of discourses at macro, meso, and micro levels. Using discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), I construct the historical and discursive landscape of airport security, and via participant observation and various types of interviews, demonstrate how officers and passengers develop and perform identity, and the resulting interactional consequences. My analysis suggests that passengers and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) perform three main types of identities in airport security contexts--what I call Stereotypical, Ideal, and Mindful--which reflect different types and levels of discourse. Identity performances are intricately related to emotional processes and occur dynamically, in relation to the identity and emotional performances of others. Theoretical implications direct attention to the ways that identity and emotional performances structure interactions, cause burdensome emotion management, and present organizational actors with tension, contradiction, and paradox to manage. Practical implications suggest consideration of passenger and TSO emotional wellbeing, policy framing, passenger agency, and preferred identities. Methodologically, this dissertation offers insight into discourse tracing and challenges of embodied "undercover" research in public spaces. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication Studies 2013

Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-02T00:00:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_10810_Hamilton Rivera Flor20171019-95619.pdf: 4725252 bytes, checksum: 16042ed4abfc5b07268db9f41baa2a83 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-17 / Automated reading and analysis of human emotion has the potential to be a powerful tool to develop a wide variety of applications, such as human-computer interaction systems, but, at the same time, this is a very difficult issue because the human communication is very complex. Humans employ multiple sensory systems in emotion recognition. At the same way, an emotionally intelligent machine requires multiples sensors to be able to create an affective interaction with users. Thus, this Master thesis proposes the development of a multisensorial system for automatic emotion recognition. The multisensorial system is composed of three sensors, which allowed exploring different emotional aspects, as the eye tracking, using the IR-PCR technique, helped conducting studies about visual social attention; the Kinect, in conjunction with the FACS-AU system technique, allowed developing a tool for facial expression recognition; and the thermal camera, using the FT-RoI technique, was employed for detecting facial thermal variation. When performing the multisensorial integration of the system, it was possible to obtain a more complete and varied analysis of the emotional aspects, allowing evaluate focal attention, valence comprehension, valence expressions, facial expression, valence recognition and arousal recognition. Experiments were performed with sixteen healthy adult volunteers and 105 healthy children volunteers and the results were the developed system, which was able to detect eye gaze, recognize facial expression and estimate the valence and arousal for emotion recognition, This system also presents the potential to analyzed emotions of people by facial features using contactless sensors in semi-structured environments, such as clinics, laboratories, or classrooms. This system also presents the potential to become an embedded tool in robots to endow these machines with an emotional intelligence for a more natural interaction with humans. Keywords: emotion recognition, eye tracking, facial expression, facial thermal variation, integration multisensorial

The research programme had three principal objectives. First, the evaluation and extension of the extant conceptual framework pertaining to motivational music in exercise settings. Second, the development of a valid instrument for assessing the motivational qualities of music: The Brunel Music Rating Inventory-2 (BMRI-2). Third, to test the effects of motivational and oudeterous (lacking in both motivational and de-motivational qualities) music in an externally-valid setting. These objectives were addressed through 4 studies. First, a series of open-ended interviews were conducted with exercise leaders and participants (N = 13), in order to investigate the characteristics and effects of motivational music in the exercise setting. The data were content analysed to abstract thematic categories of response. These categories were subsequently evaluated in the context of relevant conceptual frameworks. Subsequently, a sample of 532 health-club members responded to a questionnaire that was designed to assess the perceived characteristics of motivational music. The responses were analysed across age groups, gender, frequency of attendance (low, medium, high), and time of attendance (morning, afternoon, evening). The BMRI-2 was developed in order to address psychometric weaknesses that were associated with its forbear, the BMRI. A refined item pool was created which yielded an 8-item instrument that was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis. A single-factor model demonstrated acceptable fit indices across three different pieces of music, two samples of exercise participants, and both sexes. The BMRI-2 was used to select 20 pieces of motivational music, which were delivered in a health club gymnasium. It was found that health club members (N = 112) exercised for longer under the condition of motivational music as opposed to oudeterous music (the club’s typical output); however, no differences were noted in terms of affective response. (Jun 2004)

Recent developments in social neuroscience have stirred up increased interest within the bioethical debate (for a review see: Specker et al. 2014). Moral enhancement is a concept that directly embodies the idea of making brain science work for the social and moral good. In recent ethical discussions about biomedical means of moral enhancement, scholars have focused on so called ‘direct means of moral enhancement,’ discussing the ethical permissibility of modifying the emotional underpinnings of moral behaviour (Douglas, 2008; 2013; Persson and Savulescu, 2008; Savulescu and Persson, 2012). However, critics have argued that such modification only seems like moral enhancement, that behavioural modification is not ‘true’ moral enhancement, for the reason that it changes behaviours without making agents better moral agents. Critics have also noted that it can undermine freedom (e.g. Harris, 2011; see also: Douglas, 2014). This thesis addresses the ethical issues relating to enhancement. In the first part of this work I consider conceptual issues surrounding the concept of moral enhancement and argue that moral enhancement is plausible if we adjust our expectations to match those we have of cognitive enhancement. I examine the difference between pro-sociality and morality, and argue that an increase in empathy and reduction in anger cannot be seen as straightforward moral enhancements. The second part examines the objections related to moral disagreement, medicalization and narrative identity. The third part of this work focuses of the issues related to freedom and agency. I argue that voluntary direct emotion modulation, if embedded in appropriate reflection, is a prima facie desirable way of moral enhancement.

Using ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, this project explores the extent to which race, class, and gender shape the socialization that Black women receive about their emotions and attitudes in a college bridge program. It unpacks the ways that dominant emotion cultures can inform the emotional socialization practices of a college bridge program in ways that resist and reproduce larger cultural narratives about Black women. To operationalize this emotional socialization, I introduce a concept called emotional respectability, which suggests that emotional reactions and demeanor must always align with the larger emotion cultures and goals of institutions such as family and education. The data presented in this project suggests that through vehicles of family, emotional respectability, and discipline, the program provides academic preparation alongside a more invisible curriculum related to emotional socialization which encourages the resistance and reproduction of larger cultural narratives about Black women, especially with regard to emotion.

Recent policy analysis has had a growing interest in examining the everyday practices of policy work. Despite this, conceptions of what policy can and should encompass tend to be focused on its tangible outputs and products, in particular the texts and documents of policy and governance. Policy’s legitimacy is commonly considered to rest on its participants’ ability to make rational decisions motivated not by private reasons but by the public good. This has had serious implications for scholars’ ability to discuss the non-purposive, nonverbal and non-rational content in policy work. This thesis presents an ethnographic study of emotion in the context of policy work. Starting from informants’ own understandings of what emotion means in policy and politics, it focuses on a fifteen month period in the policy practices of a Scottish NGO and its stakeholders and participants. From the perspective of a participant observer policy worker, it uses observation, documents, and interviews to explore the way traditionally “rational” models of governance based on apparently objective knowledge and other non-rational, “caring” ways of knowing are brought to bear upon policy work through detailed examination of practice. Analysis of these practices begins by examining the way that informants described the anxieties caused by competing understandings of “good” governance. Emotion and rationality were considered mutually exclusive but equally essential components of policy making. This thesis proposes that the way these anxieties were managed by the Partnership’s policy participants was to split these incommensurable expectations of governance between two self-identifying groups: activists such as community organisers and professionals such as civil servants. Splitting knowledge in this way helped the wider policy making community to maintain their own sense of legitimacy and moral integrity while making use of “dangerous” knowledge.

This study explores an emancipatory politics of being human by asking what is at stake for a world predicated on the human being as subject. I commence with a critique of modernity and its tenet of human exceptionalism as the logical basis for our separation from social, ecological, and material others. Inextricable from these others, humans, I argue, are assemblages that merit representation as such. I demonstrate this by recruiting two human faculties conventionally considered evidence for both our human exceptionalism, or separation from perceived others, and its correlate of subjectivity: memory and emotion. I then demonstrate how even emotion and memory, as supposed wellsprings of subjectivity, in effect undermine the very premise of it in light of their assemblaged nature. I situate this study in Mauritania, where I investigate the politics and spatialities of slavery and abolition. There, I demonstrate how memories, emotions, and the humans that experience them are both consituents and products of human-environment assemblages. I then reveal both the discursive and material repercussions of remembering, feeling, and representing the world as subjects separate from this world. Finally, I suggest alternative avenues for geographic research in pursuit of a politics of being human beyond the human being as subject.

Objective: The Exeter Model is an integrative systemic-behavioural and systemic-empathic couple therapy for treating people with depression. ‘Attachment narratives’ is a component of the systemic-empathic approach, which seeks to help the couple understand how past relationships impact on the current relationship with the aim of rebuilding trust and security between the couple. This study sought to examine how attachment narratives in this Model are used by therapists. Method: Narrative Analysis was employed to explore attachment narratives in three couples who had completed therapy in an outpatient clinic where one member of the couple had been referred with depression. Results: Analysis highlighted four specific ways in which therapists used attachment narratives. These consisted of: therapist enabled stories of past relationships to be foregrounded; attachment theory employed to build hypothesis about attachment styles based on past relationships; therapist helped the couple understand how attachment styles maintain unhelpful cycles of relating and introduced alternative relationship narratives enabling improved trust and security. Analysis also demonstrated the structuring of these attachment narratives across the therapy sessions. Conclusion: This study shows that through the therapist paying attention to attachment styles, awareness of unhelpful cycles of relating within couples can be highlighted, and adjustments to how the couple can relate to each other suggested. This exploratory study serves to better inform the use of the Exeter Model.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / David A. Gustafson / Current research involving vocal emotion detection has taken a variety of different approaches, and has found certain acoustic attributes to characterize different emotional states. While there have been improvements in classification over the past few years, computer classification is not nearly as accurate as human classification. This paper proposes the existence of an attribute that has not been examined, which can be used as a measure for detecting emotion in human vocal samples. It is shown that the new infrasonic attribute is significant when examining agitated emotions. Therefore, it can be used to help improve vocal emotion detection.