L'objectif de cette thèse, en conventionnement CIFRE, est de déterminer le rôle et la place des dimensions émotionnelles et socioaffectives dans et par un dispositif de formation à destination de managers. Ces dimensions ont été appréhendées par une approche biopsychosociale permettant d’envisager les émotions comme une pratique située, incarnée et social. Par le ressenti ou l’expression de ces dimensions, l’individu sociale s’expose à un triple rapport : à soi, aux autres et à une (in)capacité à se mettre en action. L’analyse par Théorisation ancrée a été privilégiée, dans une démarche empirique, inductive et itérative. Les principaux résultats indiquent l’importance de ces dimensions dans les dispositifs de formation. Un important travail émotionnel, individuel et collectif, les module et les met en scène. De plus, le rire, s’il présente des bénéfices certains pour les participants, favorise également un positionnement social des managers dans le groupe de formation et le groupe professionnel des managers. Enfin, l’intérêt constitue une émotion indispensable dans l’engagement en formation. / The objective of this thesis is to determine the role and the place of emotional and socioaffective dimensions in training system devised for managers. These dimensions were considered through a biopsychosocial approach that allowed us to regard emotions as a situated, embodied and social practice. By feeling or expressing these dimensions, the social individual is exposed to three relations: the self, to others and to the (in) ability to put him/herself into action. Grounded theory analysis was preferred, with an empirical, inductive and iterative approach. The main results indicate the importance of these dimensions in the training system. An important emotional work, both individual and collective, influences and feeds this system. In addition, laughter, if it has some benefits for participants, also fosters a social positioning of managers in the training group and the professional group of managers. Finally, interest constitutes a necessary emotion in the training engagement.

Direct social service workers face a variety of difficulties including low pay, limited upward mobility, role ambiguity, and emotional exhaustion. This study adds to the understanding of the complexities of front-line service work with an analysis of the storytelling of case managers working with Big Brothers Big Sisters. Interview participants describe a problem of “volunteer expectations,” which they define as related to the organizational storytelling of the program: the images that entice people to volunteer do not match actual volunteer experiences. I argue that glamorized storytelling through marketing and recruitment tactics creates unintended, negative consequences for volunteers and case managers. This project contributes to the understanding of social services, emotion work, and the American “helping” culture.

Facial expression has been used as a measure of pain in clinical and experimental studies. The Sociocommunications Model of Pain (T. Hadjistavropoulos, K. Craig, & S. Fuchs-Lacelle, 2004) characterizes facial movements during pain as both expressions of inner experience and communications to other people that must be considered in the social contexts in which they occur. While research demonstrates that specific facial movements may be outward manifestations of pain states, less attention has been paid to the extent to which contextual factors influence facial movements during pain. Experimenters are an inevitable feature of research studies on facial expression during pain and study of their social impact is merited. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of experimenter presence on participants’ facial expressions during pain. Healthy young adults (60 males, 60 females) underwent painful stimulation induced by a cold pressor in three social contexts: alone; alone with knowledge of an experimenter watching through a one-way mirror; and face-to-face with an experimenter. Participants provided verbal self-report ratings of pain. Facial behaviours during pain were coded with the Facial Action Coding System (P. Ekman, W. Friesen, & J. Hager, 2002) and rated by naïve judges. Participants’ facial expressions of pain varied with the context of the pain experience condition but not with verbally self-reported levels of pain. Participants who were alone were more likely to display facial actions typically associated with pain than participants who were being observed by an experimenter who was in another room or sitting across from them. Naïve judges appeared to be influenced by these facial expressions as, on average, they rated the participants who were alone as experiencing more pain than those who were observed. Facial expressions shown by people experiencing pain can communicate the fact that they are feeling pain. However, facial expressions can be influenced by factors in the social context such as the presence of an experimenter. The results suggest that facial expressions during pain made by adults should be viewed at least in part as communications, subject to intrapersonal and interpersonal influences, rather than direct read-outs of experience. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Depression in adolescents is a ubiquitous mental health problem presenting ambiguities, uncertainties, and diverse challenges in its conceptualization, presentation, detection, and treatment. Despite the plethora of research on adolescent depression, there exists a paucity of research in regards to obtaining information from the adolescents themselves. In a mixed method, cross-sectional study, adolescents (N= 332) in grades 8 and 11 provided their conceptions of depression. Adolescents' self-recognition of depression was examined in association with depressive symptomatology and reported pathways to talking to someone. Adolescents' social and emotional competence was also examined in association with severity of their depressive symptomatology. Developed categories and subcategories of adolescent depression were guided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) criteria for Major Depressive Episode (MDE) (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). Adolescents' definitions of depression were dominated by subjective, holistic interpretations and add new information and depth to the previous research on adolescent depression. Depressed Mood and Social Impairment were the core categories, both contained intricate subcategories. The frequencies of these constructs provide a map of the themes and subthemes that pervade adolescents' personal philosophies regarding adolescent depression. About half of the adolescents who self-recognized depression within two weeks (45%),qualify into screened depression (Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale -2" version [RADS-2];Reynolds, 2002) criteria based on the DSM-IV-TR for MDE (APA, 2000). However, this study's findings showed that the mean for screened Depression Total Score (RADS-2; Reynolds, 2002)was significantly higher in those adolescents who self-recognized versus those who did not self-recognize depression. The majority of lifetime self-recognizers of depression thought that they needed to talk to someone and reported that they talked to someone when feeling depressed. Poor Emotion Awareness was a strong contributor to increasing vulnerability to depressive symptomatology. This study provides new theoretical insights regarding the concept and detection of adolescent depression, and links between social and emotional competence and depressive symptomatology. These findings extend previous research (APA, 2000), provide new understanding to guide future research, and have direct implications for research, policy, and practice strategies aimed to better communicate with and help young people with and without depression. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

When people interact with each other, they not only listen to what the other says, they react to facial expressions, gaze direction, and head movement. Human-computer interaction would be enhanced in a friendly and non-intrusive way if computers could understand and respond to users’ body language in the same way. This thesis aims to investigate new methods for human computer interaction by combining information from the body language of the head to recognize the emotional and cognitive states. We concentrated on the integration of facial expression, eye gaze and head movement using soft computing techniques. The whole procedure is done in two-stage. The first stage focuses on the extraction of explicit information from the modalities of facial expression, head movement, and eye gaze. In the second stage, all these information are fused by soft computing techniques to infer the implicit emotional states. In this thesis, the frequency of head movement (high frequency movement or low frequency movement) is taken into consideration as well as head nods and head shakes. A very high frequency head movement may show much more arousal and active property than the low frequency head movement which differs on the emotion dimensional space. The head movement frequency is acquired by analyzing the tracking results of the coordinates from the detected nostril points. Eye gaze also plays an important role in emotion detection. An eye gaze detector was proposed to analyze whether the subject's gaze direction was direct or averted. We proposed a geometrical relationship of human organs between nostrils and two pupils to achieve this task. Four parameters are defined according to the changes in angles and the changes in the proportion of length of the four feature points to distinguish avert gaze from direct gaze. The sum of these parameters is considered as an evaluation parameter that can be analyzed to quantify gaze level. The multimodal fusion is done by hybridizing the decision level fusion and the soft computing techniques for classification. This could avoid the disadvantages of the decision level fusion technique, while retaining its advantages of adaptation and flexibility. We introduced fuzzification strategies which can successfully quantify the extracted parameters of each modality into a fuzzified value between 0 and 1. These fuzzified values are the inputs for the fuzzy inference systems which map the fuzzy values into emotional states.

The purpose of this doctoral dissertation was to explore the experiences of joy during Zumba exercise. A hermeneutic phenomenological methodology was employed to explore the essential structures or essence(s) of joy. Seven long-term Zumba patrons (one male, six females) participated in this study. Each participant engaged in three phenomenological interviews, observation by the principal investigator, and were invited to keep a journal of their Zumba experiences throughout the duration of the five-month study. One final focus group was conducted at the end of the individual interviews, which four participants attended. In addition, the principal investigator oriented to the phenomenon of joy in Zumba firsthand by experiencing weekly Zumba exercise classes for the period of one year. Three articles were constructed to present the findings from this research. The first article explores the visible, bodily forms and kinaesthetic feelings during Zumba exercise. Phenomenological analysis resulted in exploring joy through stomping, bouncing, and swaying experiences of e-motion. The second article explores somatic flow through an existential connection of body-other-world. Phenomenological analysis resulted in exploring somatic flow through rhythmical and effervescent connections via motions, gestures, postures, and felt connection. Finally, the third article explores the researcher’s bodily experiences while engaging in the phenomenological research process. Three experiential accounts are explored in this inquiry, including: participating in a Zumba exercise class; engaging in a phenomenological interview; and the process of writing and re-writing the experiences of joy. This doctoral research thus offers opportunities to sense and understand joy as a motile phenomenon during Zumba exercise classes and brings attention to the various ways joy may look, feel, and flow through felt connections of e-motion.

In this doctoral thesis, a culturally-sensitive couple therapy model was developed and empirically investigated. In particular, a Western-based couple therapy, Emotionally-Focused Couple Therapy (EFT), was modified to enhance the cultural relevancy of this model to the Japanese population. An extensive literature review was conducted to examine the status of psychotherapy and couple research in Japan, and cultural differences between Western and Japanese couples, with a particular emphasis on important couple variables, including emotional expression, communication, conflict resolution, and attachment. Study objectives included an empirical investigation into cultural differences on key relationship variables of trust, attachment, communication, and conflict resolution, and the use of these findings to guide adaptations of EFT to enhance cultural relevance, and an exploration of the adapted EFT model with three Japanese couples. This study is significant in that it is the first to empirically evaluate the cross-cultural validity of EFT. This dissertation consists of two studies that have been combined in one article for the purpose of publishing the document in a Japanese journal. Both studies were combined in one article for various reasons. First, study one findings are integral to the development of the culturally-sensitive EFT model that is empirically investigated in the second study. Second, the article included in this dissertation will be translated and prepared for publication in a Japanese journal. Including both studies in one article is important given the lack of familiarity in the Japanese research community about key relationship variables, and particularly their applicability to a couple therapy system (i.e., EFT), and their use to measure change in a couple therapy outcome study.

In this thesis I argue that emotion is integral to practical rationality, contrary to the dominant tradition that has held that emotions are irrational and dangerous disruptive influences that we’d be better off without. In Chapter 1 I argue that practical rationality consists in doing what one has most normative reason to do, and in Chapter 2 that an agent is practically rational to the extent that she responds to her reasons; this is how she guides her actions in line with the norm of doing what she has most reason to do. This can be done in ways other than by the employment of practical reasoning. In Chapter 3 I argue for a picture of practical reasoning that stands against the division of emotion and rationality. This account makes room for the overwhelming evidence that challenges the traditional view of emotions as the enemy of practical rationality. Chapter 4 gives a brief overview of the philosophical literature of emotions, and their place in practical rationality. In Chapter 5 I argue that emotions provide us with the necessary access to our reasons for action which we need in order to be able to respond to them, and thereby to be practically rational. Further, as I argue in Chapter 6, emotions play vital roles in the process of practical reasoning itself. Thus practical rationality would not be better off without emotion. In Chapter 7 I argue that we should distinguish between two types of incontinent action (acting against ones all things considered judgement about what one has most reason to do) and that one of these – weakness of will – is necessarily irrational, but the other – akrasia – is not. In Chapter 8 I apply my thesis to the question in the practical domain of what it means to ‘lose self-control’ in the context of killing in response to a provocation, which is a defence to murder. I argue that the ‘control’ that is lost is the regulative guiding control characteristic of the reason-responder. Understanding practical agency as reason-responsiveness, and understanding the role that emotions play within it as per my thesis, enables this coherent understanding. Thus I am arguing for neither a pro-emotion nor anti-emotion view of the role of emotion in practical rationality. Emotions should not be seen as either ‘for’ rationality nor ‘against’ rationality: they are simply part of rationality.

Emotion Regulation Group Therapy (ERGT) är en transdiagnostisk gruppbehandling för personer med svårigheter med känsloreglering och självskadebeteende. Nationella självskadeprojektet, som fört behandlingsmetoden till Sverige, rekommenderar att genusspecifika förhållningssätt utvecklas för att göra vården mer jämlik. Syftet med denna studie var att beskriva behandlarnas kliniska erfarenhet av ERGT och manliga patienter. Sex behandlare blev intervjuade. Metod för analys av intervjuerna var systematisk textkondensering. Resultat visade att behov av genusperspektiv i ERGT var störst i början av vårdkontakten då bedömning av svårigheter med känsloreglering och bedömning av förekomst av självskada sker. Det som kräver särskild medvetenhet är att män kan ha svårt att beskriva känslor och hur självskadebeteendet ofta är mer indirekt. Erfarenheten hos behandlare var att upplevelsen av olikheter minskade med tiden, då gruppen kunnat se bortom föreställningar och normer, att det svårighet med känsloreglering och självskadebeteendets funktion istället var det gemensamma.

How individuals process different affective cues, as well as how intensely they experience different emotions, may influence how efficient they are at engaging inhibitory control. To date, it is unclear if these influences differ among young adults with and without ADHD. The current study tested the variation in young adults’ inhibitory control to three affective cues (i.e., fear, happy, and neutral) in an Emotion Go/Nogo task. Results suggest better inhibitory control in response to more distinct cues (i.e., fear Nogo/happy Go). The order in which cues were presented also mattered, such that participants displayed enhanced inhibitory control when first presented with expressions that had similar valence. This task order was particularly helpful for inhibitory control engagement among young adults with ADHD. Furthermore, self-report measures suggest that young adults with ADHD were associated with higher levels of affect intensity. However, no additional relations were found in the processing of affective cues, affect intensity, and inhibitory control between young adults with and without ADHD. Results provide evidence for how affective cues and contexts differentially influence behavioral responses in young adults. Individuals with and without ADHD also appear to differ in the intensity with which they experience different emotions. Overall, the current study provides a framework for how to further explore how emotional cues and affect intensity influence inhibitory control.