Habitual suppression of emotions has been linked to adverse consequences such as avoidant attachment, lower social support, and reduced relationship closeness (e.g. John & Gross, 2004). However, accumulating evidence that expression and suppression can be both adaptive and maladaptive in different contexts suggests the importance of flexibility in emotional regulation. The present study examined the mechanisms underlying the only laboratory measure of emotional flexibility: the Expressive Flexibility (EF) task (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004). This measure has been linked to adjustment over a one-year period, especially in the context of social threat, and among people who have experienced higher levels of life stress (Westphal, Seivert & Bonanno, 2010). We sought to test whether EF is related to physiological recovery from stress in the immediate term. Participants completed questionnaire measures, the EF Task and a stressful public speaking task. In the EF task, participants were filmed suppressing, exaggerating, and not altering facial reactions to negative and positive pictures. A “balanced EF” score was calculated reflecting their ability to suppress and exaggerate with equal success. Regression analyses used EF scores as predictors for psychophysiological indices of stress (SCR and HR) during and after the public-speaking task. The interaction of EF and social safeness (SSPS) was predictive of the magnitude of SCR recovery, such that for people with lower EF, higher SSPS is predictive of greater SCR recovery. These results converge with previous findings on the suggestion that EF is related to resilience, especially in the context of adversity.

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For offenders returning to society at record levels, securing work looms as one of the most crucial factors in successful reentry. Work hope is a construct that seeks to measure the relative presence of goals of securing desired work, thoughts about how to achieve those goals, and agency to achieve those goals, even in the presence of obstacles. This study sought to examine relationships among work hope, the socioemotional variables of attachment, emotion regulation, physical, relational, and workplace victimization, and coping, and the career-related variables of perceptions of career-related barriers and complexity level of career goals. The sample comprised cohorts from eight different correctional centers (N = 111, 72.1% male, M = 37.97, SD = 10.02), who participated in three waves of a longitudinal study. Four path models were run to model the relationship among work hope and the socioemotional variables, but none of the models satisfied all designated fit indices. The model with the combination of the most adequate fit and theoretical support found significant direct effects from Time 1 anxious attachment, but not avoidant attachment, to Time 1 difficulties with emotion regulation. Significant direct effects were found from Time 1 avoidant attachment and difficulties with emotion regulation, but not anxious attachment, to Time 3 avoidant coping. Significant direct effects were also found from Time 3 avoidant coping to Time 3 work hope. Relational, physical, and workplace victimization were not significantly related to work hope or other socioemotional variables. This study also found that work hope was significantly related to perceptions of career-related barriers (r = -.30). Overall, study findings add to the construct validity of work hope and highlight the importance of addressing socioemotional variables such as attachment, emotion regulation, and coping in preparing offenders for successful reentry and obtaining work.

Early social interactions are important to developing and maintaining positive social relationships in childhood. It is well understood that the social development is dependent on a number of developmental changes in both cognition and emotion. While most research has focused on cognitive and emotional models of social behaviors separately, a consideration for research investigating social behaviors is to examine cognitive processing and emotional processing concurrently. The current work focuses on the relationship between the executive processes involved in cognition and emotion regulation, and the influence on adaptive (social skills) and maladaptive (aggressive behavior) social behaviors. Specifically, the reformulated social behavioral model developed by Lemerise & Arsenio (2000) , as well as integrative model of social-cognitive-affective behavior (Beauchamp & Anderson, 2010) will guide this work and help specify the relationship between specific executive functions (working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), emotion regulation, and children’s social behaviors in middle childhood.

The social and emotional lives of people are highly interdependent. Incipient evidence suggests that attention may also play an essential role in determining one’s social and emotional well-being. Mindfulness, as a manner of attending, entails greater moment-to-moment awareness to internal and external events, and is thought to have both intra- and inter-personal benefits. Here a study of mindfulness training (MT) examined whether training mindful attention would improve emotion regulation in social contexts as indexed by neural, behavioral, and experience sampling measures. More specifically, 60 participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to either four brief (20 min.) MT sessions or a structurally-equivalent control procedure. Romantic partners of these participants also completed questionnaires and experience sampling measures. Findings across the variety of measures supported hypotheses that MT would benefit social emotion regulation. Relative to control participants, those in MT demonstrated greater early attention to facial expressions on an Emotional Go/No-Go task, as indexed by the N200, a neural marker of conflict monitoring. Response time and accuracy during this task revealed more sustained efficient discrimination of facial expressions for MT participants. During day-to-day social interactions, MT participants reported more positive and less negative emotion as well as less negative emotion lability from one interaction to the next. A mediation analysis found improved accuracy on the Emotional Go/No-Go task mediated the relation between MT and more positive emotion during daily social interactions. Given that social emotion regulation places unique demands on attention for which mindfulness appears well-suited, research on both topics can build from these findings to better understand both intra- and inter-personal benefits of MT.

The aim of the theoretical part of the thesis is emotional intelligence and the overview of changes in understanding this construct since its establishment. Furthermore, the thesis provides a summary of two significant models of emotional intelligence as well as a survey of existing means of its measurement and enumeration of studies focused on the connection between emotional intelligence and particular aspects of life. Finally, the theoretical part of the thesis explores the possibilities of developing emotional intelligence. The practical part uses quantitative research to analyse individual differences in emotional intelligence by comparing the levels of emotional intelligence between homosexual and heterosexual population. The findings revealed a significant difference between trait emotional intelligence of homosexual and heterosexual men. Moreover, the results also verify the difference in overall emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategy of emotion suppression between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The findings also support the claim that women have higher emotional intelligence than men and that the individuals who regard themselves as physically healthy have higher emotional intelligence than those who consider themselves as seriously ill. Keywords: Emotional intelligence,...

Toddler-aged children are expected to shift from being solely dependent on parents to regulate their emotion (e.g., Fox & Calkins, 2003) to being able to independently regulate their emotions (Calkins & Johnson, 1998). Mothers' responses to children's negative emotions are expected to influence this development. Children's temperamental negative reactivity was found to moderate the effect of mothers' socialization attempts on children's regulatory behaviors, as suggested by previous theoretical and empirical work (e.g., Putnam, Sanson, & Rothbart, 2002; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Specifically, highly negatively reactive children showed no correspondence between their mothers' attention-shifting strategies and their own attentionshifting regulation behaviors. This finding is consistent with the proposed process by which temperamentally reactive children become overaroused and unreceptive to mothers' socialization efforts (Hoffman, 1983; Scaramella & Leve, 2004). Lastly, children's reactivity did not moderate the effects of mothers' emotion-intensifying socialization on children's emotion-intensifying regulation behaviors, a finding which deserves further study.

In this study of preschool children and parents (N=64), we examined relations between two facets of parents' emotion socialization: direct and indirect socialization; three facets of children's emotional competence: emotion expression, regulation, and understanding; and their relations with children's social and emotional adjustment. Few associations were observed between indicators of parents' emotion socialization and among indicators of children's emotional competence, suggesting that these constructs are better understood as multi-faceted, rather than unitary processes. Additionally, aspects of children's emotional competence linked--both directly and indirectly--parents' emotion socialization behaviors and children's social and emotional adjustment. Results are discussed with regard to the role of parents' emotion socialization and children's emotional competence, especially emotion regulation, in children's adjustment during preschool.

The perception of and actual ability to control emotional responses during stressful, taxing situations are important to an individual’s well-being. Studies have shown that both low perceived control and a low actual ability for emotional control are related to internalizing and externalizing problems in youth. However, significant gaps in research exist in terms of testing theoretical predictions about how perceived and actual emotional control are associated with anxiety and aggressive behavior problems, particularly among adolescents. The first goal of this study was to examine two objective measures of actual control (i.e., vagal tone and vagal regulation) and their link with anxiety and aggressive behavior problems in youth ages 11-17 years. The second goal was to examine individual differences in youths’ ability to voluntarily control their heart rate and its association with youths’ perceived control and/or anxiety and aggressive behavior. The final goal was to expand upon Scott and Weems’ (2010) recent work by testing an adapted model of control using these two measures of actual emotional control. Eighty youth (aged 11-17 years; 51% female; 37.5% African American) and their primary caregivers participated in this study. Youth completed a physiological assessment in which they watched a relaxing video, rested quietly, increased and decreased their heart rate, and performed a mildly challenging cognitive task while their heart rate, skin conductance and body temperature were measured. Youth and their caregivers also completed questionnaires measuring youths’ anxiety, aggression, and perceived control. The results indicated that resting vagal tone (i.e., high frequency – heart rate variability) was negatively associated with anxiety symptoms (and perceived anxiety control) in this adolescent sample but not aggression. Conversely, anxiety (child-reported) and aggression (parent-reported) were both associated with a maladaptive vagal augmentation in response to a challenging cognitive task. The findings also suggested there were individual differences in youths’ heart rate control (but were better at increasing it) and that less change in increasing heart rate was related to more child-reported anxiety symptoms. However, the results did not provide support for differential of prediction of anxiety symptoms versus aggressive behavior problems between control profiles.