The way that emotions are processed in the brain has been widely debated. The two leading hypotheses are the cognitive appraisal viewpoint (Lazarus, 1982) and the affective primacy hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980). The former argues that higher cortical structures are needed to evaluate affective stimuli whereas the latter asserts that humans can use information only processed at the subcortical level to influence behavior. The current study tested the presence of this subcortical pathway by using an affective priming task developed by Murphy and Zajonc (1993). Happy and angry faces were presented for 4 ms before the presentation of a neutral stimulus (Chinese Ideograph) that participants were asked to rate based on how much they liked each one. Individuals do not report conscious awareness of primes presented at this suboptimal speed. In a young adult sample, participants rated ideographs preceded by happy primes significantly higher than those preceded by angry primes. Also, the priming effect was only observed in participants who reported a high positive mood. Next, when primes were presented in the left or right hemifield priming was only found in the right hemifield, and was driven by increased ratings for ideographs preceded by happy primes. Patients with epilepsy who have undergone a temporal lobectomy provide a unique opportunity to study emotional processing. In this procedure, not only is the seizure focus (typically the hippocampus) removed, but the amygdala and surrounding areas of the mesial temporal lobe are removed as well. Nine patients post right temporal lobectomy and three patients post left temporal lobectomy completed the study and did not show an effect of priming. However, 21 pre-surgical epilepsy patients were found to give higher liking ratings to ideographs preceded by angry primes as compared to those preceded by happy primes. Overall, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis however they also suggest that patients with temporal lobe dysfunction may process emotional stimuli differentially from controls. In this population, ideographs preceded by angry primes were rated as more liked than those preceded by happy primes. Directions for future studies to clarify the role of the amygdala in emotional processing are discussed. / text

Selective attention has been studied extensively and it is shown, for example, that individuals with conditions such as anxiety show attention bias to threat-related stimuli. It has been proposed that humans are predisposed or that it is naturally adaptive to selectively attend to emotional stimuli (Lang, 2000). Similarly, LeDoux (1996) and others have proposed limbic brain networks allowing for quick and automatic, but sometimes inaccurate, processing of emotion which bypasses primary cortical areas. Along these lines, automatic attention bias to subliminal image cues in an adapted Posner Covert Attention Task was examined in the current study. A sample of 64 participants was used in each of three separate experiments to examine how individuals were cued subliminally by negative or positive emotional vs. neutral images and the modulation of covert attention by emotion. Due to automatic or motivated attention to emotionally salient stimuli, participants were expected to be facilitated in task performance by negative and positive emotional image cues, relative to neutral cues. Further, state anxiety and depression were expected to impact performance on emotional cueing as well. As expected in Experiment 1, subliminal images produced significant covert attentional cueing and only negative image cues compared to neutral ones produced response time (RT) reduction by valid cueing across both cue-target delay conditions. Further, cueing differences between neutral and negative images were seen only at short delays, supporting differential subliminal processing of emotional cues in attentional paradigms and supporting previous evidence of unconscious fear processing and specialized automatic fear networks. Moreover, in Experiment 2, when delays following subliminal cues were extended further, emotional cues did not differentially modulate covert attention, suggesting that subliminal emotional cueing seems to occur more immediately. Positive subliminal imagery in Experiment 3 was largely unsuccessful in differentially modulating covert attention compared to neutral cues, suggesting that positive information is either not effective in modulating covert attention or occurs over similar immediate time durations as negative cues in Experiment 1. Finally, the presence of self-reported state anxiety and depression affected task performance, especially in Experiment 1 negative for subliminal discrimination of negative vs. neutral image cues. Overall, the current study adds to the research literature which demonstrates that emotional information, especially negative imagery processed at short intervals, can be processed below awareness to modulate attention in a different manner than less salient neutral stimuli and this modulation is further influenced by state anxiety or depressive symptomatology. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

Facial expressions can be reliable markers of emotion, and represent an important source of social information. Consequently, the ability to judge facial expressions accurately is essential for successful interpersonal interactions. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder in which social difficulties are common. Past research has suggested that facial emotion recognition may be disturbed in AN, although the precise nature of this disturbance is unclear. The current study aimed to further investigate emotion recognition in AN by comparing 12 women with AN to 21 women who were constitutionally thin (CT) on the Facial Expression Recognition Test, an established computerized test of facial emotion recognition. Still photographs of faces displaying different emotional expressions and neutral expressions were presented to participants via computer screen. Participants were required to decide which emotion each face displayed from several choices. AN subjects responded faster than CT subjects to the facial emotion stimuli, regardless of which emotion was displayed. However, AN subjects did not differ from CT subjects on overall accuracy, accuracy for different emotion categories or misclassifications. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive style of individuals with AN, recent models of socio-emotional processing, and issues of methodology.

Depth of client experiencing has been associated with positive therapeutic outcomes across theoretical orientations. Experiencing describes a particular mode of cognitive-affective processing in which clients use internal felt experience as the basis for self-examination and the resolution of personally significant issues. Given evidence that eating disorders are associated with particular disruptions of cognitive-affective processing, it is likely that experiencing plays a role in the successful treatment of eating pathology. However, no study to date has examined the relationship between experiencing and outcome in eating disorder treatment. The purposes of the current study were to examine depth of client experiencing during cognitive-behavioral treatment for eating disorders and to investigate the relationship between experiencing and outcome. Regression analyses suggested no significant relationship between depth of experiencing and outcome. However, results indicated that a restricted range of experiencing occurred during the treatment, which may have limited the possibility of detecting a relationship. A number of factors that may have contributed to the restricted range of experiencing in the sample are considered and discussed.

There are substantial data exploring the link between religiosity and health, yet there is no consensus regarding the appropriate measurement tool for assessing religiosity in health psychology settings. The purpose of this study was to identify a set of items that could serve as a reliable and valid proxy measure of religiosity. Participants included 251 (M=19.02; range = 17-25) young adults who completed self-report measures of religiosity (Intrinsic-Extrinsic/Revised, Quest Scale, Faith Maturity Scale), psychological distress (SCL-90-R), and personality (NEOPI-R). Individual item pools for religiosity were developed by identifying significant correlations between each of the religiosity measures and the SCL-90-R items. Exploratory factor analyses and item-level analyses were conducted and convergent and discriminant validity were examined for each proposed measure. A group of items were identified that were associated with previously validated measures of religiosity. These religiosity measures were also associated with the personality domains of Openness to Experience and Agreeableness but were not associated with Neuroticism. There was insufficient evidence, however, to conclude that the proposed measures could serve as true proxy measures of religiosity as they were more strongly associated with Neuroticism than the religiosity measures from which they were derived. The results of this study underscore the importance of the religiosity construct to health-related outcomes, yet much work remains to delineate the optimal means of measuring the construct and the specific pathways by which religiosity may exert its influence on both mental and physical health.

Elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines are implicated in the pathogenesis of major depression. Human and animal studies have shown that pro-inflammatory cytokines can induce a behavioural repertoire of symptoms collectively referred to as 'sickness behaviours', which include cognitive and mood symptoms, social withdrawal and sleep disturbance. When likened to clinical depression, these symptoms appear to be strikingly similar. Moreover, subsets of depressed patients have raised inflammatory markers, 30-50% of patients receiving cytokine treatment in the form of interferon-α (IFN-α) therapy develop depressive symptoms, and significantly higher rates of depression are associated with chronic inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Converging evidence has led to the hypothesis that chronic, low-grade inflammation could lead to more persistent alterations in neuropsychological function that might be instrumental in the pathophysiology of depression. However, the mechanisms for this potential modulation of mood and cognitive function are unclear. The current thesis therefore aimed to enhance understanding of the neuropsychological underpinnings of the link between inflammation and depression. Negative emotional processing biases are well-recognised in the aetiology of depression; however potential inflammation-induced alterations in emotional processing remain unexplored. Thus, a series of studies were conducted using human models of immune system activation to examine neuropsychological function. The first study demonstrated that IFN-α treatment in patients with hepatitis C produced negative biases in emotional categorisation, attentional vigilance and a specific effect of enhanced recognition of disgust. The subsequent study found a specific effect of false discrimination of disgusted faces in a healthy volunteer model of inflammatory challenge with typhoid vaccination, however further effects on emotional processing were limited. Typhoid vaccination was also shown to disrupt sleep continuity in ways that may be relevant to depression in the third study. Negative biases were not evident, however, in patients with RA. The final study found that neuropsychological effects of the atypical antidepressant tianeptine were similar to effects following IFN-α, which may be of interest considering tianeptine's purported serotonergic re-uptake enhancing properties and the effects of cytokines on serotonin metabolism. This thesis provides intriguing, yet preliminary, evidence that inflammatory pathways may modulate emotional processing - a mechanism which, if supported, may have future implications for improved identification and treatment of subgroups of depressed patients.

A hypothesised association between personality and emotional processing was investigated within the framework of Cloninger’s psychobiological theory. According to this model, personality development is based on the interaction between two domains: temperament and character. A non-experimental, correlational design was applied, using existing data from a sample of 630 South African first year psychology students who completed the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and the University of Pennsylvania Computerised Neuropsychological Test Battery (PennCNP). Canonical correlation analysis yielded significant associations between character variables Self-Directedness, Cooperativeness, and Self-Transcendence as measured and defined by the TCI and items from Penn Facial Memory Test (CPF) and Penn Emotion Discrimination Task (ED40), respectively. In this exploratory study participants lower in Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness were more efficient in facial recognition compared to participants higher in these dimensions. Conversely, individuals higher in Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness were more accurate in the discrimination of happy and sad emotions, respectively. Participants with higher Self-Transcendence performed better in facial recognition but were less accurate in discriminating between happy and sad faces. These results affirm the importance of further research into the association between temperament and character and emotional processing. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2013 / Psychology / unrestricted

Growing bodies of research suggests associations between regular physical activity (PA) and emotional health. One promising mechanism of this association is a cognitive process called cognitive control. Emerging evidence links regular PA to better cognitive control in young adult populations (e.g., Themanson, Pontifex & Hillman, 2008; Winneke et al., 2011). However, almost no research has examined associations between regular PA and cognitive control task performance with emotionally-charged stimuli. Such tasks have the potential to help detect cognitive benefits of regular PA and may more effectively elicit cognitive processes related to emotional functioning than do emotionally-neutral tasks. The current study investigated whether cognitive control is a mechanism that links regular PA and emotional functioning in young adults, particularly when emotional processing in incorporated. In other words, cognitive control, particularly in the face of emotional distractors, was expected to mediate the association between regular PA and emotional health. Participants in this study comprised 115 young adults from an undergraduate population who responded to self-report measures of PA level and emotional functioning, completed neutral and emotional cognitive control tasks, and participated in a fitness assessment. Bootstrapping to assess indirect effects revealed that contrary to hypotheses, performance on neutral and emotional cognitive control tasks did not mediate the association between PA level and emotional functioning. Regular PA was not associated with better neutral or emotional cognitive control, nor did it relate significantly to emotional functioning. Further, neither neutral nor emotional cognitive control showed a relationship with emotional functioning. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Risk factors for depression have long been identified. However, it remains unclear what are the mechanisms whereby these risk factors lead to depression. Therefore the current research examined cognitive and neurophysiological functioning in a sample of high risk vs. low risk never-depressed young adults. Risk for depression was defined by high neuroticism (N) scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). Results indicated that, compared to low N volunteers, high N volunteers show widespread negative biases across emotional processing tasks, including self-referent words categorization and memory, facial expression recognition, and emotion potentiated startle. The neural substrates of these negative biases were further illustrated by our brain-imaging experiments using fMRI. In these studies, high N is associated with increased neural signals for negative self-referent personality attributes and fearful facial expressions in a distributed network known to be involved in emotional processing, including the fusiform-amygdala circuitry, anterior cingulate, and the superior parietal cortex. By contrast, these neurocognitive biases did not seem to be accompanied by impairments in more global executive function or disturbances in biological response to stress measured by awakening salivary cortisol. Consistent with the idea that emotional processing biases represent key mechanisms underlying vulnerability to depression, our final longitudinal study showed that depression symptoms in high N volunteers were well predicted (up to 91%) at an 18 month follow up by a combination of these negative biases and stressful life events. Taken together, the current investigations therefore suggest that neurocognitive biases in emotional processing are trait vulnerability markers for depression prior to illness onset.

This thesis reports five studies investigating cognitive processes in eating disorder (ED) psychopathology. Chapter 1 describes background information about EDs. Chapter 2 reviews cognitive theories of Anorexia Nervosa (AN), and discusses how integration of a process-focused framework, originally applied to depression, may advance under-standing of maintaining mechanisms in AN. Chapter 3 reports a focus group with AN patients that explores features of the subjective experience of the disorder. Findings highlight ruminative, avoidant and discrepancy-based thinking: features that are suggested to be indicative of a ‘conceptualising’ mode of processing. Patients’ reports suggest positive effects of a body-mindfulness group, which encourages an alternative, ‘experiential’ mode of processing. Chapter 4 presents data on rumination, experiential avoidance, negative self-beliefs and underlying assumptions in an analogue population and shows elevated levels for ED-concerned individuals on all of these measures. Chapter 5 examines mode of processing effects (conceptual vs. experiential) in an analogue population. Findings show differential stress-induced emotional reactivity, particularly in the ED-concerned group. Chapter 6 investigates mode of processing effects in a sample of AN patients. Results confirm that modes of processing have differential effects on stress-induced emotional reactivity. Chapter 7 presents data from a 10-month follow-up of AN patients. This study shows that changes in ED-symptoms are associated with changes in rumination, avoidance and aspects of schematic thinking. Differential stress-induced reactivity is associated with outcome. Finally, chapter 8 discusses theoretical and clinical implications of this research and the mode of processing framework in EDs, particularly AN, as well describing how future investigations may continue integrating this framework to the study of ED psycho-pathology. The current findings suggest that both cognitive-affective content and the underlying mental processing activity need consideration in cognitive models of EDs.