abstract: Psychological theories often reduce descriptions of people’s emotional experiences to a small number of underlying dimensions that capture most of the variation in their responses. These underlying dimensions are typically uncovered by comparing the self-reported emotions of many individuals at one specific time point, to infer a single underlying structure of emotion for all people. However, theoretical work suggests that underlying dimensions uncovered in this way may not hold when modeling how people change over time. Individuals may differ not just in their typical score on a given dimension of emotion, but in what dimensions best characterize their patterns of emotional experience over time. In this study, participants described two emotional events per day for 35 days, and analyses compared individualized structures of emotion to those generated from many people at one point in time. Analyses using R-technique factor analysis, which compares many people at one time point, most often uncovered a two-factor solution corresponding to positivity and negativity dimensions - a solution well-established in the literature. However, analyses using P-technique factor analysis, which compares many emotional events for one person, uncovered a broader diversity of underlying dimensions. Individuals needed anywhere from one to five factors to best capture their self-reported emotions. Further, dimensions specifically related to romantic relationships were much more common when examining the experiences of individuals over time. This suggests that external factors, such as pursuing or being in a romantic relationship, might lead to a qualitative shift in how emotions are experienced. Research attempting to characterize emotion dynamics, including those attempting to help people shift or regulate their emotions, cannot assume that typical two dimensional structures of emotional experience apply to all people. Instead we must account for how individuals describe their own emotional experiences. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Psychology 2017

In recent years, mentoring has emerged as a research domain, however, the preponderance of mentoring research has been situated first, in the business or organizational settings and second, in the K-12 educational setting, focusing on protégé experiences, using quantitative survey instruments to collect data. Thus, mentoring research literature includes a paucity of formal studies in the arena of graduate education. Situated in the higher education setting, this study investigated the perspectives of faculty-mentors who provided mentoring to doctoral students who completed the doctoral degree, employing the qualitative research methodology known as phenomenology, as an orthogonal but complimentary epistemology to previous quantitative studies. Located specifically in the College of Education of a large research university, the study asked 262 College of Education doctoral graduates to nominate College of Education faculty who provided mentoring to them during their degree pursuit. A total of 59 faculty were nominated as mentors. Six of the most frequently nominated mentors participated in two semi-structured interviews (Berg, 2004). The interviews addressed the mentor's experience of the mentoring endeavor, seeking to gather a description of their lived experience (Creswell, 1998) of mentoring and the meanings (Cohen & Omery, 1994) they garnered from it. The interviews yielded several shared perspectives on mentoring, including: a Gratifying Perspective, an Intentional Perspective, an Idiographic Perspective, a Teleological Perspective, and a Dynamic Perspective. Other noteworthy concepts that emerged from the mentors' data were: values, motivations, symbiotic relationship, and contextual negotiation. Implications for mentoring theory and practice as well as mentor development were described. The study contributed to development of a fuller phenomenological understanding of the perspectives of faculty-mentors in a mentoring relationship with doctoral students.

No description available.

Intrusive thoughts are aversive, private thoughts that are unwanted but intrude into consciousness, and are a ubiquitous phenomenon that approximately 93% of the population experiences (Radomsky et. al., 2014). Obsessional thoughts are a key etiological component of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Cognitive behavioral models of OCD conceptualize intrusive thoughts and obsessive thoughts as the same phenomenon occurring on a spectrum, with obsessional thoughts being a particular type of intrusion that is integral to the development and maintenance of OCD (Moulding, 2014). However, there is little evidence to demonstrate this relationship. This study examined intrusive thoughts across stratified groups based on intrusion frequency using ecological momentary assessment. This exploratory study examined potential idiographic differences in reported experiences of people ranging from low to high levels of intrusive thought frequency. Personalized contemporaneous networks were constructed from participant data and examined for differences in topography, measures of centrality, and magnitude of relationships between nodes. These networks are visually distinct, providing a glimpse into a wide variety of ways in which participants experience and relate to their intrusive thoughts.

No description available.

The Patient-Centred Assessment of Symptoms and Activities (P-CASA) is a new idiographic, open-ended assessment that examines each individual patient’s symptoms within the context of his or her daily life. P-CASA asks patients for their most important activities, what interferes with these activities, and any coping strategies. This thesis presents the rationale and design of P-CASA and its first validation study. Sixty patients at the Pain and Symptom Management/Palliative Care Clinic of the BC Cancer Agency (Vancouver Island Centre) completed P-CASA and the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS), which is the current nomothetic assessment at the Clinic. The results demonstrated that P-CASA was not redundant with ESAS because it assessed (a) information about patients’ activities and coping strategies, which the ESAS does not; (b) all relevant cancer-related symptoms (not just pain or a fixed list); (c) co-occurring symptoms; (d) more specific details and different priorities about symptoms than in their ESAS. / Graduate

The aim of this thesis is to design and develop a polyphonic reanalysis instrument for analysis of school cultures, as a part of the efforts to understand and develop schools as organizations. The purpose of the new instrument is to achieve an extended possibility to highlight the values and motives underlying a school´s everyday work from the actors´ micro-oriented perspective. The concept of school culture refers to Gunnar Berg and his school development strategy of scope for action, which in turn can be understood as an empirically grounded development of Gerhard Arfwedson´s concept of school codex.  The new instrument is intended to complement these two existing and long-established analytical instruments. School development is an ambiguous concept, open to different explanation and interpretation, depending on the choice of perspectives and approaches. Christopher Hodgkinson emphasizes the difficulty in conceptualizing a discussion of the motives and values held by members of an organization. It is all about subjective concepts, the meanings of which vary, depending on the situation and the context in which they are observed. A central issue in organizations is how to reconcile the organization’s nomothetic and idiographic aspirations and structures. In school organizations the problem can be understood as the dialectical interaction between institutional and organizational values. In order to provide the kind of empirical knowledge of school development that is called for, an analytical tool is required that can capture both individual and organizational and institutional aspects of the school's everyday work. My empirical evidence is drawn from cultural analysis of schools in three municipalities and municipal districts. In the reanalysis, the emerging common features were lack of continuity in school leadership and the expectations of school leaders as educational leaders to participate more actively in the everyday work. The frequent changes of directors, was by many perceived as an inhibiting and counterproductive obstacle to sustainable school improvement. The results also showed significant differences in the schools' organizational structures of formal and informal decision-making. Knowledge of the underlying patterns that affect the school's everyday work can probably be used to make the organization more transparent and malleable. The dialectical interplay between the organization and its nomothetic-idiographic aspirations differs from school to school. The driving forces in the members’ collective action clarify the relationship between the organization and its members' goals. In-depth knowledge of actors' behavior and attitudes in the context of this interaction increases the possibility of real school development on pedagogical terms to the pupils' benefit. In conclusion: The polyphonic culture assay is still an underdeveloped area. Access to the polyphonic school culture will hopefully be the starting-point for the challenge to increase new and exciting empirical knowledge of the daily work at school.

No description available.

Previous research has attempted to identify consequences of mental transportation into narrative worlds. While scales have been developed and validated to measure readers' levels of transportation, the objective quantification has left researchers at a descriptive disadvantage for the full range of qualitative responses to this phenomenon. This study presents a qualitative method of inquiry designed to get at the experience of narrative transportation as it is lived: the phenomenological interview. Interview transcripts were inductively analyzed for common themes that indicate intersubjective features of narrative experience. Four main themes were identified, which were composed of 22 base-level experiences reported by participants. These findings corroborated the extant literature and provided a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon as it is lived.

Stressrelaterad ohälsa är en av de vanligaste sjukskrivningsorsakerna i västvärlden. I Sverige diagnostiseras vanligen långvarig stressrelaterad ohälsa som utmattningssyndrom. Vid utmattningssyndrom är kognitiva besvär ett framträdande symptom som kan vara långvarigt.  Kognitiv nedsättning vid utmattningssyndrom har tidigare fastställts utifrån en normativ ansats, vilket innebär att jämförelse görs med en icke-klinisk normgrupp. En annan metod är att använda en ideografisk ansats, vilket innebär att jämförelse görs med personens premorbida kognitiva nivå. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur stor andel av patienter med utmattningssyndrom som uppvisar kognitiv nedsättning, utifrån en normativ respektive ideografisk ansats, samt hur kognitiv funktion relaterar till arbetsförmåga i patientgruppen. Data i denna studie utgörs av pretestmätningen från RECO-studien i Västerbotten. Patientgruppen bestod av 127 deltagare med utmattningssyndrom och normgruppen av 60 friska deltagare. Samtliga genomförde ett kognitivt testbatteri. Data analyserades med hjälp av olika gränsvärden för att undersöka frekvensen och andelen procent kognitivt nedsatta. Resultatet visade att andelen som uppvisade kognitiv nedsättning ökade då ideografisk ansats användes, men att majoriteten, oavsett ansats, var kognitivt intakta. Vidare sågs signifikanta samband mellan självskattad arbetsförmåga och kognitiv funktion utifrån ideografisk ansats, men inte utifrån normativ ansats. Dessa resultat tyder på att premorbid kognitiv nivå kan vara viktigt att ta hänsyn till vid bedömning av kognitiv funktion vid utmattningssyndrom. Vidare forskning inom området behövs, exempelvis där en större normgrupp används. / Stress-related illness is one of the most common sick leave causes in the Western world. In Sweden long term stress-related illness is usually diagnosed as exhaustion disorder. In exhaustion disorder, cognitive deficits are a prominent symptom that can be long-lasting. Cognitive impairment in exhaustion disorder has previously been determined based on a normative approach, which means that comparison is made with a non-clinical norm group. Another method is to use an idiographic approach, which means that comparison is made with the person's premorbid cognitive level. The aim of this study was to investigate the proportion of patients with exhaustion disorder who display cognitive impairment, based on both normative and idiographic approaches, and how cognitive function relates to work ability in the patient group. The data in this study consists of the pretest measurement from the RECO study in Västerbotten. The patient group consisted of 127 participants with exhaustion disorder and the norm group of 60 healthy participants. All participants completed a cognitive test battery. The data were analysed using different cut-offs ​​to examine the frequency and percentage of cognitively impaired. The results showed that the proportion who showed cognitive impairment increased when the idiographic approach was used, but that the majority, regardless of the approach, were cognitively intact. Furthermore, significant relationships were seen between self-estimated work ability and cognitive function based on an idiographic approach, but not based on a normative approach. These results suggest that premorbid cognitive level may be important to consider when assessing cognitive function in exhaustion disorder. Further research in the area is needed, for example where a larger norm group is used.