This study examined the influence of contextual risk factors and parental depression on the social-emotional functioning of very young children. Ninety-four young children were recruited as part of a larger ongoing research project recruiting caregivers and children from Early Head Start programs in South Florida. Children ranged in age from 12 to 36 months and included 65 girls and 29 boys. There were 94 caregivers in the current study: 91 mothers, 2 fathers, and 1 foster mother. Caregivers were diverse in terms of age, ranging from 19 to 42 years of age (M = 27.31, SD = 5.75), ethnicity (84% African- or Caribbean-American, 14.9% Hispanic/Latino, and 1.1% Mixed/Other), and in number of years of school completed, ranging from 1 to 16 years (M = 12.02, SD = 1.91). The current study employed a cumulative risk factor perspective in examining the social-emotional functioning of infants and toddlers. Specifically, the current study tested both a threshold model and a linear model of cumulative risk. Study measures included a background questionnaire, a measure of parental depression, a measure of parenting stress, a measure of child exposure to violence, and a measure of traumatic life events in a child?s life. Further analyses examined ethnicity as a moderator of the relationship between cumulative risk and difficulties with social-emotional functioning. Results showed a significant linear relationship between cumulative risk and social-emotional functioning. However, ethnicity did not moderate this relationship. When individual risk factors were examined post hoc, parental depression, stressful parent-child interactions, having a child with special needs, and community violence were shown to significantly predict difficulties with social-emotional functioning among very young children. These data have important implications for prevention and intervention efforts.

Bipolar I disorder (BD) is one of the leading causes of disability among adults. Despite the fact that those with BD are at significantly greater risk for experiencing psychosocial hardship, many with the disorder function quite well. Researchers have shown this variability in quality of life to be partly explained by symptom severity, educational attainment, illness characteristics, and cognitive variables (e.g., executive function). The current study extends this research by examining the role of emotional intelligence in the quality of life and social and occupational functioning of people with BD. I hypothesized a significant proportion of the variance in quality of life and social and occupational functioning would be explained by emotional intelligence, above and beyond the variance explained by the aforementioned variables. Forty-two participants with BD were recruited and completed a battery of measures to assess quality of life, cognition, and emotional intelligence. Results indicated that emotional intelligence, as measured by the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, did not explain any unique variance in quality of life. Self-reported emotional intelligence, on the other hand, did explain unique variance in both subjective well-being and social functioning.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-69).

Emotions play an important role in affecting human¡¦s behaviors. It is obvious especially in the negotiation process. However, these emotional interactions disappear in the electronic communication media. Emoticons provide a new way for negotiators to show their emotions in e-negotiation. E-negotiation support system is composed of electronic communication and decision support system. Using emoticons could help negotiators display their emotions to counterparts. This study explored the effect of emoticon on negotiation process from the aspect of communication. In general, e-communication can be separated into social-emotional communication and task-oriented communication. Emoticons retrieve multiple cues and enable negotiators transmit emotions so that the interactions increase. As a result, more social-emotional communication happens between negotiators. Previous studies indicate that nonverbal cues could add the meaning of messages. In the negotiation process, negotiators may lower down the opportunity of misunderstanding by using emoticons to express their thought in text and increase the quality of communication. The negotiation process may be more effective and increase the ability to reach agreement. Negotiators will be more satisfied of the process and their counterparts when the outcome is equal or better than what they expected. The purpose of this study is to explore whether supporting emoticons influence negotiators communication behavior and change the negotiation process. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment and adopted content analysis to define the social-emotional communication and task-oriented communication behaviors. We also measured the perceived communication effectiveness and satisfaction of negotiation process by questionnaire. The results showed that emoticons increase the frequency of social-emotional communication. Social-emotional communication also increases the negotiators¡¦ task-oriented communication. As a result the communication becomes more effective. Negotiators have better satisfaction of negotiation process.

Tinnitus is the experience of sounds without an appropriate external auditory source. These auditory sensations are intertwined with emotional and attentional processing. Drawing on theories of mental control, we predicted that suppressing an affectively negative sound mimicking the psychoacoustic features of tinnitus would result in decreased persistence in a mentally challenging task (mental arithmetic) that required participants to ignore the same sound, but that receiving a mindfulness exercise would reduce this effect. Normal hearing participants (N = 119) were instructed to suppress an affectively negative sound under cognitive load or were given no such instructions. Next, participants received either a mindfulness induction or an attention control task. Finally, all participants worked with mental arithmetic while exposed to the same sound. The length of time participants could persist in the second task served as the dependent variable. As hypothesized, results indicated that an auditory suppression rationale reduced time of persistence relative to no such rationale, and that a mindfulness induction counteracted this detrimental effect. The study may offer new insights into the mechanisms involved in the development of tinnitus interference. Implications are also discussed in the broader context of attention control strategies and the effects of emotional sound on task performance. The ironic processes of mental control may have an analog in the experience of sounds. / <p>On the day of the defence date the status of this article was <em>Manuscript</em>.</p>

Background: Patients and clinicians report pain and fatigue as key outcome measures in rheumatoid arthritis. Fatigue and pain are a major concern to patients. Aim: The objective of this study was to examine fatigue and pain in adult patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to investigate the association between pain and fatigue with body awareness, demographic, disease-related, emotional and psychosocial factors. Method: Data were collected from a sample of patients with RA (n= 120) recruited from a Rheumatology clinic in a large university hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. Eligible for inclusion were patients between 20 -80 years of age and with a confirmed diagnosis of RA. Fatigue was measured using the Multidimensional Assessment of Fatigue (MAF) scale, while the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) was used to assess components of pain. A multiple stepwise regression analysis was performed to evaluate factors related to fatigue and pain. In the first step a univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for all relevant independent factors. In the next step backwards stepwise regression was applied. Result: Fatigue was significantly associated with the Disease Activity Score 28-joints (DAS 28) (p = 0.049), the Body Awareness Questionnaire (BAQ) (p = 0.006), the Positive Affect (PA) scale (p = 0.008) and no smoking (p = 0.021). Pain was significantly associated with the EuroQol EQ-5D (p = 0.008) and the DAS 28 (p = 0.001). The adjusted R-square was 28.6% for fatigue and 50.0% for pain. Conclusion: This study clearly demonstrates that fatigue and pain in patients with RA appear to be associated with disease-related factors. Furthermore, fatigue was related to body awareness and emotional factors, and pain was related to health related quality of life.

Jennifer Howard. Adkins April 12, 2004 51 pages Directed by: Dr. William Pfohl, Dr. Antony Norman, and Dr. Reagan Brown Department of Psychology Western Kentucky University In the United States today there are approximately 1.5 million students being home schooled. With this ever growing number, it is important to examine this unique population in order to determine the effects this alternative form of education will have on these students, not just academically, but in other areas as well. The purpose of this study is to examine the concepts of emotional intelligence and social skills in home schooled students. One hundred home schooled students and their parents participated in this study by completing emotional intelligence and social skills questionnaires. Results of the study support the hypotheses that the home schooled students would have higher levels of social skills and lower scores on the problem behaviors scale than the standardization population. In regards to emotional intelligence, differences were found among the elementary and secondary grade levels of the home schooled children. Home schooled elementary students achieved higher scores than the standardization population on two of the seven areas measured. No significant differences were found in the other areas. Home schooled secondary students achieved higher scores than did the standardization population on four of the seven areas measured. No significant differences were found in the other areas.

"Reclaiming Michael: a case study of a student with emotional behavioural disorder" describes the work in a school with a kindergarten to grade three student who was labeled emotionally-behaviourally disordered. Thirteen participant interviews were transcribed and analyzed to understand what the school did, how the school did this work, and why the work was done the way it was. Two themes reinforcing the importance of learning and building community emerged from the data. The data collected reinforced the general principles of both the ecological and humanistic perspectives, indicating theoretical possibilities for work with students with emotional-behavioural disorders in other schools. / February 2005

A key requirement for developing any innovative system in a computing environment is to integrate a sufficiently friendly interface with the average end user. Accurate design of such a user-centered interface, however, means more than just the ergonomics of the panels and displays. It also requires that designers precisely define what information to use and how, where, and when to use it. Facial expression as a natural, non-intrusive and efficient way of communication has been considered as one of the potential inputs of such interfaces. The work of this thesis aims at designing a robust Facial Expression Recognition (FER) system by combining various techniques from computer vision and pattern recognition. Expression recognition is closely related to face recognition where a lot of research has been done and a vast array of algorithms have been introduced. FER can also be considered as a special case of a pattern recognition problem and many techniques are available. In the designing of an FER system, we can take advantage of these resources and use existing algorithms as building blocks of our system. So a major part of this work is to determine the optimal combination of algorithms. To do this, we first divide the system into 3 modules, i.e. Preprocessing, Feature Extraction and Classification, then for each of them some candidate methods are implemented, and eventually the optimal configuration is found by comparing the performance of different combinations. Another issue that is of great interest to facial expression recognition systems designers is the classifier which is the core of the system. Conventional classification algorithms assume the image is a single variable function of a underlying class label. However this is not true in face recognition area where the appearance of the face is influenced by multiple factors: identity, expression, illumination and so on. To solve this problem, in this thesis we propose two new algorithms, namely Higher Order Canonical Correlation Analysis and Simple Multifactor Analysis which model the image as a multivariable function. The addressed issues are challenging problems and are substantial for developing a facial expression recognition system.

The present thesis investigates whether the emotional background (context) in which a neutral face is viewed changes one’s memory for that face. In Experiment 1, neutral faces were overlaid centrally onto emotional (positive or negative) or neutral background scenes, and recognition memory for faces was assessed. Memory for faces initially encoded in negative contexts was boosted relative to memory for faces initially encoded in neutral contexts. Further investigation was necessary to reveal the mechanism behind the influence that emotional context had on memory for faces. In Experiments 2 and 3 the spotlight theory of attention was tested to examine whether visual attention was mediating the memory effect. The spotlight theory of attention postulates that positive affective states broaden one’s scope of attention, while negative affective states narrow one’s scope of attention (Easterbrook, 1959; Derryberry & Tucker, 1994). According to this theory, the negative contexts may have narrowed attentional scope and therefore led to a richer processing of the face which happened to be presented centrally in Experiment 1, leading to boosted recognition of these faces. To test whether the varying emotional contexts did indeed shift attentional scope, Experiment 2 was designed in which neutral faces were presented once again in positive, negative or neutral contexts, however location of face presentation was peripheral rather than central. Results revealed a loss of the memory boost, for faces paired with negative contexts, reported in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 was designed to test the spotlight theory of attention using an intermixed design in which faces were presented either centrally or peripherally, randomly across trials, in emotional and neutral background scenes. In this experiment, faces were better remembered when they were viewed peripherally in positive, relative to neutral, contexts at time of study. Experiment 4 was designed to assess the validity of the spotlight theory in accounting for how emotional scenes change visual attention, by examining how performance on a flanker task differed when emotionally positive or negative scenes were presented centrally. Results suggest that positive scenes broaden the spotlight of attention, relative to negatives ones. In summary, emotional contexts lead to a boost in memory for faces paired with negative information, and this effect may be due to shifts in attention varied by the valence of the context.