Recent research suggests that many dysregulated behaviors, such as binge-eating and non-suicidal self-injury, often occur during times of emotional distress. These behaviors also appear to decrease negative affect. Why is it, however, that individuals engage in these behaviors to reduce emotional distress rather than taking a shower or talking to a friend? This study proposes the role of emotional cascades, an emotional phenomenon that occurs when an individual intensely ruminates on negative affect, thus intensifying that negative affect to the point that an individual engages in a dysregulated behavior in order to distract from that rumination. The purpose of these studies was to examine the relationship between rumination and dysregulated behaviors, and in doing so determine if there is some support for the emotional cascade model. Using two different studies we were able to demonstrate that rumination is associated with some dysregulated behaviors, both cross-sectionally using structural equation modeling, and temporally using a two time-point method. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: June 26, 2007. / Emotion Dysregulation, Behavioral Dysregulation, Rumination, Binge-Eating, Catastrophizing, Behavioral Dysregulation / Includes bibliographical references. / Thomas Joiner, Professor Directing Thesis; Norman B. Schmidt, Committee Member; Chris Schatschneider, Committee Member.

This was an empirically based study that examined the prevalence of social interaction anxiety, worry, state anxiety, and trait anxiety in individuals with a nut allergy. Three different groups were used, the first being the 'nut allergy' group (N = 24) consisting of individuals with a self-proclaimed nut allergy, and two comparison groups: the 'other allergy' group (N = 17) consisting of those with other (non-nut) allergies and the 'allergy free' group (N = 31) consisting of individuals who had no known allergies. The main hypotheses were that there would a direct relationship between the occurrence of a nut allergy and social interaction anxiety, worry, state anxiety, and trait anxiety. To test these hypotheses, all individuals completed 5 questionnaires: The Nut Allergy Inquiry Form, the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS), the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), the State-trait Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-S), and the State-trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait (STAI-T). These questionnaires were intended to measure social interaction anxiety, worry, state anxiety, and trait anxiety respectively. After conducting an analysis of variance to test each of the four hypotheses, it was determined that none of the hypothesized results of this study were significant. Therefore, the overall conclusion of this research is that there is not a direct relationship between the occurrence of a nut allergy and social anxiety, worry, state anxiety, or trait anxiety. However, it should be noted that the size of the Cohen d estimates indicated that some of the differences in means were practically significant. This is an indication that the present study lacked the power to fully test the hypotheses; it could be viewed as exploratory in nature with an eye toward a more comprehensive study. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: April 28, 2006. / Trait anxiety, State anxiety, Worry, Social anxiety, Anxiety, Peanut allergy, Nut allergy / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Peterson, Professor Directing Thesis; Donald Kelly, Committee Member; Jeannine Turner, Committee Member.

Activity-based anorexia (ABA), an animal model of anorexia nervosa in which rats are given free access to running wheels but restricted access to food, induces many symptoms of anorexia nervosa. This model has been used to examine biological factors that may contribute to the development of anorexia nervosa. Here, the role of the serotonin (5-HT) system in the development of ABA was examined in female rats. In Experiment 1, susceptibility to ABA was examined in rats treated with 8-OH-DPAT, a drug that reduces 5-HT neurotransmission. In this and subsequent experiments, rats had free access to running wheels, and food was restricted to 2 h/ day. Daily treatment with 8-OH-DPAT decreased wheel running and weight loss, suggesting that decreased 5-HT activity reduces susceptibility to ABA. In Experiment 2 we determined whether antagonism of the 5-HT2C receptor decreased susceptibility to ABA. Rats were subjected to the ABA paradigm as in Experiment 1 and treated daily with RS-102221, a selective 5-HT2C receptor antagonist. RS-102221 did not affect food intake or wheel running. However, RS-102221 treatment slowed weight loss, suggesting that antagonism of the 5-HT2C receptor decreases susceptibility to ABA. Because RS-102221 did not affect food intake and wheel running, some other mechanism, such as a change in thermoregulation, must mediate these results. In Experiment 3, neuronal activation in response to fenfluramine, a 5-HT agonist, was examined in rats with ABA. Rats were allowed to lose 0, 10, or 25% of their baseline body weight in the ABA paradigm. After reaching the weight loss criterion, rats were injected with fenfluramine or saline vehicle. Two h later, rats were perfused and brains were collected and processed for c-Fos-like immunoreactivity. Weight loss interacted with fenfluramine treatment to increase c-Fos expression in the nucleus of the solitary tract. Weight loss alone increased c-Fos expression in the arcuate nucleus, and fenfluramine treatment alone increased c-Fos expression in the central nucleus of the amygdala. This suggests that brain regions important in the control of energy balance are affected by exposure to the ABA paradigm. Taken together, these data suggest that 5-HT plays an important role in the development of ABA. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: June 16, 2006. / Anorexia Nervosa, Feeding, Body Weight Regulation / Includes bibliographical references. / Lisa Eckel, Professor Directing Dissertation; Cathy Levenson, Outside Committee Member; Karen Berkley, Committee Member; Robert Contreras, Committee Member; Thomas Joiner, Committee Member.

The current study examined whether intrasexual competition for career success may contribute to body dissatisfaction and worse eating attitudes among achievement oriented college-aged women. In order to examine this aim participants viewed pictures of other women who varied in terms of weight and career success. Compared to participants low on status aspiration, participants high on status aspiration reported greater body dissatisfaction and ineffectiveness after being exposed to the thin, successful targets. However, status aspiring participants did not report greater drive for thinness, maturity fears, or bulimic symptoms. Hypotheses regarding the impact of weight status and success on perceptions of target career accomplishment and body size were supported. Specifically, thin, successful targets were rated as more accomplished in their careers than overweight, successful targets. Participants also judged successful, overweight targets to be thinner than unsuccessful, overweight targets. It is hoped that these findings will shed light on ways career women can pursue success without jeopardizing their health. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: May 19, 2008. / Career, Evolutionary Theory, Intrasexual Competition, Achievement Motivation, Status Aspiration, Body Satisfaction, Eating Disorders / Includes bibliographical references. / Thomas E. Joiner, Jr., Professor Directing Thesis; Jeanette Taylor, Committee Member; Jon Maner, Committee Member.

Recent studies have drawn a close relationship between visual perception and language, showing, for example, that readers respond faster to a picture of a flying eagle than a perched eagle after a sentence that implicitly constrains the eagle's shape (Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). The present experiments pursue an ecologically-stronger design, showing how incidentally acquired connections between perceptual and linguistic experiential traces in the cognitive network can automatically affect later language comprehension. Two phases were employed here: a phase exposing participants to pictures of critical objects and a later, ostensibly unrelated reading phase. Reading times in Experiment 1 and 2 were faster when the implied shape of objects in text passages matched the shape in first phase pictures. The introduction of an articulatory suppression task in the first phase of Experiment 3, however, produced no similar advantage for the match condition in the subsequent reading tasks. These results are explained as the effect of coding mismatches between phases as well as possible strategy differences between participants. Future directions of study are proposed to provide a clearer test of two competing models of language comprehension. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: August 15, 2007. / Working Memory, Language Comprehension, Embodiment, Articulatory Suppression / Includes bibliographical references. / Rolf A. Zwaan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Gretchen Sunderman, Outside Committee Member; Michael P. Kaschak, Committee Member; Colleen M. Kelley, Committee Member; Bryan R. Loney, Committee Member.

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Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / In this thesis, which I call an essay in “fundamental psychology” (a title styled after Martin Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology”), I attempt to argue that Being as such is structured through the potential of living beings. This means that Being is not centered on understanding (noocentrism), which I take to be Heidegger’s claim, but is centered on what Aristotle calls “soul.” Aristotle, in fact, says “the soul is somehow all beings,” but gives no indication that it is a human soul, or a soul predominantly identified with understanding. In short, I propose that the soul is the proper focus for radical ontology. The first chapter offers a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s account of the soul in De Anima in order to claim that there are various ways in which all lifeforms make a creative contribution to the possibilities that characterize beings as belonging to one ontological region or another. Life gives to beings their specific modes of existing. Heidegger privileges “understanding” as that which discloses Being, but I will argue that living beings display the Being of their environments in dimensions of possibility that issue from the adapted modes of an organism’s living. For instance, and very basically, while a chemical substance may have an “objective” set of properties that marks the difference between its being poisonous and its being harmless, the ontological category under which this difference is determined is not something that exists in the world – it is not an entity – but it is a dimension of possibility that is constituted through a living anatomy. I call such categories psychological forms (in the broad sense of Aristotle’s psychology). The totality of psychological forms has a wider range than the categories that Heidegger was able to identify (presence and readiness), and it does not belong to “Dasein” to “reflect” these forms in its kind of Being. But rather, a chinchilla or an elephant proves itself to be ontological by displaying such forms as stemming from an organismic make up. In the second chapter, I attempt an extended phenomenological hermeneutic of the organismic, focused on working out the meaning of Aristotle’s analogy that the soul is like the hand. The basic conclusion reached is that the analogy presupposes a psycho-ontological interpretation of the hand as ambiguously organ and instrument, flesh and world (after Merleau-Ponty). Taking its start from Heidegger’s notion of the “ready-to-hand,” and then drawing upon themes worked out in light of the recent contributions to phenomenology under the title “carnal hermeneutics” (Kearney, Chrétien, Desmond and others), the chapter develops a “carnal” challenge to the carelessness of reducing the Being of beings to an ontological category that conforms so explicitly to a single body part – i.e., the hand. However, although Heidegger’s category of handiness is shown to be too reductive, the chapter still takes the ontological category of handiness, especially in the way Heidegger establishes it, to be instructive for understanding how an organ is figured into a living being’s possibilities with beings. By looking at the differences among prominent phenomenological interpretations (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) of how our hands relate to other organs, to instruments, and to sense-perception, a case can be made for trying to understand the organismic kind of Being through the organized structure of environmental possibilities. Basically, the conclusion of the chapter is that the Greek organon-concept reflects the way in which life-forms, characterized by articulate and differentiated bodies, figure into the formulation that makes beings possible as a whole. So, the hand, for instance, lays out a touch-world and a tool-world that are defined by a kind of intertwining of possibilities in which the organ is involved, where the interconnectedness is summed up by a totality of possibilities that refer back to the organ. The hand, then, is both instrument and organ, because it makes the dimension of Being of instrumental beings possible, while at the same time, being reflexively fit into that dimension itself instrumentally. Chapter three attempts to demonstrate how living beings can make an ontological contribution to the structure of Being as a whole from within the course of the causal succession in which they are generated. The chapter is structured as an address to a problem: “How can something relatively late in the order of becoming be prior in the order of Being?” This question arises out of the strong claims of the first two chapters that life and organs have a prior existential responsibility over beings on the whole. This is addressed through an account that tries to disentangle the chronological order of causes from the existential order. By focusing on the philosophy of Kant, in particular, it is argued that there is no contradiction in thinking that something later in the order of becoming is earlier in the order of Being. Then, through an analysis of a recent experimental attempt to demonstrate the conditions in which life first comes to be from the “primordial soup,” it is argued that life always displays an existential-ontological priority over its causes, which can be appreciated if we take into account the moment in which an ontologically novel category is posited through an entity, and where the category was not even something yet potentially in the cause of the entity. The last two chapters return to Heidegger, in order to argue that the existential-ontological priority of living beings over their causes coincides with a further need for an ontological psychology, attuned to the specific differences that have come to be in living beings. The chapter follows Heidegger in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Derrida in his reading of Heidegger in The Beast and the Sovereign, in order to argue that the familiar species classifications that Heidegger uses (‘bee,’ ‘lizard,’ ‘human’) can be “deconstructed” down to a central paradox. That is, there is something paradoxical at the core of the classical zoology that Heidegger relies upon in order to carry out his analysis. The distinction between man and animals is, in fact, undermined by the conclusion of Heidegger’s analysis – that “animals are poor in world,” and man is “world forming.” It is argued that, if this distinction obtains between entities within the world, then it simply cannot have anything to say about other worlds, or animal worlds. It cannot even have anything to say about the constitution of the world-hood of our one world. And so, “world-poverty” cannot be a criterion of distinction. The fifth chapter attempts to display further the paradoxical tension in the human essence, and to deconstruct the self-undermining logic of the definition of man as the animal having logos. Man is redefined as the “(im)possible animal,” because, at once, the human being makes the rational categorization of other living beings possible, but, in such a way as shows the “incoherence” of the essential distinction between humans and other living beings. The chapter argues that the way in which the traditional definitions of natural living kinds are considered “true” always entails their untruth (à la Heidegger), to such an extent that to say man is other than the animal in respect of the logos is equiprimordially true and untrue. The un-truth of the logos, we argue, topples the whole of zo-ology from within the specific difference of the human being. We argue that, in the “riddle” of man’s essence, we are finally presented with a means of “escaping” the prevailing noo-centrism highlighted as problematic in the first chapter. The fifth chapter, then, draws to a conclusion the Aristotelian, Heideggerian, and Derridaen lines of thinking that are roughly present throughout the dissertation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.