Exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has lasting repercussions throughout an individual’s lifetime. An adult with a history of childhood trauma is at increased risk for excessive stress reactivity, which exacerbates the development of chronic disease. It is important to investigate how this information can be used for adult trauma survivors. This study assessed the psychophysiological impacts of providing “ACE insight”. Participants completed questionnaires and were given false feedback that their childhood experiences put them at increased risk for excessive stress reactivity and the development of disease. Following ACE insight, participants underwent a speech stressor task during which cardiovascular reactivity was monitored and psychological reactions were assessed. Results indicated that participants with more adverse childhoods reported feeling more worried and less happy about feedback. Further, ACE insight caused a significant increase in cardiac output for participants with a history of childhood trauma. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The computing devices with which we interact daily continue to become ever smaller, intelligent, and pervasive. Not only are they becoming more intelligent, but some are developing awareness of a user's affective state. Affective computing—computing that in some way senses, expresses, or modifies affect—is still a field very much in its youth. While progress has been made, the field is still limited by the need for larger sets of diverse, naturalistic, and multimodal data. This work first considers effective strategies for designing psychophysiological studies that permit the assembly of very large samples that cross numerous demographic boundaries, data collection in naturalistic environments, distributed study locations, rapid iterations on study designs, and the simultaneous investigation of multiple research questions. It then explores how commodity hardware and general-purpose software tools can be used to record, represent, store, and disseminate such data. As a realization of these strategies, this work presents a new database from the Emotion in Motion (EiM) study of human psychophysiological response to musical affective stimuli comprising over 23,000 participants and nearly 67,000 psychophysiological responses. Because music presents an excellent tool for the investigation of human response to affective stimuli, this work uses this wealth of data to explore how to design more effective affective computing systems by characterizing the strongest responses to musical stimuli used in EiM. This work identifies and characterizes the strongest of these responses, with a focus on modeling the characteristics of listeners that make them more or less prone to demonstrating strong physiological responses to music stimuli. This dissertation contributes the findings from a number of explorations of the relationships between strong reactions to music and the characteristics and self-reported affect of listeners. It demonstrates not only that such relationships do exist, but takes steps toward automatically predicting whether or not a listener will exhibit such exceptional responses. Second, this work contributes a flexible strategy and functional system for both successfully executing large-scale, distributed studies of psychophysiology and affect; and for synthesizing, managing, and disseminating the data collected through such efforts. Finally, and most importantly, this work presents the EiM database itself. / Doctor of Philosophy / The computing devices with which we interact daily continue to become ever smaller, intelligent, and pervasive. Not only are they becoming more intelligent, but some are developing awareness of a user’s affective state. Affective computing—computing that in some way senses, expresses, or modifies affect—is still a field very much in its youth. While progress has been made, the field is still limited by the need for larger sets of diverse, naturalistic, and multimodal data. This dissertation contributes the findings from a number of explorations of the relationships between strong reactions to music and the characteristics and self-reported affect of listeners. It demonstrates not only that such relationships do exist, but takes steps toward automatically predicting whether or not a listener will exhibit such exceptional responses. Second, this work contributes a flexible strategy and functional system for both successfully executing large-scale, distributed studies of psychophysiology and affect; and for synthesizing, managing, and disseminating the data collected through such efforts. Finally, and most importantly, this work presents the Emotion in Motion (EiM) (a study of human affective/psychophysiological response to musical stimuli) database comprising over 23,000 participants and nearly 67,000 psychophysiological responses.

Recently there has been increased interest in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a syndrome of nonspecific symptoms and unknown etiology. The relationship between cardiovascular reflex function, fatigue, and depression in CFS was examined. Findings were as follows: First, there was no evidence of abnormal cardiovascular reflex function in the CFS group. Second, the CFS group had significantly higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure than the control group. Third, the CFS group scored higher on psychological measures of depression, fatigue, and confusion than the control group; the control group scored higher on a measure of vigor than the CFS group. Finally, the CFS group reported more CFS-related symptoms, but some members of the control group did endorse symptoms on a CFS symptom checklist. The possibility that increased peripheral resistance accounts for the elevated blood pressure in the CFS group, and the merits of exploring the role of interleukin-1 and other hormones or "hormone-like" substances in the etiology or maintenance of CFS symptomatology are discussed.

Marked differences have been found in men’s and women’s sexual response patterns, contingent upon their sexual orientation; opposite- and same-gender attracted men demonstrate greatest genital and self-reported arousal to their preferred stimulus type, whereas other-gender attracted women do not, and findings of same-gender attracted women have been mixed (e.g., Chivers, Seto & Blanchard, 2007; Chivers, Bouchard, Timmers, & Haberl, 2012). Given the complex nature of sexual stimuli that are used in research paradigms involving category-specificity of sexual arousal, however, it is often unclear to what extent contextual cues (cues other than the sexual actor’s sex characteristics; body movement, level of sexual activity, etc.) influence participants’ sexual response patterns. As such, the current study attempted to parse contextual cues from sexual stimuli and examined genital, self-reported, and continuous self-reported responses of same- and other-gender attracted men and women to prepotent sexual features (stimuli believed to elicit automatic sexual arousal: erect penises and vasoengorged vulvas), nonprepotent sexual features (flaccid penises and pubic triangles) and neutral stimuli (clothed men and women). All samples were found to exhibit a category-specific pattern of genital, self-reported, and continuous self-reported sexual arousal. Similarly, genital, self-reported, and continuous self-reported arousal was generally found to be greatest to “prepotent” sexual conditions. Limitations and implications are discussed. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-30 11:37:10.216

The purposes of this study were (1) to determine the relationship between recitation in the classroom and changes in the cardiac rate, (2) to determine the effects on cardiac rate of anticipation of recitation and tests, (3) to determine the effects on cardiac rate of compliments and assurance directed toward students by the teacher, and (4) to determine the effects on the cardiac rate of verbal threats and ridicule.

Hippocampal GABAergic interneuron deficits are implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Postmortem histological analyses show alteration in number and/or function of parvalbumin-expressing (PV+) GABAergic interneurons in the cerebral cortex of these patients. A parallel line of research using functional imaging of cerebral blood flow or volume has shown that hyperactivity of the hippocampus may contribute to psychotic symptoms as well as cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. It is not known if changes in GABA transmission, particularly in the number and function of PV+ interneurons, are causally related to hippocampal hyperactivity and expression of behavioral and cognitive abnormalities in schizophrenia. To help answer this question, we used genetic mouse models with deficits in cortical GABAergic interneuron development to test the hypothesis that a selective deficit in PV+ interneurons in the hippocampus can lead to schizophrenia relevant phenotypes such as hippocampal hyperactivity, dysregulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system, enhanced psychomotor responsiveness to amphetamine, and disruption of hippocampal dependent cognition. Here I describe my studies primarily on a mouse model with a deletion of the cell-cycle gene cyclin D2 (cD2 null). This mutation disrupts interneuron development in the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE), leading to a partial and selective deficit in PV+ interneurons in the neocortex and the hippocampus. I show that the cD2 null mouse shows regionally heterogeneous, persistent structural and functional deficit in PV+ interneurons, with a relatively larger and more functional deficit in the hippocampus. The GABAergic deficit in the hippocampus is associated with signs of disinhibition, such as increased cerebral blood volume as found by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Upon establishing the evidence for hippocampal disinhibition in the cyclin D2 null mouse, I examined the relationship between this disinhibition and two areas of neural function know to be altered in psychosis and schizophrenia: Mesostriatal DA system function and hippocampus-mediated cognition. I found that the cD2 null mice showed increased dopamine population activity in the ventral tegmental area and enhanced psychomotor response to amphetamine. The latter was eliminated by a partial lesion of the ventral hippocampus, indicating hippocampal disinhibition as the driver of DA neuron dysregulation. In addition, cD2 null mice showed deficits in cognitive functions that recruit and depend on the hippocampus, such as the contextual and cued fear conditioning. Lastly, to test for a causal relationship between the PV+ interneuron deficit in the hippocampus, and the abnormalities in hippocampal metabolism, imaging phenotype, the mesolimbic dopamine dysfunction and contextual learning and memory, I examined the effects of replacing GABAergic interneurons to the hippocampus. I used transplantation of GABAergic interneuron precursors derived from the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) into the adult hippocampus of cyclin D2 null mutants. MGE-derived progenitor cells developed into structurally and functionally mature PV+ and other GABAergic cells, and normalized hippocampal hypermetabolism. In addition, the MGE transplants normalized VTA dopamine cell activity, normalized amphetamine sensitivity and improved hippocampus-dependent learning and memory. Taken together, these studies establish the plausibility of a causal relationship between hippocampal PV+ interneuron pathology and psychosis-relevant pathophysiological and cognitive phenotypes. Moreover, they provide a rationale for limbic cortical GABAergic-interneuron-targeted treatment strategies in psychotic disorders.

The concept of emotion and how to regulate it is a central aspect of modern psychology. Within the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998), one issue is how attentional deployment affects emotion regulation and how this can be measured. In task 1, pictures of positive or negative valence were showed in two conditions, either attend or decrease emotional reaction, while participants’ eye movements were followed with an eye tracker. Ratings of arousal and valence were significantly affected by instruction, but dwell times were only significant for positive pictures. In task 2, participants were directed either to emotional or non-emotional parts of emotional pictures while skin conductance was recorded. Arousal and valence ratings decreased significantly in non-emotional areas, but no effect could be found for skin conductance data. Results were generally weak in regards to the effectiveness of measuring gaze to indicate emotion regulation in the form of attentional deployment. For future studies, research of individual differences in habitual usage of attentional deployment for emotion regulation was suggested.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Bryn Mawr College, 1929. / Vita. "Reprinted from the Personnel Journal, vol. IX, nos. 1 and 2, June and August, 1930." Bibliography: p. 75-77.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1935. / At head of title: The Catholic university of America. Bibliography: p. 102-116.

Reprint. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1913. / "Reprinted from the American Journal of Psychology, July, l9l3, vol. xxiv, pp. 305-359 ; October, 1913, vol. xxiv, pp. 508-519. Includes bibliographical references (p. 508-519).