When choosing a gift, the gift-giver has three distinct but interdependent goals: the item must 1) satisfy the recipient 2) be self-reflective for the gift-giver, and 3) indicate the nature of the relationship between the giver and the recipient. However, these goals are often mutually exclusive, making it infeasible for the giver to meet both his/her own and the recipient’s needs with his/her gift choices. In both essays we look at how the important moderator of social closeness between the giver and recipient influences givers’ prioritization of these goals. In Essay 1, we constrain givers to choose from a gift registry and posit that purchasing an identity-incongruent product can threaten an individual’s identity, particularly when purchasing for a close (vs. distant) friend who is an integral part of the self. Five experiments in the context of gift registry show that givers choosing identity-incongruent gifts for a close (vs. distant) friend experience an identity threat and seek to re-establish their shaken identities by endorsing the threatened identity and choosing identity-expressive products in subsequent decisions. In Essay 2 we loosen the constraints of the gift choice and allow givers to choose or reject the gift registry. Our main hypothesis is that when choosing for a close (vs. distant) friend, the giver will discount the recipient’s explicit preferences in favor of a gift that signals the giver’s identity or the relationship between them. However, prior research indicates that close friends choose inaccurately for one another as they conflate their own preferences with those of the recipients’. Thus we suggest that since givers are more likely to make a free choice (vs. registry choice) for a close (vs. distant) friend, they face an increased likelihood of choosing a less desirable gift for their close friends. / text

The Taiwanese middle class has experienced two waves of crisis over the past three decades in the context of a colonization transition involving globalization and democratization as primary catalysts. On the economic front, Taiwan’s economy has become increasingly integrated into the Chinese market, resulting approximately one million of the Taiwanese middle class relocating to China. Moreover, neoliberal economic reforms have led to a downsized state sector of the Taiwanese economy. These economic changes affect the growth and stability of the Taiwanese middle class. Meanwhile, on the political front, an ongoing democratic consolidation and decolonization efforts have brought about significant political changes in Taiwan that have deepened Taiwanese nationalism. While economic and political processes appear to be opposite, however, in reality they have been mutually reinforcing, causing increasingly differentiated middle class. The political economy dynamics conditioned in a colonial context suggest that the swing voters of a differentiated middle class play a pivotal role in determining electoral outcomes, and electoral outcomes reshape the differentiated middle class.

While evidence suggests stereotype threat effects invade conscious levels of processing, less is known about the role that implicit processes play in stereotype threat. Results from four studies indicate that implicit attitudes and stereotypes play a unique role in motivation and performance in stereotype threatening contexts. Women trained to have positive implicit math attitudes exhibited increased math motivation in general (Study 1). This effect was magnified among stereotype threatened women when negative stereotypes had either been primed subtly (Study 2) or implicitly reinforced (Study 3). Implicit attitudes had no effect on working memory capacity or performance however. Conversely, after retraining women to associate their gender with being good at math, they exhibited increased working memory capacity (Studies 3 and 4) and increased math performance (Study 4) in stereotype threatening situations. The enhanced performance that resulted from the positive stereotype reinforcement was mediated by the increased working memory capacity. Thus while implicit attitudes appear important for motivating stigmatized individuals to engage with stigmatized domains, stereotypes play a key role in undermining cognitive capacity that is critical for success in the domain.

This investigation sought to extend research in mediated intergroup communication by examining the role of emotion in producing intergroup bias. Two studies were guided by social identity theory, appraisal-based theories of emotion, and cultivation theory. Study 1 surveyed 254 adults, recruited through student referrals. Drawing insight from previous content analytic research and cultivation theory, results indicated that the media plays an important role in cultivating emotional reactions toward racial minorities. Overall daily television consumption was associated with experiencing anxiety-related emotions and distrust-related emotions toward Blacks. Television news consumption was associated with experiencing anger towards Blacks. Overall daily television consumption was associated with experiencing anger and anxiety-related emotions toward Latinos and Asians. Television news consumption was associated with experiencing distrust-related emotions toward Asians. In Study 2 a 2 (Immigration: Threat/No-Threat) X 2 (Ingroup Emotional Norm Endorsement: Present/Absent) plus 1 (Control) experiment examined the impact of mediated intergroup threat on attitudes toward immigration, collective self-esteem, information sharing and seeking behaviors, and policy support, in the context of illegal immigration. This study also examined whether experimental condition indirectly influenced the above-specified outcomes through intergroup emotions. Previous news consumption was examined as a potential moderator of the mediational relationship between experimental condition and intergroup outcomes via intergroup emotions. Results indicate that exposure to intergroup threat via the media directly influence attitudes toward immigrants' human rights and information sharing. Exposure to intergroup threat indirectly influences immigration attitudes through feelings of anxiety. Moreover, exposure to intergroup threat via the media indirectly influences information sharing and support for English-only legislation through feelings of disgust. Conditional indirect effects were found for immigration attitudes, information sharing, and support for English-only legislation. Exposure to threatening intergroup information neither directly, nor indirectly information seeking or emailing congressperson to reduce the number of immigrants allowed in the United States. Results are discussed in light of social identity theory, intergroup threat theory, intergroup emotions theory, and BIAS map research. Taken together, results suggest that the current study's social identity appraisal-based approach provides insight into the role of media in intergroup processes.

The United States lost its prime opponent, the Soviet Union, since Post-Cold War. To assure its hegemonic status, Joseph Nye initiated the strategy of soft power to former President Bush and Clinton’s administration, and which had influenced People’s Republic of China (as known as a potential enemy to U.S.) profoundly. Soft power is such a wonderful elementary factor that made a dictatorial state like China a huge change both in its polity and image of the world. Moreover, China had been activated by American strategy of soft power, and eventually developed its own ‘Chinese character’ soft power, which had attracted at least by its peripheral states. Commensurate with its rapid economic and diplomatic development, China used to be considered as “China’s threat”, then due to China’s soft power strategy in terms of “Confucianism” and “Wang Dao”(benign) thought had been well responded by the world. As a dominated state, maybe it is time for the United States to think about trying not to conduct the soft power as a diplomatic tool only, but to seek a new strategy of soft power that combined tolerance and respect toward the others. Anyway, by the engagement of soft power among international relations, and the interdependency of regional economy, the author has an optimistic view for a harmonious world in the future. Key words: Post-Cold War, soft power, China’s threat, Wang Dao, harmonious world. / The United States lost its prime opponent, the Soviet Union, since Post-Cold War. To assure its hegemonic status, Joseph Nye initiated the strategy of soft power to former President Bush and Clinton’s administration, and which had influenced People’s Republic of China (as known as a potential enemy to U.S.) profoundly. Soft power is such a wonderful elementary factor that made a dictatorial state like China a huge change both in its polity and image of the world. Moreover, China had been activated by American strategy of soft power, and eventually developed its own ‘Chinese character’ soft power, which had attracted at least by its peripheral states. Commensurate with its rapid economic and diplomatic development, China used to be considered as “China’s threat”, then due to China’s soft power strategy in terms of “Confucianism” and “Wang Dao”(benign) thought had been well responded by the world. As a dominated state, maybe it is time for the United States to think about trying not to conduct the soft power as a diplomatic tool only, but to seek a new strategy of soft power that combined tolerance and respect toward the others. Anyway, by the engagement of soft power among international relations, and the interdependency of regional economy, the author has an optimistic view for a harmonious world in the future. Key words: Post-Cold War, soft power, China’s threat, Wang Dao, harmonious world.

Bakgrund: Hot och våld är inom akutsjukvården ett allvarligt arbetsmiljöproblem som ökar såväl i Sverige som i resten av världen. Ambulanssjukvården är ett område inom sjukvården där förekomsten av hot och våld är som mest framträdande. Ambulanspersonalens vårdrum varierar och därför kan det vara en utmaning att skapa en säker arbetsmiljö. Syfte: Syftet var att ur ett prehospitalt perspektiv beskriva vilka åtgärder som kan vidtas för att kunna förebygga hot och våld inom akutsjukvård. Metod: En litteraturstudie med systematisk sökning och beskrivande design användes. Sökningen resulterade i 14 artiklar från tre databaser. I analysen har författarna använt sig av kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultat: I resultatet framkom vikten av att kunna identifiera risker, att använda förebyggande strategier samt att optimera förutsättningarna för att kunna förebygga hot och våld. Att identifiera risker innebar att kunna identifiera riskbeteenden, riskpatienter, utsatta personalgrupper, kritiska faktorer kring tid och rum samt typ av hot och våld. Förebyggande strategier som användes var utbildning av personal, information till patienter, bemötande, kollegial trygghet, isolering av patienter med riskbeteende, medvetenhet samt säkerhetsstrategier. Att optimera förutsättningarna innebar att se över arbetsmiljö, riktlinjer och rutiner, rapporteringssystem, säkerhetspersonal samt utbildning. Konklusion: Det är viktigt att ha en medvetenhet om vad som utgör riskerna för hot och våld. Detta för att ha en bättre handlingsberedskap vid eventuella hot- och våldssituationer som ambulanspersonalen kan ställas inför. / Background: Threats and violence in emergency care is a serious problem that is increasing both in Sweden and in the rest of the world. The ambulance service is an area of health care where the prevalence of threats and violence are most prominent. Ambulance staff workplace varies and therefore it can be a challenge to create a safe work environment. Purpose: The aim was that from a prehospital perspective describe what measures can be taken to prevent threats and violence in emergency care. Method: A literature review with systematic search and descriptive design was used. The search resulted in 14 articles from three databases. In the analysis, the authors made use of qualitative content analysis. Results: The result describes the importance of being able to identify risks, to use preventive strategies and to optimize the conditions in order to prevent threats and violence. Identifying the risks involved in order to identify risk behaviours, risk patients, vulnerable groups of staff, critical factors concerning time and space and the type of threats and violence. Preventive strategies used were staff training, information for patients, treatment, peer security, isolation of patients with risk behaviour, awareness and safety strategies. To optimize conditions meant to review the work environment, policies and procedures, reporting, security personnel and training. Conclusion: It is important to have an awareness of what constitutes risk to threats and violence. This is to have a better preparedness to any threats and violent situations that ambulance personnel may face.

Numerous studies indicate that amongst the various types of security threats, the problem of insider misuse of IT systems can have serious consequences for the health of computing infrastructures. Although incidents of external origin are also dangerous, the insider IT misuse problem is difficult to address for a number of reasons. A fundamental reason that makes the problem mitigation difficult relates to the level of trust legitimate users possess inside the organization. The trust factor makes it difficult to detect threats originating from the actions and credentials of individual users. An equally important difficulty in the process of mitigating insider IT threats is based on the variability of the problem. The nature of Insider IT misuse varies amongst organizations. Hence, the problem of expressing what constitutes a threat, as well as the process of detecting and predicting it are non trivial tasks that add up to the multi- factorial nature of insider IT misuse. This thesis is concerned with the process of systematizing the specification of insider threats, focusing on their system-level detection and prediction. The design of suitable user audit mechanisms and semantics form a Domain Specific Language to detect and predict insider misuse incidents. As a result, the thesis proposes in detail ways to construct standardized descriptions (signatures) of insider threat incidents, as means of aiding researchers and IT system experts mitigate the problem of insider IT misuse. The produced audit engine (LUARM – Logging User Actions in Relational Mode) and the Insider Threat Prediction and Specification Language (ITPSL) are two utilities that can be added to the IT insider misuse mitigation arsenal. LUARM is a novel audit engine designed specifically to address the needs of monitoring insider actions. These needs cannot be met by traditional open source audit utilities. ITPSL is an XML based markup that can standardize the description of incidents and threats and thus make use of the LUARM audit data. Its novelty lies on the fact that it can be used to detect as well as predict instances of threats, a task that has not been achieved to this date by a domain specific language to address threats. The research project evaluated the produced language using a cyber-misuse experiment approach derived from real world misuse incident data. The results of the experiment showed that the ITPSL and its associated audit engine LUARM provide a good foundation for insider threat specification and prediction. Some language deficiencies relate to the fact that the insider threat specification process requires a good knowledge of the software applications used in a computer system. As the language is easily expandable, future developments to improve the language towards this direction are suggested.

This thesis investigated the processing of emotional stimuli by the visual system, and how the processing of emotions interacts with visual awareness. Emotions have been given ‘special’ status by some previous research, with evidence that the processing of emotions may be relatively independent of striate cortex, and less affected by disruption to awareness than processing of emotionally neutral images. Yet the extent to which emotions are ‘special’ remains questionable. This thesis focused on the processing of emotional stimuli when activity in V1 was disrupted using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and whether emotional properties of stimuli can be reliably discriminated, or affect subsequent responses, when visibility is low. Two of the experiments reported in this thesis disrupted activity in V1 using TMS, Experiment 1 with single pulses in an online design, and Experiment 2 with theta burst stimulation in an offline design. Experiment 1 found that a single pulse of TMS 70-130 ms following a presentation of a body posture image disrupted processing of neutral but not emotional postures in an area of the visual field that corresponded to the disruption. Experiment 2 did not find any convincing evidence of disruption to processing of neutral or emotional faces. From Experiment 1 it would appear that emotional body posture images were relatively unaffected by TMS, and appeared to be robust to disruption to V1. Experiment 2 did not add to this as there was no evidence of disruption in any condition. Experiments 3 and 4 used visual masking to disrupt awareness of emotional and neutral faces. Both experiments used a varying interval between the face and the mask stimuli to systematically vary the visibility of the faces. Overall, the shortest SOA produced the lowest level of visibility, and this level of visibility was arguably outside awareness. In Experiment 3, participants’ ability to discriminate properties of emotional faces under low visibility conditions was greater than their ability to discriminate the orientation of the face. This was despite the orientation discrimination being much easier at higher levels of visibility. Experiment 4 used a gender discrimination task, with emotion providing a redundant cue to the decision (present half of the time). Despite showing a strong linear masking function for the neutral faces, there was no evidence of any emotion advantage. Overall, Experiment 3 gave some evidence of an emotion advantage under low visibility conditions, but this effect was fairly small and not replicated in Experiment 4. Finally, Experiments 5-8 used low visibility emotional faces to prime responses to subsequent emotional faces (Experiments 5 and 6) or words (Experiments 7 and 8). In Experiments 5, 7 and 8 there was some evidence of emotional priming effects, although these effects varied considerably across the different designs used. There was evidence for meaningful processing of the emotional prime faces, but this processing only led to small and variable effects on subsequent responses. In summary, this thesis found some evidence that the processing of emotional stimuli was relatively robust to disruption in V1 with TMS. Attempts to find evidence for robust processing of emotional stimuli when disrupted with backwards masking was less successful, with at best mixed results from discrimination tasks and priming experiments. Whether emotional stimuli are processed by a separate route(s) in the brain is still very much open to debate, but the findings of this thesis offers small and inconsistent evidence for a brain network for processing emotions that is relatively independent of V1 and visual awareness. The network and nature of brain structures involved in the processing of subliminal and low visibility processing of emotions remains somewhat elusive.

This thesis examines the validity of polyvagal theory as a model of normal socio-emotional responding (Porges, 1995, 2001, 2003a). Polyvagal theory makes several claims, and to date many of its predictions lack empirical testing. In the current research, five main hypotheses stemming from polyvagal theory were identified and tested using healthy participants. The initial empirical study examined the influence of laboratory stressors on autonomic function. The findings revealed that social evaluative threat increases activation of the sympathetic nervous system more than a virtual reality maze, and that arousal remains elevated for longer during anticipation of social evaluative threat in comparison to recovery from social evaluative threat. The second study investigated the effects of emotion regulation strategies on autonomic function, and highlighted the effectiveness of two meditation practices in reducing defensive physiological arousal and increasing subjective positive emotion. These studies were followed with a set of studies designed to evaluate the effects of defensive physiological arousal on socio-emotional functioning, as a direct test of polyvagal theory. The first study examined the effects of a laboratory stressor on facial expressivity, revealing that social evaluative threat had little impact on expressive regulation. A second study investigated the effects of a laboratory stressor on emotional sensitivity and spontaneous facial mimicry. Some limited support was found for polyvagal theory, although neither emotional sensitivity nor facial mimicry was significantly affected by laboratory stress. A final empirical study investigated the effects of a laboratory stressor on affiliation tendencies. The laboratory stressor did not influence participants’ willingness to spend time with others, however the experiment did reveal significant relationships between markers of social safeness and affiliation. The overall conclusion of this thesis is that polyvagal may not be a representative model of socio-emotional functioning in healthy participants. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the validity of polyvagal theory as a universal model of socio-emotional responding.

Based on existing theories of personality and socio-emotional functioning (e.g. Clark, 2005; Lynch, Hempel & Clark, in press) a new model is proposed and tested. The model hypothesises that (i) temperament (reward and threat sensitivity) and childhood invalidation predict problems with interpersonal functioning, (ii) this effect is mediated by self-regulatory capacity; where self-regulatory capacity comprises self-control (ranging from emotional over-control to emotional under-control) and flexible control and (iii) self-regulatory capacity itself has a quadratic relationship with interpersonal functioning. A UK community sample (n= 512) completed a self-report survey, measuring each of the aforementioned latent variables. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to determine the goodness-of-fit of this and variations of this model. SEM identified that a non-mediation model provided the best fit (χ²=49.403, p< 0.001; CFI=0.98; RMSEA=0.056). Good-fit was obtained for a model including flexible control as a partial mediator (χ²=269.06, p< 0.001; CFI=0.956; RMSEA=0.081) and adequate-fit for a model including over-control as a partial mediator (χ²= 91.744, p < 0.001, CFI=0.932; RMSEA= 0.096). Correlation analyses suggested that over-control and under-control correlated positively with interpersonal problems. Results from SEM provided promising initial evidence for the mediating role of self-regulatory capacity, particularly for the flexible control component. Correlation analyses provided support for the non-linear relationship between self-regulatory capacity and interpersonal functioning, whereby extreme over-control or extreme under-control is associated with interpersonal problems. Findings have implications for identifying mechanisms of change for therapeutic approaches to emotion dysregulation and for understanding the over-controlled population, which has previously been overlooked.