Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Emotion Studies'

Due to being at risk for a number of unfavorable environmental factors (Barcons, Abrines, Brun, Sartini, Fumadó, & Marre, 2014), adopted children have an increased likelihood of developing social, emotional, cognitive, and attachment issues (Rushton, 2010). Whether adopted domestically or internationally, adopted children are at risk for experiencing socio-emotional difficulties (Dalen & Theie, 2014; Vandivere, Malm, & Radel, 2009; Vandivere & McKlindon, 2010) that can stunt the child’s ability to effectively regulate their emotions and connect with others. Adoptive parents may find it difficult to emotionally connect with adopted children who are experiencing socio-emotional difficulties (Dalen & Theie, 2014).

Adoptive parents can aid their adopted children in learning how to connect emotionally and regulate difficult emotions through emotion coaching (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). Emotion coaching is a construct based in a parent’s meta-emotion philosophy (PMEP), which is defined as parents’ thoughts and feelings about their own emotions as well as their child’s emotions. Emotion coaching is one of the four PMEPs and is considered the ideal PMEP. Emotion coaching parents accept and validate all of their children’s emotions, and views their children’s emotional expression as an opportunity to connect with them and teach them how to manage challenging emotions. Researchers (e.g., Ellis, Alisic, Reiss, Dishion, & Fisher, 2013) has shown that children of emotion coaching parents have higher levels of emotion regulation than children of parents with less ideal PMEPs. But how do parents develop their thoughts and feelings about their own emotions and their children’s emotions? Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1969) may lend some answers to this question.

Attachment Theory emphasizes the importance of emotional attunement between the mother and infant when developing secure attachment: the ability to form intimate relationships with others (Bowlby, 1969; Gus, Rose, & Gilbert, 2015). According to Attachment Theory, an individual cannot respond to others with empathic attunement unless they have secure attachment (Bowlby, 1969). The very act of emotion coaching seems to require high levels of emotional attunement between mother and child. Bowlby (1969) emphasized the importance of the mother as a primary attachment figure, and so this study will be looking at the adoptive mother’s attachment and PMEP.

Although researchers (e.g., Cowen, 1996; Chen, Lin, & Li, 2012) have made connections between Attachment Theory and PMEP in biological families, they have not yet explored these constructs in adoptive families. Thus, the purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of how adult attachment may or may not influence adoptive mothers’ PMEP and how adoptive adult attachment and PMEP may or may not influence adopted children’s ability to emotionally regulate and attach to their adoptive parent. Because the ideal PMEP is emotion coaching, the researcher measured this type of PMEP only. Adoptive mothers completed questionnaires assessing their attachment, level of emotion coaching, and their view of their child’s ability to emotionally regulate.

Utilizing Pearson’s pairwise correlations, the researcher analyzed the relationships between the adoptive mothers’ level of emotion coaching and her attachment; the relationship between the adoptive mothers’ level of emotion coaching and her child’s emotion regulation skills; and the relationship between the adopted mothers’ attachment and her child’s emotion regulation skills. The researcher discovered that there was a statistically significant negative relationship between emotion coaching and adult attachment; a statistically significant positive relationship between emotion coaching and emotion regulation; and statistically significant positive relationship between attachment and lability. Finally, the researcher utilized a regression analysis to discover that the adoptive mothers’ level of emotion coaching acted as a mediator between the adoptive mothers’ attachment and the adopted child’s level of emotion regulation. These findings indicated that emotion coaching is an effective method of aiding adopted children’s ability to emotionally regulate. Furthermore, the findings indicated that even if an adoptive mother is struggling with attachment, if she is able to learn emotion coaching, she may still have a positive effect on her adopted child’s emotion regulation development.

Over the past decade, vinyl records have re-emerged as a mainstream format for casual music listening, drastically increasing both in sales and media attention. The emotional relationship between collectors and the real and imagined places they associate with these records, a tactile medium in an age of digital downloading and internet streaming, is a key yet overlooked factor in this contemporary resurgence. Inspired by the extant literature on collecting, emotional geographies, and other post-structural understanding of affect, this study examines this trend in three ways: reviewing the history of the recording industry, observing specific spaces of vinyl consumption in the Los Angeles area, and interpreting individual opinions of record collectors. The study concludes with a post-structural assessment of the emotional geographies of collecting vinyl records in Los Angeles and throughout North America.

Middle Eastern individuals represent a heterogeneous group comprised of different nationalities, languages, and religious identifications. Yet, Middle Eastern Americans are widely underrepresented in the psychotherapy literature. Extant literature appears to focus on professional opinions about what psychotherapists should do when working with this population, including understanding cultural factors, such as incorporating family in treatment and acculturation status. Considering cultural communication patterns among this population, emotion is generally understood to be inhibited or suppressed, as disclosing personal problems and expressing emotion outside the family sphere can be viewed as disloyal and/or shaming. Thus, one of the many areas mental health clinicians should consider when working with Middle Eastern clients is how to recognize emotional communication patterns and identify and assist their clients with emotion regulation and/or dysregulation in a culturally sensitive manner.

To address the need for research on how emotions are expressed and regulated in psychotherapy with Middle Eastern clients, this study qualitatively analyzed three psychotherapy cases from a university’s community counseling center’s archival research database. More specifically, the researchers used an inductive content analysis approach with emotion, emotion regulation and InVivo codes to observe themes of emotional expression, regulation and dysregulation that emerged from the gathered data from a course of psychotherapy with these Middle Eastern American clients to further classify the observable phenomena (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008; Hsieh & Shannon, 2005; Saldaña, 2009; Weber, 1990).

Consistent with previous literature, results indicated that negative emotions were coded more frequently in psychotherapy sessions than positive emotions, as was the emotional regulation strategy of Experiential Avoidance. Surprisingly, data emerged revealing positive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., acceptance and emotional identification) that were not identified by literature describing this population. By obtaining a better understanding of how Middle Eastern American clients expressed and utilized their emotions in treatment, this study may be useful to the future work of clinicians and researchers targeting treatment of these individuals in a culturally sensitive manner and in an approach that emphasizes positive emotion regulation strategies.

In this dissertation, I sought to give postpartum women their own voices so that they could help define the postpartum experience on their own terms. It fills important gaps within the literature on new mothers’ experiences. A phenomenological approach was used, emphasizing the lived experiences of the women, with an overlay of autoethnography, where the personal experience of the researcher becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the phenomenon being studied. Thus, my personal experience of pregnancy into early motherhood is interwoven throughout this dissertation. Forty-two women participated in the in-depth, face-to-face interview, followed by a questionnaire. The qualitative data was analyzed, specific themes became prominent, and were coded for this study. Little of the quantitative data obtained by the questionnaire was used for this study. The following are forefront in this study of understanding how do women learn to navigate the “new world” of motherhood. First, throughout pregnancy, labor, postpartum, and early motherhood women experience control in a variety of ways, specifically a lack of control. Secondly, women are often afraid of doing something wrong, during pregnancy, labor, birth, and motherhood, such as differing from the norms put forward by friends, family, and the medical field, leading to feelings of guilt. When things do go right, they can feel pride, but were not likely to express this in my study. The third area of study in this dissertation, is that mothers are judged in both appearance and motherwork. In a sense, two ideals, “The Motherhood Mandate” and “Beauty Mandate,” are fighting against one another, that of being and ideal mom in terms of mothering and of being an ideal woman in terms of beauty is intertwined. These three themes are discussed in relation to three sociological theories. Medicalization and Foucault’s “docile bodies” thesis both aid in explaining women’s thoughts and experiences, as well as constraints in the postpartum stage. The social constructionist approach of “doing gender,” is applicable as well, as a general framework under which women think and act.

This thesis investigates the role that furor and other negative emotional states have on Aeneas' mission in the Aeneid. The role of the Fates is to enact change on a large scale, and this is achieved through destruction, which is caused by mortal and immortal agents manipulated by emotion. While Aeneas is trained to control his desires in the first half of the epic, in the second his rage and passions are spurred by supernatural forces.

This study will discuss the major plot points where emotion and rage interact with the main goal of Aeneas and the Fates. Included is a linguistic analysis wherein key prototypical terms - fatum, amor, and furor - are arranged visually on graphs that show their placements line-by-line and locations relative to each other. The contention is that at various points, fatum causes amor which leads to furor, which leads to change, and thus fatum.

Research has shown that there is a complex association between emotion regulation difficulties and increased substance use. This study investigated men?s gender role conflict (GRC) as a possible moderator of this relationship. A sample of 144 adult males from the United States completed measures of alcohol use (MAST), non-alcohol substance use (DAST-20), emotion regulation difficulties (DERS), and men?s GRC (GRCS). GRCS was found to significantly correlate with DERS, MAST, and DAST-20. DERS emerged as a significant predictor for alcohol use severity and GRCS as a significant predictor for the non-alcohol substance use severity. In the regression models that included covariates, the age of first use emerged as a significant predictor of substance use severity and only DERS continued to significantly predict alcohol use severity. Men?s GRC was not found to significantly moderate the relationship between emotion regulation difficulties and substance use severity in this sample. A trend was observed where the association between emotion regulation difficulties and alcohol use severity appeared to be stronger at higher levels of men?s GRC. These findings support previous research that has found an association between men?s gender role conflict and substance use severity; however, further research is needed to clarify the nature of this association.