Emotions and cognition

This thesis explores the expression of emotion through designed objects. Objects act as vehicles of memory in the same way language is the visible form of thought. In graphic design, the sensory qualities of an object provide a material surface on which information is communicated. The goal is to expose the autonomy of materials and form available to designers in the physical world while expressing emotional meaning beyond original form. By recasting the temporary fragments and observations of life into designed objects imbued with personal and cultural importance, the audience gains insight into others' personal and emotional experiences. Through our connections with the physical world, I investigate how form and the material qualities of designed objects can elicit an emotional response from the audience.

Perceiver's use of thought suppression to maintain a consistent attitude toward another person ironically leads to nonlinear changes in their evaluations over time. In this study of interpersonal evaluation, 157 participants across three conditions (high-level mindset, low-level mindset, and control) observe the same person in seven counter-balanced videotaped social interactions depicting helpful, rude, and ambiguous behaviors. The high-level prime instructed participants to focus on the target's goals and intentions ; low-level participants focused on the target's specific concrete behaviors. High-level participants better resisted the influence of conflicting information by surpressing thoughts inconsistent with their initial evaluation of the target. From the dynamical systems perspective, such suppressed information over time becomes organized as an alternative attractor, nonconsciously influencing the perceiver's cognitive system, leading to change away from an initial attitude, as measured by the Mouse Paradigm procedure.

Jealousy is a response to a situation in which a person feels a combination of different emotions, such as love, anger, sadness and fear when an affectionate interaction is happening between a loved one and someone else. This paper discusses the definition and onset of infant jealousy, the physiological basis of jealousy, whether maternal factors play a role, as well as studies on jealousy and EEG patterns. It has been argued that infants, as young as six-months-old display jealous-like behaviors. During jealousy evocation conditions, infants demonstrate negative emotions such as protesting or crying, diminished distancing, and heightened gaze toward their mother during maternal inattention. Approach/withdrawal behaviors and electroencephalography (EEG) activation were studied in the context of an infant jealousy paradigm. In this investigation, 45 mother-infants dyads were exposed to a social versus non-social condition during maternal inattention. During the social condition, infants demonstrated increased approach-style gaze and reach and negative affect. EEG was collected during all conditions on a subsample of 15 infants and in agreement with adult jealousy literature (Harmon-Jones, Peterson, & Harris, 2009), infants displayed left midfrontal EEG asymmetry, and displayed more approach motivations during the social doll condition indicative of jealousy approach motivations.

Parents' and children's behaviors are intricately woven together over the course of development. Consequently it is difficulty to determine the sources of influence predicting socially and academically oriented outcomes. Research from several developmental fields suggests that developing mechanisms of attention during the preschool years is crucial for both emotional and cognitive control. The current study shows that parental responsive behavior is important in understanding the development of voluntary attention. More specifically, the results suggest that parental awareness, assessed utilizing their perceptions of attentive temperament is an important factor in predicting their own behavior and the developmental outcomes of their children.

The Greek term synaesthesia, which literally translates into 'perceiving together,' is known among most literary critics as the mixing of sensations. The term is applied in literature to the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another. For instance: 'hearing' a color or 'seeing' a 'smell.' That is, the description of sounds in terms of colors such as a "blue note;" of colors in terms of sound such as "loud shirt;" of sound in terms of taste such as "how sweet the sound;" and of colors in terms of temperature such as a "cool green." Although synaesthesia has been used by a variety of poets throughout the centuries, my focus will be on its use in the poetry of John Keats and Emily Dickinson. While critics and scholars have considered this subject before, normally it is approached in terms of its specific meaning within a particular poem. In contrast, I argue that Keats and Dickinson employ synaesthesia to crystallize a poetic perspective, a literary world view, and that this perspective significantly pertains to a variety of gender issues in the nineteenth century. Consequently, I contend that both poets were dealing with the large theme of an imaginative poetic world in which synaesthesia transmutes and synthesizes gender so that a "blue note," male and female, are radically the same and yet "other." After reviewing the scholarship of synaesthesia in Keats's and Dickinson's poetry, I will analyze a series of poems that illustrate my thesis, fleshing out the implications of a gender synthesis that makes us see both poets challenging and subverting the gendered commonplaces of the 19th century.

Research on Kohlberg's theory of moral development has examined moral development by examining individuals' justice operations. However, how the moral emotions are related to moral development has been neglected. In a sample of mostly undergraduates (N=53), moral development (measured using an index of higher-level moral reasoning and one of reasoning consistency from the Defining Issues Test) and the moral emotions of guilt, shame, empathy, and self-esteem were measured. Shame was positively related to higher moral reasoning (r=.26, p<.10); guilt was not (r=-.02, ns). Empathy was also positively correlated with higher moral reasoning (r=.19). Moral consistency was positively related to shame (r=.31, p<.05) and guilt (r=.32, p<.05). Existential theory was used to explain the differentiation between shame and guilt in their correlations with higher moral reasoning. The correlations between moral consistency and guilt and between moral consistency and shame are discussed with respect to the inhibitive nature of shame and guilt.