I Judge, Therefore I React: An Experimental Investigation of Acceptance

The present study was designed to provide empirical tests of some of the mechanisms thought to operate in mindfulness-based treatments. Specifically, I tested the hypothesis that appraising distress judgmentally (as a needless and useless indication of personal weakness) would be associated with experiencing meta-distress (e.g., feeling ashamed about being distressed), which would, in turn, be associated with increased experiential avoidance (i.e., suppression or distraction from the distress) and shorter distress tolerance. In addition, I examined the hypothesis that compassionately appraising distress (as normal, understandable, and potentially a source of growth) would be associated with spending more time curiously exploring that distress and thereby be associated with being able to tolerate distress for longer periods of time. Finally, I examined the prediction that compassionately appraising distress would be associated with even greater curious exploration and distress tolerance than viewing distress from a distanced perspective (as a passing mental event), which is often taught along side or as a prerequisite for compassionate appraisal. One-hundred-sixty-seven psychologically healthy college students and members of the academic community at a large Mid Southern University underwent a series of distress inductions and were told to either simply monitor their level of distress (Awareness), judgmentally appraise distress (Judgment), maintain a distanced perspective from distress (Distancing), or compassionately appraise distress while also maintaining a distanced perspective (Compassion). As expected, some support was found for the hypothesis that compassionately appraising distress was associated with greater curious investigation of distress, if not longer distress tolerance. Moreover, compassionately appraising distress was associated with greater curious investigation than simply viewing distress from a distanced perspective, but only for the idiographic sadness induction. Hypotheses regarding the impact of judgmental appraisal could not be fairly evaluated in the present study, as it appeared that the judgment manipulation failed to sufficiently alter behavior

Actually Embodied Emotions

This dissertation offers a theory of emotion called the primitivist theory. Emotions are defined as bodily caused affective states. It derives key principles from William James’s feeling theory of emotion, which states that emotions are felt experiences of bodily changes triggered by sensory stimuli (James, 1884; James, 1890). However, James’s theory is commonly misinterpreted, leading to its dismissal by contemporary philosophers and psychologists. Chapter 1 therefore analyzes James’s theory and compares it against contemporary treatments. It demonstrates that a rehabilitated Jamesian theory promises to benefit contemporary emotion research. Chapter 2 investigates James’s legacy, as numerous alterations of his theory have influenced the field of emotion research over the past fifty years, including so-called neo-Jamesian theories. This chapter argues that all these variations of the Jamesian theory assume that emotions require mental causes, whether in the form of evaluative judgments or perceptual contents. But this demand is not present in James’s theory. Nor, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, is this assumption necessary or even preferable for a fecund theory that explains human and non-human emotions. Thus, Chapter 3 offers the details of the primitivist theory of emotion: emotions are affective states that contribute to perceptual states by affectively representing relationships between the sensed environment and the sensing organism. Rather than relying on prior perceptual contents as triggers, emotions operate concurrently with, and as influencers of, exteroception. The information they carry can be conceptualized according to the theory of affordances proposed by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (1979): emotions inform emoters of their potential responses to ecological concerns. Chapter 4 then explains how the primitivist theory is compatible with uniquely human emotion episodes, namely instances in which we identify and conceptualize our emotional experiences according to introspective and contextual cues. It argues that one resource available for categorizing our emotional episodes is a felt bodily map: different emotion concepts correspond with patterns of increased or decreased activity across the body. Finally, Chapter 5 situates the primitivist theory within the debate about natural kinds in psychology. While emotion constitutes a natural kind, discrete emotions do not

Computational and Psycho-Physiological Investigations of Musical Emotions

The ability of music to stir human emotions is a well known fact (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom. 2001). However, the manner in which music contributes to those experiences remains obscured. One of the main reasons is the large number of syndromes that characterise emotional experiences. Another is their subjective nature: musical emotions can be affected by memories, individual preferences and attitudes, among other factors (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). But can the same music induce similar affective experiences in all listeners, somehow independently of acculturation or personal bias? A considerable corpus of literature has consistently reported that listeners agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece or even in particular moments or sections (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). Those studies suggest that music features encode important characteristics of affective experiences, by suggesting the influence of various structural factors of music on emotional expression. Unfortunately, the nature of these relationships is complex, and it is common to find rather vague and contradictory descriptions. This thesis presents a novel methodology to analyse the dynamics of emotional responses to music. It consists of a computational investigation, based on spatiotemporal neural networks sensitive to structural aspects of music, which "mimic" human affective responses to music and permit to predict new ones. The dynamics of emotional responses to music are investigated as computational representations of perceptual processes (psychoacoustic features) and self-perception of physiological activation (peripheral feedback). Modelling and experimental results provide evidence suggesting that spatiotemporal patterns of sound resonate with affective features underlying judgements of subjective feelings. A significant part of the listener's affective response is predicted from the a set of six psychoacoustic features of sound - tempo, loudness, multiplicity (texture), power spectrum centroid (mean pitch), sharpness (timbre) and mean STFT flux (pitch variation) - and one physiological variable - heart rate. This work contributes to new evidence and insights to the study of musical emotions, with particular relevance to the music perception and emotion research communities

Learning domain-specific sentiment lexicons with applications to recommender systems

Search is now going beyond looking for factual information, and people wish to search for the opinions of others to help them in their own decision-making. Sentiment expressions or opinion expressions are used by users to express their opinion and embody important pieces of information, particularly in online commerce. The main problem that the present dissertation addresses is how to model text to find meaningful words that express a sentiment. In this context, I investigate the viability of automatically generating a sentiment lexicon for opinion retrieval and sentiment classification applications. For this research objective we propose to capture sentiment words that are derived from online users’ reviews. In this approach, we tackle a major challenge in sentiment analysis which is the detection of words that express subjective preference and domain-specific sentiment words such as jargon. To this aim we present a fully generative method that automatically learns a domain-specific lexicon and is fully independent of external sources. Sentiment lexicons can be applied in a broad set of applications, however popular recommendation algorithms have somehow been disconnected from sentiment analysis. Therefore, we present a study that explores the viability of applying sentiment analysis techniques to infer ratings in a recommendation algorithm. Furthermore, entities’ reputation is intrinsically associated with sentiment words that have a positive or negative relation with those entities. Hence, is provided a study that observes the viability of using a domain-specific lexicon to compute entities reputation. Finally, a recommendation system algorithm is improved with the use of sentiment-based ratings and entities reputation

The effects of induced negative mood state on recalled autobiographical content and memory

Autobiographical memory has been theorized to serve as an adaptive function in coping with negative mood state. To gain a better understanding of whether autobiographical memory changes with negative mood state, a number of experiments examined the relative accessibility of cognitive content and ability to recall specific event memories in those who had a previous history of depression or showed some aspects of current depressive symptoms. Five separate studies involved 288 participants and examined the effects of negative mood components on autobiographical recall. Studies 1 – 4 examined the autobiographical content by cueing content using a cue word technique to evoke autobiographical memories by means of a modified version of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986). Negative mood state was induced by Velten mood induction technique, and self-reported mood was measured using University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology Mood Adjective Checklist (UWIST-MACL; Matthews, Jones & Chamberlain, 1990) before and after mood induction. The ability to recall specific event memories was measured in Study 5 by the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT; Raes, Hermans, Williams, & Eelen, 2007). The results indicate that negative mood does influence autobiographical recall in terms of content and memory. These results indicate that autobiographical memory is a phenomenon that is in part dependent on negative mood state and in part dependent on current depressive symptoms and history of depression. Increased rumination was particularly responsive to induced negative mood state in those with current depressive symptoms. Reduced levels of activity, alertness, loss of interest and diminished pleasure are aspects of negative mood that seem to be particularly important components of mood state at the time of recall. To gain further insights into mood state effects in autobiographical recall, future directions in mood research should focus on and differentiate between the separate mood state components that are more important in bringing about changes in recalled content, especially in those with either a history of depression or showing current depressive symptoms

Translational requirements for manufactured dopaminergic neurons for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

After decades of research there is now a plethora of cell-based therapies traversing through different phases of clinical trials. However, there remains work to be done regarding optimising the quality and production efficiency of these therapies, as well as economic considerations to validate their commercial viability. This project focuses on the process development of a candidate human embryonic stem cell (hESC) based therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the related health economics. This work set out to identify the key translational requirements for successful, robust and reproducible manufacture of a cell-based therapy for PD, by optimising a preclinical validated differentiation protocol. [Continues.]</div

The Material Theory of Induction

The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it.The content of that logic and where it can be applied are determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference

Understanding replication of experiments in software engineering: a classification

Context: Replication plays an important role in experimental disciplines. There are still many uncertain- ties about how to proceed with replications of SE experiments. Should replicators reuse the baseline experiment materials? How much liaison should there be among the original and replicating experiment- ers, if any? What elements of the experimental configuration can be changed for the experiment to be considered a replication rather than a new experiment? Objective: To improve our understanding of SE experiment replication, in this work we propose a classi- fication which is intend to provide experimenters with guidance about what types of replication they can perform. Method: The research approach followed is structured according to the following activities: (1) a litera- ture review of experiment replication in SE and in other disciplines, (2) identification of typical elements that compose an experimental configuration, (3) identification of different replications purposes and (4) development of a classification of experiment replications for SE. Results: We propose a classification of replications which provides experimenters in SE with guidance about what changes can they make in a replication and, based on these, what verification purposes such a replication can serve. The proposed classification helped to accommodate opposing views within a broader framework, it is capable of accounting for less similar replications to more similar ones regarding the baseline experiment. Conclusion: The aim of replication is to verify results, but different types of replication serve special ver- ification purposes and afford different degrees of change. Each replication type helps to discover partic- ular experimental conditions that might influence the results. The proposed classification can be used to identify changes in a replication and, based on these, understand the level of verification