Social Processes in the Experience and Regulation of Emotions

The quality of our lives can be characterized, in part, by the emotions we experience. Feeling a preponderance of negative emotions is characteristic of a range of psychological and affective disorders. As such, the ability to regulate emotions has been recognized as critical for maintaining mental health. While definitions of emotions abound, they have been primarily conceptualized as intrapersonal responses to one’s environment. Yet, while our social interactions are an inseparable aspect of our emotional lives, relatively little emphasis has been placed in prior research on the social bases of emotional experiences. This dissertation presents three bodies of research that investigate the role of social processes in experiencing and regulating negative emotions. In the first body of research, I present four studies that investigate how empathy, the ability to experience another person’s emotions, is involved in experiencing anxiety. In the second body of research, I transition to investigating the social bases of emotion regulation. Here, I present two multi-phase studies that investigate how social emotion regulation may be best implemented to help others experiencing different kinds of negative emotions. The third body of research investigates the neural bases of social emotion regulation. The results of these studies highlight how social processes are an inherent part of emotional experiences and emotion regulation

Edge states in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice of massive magnetic skyrmions

We study the collective dynamics of a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice of magnetic skyrmions. By performing large-scale micromagnetic simulations, we find multiple chiral and non-chiral edge modes of skyrmion oscillations in the lattice. The non-chiral edge states are due to the Tamm-Shockley mechanism, while the chiral ones are topologically protected against structure defects and hold different handednesses depending on the mode frequency. To interpret the emerging multiband nature of the chiral edge states, we generalize the massless Thiele's equation by including a second-order inertial term of skyrmion mass as well as a third-order non-Newtonian gyroscopic term, which allows us to model the band structure of skrymion oscillations. Theoretical results compare well with numerical simulations. Our findings uncover the importance of high order effects in strongly coupled skyrmions and are helpful for designing novel topological devices.Comment: 6 pages,4 figures,accepted by Physical Review B as a Rapid Communicatio

Affective lability and difficulties with regulation are differentially associated with amygdala and prefrontal response in women with Borderline Personality Disorder

The present neuroimaging study investigated two aspects of difficulties with emotion associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD()): affective lability and difficulty regulating emotion. While these two characteristics have been previously linked to BPD symptomology, it remains unknown whether individual differences in affective lability and emotion regulation difficulties are subserved by distinct neural substrates within a BPD sample. To address this issue, sixty women diagnosed with BPD were scanned while completing a task that assessed baseline emotional reactivity as well as top-down emotion regulation. More affective instability, as measured by the Affective Lability Scale (ALS()), positively correlated with greater amygdala responses on trials assessing emotional reactivity. Greater difficulties with regulating emotion, as measured by the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS()), was negatively correlated with left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG()) recruitment on trials assessing regulatory ability. These findings suggest that, within a sample of individuals with BPD, greater bottom-up amygdala activity is associated with heightened affective lability. By contrast, difficulties with emotion regulation are related to reduced IFG recruitment during emotion regulation. These results point to distinct neural mechanisms for different aspects of BPD symptomology

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

Interdependence

Inter/dependence comprises an installation of drawings, a zine, and a flag. They have their origins in the Artists’ Personal Impacts Survey, a 40-question survey that I created and conducted to explore positive psychological benefits of art practice. The survey was completed by 112 visual artists. Developed as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program in 2015.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/interdependence/1001/thumbnail.jp