“The many faces of sorrow”: An empirical exploration of the psychological plurality of sadness

Sadness has typically been associated with failure, defeat and loss, but it has also been suggested that sadness facilitates positive and restructuring emotional changes. This suggests that sadness is a multi-faceted emotion. This supports the idea that there might in fact be different facets of sadness that can be distinguished psychologically and physiologically. In the current set of studies, we explored this hypothesis. In a first stage, participants were asked to select sad emotional faces and scene stimuli either characterized or not by a key suggested sadness-related characteristic: loneliness or melancholy or misery or bereavement or despair. In a second stage, another set of participants was presented with the selected emotional faces and scene stimuli. They were assessed for differences in emotional, physiological and facial-expressive responses. The results showed that sad faces involving melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair were experienced as conferring dissociable physiological characteristics. Critical findings, in a final exploratory design, in a third stage, showed that a new set of participants could match emotional scenes to emotional faces with the same sadness-related characteristic with close to perfect precision performance. These findings suggest that melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair can be distinguishable emotional states associated with sadness

“Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality

Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in sensitivity to immoral behaviors and cognition compared to non-religious individual. This effect could occur due to perceptual and physiological differences that religious and non-religious individuals experience when processing and responding to immoral stimuli. In this manuscript we employ masking to test this hypothesis. We run a series of experiments to explore whether religiosity could involve higher perceptual and physiological sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety. We rate and pre-select IAPS images for moral impropriety. We present these images masked with and without negatively manipulating a pre-image moral label. We measure detection, moral discrimination, emotional and physiological responses. We found that religious participants experienced higher physiological and unbiased ROC perceptual sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety when a negative moral label did not precede a masked image. When a negative moral label was presented, religious individuals experienced the interval following the label as more physiologically arousing and responded with lower specificity for discrimination. We suggest that religiosity could involve higher conscious perceptual and physiological sensitivity to morally improper stimuli but also higher susceptibility to moral classification

Appraisal processes in emotional experiences.

According to appraisal theories of emotion, each emotion is associated with a specific way of appraising the environment. While appraisal theories have received considerable empirical support, there are other issues to be examined and this dissertation addresses three of these issues. In Study 1, I examined how appraisals change with time with anger after an anger-provoking incident. Studies in emotion-adaptation indicate that emotions tend to change to their baseline levels after the event that incited it. Study 1 adds to the literature of emotion adaptation by showing that the appraisals related to the adapting emotion (i.e., anger in this case) change in line with the adapting trajectory of that emotion. Study 2 looked into the functional form of the appraisal-emotion relationships. It shows that emotions change with appraisals in S-shaped functions, meaning that the relationships between appraisals and emotions are strongest at moderate levels. Study 3 examined the cognitive differences between positive emotions. Emotion studies tend to show that negative emotions are more differentiated cognitively than positive emotions. This, however, does not mean that positive emotions are the same. Study 3 shows that positive emotions are strongly different from each other in terms of some of the appraisals examined in appraisal theories, such as Pleasantness, Moral Violation, and Effort.Ph.D.PsychologySocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125906/2/3224767.pd

Differentiation of 13 positive emotions by appraisals

Cognition and Emotion293484-50

Taking a leap of faith: reminders of God lead to greater risk taking

Recent psychological models of religion suggest that religious beliefs provide a form of psychological control. Independently, other research has found that an increase in psychological control can lead people to adopt riskier strategies. Hence, we hypothesized that activation of God concepts increases risk taking. In three studies, we found that God primes led to take greater risk taking as though participants were literally "taking a leap of faith." In Study 2, we presented evidence that this effect could be mediated by increased psychological control. Although consistent with psychological models of religion, the findings also contradict some survey findings that religious people are less risk seeking. This inconsistency was addressed in Study 3 by looking at how religion, morality, and risk taking are related. Implications to a relational schema approach to study the effects of God primes are discussed

Cognitive deconstruction as a function of self-esteem following mortality salience

Annual meeting of the SPSP, Tampa, Florid