Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Cortical Contributions to a Combined Appetitive-Aversive Social Outcome Task.(2021) Schneider, Kevin N; Roesch, Matthew R; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Learning through the emotional states of others is a critical skill for navigating our complex social environments, which is why it is a focal point of investigation in social neuroscience. Significant advances have been made in recent years, highlighting cortical brain regions where the transfer and processing of socially-derived affective information may be taking place. Among these regions are the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), known for their roles in attention and valuation during decision-making tasks, respectively. However, social decision-making studies have typically focused on either reward or punishment as the outcome valence, making it difficult to determine the social specificity of neural contributions observed. Using a social task that manipulates reward and shock within the same experiment, I recorded single-unit activity from ACC and OFC in rats. I found that during the task, ACC activity shared responses for reward and shock outcomes, suggesting it encoded socially-derived information in the service of attention. OFC neurons showed responses to self and vicarious reward outcomes, consistent with previous work in primates. Interestingly, OFC also encoded the positive value of the rats’ approach to their conspecific following foot-shock delivery, which leads to stress relief and a reduced fear response. Thus, in this task, ACC and OFC encoded other-related outcome information with respect to the self, in accordance with their nonsocial functions, suggesting that during social decision-making tasks, internal state goals are prioritized when outcomes to the self are at stake.Item Empathy across development: Examination of multiple contexts and levels of analysis(2019) Stern, Jessica A; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Empathy—the ability to understand and “feel with” others’ emotional states, along with the tendency to feel concern for others’ wellbeing—shapes important aspects of social functioning across development (Eisenberg, 2017). In three empirical papers, we explore predictors of empathy across different stages of development, and across multiple levels of analysis within Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model. Paper 1 examined associations between brain structure and observed empathic responding among N = 78 school-aged children (4–8y). Larger bilateral hippocampal volume (adjusted for intracranial volume) predicted greater empathic responding, but only for boys. The association was not driven by a specific subregion of the hippocampus (head, body, tail), nor did it vary with age. Findings suggest that hippocampal structure contributes to individual differences in young children’s empathic responding, consistent with findings in adults (Laurita & Spreng, 2017). Paper 2 examined whether parental attributions and empathic emotions in response to child distress predicted 4-year-olds’ observed empathic responding two weeks later. In a sample of N = 88 mother–child dyads, bootstrapped mediation analyses showed that parents’ less negative and more situational/ emotion-focused attributions about child distress predicted parents’ empathy, which in turn predicted their children’s empathic responding to the experimenter’s distress. Findings shed light on the role of parents’ social information processing in the intergenerational transmission of empathic care. Drawing on attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982), Paper 3 used experimental priming methods based to test whether temporarily enhancing adolescents’ feelings of relational security at school could increase their empathy for a bullied peer. Adolescents (13–15y; N = 234) were randomly assigned to imagine school-based experiences involving (a) receiving emotional support, (b) engaging in a fun social activity, or (c) engaging in a neutral activity; they then read a news story about a bullied peer and rated their feelings of empathy and willingness to help the victim. Multilevel modeling revealed no main effect of priming on adolescents’ empathy; however, dispositional attachment security significantly predicted empathy and willingness to help, pointing to the importance of dispositional security in social relationships for shaping empathy in school contexts.Item EXPRESSIVE SUPPRESSION IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD: LINKS WITH NEGATIVE EMOTION, PHYSIOLOGY, AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR(2018) Gross, Jacquelyn T; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A commonly used strategy for regulating emotions is known as expressive suppression (ES), in which a person attempts to conceal ongoing emotion-expressive behavior. ES has been frequently studied in adults and ample evidence indicates that it is linked to a host of negative outcomes, including depression and anxiety, suicide ideation, worse relationship and social functioning, cognitive impairment, and negative health outcomes. Relatively little is known about ES in children, despite the potential for ES to have lasting consequences on development (e.g., by contributing to a negative developmental cascade in which poor emotion regulation interferes with emerging competencies). The present study used a multi-method approach to investigate the emotional, physiological, and social behavioral correlates of both state and trait ES in middle childhood, a time when patterns of emotion regulation become more stable. Children ages 9 to 11 (n=117) reported their trait ES before coming into the lab, and then were randomly assigned to suppress or not suppress while watching a sad movie scene. Skin conductance was measured during and after the movie scene, and children gave multiple reports of their subjective emotions over the duration of the visit. After the movie scene, all children participated in tasks measuring prosocial behavior and empathy for others’ distress. Results indicated that trait suppression predicted skin conductance levels during the movie scene but did not predict emotions or social behavior. Group assignment did not affect outcomes. Exploratory analyses suggested that spontaneous ES of the control group during the movie scene predicted greater subjective feelings of sadness while suppressing. Additionally, exploratory mixed-effects models with child ratings of emotion nested within individuals suggested that trait sadness ES predicted changes in subjective sadness over the duration of the visit.Item Empathy in parents and children: Links to preschoolers' attachment and aggression(2016) Stern, Jessica A.; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though theory suggests that parents’ empathy is important for children’s empathic development, the transmission of empathy from parent to child remains poorly understood. The goals of this investigation were to test an intergenerational model of empathy with child attachment as a potential mediating mechanism and to replicate findings linking child empathy to reduced risk for aggression. Eighty-nine preschoolers and their mothers completed measures of parent empathy, as well as child attachment, empathy, and aggression. Parent empathy predicted child empathy, but associations varied by the measure of empathy employed. Attachment did not mediate the association between parent and child empathy, although secure attachment predicted greater child empathy. Child empathy predicted aggression, but the direction of the effect varied by the measure of child empathy and by child sex. Findings shed light on the intergenerational transmission of empathy and highlight the importance of multi-method assessment in the study of empathy.Item Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives(2004-05-10) Giovannelli, Alessandro; Levinson, Jerrold; PhilosophyThe <i>ethical criticism of art</i> has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of <i>narratives</i>. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of <i>response</i>, specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives (Chapters 1-2); then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument in support of such a practice (Chapters 3-7). Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noël Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between <i>central</i> and <i>acentral</i> imagining, and <i>iconic</i> and <i>non-iconic</i> imagination. Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into <i>autonomism</i> and <i>moralism</i>, <i>radical</i> and <i>moderate</i>. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for (i) their <i>consequences</i> on their perceivers and (ii) the <i>means of their production</i>, and indicates the evaluation in terms of (iii) the <i>ethical perspective</i> a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic (or "fitting") representation of reality.