Thesis Defence: Emotional Concordance in Stressful and Positive Contexts: Associations with Depressive and Anxious Symptoms
June 25 at 9:30 am - 1:30 pm
Colin Loveridge, supervised by Dr. Jessica Lougheed, will defend their thesis titled “Emotional Concordance in Stressful and Positive Contexts: Associations with Depressive and Anxious Symptoms” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology – Psychological Sciences.
An abstract for Colin Loveridge’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.
Abstract
There is an unclear relationship between real-time emotional reactions and developmental scale emotion tendencies such as internalizing problems (depression, anxiety). Complicating this problem further, previous research has demonstrated during many emotion contexts, a large degree of response variation occurs across different components of the emotion system (physiology, self-reported experience, expressions). Recently, emotional concordance, the degree to which different components of the emotion system are correlated, has emerged as an important framework for the investigation of real-time emotion responses and developmental scale emotion tendencies such as internalizing symptoms. In this study, individuals were exposed to two emotion elicitation tasks (one stressor and one positive), and the real-time physiological and experiential responses of participants were recorded. Then, to examine the emotional concordance of participants, latent profile analysis was utilized to independently establish grouping that represent different emotion responses from each elicitation task. As a result, six distinct groupings of emotional concordance responses were generated for the stressor and positive emotion task. Subsequently, these emotion response groupings were probed for relationships with anxious and depression symptoms. Results indicate a relationship was found between three of the positive task emotion response groupings and internalizing symptoms. However, no relationship was found between the stressor context groupings and anxious and depressive symptoms.
