Behavioural and neural correlates of emotion recognition as a function of psychopathic personality traits

Psychopathy is associated with well-known characteristics such as a lack of empathy and impulsive behaviour, but it has also been associated with impaired recognition of emotional facial expressions. The use of event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine this phenomenon could shed light on the specific time course and neural activation associated with emotion recognition processes as they relate to psychopathic traits. In the current study we examined the PI , N170, and vertex positive potential (VPP) ERP components and behavioural performance with respect to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy (SRP-III) questionnaire. Thirty undergraduates completed two tasks, the first of which required the recognition and categorization of affective face stimuli under varying presentation conditions. Happy, angry or fearful faces were presented under with attention directed to the mouth, nose or eye region and varied stimulus exposure duration (30, 75, or 150 ms). We found that behavioural performance to be unrelated to psychopathic personality traits in all conditions, but there was a trend for the Nl70 to peak later in response to fearful and happy facial expressions for individuals high in psychopathic traits. However, the amplitude of the VPP was significantly negatively associated with psychopathic traits, but only in response to stimuli presented under a nose-level fixation. Finally, psychopathic traits were found to be associated with longer N170 latencies in response to stimuli presented under the 30 ms exposure duration. In the second task, participants were required to inhibit processing of irrelevant affective and scrambled face distractors while categorizing unrelated word stimuli as living or nonliving. Psychopathic traits were hypothesized to be positively associated with behavioural performance, as it was proposed that individuals high in psychopathic traits would be less likely to automatically attend to task-irrelevant affective distractors, facilitating word categorization. Thus, decreased interference would be reflected in smaller N170 components, indicating less neural activity associated with processing of distractor faces. We found that overall performance decreased in the presence of angry and fearful distractor faces as psychopathic traits increased. In addition, the amplitude of the N170 decreased and the latency increased in response to affective distractor faces for individuals with higher levels of psychopathic traits. Although we failed to find the predicted behavioural deficit in emotion recognition in Task 1 and facilitation effect in Task 2, the findings of increased N170 and VPP latencies in response to emotional faces are consistent wi th the proposition that abnormal emotion recognition processes may in fact be inherent to psychopathy as a continuous personality trait.

Generalization of the BTK Theory to the Case of Finite Quasiparticle Lifetimes

A generalization to the BTK theory is developed based on the fact that the quasiparticle lifetime is finite as a result of the damping caused by the interactions. For this purpose, appropriate self-energy expressions and wave functions are inserted into the strong coupling version of the Bogoliubov equations and subsequently, the coherence factors are computed. By applying the suitable boundary conditions to the case of a normal-superconducting interface, the probability current densities for the Andreev reflection, the normal reflection, the transmission without branch crossing and the transmission with branch crossing are determined. Accordingly the electric current and the differential conductance curves are calculated numerically for Nb, Pb, and Pb0.9Bi0.1 alloy. The generalization of the BTK theory by including the phenomenological damping parameter is critically examined. The observed differences between our approach and the phenomenological approach are investigated by the numerical analysis.

Examining Mentoring within a Particular Service Learning Context

My goal for this research project was to explore the levels of mentoring within a disability-focused service learning context known as the Special Needs Activity Program (SNAP). At present, research on mentoring within specific service learning contexts remains largely unexamined. In an effort to assess service learning and mentoring, I completed a comparative case study across three distinct years of SNAP. Undergraduate student leaders, known as coordinators, organize and implement SNAP as a thesis project. I focused specifically on the mentoring experience of particular coordinators of SNAP. My thesis presents and describes the findings of several levels of analysis across three SNAP coordinator cohorts. The analysis focused on key words, idiomatic expressions, patterns and dissonances. In my conclusion, I offer three metaphors that describe mentoring within the SNAP experience and relate these to my discussion about how mentoring functions as a component of service learning.

Genetic Programming for Non-Photorealistic Rendering

This thesis focuses on developing an evolutionary art system using genetic programming. The main goal is to produce new forms of evolutionary art that filter existing images into new non-photorealistic (NPR) styles, by obtaining images that look like traditional media such as watercolor or pencil, as well as brand new effects. The approach permits GP to generate creative forms of NPR results. The GP language is extended with different techniques and methods inspired from NPR research such as colour mixing expressions, image processing filters and painting algorithm. Colour mixing is a major new contribution, as it enables many familiar and innovative NPR effects to arise. Another major innovation is that many GP functions process the canvas (rendered image), while is dynamically changing. Automatic fitness scoring uses aesthetic evaluation models and statistical analysis, and multi-objective fitness evaluation is used. Results showed a variety of NPR effects, as well as new, creative possibilities.

The Effects of Body Posture on Emotion Perception: A Developmental and Theoretical Analysis

Previously, studies investigating emotional face perception - regardless of whether they involved adults or children - presented participants with static photos of faces in isolation. In the natural world, faces are rarely encountered in isolation. In the few studies that have presented faces in context, the perception of emotional facial expressions is altered when paired with an incongruent context. For both adults and 8- year-old children, reaction times increase and accuracy decreases when facial expressions are presented in an incongruent context depicting a similar emotion (e.g., sad face on a fear body) compared to when presented in a congruent context (e.g., sad face on a sad body; Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005; Mondloch, 2012). This effect is called a congruency effect and does not exist for dissimilar emotions (e.g., happy and sad; Mondloch, 2012). Two models characterize similarity between emotional expressions differently; the emotional seed model bases similarity on physical features, whereas the dimensional model bases similarity on underlying dimensions of valence an . arousal. Study 1 investigated the emergence of an adult-like pattern of congruency effects in pre-school aged children. Using a child-friendly sorting task, we identified the youngest age at which children could accurately sort isolated facial expressions and body postures and then measured whether an incongruent context disrupted the perception of emotional facial expressions. Six-year-old children showed congruency effects for sad/fear but 4-year-old children did not for sad/happy. This pattern of congruency effects is consistent with both models and indicates that an adult-like pattern exists at the youngest age children can reliably sort emotional expressions in isolation. In Study 2, we compared the two models to determine their predictive abilities. The two models make different predictions about the size of congruency effects for three emotions: sad, anger, and fear. The emotional seed model predicts larger congruency effects when sad is paired with either anger or fear compared to when anger and fear are paired with each other. The dimensional model predicts larger congruency effects when anger and fear are paired together compared to when either is paired with sad. In both a speeded and unspeeded task the results failed to support either model, but the pattern of results indicated fearful bodies have a special effect. Fearful bodies reduced accuracy, increased reaction times more than any other posture, and shifted the pattern of errors. To determine whether the results were specific to bodies, we ran the reverse task to determine if faces could disrupt the perception of body postures. This experiment did not produce congruency effects, meaning faces do not influence the perception of body postures. In the final experiment, participants performed a flanker task to determine whether the effect of fearful bodies was specific to faces or whether fearful bodies would also produce a larger effect in an unrelated task in which faces were absent. Reaction times did not differ across trials, meaning fearful bodies' large effect is specific to situations with faces. Collectively, these studies provide novel insights, both developmentally and theoretically, into how emotional faces are perceived in context.

Subjective Ambivalence and the Expression of Anti-Gay Bias

Univalent attitudes toward gay people have been widely studied, but no research to date has examined ambivalent (i.e., torn, conflicted) attitudes toward gay people. However, the Justification-Suppression Model (JSM; Crandall & Eshleman, 2003) proposes that ambivalence leads to biased expressions through intrapsychic processes which facilitate biased expression, particularly in contexts presenting strong justifications for expressing prejudice and weak pressures to suppress prejudice. I test these implications in the context of bias toward gay people. In Study 1, the measurement of ambivalence is examined in terms of both subjective ambivalence (i.e., the reported experience of “torn” attitudes) and calculated ambivalence (i.e., mathematical conflict between positive and negative attitude components). I find that higher subjective ambivalence is only associated with more negative attitudes toward gay people (and not positive attitudes toward gay people), and that higher subjective ambivalence predicts less gay rights support even after taking negative and positive attitudes toward gay people into account. Further, higher subjective ambivalence is associated with ideological opposition to gay people and more negative intergroup emotions (e.g., intergroup disgust). These findings suggest it is valuable to examine the unique component of subjective ambivalence separate from univalent negativity. Because calculated ambivalence measures are mathematically dependent upon a univalent negative measure, they cannot be examined separately from negativity. Therefore, subjective ambivalence is the focus of Study 2. The main goals of Study 2 were to determine why and when subjective ambivalence is related to bias. I examined the extent to which the negative relation between subjective ambivalence and opposition to anti-gay bullying can be accounted for by lower intergroup empathy and lower collective guilt, which may facilitate the expression of bias in keeping with the JSM. The relation between subjective ambivalence and anti-gay bullying opposition was examined within four social contexts based on a 2 (high vs. low offensiveness) x 2 (normatively unjustified vs. normatively justified) manipulation. I expected that higher subjective ambivalence would be most strongly related to lower intergroup empathy and collective guilt when there are the strongest justifications for bias expression, and that lower intergroup empathy and collective guilt would lead to less opposition to anti-gay bullying. Higher subjective ambivalence predicted less anti-gay bullying opposition. After accounting for positivity and negativity, the direct effect of subjective ambivalence was no longer significant, yet subjective ambivalence uniquely predicted intergroup empathy, which in turn predicted less anti-gay bullying opposition. These findings provide evidence that subjective ambivalence is largely negative in nature, but also presents evidence for a unique component of subjective ambivalence (separate from univalent attitudes) associated with low intergroup empathy and negativity. In contrast to previous research, I found very little evidence for the context-dependency of subjective ambivalence. Further research on subjective ambivalence, including subjective ambivalence toward other social groups, may expand our understanding of the factors leading to biased expressions.

Day Planner - 1984 (select dates)

One page from the 1984 daily planner of Donald Ziraldo, October 18, 1984, the page is filled with point form notes regarding GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). One note reads "don't understand how serious". The second date from the planner is October 27th and the notes appear to be expressions/thoughts like "society wants self-gov't" and "Realities = Crossroads in the Labrynth"

Metaphorical Interpretation: Measuring and Facilitating Growth.

Abstract A total of 378 grade 9 students participated in this study to address the problem that although metaphorical literacy and thought are expected and necessary for success in junior and senior high school and beyond, metaphorical concepts and thought are not required to be explicitly taught to these students. The students were from 20 different classes from 4 levels: English language learners (ELL), school to work (SSTW), applied, and academic. All were from 7 secondary schools within a board in southern Ontario. Nine classes made up the control group and 11 classes made up the treatment group. All classes were given 3 pretests and the posttest. The treatment group was given Socratic lessons and direct instruction on metaphorical thought and expressions during 1 semester and in conjunction with their other classroom material. The pretest scores (TOLD, Peabody, preproverbs concrete, and preproverbs abstract) did not reveal any effect of gender, but the academic students had higher scores than the applied students. The SSTW student results are more variable: (a) for the TOLD test, SSTW scores were between those of the academic and applied students; (b) for Peabody scores, SSTW students’ scores are the same as academic and are greater than applied; (c) for preproverbs concrete and preproverbs abstract, the SSTW scores are not different from the applied scores. The postproverbs concrete and postproverbs abstract scores for the treatment groups also showed no effect of gender but revealed that all students who received the treatment did better on their post scores. The positive changes of the treatment group illustrate a measured movement from literal understanding to abstract understanding using direct Socratic instruction and proverbs as a medium.

Using Poetry, Story, and Reflection to Understand Professional Self After Personal Loss

This research investigated professional identity transformation after personal loss. Through autoethnographic methods, I explore how my personal experience of my sister’s breast cancer and death affected my identity as a diabetes educator in the health culture. I discover a transformation of a professional who focuses on evidence-based medicine to a professional who values connection, therapeutic alliance, and mindfulness with patients and self in the diabetes education encounter. Using a holistic perspective on transformational learning, I integrate the poem “Wild Geese” to a collection of written narratives to connect my personal loss experience to my professional life. By unpacking the generated stories and using poetry, I conduct a process of critical and self-reflection to discover how my identity as a health professional has transformed and what makes meaning in my role as a diabetes educator in the health culture. I consider concepts of a conscious self, social relations and language and discover themes of knowledge exchange, food, and empathy as forms of language expression. These language expressions are not present in my professional life as I focus on rational, logical facts of evidence-based medicine and standardized education methods. Through this reflexive process, I hope to understand how my professional practice has changed, where I place an importance on connection, therapeutic alliance, and mindfulness. I move away from always “doing” in my professional life to focus on my state of “being” in my professional world. Rather than knowledge acquisition as the only factor in professional development, this study contributes to an understanding of additional qualities health professionals may consider that focus on the patient education encounter.

A Phenomenologically Sensitized Analysis of Images Depicting Stressed Embodiment in an Adolescent Male with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Each person with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) comes with unique characteristics (idiosyncratic) that give clues to the world they know (Connolly, 2008). It is through their body that they (a) know the world they are experiencing, (b) make meaning, and (c) express certain behaviours. I used Laban’s Movement Analysis (LMA) to practice an attuned and appreciative approach to describing and understanding the body movement in one severe manifestation of autism in an adolescent male. LMA observes human movement across many disciplines and can be applied in many contexts providing a body honoring discourse for description (Connolly, 2008). The framework examines movement in body, space, quality, and relation. Each theme provides a detailed description of the individual’s movement, thus, giving us a richer understanding of patterns and possible triggers to self-injurious behaviours (SIB). During the summer of August 2013, I participated in Brock University’s annual Autism Camp and worked with a 15 year old male named “Aaron” who manifests with low functioning autism. The purpose of my research project was to code and analyze a series of photos taken to help gain insight into movement patterns associated with stressed embodiment and self-injury in “Aaron”. As I understood more about these embodied expressions, I uncovered valuable information on how to read patterns and discover what triggers these events, thus providing strategies on how to help people do more refined observations and make meaning of the behaviour. Laban’s movement analysis provided a sensitized discourse appropriate to the embodied expressions depicted in the photos.

Feature Selection and Classification Using Age Layered Population Structure Genetic Programming

The curse of dimensionality is a major problem in the fields of machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery. Exhaustive search for the most optimal subset of relevant features from a high dimensional dataset is NP hard. Sub–optimal population based stochastic algorithms such as GP and GA are good choices for searching through large search spaces, and are usually more feasible than exhaustive and deterministic search algorithms. On the other hand, population based stochastic algorithms often suffer from premature convergence on mediocre sub–optimal solutions. The Age Layered Population Structure (ALPS) is a novel metaheuristic for overcoming the problem of premature convergence in evolutionary algorithms, and for improving search in the fitness landscape. The ALPS paradigm uses an age–measure to control breeding and competition between individuals in the population. This thesis uses a modification of the ALPS GP strategy called Feature Selection ALPS (FSALPS) for feature subset selection and classification of varied supervised learning tasks. FSALPS uses a novel frequency count system to rank features in the GP population based on evolved feature frequencies. The ranked features are translated into probabilities, which are used to control evolutionary processes such as terminal–symbol selection for the construction of GP trees/sub-trees. The FSALPS metaheuristic continuously refines the feature subset selection process whiles simultaneously evolving efficient classifiers through a non–converging evolutionary process that favors selection of features with high discrimination of class labels. We investigated and compared the performance of canonical GP, ALPS and FSALPS on high–dimensional benchmark classification datasets, including a hyperspectral image. Using Tukey’s HSD ANOVA test at a 95% confidence interval, ALPS and FSALPS dominated canonical GP in evolving smaller but efficient trees with less bloat expressions. FSALPS significantly outperformed canonical GP and ALPS and some reported feature selection strategies in related literature on dimensionality reduction.

An Abstract Algebraic Theory of L-Fuzzy Relations for Relational Databases

Classical relational databases lack proper ways to manage certain real-world situations including imprecise or uncertain data. Fuzzy databases overcome this limitation by allowing each entry in the table to be a fuzzy set where each element of the corresponding domain is assigned a membership degree from the real interval [0…1]. But this fuzzy mechanism becomes inappropriate in modelling scenarios where data might be incomparable. Therefore, we become interested in further generalization of fuzzy database into L-fuzzy database. In such a database, the characteristic function for a fuzzy set maps to an arbitrary complete Brouwerian lattice L. From the query language perspectives, the language of fuzzy database, FSQL extends the regular Structured Query Language (SQL) by adding fuzzy specific constructions. In addition to that, L-fuzzy query language LFSQL introduces appropriate linguistic operations to define and manipulate inexact data in an L-fuzzy database. This research mainly focuses on defining the semantics of LFSQL. However, it requires an abstract algebraic theory which can be used to prove all the properties of, and operations on, L-fuzzy relations. In our study, we show that the theory of arrow categories forms a suitable framework for that. Therefore, we define the semantics of LFSQL in the abstract notion of an arrow category. In addition, we implement the operations of L-fuzzy relations in Haskell and develop a parser that translates algebraic expressions into our implementation.

Feature Selection and Classification Using Age Layered Population Structure Genetic Programming

The curse of dimensionality is a major problem in the fields of machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery. Exhaustive search for the most optimal subset of relevant features from a high dimensional dataset is NP hard. Sub–optimal population based stochastic algorithms such as GP and GA are good choices for searching through large search spaces, and are usually more feasible than exhaustive and determinis- tic search algorithms. On the other hand, population based stochastic algorithms often suffer from premature convergence on mediocre sub–optimal solutions. The Age Layered Population Structure (ALPS) is a novel meta–heuristic for overcoming the problem of premature convergence in evolutionary algorithms, and for improving search in the fitness landscape. The ALPS paradigm uses an age–measure to control breeding and competition between individuals in the population. This thesis uses a modification of the ALPS GP strategy called Feature Selection ALPS (FSALPS) for feature subset selection and classification of varied supervised learning tasks. FSALPS uses a novel frequency count system to rank features in the GP population based on evolved feature frequencies. The ranked features are translated into probabilities, which are used to control evolutionary processes such as terminal–symbol selection for the construction of GP trees/sub-trees. The FSALPS meta–heuristic continuously refines the feature subset selection process whiles simultaneously evolving efficient classifiers through a non–converging evolutionary process that favors selection of features with high discrimination of class labels. We investigated and compared the performance of canonical GP, ALPS and FSALPS on high–dimensional benchmark classification datasets, including a hyperspectral image. Using Tukey’s HSD ANOVA test at a 95% confidence interval, ALPS and FSALPS dominated canonical GP in evolving smaller but efficient trees with less bloat expressions. FSALPS significantly outperformed canonical GP and ALPS and some reported feature selection strategies in related literature on dimensionality reduction.

Supporting social-cognitive development in the elementary years: The role of executive function and self-regulation

Every day we make decisions that have repercussions. Sometimes the effects are immediate and intended; other times the effects might be unintended or might not be apparent for years. As parents or educators, part of our role is to support the development of children’s decision-making skills, helping them to develop patterns of adaptive decision-making that will serve them well in their current lives and into the future. Part of successful decision-making involves self-control, a system served by the brain’s executive functions (EF). This involves the ability to put aside immediate reactions and base decisions on a variety of important considerations. Social-cognitive development, the ongoing improvement of the ability to get along with others and to understand others’ emotions, expressions, motivations, and intents, relies, to a large degree, on the same EF systems. The current paper explores the interaction of these two factors (the role of EF in social-cognitive development), explores the research to determine the most effective approaches to improving both factors, and develops a handbook providing activities for educators to use while supporting the growth of both EF and social-cognitive skills. Results of a needs assessment reveal that the majority (59%) of educators surveyed had never used a social skills improvement program in their classrooms, while a full 95% believed that social skills are important or very important for a student’s academic success.