Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
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Affective empathy and emotion recognition deficits are hypothesized to underlie impaired social interaction in children exhibiting antisocial behaviour. However, few studies have examined the...Show moreAffective empathy and emotion recognition deficits are hypothesized to underlie impaired social interaction in children exhibiting antisocial behaviour. However, few studies have examined the possible emotion recognition deficits and affective empathy. This study compared facial affect recognition, vocal emotion recognition and affective empathy of children at risk for criminal behaviour to that of normally developing children. It was expected that children at risk of criminal behaviour had impaired emotion recognition and affective empathy, and that emotion recognition deficits and affective empathy were partially related to each other. The high-risk children were recruited through and intervention project connected to several municipalities in the Netherlands, focusing on the underage siblings or children of delinquents and those exhibiting antisocial and disruptive behaviour according to teachers. Facial and vocal recognition of happy, sad, angry and fearful emotions were respectively measured with the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) test and the Prosody test of the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks (ANT). Affective empathy was assessed by recording heart rate (HR) while showing video clips with neutral and emotional content (happiness, fear, pain and sadness). It was found that the high-risk group were less able to recognize fear and sadness in still-faces, and had an overall lower percentage corrected when recognizing emotions from voices, compared to healthy controls. The high-risk group also showed reduced HR to pain and fear, but this was not related to emotion recognition deficits. These findings suggest that children that engage in antisocial behaviour have impaired emotion recognition and reduced affective empathy, but that lack of empathy cannot solely be explained by a less ability to recognize emotions.Show less
The aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants...Show moreThe aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants read an article on how anger can strengthen the ideological convictions of leftists or rightists and were then asked to rank eight headlines in the order that they would want to read the corresponding articles. Six of these headlines were designed to indicate that their corresponding articles would induce either anger, fear or hope, while two of them were neutral in content. The participants’ preference for the headlines was intended to measure their motivation to experience the emotion that the headline was correlated with. The main hypothesis was that participants reading about how anger reinforces their ideology would want to engage with anger-inducing content more than participants in the other conditions. Unfortunately, the results were non-significant and the hypothesis was rejected. The participants were not more motivated to choose anger-inducing headlines after reading about how anger reinforces their ideology. Descriptively, the fear-related headlines were the most preferred out of all headlines. This can be due to a multitude of factors, the most important being the coronavirus pandemic, which could have influenced the preference for fear.Show less
Jonathan Edwards’ “Personal Narrative” is a chronological, retrospective account of Edwards’ spiritual life interposed with comments and reflections on his experiences with the Divine. He describes...Show moreJonathan Edwards’ “Personal Narrative” is a chronological, retrospective account of Edwards’ spiritual life interposed with comments and reflections on his experiences with the Divine. He describes multiple powerful, highly emotional encounters as he recounts his religious development from his childhood to the present. It stands as a central text of eighteenth-century spirituality, a touchstone of religious thinking in this period. This thesis argues that concerns with the fallibility of language are central to Jonathan Edwards’ “Personal Narrative” (c.1740), as he struggles adequately to describe spiritual experience in words even as that experience is said to go beyond language, including in its emotional and bodily effects.Show less
This thesis discusses the way in which we construct the identity of artificial intelligence through science fiction film. It examines how sympathetic treatment of artificial intelligence in this...Show moreThis thesis discusses the way in which we construct the identity of artificial intelligence through science fiction film. It examines how sympathetic treatment of artificial intelligence in this genre may induce empathy in its audience, and how could this sway the artificial intelligence debate when it enters the political sphere. The paper first provides discussions of the artificial intelligence debate, the effect on viewer emotion films can have, and the extent to which humans can empathize with artificial intelligence. The paper then uses three science fiction films – Interstellar (2014), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Her (2013) – to demonstrate the effects such films can have on viewer emotion and discuss the possible repercussions sympathetic treatment of AI could have on the human race. The essay warns against this attitude due to the significant dangers the unchecked development of AI could pose to the human race, and suggests precautionary steps to be taken in the field of education.Show less
Deze studie onderzocht het effect van drie nachten slaapbeperking ( ≥ 30 minuten) op het werkgeheugen en het beoordelen van de betrouwbaarheid van gezichten. Gedurende drie weken werden kinderen in...Show moreDeze studie onderzocht het effect van drie nachten slaapbeperking ( ≥ 30 minuten) op het werkgeheugen en het beoordelen van de betrouwbaarheid van gezichten. Gedurende drie weken werden kinderen in hun natuurlijke omgeving blootgesteld aan drie experimentele condities (baseline, slaapbeperking en slaapverlenging). Er werd gecounterbalanced voor volgorde van experimentele conditie en washout periodes werden ingezet om overdraagbare effecten van de condities te voorkomen. Van de geworven respondenten (N = 57) is bij 63% (19 meisjes, 13 jongens) het beperken van de slaapduur gelukt (vermindering van slaapduur van tenminste 30 minuten t.o.v. de baseline). Deze kinderen (M leeftijd = 9.87 jaar) sliepen tijdens slaapbeperking significant korter (M = 566.30 minuten, SD = 30.78) dan tijdens een normale week slaap (M = 616.37 minuten, SD = 30.06). Er werd geen effect gevonden van slaapbeperking op het werkgeheugen en het beoordelen van de betrouwbaarheid van gezichten. Echter, kinderen beoordeelden gezichten significant sneller na slaapbeperking p < .001). Hoewel significante effecten van de moderatoren op de slaapduur, de cognitie en de emotie uitbleven, werden er duidelijke trends waargenomen. Zo onderscheidden ochtendtypes zich van gemiddelde types en avondtypes. Zij hadden een langere slaapduur,sliepen in het weekend minder en slaapbeperking leek geen invloed te hebben op hun werkgeheugen. Bovendien beoordeelden zij de betrouwbaarheid van gezichten, in tegenstelling tot de twee andere types, positiever tijdens slaapbeperking dan tijdens de baseline. Aangezien experimentele slaaponderzoeken bij kinderen schaars zijn, leveren deze resultaten een substantiële bijdrage aan de wetenschappelijke literatuur.Show less
