Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Joormann, Jutta

Abstract

Difficulties with social and emotional functioning characterize most major psychiatric disorders and exert outsize influence on treatment prognosis and quality of life, evincing a pressing public health concern that necessitates closer investigation. In recognition of the diverse pathways through which social contexts interact with social-emotional functioning and psychopathology, the three studies that form this dissertation deliberately span a range of topics, methods, and populations, with the goal of characterizing individual differences in the perception of social-emotional signals across a range of increasingly complex social settings. Study 1 (presented in Chapter 2) uses functional magnetic resonance imaging in an adult community sample to investigate neural mechanisms underlying two foundational social-emotional processes: the ability to accurately evaluate others’ subtle emotional expressions, and the ability to learn and adapt to social cues. Individual differences in emotion perception sensitivity and levels of social inhibition were associated with performance on a novel morphed emotional faces learning task, and were also reflected in activations in social and reward processing regions of the brain during learning, demonstrating the importance of formalizing perceptual biases in models of learning behavior. Study 2 (Chapter 3) employs a behavioral mouse-tracking design, in an online sample enriched for individuals with social anxiety, to assess how clinically significant levels of social and emotional impairment relate to perceptions of both excessively positive and negative group dynamics. Greater fear of positive evaluation, a core co-component of social anxiety alongside fear of negative evaluation, was associated with greater accuracy in assessing rates of inclusion during experiences of over-inclusion during a virtual ball-tossing game, suggesting that socially anxious individuals are particularly adept at monitoring social dynamics. Study 3 (Chapter 4) is a two-wave daily diary study in youths ages 8-15, examining how various social contexts differentially relate to the use of emotion regulation skills as children mature. Family encounters more strongly predicted emotion regulation use in younger participants, while the same was observed for peer encounters and older participants, suggesting that daily interactions with others play an important role in emotion regulation throughout development. Lastly, Chapter 5 discusses overall conclusions regarding the value of integrating across diverse methods and approaches in the study of social-emotional functioning, and offers suggestions for more naturalistic future research and later clinical applications.

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