The purpose of this study was to research if people that witness another person depicting himself/herself to be in pain would induce a positive mood in the viewer. The study examined the induction of positive moods in people viewing a video depicting a person expressing discomfort or pain. Forty-five undergraduate students were recruited from the undergraduate student population of the Introduction to Psychology course at Bemidji State University. Students completed the Mood Assessment Scale to measure their current mood and then proceeded to one of two conditions. One condition viewed an America's Funniest Home Videos (AFV) video clip of people experiencing pain (n = 24) and the other condition read a collection of the Velten positive mood statements (n = 21). At the conclusion of each condition, students again completed the Mood Assessment Scale. An independent t-test was used to measure the different changes in mood induced by the Velten mood statements and the AFV video clip. Significant results were found for both the Velten Mood and AFV video condition. Results of this study indicate that observing a person who is experiencing pain induces a positive mood in the observer.

There is a noticable lack of research done in epistemology with regards to the role of the passions (or emotions). Epistemology asks questions about what knowledge is and how we come by acquiring knowledge. Due to these types of questions, the focus is put on reason and justification. However, there is also an aspect of normativity: what methodology ought one to use in order to acquire knowledge? Given recent findings in experimental psychology, it is odd that an examination of the passions' role in normativity is less prominent in epistemology. My presentation is about my recent research into the role passions play in questions about knowledge acquisition and more specifically the normative aspects of knowledge acquisition. My primary way of doing this is not solely a review of experimental psychology literature, but also an examination of the 18th Century philosopher David Hume's work on the passions and normativity. I will show how an accurate interpetation of Hume's work is relevant to epistemological issues, and how his work can inform contemporary debates around normativity more generally. 

The 2010 annual freshmen survey from UCLA found that incoming freshmen self-report as having lower levels of mental health then previous freshmen over the past 25 years. Lower levels of mental health have been found in research to correlate with higher levels of stress. If students have high levels of stress and ineffective coping skills this may negatively affect their performance. To understand how school stress, coping, and performance interact with each other, college freshmen from a mid sized university in the rocky mountain region were asked to complete a stress inventory, a coping inventory, and a demographic survey. Results showed that stress and coping are significantly positively correlated, specifically emotion coping was significantly correlated with stress. Regression analysis showed that stress accounted for over a quarter of the variance in GPA when controlling for gender. These results suggest that stress may change a student’s performance, and that freshmen may only know how to cope with stress in an emotional way.

There has been growing scholarly attention to the fact that most global health projects/research are disproportionately focused on specific locales resulting in temporary restricted interventions. This approach is, in some significant sense a 'betrayal' of the very idea of global health. This study asks how Seattle's various global health institutions and organizations approach Global health in Kenya. I hypothesize that most global health projects promote the production of inequity, unequal and uncaring exchanges between donor institutions and the recipients. I analyze the socio-historical, economic and political histories and ties between Kenya and global health institutions in Seattle drawing on political-economy analysis and feminist care ethical analysis. I also thematically code and analyze ethnographic interviews to investigate the relationship between the responses and the main research topic. I expect to find that global health projects may not necessarily achieve their intended goals because they do not fully consider the four phases of care, which involve attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness. Understanding the factors influencing the production of unequal and uncaring exchanges in global health is essential as it will impact how global health projects should be conducted.

The study aimed to compare and contrast mother-child and father-child attachment relationships and their associations with children’s emotion regulation. It was hypothesized that both mother-child and father-child attachments would be related to regulation at school and at home. Participants were 111 children (n= 78 girls, 38 boys, 10 to 14 years of age). Children completed a questionnaire and interview measures of attachment for their mothers and fathers. Teachers completed a measure of Frustration Tolerance and mothers completed a questionnaire to assess the child’s coping strategies. Effects varied across measures of attachment. On the questionnaire measure, attachment to mothers was more consistently related to emotion regulation than attachment to fathers, but on the interview measure, attachments to both parents were equally related to emotion regulation. These results indicate that children’s attachments to their fathers are as important to the study of their emotion regulation as their attachment to mothers.