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UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE FACULTE DE PSYCHOLOGIE ET SECTION DE PSYCHOLOGIE DES SCIENCES DE L’EDUCATION PERSONALITY UNDER STRESS: WHO GETS ANGRY AND WHY? INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE APPRAISAL AND EMOTION THESE Présentée à la Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation de l’Université de Genève pour obtenir le grade de Docteur en Psychologie par Tanja WRANIK (Allemagne) THESE N° 336 GENEVE 2005 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I was very fortunate to conduct research on a topic – or should I say on topics – that I found particularly interesting and exciting. In addition, I am grateful that I was able to conduct this research within in a very dynamic team, the Geneva Emotion Research Group, and to have benefited from the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation doctoral program « Stress and emotion at work and in social relationships ». The lectures, financing, and exchanges with researchers and participants from these two groups have helped make my PhD process a very stimulating experience. There are also many people I would like to thank personally. Thank you to my thesis director, Professor Klaus Scherer, who supported my ideas, encouraged me to look into the object of anger question, and was always helpful when my enthusiasm to understand and measure everything got out of hand. Thank you to the members of the thesis committee, Professors Jens Asendorpf, Phoebe Ellsworth, Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi, and Gilbert Probst, for their very helpful comments on the first version of the document, and their willingness to read it again as members of the jury. Thank you to Professor Norbert Semmer for accepting to be a member of the jury and for reading this second version of the document. I look forward to new insightful comments. Thank you to the members of the Emotion Research Group, past and present: Professor Susanne Kaiser for introducing me to the world of appraisal and anger and for her kind and helpful comments from the beginning; Tom Johnston, Carien van Reekum, and Susanne Schmidt for the discussions and ideas while I was pondering the thesis project; Didier Grandjean for his technical and statistical advice and for the many stimulating discussions and ideas that were never put into practice due to time constraints and working realities; Ursula Scherer for her systematic and inspiring approach to complicated data sets; Rachel Baeriswyl-Cottin for her valuable assistance with the French summary; Tatjana Aue, Tanja Bänziger, Elise Dan, Etienne Roesch, David Sander, and Veronique Tran for sharing their research interests and methods with me and allowing me to learn about emotions from so many different perspectives. And of course Patricia Garcia-Prieto Chevalier and Céline Jouffray (the honorary Emotion Research Group member), who were not only helpful with research problems, but perhaps most important, kept me sane throughout the PhD process with their understanding, support, and friendship. 2 Within the FNRS-funded doctoral program, I was fortunate to have met young researchers from other teams in Switzerland, and would especially like to thank Simone Grebner, Nicola Jacobshagen, and Peter Wilhelm for the many interesting discussions. Finally, I had the opportunity to collaborate with two other research groups. Thank you to Professor Susan Schneider and Erwan Bellard for the possibility to work in the Human Resource Department and to keep in touch with the applied contexts of psychology research until this day. Thank you to Professor Guido Gendolla, who warmly accepted me into his Applied Motivation, Personality, and Learning Group and to work with Kerstin Brinkman, Michael Richter, Ralph Schmidt, and Professor Rex Wright. The work-life balance has been a tricky one to keep, and I wish to thank my parents, Peter and Ursula Wranik, for having supported my early academi