Age differences in hedonic adaptation to societal restrictions? Positive and negative affect trajectories during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 33 nations.
We examined age group differences in hedonic adaptation trajectories of positive and negative affect (PA/NA) at different arousal levels during the severe societal restrictions that governments implemented to contain the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (March to June 2020). Data from 10,509 participants from 33 countries and 12 weekly assessments were used (67% women, aged 18 to 85 +, on average 318 participants per country (SD = 434) and 5.6 assessments (SD = 2.5) per participant). Multilevel models (level 1: assessments, level 2: participants, level 3: countries) were fit to examine trajectories of low to high arousa...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The effects of spatial frequency on the decoding of emotional facial expressions.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1423-1439; doi:10.1037/emo0001115The accurate identification of emotion is critical to effectively navigating our social lives. However, it is not clear how distinct types of visual information afford the accurate perception of others’ emotion states. Here, we sought to examine the influence of different spatial frequency visual information on emotion categorization, and whether distinctive emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) are differentially influenced by specific spatial frequency content. Across one pilot and two experiments (N = 603), we tested whether emotional facial expressio...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Cross-cultural applicability of eye-tracking in assessing attention to emotional faces in preschool-aged children.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1385-1399; doi:10.1037/emo0001124Humans show an attention bias toward emotional versus neutral information, which is considered an adaptive pattern of information processing. Deviations from this pattern have been observed in children with socially withdrawn behaviors, with most research being conducted in controlled settings among children from urban areas. The goal of the current study was to examine the cross-cultural applicability of two eye-tracking–based measures in assessing attention biases and their relations to children’s symptoms of socially withdrawn behaviors in two independen...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Shyness, inhibitory control, and social support seeking in preschoolers: Role of familiar and unfamiliar contexts.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1373-1384; doi:10.1037/emo0001166The risk potentiation model of cognitive control posits that inhibitory control may heighten the risk for problematic outcomes among some temperamental styles characterized by high reactivity. Because shyness is a temperamental style defined as wariness and heightened reactivity to social novelty, we examined whether the interaction between shyness and inhibitory control predicted social support seeking differently depending on context using a between-subjects design. Typically developing preschoolers (N = 167, 52% female, Mage = 4.05 years, SDage = .77 years) ...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Positive emotional reactivity to pleasant social and nonsocial stimuli in social anxiety disorder.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1306-1316; doi:10.1037/emo0001143Prior research has shown that Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is associated with significantly diminished positive affect (PA). Few studies have examined PA reactivity to pleasant experimental stimuli in individuals with SAD and whether emotional responses might be moderated by social context. Here, we investigated repeated measures of PA reactivity among individuals with SAD (n = 46) and healthy controls (HC; n = 39) in response to standardized neutral images, pleasant music, and social versus nonsocial guided imagery. Primary analyses revealed that SAD and HC p...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Are paranoid ideation and hallucination spectrum experiences differently associated with affect dynamics? A continuous-time modeling approach.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1294-1305; doi:10.1037/emo0001150Psychotic experiences have been associated with distortions in affective functioning, including aberrancies in affect dynamics. However, it remains unclear whether the two principal symptom dimensions of psychosis, namely paranoid ideation and hallucination spectrum experiences, are differently associated with affect dynamics, and whether associations hold after statistically controlling for depressive symptoms. We investigate this by using a novel statistical approach, the hierarchical Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process model. This is a continuous-time stochastic...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Adult attachment and interpersonal emotion regulation motives in daily life.
This study analyzed the relationships between interpersonal emotion regulation motives, perceived social interaction outcomes, and attachment. Undergraduates (N = 211) reported their trait attachment. Experience sampling was used to examine the reasons why they wanted to regulate others’ emotions during daily interactions and perceived changes in their own well-being and relationship quality with the target of regulation. Attachment anxiety was associated with more self-focused prohedonic motives and impression management motives, while attachment avoidance predicted less perceived increases in emotional and relational w...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Seeing red: Distraction influences visual attention for anger but not for other negative emotions.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1224-1235; doi:10.1037/emo0001136Emotion regulation is a vital skill that improves psychological well-being and overall functioning. Distraction (the purposeful internal disengagement from an emotional stimulus) and cognitive reappraisal (the process of changing one’s thoughts about an emotional event/stimulus) are two well-established regulation strategies that can effectively decrease negative affect. Less understood, however, are the attention allocation strategies that occur when engaging in these emotion regulation strategies—specifically, do people visually scan emotional information...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1213-1223; doi:10.1037/emo0001161Emotion episodes may include a conscious aspect of the emotion, namely being aware of our own emotional experience. Despite explosion in research over previous years, it remains unclear how emotions reach awareness and become feelings. Already in 1884, William James argued that emotional feelings resemble ordinary sensations in this respect. Here, using a novel model-based ratio scale of emotion intensity, we provide one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting James’ perceptual theory by showing that emotion awareness obeys one of the most fundamental ...
Source: Emotion - September 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Reward expectation enhances reactive control of distraction by emotionally negative stimuli.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1349-1359; doi:10.1037/emo0001171Reward expectation reduces the interference of task-irrelevant emotional distractors by improving cognitive control. The current study investigated the effects of reward expectation on proactive and reactive cognitive control of negative distractors. Reward expectation (incentive vs. nonincentive trials) was manipulated by a precue signaling the opportunity to gain an extra monetary reward for fast and accurate response on a given trial, followed by the trial display with the response-relevant target stimuli in the periphery and an irrelevant, negative, or neut...
Source: Emotion - September 12, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Reappraisal and health: How habitual reappraisal and reappraisal ability interact to protect against life stress in young adults.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1360-1372; doi:10.1037/emo0001154Inadequate emotion regulation may underlie the development of psychopathology as well as worsened physical health, particularly in the context of life stress. Cognitive reappraisal is typically considered an adaptive strategy to manage negative emotions. However, the extent to which reappraisal is beneficial may hinge upon contextual and individual differences. Specifically, it is unclear whether and how the ability to reappraise effectively (i.e., reappraisal ability) and exposure to stressful life events moderate the association between habitual reappraisal a...
Source: Emotion - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Motivational direction diverges from valence for sadness, anger, and amusement: A role for appraisals?
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1334-1348; doi:10.1037/emo0001165Recent work has cast doubt on whether the strength of motivation (strength of avoidance or approach tendencies) experienced while viewing emotion-eliciting pictures is dissociable from felt valence (negative versus positive). The present study extended this work by testing specific discrete emotions (amusement, anger, awe, desire, sadness). Previous work has proposed separate motivational direction (avoid versus approach) from valence. In Study 1, participants (N = 60) rated the motivational direction or valence they experienced while viewing 100 pictures that ...
Source: Emotion - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Does your past define you? The role of previous visual experience in subjective reactions to new affective pictures and sounds.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1317-1333; doi:10.1037/emo0001168According to predictive models of emotion, people use previous experience to construct affective predictions, represented multimodally in the brain. We do not live in a stable world, however. Some environments are uncertain, whereas others are not. In two experiments we investigated how experiencing previous certain versus uncertain contingencies shaped subjective reactions to future affective stimuli, within and across sensory modalities. Two S1–S2 paradigms were used as learning and test phases. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative/neutral affective pictu...
Source: Emotion - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Facial expression of pain: Sex differences in the discrimination of varying intensities.
The objective of the present study was to explore the perceptual basis of these sexual differences by comparing the visual information used by men and women to discriminate between different intensities of pain facial expressions. Using the data-driven Bubbles method, we were able to corroborate the woman advantage in the discrimination of pain intensities that did not appear to be explained by variations in empathic tendencies. In terms of visual strategies, our results do not indicate any qualitative differences in the facial regions used by men and women. However, they suggest that women rely on larger regions of the fa...
Source: Emotion - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A divergent effect of stimulus perceptual details on affective and semantic representations of valence.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1236-1253; doi:10.1037/emo0001148The current work investigated the potential dissociation between two modes of valence: affective valence (valence of the emotional response) and semantic valence (stored knowledge about the valence of an object/event). A series of six experiments systematically examined the divergent effect of manipulating the amount of perceptual details on affective valence and semantic knowledge about valence. We predicted that affective valence, more than semantic valence, will be affected by manipulating the amount of stimulus perceptual details. Experiment 1a manipulated ...
Source: Emotion - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
