Happy is stronger than sad: Emotional information modulates social attention.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 1061-1074; doi:10.1037/emo0001145Social directional cues (e.g., gaze direction; walking direction) can trigger reflexive attentional orienting, a phenomenon known as social attention. Here, we examined whether this reflexive social attention could be modulated by the emotional content embedded in social cues. By introducing emotional (happy and sad) biological motion (BM) stimuli to the modified central cuing paradigm, we found that the happy but not the sad emotional gait could significantly boost attentional orienting effect relative to the neutral gait. Critically, this “happiness advanta...
Source: Emotion - August 18, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Differential audiovisual information processing in emotion recognition: An eye-tracking study.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 1028-1039; doi:10.1037/emo0001144Recent research has suggested that dynamic emotion recognition involves strong audiovisual association; that is, facial or vocal information alone automatically induces perceptual processes in the other modality. We hypothesized that different emotions may differ in the automaticity of audiovisual association, resulting in differential audiovisual information processing. Participants judged the emotion of a talking-head video under audiovisual, video-only (with no sound), and audio-only (with a static neutral face) conditions. Among the six basic emotions, disg...
Source: Emotion - August 18, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Changes in happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger around romantic relationship events.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 986-996; doi:10.1037/emo0001153Most people agree that romantic relationships greatly affect how we feel. For example, we typically feel happier when getting married but sadder when breaking up. However, previous research primarily focused on changes in cognitive but less so affective well-being around positive and negative relationship events. Set-point theory suggests that subjective well-being might change shortly around such experiences but bounce back in the long run. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP), we examined changes in life satisfaction, happiness, sadness, anxiet...
Source: Emotion - August 18, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of a new experimental manipulation of co-rumination.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 1190-1201; doi:10.1037/emo0001151Co-rumination is a form of interpersonal emotion regulation wherein dyads engage in extensive, cyclical conversations regarding the causes and consequences of problems and associated negative emotions. In the present investigation, we leveraged the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat to elucidate the intrapersonal costs and interpersonal benefits of co-rumination. To do so, we developed the first direct experimental manipulation of co-rumination using a multimethod, dyadic approach to test the effects of co-rumination on both dyad members. Friend dyad...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Individual differences in inhibitory control are not related to downregulation of negative emotion via distancing.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 1141-1159; doi:10.1037/emo0001135Evidence suggests that cognitive control and emotional control share partly the same cognitive processes. For example, downregulation of negative emotions requires inhibiting or limiting the expression of a prepotent appraisal of a situation in favor of selecting an alternative appraisal. Although inhibitory control seems to be a particularly relevant process in emotion regulation (ER), previous studies reported inconsistent findings on their relationship, likely because of the application of single task measures in relatively small samples. Therefore, this stu...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Desired sadness, happiness, fear and calmness in depression: The potential roles of valence and arousal.
Emotion, Vol 23(4), Jun 2023, 1130-1140; doi:10.1037/emo0001120Prior research has shown that clinically depressed individuals are somewhat more motivated to feel sadness and less motivated to feel happiness than nondepressed individuals are. However, what underlies these patterns is not yet clear, as people may be motivated to experience positive (vs. negative) valence, high (vs. low) arousal, or discrete emotions. To test these possibilities, we assessed the motivation to experience emotions that capture different combinations of positive and negative valence and high and low arousal (i.e., sadness, happiness, fear and ca...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychological well-being is associated with prosociality during the COVID-19 pandemic: A comparison of Swedish and Chinese samples.
This study revisited the link between psychological well-being and prosociality during a global crisis from a cross-cultural perspective. We surveyed two large samples of Chinese (N₁ = 1,030; 89 regions; May 1–6, 2020) and Swedish (N₂ = 1,160; 22 regions; May 14–24, 2020) individuals during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Across both countries, we observed that psychological well-being was strongly associated with one’s self-reported tendency to perform prosocial behaviors, including actions aimed at relieving the burden of the pandemic (e.g., money donation to charity organizations during COVID-19). Moreove...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Negative emotion reduces visual working memory recall variability: A meta-analytical review.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 859-871; doi:10.1037/emo0001139Negative emotion is often hypothesized to trigger a more deliberate processing mode. This effect can manifest as increased precision of information maintained in working memory (WM) captured by reduced WM recall variability under an induced negative emotional state. However, some recent evidence shows that WM representations are immune to any emotional influences. Here, we meta-analyze existing evidence based on data from 13 experiments across 491 participants who performed a delay-estimation WM task under negative and neutral emotional states. We find that induc...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Childhood adversity and emotion regulation strategies as predictors of psychological stress and mental health in American Indian adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 805-813; doi:10.1037/emo0001106Life events, such as the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, elicit increases in psychological stress and symptoms of anxiety and depression. In turn, these outcomes have negative implications for mental health. Emotion regulation strategies and prior adversity may moderate the degree to which life events affect outcomes that are linked to mental health. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate whether childhood adversity and emotion regulation strategy use interactively informed changes in outcomes linked to mental health following the onset of...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The art of getting things done: Training affective shifting improves intention enactment.
Discussion of our findings highlights the importance of theory-driven and affect-related interventions to close the gap between intention and action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Emotion)
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Attention-focused emotion regulation in everyday life in adulthood and old age.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 633-650; doi:10.1037/emo0001158Although some lab studies suggest older adults rely more on attentional deployment to regulate their emotions, little is known about age differences in specific attention deployment tactic use and how they relate to mood regulation in everyday life. The current longitudinal experience sampling study considered several different attention deployment tactics, such as shifting or focusing attention to positive and negative elements either internally or externally (thoughts and feelings vs. external environment). Younger, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 236) respo...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Guilt underlies compassion among those who have suffered adversity.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 613-621; doi:10.1037/emo0001116Feelings of guilt can often result from the onset of adverse life events. Although guilt is often linked to psychological dysfunction, emerging findings suggest that it can also act as a powerful moral force in motivating compassion. Yet, little work has been done to examine how guilt, as a function of surviving past adversity, can affect people’s propensity to feel compassion toward others. In three studies (N = 350), we examined if the emergence of guilt tendencies that result from having experienced adversity can foster increased compassion toward others in ...
Source: Emotion - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emotional complexity under high stress: Do protective associations for risk behaviors persist even during a pandemic?
We examined associations of mean affect intensity, emotion differentiation, and emotion polarity with frequency of daily substance use and binge eating across 10 days in a demographically diverse sample of U.S. adults (N = 353) recruited between March 24 and April 9, 2020, when stay-at-home orders were initiated. Owing to the nested data structure and excessive zero values, analyses were conducted using multilevel zero-inflated negative binomial regression. Consistent with past research, negative affect was positively associated with frequency of substance use and binge eating. Importantly, results indicated that negative ...
Source: Emotion - August 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Maternal socialization of emotion and the development of emotion regulation in early adolescent girls.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 872-878; doi:10.1037/emo0001110Regulation of negative emotions is a core competency of child development. Parental emotion socialization profoundly influences later capacity to regulate negative affect in childhood and adolescence. The present study examined the effects of maternal emotion socialization on the development of emotion regulation in the context of a longitudinal study of 210 mother–daughter dyads. Dyads completed a conflict resolution task when the child was age 11 years during which maternal warmth and hostility were coded. At ages 11 to 13 years, mothers completed self-report...
Source: Emotion - August 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Infants’ learning from distinct negative emotions.
Emotion, Vol 23(3), Apr 2023, 764-775; doi:10.1037/emo0001131Here we investigated infants’ developing ability to use emotional expressions as signals that guide their learning about objects. To do so, we presented 16- to 21-month-old infants (N = 99) with actors who conveyed anger, fear, or pain, and tested infants’ generalization of others’ emotional expressions (Study 1) and infants’ exploration of objects (Study 2). Our findings suggest that infants attend to the information conveyed by emotional expressions: When two expressions provide different information (e.g., one conveys threat, and the other does not), i...
Source: Emotion - August 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
