Daily variation in prioritizing positivity and well-being.
Prioritizing positivity is the tendency to use pleasant states (e.g., contentment, joy) as a key criterion to structure daily life. Research shows that people who tend to possess this trait are happier (between-person effect), but a separate question remains: On days people prioritize positivity, relative to their own baseline, do they feel happier (within-person effect)? In a sample of college students (n = 301) who completed a 2-week diary study resulting in 3,894 reports, we evaluated this hypothesis using hedonic and eudaimonic indicators of well-being. We also tested whether between-person differences in prioritizing ...
Source: Emotion - April 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Anger, guilt, and repeated cooperation in social dilemmas.
A consistent finding in behavioral economics is that in social dilemma situations in which individuals must decide between individual and group welfare, cooperation declines over time eventually resulting in noncooperation. Extant theorizing addressing phenomena such as adaptive belief-learning focus solely on cognitive explanations. Based on the appraisal-tendency framework, we propose and show that the development of cooperation has a strong emotional component. Others’ actual cooperative behavior compared to their expected cooperative behavior does not only result in adapting beliefs (cognition) but also gives rise to...
Source: Emotion - March 31, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Combined effects of intrinsic and goal relevances on attention and action tendency during the emotional episode.
Emotion, Vol 23(2), Mar 2023, 425-436; doi:10.1037/emo0001081Recent work on emotional attention suggests that attention is prioritized toward stimuli that are intrinsically relevant and toward events that are conducive to momentaneous important goals. The appraisal of intrinsic relevance and goal relevance is aimed to alert individuals to the presence of events that may require action that could affect their well-being and is part of the process that leads to an emotional episode. However, to our knowledge, no empirical data has yet highlighted how precisely intrinsic and goal relevances combine with each other to trigger ...
Source: Emotion - March 21, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
EmoSex: Emotion prevails over sex in implicit judgments of faces and voices.
Emotion, Vol 23(2), Mar 2023, 569-588; doi:10.1037/emo0001089Appraisals can be influenced by cultural beliefs and stereotypes. In line with this, past research has shown that judgments about the emotional expression of a face are influenced by the face’s sex, and vice versa that judgments about the sex of a person somewhat depend on the person’s facial expression. For example, participants associate anger with male faces, and female faces with happiness or sadness. However, the strength and the bidirectionality of these effects remain debated. Moreover, the interplay of a stimulus’ emotion and sex remains mostly unkn...
Source: Emotion - March 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Prosocial behavior promotes positive emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emotion, Vol 23(2), Mar 2023, 538-553; doi:10.1037/emo0001077The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about humans’ physical and mental well-being. In response, there has been an urgent “call to action” for psychological interventions that enhance positive emotion and psychological resilience. Prosocial behavior has been shown to effectively promote well-being, but is this strategy effective during a pandemic when ongoing apprehension for personal safety could acutely heighten self-focused concern? In two online preregistered experiments (N = 1,623) conducted during the early stage of pandemic (April 2020), we exami...
Source: Emotion - March 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Faces synchronize when communication through spoken language is prevented.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 87-96; doi:10.1037/emo0000799Cooperating with another person requires communicating intentions and coordinating behavior. People often accomplish these tasks using spoken language, but verbal communication is not always available. Here, we test the hypothesis that, to establish successful cooperative interaction, people compensate for the temporary loss of one means, verbal communication, by amplifying another, namely nonverbal expressive synchrony. Fifty-seven female dyads, half of whom were prevented from using spoken language, completed four cooperative tasks, two of which induced expressio...
Source: Emotion - March 14, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Display rules differ between positive emotions: Not all that feels good looks good.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 243-260; doi:10.1037/emo0001078People do not always show how they feel; norms often dictate when to display emotions and to whom. Norms about emotional expressions—known as display rules—are weaker for happiness than for negative emotions, suggesting that expressing positive emotions is generally seen as acceptable. But does it follow that all positive emotions can always be shown to everyone? To answer this question, we mapped out context-specific display rules for 8 positive emotions: gratitude, admiration, interest, relief, amusement, feeling moved, sensory pleasure, and triumph. In fou...
Source: Emotion - March 10, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Cross-cultural similarity and cultural specificity in the emotion perception from touch.
Emotion, Vol 23(5), Aug 2023, 1400-1409; doi:10.1037/emo0001086Can people communicate distinct emotions by touch? Previous studies in the United States have indicated that certain emotions could be perceived above the chance level when an encoder conveys emotions by touching a decoder's arm. However, the perception of emotions from touch has not been investigated in Japan, where it is uncommon to use touch as a method of daily communication. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with Japanese participants, which was nearly identical to previous studies with non-Japanese people. Results indicated that anger, love, and grati...
Source: Emotion - February 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Shifting qualities of negative affective experience through adolescence: Age-related change and associations with functional outcomes.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 278-288; doi:10.1037/emo0001079Research shows negative affect increases in healthy adolescents, and this normative change is paralleled by increasing risk for the onset of psychopathology. However, research is limited in characterizing qualitative differences in the type of negative affect experienced beyond the positive–negative valence dimension. In the current study, we establish the relationship between different forms of negative affect and functioning outcomes (i.e., different facets of social functioning and life satisfaction), and examine whether these forms of negative affect are di...
Source: Emotion - February 24, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mind the gap! Stereotype exposure discourages women from expressing the anger they feel about gender inequality.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 124-137; doi:10.1037/emo0000810This work examines strategic factors that impact women’s intention to express anger. Research suggests that women express anger to a lesser extent than they experience it (Hyers, 2007; Swim et al., 2010), and we focus on the role of gender stereotypes in this phenomenon. We differentiate two “routes” by which gender stereotypes can lead women to avoid expressions of anger. First, in the stereotype disconfirmation route, women become motivated to avoid expressing anger because it supposedly disconfirms stereotypical prescriptions for women to be kind and car...
Source: Emotion - February 24, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Within- and between-group heterogeneity in cultural models of emotion among people of European, Asian, and Latino heritage in the United States.
This study examined emotion model variability across as well as within cultural contexts in a large sample of young adults of Latino heritage along with people of European and East Asian heritage. Using latent class analysis, we characterized and predicted endorsement of emotion models, distinguishing emotion ideals (the emotions one desires) from beliefs about injunctive norms for emotion (the emotions one believes are appropriate). Students from three universities in different regions of the United States (N = 1,618; 490 of European heritage, 463 of Asian heritage, 665 of Latino heritage) provided data on the desirabilit...
Source: Emotion - February 24, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Attachment insecurity moderates emotion responses to mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation in adults raised in low socioeconomic status households.
Research on attachment theory holds that insecure attachment influences people’s daily social and emotional experiences. Mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation have been associated with improvements in physical and mental well-being often through their influence on emotion experience and regulation. Yet, little research has examined how emotional well-being may be improved in insecurely attached individuals through meditation practice. We suspected that the emotion profiles of anxious and avoidant attachment may shift with meditation training, both across time and on a particular day. Improving emotional w...
Source: Emotion - February 24, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Hindsight bias for emotional faces.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 261-277; doi:10.1037/emo0001068People who learn the outcome to a situation or problem tend to overestimate what was known in the past—this is hindsight bias. Whereas previous research has revealed robust hindsight bias in the visual domain, little is known about how outcome information affects our memory of others’ emotional expressions. The goal of the current work was to test whether participants exhibited hindsight bias for emotional faces and whether this varied as a function of emotion. Across five experiments, participants saw images of faces displaying different emotions. In the for...
Source: Emotion - February 21, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emotion regulation in old and very old age.
Emotion, Vol 22(7), Oct 2022, 1473-1486; doi:10.1037/emo0001075Prominent life span theories have suggested that the ability to downregulate negative emotions remains stable or even increases well into old age. However, past evidence for continued growth during old age is mixed. In this laboratory study, 130 young old individuals (Mage = 66.72 years, SD = 1.03, range = 65 to 69 years, 48% female) and 59 very old individuals (Mage = 86.03 years, SD = 1.44, range = 83 to 89 years, 58% female) watched negative emotion evoking film clips under different emotion regulation instructions. Subjective feelings, cardiovascular reacti...
Source: Emotion - February 21, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emotion regulation in old and very old age.
Prominent life span theories have suggested that the ability to downregulate negative emotions remains stable or even increases well into old age. However, past evidence for continued growth during old age is mixed. In this laboratory study, 130 young old individuals (Mage = 66.72 years, SD = 1.03, range = 65 to 69 years, 48% female) and 59 very old individuals (Mage = 86.03 years, SD = 1.44, range = 83 to 89 years, 58% female) watched negative emotion evoking film clips under different emotion regulation instructions. Subjective feelings, cardiovascular reactions, and facial behavioral expressions were assessed in respons...
Source: Emotion - February 21, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
