Prospective associations between emotion regulation and depressive symptoms among Mexican-origin adolescents.
Reappraisal (reconstruing emotional experiences to alter their impact) and suppression (inhibiting emotionally expressive behavior) are emotion-regulation strategies with important implications for depression. While reappraisal generally predicts lower depressive symptoms, suppression generally predicts higher depressive symptoms. Because cultural factors can influence the processes involved in these links and because adolescence—especially for ethnic minority youth—brings particular emotional challenges, it’s critical to investigate these links among Mexican-origin adolescents. However, research examining emotion re...
Source: Emotion - January 10, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Induced negative arousal modulates the speed of visual working memory consolidation.
This study examines how induced negative arousal influences the consolidation of fragile sensory inputs into durable working memory (WM) representations. Participants performed a visual WM change detection task with different amounts of encoding time manipulated by random pattern masks inserted at different levels of memory-and-mask Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA). Prior to the WM task, negative or neutral emotion was induced using audio clips from the International Affective Digital Sounds (IADS). Pupillometry was simultaneously recorded to provide an objective measure of induced arousal. Self-report measures of early-lif...
Source: Emotion - January 6, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mixed and conflicted: The role of ambivalence in romantic relationships in light of attractive alternatives.
People in romantic relationships tend to have positive feelings toward their partner and want their relationship to last. However, maintaining a romantic relationship over time is challenging, and people can often experience mixed and conflicting feelings (i.e., ambivalence) toward their significant other. While research has identified the serious consequences that ambivalence can have for personal and relational well-being, very little is known about the factors that can lead people to experience ambivalence in relationships. The present work examines how extradyadic desire (i.e., desire for someone other than the partner...
Source: Emotion - January 6, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
“You’re just envious”: Inferring benign and malicious envy from facial expressions and contextual information.
Envy shapes social hierarchies. To protect their rank, envied persons react to the threat posed by enviers. Doing so requires that envied persons initially perceive who envies them. However, a common perspective is that envy lacks a unique expression and that enviers disguise their experience, preventing the social perception of envy. In contrast to this perspective, recent evidence indicates that observers perceive benign and malicious forms of envy accurately when they can integrate information about targets. These findings suggest that observers infer envy based on multiple, contextual cues. We hypothesized that observe...
Source: Emotion - January 6, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Happy facial expressions impair inhibitory control with respect to fearful facial expressions but only when task-relevant.
In this study, we focused on the impact of facial emotional expressions on inhibition. Research in this field has provided highly mixed results. In our view, a crucial factor explaining such inconsistencies is the task-relevance of the emotional content of the stimuli. To clarify this issue, we gave two versions of a Go/No-go task to healthy participants. In the emotional version, participants had to withhold a reaching movement at the presentation of emotional facial expressions (fearful or happy) and move when neutral faces were shown. The same pictures were displayed in the other version, but participants had to act acc...
Source: Emotion - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Hate: Toward understanding its distinctive features across interpersonal and intergroup targets.
Is hate fundamentally different from other negative emotions? Despite a fair amount of theorizing about hate, there is little empirical evidence that helps to answer this basic question. The present research examines how people construe interpersonal and intergroup hate and provides an empirical analysis of how hate is conceptually different from dislike, anger, contempt, and disgust. In five preregistered studies, using exploratory (Pilot Study) and confirmatory (Studies 1, and 2a through 2c) within-subjects designs, we asked adult participants in the United States (Ntotal = 1,074) to describe examples of their interperso...
Source: Emotion - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Fast evidence accumulation in social anxiety disorder enhances decision making in a probabilistic reward task.
Choices and response times in two-alternative decision-making tasks can be modeled by assuming that individuals steadily accrue evidence in favor of each alternative until a response boundary for one of them is crossed, at which point that alternative is chosen. Prior studies have reported that evidence accumulation during decision-making tasks takes longer in adults with psychopathology than in healthy controls, indicating that slow evidence accumulation may be transdiagnostic. However, few studies have examined perceptual decision making in anxiety disorders, where hypervigilance might enhance performance. Therefore, thi...
Source: Emotion - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A trade-off model of intentional thinking for pleasure.
We investigated intentional thinking for pleasure, defined as the deliberate attempt to have pleasant thoughts while disengaged from the external world. We propose a Trade-Off model that explains when and why thinking for pleasure is enjoyable: People focus on personally meaningful thoughts when thinking for pleasure (especially when prompted to do so), which increases their enjoyment, but they find it difficult to concentrate on their thoughts, which decreases their enjoyment. Thus, the net enjoyment of thinking for pleasure is a trade-off between its benefits (personal meaningfulness) and costs (difficulty concentrating)...
Source: Emotion - December 23, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The positive and negative affect relation in the context of stress and age.
Research suggests that the within-person inverse relationship between negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) indicates poorer emotional well-being, and this interaffect correlation fluctuates in relation to the context of the individual. Specifically, age, stress, and global PA all relate to changes in the interaffect correlation. The current study used comprehensive data from the Notre Dame Study of Health and Well-Being, which allowed us to uniquely examine between-person differences in within-person change and variability in the interaffect correlation, thereby examining these constructs from a process-oriented p...
Source: Emotion - December 23, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Perceptual latencies of object recognition and affect measured with the rotating spot method: Chronometric evidence for semantic primacy.
According to the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation, stimuli must be semantically categorized to evoke emotions. This hypothesis was tested in two chronometric studies, using the rotating spot method of timing subjective events. Participants saw pleasant and unpleasant pictures while a spot rotated around the edge of the picture. In different blocks of trials, they indicated when they experienced the pleasant or unpleasant feeling evoked by the pictures, or recognized the depicted objects, by reporting the position of the spot at the time when these mental events occurred. In both experiments, the latency of...
Source: Emotion - December 20, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Rosy or blue? Change in recall bias of students’ affective experiences during early adolescence.
Changes in the quality of emotional experience are among the various significant developmental challenges that characterize early adolescence. Although retrospective and momentary emotional self-reports are known to differ, adolescents’ emotional experiences are mainly assessed retrospectively without knowing if the recall is biased in a positive or negative way. The present study extends research on recall bias by investigating possible changes in retrospection effects of students’ affective experiences during early adolescence. To this end, we compared retrospectively assessed affect with in situ reported affect. At ...
Source: Emotion - December 20, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Fear in groups: Increasing group size reduces perceptions of danger.
When we face danger or stress, the presence of others can provide a powerful signal of safety and support. However, despite a large literature on group living benefits in animals, few studies have been conducted on how group size alters subjective emotional responses and threat perception in humans. We conducted 5 experiments (N = 3,652) to investigate whether the presence of others decreases fear in response to threat under a variety of conditions. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, we experimentally manipulated group size in hypothetical and real-world situations and found that fear responses decreased as group size increased. In St...
Source: Emotion - December 20, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Influencing emotion: Social anxiety and comparisons on Instagram.
This study elaborates on cognitive-evolutionary theory, suggesting that the inferiority self-perceptions of socially anxious individuals translate to online social contexts, may be strengthened with increased exposure to such contexts, and may have a detrimental emotional impact. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Emotion)
Source: Emotion - December 20, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emotional change: Neural mechanisms based on semantic pointers.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 182-193; doi:10.1037/emo0000981Emotional change includes generation of new emotions, switching from one emotion to another, and alteration of the frequency and intensity of emotions. Psychotherapists help clients to reduce negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety and increase positive emotions such as happiness and hope. We explain such emotional shifts by the semantic pointer theory of emotions, which views them as brain processes that integrate neural representations of situations, appraisals of the goal-relevance of those situations, and physiological reactions to the situations. This ...
Source: Emotion - November 29, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Overgeneralizing emotions: Facial width-to-height revisited.
Emotion, Vol 23(1), Feb 2023, 163-181; doi:10.1037/emo0001033Facial width-to height ratio (fWHR), presumed to be shaped by testosterone during puberty, has been linked with aggressive, dominant, and power-seeking behavioral traits in adult males, although the causal mediation is still being disputed. To investigate the role of mere observer attribution bias in the association, we instructed participants to draw, feature-assemble, or photo-edit faces of fictitious males with aggressive-dominant character (compared with peaceloving-submissive), or powerful social status (compared with powerless). Across three studies involvi...
Source: Emotion - November 29, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
