Biden or Trump? Working memory for emotion predicts the ability to forecast future feelings.
We report results from a preregistered (online) study (N = 76) demonstrating that affective working memory performance predicted how accurately people anticipate their feelings about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This relationship was specific to affective working memory and was also demonstrated in a description-based forecasting measure with emotionally evocative photographs, replicating previous results. However, neither affective nor cognitive working memory was related to a novel event-based forecasting questionnaire, adapted to compare predicted and experienced feelings to everyday events. Toget...
Source: Emotion - June 8, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Social support and adaptive emotion regulation: Links between social network measures, emotion regulation strategy use, and health.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 130-138; doi:10.1037/emo0001242Social support, as perceived and experienced within one’s social network, has been associated with greater well-being and favorable health outcomes. The transition to college marks a critical time in which social support not only strengthens interpersonal bonds, but also may help an individual discover and utilize various coping strategies to lower risks associated with negative emotions, which may result in better health and well-being. In the present study, we collected data from a large sample of undergraduate students (N = 376) and conducted preregistered a...
Source: Emotion - May 29, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Patterns of emotion-network dynamics are orthogonal to mood disorder status: An experience sampling investigation.
In this study, we used daily experience sampling to examine whether these differences reflect the nature and presence of mood disorders or whether they can better be characterized as distinct dynamic emotion profiles that cut-across diagnostic boundaries. We followed 105 individuals in 2019–2020 with diagnoses of major depression, remitted major depression, bipolar disorder, or no history of disorder, over 14 days (n = 6,543 experience-sampling assessments). We applied group iterative multiple model estimation, using both diagnosis-based and data-driven methods to investigate similarities in unfolding within-person emoti...
Source: Emotion - May 25, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Altered emotional mind–body coherence in older adults.
In this study, we examined emotional coherence in older adults between continuous valence ratings and behavioral responses (facial electromyography [EMG] of the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major muscles), as well as between continuous arousal ratings and physiological measures (electrodermal activity [EDA] and fingertip temperature), in response to four emotion-eliciting film clips (anger, sadness, contentment, and amusement) film clips and an emotionally neutral clip. Intraindividual cross-correlation analyses revealed that the coherence between valence ratings and corrugator EMG activity for the anger-eliciting f...
Source: Emotion - May 25, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Characterizing empathy and compassion using computational linguistic analysis.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 106-115; doi:10.1037/emo0001205Many scholars have proposed that feeling what we believe others are feeling—often known as “empathy”—is essential for other-regarding sentiments and plays an important role in our moral lives. Caring for and about others (without necessarily sharing their feelings)—often known as “compassion”—is also frequently discussed as a relevant force for prosocial motivation and action. Here, we explore the relationship between empathy and compassion using the methods of computational linguistics. Analyses of 2,356,916 Facebook posts suggest that individual...
Source: Emotion - May 18, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Hooked on a feeling: Downregulation of negative emotion during sexual conflict is associated with sexual well-being among long-term couples.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 93-105; doi:10.1037/emo0001251Intimate partners experience more negative emotion in response to sexual versus nonsexual conflicts in their relationship. Negative emotions hinder communication and sexual well-being. In a laboratory-based observational study, we tested the prediction that couples who took longer to downregulate negative emotion during a sexual conflict discussion would report lower sexual well-being. Long-term couples (N = 150) were video recorded while they discussed the most contentious problem within their sexual relationship. Participants subsequently viewed their filmed dis...
Source: Emotion - May 18, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Childhood emotion dysregulation mediates the relationship between preschool emotion labeling and adolescent depressive symptoms.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 81-92; doi:10.1037/emo0001248Deficits in emotion processing (e.g., emotion labeling and regulation) are widely implicated in depression risk. While prior literature documents these deficits in concurrence with depression, more research is needed to investigate emotion processing pathways of depression risk across development. The purpose of this study was to investigate if emotion processes (i.e., emotion labeling and emotion regulation/dysregulation) in early and middle childhood predict adolescent depressive symptom severity in a prospective sample. Data were analyzed from a longitudinal stu...
Source: Emotion - May 18, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Affect and mental health across the lifespan during a year of the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of emotion regulation strategies and mental flexibility.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 67-80; doi:10.1037/emo0001238During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rise in common mental health problems compared to prepandemic levels, especially in young people. Understanding the factors that place young people at risk is critical to guide the response to increased mental health problems. Here we examine whether age-related differences in mental flexibility and frequency of use of emotion regulation strategies partially account for the poorer affect and increased mental health problems reported by younger people during the pandemic. Participants (N = 2,367; 11–100 years) from Au...
Source: Emotion - May 18, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
To switch or not to switch? Individual differences in executive function and emotion regulation flexibility.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 52-66; doi:10.1037/emo0001250Emotion regulation (ER) constitutes strategies that modulate the experience and expression of emotions. While past work has predominantly assumed that ER strategies are consistently adaptive (or maladaptive) across situations, recent research has begun to examine individual-difference factors that are associated with the flexible use of ER strategies in line with contextual demands (i.e., ER flexibility). Theoretical accounts maintain that the choice to use ER strategies in a given context is contingent on individual differences in executive function (EF), which re...
Source: Emotion - May 11, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Effects of emotion on auditory ERPs are independent of manipulated target relevance.
Emotion, Vol 24(1), Feb 2024, 39-51; doi:10.1037/emo0001244Emotional attention describes the prioritized processing of emotional information to help humans quickly detect biologically salient stimuli and initiate appropriate reactions. Humans can also voluntarily attend to specific stimulus features that are target-relevant. Electrophysiological studies have shown specific temporal interactions between voluntary and emotional attention, while no such studies exist for natural sounds (e.g., explosions, running water, applause). In two experiments (N = 40, each), we examined event-related potentials (ERPs) toward target rele...
Source: Emotion - May 11, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
An experimental test of the mindfulness-to-meaning theory: Casual pathways between decentering, reappraisal, and well-being.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2243-2258; doi:10.1037/emo0001252Emotion regulation ideally promotes subjective well-being in addition to relieving distress. Mindfulness-to-Meaning theory (MMT) proposes that well-being interventions follow a common pathway to promote wellness using two intermediate stages: decentering from initial stress appraisals followed by positive reappraisal of life events—linking a broadened state of awareness with narrative meaning-making. A preregistered (https://osf.io/c2xzd) evaluation of the MMT compared online, 3-week adaptations of established well-being interventions in a postsecondary stude...
Source: Emotion - May 11, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Multimodality and skewness in emotion time series.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2117-2141; doi:10.1037/emo0001218The ability to measure emotional states in daily life using mobile devices has led to a surge of exciting new research on the temporal evolution of emotions. However, much of the potential of these data still remains untapped. In this paper, we reanalyze emotion measurements from seven openly available experience sampling methodology studies with a total of 835 individuals to systematically investigate the modality (unimodal, bimodal, and more than two modes) and skewness of within-person emotion measurements. We show that both multimodality and skewness are hi...
Source: Emotion - May 11, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Golden tears: A cross-country study of crying in the Olympics.
This article studies tears of joy by exploring data on the behavior of gold medalists of all 450 individual events at the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympic Games at the end of the medalists’ respective competitions and during the medal ceremonies. We find that women cry more than men, older athletes cry more than younger athletes, athletes from the host country cry more at the end of the competition, and athletes cry more when they receive information on their victory immediately after completing their task. When looking at the socioeconomic characteristics of athletes’ countries, we find that men from countries with larger...
Source: Emotion - May 8, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Individual differences in emotion regulation: Personal tendency in strategy selection is related to implementation capacity and well-being.
This study is the first to provide experimental evidence that a person’s tendency to select a particular ER strategy is associated with the person’s capacity to implement it successfully. Moreover, based on experimental data, we confirm an association between reappraisal tendency and mental health that has previously been suggested by questionnaire studies. This points to regulatory selection as a potential target for interventions fostering resilience and mental health. In the next step, intervention studies should clarify whether the association reflects a causal influence of regulation tendency on resilience. (PsycI...
Source: Emotion - May 8, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Bodily cues of sex and emotion can interact symmetrically: Evidence from simple categorization and the garner paradigm.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2385-2398; doi:10.1037/emo0001243Although much research has investigated how multiple sources of social information derived from faces are processed and integrated, few studies have extended this investigation to bodies. The current study addressed this gap by investigating the nature of the interaction between bodily cues of sex and emotion. Using the Garner paradigm, participants recruited from a university student participant pool categorized the sex or the emotional expression (happy and angry in Experiment 1 [n = 194], angry and sad in Experiment 2 [n = 129]) of bodies across two block ty...
Source: Emotion - May 1, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
