Chronic pain patients low in social connectedness report higher pain and need deeper pressure for pain relief.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2156-2168; doi:10.1037/emo0001228The experience of rejection and disconnection reliably amplifies pain. Yet, little is known about the impact of enduring feelings of closeness, or social connectedness, on experiences of chronic pain. The current secondary analysis tested the hypothesis that greater social connectedness would predict lower chronic pain ratings, mediated by lower depression and anxiety. In addition, based on the social-affective effects of deeper pressure, and our previous finding that deeper pressure from a weighted blanket reduced chronic pain ratings, we examined whether deep...
Source: Emotion - March 30, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Everyday emotional functioning in COVID-19 lockdowns.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2219-2230; doi:10.1037/emo0001226Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have tried to balance the effectiveness of lockdowns (i.e., stay-at-home orders) with their potential mental health costs. Yet, several years into the pandemic, policy makers lack solid evidence about the toll of lockdowns on daily emotional functioning. Using data from two intensive longitudinal studies conducted in Australia in 2021, we compared the intensity, persistence, and regulation of emotions on days in and out of lockdown. Participants (N = 441, observations = 14,511) completed a 7-day study either entir...
Source: Emotion - March 27, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Interoceptive ability moderates the effect of physiological reactivity on social judgment.
We examined the factors that contribute to, and mitigate, affective realism during a stressful interview. Using data collected between 2015 and 2019, we hypothesized and found that individuals’ ability (N = 161; 57.6% female; 57.6% European American, 13.6% African American, 13.6% Asian American, 6.4% Latinx, 6.0% biracial, and 2.8% that identified with none or 1 + of the races presented; Mage = 19.20 years) to accurately perceive their own internal sensations (i.e., heartbeats) influenced whether they attributed their own heightened stress reactions (i.e., sympathetic nervous system reactivity) to the behavior of two imp...
Source: Emotion - March 23, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The longest year ever: Emotions and time perception interact to predict how frequently individuals engage in COVID-19 avoidance behaviors.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2169-2178; doi:10.1037/emo0001230Affective states alter the perception of how quickly time is passing. However, previous studies have not examined the independent and interactive effects of emotion and time perception on behavioral outcomes. The current study sought to better understand the relationships between affect, time perception, and reported engagement in COVID-19 pathogen avoidance behaviors (e.g., social distancing, wearing a mask) over 1 year. The study sample was comprised of American adults (n = 1,000) recruited using Prolific. The majority of participants in the final sample (50....
Source: Emotion - March 23, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Comparing implications of distinct emotion, network, and dimensional approaches for co-occurring emotions.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2300-2321; doi:10.1037/emo0001214Many situations elicit multiple emotions at the same time. Therefore, emotion theories should explain when and how emotions co-occur. We compared four parsimonious, formal theories that could explain emotion co-occurrence inspired by distinct emotion, network, and dimensional approaches to emotions. In three studies (N = 1,038), diverse participants rated the intensity of awe and kama muta (Study 1; US community sample; conducted in 2020), shame and guilt (Study 2; Dutch students; conducted in 2006), or awe and fear (Study 3; GB community sample; conducted in 2...
Source: Emotion - March 16, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Primiparous mothers’ parenting self-efficacy in managing toddler distress: Childhood nonsupportive emotion socialization, adult attachment style, and toddler temperament as antecedents.
Emotion, Vol 23(8), Dec 2023, 2205-2218; doi:10.1037/emo0001233Early maternal sensitivity to child distress is predictive of child subsequent social-emotional adjustment. A mother's global parenting self-efficacy shapes her adaptive responses to child challenging behaviors (e.g., negative emotions). However, little is known about the antecedents of maternal self-efficacy in managing child distress. Using longitudinal data from a diverse sample of 259 primiparous mothers and their toddlers, we tested a model predicting maternal self-efficacy in managing toddler distress. Mothers’ remembered childhood experiences of matern...
Source: Emotion - March 16, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Pandemic boredom: Little evidence that lockdown-related boredom affects risky public health behaviors across 116 countries.
We examined whether there was empirical evidence to support this concern during the COVID-19 pandemic in a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries. Although boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases and in countries that instituted more stringent lockdowns, such boredom did not predict longitudinal within-person decreases in social distancing behavior (or vice versa; n = 8,031) in early spring and summer of 2020. Overall, we found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, and avoidin...
Source: Emotion - March 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Formation of non-veridical action-outcome associations following exposure to threat-related cues.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2094-2099; doi:10.1037/emo0001212Acting in a goal-directed manner requires an ability to accurately predict the outcomes of one's actions. However, not much is known regarding how threat-related cues influence our ability to form action-outcome associations according to the environment's known causal structure. Here, we examined the extent to which threat-related cues influence individuals' tendency to form and act in accordance with action-outcome associations that do not exist in the external environment (i.e., outcome-irrelevant learning). Forty-nine healthy participants completed an online...
Source: Emotion - March 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Judging emotions as good or bad: Individual differences and associations with psychological health.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 1876-1890; doi:10.1037/emo0001220People differ in their initial emotional responses to events, and we are beginning to understand these responses and their pervasive implications for psychological health. However, people also differ in how they think about and react to their initial emotions (i.e., emotion judgments). In turn, how people judge their emotions—as predominantly positive or negative—may have crucial implications for psychological health. Across five MTurk and undergraduate samples collected between 2017 and 2022 (total N = 1,647), we investigated the nature of habitual emotion...
Source: Emotion - March 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Awe and social conformity: Awe promotes the endorsement of social norms and conformity to the majority opinion.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2100-2104; doi:10.1037/emo0001225Given that awe experiences promote collective identity and decrease self-importance, we reasoned that they should lead individuals to be more prone to cherish social conformity value and to adopt conformity behaviors. In two online experiments (N = 593), compared to neutral and amusement emotional states, awe was found to drive individuals to value the respect of social norms in a greater extent (Experiment 1), and to lead individuals to conform to the majority opinion on an evaluative judgment task (Experiment 2). The present research provides the first empiri...
Source: Emotion - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
When men are wonderful: A larger happy face facilitation effect for male (vs. female) faces for male participants.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2080-2093; doi:10.1037/emo0001221Facial cues for age, race, and sex influence how we recognize facial expressions. For example, the faster recognition of happy compared to sad expression increases in magnitude when the faces are female compared to male—an effect termed Researchers have argued that presenting expressions of opposite valence (e.g., sad vs. happy expressions) creates an evaluative mindset and consequently, face sex affects emotion recognition via evaluative rather than stereotype associations. For the comparison between anger and happiness, recent results indicate that the effe...
Source: Emotion - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Developmental dynamics of positive and negative emotion in infancy.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2024-2038; doi:10.1037/emo0001219The dynamic features of emotion—intensity, speed of response, rise time, persistence, recovery—are important to emotion development, but there remains limited understanding of early developmental changes in these dynamics and how they are organized. In this exploratory study, 58 White infants were observed at ages 6, 9, and 12 months in four social episodes designed to elicit positive emotion (two games with mother) and negative emotion (stranger approach and separation from mother). Continuous time-sampled ratings and summary assessments of facial and voca...
Source: Emotion - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Assessing the influence of emotional expressions on perceptual sensitivity to faces overcoming interocular suppression.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2059-2079; doi:10.1037/emo0001215Detecting faces and identifying their emotional expressions are essential for social interaction. The importance of expressions has prompted suggestions that some emotionally relevant facial features may be processed unconsciously, and it has been further suggested that this unconscious processing yields preferential access to awareness. Evidence for such preferential access has predominantly come from reaction times in the breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) paradigm, which measures how long it takes different stimuli to overcome interocular suppressi...
Source: Emotion - March 6, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Blunted neural response to errors prospectively predicts increased symptoms of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 1929-1944; doi:10.1037/emo0001224Symptoms of depression have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, possibly due to increases in both chronic and episodic stress exposure. Yet these increases are being driven by a subset of people, leading to questions of what factors make some people more vulnerable. Individual differences in neural response to errors may confer vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology. However, it is unclear whether neural response to errors prospectively predicts depressive symptoms within the context of chronic and episodic stress exposure. Prior to the pandemic, n...
Source: Emotion - March 6, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Direct evidence for proactive suppression of salient-but-irrelevant emotional information inputs.
Emotion, Vol 23(7), Oct 2023, 2039-2058; doi:10.1037/emo0001213It has long been debated whether emotional information inherently captures attention. The mainstream view suggests that the attentional processing of emotional information is automatic and difficult to be controlled. Here, we provide direct evidence that salient-but-irrelevant emotional information inputs can be proactively suppressed. First, we demonstrated that both negative and positive emotional distractors (fearful and happy faces) induced attentional capture effects (i.e., more attention allocated to emotional distractors than neutral distractors) in the ...
Source: Emotion - March 2, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
