The discrimination of self from other as a component of empathy.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1773-1780; doi:10.1037/emo0001193Despite the centrality of empathy in human social life, there is no widely agreed definition or characterization of the concept of empathy. A common thread in many of the proposed definitions, however, is that empathy presupposes the discrimination of self and other on the grounds that, to empathize with another individual, the mental state of the target individual must first be distinguished from the empathizer's own mental state. The purpose of this study is to investigate this proposal empirically. We employed a paradigm in which participants rated the emoti...
Source: Emotion - December 22, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Modulation of emotion-enhanced recollection by gender and task instructions.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1764-1772; doi:10.1037/emo0001196Previous work has shown recognition of emotional facial expressions may differentially relate to task demands, such as whether one indirectly or directly encodes the emotional information. Given gender differences in emotion processing and memory, we assessed whether participant gender might moderate these encoding task effects. Using a between-subjects design with a sample of 100 undergraduates, participants made judgments about the gender (indirect) or emotion (direct) of facial stimuli displaying fearful, angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Different task...
Source: Emotion - December 22, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Gone for good: Lack of priming suggests early perceptual interference in emotion-induced blindness with negative stimuli.
In this study, we used a priming task to assess these alternative possibilities. Each emotion-induced blindness trial was immediately followed by a speeded arrow judgment task, in which the arrow’s orientation could be congruent or incongruent with the orientation of an emotion-induced blindness target. Analyses revealed strong evidence that seen targets primed the arrow judgment, but there was moderate to strong evidence that unseen targets elicited no priming whatsoever. These results lend support to claims that emotion-induced blindness reflects failure to perceptually encode target information, and may reflect a diff...
Source: Emotion - December 15, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Examining the effects of emotional valence and arousal on source memory: A meta-analysis of behavioral evidence.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1740-1763; doi:10.1037/emo0001188The current meta-analysis examined the effects of valence and arousal on source memory accuracy, including the identification of variables that moderate the magnitude and direction of those effects. Fifty-three studies, comprising 85 individual experiments (N = 3,040 participants), were selected. Three separate analyses focusing on valence effects (valence-based: negative-neutral; positive-neutral; negative-positive) and other three focusing exclusively on arousal (arousal-based: high-low; medium-low; high-medium) were considered. Effect sizes varied from very ...
Source: Emotion - December 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
One size does not fit all: Decomposing the implementation and differential benefits of social emotion regulation strategies.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1522-1535; doi:10.1037/emo0001194Although considerable research has demonstrated the importance of social relationships for well-being, limited work has assessed how people help regulate each other’s emotions, a process called social emotion regulation. The present research utilized two experiments in 2020 (N₁ = 50, N₂ = 268) where people shared and responded to personal experiences to examine: (a) the kinds of regulatory support people offered others; (b) how people felt receiving different types of social feedback about their experiences; and (c) whether the support they offered others...
Source: Emotion - December 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Relief in everyday life.
This study constitutes a detailed empirical investigation of people’s reports of everyday episodes of relief. A set of four studies collected a large corpus (N = 1,835) of first-person reports of real-life episodes of relief and examined people’s judgments about the antecedents of relief, its relation to counterfactual thoughts, and its subsequent effects on decision making. Some participants described relief experiences that had either purely temporal or purely counterfactual precursors. Nevertheless, the findings indicated that the prototypical instance of relief appears to be one in which both these elements are pre...
Source: Emotion - December 1, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Affective working memory in depression.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1802-1807; doi:10.1037/emo0001130Depressed individuals show a wide range of difficulties in executive functioning (including working memory), which can be a significant burden on everyday mental processes. Theoretical models of depression have proposed these difficulties to be especially pronounced in affective contexts. However, evidence investigating affective working memory (WM) capacity in depressed individuals has shown mixed results. The preregistered study used a complex span task, which has been shown to be sensitive to difficulties with WM capacity in affective relative to neutral con...
Source: Emotion - November 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.
This study confirms the interest of studying both spatial and temporal characteristics of oculomotor behaviors to better understand the age-related effects on emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Emotion)
Source: Emotion - November 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Effectiveness of extrinsic emotion regulation strategies in text-based online communication.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1714-1725; doi:10.1037/emo0001186In daily life, others play a key role in helping regulate an individual’s emotions. Such emotion regulation occurs not only in face-to-face communication but also in text-based online communication. To date, much research has examined strategies for alleviating one’s own negative emotions (intrinsic emotion regulation) based on the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998, 2015a). However, little is known about the effectiveness of the full range of strategies for alleviating others’ negative emotions (extrinsic emotion regulation) derived from th...
Source: Emotion - November 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Nostalgia restores meaning in life for lonely people.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1791-1795; doi:10.1037/emo0001190Lonely individuals lack meaning in life. We hypothesized that nostalgia, a bittersweet emotion that entails reflecting sentimentally on the past, helps restore meaning for lonely people. In two studies, we measured trait loneliness, measured state nostalgia (Study 1) or experimentally induced nostalgia (Study 2), and assessed meaning. Results supported the hypothesis: The relation between loneliness and meaning deficits was reduced among nostalgic individuals and this was driven by the fact that nostalgia (whether measured or experimentally induced) was linked ...
Source: Emotion - November 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Facing emotional politicians: Do emotional displays of politicians evoke mimicry and emotional contagion?
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1702-1713; doi:10.1037/emo0001172Emotional displays of politicians can be persuasive. According to prominent psychological theories, we can easily “catch” the emotional displays of others through mimicry and emotional contagion. Do these processes work for politicians too, or is it conditional on what voters think of the politician making the display? In a preregistered within-subjects laboratory experiment, participants observed images of neutral and manipulated emotional displays of politicians. We measured emotional mimicry (facial electromyography) and emotional contagion (self-reports...
Source: Emotion - November 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Fearful faces straight ahead or in the periphery: Early neuronal responses independently of trait anxiety.
We examined the impact of spatial location and trait anxiety on event-related potentials to fearful faces (ERPs) in a large sample (N = 80). Using a face-unrelated oddball detection task and online eye-tracking, we ensured central fixation but sustained attention to the location of fearful and neutral faces at central or peripheral locations (12° left or right). Manipulation checks showed high task performance and successful shifts of visuospatial attention indexed by prestimulus alpha lateralization of the EEG spectra. Concerning ERPs, we observed increased P1 amplitudes for fearful compared to neutral faces, independent...
Source: Emotion - November 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The representation of emotional experience from imagined scenarios.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1670-1686; doi:10.1037/emo0001192One of the key unresolved issues in affective science is understanding how the subjective experience of emotion is structured. Semantic space theory has shed new light on this debate by applying computational methods to high-dimensional data sets containing self-report ratings of emotional responses to visual and auditory stimuli. We extend this approach here to the emotional experience induced by imagined scenarios. Participants chose at least one emotion category label among 34 options or provided ratings on 14 affective dimensions while imagining two-sentenc...
Source: Emotion - November 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Parents’ emotion suppression exacerbates the effect of COVID-19 stress on youth internalizing symptomatology.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1808-1813; doi:10.1037/emo0001174The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in heightened stress for families in the United States, and exposure to pandemic-related stress has been found to confer risk for mental health problems among both children and parents. To isolate risk and protective factors for children living through the ongoing pandemic, several studies have begun to examine family-level factors that may exacerbate or buffer the impact of exposure to COVID-19-related stress on children’s symptomatology. Building upon the extant literature documenting associations between parents’ emotio...
Source: Emotion - November 10, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Prosocial behavior reliably reduces loneliness: An investigation across two studies.
Emotion, Vol 23(6), Sep 2023, 1781-1790; doi:10.1037/emo0001179Prosocial behavior, any behavior with the goal of benefiting another person, has been shown to improve mood and boost overall well-being for the individual performing the action as well as the recipient. The purpose of this study was to assess whether prosocial behavior could also reduce state loneliness. To examine this, we conducted two experimental studies to evaluate the effect of different prosocial behaviors on loneliness and associated cognitive and affective measures. In Study 1, we operationalized prosocial behavior as gift giving, and participants (n ...
Source: Emotion - November 10, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
