Psychology Research Digest
Emotion - Vol 26, Iss 6
Emotion publishes significant contributions to the study of emotion from a wide range of theoretical traditions and research domains. Emotion includes articles that advance knowledge and theory about all aspects of emotional processes, including reports of substantial empirical studies, scholarly reviews, and major theoretical articles.
Behavioral consequences of blunting fear with acetaminophen.
The widely used painkiller acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol) has been found to blunt various emotional states and evaluations, possibly through the same mechanisms by which it dulls the affective component of physical pain. However, there are limited investigations into the behavioral consequences of blunting emotions pharmacologically. Previous work has demonstrated that acetaminophen lessens risk perception and increases risk-taking in tasks with low-stakes incentives, though no studies have tested its effects in fear-inducing contexts that require evaluating safety risk. As fear promotes behaviors that keep us safe, dampening fear could alter how people respond to threatening situations. To test this possibility, 260 participants were given either 1,000 mg of acetaminophen or placebo capsules prior to a frightening virtual reality plank walk at extreme heights. Compared to the placebo group, those on acetaminophen took less time to step onto the plank, walked across it faster, and had lower heart rates. These findings suggest that acetaminophen may reduce protective behaviors associated with the fear response, raising potential safety concerns for everyday users. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Just keep flowing: A meta-analysis on the relationship between flow and well-being.
Flow is the experience of being deeply immersed in an activity, an experience that researchers have embraced as a predictor of well-being. Although research on the beneficial effects of flow is widespread, its multidisciplinary nature has precluded a clear consensus on their nature and strength. Results from a meta-analysis revealed a moderately strong, positive relationship between flow and well-being, consistent with our hypothesis. Features of the well-being measure moderated the association, such that eudaimonic measures showed a stronger association than did hedonic measures, and among hedonic measures, measures of cognitive well-being were more strongly associated with flow than affective measures. Measures of positive aspects of well-being were also more strongly associated with flow than measures of negative aspects. The association was surprisingly robust to features of the flow measure and activity, the design of the study, and characteristics of the sample. These findings suggest that flow in all its forms may be positively associated with well-being, though not all forms of well-being equally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Age moderates the association between helping and meaning in daily life.
The present study examined age differences in everyday prosocial behavior as well as its associated experienced meaning and emotions. In this study, with data collected from 2004 to 2005, a total of 180 participants aged 18–93 years completed an experience sampling procedure (five times a day for 7 days), where they reported the activities they were engaged in, the degree to which their present experiences were meaningful, and the emotions they were feeling. Age was positively associated with the frequency of helping others, and helping was related to greater experienced meaning at the between-person level. At the between-person level, helping was also associated with more positive emotional experience (and unrelated to negative emotional experience), and this effect was stronger for older than younger participants. At the within-person level, helping was associated with more momentary negative (but not positive) emotions. Within-individual analyses also showed that on occasions when participants were helping others, they reported more meaning than at moments when they were engaging in nonhelping activities. Findings are consistent with previous evidence for greater charitable giving in older people than younger people and extend prosocial acts to encompass helping others in daily life. Findings also suggest that individuals may experience negative emotions while helping others, but high overall frequencies of helping were associated with reports of greater positive emotion and meaning across adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>How honesty shapes the personal and interpersonal benefits of gratitude.
Honesty is highly valued in our close relationships, yet much of our understanding of honesty in interpersonal contexts has focused on the effects of sharing threatening information. In the current work, we examine how honesty may promote benefits in positive contexts, particularly during expressions of gratitude between romantic partners. Specifically, we examined whether expressed, perceived, and accurate perceptions of honesty about gratitude strengthen personal and relationship well-being. Romantic couples (Ncouples = 214, Nindividuals = 418) participated in a 14-day daily experience study (Study 1a) and a background survey, in-person lab interaction, and 3-month follow-up survey (Study 1b). Couples reported on their expressed and perceived honesty about a gratitude event, well-being, and felt appreciation. Results indicated that expressed honesty predicted intrapersonal benefits, with those who were more honest in their gratitude expressions experiencing greater personal and relationship well-being in the moment and across daily life. Perceived honesty predicted both intra- and interpersonal benefits. Those who perceived a partner to be honest about gratitude experienced greater personal well-being, relationship satisfaction, and felt gratitude in the moment, across daily life, and over time; additionally, their partners experienced greater relationship well-being in the moment and across daily life. Accurate perceptions of honest gratitude expressions did not predict any outcomes. Results could not be explained by baseline relationship satisfaction, expresser authenticity, or (perceived) gratitude intensity. Collectively, these results indicate that perceiving greater honesty about gratitude—regardless of a partner’s actual honesty or accuracy in perceiving that honesty—is most consequential to couple well-being and feelings of being appreciated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Staying connected: How close friendships supported emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Close social relationships are critical for emotional well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted in-person contact with friends, particularly among young adults, for whom friendships support key developmental goals. In a longitudinal study of U.S. college students (N = 205; 10,088 observations), we examined how close friendship networks related to emotional well-being during the early months of the pandemic (May–October 2020). Leveraging prepandemic social network data and 28 days of ecological momentary assessments of affect and social interactions, we found that students with more close college friends reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect in daily life, even while physically separated from those friends. These individuals were buffered from the emotional toll of pandemic-related stressors, a pattern not explained by personality, interaction frequency, or living conditions. Rather, participants with more close friends experienced higher quality online interactions. Additionally, personal disclosures, whether in-person or online, were consistently associated with greater feelings of closeness. Notably, individuals with fewer close friends showed the largest boost in closeness following partner disclosures, suggesting that emotional sharing may play a compensatory role for those with limited social ties. These findings illustrate how friendships can continue to shape affective experiences from afar and highlight disclosure as a key mechanism through which closeness and its emotional benefits can be cultivated. Integrating social network structure, daily affect, and interaction-level processes, this work advances affective science by providing evidence of how the social regulation of emotion extends beyond physical proximity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Co-imagination fosters shared emotions of future experiences.
Emotions play a crucial role in a host of goal-directed cognitive processes such as imagining and planning for the future. From hope to despair, shared emotions within representations of the future can motivate farsighted decisions and facilitate social coordination. Though interpersonal dynamics are critical to theories of emotion, imagination has been primarily studied as a process occurring within individuals rather than between them. Nevertheless, humans readily imagine their futures together. Here, we test the hypothesis that such collaborative imagination (co-imagination) of shared future experiences promotes emotional convergence in future event representations among individuals. Analyzing data from two experiments conducted in 2019 and 2021, involving university and Prolific participants (N = 204), we use natural language models to code individual narratives for a rich and complex array of emotional states. These studies demonstrate that co-imagination in novel dyads fosters alignment in the emotions partners express within their individual representations of the shared future, more so than independently imagining future events using the same cues. This work illuminates a new framework and mechanism for the formation of shared emotions within representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Depressed individuals want to feel more unpleasant emotions in daily life, but try harder to decrease them.
Prior research has demonstrated that depressed individuals want to feel relatively more intense sadness and less intense happiness than nondepressed individuals do. However, it has rarely been tested whether these differences extend to daily life and how they might be related to attempts to regulate emotions. We assessed what depressed (n = 58) and nondepressed (n = 62) individuals wanted to feel in daily life and how much they tried to regulate their emotions, using Ecological Momentary Assessments. To better understand motivated emotion regulation in depression and what underlies it, we moved beyond sadness and happiness and targeted four discrete emotions that differ by valence and arousal (i.e., sadness, anxiety, happiness, and calmness). Data were collected during 2021–2022. We found that while both depressed and nondepressed individuals reported wanting very low levels of unpleasant emotions, depressed individuals wanted to feel more sadness and anxiety and less happiness in daily life than nondepressed individuals did. At the same time, depressed individuals attempted to decrease their sadness and anxiety more than nondepressed individuals did. Our conclusions are limited to a sample of relatively young adult students. Our findings suggest that emotion dysregulation in depression may involve a misalignment between what individuals want to feel and how they attempt to regulate their emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The Nonverbal Emotion Assessment Tool (NEAT): An intercultural validation.
This research aimed to validate a newly developed tool for the assessment of emotions. The “Nonverbal Emotion Assessment Tool” (NEAT) is based on schematic facial expressions of emotions and serves to capture both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of common emotions. Study 1 (N = 126) was conducted with primary school children (6–11 years), who matched the emotions represented in vignettes to the emotional facial expressions of the NEAT. Although the children’s recognition rates varied across emotions, they were overall moderately accurate. Older children did not perform substantially better than younger children. Study 2 validated the NEAT scales with adult participants from Germany (N = 102), Bulgaria (N = 116), and Malaysia (N = 132). Cross-country intraclass correlations revealed cultural differences in emotion perception, yet the construct validity was high. Comparisons of the two European samples with the Southeast Asian sample yielded a lower level of agreement across countries than the comparison of the two European samples, suggesting more similarities between the German and Bulgarian samples and stronger differences between the European and the Malaysian sample. Together, these findings provide evidence that the NEAT is a useful and valid tool for the assessment of emotions in child and adult samples from different areas of the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Resilience in the face of racial discrimination: The role of emotional acceptance.
Racial discrimination has severe adverse mental and physical health consequences for Black Americans. As such, it is critical to understand how best to help protect the health of Black Americans in the face of this stressor. The emotional burden of chronic stress represents a key pathway through which stress damages health; thus, the ability to manage this emotional burden using emotion regulation may represent a core protective factor. Racial discrimination targets individuals’ identities, which may have important implications for which regulation strategies will be most helpful. We predicted that successfully using strategies that are more likely to validate individuals’ experiences (e.g., emotional acceptance) may be particularly helpful. Other strategies that are less likely to validate individuals’ experiences may be less helpful (e.g., cognitive reappraisal). In a sample of Black individuals (N = 504, data from 2018), the link between discrimination and multiple indices of worse health was consistently buffered for people who reported more successful use of emotional acceptance, but not for those who reported more successful use of reappraisal or suppression. These patterns were replicated in a follow-up time point predicting mental health 2 years later (N = 251). These findings underscore the crucial role of context for emotion regulation, suggesting that emotional acceptance may be a uniquely useful approach that protects the health of Black Americans by validating justified emotions in the context of racial discrimination. This work underscores a useful pathway for culturally competent psychosocial interventions for reducing anxiety, depression, and stress-related chronic illness in Black Americans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Heart rate variability and emotion regulation: Multiethnic differences in reappraisal and suppression.
Recent work found ethnic differences in the association between resting heart rate variability (HRV), an index of emotion regulation (ER) capacity, and ER difficulties. The present study examined whether this relationship exists among American adults from other marginalized ethnic backgrounds living in the United States, African American (AfAm) and Hispanic or Latino Americans (Hispanics), which remains unexplored in the literature. We addressed this gap by investigating whether self-reported ethnicity differentially moderated the relationship between log-transformed high-frequency HRV and ER, indexed by suppression and reappraisal. A total of 1,047 emerging adults (Mage = 19.7 years [1.7]) had complete ER and resting 10-min HRV data (82 AfAm [65% women], 183 Asians [52% women], 228 Hispanics [59% women], and 554 non-Hispanic White [NHW; 60% women]). HRV was highest among AfAm and Hispanics and lowest among Asian individuals. Linear regression, adjusting for waist circumference and sex, revealed that the HRV–reappraisal associations were of greater magnitude among self-identified ethnic minorities than NHW, despite similar mean levels of reappraisal. AfAm and Hispanics showed statistically similar negative associations, while similar marginal positive associations were observed among Asians and NHW. In contrast, AfAm and Asian individuals showed a statistically similar positive HRV–suppression association, which differed marginally from NHW. NHW reported lower suppression compared to all groups and showed a unique negative HRV–suppression association. Findings suggest that neurovisceral capacity and sociocultural contexts may jointly establish culturally patterned regulatory behavior in American cultural contexts. Additional social contexts, including geographical locations and discrimination, should be investigated as mediators of these associations in future work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Emotion-specific verbal fluency relates to the intensity and variety of emotional experiences but not their specificity.
Individual differences in the intensity (e.g., emotional reactivity and mean affect), variety (e.g., emodiversity and range of emotions), and specificity (e.g., emotional granularity and alexithymia) of self-reported emotion experiences throughout daily life are important indicators of mental health and well-being. As commonly measured, these constructs reflect differences in how individuals employ emotion concept words to report their feelings. Here, we examined how emotion fluency (the number of emotion concept words one can readily access) relates to the intensity, variety, and specificity of individuals’ reported emotion experiences using both retrospective self-report questionnaires and measures derived from emotion experience ratings over a 6-week experience sampling protocol. Those higher in emotion fluency reported experiencing more intense emotions, particularly negative emotions, and a wider variety of emotions over time (e.g., greater emodiversity) even when controlling general verbal fluency. However, emotion fluency was not related to measures associated with the specificity or precision with which one uses emotion concepts to report their experiences (e.g., emotional granularity and alexithymia). Findings suggest that having ready access to many emotion concepts may enable a person to use a lot of different emotion concepts when reporting feelings, but that greater emotion fluency does not necessarily result in using those concepts in more specific, context-dependent ways. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Dynamics of emotion expression in tweets are associated with depression and anxiety.
Mental health can influence both the intensity and dynamics of emotion expression. For example, persistent and intense negative emotions are symptoms of depression and anxiety. Such patterns could reflect maladaptive or impaired emotion regulation. Researching the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression and mental health can improve our understanding of the experiences that characterize these conditions and help inform their prevention and treatment. Many previous studies rely on self-reports of emotion, a limitation that could be addressed by assessing emotion expression in social media posts. We used Twitter (now “X”) data, from 2020 to 2022, and gold-standard questionnaire measures of mental health from 230 adult participants in a U.K. longitudinal study to explore the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression in tweets and mental health. We compared results generated using three different sentiment analysis methods. We found evidence that posting tweets that expressed more positive and less negative emotions was associated with reduced symptoms of anxiety. Expressing positive emotions at a greater variability was also associated with reduced anxiety symptoms in our participants. There was much less evidence that variability in negative emotions and instability in any emotion were associated with mental health. Mood disorders, such as anxiety, may be characterized by more negative emotions and a reduced ability to respond to positive internal and external stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Painful politics: Negative affect and the role of emotion regulation during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
Presidential elections are a period of heightened negative affect for many Americans. Emotion regulation strategies are known to alleviate single-shot experiences of negative affect, but it is unclear how some of these strategies work in the context of recurring negative affect, like the days surrounding a presidential election. The present research examined these issues in the context of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election by collecting data from an online sample of U.S. partisans at four distinct assessments, spanning the day prior to Election Day to 1 week after Election Day. We find that Democrats reported significantly more negative affect than Republicans prior to the race being called, and as expected, Joe Biden’s projected victory corresponded to increases in negative affect among Republicans and decreases among Democrats. Examining how the use of seven emotion regulation strategies was associated with changes in negative affect revealed that, broadly, cognitive change strategies (i.e., reappraisal, self-distancing, acceptance) were associated with decreases in negative affect, while disengagement-focused strategies (i.e., situational avoidance, distraction, cognitive suppression) were associated with increases in negative affect. Crucially, we detected differences in the source of these effects, with the effects of reappraisal and self-distancing occurring at the dispositional level (between-person), and those of acceptance and expressive suppression occurring at the state level (within-person). This study provides valuable insights into how different patterns of emotion regulation may affect negative affect caused by heightened political tensions and highlights the importance of separating between- and within-person variance when assessing these processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Managing loved ones’ emotions: The promise and pitfalls of reappraisal.
People may often attempt to support a loved one by changing how that loved one interprets a stressful situation (i.e., other-focused cognitive reappraisal). However, there are many specific ways in which a situation can be reframed, and while some reappraisal tactics may be effective, other tactics may be inert or possibly backfire—even when used with good intentions. We propose that it is useful to distinguish between decommitment tactics that involve decommitting from a previously held perspective (e.g., reducing severity: “It is not as bad as it seems”; situational acceptance: “It is out of your hands”) and commitment tactics that involve committing to an alternative perspective (e.g., finding benefits: “This will help you grow”; enhancing controllability: “You can handle this”). Across a pilot study (N = 963, collected in 2022), a longitudinal study (N = 261, collected in 2021), and a round-robin study (N = 344, collected in 2024), we investigated how regulators’ use of different tactics to manage loved ones’ (i.e., recipients’) emotions predicted recipient and relationship outcomes in diverse samples. Across studies, people commonly used each tactic to regulate recipients’ emotions. However, only the commitment tactics (enhancing controllability and finding benefits) consistently predicted better outcomes across three studies—improved recipient emotional experience and feelings of being supported and, in turn, better recipient well-being and relationship quality—while both decommitment tactics (reducing severity and situational acceptance) were inert and sometimes linked to worse interpersonal outcomes. These findings highlight the complex implications of managing loved ones’ emotions using reappraisal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Leader choices reflect cultural differences in ideal affect more during organizational growth than decline.
What emotions do people prefer in their leaders, and do these emotional preferences vary depending on how their organizations are performing? In three studies conducted between 2018 and 2023 with European American, East Asian American, and Hong Kong Chinese participants, we predicted that people would choose leaders whose emotional expressions matched their culture’s ideal affect (the affective states they value) more during growth, when conditions are favorable and people default to cultural ideals, than during decline, when conditions are unfavorable, and people are more open to other options. In Study 1 (N = 304), participants imagined that their own organizations were undergoing growth or decline and rated the emotions they would ideally like their leaders to have. In Studies 2 (N = 449) and 3 (N = 558), participants read hypothetical scenarios of student organizations undergoing growth and decline, and chose a leader among excited, calm, and neutral candidates. Across the studies, during growth, European Americans and East Asian Americans chose excited candidates more and calm candidates less than did Hong Kong Chinese, consistent with cultural differences in the valuation of high arousal positive affect. During decline, however, these cultural differences disappeared. Moreover, in Study 3, participants’ ideal high arousal positive affect predicted their positive judgments of the excited candidate when conditions were favorable but not when they were unfavorable, suggesting one mechanism underlying these cultural differences in leader choice. Together, these studies suggest that people prefer leaders who express culturally ideal emotions more during organizational growth than decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Ew! Yuck! Ugh! Nonverbal vocalizations of pathogen and moral disgust.
Nonverbal vocalizations like “Ew!” and “Ugh!” are often used to communicate disgust. While disgust evolved primarily to promote the avoidance of pathogens (pathogen disgust), it is also expressed toward moral violations (moral disgust). In this study, we investigated whether vocalizations of pathogen and moral disgust are acoustically distinct and whether listeners can differentiate between them. To do so, we conducted machine learning analyses of acoustic parameters and two preregistered listening experiments (all conducted in 2023). Based on a data set of 1,000 spontaneous disgust vocalizations, six machine learning classifiers with fivefold cross-validation were able to distinguish between pathogen and moral disgust vocalizations with above-chance accuracy (AUC = 0.73). In a listening experiment (n = 200), participants differentiated between the two types of disgust vocalizations above chance (62%). In a second listening study (n = 680), listeners rated pathogen disgust vocalizations as expressing stronger avoidance motivations and as sounding more negative than moral disgust vocalizations. Together, these findings demonstrate that pathogen and moral disgust vocalizations are both acoustically and perceptually distinguishable. These findings align with the putative functional differences between pathogen and moral disgust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Emotional specificity and attributional clarity in daily life: Associations with depression, rumination, and overgeneralizing cognitions.
This study used a qualitative approach to examine how specificity in emotional labeling (reflecting greater differentiation) and clarity of emotion attributions in daily life are associated with depressive symptoms and cognition (rumination and overgeneralization). Participants were 191 young adults (74% female, racially/ethnically diverse, mean age 19) who completed baseline measures and a 14-day daily diary that included two prompts about their current experience of negative emotion. Participant-generated negative emotion labels and open-ended descriptions were coded for level of specificity and attributional clarity, respectively, by two trained coders with acceptable interrater agreement. Results revealed that participants made use of many nonstandard labels (87% of words) to describe their emotions, words that would not have been captured using standard emotion rating scales. Momentary specificity was unrelated to momentary rumination and overgeneralizing cognitions and was also unrelated to traditionally derived negative emotion differentiation (using intraclass correlations). However, attributional clarity significantly predicted momentary rumination and overgeneralizing as well as depressive symptoms. Our results point to limitations with specificity coding but suggest that momentary attributions may play a pivotal role in depression and depression-related cognitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Unraveling the cycle of depression: Dynamics of state depression, state attachment, and social emotion regulation among psychiatric patients.
Attachment and social emotion regulation strategies play crucial roles in social interactions and are associated with the maintenance and exacerbation of depressive symptoms. However, previous studies have relied on retrospective questionnaire surveys, which are susceptible to recall bias and limit the ability to capture dynamic interactions among depression, attachment, and social emotion regulation—particularly in psychiatric patients. Therefore, this study employed the experience sampling method to investigate the dynamic relationships among state depression, state attachment, and social emotion regulation in diagnosed psychiatric patients. Participants (N = 205; Mage = 31.87, SDage = 11.44; 69.8% female) with depression or anxiety disorders provided self-reports of state depression, state attachment (security, anxiety, and avoidance), and social emotion regulation (social sharing and expressive suppression) three times daily over 10 days, resulting in a total of 4,711 momentary assessments. Data were analyzed using dynamic structural equation modeling. The results provided preliminary evidence for two cyclical patterns of depression at the within-person level: (a) State depression was associated with increased social sharing at subsequent measurements, either directly or indirectly via heightened state attachment anxiety at the next time point. In turn, social sharing predicted a momentary reduction in state depression at the next measurement. (b) State attachment anxiety and state depression reinforced each other in a reciprocal cycle. Both were associated with increased expressive suppression at the subsequent measurement. These findings highlight the importance of attachment insecurity and social emotion regulation in maintaining depression, providing empirical support for interventions aimed at breaking the cycle of depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>