Psychology Research Digest
Emotion - Vol 25, Iss 1
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.
Motivated to feel better and doing something about it: Cross-cultural differences in motivated emotion regulation during COVID-19.
Emotion regulation is linked to adaptive psychological outcomes. To engage in such regulation, people must be motivated to do it. Given that people in different countries vary in how they think about unpleasant emotions, we expected motivation to decrease unpleasant emotions to differ across countries. Furthermore, given that emotion regulation strategies operate in the service of motivation, we expected people who are less motivated to decrease unpleasant emotions to use emotion regulation strategies less across countries. To test these predictions, we conducted two studies during the COVID-19 pandemic: Study 1 in 2020 (N = 1,329) and Study 2 in 2021 (N = 1,279). We assessed the motivation to decrease unpleasant emotions and the use of emotion regulation strategies among members of East Asian countries (i.e., Japan, South Korea, and China) and Western countries (i.e., United States, United Kingdom, and Germany). Because we found substantial variation within these two broader cultural categories, we examined motivation and overall strategy use in emotion regulation at the country level. In both studies, motivation to decrease unpleasant emotions was the lowest in Japan and relatively high in the United States. As expected, across countries, weaker motivation to decrease unpleasant emotions was associated with using emotion regulation strategies less. We discuss implications of our findings for understanding cultural differences in motivated emotion regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Situation covariation and goal adaptiveness? The promoting effect of cognitive flexibility on emotion regulation in depression.
Cognitive inflexibility as a generalized characteristic of depression has been closely implicated in maladaptive coping with changing situations and goals in daily life. The association between cognitive flexibility and depression can be elucidated by situation covariation and goal adaptiveness of emotion regulation flexibility (ERF), which facilitates adaptive responses to changing environments. However, little is known about the contribution of cognitive flexibility to emotion regulation in depression under changing situations and goals. To address this gap, we performed three experiments to assess situation covariation and goal adaptiveness of ERF, and we further examined the contribution of situation covariation and goal adaptiveness to the association between cognitive inflexibility and depression. The results of Experiments 1 (N = 120) and 2 (N = 117) showed a significantly negative correlation between cognitive flexibility and goal adaptiveness (but not situation covariation) of ERF. Further mediation analysis revealed the contribution of goal adaptiveness scores to the relationship between cognitive flexibility and depression. In Experiment 3 (N = 93), we performed a 14-day training of cognitive flexibility and observed that the training increased goal adaptiveness, but not situation covariation, of ERF and reduced symptoms of depression. Furthermore, the improvement of goal adaptiveness scores significantly mediated the effect of cognitive flexibility on depressive remission. In sum, these findings identified a vital involvement of goal adaptiveness of ERF in the effect of cognitive flexibility on depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Is emotion perception altered by gaze direction, gender appearance, and gender identity of the perceived face?
The purpose of the present study was to examine how gaze and emotion processing may change due to differences in gender appearance and gender identity of the perceived face. We manipulated gender appearance (male or female), gender identity (cisgender or transgender), gaze direction (direct or averted), and expressed emotions (anger, fear, or neutral) of face models in an emotion rating task. We replicate several previous findings, including a direct gaze advantage, an emotion effect, and an interaction between gaze direction and expressed emotion. In line with previous findings on the influence of facial morphology for face processing, we found that male faces were more quickly and intensely perceived for displays of anger, while female faces were more quickly and intensely perceived for displays of fear. Of key interest, gender identity influenced face perception for different emotion expressions and gaze directions for ratings and reaction times in a variety of ways. For example, transgender male faces were seen as angrier and less fearful than cisgender male faces, while the opposite effect occurred for female faces. These results suggest that face perception is systematically shaped by morphological differences as well as more abstract social constructs related to gender identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Dynamics between affect and social acceptance as a function of social anxiety: A person-specific network approach.
Social acceptance and rejection are salient experiences, especially during adolescence. Acceptance and rejection relate to changes in positive and negative affect, although directionality of the relation remains unclear. The ability to regulate affect following social experiences may be part of the etiology of social anxiety disorder. With the importance of social cues in adolescence, as well as adolescence as a key window for the onset of social anxiety, we used daily diary data collected in a sample ranging from 9 to 18 years to examine daily changes in acceptance, rejection, positive affect, and negative affect. Taking a person-centered approach, we constructed networks directionally linking social experiences and affect, which served as behaviors of interest (“nodes”) in the network for each individual. From these networks, we extracted recovery times from different nodes, that is, the number of days it took for a node to return to baseline when (a) the node itself was perturbed and (b) when a connected node was perturbed. We examined associations between network metrics and social anxiety, age, gender, and their interaction. We found that the recovery time of positive affect when social acceptance was perturbed was inversely related with social anxiety and age, suggesting benefits of acceptance may be shorter lasting for those with more (vs. less) social anxiety symptoms and for older (vs. younger) adolescents. We conclude that positive affect may be a critical yet understudied piece in understanding why adolescence is a developmental period of increased risk for psychopathology and for understanding the etiology of social anxiety disorder. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Judging emotion in natural images of crowds.
It has been suggested that humans use summary statistics such as the average of the emotion of individual faces when they rapidly judge group emotion. Previous studies have mainly used faces of actors posing basic emotions, and morphed versions of these faces, against a plain background. In the present study, photographs taken in real-world settings were used to investigate the influence of mean facial emotion, maximal facial emotion, and background context on judgments of group emotion, assessed using dimensional ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance. Background context explained a significant amount of unique variance in group ratings for each dimension. Mean emotion explained additional unique variance for valence ratings, whereas maximal emotion explained additional unique variance for arousal, with dominance showing more mixed results. Removing background context and disrupting the contextual and spatial relationship between faces by randomly replacing faces with ones from other images within the stimulus set increased reliance on mean emotion. However, under all conditions, the maximally arousing face continued to exert an influence on ratings of group arousal, in line with theoretical accounts arguing for a unique bottom-up effect of emotional arousal on attentional competition and postattentive perceptual processing. Together these findings suggest that individuals’ reliance on average emotion when judging crowd scenes differs as a function of the dimension of affect. In addition, the presence of background context both directly impacts judgments of crowd emotion and modulates the relative influence of maximal versus mean emotion on these judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Affective control in adolescence: The influence of age and depressive symptomatology on working memory.
People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. There is some evidence that affective control undergoes significant improvement throughout adolescence, though it is unclear how adolescents deemed at risk of developing depression exercise affective control despite poor affective control being identified as a contributing factor to ongoing mental ill health in adulthood. The present study therefore investigated affective control in a large (n = 425) sample of adolescents (aged 11–18 years) collected from 2016 to 2018. A simultaneous visuospatial search and written storage working memory (WM) capacity task was carried out to examine affective control, using affectively neutral and affectively negative social images as the task-irrelevant distractors. Overall, WM capacity increased as a function of age across both affective conditions. Moreover, we report a significant difference between affective conditions, with WM capacity slightly lower during trials with affectively negative social scenes, relative to neutral. Performance in each condition and the performance “cost” for completing the task in negative relative to neutral conditions was not modulated by depressive symptoms. Furthermore, age did not predict performance cost, irrespective of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that WM capacity is relatively robust against socioaffective contexts and mood in adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Smiling and frowning induced by facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) modulate felt emotion and physiology.
According to the facial feedback hypothesis, feedback from facial muscles can initiate and modulate a person’s emotional state. This assumption is debated, however, and existing research has arguably suffered from a lack of control over which facial muscles are activated, when, to what degree, and for how long. To overcome these limitations, we carried out a preregistered experiment including 58 participants. Facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) was applied to the bilateral zygomaticus major and depressor anguli oris muscles for 5 s at 100% and 50% of the participants’ individual motor threshold. After each trial, participants reported their emotional valence and intensity and levels of experienced discomfort. Facial muscle activations were verified with automatic video coding; heart rate and electrodermal activity were recorded throughout. Results showed that muscle activation through fNMES, even when controlling for fNMES-induced discomfort, modulated participants’ emotional state as expected, with more positive emotions reported after stronger stimulation of the zygomaticus major than the depressor anguli oris muscle. The addition of expression-congruent emotional images increased the effect. Moreover, fNMES intensity predicted intensity ratings, reduced HR, and skin conductance response. The finding that changes in felt emotion can be induced through brief and controlled activation of specific facial muscles is in line with the facial feedback hypothesis and offers exciting opportunities for translational intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Momentary savoring in daily life in an adult life-span sample.
Savoring moments can foster well-being. Older adults are theorized to prioritize emotional well-being in daily life, which directs their attention to positive aspects of life. In this study, with data collected from 2018 to 2021, 285 adults aged 25–85 completed an experience sampling procedure (six times a day for 10 days) where they reported their experienced emotions, whether they were savoring the moment, and how close they felt to their most recent social partner. They also completed a trait-level questionnaire on psychological well-being. Across the age range, individuals were more likely to savor moments when they were with close social partners. Older people were more likely than younger people to report savoring when experiencing high levels of positive affect. The tendency to savor was also tied to psychological well-being among individuals independent of their age. Findings highlight the relational aspect of savoring in daily contexts and suggest that savoring may contribute to well-being, helping to account for age advantages in well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Putting it into words: Emotion vocabulary, emotion differentiation, and depression among adolescents.
Emotion differentiation (ED; the ability to distinguish discrete internal emotion states) may reflect or benefit from knowledge of linguistic labels. The present study uses natural language processing to examine how emotion vocabulary (EV; diversity of unique emotion terms within active vocabulary) relates to ED and depression in an adolescent sample. We tested two competing preregistered (https://osf.io/4j75w/) models regarding the EV–ED link. In the lexical facilitation hypothesis, we posited that larger EV may inform ED, perhaps resulting in larger EVs being associated with greater ED. In the emotional concision hypothesis, we theorized that ED may reflect narrower emotional experiences that are more succinctly labelled, which could result in larger EV being associated with lower ED. A community sample of adolescents (N = 241, ages 14–17, predominantly White) completed interviews, self-report measures, and ecological momentary assessments as part of a larger study conducted between 2014 and 2016. EV was derived using speech samples from transcribed recordings of life stress interviews. In line with the emotion concision hypothesis, EV and ED were inversely related for negative emotions. Moreover, larger negative EV and lower negative ED were each uniquely associated with depression, casting further doubt on whether diverse negative EVs within spontaneous language are fundamentally adaptive for emotional functioning. Replication in more diverse samples is needed to extend generalizability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Cultural variation in the motivational correlates of gratitude.
Gratitude confers a sense of indebtedness to repay the benefactor, which poses a limitation on one’s autonomy—an aversive experience in individualist cultures. Yet, gratitude is frequently valued and expressed in individualist cultures such as the United States. One solution to this dilemma is that gratitude has different aspects: It confers a sense of obligation but also strengthens social relations. Thus, gratitude might be associated more strongly with indebtedness in cultural contexts where autonomy is less valued, but it might be associated with a desire to be close to others in cultural contexts where autonomy is more valued. We tested how motivations for being indebted, for connecting to others, and for a hedonic emotional balance predict both gratitude to God and interpersonal gratitude in samples from the United States, India, Israel, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey (N = 2,093). Results revealed substantial cultural variation in how these correlates are associated with gratitude. We discuss how gratitude can inform cultural differences in how relationships are construed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Unpacking the components of positive affect variability: Implications for psychological health across contexts.
Prior research suggests variability of positive affect (PA), or the degree to which an individual’s experience of PA is variable rather than stable, is associated with worse psychological health. However, it is unclear whether different aspects of PA variability serve different psychological functions. One possibility is that changes in PA in response to rewarding contexts, or PA reactivity, serve a healthy function, while general instability of PA from one moment to the next serves an unhealthy function. The current investigation separated out PA reactivity to pleasant activities from general PA instability. We tested associations in three experience-sampling studies collected between 2012 and 2020 (N = 323). An internal meta-analysis revealed a significant association between PA reactivity to pleasant activities and less well-being. Moderation by average levels of PA was present but inconsistent across studies. We discuss how PA reactions to rewarding contexts may not necessarily reflect healthy emotion regulation and consider that “mood brightening” effects in daily life may indicate ill-being rather than well-being. Caution is warranted when interpreting the primary findings, as the indirect effect of PA reactivity was significant in only one of the three individual studies, and the effect was only found for the outcome of well-being and not distress. Results can be most confidently generalized to White adults living in the Midwest region of the United States. Future research should test not only the intensity of PA reactivity to rewarding contexts but also how long a person can sustain elevated PA—in relation to psychological health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Examining the association among adolescents’ emotional clarity, emotion differentiation, and the regulation of negative and positive affect using a daily diary approach.
Emotional clarity and emotion differentiation (ED) are two core aspects of the application of emotional knowledge. During adolescence, novel emotional experiences result in temporary decreases of differentiation and clarity. These temporary difficulties might profoundly impact choices of regulatory strategies. And indeed, prior research has shown that lower emotional clarity and emotion differentiation are each associated with higher use of putatively maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in youth. The two constructs, however, are rarely examined together, and it remains unclear how they are associated in daily life, particularly in children and adolescents. In addition, previous studies have focused on the regulation of negative but not positive affect. To address these gaps, the present study used an intensive longitudinal design in youth. Between June 2021 and March 2022, 172 children and adolescents (M = 12.99 years) completed a 28-day diary (> 3,500 entries in total) reporting daily affect, emotional clarity, and the use of five emotion regulation strategies in response to negative and positive affect (i.e., rumination, dampening, behavioral avoidance, negative and positive suppression). As predicted, on both between- and within-person levels, higher emotional clarity was associated with decreased use of all maladaptive emotion regulation strategies after adjusting for mean affect intensity. Results for emotion differentiation were mostly nonsignificant. Only higher daily positive emotion differentiation was associated with decreased rumination. In sum, this innovative study explores multiple aspects of emotional knowledge usage and regulation during a critical developmental stage and emphasizes the role of emotional clarity in the regulation of negative and positive affect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Cross-channel adaptation reveals shared emotion representation from face and biological motion.
Emotions in interpersonal interactions can be communicated simultaneously via various social signals such as face and biological motion (BM). Here, we demonstrate that even though BM and face are very different in visual properties, emotions conveyed by these two types of social signals involve dedicated and common processing mechanisms (N = 168, college students, 2020–2024). By utilizing the visual adaptation paradigm, we found that prolonged exposure to the happy BM biased the emotion perception of the subsequently presented morphed BM toward sad, and vice versus. The observed aftereffect disappeared when the BM adaptors were shown inverted, indicating that it arose from emotional information processing rather than being a result of adaptation to constitutive low-level features. Besides, such an aftereffect was also found for facial expressions and similarly vanished when the face adaptors were inverted. Critically, preexposure to emotional faces also exerted an adaptation aftereffect on the emotion perception of BMs. Furthermore, this cross-channel effect could not only happen from faces to BMs but also from BMs to faces, suggesting that emotion perception from face and BM are potentially driven by common underlying neural substrates. Overall, these findings highlighted a close coupling of BM and face emotion perception and suggested the existence of a dedicated emotional representation that can be shared across these two different types of social signals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Induced negative affect hinders self-referential belief updating in response to social feedback.
When people receive feedback from others, this is an opportunity for them to update their self-views. People with mental health problems (e.g., depression), however, often have difficulty using social feedback to update negative beliefs about themselves. To better understand when and how difficulties with integrating social feedback manifest, we investigated how current affect influences social feedback processing. Our preregistered hypothesis was that negative affect hinders change in participants’ self-views in response to social feedback. In a nonclinical sample of little diversity (N = 117) in 2023, participants were invited to a laboratory examination in groups of three–five people. After indicating how they thought about themselves in terms of a number of personality traits (e.g., friendly), participants played a popular parlor game together for 45 min. Subsequently, they indicated how they perceived the other players in terms of their personality. Before receiving anonymous feedback, suggesting that the others perceived them as a highly likeable person, participants underwent the induction of negative versus positive affect versus a neutral control procedure. The results show that the induction of negative affect before receiving social feedback hindered its integration into participants’ self-views, relative to the induction of positive affect. Changes in participants’ self-views remained relatively stable also 1 day later, except for the control group, in which it slightly declined. These findings confirm that negative affect can indeed hamper the integration of (positive) social feedback. Since negative affect is prevalent in many mental disorders, this might contribute to their problems with social feedback processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Behavioral variability in physiological synchrony during future-based conversations between romantic partners.
Physiological synchrony—or similarity between two people’s physiological responses—is thought to have important consequences for health and well-being and has been observed in social relationship contexts. The present study investigated variability in dyads’ physiological synchrony as a function of both partners’ behaviors during an emotionally salient discussion. We examined concurrent covariation in cardiac interbeat intervals in a sample of young adult romantic couples (N = 79 dyads) who discussed the coordination of a personal goal with the future of their relationship (data collected from 2013 to 2015). Partners assigned to be disclosers revealed hypothetical good news (e.g., a dream job offer) with their partner, the responder, who reacted to this disclosure. To understand covariation–behavior associations, we examined three motivationally relevant behaviors that may underlie synchrony based on people’s role in the discussion. We found significant variability in how much couples experienced covariation, and covariation depended, at least in part, on people’s behaviors during the discussions. When disclosers spoke more (a behavior associated with less satisfying relationships and less positive partner perceptions), dyads experienced less physiological covariation. Furthermore, when responders showed more neglect and withdrawal, and when both partners displayed less positive emotion, dyads experienced less physiological covariation. These findings underscore couples’ physiological synchrony as a heterogeneous process that can emerge with the presence of greater behavioral and emotional positivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The expectation-updating mechanism in gratitude: A predictive coding perspective.
The fluctuations in emotions during constant help are unexplained by traditional emotion theories but may align with the predictive coding theory. This theory suggests that individuals tend to form expectations of others’ help during social interactions. When outcomes exceed expectations, positive prediction errors are generated, potentially increasing gratitude. Conversely, constant help may build up expectations that surpass outcomes, resulting in negative prediction errors and reduced gratitude. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies to examine the relationship between prediction errors and gratitude and its underlying mechanism. Here, we conducted two studies. Study 1 consistently found that higher expectations were associated with lower gratitude, when benefactors refused to help, in both reward-gaining and punishment-avoiding tasks. Moreover, prediction errors were positively and reliably linked to gratitude. Study 2 further identified that gratitude dynamically changed through an expectation-updating mechanism. A computational model incorporating predictive coding outperformed traditional theories in predicting the dynamics of gratitude. The findings support predictive coding theory, providing a temporal perspective and a mechanistic understanding of the fluctuations in gratitude, thus having implications for new interventions to improve mental health and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Training self–other distinction: Effects on emotion regulation, empathy, and theory of mind.
Navigating our social environment requires the ability to distinguish ourselves from others. Previous research suggests that training interventions have the potential to enhance the capacity for self–other distinction (SOD), which then may impact various sociocognitive domains, including imitation–inhibition, visual perspective taking, and empathy. Importantly, empirical research on the role of SOD in emotion regulation remains scarce. In this study, we aim to investigate the impact of training SOD on emotion regulation and also replicate findings on empathy and the attribution of mental states to others. Using a pre–post design, participants (N = 104) were assigned to either the imitation–inhibition or general inhibitory control training. Compared to general inhibitory control training, participants trained to inhibit imitation displayed a significant increase in posttest emotion regulation levels compared to pretest levels, indicating that imitation–inhibition training increased self-reported emotion regulation. Notably, emotional interference remained unaffected by either form of training. Both training interventions resulted in diminished self-reported empathic concern, while only general inhibitory control training led to a reduction in personal distress. Moreover, neither type of training had an impact on self-reported perspective taking or theory of mind performance. This study provides novel empirical evidence of the positive impact of imitation–inhibition training on emotion regulation. Furthermore, our findings make significant contributions to the advancement of research in this area and offer further support for the advantages of behavioral training as a methodological approach to studying sociocognitive abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>“Hot” affect-related aspects in emotional information processing: The role of facial muscle responses in the direct and indirect processing of emotion categories.
The present study investigated the involvement of facial muscle responses in the indirect and direct processing of emotional facial expressions. Five discrete emotion categories were used, and we assessed both facial muscle and behavioral responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Experiment 1 tested facial muscle activation of clearly visible stimuli in an emotion categorization task. We observed emotion-specific facial muscle responses and corresponding behavioral categorization effects, providing evidence for the specificity of facial muscle activation. By contrast, under masked indirect presentation conditions in which emotional facial expressions were presented as primes in an emotion misattribution procedure, a specific pattern of emotion-congruent and cross-category behavioral misattributions was observed (in line with Rohr et al., 2015, 2018). Multilevel analyses in Study 2 suggest that an emotional reaction feeds into the behavioral decision, as indicated by differential activation of the frontalis lateralis in response to angry faces. Thus, the present study provides evidence that facial muscle responses contribute to behavioral decisions under masked indirect processing conditions. The different pattern of effects in both studies suggests that facial muscle responses index different processes, depending on the processing conditions: sensorimotor simulation in direct processing conditions and emotional reactions in masked indirect processing conditions. We discuss the implications for models that aim to account for facial muscle activity in response to emotional facial expressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Examining the effectiveness of positive reappraisal in the context of discrimination.
Positive reappraisal has been shown to be a generally effective emotion regulation strategy associated with multiple indices of greater psychological functioning. There are, however, some emotion-eliciting events, such as discrimination, that may not lend themselves to favorable alternative interpretations or which have relatively fewer affordances. In such instances, a reappraisal strategy could lose its effectiveness. We conducted an experimental test of this hypothesized ineffectiveness of positive reappraisal within a discriminatory context. Participants were 404 Black and Latine college students randomly assigned to imagine being the recipient of a rude or discriminatory comment and immediately afterward were asked to either ruminate about or positively reappraise the event. Overall, positive reappraisal was more effective than rumination in downregulating anxiety and anger. However, a single-df contrast test revealed that positive reappraisal in response to the rude comment was significantly more effective in reducing anxiety relative to the other three conditions (average of positive reappraisal of the discriminatory comment or rumination to either the rude or discriminatory comment). Additional analyses also showed that oppressed minority ideology (OMI) moderated the utility of anger regulation such that, for those lower on OMI, positive reappraisal was most effective in regulating anger in response to discrimination (compared to all other conditions), but among those higher on OMI, rumination and reappraisal to discrimination were equally effective. Results suggest that the effectiveness of positive reappraisal is lessened in a discrimination context and that more robust strategies may be needed to deal with the emotional fallout from this unique stressor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Perceived prolonged stress leads to difficulties in recognizing sadness from voice cues in men but not women.
It has long been known that stress has detrimental effects on cognition (e.g., Alderson & Novack, 2002; Lupien & Lepage, 2001), most notably documented for memory functions (e.g., Schwabe & Wolf, 2013). Interestingly, less is known about the effects of stress on other cognitive functions including language processing. Here, we have examined the effects of self-reported prolonged stress on recognition of emotional language content with a particular emphasis on gender differences. We tested how well 399 participants with different perceived stress levels recognized emotional voice cues. Findings confirm previous results from the emotional prosody literature by demonstrating that women generally outperform men in the vocal emotion recognition task. Crucially, results also revealed that medium levels of perceived stress impair the ability to detect sadness from voice cues in men but not women. These findings were not modulated by task demands (e.g., speeded response) or better acoustic discrimination abilities in women. Results are in line with the idea that perceived stress has a different impact on men versus women and that women have a higher level of experience in voice sadness recognition, potentially due to their predominant role as primary caretakers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>What makes us feel good? A data-driven investigation of positive emotion experience.
What does it mean to feel good? Is our experience of gazing in awe at a majestic mountain fundamentally different than erupting with triumph when our favorite team wins the championship? Here, we use a semantic space approach to test which positive emotional experiences are distinct from each other based on in-depth personal narratives of experiences involving 22 positive emotions (n = 165; 3,592 emotional events). A bottom-up computational analysis was applied to the transcribed text, with unsupervised clustering employed to maximize internal granular consistency (i.e., the clusters being maximally different and maximally internally homogeneous). The analysis yielded four emotions that map onto distinct clusters of subjective experiences: amusement, interest, lust, and tenderness. The application of the semantic space approach to in-depth personal accounts yields a nuanced understanding of positive emotional experiences. Moreover, this analytical method allows for the bottom-up development of emotion taxonomies, showcasing its potential for broader applications in the study of subjective experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (6th century BC)
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