The emotion attributed to the prototypical “facial expression of disgust” (a nose scrunch) depended on what facial expressions preceded it. In two studies, the majority of 120 children (5–14 years) and 135 adults (16–58 years) judged the nose scrunch as expressing disgust when the preceding set included an anger scowl, but as angry when the anger scowl was omitted. An even greater proportion of observers judged the nose scrunch as angry when the preceding set also included a facial expression of someone about to be sick. The emotion attributed to the nose scrunch therefore varies with experimental context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
What emotion does the “facial expression of disgust” express?
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The effect of poser race on the happy categorization advantage depends on stimulus type, set size, and presentation duration.
The question as to whether poser race affects the happy categorization advantage, the faster categorization of happy than of negative emotional expressions, has been answered inconsistently. Hugenberg (2005) found the happy categorization advantage only for own race faces whereas faster categorization of angry expressions was evident for other race faces. Kubota and Ito (2007) found a happy categorization advantage for both own race and other race faces. These results have vastly different implications for understanding the influence of race cues on the processing of emotional expressions. The current study replicates the results of both prior studies and indicates that face type (computer-generated vs. photographic), presentation duration, and especially stimulus set size influence the happy categorization advantage as well as the moderating effect of poser race. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Cardiac vagal tone predicts inhibited attention to fearful faces.
The neurovisceral integration model (Thayer, J. F., & Lane, R. D., 2000, A model of neurovisceral integration in emotion regulation and dysregulation.
Journal of Affective Disorders, 61, 201–216. doi:10.1016/S0165-0327(00)00338-4) proposes that individual differences in heart rate variability (HRV)—an index of cardiac vagal tone—are associated with attentional and emotional self-regulation. In this article, we demonstrate that individual differences in resting HRV predict the functioning of the inhibition of return (IOR), an inhibitory attentional mechanism highly adaptive to novelty search, in response to affectively significant face cues. As predicted, participants with lower HRV exhibited a smaller IOR effect to fearful versus neutral face cues than participants with higher HRV, which shows a failure to inhibit attention from affectively significant cues and instigate novelty search. In contrast, participants with higher HRV exhibited similar IOR effects to fearful and neutral face cues, which shows an ability to inhibit attention from cues and instigate novelty search. Their ability to inhibit attention was most pronounced to high spatial frequency fearful face cues, suggesting that this effect may be mediated by cortical mechanisms. The current research demonstrates that individual differences in HRV predict attentional inhibition and suggests that successful inhibition and novelty search may be mediated by cortical inhibitory mechanisms among people with high cardiac vagal tone. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Correlates and characteristics of adolescents' encoded emotional arousal during family conflict.
Associations between adolescents' range of fundamental frequency, cortisol output, and self-reported emotional experience were examined during problem discussions with parents. Participants are a community-based sample of 56 boys and girls in a longitudinal study on conflict exposure. Results reveal that higher aggregate levels of range of fundamental frequency are associated with higher cortisol output and higher levels of self-reported negative emotions for boys and girls. Additionally, greater cortisol output is significantly associated with a slower time-to-peak of range of fundamental frequency for girls and with significantly less variability in range of fundamental frequency for boys. Implications of results for emotional development in adolescents, measurement, and modeling are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Intergroup anxiety effects on implicit racial evaluation and stereotyping.
How does intergroup anxiety affect the activation of implicit racial evaluations and stereotypes? Given the common basis of social anxiety and implicit evaluative processes in memory systems linked to classical conditioning and affect, we predicted that intergroup anxiety would amplify implicit negative racial evaluations. Implicit stereotyping, which is associated primarily with semantic memory systems, was not expected to increase as a function of intergroup anxiety. This pattern was observed among White participants preparing to interact with Black partners, but not those preparing to interact with White partners. These findings shed new light on how anxiety, often elicited in real-life intergroup interactions, can affect the operation of implicit racial biases, suggesting that intergroup anxiety has more direct implications for affective and evaluative forms of implicit bias than for implicit stereotyping. These findings also support a memory-systems model of the interplay between emotion and cognition in the context of social behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Startle response and anxiety sensitivity: Subcortical indices of physiologic arousal and fear responding.
There is a well-established and clinically meaningful relation between the cognitive-affective-based construct of anxiety sensitivity (AS) and risk for the development and maintenance of anxiety psychopathology (B. J. Cox, Fuentes, Borger, & Taylor, 2001). Research findings within this area have revealed mixed results; however, there is evidence to suggest that some individuals with anxiety disorder diagnoses may demonstrate enhanced subcortical arousal (e.g., exaggerated startle response to unexpected, aversive stimuli [A. M. Waters et al., 2008], and deficient prepulse inhibition [PPI; S. Ludewig, Ludewig, Geyer, Hell, & Vollenweider, 2002]), it is presently unclear whether these differences are found within the general population. To address this gap in the extant literature, the current investigation examined the impact of AS on acoustic startle response magnitude and PPI. Results indicated that individuals high and low in AS differ with regard to subcortical measures of arousal, with individuals expressing high levels of AS demonstrating enhanced startle response and deficient PPI. Results are discussed in terms of the role of the cognitive-affective-based factor of AS in the context of physiologic markers for vulnerability for anxiety psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Correction to Vandekerckhove et al. (2012).
Reports an error in "Experiential Versus Analytical Emotion Regulation and Sleep: Breaking the Link Between Negative Events and Sleep Disturbance" by Marie Vandekerckhove, Jenny Kestemont, Rolf Weiss, Chris Schotte, Vasilis Exadaktylos, Bart Haex, Johan Verbraecken and James J. Gross (
Emotion, Advanced Online Publication, Jul 9, 2012, np). In the article, the order of authorship was listed incorrectly. The correct order is given in the correction. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record
2012-17902-001.) Despite a long history of interest in emotion regulation as well as in the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between emotion regulation and sleep is not yet well understood. The present study investigated whether “an experiential approach”—defined by coping through affectively acknowledging, understanding, and expressing actual emotional experience and affective feeling about a situation—compared with a “cognitive analytical approach”—defined by the cognitive analysis of the causes, meanings and implications of the situation for the own self—would buffer the impact of an emotional failure experience on (1) emotional experience and (2) sleep structure assessed by EEG polysomnography. Twenty-eight healthy volunteers participated in this study. A direct comparison of the two emotion regulation strategies revealed that participants who were instructed to apply an experiential approach showed less fragmentation of sleep than participants who were instructed to apply an analytical approach. The use of an experiential approach resulted in a longer sleep time, higher sleep efficiency, fewer awakenings, less % time awake, and fewer minutes wake after sleep onset. Implications of the differential effects of these two forms of emotion regulation on sleep are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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The relationship between self-distancing and the duration of negative and positive emotional experiences in daily life.
Extant research suggests that self-distancing facilitates adaptive self-reflection of negative emotional experiences. However, this work operationalizes adaptive self-reflection in terms of a reduction in the intensity of negative emotion, ignoring other important aspects of emotional experience such as emotion duration. Moreover, prior research has predominantly focused on how self-distancing influences emotional reactivity in response to reflecting on negative experiences, leaving open questions concerning how this process operates in the context of positive experiences. We addressed these issues by examining the relationship between self-distancing and the duration of daily negative and positive emotions using a daily diary methodology. Discrete-time survival analyses revealed that reflecting on both daily negative (Studies 1 and 2) and positive events (Study 2) from a self-distanced perspective was associated with shorter emotions compared with reflecting on such events from a self-immersed perspective. The basic science and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Age-related differences in emotional reactivity, regulation, and rejection sensitivity in adolescence.
Although adolescents' emotional lives are thought to be more turbulent than those of adults, it is unknown whether this difference is attributable to developmental changes in
emotional reactivity or
emotion regulation. Study 1 addressed this question by presenting healthy individuals aged 10–23 with negative and neutral pictures and asking them to respond naturally or use cognitive reappraisal to down-regulate their responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Results indicated that age exerted both linear and quadratic effects on regulation success but was unrelated to emotional reactivity. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings using a different reappraisal task and further showed that situational (i.e., social vs. nonsocial stimuli) and dispositional (i.e., level of rejection sensitivity) social factors interacted with age to predict regulation success: young adolescents were less successful at regulating responses to social than to nonsocial stimuli, particularly if the adolescents were high in rejection sensitivity. Taken together, these results have important implications for the inclusion of emotion regulation in models of emotional and cognitive development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Pursuing happiness in everyday life: The characteristics and behaviors of online happiness seekers.
Although the last decade has witnessed mounting research on the development and evaluation of positive interventions, investigators still know little about the target population of such interventions: happiness seekers. The present research asked three questions about happiness seekers: (1) What are their general characteristics?, (2) What do they purposefully do to become happier?, and (3) How do they make use of self-help resources? In Study 1, we identified two distinct clusters of online happiness seekers. In Study 2, we asked happiness seekers to report on their use of 14 types of happiness-seeking behaviors. In Study 3, we tracked happiness seekers' usage of an iPhone application that offered access to eight different happiness-increasing activities, and assessed their resulting happiness and mood improvements. Together, these studies provide a preliminary portrait of happiness seekers' characteristics and naturalistic behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Out of sight but not out of mind: Unseen affective faces influence evaluations and social impressions.
Using Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS), we demonstrated in four experiments that affective information extracted from unseen faces influences both affective and personality judgments of neutral faces. In four experiments, participants judged neutral faces as more pleasant or unpleasant (Studies 1 and 2) or as more or less trustworthy, likable, and attractive (Study 3) or as more or less competent or interpersonally warm (Study 4) when paired with unseen smiling or scowling faces compared to when paired with unseen neutral faces. These findings suggest that affective influences are a normal part of everyday experience and provide evidence for the affective foundations consciousness. Affective misattribution arises even when affective changes occur
after a neutral stimulus is presented, demonstrating that these affective influences cannot be explained as a simple semantic priming effect. These findings have implications for understanding the constructive nature of experience, as well as the role of affect in social impressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Not all collectivisms are equal: Opposing preferences for ideal affect between East Asians and Mexicans.
Previous research has revealed differences in how people value and pursue positive affect in individualistic and collectivistic cultural contexts. Whereas Euro-Americans place greater value on high activation positive affect (HAP; e.g., excitement, enthusiasm, elation) than do Asian Americans and Hong Kong Chinese, the opposite is true for low activation positive affect (LAP; e.g., calmness, serenity, tranquility). Although the form of collectivism present in East Asia dictates that individuals control and subdue their emotional expressions so as to maintain harmonious relationships, the opposite norm emerges in Mexico and other Latin American countries, in that the cultural script of simpatía promotes harmony through the open and vibrant expression of positive emotion. Across two studies, we found that Mexicans display a pattern of HAP/LAP preference different from those from East Asian collectivistic cultures, endorsing HAP over LAP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Interpreting infant vocal distress: The ameliorative effect of musical training in depression.
An infant's cry is one of the most emotionally salient sounds in our environment. Depression is known to disrupt a mother's ability to respond to her infant, but it is not well-understood why such difficulties arise. One reason might be that depression disrupts the perceptual abilities necessary to interpret infant's affective cues. Given that musicians are known to have enhanced auditory perception, we assessed whether depression and previous musical training can impact on the ability to interpret distress in infant cries, as manipulated by changes in pitch. Depressed participants with musical training demonstrated better discriminative acuity of distress in infant cry bursts compared to those without. Non-depressed participants, with and without musical training, had levels comparable to musicians with depression. We suggest that previous musical training may act as a protective factor that maintains auditory perceptual abilities in the context of depression. These findings have potential implications for the development of novel training interventions to maintain sensitivity to infant vocal cues in individuals with postnatal depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Context explains divergent effects of anger on risk taking.
The emotion anger is typically associated with increased risk taking. However, anger also produces increased probability estimates that emotionally congruent negative events will occur. This latter finding suggests that the general assumption that anger always increases risky decision making may be subject to caveat. The context of a risk-taking opportunity may dictate whether anger leads to greater or lesser acceptance of risk as a function of which component of the emotional state (i.e., affective or conceptual) is salient. In the experiment reported, participants completed one of two versions of a risk-taking measure that differ according to whether they evoke decisions based on affective feelings or more deliberate reasoning. Results demonstrated that angry participants made riskier decisions than their neutral counterparts under conditions less susceptible to the use of affective information, but made less risky decisions under conditions that favored the use of affective information. The importance of studying emotional states as multifaceted and contextualized phenomenon is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Promoting intergroup contact by changing beliefs: Group malleability, intergroup anxiety, and contact motivation.
Intergroup contact plays a crucial role in moderating long-term conflicts. Unfortunately, the motivation to make contact with outgroup members is usually very low in such conflicts. We hypothesized that one limiting factor is the belief that groups cannot change, which leads to increased intergroup anxiety and decreased contact motivation. To test this hypothesis, we experimentally manipulated beliefs about group malleability in the context of the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and then assessed intergroup anxiety and motivation to engage in intergroup contact. Turkish Cypriots who were led to believe that groups can change (with no mention of the specific groups involved) reported lower levels of intergroup anxiety and higher motivation to interact and communicate with Greek Cypriots in the future, compared with those who were led to believe that groups cannot change. This effect of group malleability manipulation on contact motivation was mediated by intergroup anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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The Easterlin Paradox revisited.
The traditional view that well-being depends on both absolute and relative income was challenged in a 1974 paper by Richard Easterlin (Does economic growth improve the human lot? In P. David and M. Reder (Eds.), Nations and households in economic growth: Essays in honor of Moses Abramovitz (pp. 89–125), New York: Academic Press). He noted that although individual well-being is strongly positively associated with income within any country at a given point in time, the average level of measured well-being for a country changes little over time, even in the face of substantial growth in average incomes. For decades, social scientists have struggled to explain this “Easterlin Paradox.” In a 2008 paper, Betsey Stephenson and Justin Wolfers (Economic growth and subjective well-being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 39, pp. 1–87) argued that the Easterlin Paradox was a statistical illusion. Using richer data sets that facilitate more precise estimates of the various links between income and well-being, they assert that average well-being in a country does, in fact, rise as average income rises over time, and that rich countries are happier than slightly poorer ones. They also suggest that the link between income and well-being may run through absolute income alone—that is, that individual well-being may be completely independent of relative income. In this article, I argue that there have always been good reasons to believe that well-being is positively linked to absolute income. I also argue, however, that there is no reason to believe that individual well-being is independent of relative income. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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The new stylized facts about income and subjective well-being.
Economists in recent decades have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to well-being. In this paper, we review the evidence to assess the importance of absolute and relative income in determining well-being. Our research suggests that absolute income plays a major role in determining well-being and that national comparisons offer little evidence to support theories of relative income. We find that well-being rises with income, whether we compare people in a single country and year, whether we look across countries, or whether we look at economic growth for a given country. Through these comparisons we show that richer people report higher well-being than poorer people; that people in richer countries, on average, experience greater well-being than people in poorer countries; and that economic growth and growth in well-being are clearly related. Moreover, the data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Letting go of the bad: Deficit in maintaining negative, but not positive, emotion in bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is a disorder of emotion regulation. Less is known, however, about the specific processes that foster the maintenance of such prolonged and intense emotions—particularly positive—over time in this disorder. We investigated group-related differences in the ability to maintain positive and negative emotion representations over time using a previously validated emotion working memory task (Mikels et al., 2005, 2008) among individuals with bipolar I disorder (BD; n = 29) compared with both major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 29) and healthy control (n = 30) groups. Results revealed that the BD group exhibited a selective deficit in maintaining negative—but not positive—emotions compared to both the MDD and the control groups. The MDD and control groups did not differ significantly. These findings suggest that the heightened magnitude and duration of positive emotion observed in BD may, in part, be accounted for by difficulties maintaining negative emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Models of hemispheric specialization in facial emotion perception—a reevaluation.
A considerable amount of research on functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) for facial emotion perception has shown conflicting support for three competing models: (i) the Right Hemisphere Hypothesis, (ii) the Valence-Specific Hypothesis, and (iii) the Approach/Withdrawal model. However, the majority of studies evaluating the Right Hemisphere or the Valence-Specific Hypotheses are rather limited by the small number of emotional expressions used. In addition, it is difficult to evaluate the Approach/Withdrawal Hypothesis due to insufficient data on anger and FCAs. The aim of the present study was (a) to review visual half field (VHF) studies of hemispheric specialization in facial emotion perception and (b) to reevaluate empirical evidence with respect to all three partly conflicting hypotheses. Results from the present study revealed a left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere advantage for the perception of angry, fearful, and sad facial expressions and a right visual field (RVF)/left hemisphere advantage for the perception of happy expressions. Thus, FCAs for the perception of specific facial emotions do not fully support the Right Hemisphere Hypothesis, the Valence-Specific Hypothesis, or the Approach/Withdrawal model. A systematic literature review, together with the results of the present study, indicate a consistent LVF/right hemisphere advantage only for a subset of negative emotions including anger, fear and sadness, rather suggesting a “negative (only) valence model.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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Individual differences in the physical embodiment of care: Prosocially oriented women respond to cuteness by becoming more physically careful.
Prosocially oriented individuals tend to respond to care-relevant stimuli in a highly embodied manner. Research on facets of prosocial orientation—such as empathy—and embodiment has focused on processes triggered by the perception of others' distress or pain. We suspect that the predisposition among prosocially oriented individuals toward having embodied responses to care-relevant stimuli might be more extensive. We tested the specific hypothesis that prosocial orientation would predict the likelihood of responding to cuteness (an understudied care stimulus that does not involve overt distress) with the physical embodiment of care: increased physical carefulness. In 2 studies, for prosocially oriented women only, cuteness elicited greater physical carefulness in a manual precision task. For such women, the elevated state of care elicited by cuteness cues is not only a coordinated set of feelings and motives but it is also a physically embodied state characterized by heightened carefulness in one's physical movements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)![]()
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