Emotion

Burns, John W.; Quartana, Phillip J.; Elfant, Erin; Matsuura, Justin; Gilliam, Wesley; Nappi, Carla; Wolff, Brandy; Gray, Erika

doi: 10.1037/a0021155pmid: 21171754

Unlike most people, those who are characterized by a repressive coping style report high levels of physical (sensory) pain but low levels of emotional distress (affective pain), which is a discrepancy that may suggest a “conversion” process. In two studies, we tested an attention allocation model, proposing that repressors direct attention away from threatening negative affective information and toward nonthreatening physical pain information during emotionally arousing (painful) situations. In Study 1, 84 participants underwent a cold pressor and then recovered. Repressors reported greater pain during recovery than low- and high-anxious participants, but they reported lower distress than high-anxious participants. Repressors reported significant and large discrepancies between high pain and low distress, whereas these differences were less pronounced for other groups. In Study 2, 77 participants underwent an ischemic pain task while performing a modified dot-probe task with sensory and negative affective pain words as stimuli. Repressors showed increasing biases away from affective pain words and toward sensory pain words as the pain task continued, whereas low- and high-anxious participants did not show these shifts in attention. The results support the notion that conversion among repressors may involve a process by which attention is directed away from emotional distress during noxious stimulation and is focused instead on sensory information from pain.

Weinberg, Anna; Hajcak, Greg

doi: 10.1037/a0020242pmid: 21058848

The present study examined electrocortical evidence for a negativity bias, focusing on the impact of specific picture content on a range of event-related potentials (ERPs). To this end, ERPs were recorded while 67 participants viewed a variety of pictures from the International Affective Picture System. Examination of broad categories (i.e., pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) found no evidence for a negativity bias in two early components, the N1 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), but revealed that unpleasant images did elicit a larger late positive potential (LPP) than pleasant pictures. However, images of erotica and mutilation elicited comparable LPP responses, as did affiliative and threatening images. Exciting (i.e., sports) images and disgusting images elicited smaller LPPs than other emotional images, similar to neutral images containing people—which were associated with the largest LPPs among neutral pictures. When these three anomalous categories (exciting, disgusting, and scenes with people) were excluded, unpleasant images no longer elicited a larger LPP than pleasant images. Thus, including exciting images in pleasant ERP averages disproportionately reduces the LPP. The present findings are discussed in light of the motivational significance of specific picture subtypes.

Troy, Allison S.; Wilhelm, Frank H.; Shallcross, Amanda J.; Mauss, Iris B.

doi: 10.1037/a0020262pmid: 21058843

Individuals differ in their adjustment to stressful life events, with some exhibiting impaired functioning, including depression, while others exhibit impressive resilience. The present study examined the hypothesis that the ability to deploy a particularly adaptive type of emotion regulation—cognitive reappraisal—may be a protective factor. It expands upon existing research in three ways. First, participants' ability to use reappraisal (cognitive reappraisal ability: CRA) was measured by using a behavioral challenge that assessed changes in experiential and physiological domains, rather than questionnaires. Second, all participants had been exposed to one or more recent stressful life events, a context in which emotion regulation may be particularly important. Third, a community sample of 78 women aged 20 to 60 was recruited, as opposed to undergraduates. Results indicate that, at low levels of stress, participants' CRA was not associated with depressive symptoms. However, at high levels of stress, women with high CRA exhibited less depressive symptoms than those with low CRA, suggesting that CRA may be an important moderator of the link between stress and depressive symptoms.

Greitemeyer, Tobias; Osswald, Silvia; Brauer, Markus

doi: 10.1037/a0020194pmid: 21171755

Past research provided abundant evidence that exposure to violent video games increases aggressive tendencies and decreases prosocial tendencies. In contrast, research on the effects of exposure to prosocial video games has been relatively sparse. The present research found support for the hypothesis that exposure to prosocial video games is positively related to prosocial affect and negatively related to antisocial affect. More specifically, two studies revealed that playing a prosocial (relative to a neutral) video game increased interpersonal empathy and decreased reported pleasure at another's misfortune (i.e., schadenfreude). These results lend further credence to the predictive validity of the General Learning Model (Buckley & Anderson, 2006) for the effects of media exposure on social tendencies.

Sze, Jocelyn A.; Gyurak, Anett; Yuan, Joyce W.; Levenson, Robert W.

doi: 10.1037/a0020146pmid: 21058842

Two fundamental issues in emotion theory and research concern: (a) the role of emotion in promoting response coherence across different emotion systems; and (b) the role of awareness of bodily sensations in the experience of emotion. The present study poses a question bridging the two domains; namely, whether training in Vipassana meditation or dance, both of which promote attention to certain kinds of bodily sensations, is associated with greater coherence between the subjective and physiological aspects of emotion. We used lag correlations to examine second-by-second coherence between subjective emotional experience and heart period within individuals across four different films. Participants were either: (a) experienced Vipassana meditators (attention to visceral sensations), (b) experienced dancers (attention to somatic sensations), and (c) controls with no meditation or dance experience. Results indicated a linear relationship in coherence, with meditators having highest levels, dancers having intermediary levels, and controls having lowest levels. We conclude that the coherence between subjective and cardiac aspects of emotion is greater in those who have specialized training that promotes greater body awareness.

van't Wout, Mascha; Chang, Luke J.; Sanfey, Alan G.

doi: 10.1037/a0020069pmid: 21171756

Although adequate emotion regulation is considered to be essential in every day life, it is especially important in social interactions. However, the question as to what extent two different regulation strategies are effective in changing decision-making in a consequential socially interactive context remains unanswered. We investigated the effect of expressive suppression and emotional reappraisal on strategic decision-making in a social interactive task, that is, the Ultimatum Game. As hypothesized, participants in the emotional reappraisal condition accepted unfair offers more often than participants in the suppression and no-regulation condition. Additionally, the effect of emotional reappraisal influenced the amount of money participants proposed during a second interaction with partners that had treated them unfairly in a previous interaction. These results support and extend previous findings that emotional reappraisal as compared to expressive suppression, is a powerful regulation strategy that influences and changes how we interact with others even in the face of inequity.

Yates, Alan; Ashwin, Chris; Fox, Elaine

doi: 10.1037/a0020325pmid: 21058839

This study examined the impact of perceptual load on the processing of unattended threat-relevant faces. Participants performed a central letter-classification task while ignoring irrelevant face distractors, which appeared above or below the central task. The face distractors were graded for affective salience by means of aversive fear conditioning, with a conditioned angry face (CS+), an unconditioned angry face (CS−), and a neutral control face. The letter-classification task was presented under conditions of both low and high perceptual load. Results showed that fear conditioned (i.e., CS+) angry face distractors interfered with task performance more than CS− angry or neutral face distractors but that this interference was completely eliminated by high perceptual load. These findings demonstrate that aversively conditioned face distractors capture attention only under conditions of low perceptual load.

Talbot, Lisa S.; McGlinchey, Eleanor L.; Kaplan, Katherine A.; Dahl, Ronald E.; Harvey, Allison G.

doi: 10.1037/a0020138pmid: 21058849

The present study investigated the impact of sleep deprivation on several aspects of affective functioning in healthy participants selected from three different developmental periods: early adolescence (ages 10–13), midadolescence (ages 13–16), and adulthood (ages 30–60). Participants completed an affective functioning battery under conditions of sleep deprivation (a maximum of 6.5 hours total sleep time on the first night followed by a maximum of 2 hours total sleep time on the second night) and rest (approximately 7–8 hours total sleep time each night for two consecutive nights). Less positive affect was observed in the sleep-deprived, compared to rested, condition. This effect held for 9 of the 12 positive affect items on the PANAS-C. Participants also reported a greater increase in anxiety during a catastrophizing task and rated the likelihood of potential catastrophes as higher when sleep deprived, relative to when rested. Early adolescents appraised their main worry as more threatening when sleep deprived, relative to when rested. These results support and extend previous research underscoring the adverse affective consequences of sleep deprivation.

Chiew, Kimberly S.; Braver, Todd S.

doi: 10.1037/a0019704pmid: 21058838

Affective conflict and control may have important parallels to cognitive conflict and control, but these processes have been difficult to quantitatively study with emotionally naturalistic laboratory paradigms. The current study examines a modification of the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a well-validated probe of cognitive conflict and control, for the study of emotional conflict. In the Emotional AX-CPT, speeded emotional facial expressions measured with electromyography (EMG) were used as the primary response modality, and index of emotional conflict. Bottom-up emotional conflict occurred on trials in which precued facial expressions were incongruent with the valence of an emotionally evocative picture probe (e.g., smiling to a negative picture). A second form of top-down conflict occurred in which the facial expression and picture probe were congruent, but the opposite expression was expected based on the precue. A matched version of the task was also performed (in a separate group of participants) with affectively neutral probe stimuli. Behavioral interference was observed, in terms of response latencies and errors, on all conflict trials. However, bottom-up conflict was stronger in the emotional version of the task compared to the neutral version; top-down conflict was similar across the two versions. The results suggest that voluntary facial expressions may be more sensitive to indexing emotional than nonemotional conflict, and importantly, may provide an ecologically valid method of examining how emotional conflict may manifest in behavior and brain activity.

León, Inmaculada; Díaz, José M.; de Vega, Manuel; Hernández, Juan A.

doi: 10.1037/a0019983pmid: 21171758

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence's last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonist's emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word.