Happiness and reminiscing: The role of time perspective, affect, and mode of thinking.

Conducted 3 experiments to determine the affect of reminiscing on reported well-being. 51 students at a professional school for translators and interpreters in Exp I and 36 undergraduates in Exp II recounted events that they had experienced as positive and pleasant or as negative and unpleasant. In Exp III, 64 undergraduates wrote down a particularly positive or negative event and then asked to explain either why or how this event occurred. Ss in all 3 experiments were then asked to rate their happiness and life satisfaction. Overall results indicate that Ss' ratings of general life satisfaction depended not only on the hedonic quality of the life experiences they happened to recall but also on the way in which they thought about them. Specifically, the hedonic quality of present life events influenced Ss' judgments of well-being in the same direction. The hedonic quality of past events, however, had a congruent impact on well-being judgments only when thinking about them elicited affect in the present but otherwise had a contrast effect on these judgments. Two factors were found to determine if thinking about the past elicits affect: whether Ss describe the events vividly and in detail or only mention them briefly, and whether Ss describe how the events occurred rather than why they occurred. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-Monitoring, Activity Levels, and Mood in the Development and Maintenance of Depression.

The reactive effect on mood of self-monitoring pleasant and unpleasant events was assessed. Forty-five females spent 28 days monitoring in one of four conditions: (a) pleasant events, (b) unpleasant events, (c) both, and (d) no monitoring. Motor activity level (pedometer recordings) and mood were also assessed daily. Class of event monitored was not found to influence mood. Correlations between mood and both pleasant and unpleasant events were found even with activity level partialed out. Implications for self-monitoring assessment in depression therapy programs and for models of depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mood, pleasant events, and unpleasant events: Two pilot studies.

Assessed the relationship between mood and both pleasant and unpleasant events in 2 studies with a total of 34 undergraduates. Ss made self-ratings of mood and kept daily logs of pleasant and unpleasant events for approximately 2 wks. Intrasubject correlations in both studies suggested that mood was related to pleasant and unpleasant events independently. Intersubject correlations were consistent but nonsignificant. Cross-lagged correlations were significantly less than same-day correlations. Weighted event scores produced marginally higher correlations with mood than unweighted scores. Minor sex differences are noted. Implications of these results for theory and practice are discussed. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Loss of emotional experience after traumatic brain injury: Findings with the startle probe procedure.

The authors used affective modulation of the eyeblink startle response to examine the impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on emotional reactions to pictures. Participants were 13 individuals with severe TBI and 24 controls. Participants were presented with pictures that differed in affective valence (e.g., mutilated bodies, erotic couples, and household objects) while the eyeblink startle response to an acoustic probe was measured. Startle amplitude was used to assess valence of emotional response, and startle latency was used to index interest in the pictures. Subjective ratings of the affect and arousal elicited by the various pictures were also obtained. TBI impaired startle potentiation to unpleasant pictures but not startle attenuation to pleasant pictures. Further, subjective ratings indicated that TBI participants found unpleasant pictures less arousing than did controls. The results are consistent with recent evidence of differential impairment in negative versus positive emotions after TBI and are discussed in relation to 2 competing explanations of startle modulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some relations between pleasant and unpleasant mood-related events and depression.

Studied (a) the validity of 2 methods of identifying reinforcing and punishing events, (b) their interrelations and dimensional structure, and (c) their relation to depression. A total of 909 Ss who were screened with the MMPI and classified as depressed, nondepressed psychiatric, or normal control rated the frequency and the subjective enjoyability or aversiveness of 320 pleasant (the Pleasant Event Schedule Form III) and 320 unpleasant events (the Unpleasant Events Schedule Form I). Some Ss also monitored the occurrence of pleasant and unpleasant events and rated their mood on a daily basis (Depression Adjective Check List). Correlations between each event and mood were calculated and used to identify 49 pleasant and 35 unpleasant "mood-related events." The proportion of Ss for whom the events correlated with mood and the mean enjoyability and aversiveness of the items were hypothesized to be measures of reinforcing or punishing impact. As predicted, statistically significant correlations between these 2 measures were obtained. The mood-related events also discriminated more strongly between depressed and nondepressed groups than the non-mood-related events did. The intercorrelations between pleasant and unpleasant events yielded separate and orthogonal dimensions of punishment and of reinforcement. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-imagining enhances recognition memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage.

Objective: The ability to imagine an elaborative event from a personal perspective relies on several cognitive processes that may potentially enhance subsequent memory for the event, including visual imagery, semantic elaboration, emotional processing, and self-referential processing. In an effort to find a novel strategy for enhancing memory in memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage, we investigated the mnemonic benefit of a method we refer to as self-imagining—the imagining of an event from a realistic, personal perspective. Method: Fourteen individuals with neurologically based memory deficits and 14 healthy control participants intentionally encoded neutral and emotional sentences under three instructions: structural-baseline processing, semantic processing, and self-imagining. Results: Findings revealed a robust “self-imagination effect (SIE),” as self-imagination enhanced recognition memory relative to deep semantic elaboration in both memory-impaired individuals, F(1, 13) = 32.11, p     

Personality, mood, and the evaluation of affective and neutral word pairs.

Four studies bridged the areas of personality–mood and mood–cognition relations by investigating the effects of Extraversion and Neuroticism on the evaluation of affectively pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral word pairs. Specifically measured were affectivity ratings, categorization according to affect, judgments of associative strength, and response latencies. A strong, consistent cognitive bias toward affective as opposed to neutral stimuli was found across participants. Although some biases were systematically related to personality and mood, effects of individual differences were present only under specific conditions. The results are discussed in terms of a personality–mood framework and its implications for cognitive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Valence focus and self-esteem lability: Reacting to hedonic cues in the social environment.

Individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of pleasure or displeasure in their verbal reports of emotional experience, termed valence focus (VF). Two event-contingent, experience-sampling studies examined the relationship between VF and sensitivity to pleasant and unpleasant social cues. It was predicted, and found, that individuals with greater VF (i.e., who emphasized feelings of pleasure/displeasure in reports of emotional experience) demonstrated greater self-esteem lability (i.e., larger changes in self-esteem) to pleasant and unpleasant information contained in social interactions than did those lower in VF. These effects held even after statistically controlling for possible confounding variables (neuroticism, affect intensity). Implications for understanding the psychological impact of valenced interpersonal events are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect, pain, and autobiographical memory.

Twenty-five young female undergraduates were tested on two occasions: once when they were experiencing menstrual pain of at least moderate severity and once when they were pain free. On each occasion, Ss rated their current levels of pain and affect and retrieved real-life events from their personal past. At the end of the second occasion, Ss were reminded of all of the events they had retrieved on either occasion, and then rated the pleasantness of these events at the time of their original occurrence. Results revealed that the impact of pain on autobiographical memory was wholly mediated by its influence on mood. That is, pain impeded access to memories of pleasant personal experiences, whereas it promoted the retrieval of unpleasant events only if pain was accompanied by an increase in unpleasant affect. Discussion centers on the clinical and cognitive implications of the present results, and on prospects for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of changes in spatial distance on emotional responses.

Drawing on motivational approaches to emotion, the authors propose that the perceived change in spatial distance to pictures that arouse negative emotions exerts an influence on the significance of these pictures. Two experiments induced the illusion that affective pictures approach toward the observer, recede from the observer, or remain static. To determine the motivational significance of the pictures, emotional valence and arousal ratings as well as startle responses were assessed. Approaching unpleasant pictures were found to exert an influence on both the valence and the arousal elicited by the pictures. Furthermore, movement of pleasant or neutral pictures did not influence startle responses, while the second experiment showed that approaching unpleasant pictures elicited enhanced startle responses compared to receding unpleasant pictures. These findings support the view that a change of spatial distance influences motivational significance and thereby shapes emotional responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional learning, hedonic change, and the startle probe.

A multiple-response analysis of aversive learning was conducted in human Ss. For each S, 2 pictorial stimuli were presented, 1 paired with electric shock. After training, the magnitude of the acoustic startle eyeblink reflex elicited in the context of the shocked picture increased dramatically and was significantly larger than for reflexes elicited during the nonshocked stimulus. Five different picture contents were tested in separate groups: Reflex potentiation was larger for pictures rated as pleasant than pictures rated as unpleasant. CRs were also evident for skin conductance, heart rate, and affective judgments. Different systems reflected different aspects of the acquired fear response: Conductance change covaried with arousal, and startle probe magnitude varied with affective valence (pleasure). The neurophysiological implications of the data are elucidated, and parallels drawn between animal and human S findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attending to affect: Appraisal strategies modulate the electrocortical response to arousing pictures.

Arousing (unpleasant and pleasant) pictures elicit increased neurophysiological measures of perceptual processing. In particular, the electrocortical late positive potential (LPP) is enhanced for arousing, compared with neutral, pictures. To determine whether the magnitude of the LPP is sensitive to the way stimuli are appraised, 16 participants viewed both pleasant and unpleasant pictures and categorized them along an affective or nonaffective dimension. Results indicate that the LPP was reduced for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures when participants made nonaffective, compared with affective, judgments. These results are consistent with previous studies that have used functional neuroimaging to investigate the role of appraisal on emotional processing. The results are further discussed in terms of the utility of using the LPP to study emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb aspect and the activation of event knowledge.

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The moderating effects of stimulus valence and arousal on memory suppression.

This study examined the separate and combined effects of stimulus valence and arousal on retrieval inhibition. Participants performed Anderson and Green's (2001) memory suppression task with stimuli varying across dimensions of valence and arousal. Memory was tested through free and cued recall as well as speeded recognition. Results showed that both stimulus valence and arousal influenced the extent to which participants successfully inhibited retrieval, but not in the ways anticipated. Specifically, the strongest inhibition effects were for highly arousing, pleasant words. In addition, unpleasant stimuli that were suppressed were better recalled during both cued and free-recall tasks than pleasant stimuli that were suppressed. Across all tests of memory performance, there were no significant differences between the experimental conditions for highly arousing, unpleasant words. The implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The feeling of uncertainty intensifies affective reactions.

Uncertainty has been defined as a lack of information about an event and has been characterized as an aversive state that people are motivated to reduce. The authors propose an uncertainty intensification hypothesis, whereby uncertainty during an emotional event makes unpleasant events more unpleasant and pleasant events more pleasant. The authors hypothesized that this would happen even when uncertainty is limited to the feeling of "not knowing," separable from a lack of information. In 4 studies, the authors held information about positive and negative film clips constant while varying the feeling of not knowing by having people repeat phrases connoting certainty or uncertainty while watching the films. As predicted, the subjective feeling of uncertainty intensified people's affective reactions to the film clips. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pleasantness-unpleasantness of environmental sounds and gender difference in evaluation

The present experiment examined emotional evaluation of 40 environmental sounds which were presented to 388 college students in a lecture room. Students were required to rate pleasantness-unpleasantness, to identify the sounds, and to rate their confidence about their identifications. Analysis showed that the pleasant sounds were natural and musical sounds and that the unpleasant sounds were sounds of a belch, of a dentist's drill, and of scratching on a blackboard. It is interesting that for pleasant sounds confidence was always high, which suggested that emotional evaluation of the environmental sounds was closely related to the confidence of observers in their identifications of the sounds. Gender differences were noted on the ratings on pleasantness-unpleasantness of environmental sounds, that is, women evaluated the pleasant sounds as more pleasant than men, and men evaluated the unpleasant sounds as not so unpleasant as did women.     

Emotion-Modulated Performance and Activity in Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex.

Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to examine the relationship between processing of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli and activity in prefrontal cortex. Twenty volunteers identified the colors in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were printed. Pleasant words prompted more activity bilaterally in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) than did unpleasant words. In addition, pleasant words prompted more activity in left than in right DLPFC. Response speed to pleasant words was correlated with DLPFC activity. These data directly link positive affect, enhanced performance, and prefrontal activity, providing some of the first fMRI evidence supporting models of emotional valence and frontal brain asymmetry based on electroencephalography (EEG). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's facial responsiveness to odors: Influences of hedonic valence of odor, gender, age, and social presence.

Facial responsiveness to pleasant and unpleasant odors was examined in 5- to 12 year-old children in either an alone condition (AC) or a social presence condition (SPC). The children failed to display reflex-like patterns, but they exhibited facial configurations that varied according to the odor valence and the social condition. Girls evidenced more smiles than did boys, but this sex difference was significant only in response to unpleasant odors in the SPC. Furthermore, untrained observers were able to accurately identify the children's facial responses to unpleasant odors in the AC only and to pleasant odors in the SPC only. These findings (a) suggest that facial responsiveness to odors is flexible and able to reorganize when display rules operate and (b) support the emotional and communicative functions of human facial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further evidence for mixed emotions.

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested several alternative interpretations for prior evidence that happiness and sadness can co-occur in bittersweet situations (i.e., those containing both pleasant and unpleasant aspects). One possibility is that subjects who reported mixed emotions merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 1–3 by asking subjects to complete online continuous measures of happiness and sadness. Subjects reported more simultaneously mixed emotions during a bittersweet film clip than during a control clip. Another possibility is that subjects in earlier studies reported mixed emotions only because they were explicitly asked whether they felt happy and sad. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 4–6 with open-ended measures of emotion. Subjects were more likely to report mixed emotions after the bittersweet clip than the control clip. Both patterns occurred even when subjects were told that they were not expected to report mixed emotions (Studies 2 and 5) and among subjects who did not previously believe that people could simultaneously feel happy and sad (Studies 3 and 6). These results provide further evidence that positivity and negativity are separable in experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)