"It's a bittersweet symphony: Simultaneously mixed emotional responses to music with conflicting cues": Correction to Larsen and Stastny (2011).

Reports an error in "It's a bittersweet symphony: Simultaneously mixed emotional responses to music with conflicting cues" by Jeff T. Larsen and Bradley J. Stastny (Emotion, 2011, np). In the first paragraph on page 5, the word “inches” was omitted from the sentence, “As noted by Sir Arthur Eddington (1939; see Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994), scientists who cast nets with 2 mesh into the sea may catch many fish, but none of them will be smaller than 2.” The corrected sentence is provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2011-12883-001.) Some evidence indicates that emotional reactions to music can be organized along a bipolar valence dimension ranging from pleasant states (e.g., happiness) to unpleasant states (e.g., sadness), but songs can contain some cues that elicit happiness (e.g., fast tempos) and others that elicit sadness (e.g., minor modes). Some models of emotion contend that valence is a basic building block of emotional experience, which implies that songs with conflicting cues cannot make people feel happy and sad at the same time. Other models contend that positivity and negativity are separable in experience, which implies that music with conflicting cues might elicit simultaneously mixed emotions of happiness and sadness. Hunter, Schellenberg, and Schimmack (2008) tested these possibilities by having subjects report their happiness and sadness after listening to music with conflicting cues (e.g., fast songs in minor modes) and consistent cues (e.g., fast songs in major modes). Results indicated that music with conflicting cues elicited mixed emotions, but it remains unclear whether subjects simultaneously felt happy and sad or merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. To examine these possibilities, we had subjects press one button whenever they felt happy and another button whenever they felt sad as they listened to songs with conflicting and consistent cues. Results revealed that subjects spent more time simultaneously pressing both buttons during songs with conflicting, as opposed to consistent, cues. These findings indicate that songs with conflicting cues can simultaneously elicit happiness and sadness and that positivity and negativity are separable in experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can people feel happy and sad at the same time?

The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. A Carroll's (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model Q. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated and extended past research by showing that whereas most participants surveyed in typical situations felt either happy or sad, many participants surveyed immediately after watching the film Life Is Beautiful, moving out of their dormitories, or graduating from college felt both happy and sad. Results suggest that although affective experience may typically be bipolar, the underlying processes, and occasionally the resulting experience of emotion, are better characterized as bivariate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Feelings and perceptions of happiness and sadness induced by music: Similarities, differences, and mixed emotions.

The authors examined similarities and differences between (1) listeners’ perceptions of emotions conveyed by 30-s pieces of music and (2) their emotional responses to the same pieces. Using identical scales, listeners rated how happy and how sad the music made them feel, and the happiness and the sadness expressed by the music. The music was manipulated to vary in tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor). Feeling and perception ratings were highly correlated but perception ratings were higher than feeling ratings, particularly for music with consistent cues to happiness (fast-major) or sadness (slow-minor), and for sad-sounding music in general. Associations between the music manipulations and listeners’ feelings were mediated by their perceptions of the emotions conveyed by the music. Happiness ratings were elevated for fast-tempo and major-key stimuli, sadness ratings were elevated for slow-tempo and minor-key stimuli, and mixed emotional responses (higher happiness and sadness ratings) were elevated for music with mixed cues to happiness and sadness (fast-minor or slow-major). Listeners also exhibited ambivalence toward sad-sounding music. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identification of emotion in a dichotic listening task: event-related brain potential and behavioral findings

The lateralization of emotion perception has been examined using stimuli in both auditory and visual modalities. Studies using dichotic stimuli have generally supported the hypothesis of right-hemisphere dominance for emotion perception, whereas studies of facial and verbal emotion perception have provided evidence for the right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses. A dichotic target detection task was developed to enable acquisition of event-related potentials (ERP) from subjects engaged in emotion detection. Nonsense syllables (e.g., ba, pa) stated in seven different emotional intonations were dichotically presented to 24 young adults, in a target detection task during four separate blocks (target emotions: happiness, interest, anger, or sadness). Accuracy and reaction time and ERP measures were also collected. ERPs were recorded from 14 scalp electrodes with a nose reference and quantified for N100, sustained negativity, late positivity, and slow wave. Significantly greater left- than right-ear accuracy was obtained for the identification of target prosodic emotion. Hemispheric asymmetries of N100 and sustained negativity were found, with left-hemisphere amplitudes greater than right-hemisphere amplitudes. These ERP asymmetries were not significantly correlated with the left-ear dichotic advantage and may be related more to early phonetic processing than to emotion perception. Since the behavioral evidence supports the right-hemisphere hypothesis for emotion perception, behavioral and ERP asymmetries evident in this task reflect separable patterns of brain lateralization.     

Culture and mixed emotions: Co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in Japan and the United States.

Previous cross-cultural comparisons of correlations between positive and negative emotions found that East Asians are more likely than Americans to feel dialectical emotions. However, not much is known about the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in a given situation. When asked to describe situations in which they felt mixed emotions, Japanese and American respondents listed mostly similar situations. By presenting these situations to another group of respondents, we found that Japanese reported more mixed emotions than Americans in the predominantly pleasant situations, whereas there were no cultural differences in mixed emotions in the predominantly unpleasant situations or the mixed situations. The appraisal of self-agency mediated cultural differences in mixed emotions in the predominantly pleasant situations. Study 2 replicated the findings by asking participants to recall how they felt in their past pleasant, unpleasant, and mixed situations. The findings suggest that both Americans and Japanese feel mixed emotions, but the kinds of situation in which they typically do so depends on culture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discrete emotions predict changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology: A meta-analysis of experimental emotion elicitations.

Our purpose in the present meta-analysis was to examine the extent to which discrete emotions elicit changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology; whether these changes are correlated as would be expected if emotions organize responses across these systems; and which factors moderate the magnitude of these effects. Studies (687; 4,946 effects, 49,473 participants) were included that elicited the discrete emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety as independent variables with adults. Consistent with discrete emotion theory, there were (a) moderate differences among discrete emotions; (b) differences among discrete negative emotions; and (c) correlated changes in behavior, experience, and physiology (cognition and judgment were mostly not correlated with other changes). Valence, valence–arousal, and approach–avoidance models of emotion were not as clearly supported. There was evidence that these factors are likely important components of emotion but that they could not fully account for the pattern of results. Most emotion elicitations were effective, although the efficacy varied with the emotions being compared. Picture presentations were overall the most effective elicitor of discrete emotions. Stronger effects of emotion elicitations were associated with happiness versus negative emotions, self-reported experience, a greater proportion of women (for elicitations of happiness and sadness), omission of a cover story, and participants alone versus in groups. Conclusions are limited by the inclusion of only some discrete emotions, exclusion of studies that did not elicit discrete emotions, few available effect sizes for some contrasts and moderators, and the methodological rigor of included studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect and Face Perception: Odors Modulate the Recognition Advantage of Happy Faces.

Previous choice reaction time studies have provided consistent evidence for faster recognition of positive (e.g., happy) than negative (e.g., disgusted) facial expressions. A predominance of positive emotions in normal contexts may partly explain this effect. The present study used pleasant and unpleasant odors to test whether emotional context affects the happy face advantage. Results from 2 experiments indicated that happiness was recognized faster than disgust in a pleasant context, but this advantage disappeared in an unpleasant context because of the slow recognition of happy faces. Odors may modulate the functioning of those emotion-related brain structures that participate in the formation of the perceptual representations of the facial expressions and in the generation of the conceptual knowledge associated with the signaled emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Choosing to be afraid: Preferences for fear as a function of goal pursuit.

According to an instrumental approach to emotion regulation (M. Tamir, in press), people may not always prefer to feel pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones. Instead, they may be motivated to experience even unpleasant emotions when they might be useful for goal attainment. Given that fear serves to promote successful avoidance, these studies tested this hypothesis by examining preferences for fear in preparation for avoidance goal pursuits. Consistent with the predictions of the instrumental approach, participants preferred to increase their level of fear as they prepared to pursue an avoidance goal. Such preferences were higher than preferences for either excitement or anger and were unique to avoidance (vs. approach or confrontational) goal pursuits. Given the aversive nature of fear, these findings clearly demonstrate that people may sometimes prefer to feel bad if doing so can lead to instrumental benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The personality structure of affect.

We examined the organization of individual differences in pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and six discrete emotions. We used several refinements over past studies: a) systematic sampling of emotions; b) control of measurement error through the use of latent traits; c) multiple methods for measuring affect; d) inclusion of only affects that are widely agreed to be emotions; e) a statistical definition of "independence"; and f) a focus on the frequency and duration of long-term affect. There was strong convergence between the two pleasant emotions (love and joy) and between the four unpleasant emotions (fear, anger, sadness, and shame). The results indicated, however, that individual differences in the discrete emotions cannot be reduced to positive and negative affect. The latent traits of pleasant and unpleasant affect were correlated –.44, and a two-factor model accounted for significantly more variance than a one-factor model. This finding indicates that long-term pleasant and unpleasant affect are not strictly orthogonal, but they are separable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing of observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy.

Facial autonomic responses may contribute to emotional communication and reveal individual affective style. In this study, the authors examined how observed pupillary size modulates processing of facial expression, extending the finding that incidentally perceived pupils influence ratings of sadness but not those of happy, angry, or neutral facial expressions. Healthy subjects rated the valence and arousal of photographs depicting facial muscular expressions of sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust. Pupil sizes within the stimuli were experimentally manipulated. Subjects themselves were scored with an empathy questionnaire. Diminishing pupil size linearly enhanced intensity and valence judgments of sad expressions (but not fear, surprise, or disgust). At debriefing, subjects were unaware of differences in pupil size across stimuli. These observations complement an earlier study showing that pupil size directly influences processing of sadness but not other basic emotional facial expressions. Furthermore, across subjects, the degree to which pupil size influenced sadness processing correlated with individual differences in empathy score. Together, these data demonstrate a central role of sadness processing in empathetic emotion and highlight the salience of implicit autonomic signals in affective communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of discrete emotions on young children's suggestibility.

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child completed a task to try to win the prize. The outcome of the child's effort was manipulated in order to elicit sadness, anger, or happiness. Children's emotions did not affect story recall, but children were more vulnerable to misleading questions about the stories when sad than when angry or happy. In Experiment 2, a story was presented and emotions were elicited using an autobiographical recall task. Children responded to misleading questions and then recalled the story for a different interviewer. Again, children's emotions did not affect the amount of story information recalled correctly, but sad children incorporated more information from misleading questions during recall than did angry or happy children. Sad children's greater suggestibility is discussed in terms of the differing problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 11(4) of Emotion (see record 2011-18271-002). There was an error in the title. The title of the article should read, “Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” All versions of this article have been corrected.] Happiness is a key ingredient of well-being. It is thus reasonable to expect that valuing happiness will have beneficial outcomes. We argue that this may not always be the case. Instead, valuing happiness could be self-defeating, because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed. This should apply particularly in positive situations, in which people have every reason to be happy. Two studies support this hypothesis. In Study 1, female participants who valued happiness more (vs. less) reported lower happiness when under conditions of low, but not high, life stress. In Study 2, compared to a control group, female participants who were experimentally induced to value happiness reacted less positively to a happy, but not a sad, emotion induction. This effect was mediated by participants' disappointment at their own feelings. Paradoxically, therefore, valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness": Correction to Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, and Savino (2011).

Reports an error in "Can seeking happiness make people happy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness" by Iris B. Mauss, Maya Tamir, Craig L. Anderson and Nicole S. Savino (Emotion, 2011, np). There was an error in the title. The title of the article should read, “Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2011-08397-001.) Happiness is a key ingredient of well-being. It is thus reasonable to expect that valuing happiness will have beneficial outcomes. We argue that this may not always be the case. Instead, valuing happiness could be self-defeating, because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed. This should apply particularly in positive situations, in which people have every reason to be happy. Two studies support this hypothesis. In Study 1, female participants who valued happiness more (vs. less) reported lower happiness when under conditions of low, but not high, life stress. In Study 2, compared to a control group, female participants who were experimentally induced to value happiness reacted less positively to a happy, but not a sad, emotion induction. This effect was mediated by participants' disappointment at their own feelings. Paradoxically, therefore, valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion Context Insensitivity in Major Depressive Disorder.

The present study tested 3 competing views of how depression alters emotional reactivity: positive attenuation (reduced positive), negative potentiation (increased negative), and emotion context insensitivity (ECI; reduced positive and negative). Normative and idiographic stimuli that elicited happy, sad, and neutral states were presented to currently depressed, formerly depressed, and healthy control individuals while experiential, behavioral, and autonomic responses were measured. Currently depressed individuals reported less sadness reactivity and less happiness experience across all conditions than did the other participants, and they exhibited a more dysphoric response to idiographic than to normative stimuli. Overall, data provide partial support for the positive attenuation and ECI views. Depression may produce mood-state-dependent changes in emotional reactivity that are most pronounced in emotion experience reports. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Happiness versus sadness as a determinant of thought confidence in persuasion: A self-validation analysis.

The present research introduces a new mechanism by which emotion can affect evaluation. On the basis of the self-validation hypothesis (R. E. Petty, P. Bri?ol, & Z. L. Tormala, see record 2002-12575-003), the authors predicted and found that emotion can influence evaluative judgments by affecting the confidence people have in their thoughts to a persuasive message. In each study, participants first read a strong or weak persuasive communication. After listing their thoughts about the message, participants were induced to feel happy or sad. Relative to sad participants, those put in a happy state reported more thought confidence. As a consequence, the effect of argument quality on attitudes was greater for happy than for sad participants. These self-validation effects generalized across different emotion inductions, different persuasion topics, and different measures of thought confidence. In one study, happy and sad conditions each differed from a neutral affect control. Most important, these metacognitive effects of emotion only occurred under high elaboration conditions. In contrast, individuals with relatively low motivation to think showed a main effect of emotion on attitudes, regardless of argument quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional Biases for Negative Interpersonal Stimuli in Clinical Depression.

An information-processing paradigm was used to examine attentional biases in clinically depressed participants, participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and nonpsychiatric control participants for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Faces were presented for 1,000 ms, at which point depressed participants had directed their attention selectively to depression-relevant (i.e., sad) faces. This attentional bias was specific to the emotion of sadness; the depressed participants did not exhibit attentional biases to the angry or happy faces. This bias was also specific to depression; at 1,000 ms, participants with GAD were not attending selectively to sad, happy, or anxiety-relevant (i.e., angry) faces. Implications of these findings for both the cognitive and the interpersonal functioning of depressed individuals are discussed and directions for future research are advanced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemispheric perception of emotional valence from facial expressions.

The authors previously reported that normal subjects are better at discriminating happy from neutral faces when the happy face is located to the viewer's right of the neutral face; conversely, discrimination of sad from neutral faces is better when the sad face is shown to the left, supporting a role for the left hemisphere in processing positive valence and for the right hemisphere in processing negative valence. Here, the authors extend this same task to subjects with unilateral cerebral damage (31 right, 28 left). Subjects with right damage performed worse when discriminating sad faces shown on the left, consistent with the prior findings. However, subjects with either left or right damage actually performed superior to normal controls when discriminating happy faces shown on the left. The authors suggest that perception of negative valence relies preferentially on the right hemisphere, whereas perception of positive valence relies on both left and right hemispheres. (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)     

Memories of yesterday’s emotions: Does the valence of experience affect the memory-experience gap?

Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)