What does it mean to be angry at yourself? Categories, appraisals, and the problem of language.

According to appraisal theorists, anger involves a negative event, usually blocking a goal, caused by another person. Critics argue that other-agency is unnecessary, since people can be angry at themselves, and thus that appraisal theory is wrong about anger. In two studies, we compared anger, self-anger, shame, and guilt, and found that self-anger shared some appraisals, action tendencies, and associated emotions with anger, others with shame and guilt. Self-anger was not simply anger with a different agency appraisal. Anger, shame, and guilt almost always involved other people, but almost half of the occurrences of self-anger were solitary. We discuss the incompatibility of appraisal theories with any strict categorical view of emotions, and the inadequacy of emotion words to capture emotional experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition.

Two studies provide evidence for the role of cultural familiarity in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. For Chinese located in China and the United States, Chinese Americans, and non-Asian Americans, accuracy and speed in judging Chinese and American emotions was greater with greater participant exposure to the group posing the expressions. Likewise, Tibetans residing in China and Africans residing in the United States were faster and more accurate when judging emotions expressed by host versus nonhost society members. These effects extended across generations of Chinese Americans, seemingly independent of ethnic or biological ties. Results suggest that the universal affect system governing emotional expression may be characterized by subtle differences in style across cultures, which become more familiar with greater cultural contact. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Confusion and interest: The role of knowledge emotions in aesthetic experience.

What makes something confusing? Confusion is a common response to challenging, abstract, and complex works, but it has received little attention in psychology. On the basis of appraisal theories of emotion, I suggest that confusion and interest have different positions in a 2-dimensional appraisal space: Interesting things stem from appraisals of high novelty and high comprehensibility, and confusing things stem from appraisals of high novelty and low comprehensibility. Two studies—a multilevel correlational study and an experiment that manipulated comprehensibility—found support for this appraisal model. Confusion and interest are thus close relatives in the family of knowledge emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion and rationality: A critical review and interpretation of empirical evidence.

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined--incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses--and three conceptions of rationality are considered--logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal objects, distort beliefs in an assimilative fashion, disrupt self-control when intensely negative, but do not necessarily increase risk-taking. Integral emotional responses are often used as proxies for values, and valuations based on these responses exhibit distinct properties: efficiency, consistency, polarization, myopia, scale-insensitivity, and reference-dependence. Emotions seem to promote social and moral behavior. Conjectures about the design features of the affective system that give rise to seeming sources of rationality or irrationality are proposed. It is concluded that any categorical statement about the overall rationality or irrationality of emotion would be misleading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective dimensions of odor perception: A comparison between Swiss, British, and Singaporean populations.

Do affective responses to odors vary as a function of culture? To address this question, we developed two self-report scales in the United Kingdom (Liverpool: LEOS) and in Singapore (city of Singapore: SEOS), following the same procedure as used in the past to develop the Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS: Chrea, Grandjean, Delplanque et al., 2009). The final scales were obtained by a three-step reduction of an initial pool of 480 affective terms, retaining only the most relevant terms to describe odor-related subjective affective states and comprised of six (GEOS) or seven affective dimensions (LEOS and SEOS). These included dimensions that were common to the three cultures (Disgust, Happiness Well-being, Sensuality Desire, and Energy), common to the two European samples (Soothing Peacefulness), and dimensions that were culture specific (Sensory Pleasure in Geneva; Nostalgia and Hunger Thirst in Liverpool; Intellectual Stimulation, Spirituality, and Negative Feelings in Singapore). A comparative approach showed that the dimensional organization of odor-related affective terms in a given culture better explained data variability for that culture than data variability for the other cultures, thus highlighting the importance of culture-specific tools in the investigation of odor-related affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive appraisals and emotions predict cortisol and immune responses: A meta-analysis of acute laboratory social stressors and emotion inductions.

Models of stress and health suggest that emotions mediate the effects of stress on health; yet meta-analytic reviews have not confirmed these relationships. Categorizations of emotions along broad dimensions such as valence (e.g., positive and negative affect) may obscure important information about the effects of specific emotions on physiology. Within the context of the integrated specificity model, we present a novel theoretical framework that posits that specific emotional responses associated with specific types of environmental demands influence cortisol and immune outcomes in a manner that would have likely promoted the survival of our ancestors. We analyzed experiments from 66 journal articles that directly manipulated social stress or emotions and measured subsequent cortisol or immune responses. Judges rated experiments for the extent to which participants would experience theoretically relevant cognition and affect clustered around five categories: (a) cognitive appraisals, (b) basic emotions, (c) rumination and worry, (d) social threat, and (e) global mood states. As expected, global mood states were unassociated with the effect sizes, whereas exemplars from the other categories were generally associated with effect sizes in the expected manner. The present research suggests that coping strategies that alter appraisals and emotional responses may improve long-term health outcomes. This might be especially relevant for stressors that are acute or imminent, threaten one’s social status, or require extended effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibition of return to negative emotion: Evidence from an emotional expression detection task.

After the presentation of an uninformative spatial cue, it usually takes participants more time to respond to a target that appears at the cued location when the interval between the cue and target is long. This phenomenon is named inhibition of return (IOR), implying that returning attention to the cued location is inhibited because of attentional disengagement. The present study investigated whether irrelevant emotional information is processed by the attentional system in a similar manner. Uninformative positive and negative emotional cues were presented at the center of the screen, and faces were presented as the target. An emotional expression detection task was used to reveal the inhibitory and facilitatory aftereffects of the attentional processing of the emotional cues. An emotion-based IOR effect on reaction time was observed only after the presence of a negative emotional cue, implying that the attentional system tends to inhibit irrelevant negative emotion but not inhibit irrelevant positive emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Duchenne smile, emotional experience, and autonomic reactivity: A test of the facial feedback hypothesis.

This study examined the modulatory function of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles on subjective and autonomic components of emotion. Participants were asked to hold a pencil in their mouth to either facilitate or inhibit smiles and were not instructed to contract specific muscles. Five conditions--namely lips pressing, low-level non-Duchenne smiling, high-level non-Duchenne smiling, Ducherme smiling, and control--were produced while participants watched videoclips that were evocative of positive or negative affect. Participants who displayed Duchenne smiles reported more positive experience when pleasant scenes and humorous cartoons were presented. Furthermore, they tended to exhibit different patterns of autonomic arousal when viewing positive scenes. These results support the facial feedback hypothesis and suggest that facial feedback has more powerful effects when facial configurations represent valid analogs of basic emotional expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speed and accuracy of facial expression classification in avoidant personality disorder: A preliminary study.

The aim of this preliminary study was to examine whether individuals with avoidant personality disorder (APD) could be characterized by deficits in the classification of dynamically presented facial emotional expressions. Using a community sample of adults with APD (n = 17) and non-APD controls (n = 16), speed and accuracy of facial emotional expression recognition was investigated in a task that morphs facial expressions from neutral to prototypical expressions (Multi-Morph Facial Affect Recognition Task; Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001). Results indicated that individuals with APD were significantly more likely than controls to make errors when classifying fully expressed fear. However, no differences were found between groups in the speed to correctly classify facial emotional expressions. The findings are some of the first to investigate facial emotional processing in a sample of individuals with APD and point to an underlying deficit in processing social cues that may be involved in the maintenance of APD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evolving Judgments of Terror Risks: Foresight, Hindsight, and Emotion.

The authors examined the evolution of cognitive and emotional responses to terror risks for a nationally representative sample of Americans between late 2001 and late 2002. Respondents' risk judgments changed in ways consistent with their reported personal experiences. However, they did not recognize these changes, producing hindsight bias in memories for their judgments. An intensive debiasing procedure failed to restore a foresightful perspective. A fear-inducing manipulation increased risk estimates, whereas an anger-inducing manipulation reduced them-both in predictions (as previously observed) and in memories and judgments of past risks. Thus, priming emotions shaped not only perceptions of an abstract future but also perceptions of a concrete past. These results suggest how psychological research can help to ensure an informed public. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for strong dissociation between emotion and facial displays: The case of surprise.

Eight experiments examined facial expressions of surprise in adults. Surprise was induced by disconfirming a previously established schema or expectancy. Self-reports and behavioral measures indicated the presence of surprise in most participants, but surprise expressions were observed only in 4%-25%, and most displays consisted of eyebrow raising only; the full, 3-component display was never seen. Experimental variations of surprise intensity, sociality, and duration/complexity of the surprising event did not change these results. Electromyographic measurement failed to detect notably more brow raisings and, in one study, revealed a decrease of frontalis muscle activity in the majority of the participants. Nonetheless, most participants believed that they had shown a strong surprise expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultures of Moderation and Expression: Emotional Experience, Behavior, and Physiology in Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans.

Ethnographic accounts suggest that emotions are moderated in Chinese cultures and expressed openly in Mexican cultures. The authors tested this notion by comparing subjective, behavioral, and physiological aspects of emotional responses to 3 (warned, unwarned, instructed to inhibit responding) aversive acoustic startle stimuli in 95 Chinese Americans and 64 Mexican Americans. Subjective reports were consistent with ethnographic accounts; Chinese Americans reported experiencing significantly less emotion than Mexican Americans across all 3 startle conditions. Evidence from a nonemotional task suggested that these differences were not artifacts of cultural differences in the use of rating scales. Few cultural differences were found in emotional behavior or physiology, suggesting that these aspects of emotion are less susceptible to cultural influence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment theory and intergroup bias: Evidence that priming the secure base schema attenuates negative reactions to out-groups.

Five studies examined the effects of priming the secure base schema on intergroup bias. In addition, Studies 1–2 examined the effects of dispositional attachment style, Studies 2–5 examined a mood interpretation, Study 3 examined the mediating role of threat appraisal, and Studies 4–5 examined the effects of secure base priming while inducing a threat to self-esteem or cultural worldview. Secure base priming led to less negative evaluative reactions toward out-groups than positive affect and neutral control conditions. In addition, whereas the effects of secure base priming did not depend on attachment style and were not explained by mood induction, they were mediated by threat appraisal and occurred even when self-esteem or cultural worldview was threatened. The discussion emphasizes the relevance of attachment theory for understanding intergroup attitudes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotions over time: Synchronicity and development of subjective, physiological, and facial affective reactions to music.

Most people are able to identify basic emotions expressed in music and experience affective reactions to music. But does music generally induce emotion? Does it elicit subjective feelings, physiological arousal, and motor reactions reliably in different individuals? In this interdisciplinary study, measurement of skin conductance, facial muscle activity, and self-monitoring were synchronized with musical stimuli. A group of 38 participants listened to classical, rock, and pop music and reported their feelings in a two-dimensional emotion space during listening. The first entrance of a solo voice or choir and the beginning of new sections were found to elicit interindividual changes in subjective feelings and physiological arousal. Quincy Jones' "Bossa Nova" motivated movement and laughing in more than half of the participants. Bodily reactions such as "goose bumps" and "shivers" could be stimulated by the "Tuba Mirum" from Mozart's Requiem in 7 of 38 participants. In addition, the authors repeated the experiment seven times with one participant to examine intraindividual stability of effects. This exploratory combination of approaches throws a new light on the astonishing complexity of affective music listening. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autism and the extraction of emotion from briefly presented facial expressions: Stumbling at the first step of empathy.

Identification of other people's emotion from quickly presented stimuli, including facial expressions, is fundamental to many social processes, including rapid mimicry and empathy. This study examined extraction of valence from brief emotional expressions in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by impairments in understanding and sharing of emotions. Control participants were individuals with reading disability and typical individuals. Participants were shown images for durations in the range of microexpressions (15 ms and 30 ms), thus reducing the reliance on higher level cognitive skills. Participants detected whether (a) emotional faces were happy or angry, (b) neutral faces were male or female, and (c) neutral images were animals or objects. Individuals with ASD performed selectively worse on emotion extraction, with no group differences for gender or animal?object tasks. The emotion extraction deficit remains even when controlling for gender, verbal ability, and age and is not accounted for by speed-accuracy tradeoffs. The deficit in rapid emotional processing may contribute to ASD difficulties in mimicry, empathy, and related processes. The results highlight the role of rapid early emotion processing in adaptive social?emotional functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction of kindergartners' academic achievement from their effortful control and emotionality: Evidence for direct and moderated relations.

The relations between effortful control, emotionality (anger, sadness, and shyness), and academic achievement were examined in a short-term longitudinal study of 291 kindergartners. Teachers and parents reported on students' effortful control and emotionality. Students completed the Continuous Performance Task and the Letter-Word, Passage Comprehension, and Applied Problems subtests of the Woodcock–Johnson tests of achievement. Effortful control was positively related to achievement. Parent- and teacher-reported anger and teacher-reported sadness and shyness were negatively related to achievement, but many of the main effects were qualified by interactions with effortful control. At low levels of anger or sadness, students high in effortful control performed best, but at high levels of these emotions, all children performed similarly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and emotional memory: The forgettable nature of negative images for older adults.

Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality and Emotion: Test of Gray's Personality Theory by Means of an fMRI Study.

Although it is known that there are fundamental personality differences in the behavioral responses to emotional stimuli, traits have scarcely been investigated in this context by means of functional imaging studies. To maximize the variance with respect to personality, the authors tested 12 control subjects and 12 subjects who had sadomasochistic experiences with respect to the relationship between J. A. Gray's (1970) personality dimensions, the behavioral approach system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), and brain activity in regions of interest. The BIS was associated with activity in numerous brain areas in response to fear, disgust, and erotic visual stimuli, whereas few associations could he detected between the BAS and brain activity in response to disgust and erotic stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)