Unresolved anger and sadness: Identifying vocal acoustical correlates.

The authors conducted 2 studies to identify the vocal acoustical correlates of unresolved anger and sadness among women reporting unresolved anger toward an attachment figure. In Study 1, participants (N = 17) were induced to experience and express anger then sadness or sadness then anger. In Study 2, a 2nd group of participants (N = 22) underwent a relationship-oriented, emotion-focused analogue therapy session. Results from both studies showed that, relative to emotionally neutral speech, anger evoked an increase in articulation rate and in mean fundamental frequency (F0) and F0-range, whereas sadness evoked an increase in F0-perturbation. Both F0 and F0-range were larger for anger than for sadness. In addition, results from the mood-induction-procedure study revealed 2 Emotion×Order interactions. Whereas variations in amplitude range suggested that anger evoked less physiological activation when induced after sadness, variations in F0-perturbation suggested that sadness evoked more physiological activation when induced after anger. These findings illustrate the feasibility of using acoustical measures to identify clients' personally and clinically meaningful emotional experiences, and shifts between such emotional experiences, in the context of psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From unresolved anger to sadness: Identifying physiological correlates.

This study was designed to identify physiological correlates of unresolved anger and sadness, and the shift between these emotions, in a context similar to that of emotion-focused, experiential psychotherapy. Twenty-seven university students reporting unresolved anger toward an attachment figure were induced to experience and express unresolved anger and sadness. Simultaneously, their heart rate variability, finger temperature, and skin conductance levels were monitored. The sequence of emotion induction was counterbalanced. Sympathetic activation, as reflected by finger temperature, increased significantly from anger to sadness, but not from sadness to anger. A follow-up study (N=36) of participants induced to experience and express either anger or sadness in both the 1st and 2nd inductions ruled out an Anger×Time interaction and a sadness-sadness effect, suggesting that the increase in sympathetic activation from anger to sadness was a function of the unique sequence of emotions. These findings represent a first step toward using physiological measures to capture shifts from unresolved anger to vulnerable primary emotions during a therapy-like task and provide evidence for the purported mechanism underlying unresolved anger. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of subliminal anger and sadness primes on agency appraisals.

Two studies examined whether appraisals can be differentially affected by subliminal anger and sadness primes. Participants from Singapore (Experiment 1) and China (Experiment 2) were exposed to either subliminal angry faces or subliminal sad faces. Supporting appraisal theories of emotions, participants exposed to subliminal angry faces were more likely to appraise negative events as caused by other people and those exposed to subliminal sad faces were more likely to appraise the same events as caused by situational factors. The results provide the first evidence for subliminal emotion-specific cognitive effects. They show that cognitive functions such as appraisals can be affected by subliminal emotional stimuli of the same valence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social-contextual influences on expectancies for managing anger and sadness: The transition from middle childhood to adolescence.

This study examined the influence of emotion type (i.e., anger, sadness), audience type (i.e., mother, father, best friend), gender, and age on 140 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade adolescents' emotion management decisions, emotional self-efficacy, and outcome expectancies. Participants were read 8 vignettes and responded to 8 questions per vignette. Results indicated that 8th-grade adolescents reported regulating emotion most and expected the least interpersonal support from mothers. Children expressed greater self-efficacy and regulation of sadness than of anger. Boys reported dissembling emotion and expecting a negative interpersonal response to emotional behavior more than did girls. Children were more concerned with protecting feelings of friends than with protecting feelings of fathers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of alcohol on person perception: A social cognitive neuroscience approach.

The acute effects of alcohol on cognitive processing of expectancy violations were investigated using event-related brain potentials and a cued recall task to index attentional and working memory processes associated with inconsistency resolution. As predicted, expectancy-violating behaviors elicited larger late positive potentials (LPP) and were recalled better than expectancy-consistent behaviors. These effects were moderated by alcohol and the valence of initial expectancies. For placebo group participants, positive targets performing negative behaviors elicited the largest LPP responses and were recalled best. For those in the alcohol groups, negative targets behaving positively elicited the largest LPP and recall responses. These findings suggest that alcohol does not globally impair working memory processes in person perception but instead changes the nature of valenced information processing. Findings are discussed in the context of alcohol's effects on working memory processes, reward sensitivity, and the prefrontal cortical structures thought to mediate them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The experience of anger and sadness in everyday problems impacts age differences in emotion regulation.

The authors examined regulation of the discrete emotions anger and sadness in adolescents through older adults in the context of describing everyday problem situations. The results support previous work; in comparison to younger age groups, older adults reported that they experienced less anger and reported that they used more passive and fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies in interpersonal situations. The experience of anger partially mediated age differences in the use of proactive emotion regulation. This suggests that at least part of the reason why older adults use fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies is their decreased experience of anger. Results are discussed in the context of lifespan theories of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond social cognitions.

Reviews the book, Social motivation: Understanding children's school adjustment edited by J. Juvonen and K. R. Wentzel (see record 1997-97006-000). In general, research has paid little attention to the possibility that children's social motivation is intertwined with their academic motivation. Affiliation and achievement have been regarded as two distinct motivations. This book is an attempt to redress this imbalance and misconception. The book argues that children's social and academic development are intertwined. Contributors to the book discuss specific ways in which children are motivated to achieve socially and academically at school. The book's social motivation perspective has successfully extended the reader's attention from intrapsychological processes to interpersonal relationships and social concerns as motivators of behavior. (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)     

Cognitive-relaxation and social skills treatments of anger: A year later.

The present study provides a 12-month follow-up of a study by Deffenbacher, Story, Stark, Hogg, and Brandon (1987) that compared cognitive-relaxation and social skills training interventions for general anger reduction in college students. After 1 year both cognitive-relaxation and social skills subjects reported less general anger, personal-situational anger, anger-related psychophysiological reactivity, and trait anxiety than untreated controls. These findings suggested longterm maintenance of anger reduction and a generalization to anxiety that was not found posttreatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus pooling and social perception.

"The effects of stimulus pooling on judgments of personal attractiveness were investigated in an orthogonal factorial design, using as stimulus components identification type photographs which had been previously scaled on attractiveness… . The implications of the findings for (a) social perception… and (b) group judgment were considered." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction and perception of social motives.

In 2 experiments 70 male and female and 89 female undergraduates were required to observe and predict the behavior of a hypothetical "chooser" who made choices for him- or herself and for a hypothetical other in a series of decomposed games. The preference for outcomes, or social motivational orientation, of the chooser was preprogramed and varied across conditions. Ss were more readily able to detect the outcome preferences of choosers who made choices according to individualistic or competitive choice rules than of choosers who behaved in a prosocial or negatively self-interested manner. Furthermore, the prediction data from Exp II reveal that Ss tended to perceive choosers' own gain as an important component of most of the choosers' secondary motivation. Evidence from Ss' ratings of the choosers' personality attributes and estimates of the relative weights the choosers attached to their own and the other's gain (Exp II) indicated that Ss formed distinctive impressions of the choosers despite differences in predictive accuracy across conditions. Exp III with 64 undergraduates was performed to investigate the relationship between predictive accuracy and the mathematical complexity of the choosers' various choice rules; no evidence was found that mathematical complexity influenced Ss' performance on the prediction task. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anger and advancement versus sadness and subjugation: The effect of negative emotion expressions on social status conferral.

Four studies examined status conferral (decisions about who should be granted status). The studies show that people confer more status to targets who express anger than to targets who express sadness. In the 1st study, participants supported President Clinton more when they viewed him expressing anger about the Monica Lewinsky scandal than when they saw him expressing sadness about the scandal. This effect was replicated with an unknown politician in Study 2. The 3rd study showed that status conferral in a company was correlated with peers' ratings of the workers' anger. In the final study, participants assigned a higher status position and a higher salary to a job candidate who described himself as angry as opposed to sad. Furthermore, Studies 2–4 showed that anger expressions created the impression that the expresser was competent and that these perceptions mediated the relationship between emotional expressions and status conferral. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Incidental sadness biases social economic decisions in the Ultimatum Game.

Recent dual-process models of decision making have suggested that emotion plays an important role in decision making; however, the impact of incidental moods (i.e., emotions unrelated to the immediate situation) on decisions remains poorly explored. This question was investigated by inducing 2 basic emotional states (amusement or sadness) that were compared with a neutral-emotion control group. Decision making was assessed with a well-studied social task, the Ultimatum Game. In this task, participants had to make decisions to either accept or reject monetary offers from other players, offers that varied in their degree of unfairness. Emotion was induced with short movie clips. Induced sadness interacted with offer fairness, with higher sadness resulting in lower acceptance rates of unfair offers. Induced amusement was not associated with any significant biases in decision making. These results demonstrate that even subtle incidental moods can play an important role in biasing decision making. Implications of these results in regards to the emotion, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical literatures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure and process of emotional experience following nonmarital relationship dissolution: Dynamic factor analyses of love, anger, and sadness.

Dynamic factor analysis was used to examine the structure and process of daily emotions in a sample of young adults following a romantic breakup. Participants completed a daily diary for 4 weeks reporting on their love/longing for their ex-partner, anger, and sadness. Using a lag-1 process factor analysis model, results revealed that love/longing, sadness, and anger could be reliably distinguished as separate but correlated mood states in a trivariate model. Four emotional dynamics (amplification, reversing, persistence, and cooccurrence) were operationalized and investigated. Differences in these dynamics were observed on the basis of overall adjustment to the separation and attachment styles. Findings are discussed in terms of attachment and contemporary emotion theories, as well as the need to operationalize time-based affective processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Triumph and sadness.

Reviews the book, Human capital or cultural capital?: Ethnicity and poverty groups in an urban school district by George Farkas (1996). Farkas has written a remarkable book. He has a clear, though difficult, goal: determining factors that lead to the relatively poor school performance, and later the lack of occupational success, of disadvantaged students. In his empirical research, he finds some key factors and examines their impact across contexts and levels of analysis. The determinants of educational achievement are all at the individual or family level and they are used to explain group differences in school achievement. Differences in basic cognitive skills and work habits are able to explain almost all of the ethnic and social class differences in school achievement within his sample. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Height perception: A function of social distance.

Investigated the effects of (a) status-related ethnic membership, and (b) the prejudice of the O on height perception. Ss were 126 undergraduates who were shown slides of various objects and people in a counter-balanced fashion. It was found that height-equated individuals rated high on the Bogardus Social Distance Scale were perceived as taller than height-equated individuals rated low on the Bogardus Social Distance Scale. The implications of these findings are discussed. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: Categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children's tantrums.

Young children's temper tantrums offer a unique window into the expression and regulation of strong emotions. Previous work, largely based on parental report, suggests that two emotions, anger and sadness, have different behavioral manifestations and different time courses within tantrums. Individual motor and vocal behaviors, reported by parents, have been interpreted as representing different levels of intensity within each emotion category. The present study used high-fidelity audio recordings to capture the acoustic features of children's vocalizations during tantrums. Results indicated that perceptually categorized screaming, yelling, crying, whining, and fussing each have distinct acoustic features. Screaming and yelling form a group with similar acoustic features while crying, whining, and fussing form a second acoustically related group. Within these groups, screaming may reflect a higher intensity of anger than yelling while fussing, whining, and crying may reflect an increasing intensity of sadness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of communication, information overlap, and behavioral consistency on consensus in social perception.

Three experiments (N?=?69, 162, and 201, respectively) were conducted to test the mathematically derived predictions of the Weighted Average Model (D. A. Kenny, 1991) of consensus in interpersonal perception. Study 1 estimated the effect of perceiver communication, Study 2 estimated the effects of communication and stimulus overlap, and Study 3 estimated the effects of communication, overlap, and target consistency on consensus. The strongest consensus was found when perceivers communicated about highly overlapping information about targets who were cross-situationally consistent. Conversely, the lowest level of consensus was observed when perceivers did not communicate and had nonoverlapping information about targets who were cross-situationally inconsistent. Both stimulus variables (overlap and consistency) and an interpersonal variable (communication) affected consensus as predicted by the Weighted Average Model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regulating responses to anger: Effects of rumination and distraction on angry mood.

Previous research has found that self-focused rumination maintains or increases depressed mood, whereas distraction decreases depressed mood (S. Nolen-Hoeksema & J. Morrow, 1993; S. Nolen-Hoeksema, J. Morrow, & B. L. Fredrickson, 1993). The present series of experiments examined these mood regulation strategies in the context of an angry mood. In Experiments 1 and 3, rumination increased anger, whereas distraction decreased or had no effect on anger. In Experiments 2 and 4, women were more likely to choose to ruminate when in a neutral mood but to distract themselves following induction of an angry mood. Men were equally likely to choose rumination or distraction, regardless of mood condition. The results are interpreted and discussed within the framework of an associative-network model of anger. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivational and judgmental determinants of social perception.

This experiment was designed to demonstrate that motivationally neutral judgmental processes operate in social perception to affect the characteristics attributed to a particular stimulus person. 72 female college students were induced to have either high or low liking for the other girl assembled with them. The S then exchanged 2 messages with her partner on the issue of college fraternities. Previously constructed notes were substituted so that each S received 2 messages that were approximately either 1, 2, or 4 scale units from her initial position (on an 11-point scale) on this issue. 2 major findings were obtained when Ss were asked to estimate the partner's attitude position: (a) Regardless of the objective discrepancy between their own and their partner's views, most of the Ss in the high-liking condition minimized the difference between themselves and the attractive other person. (b) As expected, a judgmental contrast effect occurred in the low-liking condition when the objective discrepancy between S's and the partner's beliefs was relatively great. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)