Emotion最新文献

Difficulties in emotion regulation during adolescence have been linked to depression. Early identification of deficits in emotion regulation may help prevent the onset of depression. This study investigated whether emotion regulation dynamics, particularly the strength of regulation to one's affective equilibrium (damping) inferred from the damped oscillator model, predicts future depressive symptoms in adolescents. We hypothesized that the relationship between damping and long-term outcomes would depend on the position of an individual's equilibrium. From July 2019 to May 2024, participants (N = 115) aged 12-15 completed smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment for 30 days, rating six emotions four times daily. The damped oscillator model was applied to each participant's time-series data, yielding person-specific frequency of oscillations (η) and damping (ζ) parameters. These parameters were then used to predict depressive symptoms at 6- and 12-month follow-ups controlling for baseline levels of depression. Results revealed that the interaction between the damping parameter and the equilibrium position significantly predicted depressive symptoms for sadness, but not for other emotions. For individuals with higher equilibrium levels of sadness, stronger damping predicted higher follow-up depressive symptoms. Additionally, higher frequency of oscillation around the equilibrium-representing greater elasticity and less rigidity-of two emotions (interest and happiness) predicted fewer depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that the adaptive value of rapid emotional recovery depends on one's baseline emotional state. Tracking emotion regulation dynamics of both positive and negative emotions may improve our ability to identify adolescents at risk for depression before symptoms emerge, thereby informing targeted intervention and prevention efforts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Are anxious individuals aware that their attention is excessively captured by threat-related stimuli? If so, how accurate is this awareness? Accurate attentional monitoring is crucial for effective attentional control, as it enables individuals to recognize whether and to what extent attentional control is necessary. The present study investigates how accurately individuals (recruited in 2023-2024) monitor their attentional bias toward an angry face and whether this ability is associated with anxiety levels. Adopting a novel approach that involves average facial expression and attentional allocation judgments, we demonstrate that individuals can monitor their attentional bias toward an angry face. However, anxious individuals tend to underestimate their greater attentional bias, despite having an intact ability to monitor trial-by-trial variations in attentional bias; this may explain why they exhibit impaired attentional control. This study provides a novel theoretical framework that incorporates attentional monitoring processes to more comprehensively understand the relationship between attention and anxiety. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research suggests that disgust may be more resistant to extinction than fear, with implications for anxiety disorder treatment. Theory suggests that disgust and fear are driven by distinct cognitive learning mechanisms, yet limited research has directly compared them experimentally as most prior work has examined either fear or disgust in isolation, often using different types of unconditioned stimuli (US). In the present online investigation (collected spring 2025), n = 332 participants (i.e., majority White and female undergraduates) were randomly assigned to one of four differential conditioning paradigms, each defined by the emotion and sensory modality of the US: (a) disgust-auditory (DA), (b) fear-auditory (FA), (c) disgust-images, or (d) fear-images. Participants rated the conditioned stimuli (CSs) using a standard US expectancy scale to assess expectancy learning and using discrete emotion ratings (fear and disgust) and valence ratings (pleasantness) to assess evaluative learning. During acquisition, the DA condition showed the strongest learning when measured via discrete emotion ratings, while the FA condition showed the strongest and fastest expectancy learning. DA was also the most resistant to extinction across both evaluative measures. No group differences emerged for reinstatement based on evaluative indices; however, FA produced the strongest reinstatement in US expectancy, while DA showed the weakest. Overall, results support the idea of differences in learning mechanism, suggesting that disgust learning is driven primarily by evaluative cognition, whereas fear learning is driven by expectancy cognition. Disgust's relative resistance to extinction may be a mechanism explaining poorer treatment outcomes for disorders characterized by heightened disgust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The long-term mental and physical health impacts attributed to loneliness may result from its longitudinal association with stress. Yet, the directionality of this association remains unclear. The present study examined the bidirectional association between loneliness and perceived stress across four monthly time points. Participants (N = 1,921, M_age = 48.59, 84% women) completed measures of loneliness and perceived stress between June and September 2021. Data were analyzed using a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which separately estimated between- and within-person effects over time. Supporting hypotheses, increases in loneliness and perceived stress, relative to expected scores, were each prospectively associated with respective increases in perceived stress and loneliness at the within-person level. In other words, loneliness and perceived stress were reciprocally related over time, even when accounting for their strong, traitlike association. Findings have key implications for methodological approaches to the study of loneliness and stress and inform mechanistic understandings of this association. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Recreational fear experiences, such as haunted attractions, paradoxically attract millions of patrons annually; despite fear being a generally negative emotion, people will pay money to experience it. Some have stipulated that part of the appeal is interpersonal-anecdotally, such experiences appear to bring people closer together. We put this idea to the test in five studies conducted at three commercial haunted attractions. In Studies 1-4, feeling more fear and making physical contact with other attraction guests were strong predictors of perceiving that the experience brought participants closer together. However, we consistently observed tiny or null results when measuring pre-to-post changes in participants' interpersonal closeness ratings (Studies 2 and 4), highlighting the nuanced nature of these relational dynamics. To further investigate these complexities, we employed a final qualitative interview study (Study 5), which found that postexperience processing (time to talk about the experience before quantifying one's feelings) may be critical to bonding. These findings suggest that while fear reliably fosters a subjective sense of connection, its relational impact may depend on how the experience is processed and contextualized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

How we detect and perceive threats and other emotional objects has long been a central theme in affective science research. Recent studies have emphasized that top-down, emotion-guided attention impacts perceptual decision making of emotional stimuli. While the influential low road hypothesis proposes spatial frequency (SF) being an important factor in threat detection, a crucial outstanding question is how emotional information-carried in different SF signals-is processed in perceptual decision making under emotion-guided attention. Over a series of five experiments, we measured participants' (N = 219) emotion-related decision making, examining the interaction of top-down (attention) and bottom-up (emotion expression, and SF) factors. Results showed there was significantly better performance in detecting high (H)SF compared to low (L)SF fearful targets under emotion-guided attention; this pattern also emerged for happy target detection. However, in a gender-identification task, better performance for HSF fearful stimuli was not observed. Drift diffusion modeling revealed that emotion-guided attention enhanced the evidence accumulation for HSF compared to LSF information. These results support the notion that while the fast low road may be responsible for allowing threat to capture our attention in a bottom-up manner, detailed information beyond the low road may be more efficient in driving top-down-guided identification of the threatening or emotional object. Findings from this series of experiments indicate the potentially context-dependent functions of bottom-up and top-down factors in threat detection and perception as well as emotion perception in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated how emotional events-specifically experiences of sadness (vs. happiness)-influence individuals' mental visualization processes, with a focus on how they alter perceived color chroma in visual imagery. Drawing on emotion regulation theory, we propose that people are more motivated to forget sad experiences than happy ones, and this tendency influences how such events are mentally visualized. Specifically, individuals tend to mentally represent sad events with lower color chroma (i.e., reduced vividness, intensity, or saturation) compared to happy events. Results from three experiments involving 939 participants support our theorization (data collected in 2018-2023). Experiment 1 extends prior research by showing that participants mentally represent sad experiences in lower color chroma than happy experiences. This suggests that the color-emotion association exists not only in stimuli-based processing but also in mental visualization. Experiment 2 identifies the mediating role of the motivation to forget the emotional experience in the causal relationship between emotions and color chroma representation. Experiment 3 further indicates that the effect of emotions on color chroma is mitigated when individuals are explicitly prompted to forget emotional experiences. This research demonstrates the role of motivational processes in shaping mental visualization and provides a novel and verifiable explanation for the association between color chroma and emotions documented in the emotion literature (Pazda et al., 2024). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Expressive suppression is often considered a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy given its negative effects on psychological and physiological outcomes. However, expressive suppression may help fulfill impression management goals, offsetting some intrapersonal costs. The present research considers this question by examining impressions of others who suppress versus express anger across a large range of situations. Across seven studies conducted between the spring of 2023 and the spring of 2024, participants (n = 2,613; 47.88% women; 67.39% White; 10.07% Black; 8.30% Asian; 7.77% bi/multiracial; 5.32% Hispanic/Latine; 0.77% other; 0.34% Native American or American Indian) read vignettes about people responding angrily or suppressing anger in response to public confrontations. Overall, results revealed that targets who suppressed (vs. expressed) anger were perceived as warmer and more competent. Further, mediation analyses demonstrated that participants were more likely to ascribe more sophisticated minds to targets who suppressed (vs. expressed) anger, which was, in turn, related to warmth and competence perceptions (Study 3). Taken together, participants had more positive regard for anger suppressors than anger expressors, and these effects were generally not qualified by context or by target race or gender. These results suggest that apparently personally maladaptive suppression strategies might trade off against the interpersonal benefits of suppressing situationally inappropriate emotions such as anger. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Reappraisal is a common emotion regulation strategy that involves adjusting how a situation is appraised. While much is known about its use to reduce negative affect in negative situations, less is known about its use across negative, neutral, and positive contexts to increase positive affect (i.e., positive goal reappraisal). To fill this gap, we investigated the efficacy and mechanisms of positive goal reappraisal across three valence categories in two complementary studies. In Study 1, 158 participants rated their subjective affect and reported how they appraised depicted situations on key appraisal dimensions with and without using reappraisal. In Study 2, 70 participants completed the same task, while their electromyographic and electroencephalographic responses were recorded. We found that reappraisal was effective across all valence categories, as it increased subjective positive affect and decreased subjective negative affect in response to negative, neutral, and positive pictures. Reappraisal also increased zygomaticus major reactivity for neutral and positive pictures and decreased corrugator supercilii reactivity for negative and neutral pictures. Regarding cognitive mechanisms, we found that the effects of reappraisal were related to appraisal shifts, particularly changes in congruence and relevance. A broader range of appraisal shifts were involved in neutral and positive contexts than in negative ones, suggesting that reappraisal mechanisms may be context-dependent. Finally, reappraisal amplified the late positive potential across all picture types within a relatively early time window (263-1,013 ms), indicating sustained attentional engagement. We conclude that positive goal reappraisal may be effective irrespective of stimulus valence by producing appraisal shifts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Converging evidence suggests that visual spatial attention is preferentially allocated to emotional over neutral stimuli, referred to as an attentional bias to emotional information. Intriguing questions emerged about whether this attentional bias is facilitated by an assumed right hemispheric dominance of emotion processing and by converging cross-modal information (Gerdes et al., 2021). However, we argue that a critical condition that would allow an interpretation in terms of an influence on an emotional attention bias is missing from the experimental design testing these effects: namely, a condition presenting only neutral pictures. To corroborate our argument, we conducted a replication and extension of the eye-tracking study by Gerdes et al. (2021), including this control condition. Specifically, we presented pairs of pictures and lateralized sounds in a free-viewing paradigm and tested the effect of picture position, sound position, and sound valence on an attentional bias score (BS), a difference value for the number of first fixations to unpleasant pictures compared to neutral ones. Importantly, we included a neutral-neutral condition and computed a corresponding BS for an arbitrary set of neutral pictures. Both the supposed leftward bias of emotional attention (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if they are presented on the left) and its supposed guidance by sounds (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if a sound was heard on the same side as the unpleasant picture) emerged in striking parallelism for both unpleasant-neutral and neutral-neutral picture pairs. Thus, the paradigm gives no evidence for emotion specificity of results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).