Emotion最新文献

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).

The stereotype that women are more emotional than men is pervasive in Western culture, but little research has directly examined how this stereotype translates into judgments of emotionality. We propose that one way gender stereotypes shape judgments of emotionality is through the aggregation of emotional expressions, in which perceivers preferentially remember stereotype-congruent emotional stimuli and consequently overweight these stimuli when forming judgments. To test this, we conducted five studies (N = 772) during 2021-2025 among men participants. In Study 1, we validated the persistence of gender-emotion stereotypes. For Studies 2-5, we selected emotional expression stimuli that elicited no gender difference in ratings of emotionality at the single face level. Men participants saw sequences of male and female faces displaying emotional expressions ranging from neutral-to-angry (Study 2), neutral-to-happy (Study 3), and neutral-to-sad (Study 4) and were asked to indicate whether they considered the person in the sequence to be emotional or not. When men perceivers aggregated these stimuli (which exhibited no gender difference at the single face level), they were more likely to rate sequences of female faces as emotional. Furthermore, using a memory test we show that participants better remembered angry female faces within a sequence compared with angry male faces (Study 5), supporting the idea that aggregation of emotional information enables stereotypes to influence judgments via memory. This study reveals an important mechanism by which stereotypes are translated into emotionality judgments. We used only White stimuli faces and recruited only men participants, limiting generalizability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There is an age-related positivity effect in attention to emotional faces. However, all of these studies have relied on computer tasks where people are directed to look at faces on a screen. The primary aim of this study was to test whether the age-related positivity effect to emotional faces emerges under more naturalistic settings. The secondary aim was to test whether an own-age bias exists in attention to emotional faces and whether task ecological validity moderates any observed effect. Younger and older adults completed a naturalistic positivity effect task where they sat in a waiting room with emotional faces on the walls while their eye-gaze behavior was monitored with a mobile eye-tracker. They also completed a computer-based task that involved viewing pairs of emotional faces on a screen while wearing a mobile eye-tracker. As predicted, a positivity effect emerged in the computer-based task where older adults looked less at negative faces compared to younger adults, but no age-related positivity bias emerged in the naturalistic task. In addition, younger adults showed an own-age bias in attention to faces, and this was strongest in the naturalistic task. There was no evidence of an own-age bias in older adults for either task. These findings highlight the importance of considering ecological validity in studies of attention and emotional aging. Implications and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People often physically cling to others when afraid and doing so can downregulate negative emotional experiences (e.g., Coan et al., 2006). However, in some situations, physical touch may fail to downregulate emotional experiences-such as when an individual being touched is physiologically aroused themselves. To test this hypothesis, we built plush robots with motorized plastic ribcages that were manipulated to contract and expand to simulate human breathing patterns. Participants held these robots while we measured their heart rate before, during, and after watching a fear-eliciting stimulus. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who interacted with robots that exhibited accelerated-breathing patterns experienced a pronounced increase in their own heart rate, compared to participants who held stable-breathing and nonbreathing robots. These results indicate that holding or clinging to others engaged in accelerated breathing may be ineffective or detrimental for downregulating one's own physiological arousal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There is growing interest in examining loneliness using intensive repeated assessment methods in daily life; however, much remains unknown regarding variation in loneliness at the within- and between-person level. Better characterizing dynamic daily experiences of loneliness will help clarify the nature of loneliness experiences that may be indicative of current and future risk for chronic loneliness and provide information to inform future study designs. We characterized daily loneliness among an online sample of 98 adults (23-78 years, 55% women, generally healthy) who completed daily surveys for 14 consecutive days (N_observations = 1,330). Participants were systematically recruited in 2024 based on loneliness status categories (41 chronically lonely, 27 acutely lonely, and 30 nonlonely) derived from Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure scores and self-reported duration. We compared the following for each group: (a) average levels of daily loneliness, (b) the proportion of within- versus between-person variance in daily loneliness, and (c) indicators of within- and between-person daily loneliness variability. Analyses revealed that lonely individuals overall (both chronic and acute) reported higher levels of average daily loneliness than nonlonely individuals. Furthermore, despite self-reporting similar levels of traitlike loneliness (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure) and average daily loneliness as acutely lonely individuals, chronically lonely individuals had a higher proportion of within-person variance and greater within-person variability in daily loneliness. Findings offer a starting point to disentangle how within-person variability of loneliness in daily life may play a role in the development and maintenance of chronic loneliness over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).