Emotion最新文献

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).

Emerging evidence suggests inflammation may enhance social approach toward close others. Yet, little is known about how inflammation relates to positive affective experiences with different social targets. To address this, we examined associations between inflammation and perceptions of anticipated and experienced shared, kind-hearted positive affect (i.e., perceived positivity resonance) with close versus non-close others. Participants (N = 55; 67% female; 43% White; M_age = 20.06) provided blood samples on two consecutive days, once before and once after receiving the annual influenza vaccine, which were assayed for levels of the inflammatory marker interleukin-6. They also completed an in-lab writing task about anticipated positivity resonance in social interactions and completed eight momentary assessments of experienced positivity resonance. A divergence emerged between anticipated and experienced positivity resonance, specifically with non-close others: Higher interleukin-6 levels were associated with greater anticipated, but lower experienced, positivity resonance during interactions with non-close others. However, these effects did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and are considered preliminary. Additionally, higher levels of interleukin-6 were related to significantly greater ease imagining interacting with a close other, and a larger quantity of interactions with different close others. These findings provide preliminary evidence that associations between inflammation and positive emotions during social interactions vary as a function of anticipated versus experienced interactions, and as a function of target (close vs. non-close others). Future work is needed to test whether results replicate and generalize to older adults and those with chronically elevated inflammation. (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 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).

The transition from childhood to adolescence is a period of social-emotional reorganization involving changes in affect. Most research has examined developmental changes in between-person affect. Few studies have investigated developmental changes in associations between individual emotions and the structure of affective experience in youth across developmental age. This study used exploratory graph analysis to assess developmental changes in emotional complexity using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule administered at three time points from 2007 to 2013 in a three-cohort, accelerated longitudinal design spanning Grades 3 through 12 (N = 682): late childhood, M_age = 9.39, SD = 0.53; early adolescence, M_age = 11.80, SD = 0.67; and middle adolescence, M_age = 14.60, SD = 0.60. Decreases in edge density and entropy and increases in R² were identified across development. In contrast, nonlinear shifts were found for the number of negative edges between affective dimensions and mean absolute error and possible shifts in dimensionality. Results suggest that global network metrics support decreases in emotional complexity from childhood through adolescence, though other indices suggest distinct patterns of change. Implications for research and study limitations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Autobiographical memories, the memories we have of our personal past, change over time as content is forgotten or added to the original memory trace. While decades of research has demonstrated the augmenting effect emotion can have on memory, even memories for very negative experiences seem to be susceptible to change. However, it is unclear whether or not negative emotion in day-to-day life might protect everyday memories from distortion. Here, we examined whether the consistency with which everyday experiences are recalled differs as a function of the emotionality of the event. Participants (N = 513) recalled negative and neutral events from their past at two time points, 8 weeks apart. Using human scoring and large language modeling approaches to quantify the consistency of narrative recalls, we found that, although both negative and neutral memories showed moderate consistency between recalls, memories for negative events were more consistent than memories for neutral events. While emotional memories are not perfect records of the past, this work suggests that emotion reduces a memory's vulnerability to changing over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In a pattern known as the positivity effect, older adults tend to prioritize positive over negative information in attention and memory compared to younger adults. Traditional theories attribute this effect to age-related shifts toward positive emotions, and it is typically operationalized as a two-by-two interaction between age (younger vs. older) and valence (negative vs. positive). Alternative accounts, however, suggest that discrete emotions within valence categories may differentially drive the effect. To test this, from June to July 2023, younger adults (n = 101) and older adults (n = 108) completed an emotion-induced blindness task online. In each task trial, an emotional distractor image appeared shortly before a task-relevant target in a rapid stream of images. Emotional distractors depicted scenes of fear, disgust, excitement, contentment, or were emotionally neutral. We measured distraction from the emotional images and found minimal age-related differences between trials with different discrete emotion categories, but the positivity effect was evident when we compared across negative and positive valence categories. These findings suggest that valence, rather than discrete emotions, drives the positivity effect in attention. We discuss insights gained, limitations of our approach, and generalizability of our results to understand age-related changes in emotional prioritization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Violence exposure has deleterious effects on emotional well-being, including higher rates of future mental illness. Adolescence is an important period of neural development within brain regions (e.g., prefrontal cortex) that support emotional processes. The relationship between brain activity and emotion may vary with violence exposure. Thus, this study investigated the relationship between violence exposure, stress-elicited brain activity, and emotion in young people. Violence exposure was measured four times from 11 to 19 years of age. Participants (n = 301) returned 1 year later (age = 20) to complete mental health (i.e., anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress) questionnaires and the Montreal Imaging Stress Task during behavioral (e.g., skin conductance response and cortisol) and neuroimaging data collection. Data were collected from 2004 to 2018. Violence exposure was positively associated with mental health symptoms. Further, violence exposure moderated the relationship between stress-elicited dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and depression, cortisol, and skin conductance response. These findings suggest that violence exposure moderates the relationship between stress-elicited brain function and emotion-related behavior in young people. These findings provide novel insight into neural processes that may underlie the relationship between prior violence exposure and emotional function, which may have important implications for mental health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Close social relationships are critical for emotional well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted in-person contact with friends, particularly among young adults, for whom friendships support key developmental goals. In a longitudinal study of U.S. college students (N = 205; 10,088 observations), we examined how close friendship networks related to emotional well-being during the early months of the pandemic (May-October 2020). Leveraging prepandemic social network data and 28 days of ecological momentary assessments of affect and social interactions, we found that students with more close college friends reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect in daily life, even while physically separated from those friends. These individuals were buffered from the emotional toll of pandemic-related stressors, a pattern not explained by personality, interaction frequency, or living conditions. Rather, participants with more close friends experienced higher quality online interactions. Additionally, personal disclosures, whether in-person or online, were consistently associated with greater feelings of closeness. Notably, individuals with fewer close friends showed the largest boost in closeness following partner disclosures, suggesting that emotional sharing may play a compensatory role for those with limited social ties. These findings illustrate how friendships can continue to shape affective experiences from afar and highlight disclosure as a key mechanism through which closeness and its emotional benefits can be cultivated. Integrating social network structure, daily affect, and interaction-level processes, this work advances affective science by providing evidence of how the social regulation of emotion extends beyond physical proximity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).