Emotion最新文献

This study used a qualitative approach to examine how specificity in emotional labeling (reflecting greater differentiation) and clarity of emotion attributions in daily life are associated with depressive symptoms and cognition (rumination and overgeneralization). Participants were 191 young adults (74% female, racially/ethnically diverse, mean age 19) who completed baseline measures and a 14-day daily diary that included two prompts about their current experience of negative emotion. Participant-generated negative emotion labels and open-ended descriptions were coded for level of specificity and attributional clarity, respectively, by two trained coders with acceptable interrater agreement. Results revealed that participants made use of many nonstandard labels (87% of words) to describe their emotions, words that would not have been captured using standard emotion rating scales. Momentary specificity was unrelated to momentary rumination and overgeneralizing cognitions and was also unrelated to traditionally derived negative emotion differentiation (using intraclass correlations). However, attributional clarity significantly predicted momentary rumination and overgeneralizing as well as depressive symptoms. Our results point to limitations with specificity coding but suggest that momentary attributions may play a pivotal role in depression and depression-related cognitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Nonverbal vocalizations like "Ew!" and "Ugh!" are often used to communicate disgust. While disgust evolved primarily to promote the avoidance of pathogens (pathogen disgust), it is also expressed toward moral violations (moral disgust). In this study, we investigated whether vocalizations of pathogen and moral disgust are acoustically distinct and whether listeners can differentiate between them. To do so, we conducted machine learning analyses of acoustic parameters and two preregistered listening experiments (all conducted in 2023). Based on a data set of 1,000 spontaneous disgust vocalizations, six machine learning classifiers with fivefold cross-validation were able to distinguish between pathogen and moral disgust vocalizations with above-chance accuracy (AUC = 0.73). In a listening experiment (n = 200), participants differentiated between the two types of disgust vocalizations above chance (62%). In a second listening study (n = 680), listeners rated pathogen disgust vocalizations as expressing stronger avoidance motivations and as sounding more negative than moral disgust vocalizations. Together, these findings demonstrate that pathogen and moral disgust vocalizations are both acoustically and perceptually distinguishable. These findings align with the putative functional differences between pathogen and moral disgust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Flow is the experience of being deeply immersed in an activity, an experience that researchers have embraced as a predictor of well-being. Although research on the beneficial effects of flow is widespread, its multidisciplinary nature has precluded a clear consensus on their nature and strength. Results from a meta-analysis revealed a moderately strong, positive relationship between flow and well-being, consistent with our hypothesis. Features of the well-being measure moderated the association, such that eudaimonic measures showed a stronger association than did hedonic measures, and among hedonic measures, measures of cognitive well-being were more strongly associated with flow than affective measures. Measures of positive aspects of well-being were also more strongly associated with flow than measures of negative aspects. The association was surprisingly robust to features of the flow measure and activity, the design of the study, and characteristics of the sample. These findings suggest that flow in all its forms may be positively associated with well-being, though not all forms of well-being equally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

What emotions do people prefer in their leaders, and do these emotional preferences vary depending on how their organizations are performing? In three studies conducted between 2018 and 2023 with European American, East Asian American, and Hong Kong Chinese participants, we predicted that people would choose leaders whose emotional expressions matched their culture's ideal affect (the affective states they value) more during growth, when conditions are favorable and people default to cultural ideals, than during decline, when conditions are unfavorable, and people are more open to other options. In Study 1 (N = 304), participants imagined that their own organizations were undergoing growth or decline and rated the emotions they would ideally like their leaders to have. In Studies 2 (N = 449) and 3 (N = 558), participants read hypothetical scenarios of student organizations undergoing growth and decline, and chose a leader among excited, calm, and neutral candidates. Across the studies, during growth, European Americans and East Asian Americans chose excited candidates more and calm candidates less than did Hong Kong Chinese, consistent with cultural differences in the valuation of high arousal positive affect. During decline, however, these cultural differences disappeared. Moreover, in Study 3, participants' ideal high arousal positive affect predicted their positive judgments of the excited candidate when conditions were favorable but not when they were unfavorable, suggesting one mechanism underlying these cultural differences in leader choice. Together, these studies suggest that people prefer leaders who express culturally ideal emotions more during organizational growth than decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Presidential elections are a period of heightened negative affect for many Americans. Emotion regulation strategies are known to alleviate single-shot experiences of negative affect, but it is unclear how some of these strategies work in the context of recurring negative affect, like the days surrounding a presidential election. The present research examined these issues in the context of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election by collecting data from an online sample of U.S. partisans at four distinct assessments, spanning the day prior to Election Day to 1 week after Election Day. We find that Democrats reported significantly more negative affect than Republicans prior to the race being called, and as expected, Joe Biden's projected victory corresponded to increases in negative affect among Republicans and decreases among Democrats. Examining how the use of seven emotion regulation strategies was associated with changes in negative affect revealed that, broadly, cognitive change strategies (i.e., reappraisal, self-distancing, acceptance) were associated with decreases in negative affect, while disengagement-focused strategies (i.e., situational avoidance, distraction, cognitive suppression) were associated with increases in negative affect. Crucially, we detected differences in the source of these effects, with the effects of reappraisal and self-distancing occurring at the dispositional level (between-person), and those of acceptance and expressive suppression occurring at the state level (within-person). This study provides valuable insights into how different patterns of emotion regulation may affect negative affect caused by heightened political tensions and highlights the importance of separating between- and within-person variance when assessing these processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent work found ethnic differences in the association between resting heart rate variability (HRV), an index of emotion regulation (ER) capacity, and ER difficulties. The present study examined whether this relationship exists among American adults from other marginalized ethnic backgrounds living in the United States, African American (AfAm) and Hispanic or Latino Americans (Hispanics), which remains unexplored in the literature. We addressed this gap by investigating whether self-reported ethnicity differentially moderated the relationship between log-transformed high-frequency HRV and ER, indexed by suppression and reappraisal. A total of 1,047 emerging adults (M_age = 19.7 years [1.7]) had complete ER and resting 10-min HRV data (82 AfAm [65% women], 183 Asians [52% women], 228 Hispanics [59% women], and 554 non-Hispanic White [NHW; 60% women]). HRV was highest among AfAm and Hispanics and lowest among Asian individuals. Linear regression, adjusting for waist circumference and sex, revealed that the HRV-reappraisal associations were of greater magnitude among self-identified ethnic minorities than NHW, despite similar mean levels of reappraisal. AfAm and Hispanics showed statistically similar negative associations, while similar marginal positive associations were observed among Asians and NHW. In contrast, AfAm and Asian individuals showed a statistically similar positive HRV-suppression association, which differed marginally from NHW. NHW reported lower suppression compared to all groups and showed a unique negative HRV-suppression association. Findings suggest that neurovisceral capacity and sociocultural contexts may jointly establish culturally patterned regulatory behavior in American cultural contexts. Additional social contexts, including geographical locations and discrimination, should be investigated as mediators of these associations in future work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

People may often attempt to support a loved one by changing how that loved one interprets a stressful situation (i.e., other-focused cognitive reappraisal). However, there are many specific ways in which a situation can be reframed, and while some reappraisal tactics may be effective, other tactics may be inert or possibly backfire-even when used with good intentions. We propose that it is useful to distinguish between decommitment tactics that involve decommitting from a previously held perspective (e.g., reducing severity: "It is not as bad as it seems"; situational acceptance: "It is out of your hands") and commitment tactics that involve committing to an alternative perspective (e.g., finding benefits: "This will help you grow"; enhancing controllability: "You can handle this"). Across a pilot study (N = 963, collected in 2022), a longitudinal study (N = 261, collected in 2021), and a round-robin study (N = 344, collected in 2024), we investigated how regulators' use of different tactics to manage loved ones' (i.e., recipients') emotions predicted recipient and relationship outcomes in diverse samples. Across studies, people commonly used each tactic to regulate recipients' emotions. However, only the commitment tactics (enhancing controllability and finding benefits) consistently predicted better outcomes across three studies-improved recipient emotional experience and feelings of being supported and, in turn, better recipient well-being and relationship quality-while both decommitment tactics (reducing severity and situational acceptance) were inert and sometimes linked to worse interpersonal outcomes. These findings highlight the complex implications of managing loved ones' emotions using reappraisal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Mental health can influence both the intensity and dynamics of emotion expression. For example, persistent and intense negative emotions are symptoms of depression and anxiety. Such patterns could reflect maladaptive or impaired emotion regulation. Researching the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression and mental health can improve our understanding of the experiences that characterize these conditions and help inform their prevention and treatment. Many previous studies rely on self-reports of emotion, a limitation that could be addressed by assessing emotion expression in social media posts. We used Twitter (now "X") data, from 2020 to 2022, and gold-standard questionnaire measures of mental health from 230 adult participants in a U.K. longitudinal study to explore the relationships between the dynamics of emotion expression in tweets and mental health. We compared results generated using three different sentiment analysis methods. We found evidence that posting tweets that expressed more positive and less negative emotions was associated with reduced symptoms of anxiety. Expressing positive emotions at a greater variability was also associated with reduced anxiety symptoms in our participants. There was much less evidence that variability in negative emotions and instability in any emotion were associated with mental health. Mood disorders, such as anxiety, may be characterized by more negative emotions and a reduced ability to respond to positive internal and external stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in the intensity (e.g., emotional reactivity and mean affect), variety (e.g., emodiversity and range of emotions), and specificity (e.g., emotional granularity and alexithymia) of self-reported emotion experiences throughout daily life are important indicators of mental health and well-being. As commonly measured, these constructs reflect differences in how individuals employ emotion concept words to report their feelings. Here, we examined how emotion fluency (the number of emotion concept words one can readily access) relates to the intensity, variety, and specificity of individuals' reported emotion experiences using both retrospective self-report questionnaires and measures derived from emotion experience ratings over a 6-week experience sampling protocol. Those higher in emotion fluency reported experiencing more intense emotions, particularly negative emotions, and a wider variety of emotions over time (e.g., greater emodiversity) even when controlling general verbal fluency. However, emotion fluency was not related to measures associated with the specificity or precision with which one uses emotion concepts to report their experiences (e.g., emotional granularity and alexithymia). Findings suggest that having ready access to many emotion concepts may enable a person to use a lot of different emotion concepts when reporting feelings, but that greater emotion fluency does not necessarily result in using those concepts in more specific, context-dependent ways. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research has demonstrated that depressed individuals want to feel relatively more intense sadness and less intense happiness than nondepressed individuals do. However, it has rarely been tested whether these differences extend to daily life and how they might be related to attempts to regulate emotions. We assessed what depressed (n = 58) and nondepressed (n = 62) individuals wanted to feel in daily life and how much they tried to regulate their emotions, using Ecological Momentary Assessments. To better understand motivated emotion regulation in depression and what underlies it, we moved beyond sadness and happiness and targeted four discrete emotions that differ by valence and arousal (i.e., sadness, anxiety, happiness, and calmness). Data were collected during 2021-2022. We found that while both depressed and nondepressed individuals reported wanting very low levels of unpleasant emotions, depressed individuals wanted to feel more sadness and anxiety and less happiness in daily life than nondepressed individuals did. At the same time, depressed individuals attempted to decrease their sadness and anxiety more than nondepressed individuals did. Our conclusions are limited to a sample of relatively young adult students. Our findings suggest that emotion dysregulation in depression may involve a misalignment between what individuals want to feel and how they attempt to regulate their emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).