Emotion最新文献

Facial emotion perception in real life is inevitably influenced by the affective context, such as the expressions on nearby people's faces. However, to what extent and how the expressions of others exert a contextual influence on our interpretation of target facial emotions remains largely unclear. Using psychophysical methods, we demonstrated that the emotional facial context alone (i.e., without any evident social interaction cues) is sufficient to bias the perceived expression of an ambiguous target face (N = 160, healthy Asian college students, 2017-2025). Intriguingly, the contextual effect induced by faces with fearful, but not happy, expressions was regulated by observers' awareness of the context. For fearful contexts, the contextual effect showed a dissociation between nonconscious and conscious conditions, occurring only when the contextual face was not consciously perceived. By contrast, contextual faces expressing happiness biased emotion perception regardless of awareness. These findings broaden our understanding of the affective contextual effect in situations without explicit social relationships. More crucially, they unveil the intertwined roles of emotional valence and consciousness in emotional information integration, offering valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms whereby affective context shapes facial emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Body posture provides a rich source of information about the emotional states of other people. Recent research has shown that people can recognize emotions even from isolated images of body parts, especially from hands. In perception of emotion from faces, research has emphasized the importance of relational information about the global spatial relations between different parts of the face. The role of holistic processing in perception of emotion from bodies is unknown. One potential signature of holistic processing in emotional perception of bodies is the finding the recognition of emotions is higher when both hands are shown compared with just one hand. This could indicate that the spatial relationship between the hands carries information about emotions over and above that present in each hand individually. Alternatively, it could reflect the fact that when two hands are present, there is simply twice as much total information. This study therefore compared emotion recognition when participants were shown: (a) both hands in their actual configuration, (b) both hands in a distorted configuration, or (c) one hand. Performance was substantially above chance in all conditions, replicating the finding that emotion can be recognized from isolated hand images. Critically, performance was higher when both hands were shown in their actual configuration compared with the other two conditions. These results provide evidence for holistic processing in the perception of emotion from body parts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

New fatherhood is marked by profound psychological and neural transformations. While these changes can be stressful, many fathers also report increased life satisfaction associated with parenthood. Personal meaning-the subjective sense that life has purpose, meaning, and coherence-may reflect positive adaptation to parenthood. This study investigated how personal meaning across the transition to fatherhood is associated with both psychological and neural changes. Among 88 first-time fathers followed from mid-pregnancy into the first year after birth, we found an approximately even split between fathers who reported increases or decreases in personal meaning. Within 35 fathers who also underwent neuroimaging before and after birth, we observed increases in resting-state functional connectivity in the bilateral temporal lobes, right angular gyrus, thalamus, and right lateral occipital cortex, and decreases in regions such as the right frontal pole, left opercular cortex, and anterior cingulate. Increases in insular cortex connectivity predicted greater postnatal personal meaning, even after controlling for both positive and negative parenting-related feelings. These findings suggest that dynamic changes within the insula may support fathers' ability to form a higher order sense of meaning and purpose during this transformative period. Future mixed-methods research may further elucidate how these neural changes contribute to well-being during stressful life transitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

During the transition to middle school, difficulties understanding and identifying emotions may place youth at risk for maladaptive responses to peer victimization. In turn, maladaptive responses to victimization may increase the likelihood of engaging in aggressive behaviors. In a prospective, multi-informant study of 636 youth (338 girls; M_age in fourth grade = 9.94 years; 66.7% White; 34.75% receiving subsidized lunch) from fourth to sixth grades (2008-2011), we examined the indirect pathways from emotional clarity to aggressive behavior via responses to peer victimization. Results revealed that poor emotional clarity predicted less effortful engagement and more involuntary disengagement responses to peer victimization, which predicted more aggressive behaviors. These results highlight the importance of promoting emotional understanding to enhance effective coping with victimization and reduce aggression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Does emotional information have a place in court, or does it bias legal decisions? We address this longstanding question using real-world national sentencing patterns and laboratory-based mock jury decisions. Archival analysis of 918,152 observations reveals that the introduction of Victim Impact Statements, in which victims express the effect of crimes on their lives, did not change sentencing outcomes for violent crimes (Study 1). We hypothesized this may occur if observers empathize with victims over defendants by default. In two experimental studies (including a preregistered replication; data collected 2018 and 2019), exposure to the facts of a crime produced empathy for victims but dehumanization of defendants, a pattern not altered by Victim Impact Statements. Upon exposure to both the defendant's perspective and the victim's perspective, people express empathy for the victim and defendant, humanize defendants, and support more lenient sentencing. Internal meta-analyses of Study 2 and 3 found that the pooled effect of the defendant's perspective was much stronger than that of the victim, despite a content analysis demonstrating no significant difference in the emotionality or tone of the two statements. Taken together, the large and real-world sample of Study 1, combined with the experimental manipulation of Studies 2 and 3, suggests that "empathic defaults" are part of legal decision making and that introducing-rather than ignoring-multiple perspectives may balance the emotional scales. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A widely cited idea in the emotion regulation literature holds that expressive suppression impairs memory while cognitive reappraisal has no effect on or may enhance memory relative to control. However, empirical evidence for these effects has been inconsistent. To provide a definitive test, we conducted four well-powered experiments with more than 4,000 participants to examine the effects of reappraisal and suppression of negative emotion (Experiments 1 and 3) and positive emotion (Experiments 2 and 4) on verbal and nonverbal memory. Results showed no consistent evidence for an effect of reappraisal on either type of memory, though expressive suppression of negative emotion consistently impaired verbal memory relative to control. Obtained effect sizes were small given successful emotion regulation manipulations and adequate statistical power (ds < 0.11). Conclusions are constrained to English-speaking online samples, and may not generalize to other types of memory. These findings highlight the need to systematically test widely accepted assumptions as a field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Interpersonal affect worsening involves intentionally making others feel bad and can stem from varied motives, including counterhedonic (to purely harm emotionally) and altruistic (to benefit others without personal gain) reasons. While prior research has examined these motives, their interplay with specific strategies remains underexplored. This study used ecological momentary assessment to investigate the links between motives (altruistic and counterhedonic) and strategies (negative engagement and rejection) in a sample of 228 participants across 21 ecological momentary assessments (three times a day over 7 days). Results revealed significant within-person associations: Higher levels than usual of altruistic motives positively predicted higher levels than usual in the use of negative engagement strategies, while counterhedonic motives positively predicted rejection strategies at the same time. The same pattern was true from strategies to motives. However, no evidence was found for spillover effects across time from motives to strategies. Nevertheless, the use of both rejection and negative engagement strategies at a previous time positively predicted higher counterhedonic motives at a later time. Similar links were also observed at the between-person level, suggesting specific alignments between motives and strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A growing body of literature suggests that prosocial behavior, or behavior intended to help others, benefits well-being. However, modern society often places a greater emphasis on self-focused acts in the pursuit of well-being. To understand the effects of these differing forms of kindness (to others or the self), we conducted a 2-week intervention study of a community sample during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Participants were randomly assigned to a prosocial (other-kindness), self-kindness, or control condition, and those in the active conditions were asked to perform three acts of kindness each week. Of those who completed the intervention (N = 777), we found that participants in the other-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and loneliness from pre- to postintervention, offering compelling evidence for the mental health benefits of prosocial behavior. Furthermore, we found that participants in the self-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, but no differences in anxiety and loneliness. While the self-kindness group reported experiencing more positive feelings during their acts of kindness, the other-kindness group felt more connected. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed that, for the prosocial group, the effect of condition on depression, anxiety, and loneliness was mediated by increases in feelings of social connection, whereas for the self-kindness group, the effect of condition on depression was mediated by increases in positive feelings. Overall, these findings reaffirm the benefits of prosocial behavior on well-being and suggest unique pathways to mental health benefits for these two forms of kindness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous studies have indicated that adolescents are susceptible to emotional cues and can benefit from peers' interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). However, it remains unclear how an adolescent regulator's personal traits shape an effective IER. The present study examined the role of regulator's trait empathy and social distance between the regulator and the target on IER effectiveness among adolescents and explored the underlying behavioral mechanism. A total of 420 adolescent dyads with ages ranging from 12 to 18 years participated (212 dyads of friends; 208 dyads of strangers). After reporting their empathy levels, each regulator inferred the emotional intensity of the target based on the given negative events the target had experienced and then wrote down regulation strategies. Targets rated their own emotions before and after reading regulation strategies and evaluated the suitability of the strategies for them. The results showed that regulators with higher cognitive empathy were better at accurately perceiving targets' negative emotions, which, in turn, enhanced their regulation effectiveness. Similarly, regulators' behavioral empathy was positively related to regulation effectiveness through target-perceived strategy suitability. Additionally, close social distance enhanced the role of regulator's cognitive empathy in emotion perception accuracy and strengthened the impact of the regulator's behavioral empathy on regulation effectiveness. In contrast, closer social distance weakened the positive effect of regulator's behavioral empathy on target-perceived strategy suitability. These findings first highlight how and when different components of an adolescent regulator's trait empathy are linked to IER effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of adopting a dyadic design in the field of IER. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Schematized knowledge structures have been extensively studied in the cognitive domain, and yet the nature of affective schemas remains an uncharted area, with experimental work virtually nonexistent. Here, we examined how affective schemas are acquired, updated, and used for inference-making using three novel experimental paradigms. We show that affective schemas emerge by abstracting a common affective value from a distribution of unique affective associations. This common abstracted affective value semanticizes from the discrete exemplars into complex, valenced schemas (negative, positive, neutral), which consolidates across a 24-hr period. Valenced schemas (negative/positive) form faster than neutral schemas, resist affective reversals more strongly, and facilitate rapid learning and memory for related emotional information. Negative-valenced schemas, in particular, are most prioritized for learning, show greater resilience to change, and are more effective in supporting generalized (gist-based) inferences. This work defines key features of affective schemas, moving the study of emotional learning and memory systems from the conditioning of specific associations to the abstraction and consolidation of complex emotional knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).