Emotion最新文献

Physiological synchrony-or similarity between two people's physiological responses-is thought to have important consequences for health and well-being and has been observed in social relationship contexts. The present study investigated variability in dyads' physiological synchrony as a function of both partners' behaviors during an emotionally salient discussion. We examined concurrent covariation in cardiac interbeat intervals in a sample of young adult romantic couples (N = 79 dyads) who discussed the coordination of a personal goal with the future of their relationship (data collected from 2013 to 2015). Partners assigned to be disclosers revealed hypothetical good news (e.g., a dream job offer) with their partner, the responder, who reacted to this disclosure. To understand covariation-behavior associations, we examined three motivationally relevant behaviors that may underlie synchrony based on people's role in the discussion. We found significant variability in how much couples experienced covariation, and covariation depended, at least in part, on people's behaviors during the discussions. When disclosers spoke more (a behavior associated with less satisfying relationships and less positive partner perceptions), dyads experienced less physiological covariation. Furthermore, when responders showed more neglect and withdrawal, and when both partners displayed less positive emotion, dyads experienced less physiological covariation. These findings underscore couples' physiological synchrony as a heterogeneous process that can emerge with the presence of greater behavioral and emotional positivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, feedback from facial muscles can initiate and modulate a person's emotional state. This assumption is debated, however, and existing research has arguably suffered from a lack of control over which facial muscles are activated, when, to what degree, and for how long. To overcome these limitations, we carried out a preregistered experiment including 58 participants. Facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) was applied to the bilateral zygomaticus major and depressor anguli oris muscles for 5 s at 100% and 50% of the participants' individual motor threshold. After each trial, participants reported their emotional valence and intensity and levels of experienced discomfort. Facial muscle activations were verified with automatic video coding; heart rate and electrodermal activity were recorded throughout. Results showed that muscle activation through fNMES, even when controlling for fNMES-induced discomfort, modulated participants' emotional state as expected, with more positive emotions reported after stronger stimulation of the zygomaticus major than the depressor anguli oris muscle. The addition of expression-congruent emotional images increased the effect. Moreover, fNMES intensity predicted intensity ratings, reduced HR, and skin conductance response. The finding that changes in felt emotion can be induced through brief and controlled activation of specific facial muscles is in line with the facial feedback hypothesis and offers exciting opportunities for translational intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Gratitude confers a sense of indebtedness to repay the benefactor, which poses a limitation on one's autonomy-an aversive experience in individualist cultures. Yet, gratitude is frequently valued and expressed in individualist cultures such as the United States. One solution to this dilemma is that gratitude has different aspects: It confers a sense of obligation but also strengthens social relations. Thus, gratitude might be associated more strongly with indebtedness in cultural contexts where autonomy is less valued, but it might be associated with a desire to be close to others in cultural contexts where autonomy is more valued. We tested how motivations for being indebted, for connecting to others, and for a hedonic emotional balance predict both gratitude to God and interpersonal gratitude in samples from the United States, India, Israel, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey (N = 2,093). Results revealed substantial cultural variation in how these correlates are associated with gratitude. We discuss how gratitude can inform cultural differences in how relationships are construed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research suggests variability of positive affect (PA), or the degree to which an individual's experience of PA is variable rather than stable, is associated with worse psychological health. However, it is unclear whether different aspects of PA variability serve different psychological functions. One possibility is that changes in PA in response to rewarding contexts, or PA reactivity, serve a healthy function, while general instability of PA from one moment to the next serves an unhealthy function. The current investigation separated out PA reactivity to pleasant activities from general PA instability. We tested associations in three experience-sampling studies collected between 2012 and 2020 (N = 323). An internal meta-analysis revealed a significant association between PA reactivity to pleasant activities and less well-being. Moderation by average levels of PA was present but inconsistent across studies. We discuss how PA reactions to rewarding contexts may not necessarily reflect healthy emotion regulation and consider that "mood brightening" effects in daily life may indicate ill-being rather than well-being. Caution is warranted when interpreting the primary findings, as the indirect effect of PA reactivity was significant in only one of the three individual studies, and the effect was only found for the outcome of well-being and not distress. Results can be most confidently generalized to White adults living in the Midwest region of the United States. Future research should test not only the intensity of PA reactivity to rewarding contexts but also how long a person can sustain elevated PA-in relation to psychological health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional clarity and emotion differentiation (ED) are two core aspects of the application of emotional knowledge. During adolescence, novel emotional experiences result in temporary decreases of differentiation and clarity. These temporary difficulties might profoundly impact choices of regulatory strategies. And indeed, prior research has shown that lower emotional clarity and emotion differentiation are each associated with higher use of putatively maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in youth. The two constructs, however, are rarely examined together, and it remains unclear how they are associated in daily life, particularly in children and adolescents. In addition, previous studies have focused on the regulation of negative but not positive affect. To address these gaps, the present study used an intensive longitudinal design in youth. Between June 2021 and March 2022, 172 children and adolescents (M = 12.99 years) completed a 28-day diary (> 3,500 entries in total) reporting daily affect, emotional clarity, and the use of five emotion regulation strategies in response to negative and positive affect (i.e., rumination, dampening, behavioral avoidance, negative and positive suppression). As predicted, on both between- and within-person levels, higher emotional clarity was associated with decreased use of all maladaptive emotion regulation strategies after adjusting for mean affect intensity. Results for emotion differentiation were mostly nonsignificant. Only higher daily positive emotion differentiation was associated with decreased rumination. In sum, this innovative study explores multiple aspects of emotional knowledge usage and regulation during a critical developmental stage and emphasizes the role of emotional clarity in the regulation of negative and positive affect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

With more than half the global population on social media, there is a critical need to understand how to engage it in a way that improves rather than worsens user well-being. Here, we show that positive empathy is a promising tool. Participants who received brief positive empathy instructions before 10 min of browsing their own Instagram feed showed greater affective well-being (Studies 1-4) and life satisfaction (Study 4) at posttest relative to participants who were instructed to browse as usual. The positive empathy intervention showed an average effect size on well-being of about a quarter of a standard deviation (mean Cohen's d = 0.25). We included unique active control groups in each study. We found using positive empathy on social media was about as beneficial to well-being as watching a nature video (Study 1, N = 298) and was better than instructions to focus on positive content (Study 2, N = 302), empathize with all emotions (Study 3, N = 301), or reappraise one's own emotions (Study 4, N = 426). We used structural equation modeling to demonstrate the effect of the intervention on subjective well-being is mediated by changes in positive emotion sharing, appreciative joy, and self-compassion. These experiences form a latent factor we term positive empathy. Our results show that a brief intervention successfully manipulates positive empathy on Instagram, which increases well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Given the pervasive role of smartphones in modern life, research into their impact on well-being has flourished. This study addresses existing methodological shortcomings using smartphone log data and experience sampling methods (ESM) to explore the bidirectional within-person relationship between smartphone usage and momentary well-being variables (i.e., affect valence, loneliness, positive affect, and negative affect). We further examine different categories of smartphone usage, namely, communication, social media, and other apps. We analyze three samples (N₁ = 225, N₂ = 17, N₃ = 13; with T₁ = 7,874, T₂ = 2,566, T₃ = 1,533 ESM reports) with multilevel models to test our preregistered hypotheses. Data for Sample I were collected in Spain in 2022 (82% female; M_age = 23.1). Samples II and III (80% female; M_age = 21.6) were collected in the Netherlands between 2021 and 2022. Our results suggest that smartphone usage within an hour before ESM assessment, especially using social media apps, is associated with reduced affect valence and increased loneliness on a within-person level. Loneliness was associated with more smartphone usage than usual, particularly the use of social media apps, within the hour following ESM assessments. However, overall, our findings indicate weak bidirectional associations between smartphone usage and indicators of momentary well-being (range standardized β = .00-.08). On the between-person level, those individuals generally high in loneliness were more affected in their momentary loneliness by prior social media use, suggesting a heightened social media sensitivity. The interplay between social media use and momentary loneliness should be studied in more detail, including contextual factors and experimental designs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined categorical processing biases in the perception and recognition of facial expressions of emotion across two studies. In both studies, participants first learned to discriminate between two ambiguous facial expressions of emotion selected from the middle of a continuous array of blended expressions (i.e., an array created from morphing images of two facial expressions together, with still images selected in equidistant increments). Participants were then asked to recognize the specific expressions they were trained to discriminate. In Study 1, target expressions labeled with emotion words (e.g., more angry face) during discrimination and recognition tasks were misremembered as more perceptually distinct from one another and therefore more perceptually similar to the stereotypical expression for their labeled emotion category than they were in reality. Critically, in Study 2, these recognition biases were significantly reduced or absent in conditions where the target expressions were not labeled with emotion words (e.g., Face A), demonstrating the role of emotion words in promoting categorical processing biases in emotion recognition. Moreover, in the absence of emotion labels, peoples' beliefs about the nature of emotion categories were related to the extent to which they employed categorical processing during emotion perception and recognition. Specifically, people with more essentialist beliefs about emotion categories-believing emotion categories are more innate, biologically-based, and immutable-exhibited more pronounced categorical processing biases during emotion recognition. Findings shed light on the critical role of language and cognition in constructing emotion and add to empirical findings on categorical processing in emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The assumption that people differ in affective awareness (i.e., the extent to which a person's subjective affective experience matches their affective bodily state) is central to emotional competence. To test this assumption empirically, we used a physiology-based approach to investigate individual differences in affective awareness. Participants (N = 255) viewed 76 pictures with affective content and rated their experienced affect. Facial muscle activity during picture presentation was assessed via electromyography (EMG) as a direct physiological measure of affective reactions. We used a multilevel model to quantify affective awareness as the strength of the intraindividual relationship between a person's EMG reactions and affect ratings. This relationship was positive on average and differed significantly between participants. These individual differences in affective awareness were reliable and stable over time. Affective awareness was higher for women than for men and went along with generally strong affective EMG reactivity and better socioemotional abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Stress must not be avoided unilaterally because adaptive mindsets toward stress and stress-induced emotions are associated with better mental health outcomes. However, few studies have explored the reciprocal relationships between adaptive mindsets and mental health. This study assessed the role of trait-level stress-is-enhancing mindsets in the dynamic interplay between emotional growth mindsets and mental health in real-life contexts. Using ecological momentary assessment, 196 participants recorded daily stressful events, emotional growth mindsets following these events, depression and life satisfaction four times daily over 10-12 days, after completing baseline measures of stress-is-enhancing mindsets. Dynamic structural equation modeling was used to examine the cross-lagged associations between daily emotional growth mindsets and mental health indicators and to investigate the moderating role of stress-is-enhancing mindsets in these relationships. The findings suggest that increased emotional growth mindsets predict decreased depressive symptoms and elevated life satisfaction on the next occasion. Moreover, heightened levels of life satisfaction predict subsequent increases in the emotional growth mindsets. In tandem with the principal findings, this study underscores that the inverse link between preceding depressive symptoms and subsequent emotional growth mindsets, as well as the positive association between life satisfaction and subsequent emotional growth mindsets, is amplified for individuals endorsing higher stress-is-enhancing mindsets. These findings have noteworthy clinical implications since interventions geared toward fostering adaptive mindsets have the potential to simultaneously mitigate vulnerability to depression and amplify life satisfaction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).