Affective science最新文献

Recent work is establishing awe as an important positive emotion that offers physical and psychological benefits. However, early theorizing suggests that awe's experience is often tinged with fear. How then, do we reconcile emergent positive conceptualizations of awe with its more fearful elements? We suggest that positive conceptualizations of awe may partially reflect modern Western experiences of this emotion, which make up the majority of participant samples when studying awe. To test whether awe contains more fearful qualities outside of Western cultures, we compared participants' experiences of this emotion in China to those in the United States. In a two-week daily diary study (Study 1), Chinese participants reported greater fear than American participants during experiences of awe, but not a comparison positive emotion. In response to a standardized awe induction (Study 2), Chinese participants reported more fear, whereas American participants reported more positive emotions. Physiological changes in autonomic activity differed by culture only for heart rate, but not skin conductance or respiratory sinus arrhythmia. These findings reveal that awe may be experienced as a more fearful, mixed emotion in China than in the United States and suggest that current positive conceptualizations of awe may reflect a disproportionate reliance on modern Western samples.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-024-00243-3.

Despite the prevalence and importance of resting state thought for daily functioning and psychological well-being, it remains unclear how such thoughts differ between young and older adults. Age-related differences in the affective tone of resting state thoughts, including the affective language used to describe them, could be a novel manifestation of the positivity effect, with implications for well-being. To examine this possibility, a total of 77 young adults (M = 24.9 years, 18-35 years) and 74 cognitively normal older adults (M = 68.6 years, 58-83 years) spoke their thoughts freely during a think-aloud paradigm across two studies. The emotional properties of spoken words and participants' retrospective self-reported affective experiences were computed and examined for age differences and relationships with psychological well-being. Study 1, conducted before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that older adults exhibited more diversity of positive, but not negative, affectively tinged words compared to young adults and more positive self-reported thoughts. Despite being conducted virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, study 2 replicated many of study 1's findings, generalizing results across samples and study contexts. In an aggregated analysis of both samples, positive diversity predicted higher well-being beyond other metrics of affective tone, and the relationship between positive diversity and well-being was not moderated by age. Considering that older adults also exhibited higher well-being, these results hint at the possibility that cognitively healthy older adults' propensity to experience more diverse positive concepts during natural periods of restful thought may partly underlie age-related differences in well-being and reveal a novel expression of the positivity effect.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-024-00239-z.