Affective science最新文献

Previous work suggests that some social media (SM) activities may have detrimental effects on users’ affective well-being, whereas other activities can be more adaptive. SM use is typically assessed with global or retrospective measures; it remains unclear how its relation with affect may play out in real-time and in regard to specific SM activities, as opposed to general SM use. The current study investigated the association between specific SM activities (posting, viewing others’ posts, liking/commenting, checking replies to one’s own posts, direct messaging) and concurrent positive and negative affect in a sample of n = 349 18-year-old emerging adults. Participants reported SM activities and affect up to five times per day for 14 days. Using parallel multilevel models, we found significant within-person associations between positive affect and certain SM activities: participants’ positive affect was lower at times when they reported liking/commenting or viewing, and was higher when they reported direct messaging or posting, than at times when they were not engaging in these SM activities. In between-persons, only viewing was related to positive affect; individuals who more frequently viewed others’ posts had lower positive affect on average. Negative affect did not relate to any SM activities within-persons or between-persons. In sum, these results suggest specificity—in which SM activities link with affective well-being, in the correlational direction of those links, and in links mostly with positive affect—and that effects unfold within-persons in daily life but may not be detectable in terms of individual differences.

During the #MeToo movement, the perceived morality of public figures changed in light of sexual assault allegations against them. Here, we asked how these changes were influenced by the perceived severity of alleged actions and by how well-known and well-liked were the public figures. Perceived morality was assessed by measuring (im)moral language usage in 1.4 million tweets about 50 male public figures accused of sexual assault. Using natural language processing to analyze the tweets, we found that liking of public figures mitigated perceived immorality for less severe allegations, but had little effect on perceived immorality for more severe allegations. The persistence of negative perceptions 1 year later was related to liking and familiarity for the public figure, not allegation severity. These results suggest that in real-world contexts, we can forgive less harmful actions for people we like, but may not be able to if their actions are more harmful; over time, however, liking for others predicts lasting negative impressions of their moral misdeeds.

Emotions change from one moment to the next. They have a duration from seconds to hours and then transition to other emotions. Here, we describe the early ontology of these key aspects of emotion dynamics. In five cross-sectional studies (N = 904) combining parent surveys and ecological momentary assessment, we characterize how caregivers’ perceptions of children’s emotion duration and transitions change over the first 5 years of life and how they relate to children’s language development. Across these ages, the duration of children’s emotions increased, and emotion transitions became increasingly organized by valence, such that children were more likely to transition between similarly valenced emotions. Children with more mature emotion profiles also had larger vocabularies and could produce more emotion labels. These findings advance our understanding of emotion and communication by highlighting their intertwined nature in development and by charting how dynamic features of emotion experiences change over the first years of life.

Since the advent of smartphones, peer interactions over digital platforms have become a primary mode of socializing among adolescents. Despite the rapid rise in digital social activity, it remains unclear how this dramatic shift has impacted adolescent social and emotional experiences. In an intensive, longitudinal design (N = 26, n = 206 monthly observations for up to 12 months, 12–17 years), we used digital phenotyping methods to objectively measure within-person fluctuations in smartphone use (screen time, pickups, notifications) across different categories (social media, communication, entertainment, games) and examined their prospective, bidirectional associations with positive and negative mood. Bayesian hierarchical models showed that when adolescents reported better mood than usual, they subsequently spent more time on communication apps and launched social media and communication apps upon pickup less often. Meanwhile, when adolescents used entertainment apps more than usual, they subsequently reported improved mood. These preliminary findings suggest a pattern where fluctuations in mood relate to subsequent changes in smartphone use that are primarily social, whereas the fluctuations in smartphone use relating to subsequent changes in mood were primarily entertainment-related. We found little evidence that within-person fluctuations in screen time or social media use were associated with increases in negative mood, as frequently theorized. These findings highlight the importance of disentangling the distinct components of smartphone use that relate to affective processes and examining their bidirectional, prospective relationships over time, due to the possibility of differential outcomes. This work is a necessary first step in identifying targets for intervention efforts promoting resilience and wellbeing during adolescence.

This project examines associations of gender and emotions in videos on YouTube Kids, a virtual environment for socialization during middle childhood. We selected YouTube Kids because of its popularity, newness, and absence in previous research on emotion socialization. The top 20 recommended videos were sampled and coded for gender and emotional content, by two independent teams of coders. This procedure was replicated for a total of 40 videos and 689 characters. By assessing gender and emotion content at both the video and character levels, we found feminine videos and characters depict more positive emotionality than their masculine counterparts. Furthermore, characters presented without any gender-typed information displayed significantly less emotionality than feminine, masculine, and androgynous characters. Emotionality is a gendered aspect of media representations. Nonetheless, evolving forms of media have potential as an avenue towards gender-fair socialization of emotions by proactively presenting and promoting equal representations of people and emotions.

Public discourse and empirical studies have predominantly focused on the negative repercussions of social media on adolescents’ mental health. However, pervasive social media use is a relatively new phenomenon—its apparent harms have been widely accepted before sufficient longitudinal and experimental research has been conducted. The present study used an intensive longitudinal design (four assessments/day × 14 days; N = 154 12- to 15-year-olds (M_age = 13.47, SD = 0.58); N = 6,240 valid measurement occasions) to test the directionality of social media–negative emotion links in early adolescence, accounting for the type of social media usage (i.e., browsing vs. posting). The significance of effects depended on social media type: browsing predicted higher-than-usual negative emotions hours later, whereas no significant directional effects emerged for posting. The browsing effect was small but held after controlling for prior levels of negative emotions. It did not replicate concurrently, underscoring the importance of process-oriented designs with mental health symptoms tested shortly after passive social media usage. The results partially support the active-passive hypothesis, which singles out passively engaging with others’ curated social media content as most detrimental to mental health. Nonetheless, the small browsing effect and overall null-leaning pattern of effects imply that mediators and moderators are needed to further understand when using social media is problematic, beneficial, or neither.

Effective and safe foraging requires animals to behave according to the expectations they have about the rewards, threats, and costs in their environment. Since these factors are thought to be reflected in the animals’ affective states, we can use foraging behavior as a window into those states. In this study, rats completed a foraging task in which they had repeatedly to decide whether to continue to harvest a food source despite increasing time costs, or to forgo food to switch to a different food source. Rats completed this task across two experiments using manipulations designed to induce both positive and negative, and shorter- and longer- term changes in affective state: removal and return of enrichment (Experiment 1), implementation and reversal of an unpredictable housing treatment (Experiment 1), and delivery of rewards (tickling or sucrose) and punishers (air-puff or back-handling) immediately prior to testing (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, rats completed fewer trials and were more prone to switching between troughs when housed in standard, compared to enriched, housing conditions. In Experiment 2, rats completed more trials following pre-test tickling compared to pre-test sucrose delivery. However, we also found that they were prone to disengaging from the task, suggesting they were really choosing between three options: ‘harvest’, ‘switch’, or ‘not work’. This limits the straightforward interpretation of the results. At present, foraging behavior within the context of this task cannot reliably be used as an indicator of an affective state in animals.

Adolescence is a period of profound biological and social-emotional development during which social anxiety symptoms commonly emerge. Over the past several decades, the social world of teens has been transformed by pervasive digital media use (e.g., social media, messaging apps), highlighting the urgent need to examine links between digital media use and mental health. Prior work suggests that a preference to use digital media to communicate emotions, rather than face-to-face contexts, is associated with emotion regulation vulnerabilities. Difficulties with emotion regulation are a hallmark of elevated anxiety, and the maturation of frontal-subcortical circuitry underlying emotion regulation may make adolescents especially vulnerable to the possible detrimental effects of digital media use. The current study leveraged an emerging neurophysiological correlate of emotion regulation, delta-beta coupling, which captures cortical-subcortical coherence during resting state. We test links among digital media use preferences, delta-beta coupling, and anxiety symptoms with a sample of 80 adolescents (47 females; 33 males) ages 12–15 years (M = 13.9, SD = 0.6) (80% White, 2% Black/African American, 16% more than one race, 2% Hispanic/Latine). Youth had their EEG recorded during 6 min of resting-state baseline from which delta-beta coupling was generated. Youth self-reported their social anxiety symptoms and preferences for digital media use vs face-to-face modalities. Greater digital media use preferences for both positive and negative social-emotional communication were associated with elevated social anxiety symptoms indirectly through high delta-beta coupling. This suggests that neural regulatory imbalance may be a pathway through which adolescents’ habitual preferences for digital media use over face-to-face communication relate to elevated social anxiety.

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.

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.