Affective science最新文献

Optimism is typically conceptualized as a relatively static tendency regarding positive expectations about one’s future. However, recent studies suggest that optimism may meaningfully fluctuate within individuals over time. To date, little is known about the characteristics of such state optimism and potential cultural difference in state optimism. Accordingly, we developed a Japanese version of the State Optimism Measure (J-SOM) and examined its validity and the nature of intraindividual state optimism fluctuations; we also examined relationships between the J-SOM and other measures of mental health, including trait optimism. We conducted two online longitudinal surveys with different time intervals (weekly, n = 97; monthly, n = 99) targeting university students. Results were largely consistent between the two surveys. We confirmed high factor validity and internal consistency of the J-SOM. The J-SOM showed significant correlations in expected directions with other measures such as depressive mood and subjective happiness. In addition, intraindividual changes in the J-SOM were associated with changes in mood and quality of daily life. Importantly, these associations between intraindividual change in optimism and in other variables were minimal for trait optimism. We also found that state optimism, compared with trait optimism, tended to show larger intraindividual changes over 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 weeks. In summary, this study developed a translated version of the SOM and validated it, and then showed, for the first time, that state optimism can fluctuate within individuals in daily life over a span of several weeks.

The growing literature on interpersonal emotion regulation has largely focused on the strategies people use to regulate. As such, researchers have little understanding of how often people regulate in the first place, what emotion regulation goals they have when they regulate, and how much effort they invest in regulation. To better characterize features of the regulation process, we conducted two studies using daily diary (N = 171) and experience sampling methods (N = 239), exploring interpersonal emotion regulation in the context of everyday social interactions. We found people regulated others’ emotions nearly twice a day, regulated their own emotions through others around once a day, and regulated both their own and others’ emotions in the same interaction roughly every other day. Furthermore, not only did people regulate others’ emotions more often than regulating their own emotions through others, but they also put in more effort to do so. The goals of regulation were primarily to make themselves or others feel better, most often through increasing positive emotions, rather than decreasing negative emotions. Together, these findings provide a foundational picture of the interpersonal emotion regulation landscape, and lay the groundwork for future exploration into this emerging subfield of affective science.

Over the past few decades, emotion regulation research has matured into a vibrant and rapidly growing field (in 2022 alone, more than 30 thousand papers were published on emotion regulation). Taking stock of our progress, we ask “What does the future hold?” In this manuscript, we offer a roadmap for the next generation of research on emotion regulation. We begin by painting a picture of the field’s journey so far. We then outline a forward-looking agenda for broadening our field of view along three key dimensions: (1) increasing our resolution to see how regulatory strategies are flexibly and dynamically translated into tactics; (2) widening our viewing angle to embrace interpersonal emotion regulation; and (3) extending the timescale of emotion regulation research to examine how regulatory efforts are fine-tuned across the regulatory cycle and in the context of a broader range of affective experiences. In doing so, we highlight empirical studies that exemplify these three areas of focus and discuss the opportunities that lie before us. We close by offering a set of concrete practical and methodological recommendations for how the field can accomplish the goals we have outlined.

Habitual expressive suppression (i.e., a tendency to inhibit the outward display of one's emotions; hereafter suppression) is often conceptualized as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. Yet, is this equally true for suppression of positive and of negative emotions? Across three studies and seven samples (total N > 1300 people) collected in two culturally distinct regions (i.e., Taiwan and the US), we examined the separability and distinct well-being effects of suppressing positive vs. negative emotions. Results consistently showed that (a) people suppressed their positive (vs. negative) emotions less, (b) the construct of suppression of positive (vs. negative) emotions was conceptually farther away from that of suppression of emotions in general, (c) suppression of positive and of negative emotions were only moderately correlated, and (d) only suppression of positive, but not negative, emotions, predicted lower well-being. An internal meta-analysis (k = 52 effect sizes) showed that these associations were robust to the inclusion of age, gender, and region as covariates. Future research may further probe the respective links between suppression of positive and of negative emotions and well-being across more cultural regions and across the life-span.

Modern affective science—the empirical study of emotional responding and affective experience—has been active for a half-century. The Future of Affective Science special issue considers the history of this field and proposes new directions for the decades ahead. Contributors represent diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological expertise, and domains of study, and the special issue includes both literature reviews and new empirical studies as illustrations. This introductory article synthesizes the contributions, articulating the broader context of the current status of our field and highlighting common themes across articles as well as gaps notable even in this special issue. Sections of the article address theoretical and conceptual issues, research methodology, the questions we ask, and translation of basic affective science to applied domains. We conclude that much has been learned from the first 50 years of affective science, and it is now time for new theories, new research questions, and innovative methods for the decades ahead.

A fundamental premise of affective and clinical science is that fluctuations in mood drive meaningful changes in cognition and behavior. These theories are often tested via laboratory mood induction procedures followed by performing an established task. Despite advances in understanding the temporal dynamics of emotions, it is still unclear whether it is the enduring mood that impacts subsequent task performance. Additionally, this design requires task switching, which may limit the impact of mood and affect task performance. We suggest that virtual reality (VR) offers a more powerful, immersive alternative to traditional mood induction methods and effectively addresses these limitations because it can be used to create mood contexts that occur simultaneously with task performance. VR creates an immersive, real-world experience while benefiting from a well-controlled laboratory setting (Diniz Bernardo et al., 2021). We first summarize the literature on mood induction methodologies, including evidence that VR creates a more immersive environment, leading to mood inductions that are greater in magnitude than other methods. We then report a novel empirical study on the feasibility of utilizing VR to create a mood context that occurs simultaneously with a gold-standard emotion regulation task. Our results indicate that VR was a powerful and enduring positive mood induction tool, resulting in immediate changes in mood and greater trial-by-trial positivity ratings during the concurrent task. Portions of this study were pre-registered on August 3, 2020, on the Clinical Trials website (project citation: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04496258).

Affective science is a broad and burgeoning field, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) support research on a similarly broad range of topics. Across NIH, funding is available for basic, translational, and intervention research, including research in non-human animals, healthy populations, and those with or at risk for disease. Multiple NIH Institutes and Centers have specific programs devoted to topics within the affective science umbrella. Here, we introduce the funding priorities of these six: the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Aging (NIA), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). We then discuss overlapping themes and offer a perspective on promising research directions.

A wealth of literature suggests the existence of sex differences in how emotions are experienced, recognized, expressed, and regulated. However, to what extent these differences result from the put in place of stereotypes and social rules is still a matter of debate. Literature is an essential cultural institution, a transposition of the social life of people but also of their intimate affective experiences, which can serve to address questions of psychological relevance. Here, we created a large corpus of literary fiction enriched by authors’ metadata to measure the extent to which culture influences how men and women write about emotion. Our results show that even though before the twenty-first century and across 116 countries women more than men have written about affect, starting from 2000, this difference has diminished substantially. Also, in the past, women’s narratives were more positively laden and less arousing. While the difference in arousal is ubiquitous and still present nowadays, sex differences in valence vary as a function of culture and have dissolved in recent years. Altogether, these findings suggest that historic evolution is associated with men and women writing similarly about emotions and reveal a sizable impact of culture on the affective characteristics of the lexicon.

Valence is central to the experience of emotion. However, to the detriment of affective science, it is often ill-defined and poorly operationalized. Being more precise about what is meant by valence would make for more readily comparable emotion stimuli, methodologies, and results, and would promote consideration of the diversity, complexity, and function of discrete emotions. This brief review uses prior literature and an informal survey of affective scientists to illustrate disagreements in conceptualizing valence. Next, we describe issues of valence in affective science, particularly as they pertain to the emotion process, the functions of emotion, and precision in empirical research. We conclude by providing recommendations for the future of valence in affective science.

This study examined daily affective dynamic indices among individuals with a major depressive disorder (MDD) diagnosis in the past one year at the time of the interview, focusing on affective variability and change in affect in response to daily events (affective reactivity). Data were from the main survey and daily diary project of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. Participants (N = 1,970; n_MDD = 202; n_non-MDD = 1,768) completed structured clinical interviews on mental health and telephone interviews about their daily experiences spanning eight consecutive days. Multilevel models revealed that the MDD group experienced greater positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) variability than the non-MDD group. On days that at least one stressful event was reported, the MDD group experienced a greater decrease in PA and a greater increase in NA. On days that at least one positive event was reported, the MDD group experienced a greater increase in PA and a greater decrease in NA. Changes in affect to daily events, particularly the mood brightening effect, may be indicators of depression and potential targets for intervention. Limitations of the study include a community sample, reliance on self-reported measures of daily stressors and positive events, inclusion of remitted and current MDD participants, and the DSM-III-R based criteria for MDD diagnosis.