In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emo- tions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for (...) regulating felt affective states. We argue that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhich emotion regulation strategy one uses in a given context can have profound affective, cognitive, and social consequences. It is therefore important to understand the determinants of emotion regulation choice. Many prior studies have examined person-specific, internal determinants of emotion regulation choice. Recently, it has become clear that external variables that are properties of the stimulus can also influence emotion regulation choice. In the present research, we consider whether reappraisal (...) class='Hi'>affordances, defined as the opportunities for re-interpretation of a stimulus that are inherent in that stimulus, can shape individuals’ emotion regulation choices. We show that reappraisal affordances have stability across people and across time, and are confounded with emotional intensity for a standardised set of picture stimuli. Since emotional intensity has been shown to drive emotion regulation choice, we construct a context in which emotional intensity is separable from r... (shrink)

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only (...) cognition but also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well. (shrink)

Philosophers of embodied and situated cognition have provided convincing explanations of what objects do in affective processes (e.g., in emotion regulation). They have often used the concept of 'affective affordance' to account for the affective role of objects but it is not clear how this concept relates to other concepts of affordance, in particular those used in empirical works in cognitive science. We start to fill this gap by providing a new definition of (...) class='Hi'>affective affordances and we suggest a possible way to test this novel theoretical construct through a kinematic analysis of hand movements. (shrink)

Depression is a disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Consequently, examining individual differences in the habitual use of emotion-regulation strategies has considerable potential to inform models of this debilitating disorder. The aim of the current study was to identify cognitive processes that may be associated with the use of emotion-regulation strategies and to elucidate their relation to depression. Depression has been found to be associated with difficulties in cognitive control and, more specifically, with difficulties inhibiting (...) the processing of negative material. We used a negative affective priming task to assess the relations among inhibition and individual differences in the habitual use of rumination, reappraisal, and expressive suppression in clinically depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants. We found that depressed participants exhibited the predicted lack of inhibition when processing negative material. Moreover, within the group of depressed participants, reduced inhibition of negative material was associated with greater rumination. Across the entire sample, reduced inhibition of negative material was related to less use of reappraisal and more use of expressive suppression. Finally, within the formerly depressed group, less use of reappraisal, more use of rumination, and greater expressive suppression were related to higher levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that individual differences in the use of emotion-regulation strategies play an important role in depression, and that deficits in cognitive control are related to the use of maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies in this disorder. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions as well as differently-valenced emotions conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous (...) work, we found evidence for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contex... (shrink)

Self-regulation, especially the regulation of emotion, is an important component of athletic performance. In our study, we tested the effect of a self-distancing strategy on athletes’ performance in an aggression-inducing experimental task in the laboratory. To this end, we modified an established paradigm of interpersonal provocation [Taylor Aggression Paradigm ], which has the potential to complement field studies in order to increase our understanding of effective emotion regulation of athletes in critical situations in competitions. In (...) our experimental setting, we first tested the applicability of the self-distancing perspective and the athletes’ ability to dynamically adapt besides the self-distanced perspective a self-immersed perspective to provocation in the TAP. Secondly, we investigated how this altered perspective modulated regulatory abilities of negative affectivity, anger, and aggression. The experiment consisted of two conditions in which the participant adopted either a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Forty athletes from different team and individual sports with a mean age of 23.83 years competed individually in a reaction-time task against a opponent. Results show that athletes are equally able to adopt both perspectives. In addition, within-person analyses indicate that self-distancing decreased aggressive behavior and negative affect compared to the self-immersed perspective. Our results suggest that self-distancing modulates different levels of athletes’ experience and behavior. Furthermore, this demonstrates the feasibility of testing self-regulation of emotion in athletes in a laboratory setting and allows for further application in research in sports and exercise psychology. (shrink)

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over three weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being (...) and negatively associated with perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

The study of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder addresses variables related to three core symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. However, it has been suggested that in recent years emotional difficulties and subsequent social challenges have not received sufficient attention. This study had two objectives: 1) to compare the performance of participants (age range: 8-14 years) on facial emotion recognition tasks using the Affect Recognition subtest of the Children Neuropsychological Battery II; and 2) to assess the perceptions of family members in (...) relation to variables associated with emotional problems, difficulty in regulating emotions, and anger management using the Spanish Assessment System for Children and Adolescents. Assessments were conducted before and after applying an emotion regulation intervention designed for this study. Following the intervention, there was a significant decrease in scores associated with emotional regulation, and an improvement in the identification of affect on facial recognition tasks. The results suggest that despite Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder children and adolescents having social and emotional deficits secondary to the core symptom triad, emotional regulation in this group can be improved by the application of socio-emotional intervention programs. (shrink)

Crying is a common response to emotional distress that elicits support from the environment. People may regulate another’s crying in several ways, such as by providing socio-affective support (e.g. comforting) or cognitive support (e.g. reappraisal), or by trying to emotionally disengage the other by suppression or distraction. We examined whether people adapt their interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to the situational context, by manipulating the regulatory demand of the situation in which someone is crying. Participants watched a video (...) of a crying man and provided support by recording a video message. We hypothesised that when immediate down-regulation was required (i.e. high regulatory demand), participants would provide lower levels of socio-affective and cognitive support, and instead distract the crying person or encourage them to suppress their emotions, compared to when there is no such urgency (i.e. low regulatory demand). As predicted, both self-reported and behavioural responses indicated that high (as compared to low) regulatory demand led to a reduction in socio-affective support provision, and a strong increase in suppression and distraction. Cognitive support provision, however, was unaffected by regulatory demand. When the context required more immediate down-regulation, participants thus employed more regulation strategies aimed at disengaging from the emotional experience. This study provides a first step in showing that people take the context into account when attempting to regulate others’ emotions. (shrink)

The negative emotions generated following stressful life events can increase one’s risk of depressive symptoms and promote higher levels of perceived stress. The process model of emotion regulation can help distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to determine who may be at the greatest risk of worse psychological health across the lifespan. Heart rate variability may affect these relationships as it indexes aspects of self-regulation, including emotion and behavioral regulation, that (...) enable an individual to dynamically adapt to the changing demands of both internal and external environments. In this study, we expected individual differences in resting vagally mediated HRV to moderate the influence of emotion regulatory strategies among our sample of 267 adults. We found support for the hypothesis that higher vagally mediated HRV buffers against the typical adverse effects of expressive suppression when evaluating depressive symptoms and found weak support when considering perceived stress. There was no evidence for an interaction between cognitive reappraisal and vagally mediated HRV but there was a significant, negative association between cognitive reappraisal and depressive symptoms and perceived stress. Future work may determine if intervening on either emotion regulation strategies or HRV may change these within-persons over time. (shrink)

Day-to-day life is inundated with attempts to control emotions and a wealth of research has examined what strategies people use and how effective these strategies are. However, until more recently, research has often neglected more basic questions such as whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions (i.e. emotion regulation choice). In an effort to identify what we know and what we need to know, we systematically reviewed studies that examined potential determinants of whether and (...) how people choose to regulate their emotions. Eighteen determinants were identified across 219 studies and were categorised as being affective, cognitive, motivational, individual or social-cultural in nature. Where there were sufficient primary studies, meta-analysis was used to quantify the size of the associations between potential determinants and measures of whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions. Based on the findings, we propose that people’s decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions are determined by factors relating to the individual doing the regulating, the emotion that is being regulated, and both the immediate situation and the broader social context in which the regulation is taking place. (shrink)

Debates on situated affectivity have mainly focused on tools that exert some positive influence on affective experience. Far less attention has been paid to artifacts that interact with the expression of affect, or to those that exert some negative influence. To shed light on that shadowy corner of our affective social lives, I describe the workings of an atypical socio-affective artifact, namely, sunglasses. Drawing on insights from psychology and other social sciences, I construe sunglasses as (...) a social shield that helps us block spontaneous emotional expressions, as well as affecting other social processes that heavily depend on the eye region: gaze direction detection, identity recognition, and the sense of intimacy afforded by eye contact. (shrink)

Recent findings in affective and cognitive neuroscience underscore the fact that traumatic memories are embodied and inextricably integrated with the affective dimensions of associated emotional responses. These findings can be used to clarify, and in some cases challenge, traditional claims about the unrepresentability of traumatic experience that have been central to trauma literary studies. The cognitive and affective dimensions experience and memory are closely integrated. Recollection is always an attenuated form of embodied reenactment. Further, situation models for (...) narrative comprehension show us that these same neurobiological processes that underwrite narrative understanding. This, in turn suggests that literary texts can be used as a resource for representing, reenacting, and understanding traumatic experience and might serve as external regulatory resources for reenacting, shaping, and thereby coping with traumatic memory. (shrink)

Emotion regulation strategies may reduce the negative relationship between math anxiety and mathematics accuracy, but different strategies may differ in their effectiveness. We recorded electrodermal activity to examine the effect of physiological arousal on performance during different applied ER strategies. We explored how ER strategies might affect the decreases in accuracy attributed to physiological arousal in high math anxious individuals. Participants were instructed to use cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, or a “business as usual” strategy. During the ES (...) condition, HMA individuals showed decreases in math accuracy associated with increased EDA, compared to low math anxious individuals. For both HMA and LMA groups, CR reduced the association between physiological arousal and math accuracy, such that even elevated physiological arousal levels no longer had a negative association with math accuracy. These results show that CR provides a promising technique for ameliorating the negative relationship between math anxiety and math accuracy. (shrink)

Much of the recent work in psychology (and affective science) has shown that humans regulate their emotions nearly constantly, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. I argue that properly regulating one’s emotions displays emotional rationality, and failing to do so displays emotional irrationality. If an agent feels an emotion that is obviously problematic for the agent to feel and she is aware that it is problematic, then the agent ought to regulate her emotions in future similar (...) situations. To capture this aspect of emotional rationality, I introduce the concept of imprudence, which is meant to capture a familiar way that we assess each other’s emotions, despite the fact that it has yet to be a factor in the literature on emotions in philosophy, psychology, or affective science. (shrink)

Building relationships is crucial for satisfaction and success, especially when entering new social contexts. In the present paper, we investigate whether attempting to improve others’ feelings helps people to make connections in new networks. In Study 1, a social network study following new networks of people for a twelve-week period indicated that use of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies predicted growth in popularity, as indicated by other network members’ reports of spending time with the person, in work and (...) non-work interactions. In Study 2, linguistic analysis of the tweets from over 8000 Twitter users from formation of their accounts revealed that use of IER predicted greater popularity in terms of the number of followers gained. However, not all types of IER had positive effects. Behavioral IER strategies (which use behavior to reassure or comfort in order to regulate affect) were associated with greater popularity, while cognitive strategies (which change a person’s thoughts about his or her situation or feelings in order to regulate affect) were negatively associated with popularity. Our findings have implications for our understanding of how new relationships are formed, highlighting the important the role played by intentional emotion regulatory processes. (shrink)

In this book, Tom Cochrane develops a new control theory of the emotions and related affective states. Grounded in the basic principle of negative feedback control, his original account outlines a new fundamental kind of mental content called 'valent representation'. Upon this foundation, Cochrane constructs new models for emotions, pains and pleasures, moods, expressive behaviours, evaluative reasoning, personality traits and long-term character commitments. These various states are presented as increasingly sophisticated layers of regulative control, which together (...) underpin the architecture of the mind as a whole. Clearly structured and containing numerous diagrams and examples to illustrate the discussion, this study draws on the latest research from fields including philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and will appeal to readers interested in the philosophy and cognitive science of emotion. (shrink)

As an alternative to using the concepts of emotion, fear, anger, and the like as scientific tools, this article advocates an approach based on the concepts of core affect and psychological construction, expanding the domain of inquiry beyond “emotion”. Core affect is a neurophysiological state that underlies simply feeling good or bad, drowsy or energised. Psychological construction is not one process but an umbrella term for the various processes that produce: (a) a particular emotional episode's “components” (such as (...) facial movement, vocal tone, peripheral nervous system change, appraisal, attribution, behaviour, subjective experience, and emotion regulation); (b) associations among the components; and (c) the categorisation of the pattern of components as a specific emotion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theories of Emotion: Expressing, Feeling, Acting by Pia CAMPEGGIANISabrina B. LittleCAMPEGGIANI, Pia. Theories of Emotion: Expressing, Feeling, Acting. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. xiv + 199 pp. Cloth, $80.89; paper, $21.60In Theories of Emotion, Pia Campeggiani provides a philosophical introduction to the emotions. The book is multidisciplinary and empirically informed. It is organized around three “groundbreaking intuitions” of emotion theory—(1) expression, (2) subjectivity, (...) and (3) action. Each section corresponds to a different thinker—Charles Darwin, William James, and John Dewey, respectively—and each section concludes with a discussion of relevant debates. This book is outstanding. It is clearly written, well organized, and impressive in its scope. In what follows, I outline key ideas and raise questions generated by each section, then conclude with general reflections on the text.Campeggiani begins with the “scandal” of emotion research: There is no agreement about what an emotion is. In part, this lack of consensus is due to the imprecise ways we employ concepts like feelings, emotions, affect, and passions in ordinary discourse. In part, it is due to empirical difficulties. For example, Campeggiani describes how implicit assumptions and a forced-choice format compromised an experiment about expression universality.Additionally, Campeggiani points out that the category “emotions” has an internal structure that lacks clear-cut boundaries. There are paradigmatic examples of emotions, such as fear and anger, but there are also ambiguous phenomena, such as respect and modesty, which we may or may not recognize as such. Throughout the text, Campeggiani introduces and evaluates numerous accounts of emotions, drawing our attention to the strengths, limitations, and empirical adequacy of each.Part 1 begins with Charles Darwin’s contributions to emotion theory—an emphasis on the biological origins of emotions and a focus on expression. This section examines emotions in connection to adaptive fitness, exploring phenomena such as blushing when we are ashamed and the biological bases of emotions. A highlight of this section is an exploration of the social or communicative character of the emotions, which Darwin described as “only a secondary effect” of expression. Campeggiani examines emotional contagion and imitation, as well as the [End Page 141] phenomenon of feeling more pain when we express pain on our faces. There is also a rich discussion about constructionism as an alternative to basic emotions theory.Part 2 opens with William James on subjective experience. Campeggiani describes the limitations of James’s position—of understanding emotions to be reducible to feelings. For starters, this position is not empirically well supported. Campeggiani cites Walter Cannon’s observation that “many of the autonomic changes that are symptomatic of a given emotion can also occur in its absence.” Additionally, James fails to “properly flesh out the link between emotions and evaluations.” Campeggiani then describes the cognitive turn in emotion theory that emerged in response to the lack of attention paid to evaluation. Cognitive accounts of emotion deemphasize the bodily dimensions of emotional experiences in favor of the intentional properties, or “aboutness,” of emotions. Emotions see things as things.From my vantage, this was the best part of the book. Campeggiani highlights Damasio’s point that decision-making depends on having a “correct affective perception of the values at stake in a given situation.” For instance, feeling outsized or misdirected fear may undermine our decision-making. Campeggiani also introduces debates about whether emotions are appraisals, and whether emotions entail judgments or make judgments more likely. In the introduction, she mentions that “decision-making processes are always and inevitably underpinned by emotions, for good and for ill.” We see what she means in this section. Emotions participate in reason, impede reason, and have cognitive content themselves.That emotions involve or participate in our judgments raises two kinds of concerns—epistemic and normative. The epistemic worry is that inaccurate appraisals may undermine our understanding of the world. This is especially worrisome for the class of emotions Campeggiani calls “recalcitrant,” or closed off to other mental states, and for the emotions she says are “heavily influenced by our needs and goals.” Emotions are imperfectly truth-tracking, as was made clear earlier, in part 1, regarding their adaptive nature. The normative worry is that certain emotional... (shrink)

Despite a staggering body of research demonstrating sex differences in expressed emotion, very few theoretical models (evolutionary or non-evolutionary) offer a critical examination of the adaptive nature of such differences. From the perspective of a socio-relational framework, emotive behaviors evolved to promote the attraction and aversion of different types of relationships by advertising the two most parsimonious properties ofreciprocity potential, or perceived attractiveness as a prospective social partner. These are the individual's (a)perceived capacityor ability to provide expedient resources, (...) or to inflict immediate harm onto others, and their (b)perceived trustworthinessor probability of actually reciprocating altruism (Vigil 2007). Depending on the unique social demands and relational constraints that each sex evolved, individuals should be sensitive to advertise “capacity” and “trustworthiness” cues through selective displays of dominant versus submissive and masculine versus feminine emotive behaviors, respectively. In this article, I introduce the basic theoretical assumptions and hypotheses of the framework, and show how the models provide a solid scaffold with which to begin to interpret common sex differences in the emotional development literature. I conclude by describing how the framework can be used to predict condition-based and situation-based variation in affect and other forms of expressive behaviors. (shrink)

Victims of oppression are often called to let go of their anger in order to facilitate better discussion to bring about the end of their oppression. According to Amia Srinivasan, this constitutes an affective injustice. In this paper, we use research on emotion regulation to shed light on the nature of affective injustice. By drawing on the literature on emotion regulation, we illustrate specifically what kind of work is put upon people who are experiencing (...) affective injustice and why it is damaging. We begin by explaining affective injustice and how it can amount to a call for emotion regulation. Then we explain the various techniques that can be used to regulate emotions and explain how each might be harmful here. In the penultimate section of the paper, we explain how the upshot of this is that victims of affective injustice are left with a dilemma. Either they try to regulate their anger in a way that involves ignoring the fact of their oppression or they regulate it in a way that is likely to be harmful for them. Finally, we consider whether there are any good solutions to this dilemma, and how this issue opens up the possibility for further research into emotion regulation and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Research on the relationship between context and facial expressions generally assumes a unidirectional effect of context on expressions. However, according to the model of the meaning of emotion expressions in context the effect should be bidirectional. The present research tested the effect of emotion expression on the interpretation of scenes. A total of 380 participants either rated facial expressions with regard to the likely appraisal of the eliciting situation by the emoter, appraised the scenes alone or appraised scenes (...) shown together with the expressions they supposedly elicited. The findings strongly supported the MEEC. When a scene was combined with an expression signalling a situation that is undesirable, or high in locus of control or sudden, the participants appraised the scene correspondingly. Thus, the meaning of scenes is malleable and affected by the way that people are seen to react to them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent research suggests that impaired emotion regulation may play an important role in the development of youth psychopathology. However, little research has explored the effects of ER strategies on affect in early adolescents. In Study 1, we examined if early adolescents are able to use distraction and whether the effects of this strategy are similar to talking to one’s mother. In Study 2, we compared the effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination. In both studies, participants received (...) instructions on how to regulate their emotions after a standardised negative mood induction. In general, the results indicated that distraction, but also cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, had promising short-term effects on positive and negative affect in early adolescents. These findings suggest that targeting adaptive ER skills, such as distraction, acceptance, and cognitive reappraisal, may be an important strategy to prevent or treat psychological pro... (shrink)

This paper offers a Nietzschean theory of emotion as expressed by following thesis: paradigmatic emotional experiences exhibit a distinctive kind of affective intentionality, specified in terms of felt valenced attitudes towards the (apparent) evaluative properties of their objects. Emotional experiences, on this Nietzschean view, are therefore fundamentally feelings towards value. This interpretation explains how Nietzschean affects can have evaluative intentional content without being constituted by cognitive states, as these feelings towards value are neither reducible to, nor to (...) be thought along the lines of, judgements, perceptions, or other mental states. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople's relationship between positive and negative affect varies on a continuum from relatively independent to bipolar opposites, with stronger bipolar opposition being termed affective bipolarity. Experiencing more depressive symptoms is associated with increased bipolarity, but the processes underlying this relation are not yet understood. Here, we sought to replicate this link, and to examine the role of two potential mediating mechanisms: emotion regulation ability, and trait brooding. Drawing from the Dynamic Model of Affect, we hypothesised that a (...) poor ability to regulate negative emotion, and the tendency to brood over one's depressed feelings would predict stronger affective bipolarity, and mediate the relationship between depressive symptoms and affective bipolarity. To measure affective bipolarity, we calculated within-person affect correlations using two weeks of experience sampling data from a community sample. Mediation analyses indicated that baseline assessments o... (shrink)

The relationship between coping styles and subjective well-being has recently received considerable empirical and theoretical attention in the scientific literature. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship have primarily remained unclear. The present research aimed to determine whether emotion regulation mediated the relationship between coping styles and subjective well-being. Our hypothesis is based on the integration of theoretical models among 1,247 Chinese college students. The SWB questionnaire, Ways of Coping Questionnaire, and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire were used to (...) correlate SWB, emotion regulation strategies, and coping styles, respectively. The random forest method was applied to predict life satisfaction and estimate the average variable importance to life satisfaction. The results indicated that positive coping can indirectly influence life satisfaction via cognitive reappraisal and indirectly influence expression suppression via positive affect. Negative coping can indirectly influence negative affect via expression suppression. Besides, negative coping was positively associated with both expression suppression and negative affect. Cognitive reappraisal was found to be positively associated with positive affect. The findings indicated that coping style is essential for the SWB of college students. These findings provide insight into how coping styles impact SWB and have implications for developing and assessing emotion regulation-based interventions. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role of emotions in social interaction and their effects on social structuration and the emergence of micro-social order. It argues that facial expressions of emotion are key in generating robust patterns of social interaction. First, the article shows that actors' encoding of facial expressions combines hardwired physiological principles on the one hand and socially learned aspects on the other hand, leading to fine-grained and socially differentiated dialects of expression. Second, it is argued that decoding (...) facial expression is contingent upon this combination so that reciprocal attributions of emotional states, situational interpretations, and action tendencies are more effective within rather than across social units. Third, this conjunction affects the conditions for emotional contagion, which is argued to be more effective within social units exhibiting similar encoding and decoding characteristics, and thus aligns emotions and action tendencies in a coherent, yet socially differentiated way. (shrink)

It is often acknowledged that mindfulness facilitates emotion regulation on a long-term scale. Only few empirical studies support the hypothesis that even a brief mindfulness induction among subjects without previous experience of meditation allows an effective reduction of both positive and negative emotions. To the best of our knowledge, this hypothesis has never been tested when comparing mindfulness to other regulation strategies known to be effective. The current study investigates the effects of mindfulness, reappraisal and (...) class='Hi'>expressive suppression during the regulation of positive emotions. Forty-five participants without previous meditation experience watched four positive video clips while applying a specific regulation strategy: mindful attention, reappraisal, expressive suppression or no strategy. Video clips were matched for intensity and positive emotions index. Each of them was evaluated on two dimensions, valence and arousal. Moreover, participants’ facial expressions were recorded during the presentation of the video clips. Results showed that participants report less positive affect in reappraisal and mindful attention conditions compared to expression suppression and a control condition; and the facialexpression – activation of AU12 and AU6 – varies with the regulation strategy applied. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness in decreasing both the evaluative judgment of positive video clips and the related facial expression, among participants without previous mindfulness experience. (shrink)

Unpleasant emotions can be strongly “propulsive,” spurring us to make changes to our situation, perspective, values, and commitments. These changes are often positive, even crucial to our pursuit of the good life. But under what conditions are unpleasant emotions strongly propulsive? I argue that the source of affective propulsion should not be located in the mere unpleasantness of a given emotion, but, rather, in the emotional context in which the emotion arises. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s (...) comparative analysis of “shallow” and “deep” boredom, I claim that the propulsive quality of an emotion arises not from its intrinsic properties but from the ambivalence generated when two affective states simultaneously influence our sense-making activity in opposing ways. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of emotion propose that the interpretation of emotion-eliciting situations crucially shapes affective responses. Implicit or automatic biases in these interpretations may hinder emotion regulation and thereby increase risk for the onset and maintenance of psychological disorders. In this study, participants were randomly assigned to a positive or negative interpretation bias training using ambiguous social scenarios. After the completion of the training, a stress task was administered and changes in positive and negative affect and (...) self-esteem were assessed. The results demonstrate that the interpretation bias training was successful in that participants exhibited a tendency to interpret novel scenarios in accordance with their training condition. Importantly, the positive training condition also had a protective effect on self-esteem. Participants in this condition did not exhibit a decrease in self-esteem after the stress task, whereas participants in the negative condition did. These results demonstrate that implicit cognitive biases can be trained and that this training affects self-esteem. Implications of these findings for research on psychopathology and emotion regulation are discussed. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence era challenges the use and functions of emotion in college students and the students’ college life is often experienced as an emotional rollercoaster, negative and positive emotion can affect the emotional outcomes, but we know very little about how students can ride it most effectively to increase their creativity. We introduce frustration tolerance as a mediator and emotion regulation as a moderator to investigate the mechanism of creativity improvement under negative emotion. Drawing on (...) a sample of 283 students from professional music colleges or music major in normal universities, we find that negative emotion are generally associated with a lower creativity, while frustration tolerance can mediate the relationship between negative emotion and creativity, but these effects depend on the emotion regulation. Cognitive reappraisal exerts a negative effect on the relationship between negative emotion and creativity, while expressive suppression has the opposite effect. Our study contributes to the literatures on student’s emotions and creativity in music education and to the emotion regulation literature. (shrink)

Psychology suffers from the absence of mathematically-formalized primitives. As a result, conceptual and quantitative studies lack an ontological basis that would situate them in the company of natural sciences. The article addresses this problem by describing a minimal psychic structure, expressed in the algebra of quantum theory. The structure is demarcated into categories of emotion and color, renowned as elementary psychological phenomena. This is achieved by means of quantum-theoretic qubit state space, isomorphic to emotion and color experiences both (...) in meaning and math. In particular, colors are mapped to the qubit states through geometric affinity between the HSL-RGB color solids and the Bloch sphere, widely used in physics. The resulting correspondence aligns with the recent model of subjective experience, producing a unified spherical map of emotions and colors. This structure is identified as a semantic atom of natural thinking—a unit of affectively-colored personal meaning, involved in elementary acts of a binary decision. The model contributes to finding a unified ontology of both inert and living Nature, bridging previously disconnected fields of research. In particular, it enables theory-based coordination of emotion, decision, and cybernetic sciences, needed to achieve new levels of practical impact. (shrink)

Sound moves us. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our responses to genuine emotional vocalizations, be they heartfelt distress cries or raucous laughter. Here, we present perceptual ratings and a description of a freely available, large database of natural affective vocal sounds from human infants, adults and domestic animals, the Oxford Vocal (OxVoc) Sounds database. This database consists of 173 non-verbal sounds expressing a range of happy, sad, and neutral emotional states. Ratings are presented for the sounds on (...) a range of dimensions from a number of independent participant samples. Perceptions related to valence, including distress, vocalizer mood, and listener mood are presented in Study 1. Perceptions of the arousal of the sound, listener motivation to respond and valence (positive, negative) are presented in Study 2. Perceptions of the emotional content of the stimuli in both Study 1 and 2 were consistent with the predefined categories (e.g., laugh stimuli perceived as positive). While the adult vocalizations received more extreme valence ratings, rated motivation to respond to the sounds was highest for the infant sounds. The major advantages of this database are the inclusion of vocalizations from naturalistic situations, which represent genuine expressions of emotion, and the inclusion of vocalizations from animals and infants, providing comparison stimuli for use in cross-species and developmental studies. The associated website provides a detailed description of the physical properties of each sound stimulus along with cross-category descriptions. (shrink)

From an outsider's perspective, today's Popular China might appear as a self-confident and triumphant country. However, a large-scale examination of the country's recent moral controversies reveals a very different picture, one that has much to do with the widespread local public perception of an ongoing “moral crisis”, whose examination requires careful attention placed on the ethical and affective aspects of the everyday lives of today's Chinese people. In this article, I propose to examine the anguish that Chinese bachelor youths (...) and their concerned parents undergo and express, as they are confronted with the difficult process of finding a suitable mate for marriage. I examine the fears their celibacy generates, the mutual distrust that participants taking part in bachelors’ parents gatherings demonstrate, and the disputes these encounters engage. I analyze the moral world of today's urban China from the perspective of the very feelings and affects that pervade it. Highlighting the ways in which my interlocutors shared their emotions with me along the course of my fieldwork, carried out in the cities of Beijing and Chengdu, I will insist on the importance of these affects within an anthropological approach. The moral sensitivities contained in the maintenance of the economic and social situations of one's family reveal themselves as an exceptional resource for knowledge. By examining the political economy of sentiments within which parents and their children find themselves entrapped, I argue that we can gain a deeper understanding of the concrete consequences of today's societal transformations. (shrink)

Reappraisal is an adaptive emotion regulation strategy associated with favourable mental health outcomes. It is unclear whether the adaptive outcomes of habitual reappraisal are associated with better implementation of reappraisal when faced with negative affective situations. The current study aimed to examine whether habitual reappraisal predicts the implementation of instructed reappraisal and to evaluate the potential moderating effects of situational factors, namely – emotional intensity and reappraisal affordance. To address this question, 100 participants reported their habitual reappraisal (...) tendency and were asked to imagine themselves in different hypothetical interpersonal situations. Participants rated emotional intensity levels and reappraisal affordance for each situation, followed by instructions to implement reappraisal. Implementation success was measured by self-reported affect pre-and-post-implementation. Results indicated that habitual reappraisal was associated with greater reappraisal implementation success. While higher intensity scores predicted greater reappraisal implementation success, intensity did not moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Reappraisal affordance did not predict reappraisal implementation success, nor did it moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Our findings suggest that individual-centred factors play a significant role in reappraisal implementation success, while the effects of situation-centred factors demand further investigation. (shrink)

Putting feelings into words, or “affect labeling,” can attenuate our emotional experiences. However, unlike explicit emotion regulation techniques, affect labeling may not even feel like a regulatory process as it occurs. Nevertheless, research investigating affect labeling has found it produces a pattern of effects like those seen during explicit emotion regulation, suggesting affect labeling is a form of implicit emotion regulation. In this review, we will outline research on affect labeling, comparing it to reappraisal, (...) a form of explicit emotion regulation, along four major domains of effects—experiential, autonomic, neural, and behavioral—that establish it as a form of implicit emotion regulation. This review will then speculate on possible mechanisms driving affect labeling effects and other remaining unanswered questions. (shrink)

Smooth social interaction requires interindividual coordination. This Theory Section addresses the nature of the processes involved and the potential dangers of malfunctioning coordination. In her invited article, Butler provides a general overview of the processes involved, including interpersonal synchronisation, and advocates a dynamic systems framework for further research. In their commentary, Carré and Cornejo concur in principle but highlight the importance of the meaning attributed to the spontaneous expressive movements in naturally occurring interactions and the nature of the respective (...) social situations. Suhay, in her commentary from a political science perspective, highlights the need for synergy based on social coordination for successful democratic governing. In commenting on the problem of political polarisation because of malfunctioning social coordination, introduced by Butler, Suhay adds the important role played by social identity and emotion. Of particular importance are affective reactions based on “evaluative biases” in favour of information that bolsters one's views and rejection of information that challenges them. I conclude this editorial by referring to recent data on affective polarisation, pleading for more multidisciplinary research on the phenomenon, and arguing for a more substantial contribution from the cognitive and emotion sciences. In particular, I outline the “predictive coding” framework and the potential contributions from emotion science. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, (...) one that coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

A natural landscape can look serene, a shade of colour cheerful and a piece of music might sound heartrending. Why do we ascribe affective qualities to objects that can't entertain psychological states? The capacity that objects, and especially artworks, have to express affective states is a bizarre phenomenon that needs to be clarified in numerous respects. Philosophers are still struggling with the phenomenon of expressiveness being a matter of imagination, perception, or mnemonic association, and usually do not agree (...) on the role that emotions and human bodily expressions play in it. Benenti questions the main theories that populate the aesthetics domain using the tools of philosophy of mind. This study deals with crucial debates concerning seeing-in, cognitive penetration, the relation between phenomenal character and representational content and between emotions and expressions. It aims at providing a viable account of the experience we have of expressive properties by casting light on its fundamentally perceptual nature. The outcome is an empirically informed and critical overview of a topic which has been rather neglected in the philosophy of mind. The book will be of interest to scholars of the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, the cognitive sciences, and psychology. (shrink)

It seems that in interpreting others we sometimes simulate, sometimes apply theory. Josef Perner has suggested that a fruitful line of inquiry in folk psychology would seek "criteria for problems where we have to use simulation from those where we do without or where it is even impossible to use." In this paper I follow Perner with a suggestion that our understanding of our interpretive processes may benefit from considering their physiological bases. In particular, I claim that it may be (...) useful to consider the role emotion plays in the respective interpretive processes. I give reasons for believing that affective processes are more heavily involved in simulation (especially in situations of practical judgment and practical reasoning) than in theory-application. But affective processes have distinctive neurological and metabolic properties. These distinctive features of emotion may not only enrich our understanding of the simulation process, but also afford us a step towards responding to Perner's challenge. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is (...) drawing on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

Variability in the emotion regulation (ER) strategies one uses throughout daily life has been suggested to reflect adaptive ER ability and to act as a protective factor in mental health. Moreover, psychological inflexibility and persistent negative affect (or affective inertia) are key features of depression and other forms of mental illness and are often further exacerbated by rigid or overly passive regulatory behaviours. The current study investigated the hypothesis that ER variability might serve as a protective factor (...) against depressive symptoms and affective inertia. Using experience-sampling (N = 213), we tested whether two indictors of ER variability (between- and within-strategy SDs) were related to depressive symptoms and affective inertia. We found that people with higher between-strategy variability and within-strategy variability (specifically for reappraisal and distraction) reported fewer depressive symptoms. Both within- and between-strategy variability were negatively related to negative affective inertia. Between-strategy variability and negative affective inertia had unique effects on depression, when used as simultaneous predictors. Altogether, this study provides further evidence for the utility of ER as a factor buffering against depressive symptoms and particularly for the use of variable ER strategies. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: triggering processes, physiological reactions, action tendencies, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and higher cognitive processes. The theory (...) stresses the dynamics of affective processes and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. (shrink)