Misery loves company: when sadness increases the desire for social connectedness

In three experiments, the authors investigated the effects of sadness on the desire for social connectedness. They hypothesized that sadness serves an adaptive function by motivating people to reach out to others and preferentially attend to information related to one's current level of social connectedness, but only when it is instigated by social loss. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors observed that sadness induced by an emotional depiction of social loss enhanced (a) attention to nonverbal cues, an important source of information concerning an individual's current level of social connectedness (Experiment 1), and (b) the desire to engage in social behaviors (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3 the authors found that sadness that results from imagined social loss uniquely produced this pattern of effects. Sadness that resulted from imagined failure had different effects on motivation and no effect on sensitivity to nonverbal cues. These results support and refine functional explanations for the universality of sadness.     

Decision mechanisms underlying mood-congruent emotional classification

There is great interest in understanding whether and how mood influences affective processing. Results in the literature have been mixed: some studies show mood-congruent processing but others do not. One limitation of previous work is that decision components for affective processing and responses biases are not dissociated. The present study explored the roles of affective processing and response biases using a drift-diffusion model (DDM) of simple choice. In two experiments, participants decided if words were emotionally positive or negative while listening to music that induced positive or negative mood. The behavioural results showed weak, inconsistent mood-congruency effects. In contrast, the DDM showed consistent effects that were selectively driven by an a-priori bias in response expectation, suggesting that music-induced mood influences expectations about the emotionality of upcoming stimuli, but not the emotionality of the stimuli themselves. Implications for future studies of emotional classification and mood are subsequently discussed.     

An experience sampling study of emotional reactions to music: listener, music, and situation

The Experience Sampling Method was used to explore emotions to music as they naturally occurred in everyday life, with a focus on the prevalence of different musical emotions and how such emotions are related to various factors in the listener, the music, and the situation. Thirty-two college students, 20 to 31 years old, carried a palmtop that emitted a sound signal seven times per day at random intervals for 2 weeks. When signaled, participants were required to complete a questionnaire on the palmtop. Results showed that music occurred in 37% of the episodes, and in 64% of the music episodes, the participants reported that the music affected how they felt. Comparisons showed that happiness-elation and nostalgia-longing were more frequent in episodes with musical emotions, whereas anger-irritation, boredom-indifference, and anxiety-fear were more frequent in episodes with nonmusical emotions. The prevalence of specific musical emotions correlated with personality measures and also varied depending on the situation (e.g., current activity, other people present), thus highlighting the need to use representative samples of situations to obtain valid estimates of prevalence.     

对恐怖情绪的调节：认知重评优于表达抑制 ——一样ERP研究

摘要 本研究采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术,通过测量由视觉诱发的脑电成分晚正波（LPP）来比较情绪调节策略在生理电特征上的差异,进一步探讨认知重评和表达抑制的优劣。实验结果表明：（1）从波幅的角度来比较：在400-600ms时间窗口内,认知重评条件下恐怖图片诱发的LPP波幅显著小于在自由观看条件下的波幅,而表达抑制和自由观看组所诱发的LPP波幅差异较小。（2）从时间进程的角度来比较：认知重评与自由观看组的差异发生在400ms并持续到600ms,甚至以后;而表达抑制和自由观看之间的差异发生在450ms但是只持续到550ms。这表明认知重评相较于表达抑制,对负性情绪起调节作用开始较早,并且持续时间较长。这为认知重评优于表达抑制策略提供了神经生理学上的证据。     

Misery has more company than people think: underestimating the prevalence of others' negative emotions

Four studies document underestimations of the prevalence of others' negative emotions and suggest causes and correlates of these erroneous perceptions. In Study 1a, participants reported that their negative emotions were more private or hidden than were their positive emotions; in Study 1b, participants underestimated the peer prevalence of common negative, but not positive, experiences described in Study 1a. In Study 2, people underestimated negative emotions and overestimated positive emotions even for well-known peers, and this effect was partially mediated by the degree to which those peers reported suppression of negative (vs. positive) emotions. Study 3 showed that lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences predicted greater loneliness and rumination and lower life satisfaction and that higher estimations for positive emotional experiences predicted lower life satisfaction. Taken together, these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are.     

The development of emotional responses to music in young children

Children aged 3 to 4 and 7 to 8 years listened to eight tunes which were either in the major or minor mode and either unaccompanied melody or harmonized. For each tune children selected one of two schematic faces chosen to depict happy or sad facial expressions. Children 7 to 8 years old showed a significant major-happy and minor-sad connotation, which was also shown by adults. However 3 to 4 year-olds did not show any such significant association between musical mode and emotional response. Harmonic accompaniment significantly increased the frequency of happy responses. The results support the idea of a learned association between mode and emotional response. We thank the teachers and children of Mauldeth Road County Primary School and Ladybarn Primary School, Manchester, for their cooperation, and we thank Debra Raye and Daniela Milone for help with testing.     

It's a bittersweet symphony: simultaneously mixed emotional responses to music with conflicting cues

Some evidence indicates that emotional reactions to music can be organized along a bipolar valence dimension ranging from pleasant states (e.g., happiness) to unpleasant states (e.g., sadness), but songs can contain some cues that elicit happiness (e.g., fast tempos) and others that elicit sadness (e.g., minor modes). Some models of emotion contend that valence is a basic building block of emotional experience, which implies that songs with conflicting cues cannot make people feel happy and sad at the same time. Other models contend that positivity and negativity are separable in experience, which implies that music with conflicting cues might elicit simultaneously mixed emotions of happiness and sadness. Hunter, Schellenberg, and Schimmack (2008) tested these possibilities by having subjects report their happiness and sadness after listening to music with conflicting cues (e.g., fast songs in minor modes) and consistent cues (e.g., fast songs in major modes). Results indicated that music with conflicting cues elicited mixed emotions, but it remains unclear whether subjects simultaneously felt happy and sad or merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. To examine these possibilities, we had subjects press one button whenever they felt happy and another button whenever they felt sad as they listened to songs with conflicting and consistent cues. Results revealed that subjects spent more time simultaneously pressing both buttons during songs with conflicting, as opposed to consistent, cues. These findings indicate that songs with conflicting cues can simultaneously elicit happiness and sadness and that positivity and negativity are separable in experience.     

Emotional eating and Pavlovian learning: evidence for conditioned appetitive responding to negative emotional states

Appetitive learning has been demonstrated several times using neutral cues or contexts as a predictor of food intake and it has been shown that humans easily learn cued desires for foods. It has, however, never been studied whether internal cues are also capable of appetitive conditioning. In this study, we tested whether humans can learn cued eating desires to negative moods as conditioned stimuli (CS), thereby offering a potential explanation of emotional eating (EE). Female participants were randomly presented with 10 different stimuli eliciting either negative or neutral emotional states, with one of these states paired with eating chocolate. Expectancy to eat, desire to eat, salivation, and unpleasantness of experiencing negative emotions were assessed. After conditioning, participants were brought into a negative emotional state and were asked to choose between money and chocolate. Data showed differential conditioned responding on the expectancy and desire measures, but not on salivation. Specific conditioned effects were obtained for participants with a higher BMI (body mass index) on the choice task, and for participants high on EE on the unpleasantness ratings. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for the idea that negative emotions can act as conditioned stimuli, and might suggest that classical conditioning is involved in EE.     

Personality and socialization correlates of vicarious emotional responding

The relations of personality and family characteristics to adults' negative vicarious emotional responses to sympathy and distress films were examined. Ss reported more sympathy and less personal distress and exhibited less skin conductance as well as heart rate deceleration when viewing a sympathy-evoking film. Dispositional emotional intensity and fantasy empathy were associated with greater self-reported emotional responding and higher skin conductance. Dispositional perspective taking and personal distress were positively and negatively correlated, respectively, with reported vicarious responding to the sympathy film when Ss were administered instructions to imagine the emotions of those in the films. Family cohesiveness was associated with reported sympathy and sadness in reaction to the sympathy film, whereas the expression of negative subordinate and positive emotional states in the home of origin was associated with women's reported responsivity.     

A multimodal investigation of emotional responding in alexithymia

The personality construct of alexithymia is thought to reflect a deficit in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotional states. To explore the relations between alexithymia and emotional responding, 50 older adults (28 men, 22 women) were studied across different contexts: (1) initial exposure to an emotion‐evoking movie; (2) second exposure to that stimulus; (3) reports of rumination and social sharing; and (4) describing their emotional response (verbal re‐evocation). Facets of the alexithymia construct were associated at the initial exposure with lower emotional responses at the cognitive‐experiential level, but with higher emotional responses at the physiological level as measured by heart rate. At the second exposure, the results were replicated for physiological responses. Certain facets of alexithymia were associated also with lower reports of rumination and social sharing involving emotional aspects, and with a lower proportion of emotional words related to the emotional stimulus during the verbal re‐evocation.     

Relaxing music counters heightened consolidation of emotional memory

Emotional events tend to be retained more strongly than other everyday occurrences, a phenomenon partially regulated by the neuromodulatory effects of arousal. Two experiments demonstrated the use of relaxing music as a means of reducing arousal levels, thereby challenging heightened long-term recall of an emotional story. In Experiment 1, participants (N=84) viewed a slideshow, during which they listened to either an emotional or neutral narration, and were exposed to relaxing or no music. Retention was tested 1 week later via a forced choice recognition test. Retention for both the emotional content (Phase 2 of the story) and material presented immediately after the emotional content (Phase 3) was enhanced, when compared with retention for the neutral story. Relaxing music prevented the enhancement for material presented after the emotional content (Phase 3). Experiment 2 (N=159) provided further support to the neuromodulatory effect of music by post-event presentation of both relaxing music and non-relaxing auditory stimuli (arousing music/background sound). Free recall of the story was assessed immediately afterwards and 1 week later. Relaxing music significantly reduced recall of the emotional story (Phase 2). The findings provide further insight into the capacity of relaxing music to attenuate the strength of emotional memory, offering support for the therapeutic use of music for such purposes.     

Time flies with music whatever its emotional valence

The present study used a temporal bisection task to investigate whether music affects time estimation differently from a matched auditory neutral stimulus, and whether the emotional valence of the musical stimuli (i.e., sad vs. happy music) modulates this effect. The results showed that, compared to sine wave control music, music presented in a major (happy) or a minor (sad) key shifted the bisection function toward the right, thus increasing the bisection point value (point of subjective equality). This indicates that the duration of a melody is judged shorter than that of a non-melodic control stimulus, thus confirming that “time flies” when we listen to music. Nevertheless, sensitivity to time was similar for all the auditory stimuli. Furthermore, the temporal bisection functions did not differ as a function of musical mode.     

Bulimics' perceptions of emotional responding during binge-purge episodes.

The concept of changes in emotional arousal during the binge-purge cycle plays a principal role in bulimia theory. Female bulimic patients (n = 29) retrospectively rated the intensity of several emotions during their binge-purge cycle. When collapsed into positive versus negative emotion categories, both categories showed significant changes in emotions over the course of the binge-purge episode. Negative emotion increased after a binge and decreased during the purge. Positive emotion decreased after binging and increased during and after purging.     

Retrieving positive memories to regulate negative mood: consequences for mood-congruent memory

Several researchers have suggested that mood-incongruency effects are due to a mood-regulatory process in which people retrieve positive memories to repair negative moods. The present studies tested this idea by manipulating mood-repair strategies and examining their impact on positive and negative memory retrieval. Mood-congruent retrieval occurred when participants stayed focused on events associated with their negative mood; mood-incongruent retrieval occurred when participants engaged in positive reappraisal (when they reinterpreted events as having positive outcomes). The effects of these strategies on memory retrieval also interacted with personality traits related to negative mood regulation. Individuals high in such traits showed stronger mood-incongruent memory than did individuals low in negative mood-regulation traits. Discussion focuses on integrating mood-regulatory variables and personality variables into existing mood-congruency theories (e.g., associative network models).     

Probabilistic models of expectation violation predict psychophysiological emotional responses to live concert music

We present the results of a study testing the often-theorized role of musical expectations in inducing listeners’ emotions in a live flute concert experiment with 50 participants. Using an audience response system developed for this purpose, we measured subjective experience and peripheral psychophysiological changes continuously. To confirm the existence of the link between expectation and emotion, we used a threefold approach. (1) On the basis of an information-theoretic cognitive model, melodic pitch expectations were predicted by analyzing the musical stimuli used (six pieces of solo flute music). (2) A continuous rating scale was used by half of the audience to measure their experience of unexpectedness toward the music heard. (3) Emotional reactions were measured using a multicomponent approach: subjective feeling (valence and arousal rated continuously by the other half of the audience members), expressive behavior (facial EMG), and peripheral arousal (the latter two being measured in all 50 participants). Results confirmed the predicted relationship between high-information-content musical events, the violation of musical expectations (in corresponding ratings), and emotional reactions (psychologically and physiologically). Musical structures leading to expectation reactions were manifested in emotional reactions at different emotion component levels (increases in subjective arousal and autonomic nervous system activations). These results emphasize the role of musical structure in emotion induction, leading to a further understanding of the frequently experienced emotional effects of music.     

Stopping anger and anxiety: Evidence that inhibitory ability predicts negative emotional responding

Research has begun to suggest that cognitive ability contributes to emotional processes and responses. The present study sought novel evidence for this hypothesis by examining the relationship between individual differences in the capacity for inhibitory control and responses to a common emotion-induction procedure involving autobiographical memories. Participants first completed a stop-signal task to measure inhibitory control and then underwent an anger, anxiety, or neutral emotion induction. Performance on the stop-signal task predicted emotional responses such that participants with poorer inhibitory control reported larger increases in anger following the anger induction and larger increases in anxiety across emotion induction conditions, relative to better inhibitors. These results suggest that individual differences in cognitive ability may influence the intensity of emotional states induced by common laboratory methods of emotion induction.     

Fear of snakes and facial reactions: A case of rapid emotional responding

The aim of the present study was to explore how rapid emotional responses are manifested as facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions when people with explicit fear of snakes are exposed to their fear relevant stimuli. Fifty-six subjects, high or low in fear of snakes, were exposed to pictures of snakes and flowers while facial EMG activity from the corrugator supercilii and the zygomatic major muscle regions was recorded. Measures of autonomic activity and ratings of the stimuli were also collected. Pictures of snakes evoked a rapid corrugator supercilii muscle reaction which was larger in the High fear group as early as 500ms after stimulus onset. The High fear group also rated snakes as more unpleasant and displayed larger skin conductance responses (SCRs) and increased heart rate (HR) when exposed to snakes. Pictures of flowers tended to evoke increased zygomatic major muscle activity which did not differ among the groups. The present results demonstrate that the facial EMG technique is sensitive enough to detect rapidly evoked negative emotional reactions. The results support the hypothesis that people high in fear of snakes are disposed to react very rapidly with a negative emotional response to their fear relevant stimuli.