Frequency, determinants, and consequences of different drivers’ emotions: An on-the-road study using self-reports, (observed) behaviour, and physiology

In the present study, the frequency, determinants and consequences of three relevant emotions in traffic were investigated. Based on appraisal theory, it was predicted that the combination of three appraisal components (goal congruence, blame and threat) affects the occurrence of anger, anxiety and happiness. Participants (n = 44) filled in a questionnaire containing background and personality variables, and performed a test drive in an instrumented car. During the drive, speed and heart rate were registered and the traffic environment was recorded on video. Participants verbally reported scores for emotions and perceived risk. The most frequently occurring emotion was anxiety, followed by anger and happiness. Emotions while driving were related to emotional traits. Emotions while driving were also related to traffic events: anger and anxiety were both associated with goal incongruent events, and happiness with goal congruent events. Anger was mostly associated with other-blame and anxiety with situation-blame. Anger was mostly associated with events affecting impeded progress, and anxiety with events affecting safety. Anxiety, but not anger or happiness, was associated with increased perceived risk and with increased heart rate. Participants who reported anger drove faster and exceeded the speed limit more often on a 100 km/road section than participants who did not report anger. These and other results are discussed in terms of appraisal theory and state-trait differences in emotion.     

Basic emotions elicited by odors and pictures

The sense of olfaction is often reported to have a special relationship with emotional processing. Memories triggered by olfactory cues often have a very emotional load. On the other hand, basic negative or positive emotional states should be sufficient to cover the most significant functions of the olfactory system including ingestion, hazard avoidance, and social communication. Thus, we investigated whether different basic emotions can be evoked in healthy people through the sense of olfaction. We asked 119 participants which odor evokes one of the six basic emotions (happiness, disgust, anger, anxiety, sadness, and surprise); another 97 participants were asked about pictures evoking those emotions. The results showed that almost every participant could name an olfactory elicitor for happiness or disgust. Olfactory elicitors of anxiety were reported less frequently, but they were still reported by three-quarters of the participants. However, for sadness and anger only about half of the participants reported an olfactory elicitor, whereas significantly more named a visual cue. Olfactory emotion elicitors were mainly related to the classes of culture, plants, and food, and visual emotion elicitors were largely related to humans. This data supports the hypothesis that in the vast majority of people, few differentiated emotions can be elicited through the olfactory channel. These emotions are happiness, disgust, and anxiety.     

Emotion experience and expression across the adult life span: insights from a multimodal assessment study

This investigation represents a multimodal study of age-related differences in experienced and expressed affect and in emotion regulatory skills in a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults (N=96), testing formulations derived from differential emotions theory. The experimental session consisted of a 10-min anger induction and a 10-min sadness induction using a relived emotion task; participants were also randomly assigned to an inhibition or noninhibition condition. In addition to subjective ratings of emotional experience provided by participants, their facial behavior was coded using an objective facial affect coding system; a content analysis also was applied to the emotion narratives. Separate repeated measures analyses of variance applied to each emotion domain indicated age differences in the co-occurrence of negative emotions and co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions across domains, thus extending the finding of emotion heterogeneity or complexity in emotion experience to facial behavior and verbal narratives. The authors also found that the inhibition condition resulted in a different pattern of results in the older versus middle-aged and younger adults. The intensity and frequency of discrete emotions were similar across age groups, with a few exceptions. Overall, the findings were generally consistent with differential emotions theory.     

Willingness to express emotion depends upon perceiving partner care

Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxiety to each partner. Individuals who generally perceive high communal strength from their partners were also generally most willing to express emotion to partners. Independently, participants were more willing to express emotion to particular partners whom they perceived felt more communal strength toward them. In Study 2, members of romantic couples independently reported their own felt communal strength toward one another, perceptions of their partners’ felt communal strength toward them, and willingness to express emotions (happiness, sadness, anxiety, disgust, anger, hurt and guilt) to each other. The communal strength partners reported feeling toward the participants predicted the participants’ willingness to express emotion to those partners. This link was mediated by participants’ perceptions of the partner’s communal strength toward them which, itself, was a joint function of accurate perceptions of the communal strength partners had reported feeling toward them and projections of their own felt communal strength for their partners onto those partners.     

Parents' Expressiveness and Young Children's Emotion Decoding With Parents and Unknown Adults

The authors investigated young children's ability to decode the emotions of happiness and anger expressed by their parent and an adult stranger. Parents and adult strangers (encoders) were videotaped while describing events that had elicited happiness or anger. Children viewed brief clips edited from these videotapes and indicated the emotion that their parent or the stranger was expressing. With male encoders, only children's age predicted accuracy. With female encoders, mothers' expressive style and children's age interacted to predict children's decoding accuracy. Compared with older children of less positively expressive mothers, older children of more positively expressive mothers were more accurate overall, because they were better at recognizing happiness. In general, children were no more or less accurate in decoding their parent's emotions than they were in decoding an unknown adult's emotions.     

On the Role of Specific Emotions in Autonomous and Controlled Motivated Behaviour

In the present study, we study the effect of four specific emotions (i.e. happiness, relaxation, depression, and anxiety) on autonomous and controlled motivated behaviour. Drawing on the componential approach to emotions, we argue that because different emotions have a different action readiness—the readiness to engage with the environment—they also have a different impact on autonomous and controlled motivated behaviour. To test this hypothesis, we performed two studies. In the first one, 50 participants took part in an experience sampling study in which they reported their emotions (happiness, relaxation, depression, and anxiety) and autonomous and controlled motivated behaviour 10 times a day for 7 consecutive days. In the second study, 217 students participated in a lab experiment in which we studied the effect of induced anxiety, depression, happiness, and relaxation on autonomous motivated behaviour. The results showed how specific emotions predict autonomous motivated behaviour and that the relationship between the different emotions and autonomous motivated behaviour depends on the emotion under study. By doing so, we demonstrated the important role of emotions in the elicitation of autonomous motivated behaviour. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Emotion and false memory: How goal-irrelevance can be relevant for what people remember

Elaborating on misleading information concerning emotional events can lead people to form false memories. The present experiment compared participants’ susceptibility to false memories when they elaborated on information associated with positive versus negative emotion and pregoal versus postgoal emotion. Pregoal emotion reflects appraisals that goal attainment or failure is anticipated but has not yet occurred (e.g., hope and fear). Postgoal emotion reflects appraisals that goal attainment or failure has already occurred (e.g., happiness and devastation). Participants watched a slideshow depicting an interaction between a couple and were asked to empathise with the protagonist's feelings of hope (positive pregoal), happiness (positive postgoal), fear (negative pregoal), or devastation (negative postgoal); in control conditions, no emotion was mentioned. Participants were then asked to reflect on details of the interaction that had occurred (true) or had not occurred (false), and that were relevant or irrelevant to the protagonist's goal. Irrespective of emotional valence, participants in the pregoal conditions were more susceptible to false memories concerning goal-irrelevant details than were participants in the other conditions. These findings support the view that pregoal emotions narrow attention to information relevant to goal pursuit, increasing susceptibility to false memories for irrelevant information.     

情绪设计对多媒体学习的影响

通过两个实验探讨多媒体学习中情绪设计对学习者情绪、认知过程和学习结果的影响。实验1将内部情绪设计与外部情绪诱发两种方式结合起来,探讨多媒体学习环境中不同方式诱发的积极情绪对学习的影响。实验2进一步聚焦于内部情绪设计,考察颜色和拟人化这两个特定的情绪设计元素对学习者情绪和学习的影响。结果发现:(1)积极的外部情绪诱发和内部情绪设计可以诱发积极情绪,并促进学习迁移。(2)对学习材料进行内部积极情绪设计可以诱发学习者积极情绪,增强学习者的学习动机,降低学习者感知到的学习材料的难度,并促进学习迁移。其中,彩色设计可以诱发学习者积极情绪,但拟人化只有与彩色结合才能诱发学习者积极情绪;在拟人化条件下,彩色设计可以增强学习者学习动机;彩色设计可降低学习者对学习材料感知到的难度;彩色和拟人化都可以促进学习迁移。     

Patterns of emotional responses to affective situations: Relations among happiness,sadness, anger,fear, depression,and anxiety

Although emotion research and clinical practice often implicitly entail judgments about the patterns and situational appropriateness of a person's emotional reactions, we have little empirical knowledge of how emotions typically interrelate during various affective situations. To assess patterns of response to normative situations, a questionnaire was constructed and validated to include items primarily eliciting one of six emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, depression, and anxiety) and one of three intensities (low, moderate, and high). A total of 216 persons rated one of four forms of the questionnaire on each of the six emotional categories. Each of the six types of situations generated significantly different patterns of emotion. As Izard (1972) predicted, depression situations elicited more complex patterns of emotion than sadness situations, including significantly more anger, fear, and anxiety. In contrast, anxiety situations did not elicit more complex patterns than fear situations. Rather, the evidence was more consistent with the conclusion that fear is a particular type of anxiety. Various other relations among specific emotions are discussed, as well as some subtle sex differences and intensity effects. The data highlight the sensitivity with which the assessment of patterns of emotions associated with specific situations can produce new information about the nature of affective experience.     

BRIEF REPORT Functional and dysfunctional feelings in Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion: An empirical analysis

This study is to our knowledge the first to investigate how rational and irrational beliefs (RBs and IBs) generate qualitatively different feelings/emotions based on the same physiological arousal when the immediate environment is devoid of relevant cues. Participants in this study (N = 120) were evaluated for and primed with rational or irrational beliefs. Next, they exercised or sat still, and either immediately or after a delay, rated their emotional state. Consistent with the bifactorial theory of emotion and with Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion, participants in the exercise delayed‐rating condition, who lacked an obvious explanation for their residual arousal, interpreted their arousal in terms of primed beliefs. RBs were associated with positive emotions, while IBs were associated with dysfunctional negative emotions and their corresponding functional negative emotions (e.g., both depressed and sad). Participants in the exercise immediate‐rating condition and those in the no‐exercise condition were not influenced by their primed beliefs. Implications for Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion are discussed.     

Data versus Spock: lay theories about whether emotion helps or hinders

The android Data from Star Trek admired human emotion whereas Spock viewed emotion as irrational and maladaptive. The theory that emotions fulfil adaptive functions is widely accepted in academic psychology but little is known about laypeople’s theories. The present study assessed the extent to which laypeople share Data’s view of emotion as helpful or Spock’s view of emotion as a hindrance. We also assessed how help and hinder theory endorsement were related to reasoning, emotion regulation, and well-being. Undergraduates (N?=?630) completed a stressful timed reasoning task and questionnaires that assessed their theories of emotion, emotion regulation strategies, happiness, and social support. Overall, participants viewed emotion more as a help than a hindrance. The more they endorsed the view that emotion helps, the better their reasoning scores. Endorsing a help theory also predicted the use of reappraisal which, in turn, predicted greater happiness and social support. In contrast, endorsing the view that emotion hinders was associated with emotion suppression and less social support. Thus, people’s theories about the functionality of emotion may have important implications for their reasoning and emotional well-being.     

Awareness and regulation of emotions in deaf children

In this study, deaf children's understanding of their own emotions was compared with that of hearing peers. Twenty‐six deaf children (mean age 11 years) and 26 hearing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with various tasks that tap into their emotion awareness and regulation (coping) regarding the four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear). The findings suggest that deaf children have no difficulties in identifying their own basic emotions and the elicitors, or multiple emotions of opposite valence (happy and sad). Yet, they did show an impaired capacity to differentiate between their own emotions within the negative spectrum, which suggests a more generic evaluation of the situation. Deaf children's emotion regulation strategies showed a strong preference for approaching the situation at hand, but almost no deaf child reported the use of an avoidant tactic in order to diminish the negative impact of the situation. Overall, deaf children's emotion regulation strategies seemed less effective than those of their hearing peers. The implications for deaf children's emotional development are discussed.     

Effects of incidental positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal on affective responses to negative stimuli

Previous studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies (Studies 1, 2), reappraisal effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study (Study 3), we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality (VR), used a social stress anticipation task, and instructed participants to reappraise the anticipated stressor positively. Although there was a robust effect of the positive emotion induction (relative to the neutral induction) on feeling more positive emotions throughout stress anticipation, the results again indicated that incidental positive emotions did not facilitate cognitive reappraisal. We propose that incidental positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal may constitute separate pathways of influence when regulating one's responses to negative events.     

The contributory role of worry in emotion generation and dysregulation in generalized anxiety disorder

The role of worry in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has been posited to serve as an avoidance of emotional experience, and emotion regulation deficits in GAD have been found in several previous studies. It remains unclear whether those with GAD experience more dysregulated emotions during periods of euthymia and positive affect or whether these deficits occur only during periods of worry. Individuals with GAD (with and without co-occurring dysphoria) and non-anxious controls were randomly assigned to receive a worry, neutral, or relaxation induction. Following the induction, all participants viewed a film clip documented to elicit sadness. Intensity of emotions and emotion regulation were examined following the induction period and film clip. The results revealed that, regardless of co-occurring dysphoria, individuals with GAD in the worry condition experienced more intense depressed affect than GAD participants in the other conditions and controls participants. In contrast, presence of worry appeared to have less impact on indices of emotion dysregulation, which were greater in participants with GAD compared to controls, but largely insensitive to contextual effects of worry or of relaxation. Following film viewing, both GAD participants with and without dysphoria displayed poorer understanding, acceptance, and management of emotions than did controls. However, acceptance and management deficits were most pronounced in individuals with both GAD and co-occurring dysphoria. Implications for the role of emotions in conceptualization and treatment of GAD are discussed.     

Similar patterns of age-related differences in emotion recognition from speech and music

Young and old adults’ ability to recognize emotions from vocal expressions and music performances was compared. The stimuli consisted of (a) acted speech (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; each posed with both weak and strong emotion intensity), (b) synthesized speech (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness), and (c) short melodies played on the electric guitar (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness; each played with both weak and strong emotion intensity). The listeners’ recognition of discrete emotions and emotion intensity was assessed and the recognition rates were controlled for various response biases. Results showed emotion-specific age-related differences in recognition accuracy. Old adults consistently received significantly lower recognition rates for negative, but not for positive, emotions for both speech and music stimuli. Some age-related differences were also evident in the listeners’ ratings of emotion intensity. The results show the importance of considering individual emotions in studies on age-related differences in emotion recognition.     

Yes I can: Expected success promotes actual success in emotion regulation

People who expect to be successful in regulating their emotions tend to experience less frequent negative emotions and are less likely to suffer from depression. It is not clear, however, whether beliefs about the likelihood of success in emotion regulation can shape actual emotion regulation success. To test this possibility, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the likelihood of success in emotion regulation and assessed their subsequent ability to regulate their emotions during a negative emotion induction. We found that participants who were led to expect emotion regulation to be more successful were subsequently more successful in regulating their emotional responses, compared to participants in the control condition. Our findings demonstrate that expected success can contribute to actual success in emotion regulation.     

Who gets mad,sad, scared or happy at discipline? Emotion attributions explain child externalizing behaviour

Few studies have linked parental discipline with children's emotional experiences, and not much data explore children's emotional attributions to discipline linked to externalizing behaviour. With a sample from Brazil, this study examines which emotions children most aptly attribute to a protagonist facing spanking, time-out or inductive discipline for norm violations. We hypothesized that anger, sadness, and fear would have higher attribution rates at spanking or time-out, relative to inductive discipline and that happiness would have higher attribution rates at induction relative to the other discipline modalities. We expected these findings to be more pronounced in older children. Based on emotional functions, we also tested the role of neutrality and happiness attributions to discipline in children's externalizing behaviour. A two-way MANOVA, with discipline and child age as explanatory variables, showed that children attributed more anger at time-out or spanking than at induction, and more happiness and neutrality at induction than at either time-out or spanking. Older children attributed significantly more sadness and less fear or neutrality. Hierarchical regressions showed that child externalizing behaviour was negatively related to happy attributions in discipline independently of child emotion situation knowledge or demographics. The results are interpreted in light of a functional view of emotions.     

Perceptual learning and recognition confusion reveal the underlying relationships among the six basic emotions

The six basic emotions (disgust, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) have long been considered discrete categories that serve as the primary units of the emotion system. Yet recent evidence indicated underlying connections among them. Here we tested the underlying relationships among the six basic emotions using a perceptual learning procedure. This technique has the potential of causally changing participants’ emotion detection ability. We found that training on detecting a facial expression improved the performance not only on the trained expression but also on other expressions. Such a transfer effect was consistently demonstrated between disgust and anger detection as well as between fear and surprise detection in two experiments (Experiment 1A, n?=?70; Experiment 1B, n?=?42). Notably, training on any of the six emotions could improve happiness detection, while sadness detection could only be improved by training on sadness itself, suggesting the uniqueness of happiness and sadness. In an emotion recognition test using a large sample of Chinese participants (n?=?1748), the confusion between disgust and anger as well as between fear and surprise was further confirmed. Taken together, our study demonstrates that the “basic” emotions share some common psychological components, which might be the more basic units of the emotion system.     

特质焦虑个体在高难度Stroop任务下的情绪启动效应

通过问卷法,选取特质焦虑和非特质焦虑被试作为本实验的研究对象,考察了正性、负性、中性三种不同的情绪对不同特质焦虑个体认知抑制的影响。在Stroop任务之前呈现三种情绪图片,结果发现,相比非特质焦虑被试,特质焦虑被试的Stroop效应量更大;特质焦虑被试和非特质焦虑被试在正性和负性情绪条件下的Stroop效应量均更大。说明特质焦虑被试的认知抑制功能存在不足,正性和负性情绪对特质焦虑和非特质焦虑被试的认知抑制均存在阻碍作用。