Emotion colors time perception unconsciously

Emotion modulates our time perception. So far, the relationship between emotion and time perception has been examined with visible emotional stimuli. The present study investigated whether invisible emotional stimuli affected time perception. Using continuous flash suppression, which is a kind of dynamic interocular masking, supra-threshold emotional pictures were masked or unmasked depending on whether the retinal position of continuous flashes on one eye was consistent with that of the pictures on the other eye. Observers were asked to reproduce the perceived duration of a frame stimulus that was concurrently presented with a masked or unmasked emotional picture. As a result, negative emotional stimuli elongated the perceived duration of the frame stimulus in comparison with positive and neutral emotional stimuli, regardless of the visibility of emotional pictures. These results suggest that negative emotion unconsciously accelerates an internal clock, altering time perception.     

来源记忆与情绪

来源记忆是有关事件背景的记忆,它与情绪存在一定的关联。首先,来源记忆受受试者情绪状态的影响;其次,情绪材料与中性材料的来源信息提取的行为特点及激活的大脑区域有所不同;最后,情绪背景与中性背景来源提取的任务难度不同,且前者比后者需要参与的大脑区域更多。     

情绪的神经心理学理论概述

本文主要论述了情绪神经心理学的有关理论。过去,人们认为情绪和认知分别由皮层下和皮层结构所控制,认知系统控制着情绪系统。现在,人们认为认知和情绪两个机能系统是相互联系的。情绪系统能快速、自动地加工有限数量的信息,认知系统则能有意识和有控制地分析信息。情绪是一个非同质的、多成分的、有等级组织的适应系统。大脑左、右半球在情绪表征和控制中具有不对称性,右半球主要控制自动的、自发的情绪,而左半球在概念水平上调节控制情绪。     

情绪与语言加工的相互作用

情绪与语言加工的相互关系逐渐受到了研究者的重视。一方面,情绪对语言加工有着重要的影响,表现为：（1）语言中蕴含的情绪信息对语言加工的影响,包括情绪词、情绪性语句、情绪性篇章的加工;（2）情绪背景对语言加工的影响,包括自身的情绪状态背景（如,抑郁、焦虑、快乐等心境）,以及情绪语调/语境、情绪图片、音乐等外在情绪线索诱发的情绪背景;（3）内化的情绪反应模式（如身体姿势、面部表情等）对语言加工的影响。另一方面,语言对情绪加工也有着重要的影响,表现为：（1）语义概念对情绪知觉的影响;（2）语言指导在情绪学习中的作用;（3）语言在情绪调节中的作用。未来的研究应该深入探讨情绪与语言加工的相互作用的内部机制,并将基础研究和教育及临床应用结合起来。     

Emotion as a tradeable quantity

Three studies investigate how physiological emotional responses can be combined with symbolic information to predict preferences. The first study used a weighted proportional difference rule to combine explicitly quantified symbolic and emotional information. The proportion of emotion model was more predictive than a simple additive emotional (AE) combination in decisions about selecting dating partners. Study 2 showed that a simple proportion algorithm of emotionally derived weights and a simple AE model predicted preference equally well for decisions between equal expected value (EV) gambles. Study 3 provided additional evidence for decision mechanisms that combine physiological measures within symbolic trade‐off algorithms for choices between diamond rings. Self‐reported emotion measures proved to be better predictors than physiological measures. The results are discussed in the context of other major models of emotional influence on preference and provide a foundation for future research on emotional decision‐making mechanisms. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotion und Psychotherapie

Considering the fact that all psychic disturbances are emotional disturbances as well, we develop based on our research on the modular structure of the emotional system a systematisation of the disturbance-specific concatenation of these modules within the patient’s social relationships. Subsequently, we discuss treatment possibilities and contraindications for each clinical empirically validated constellation. We describe a fundamental mechanism of affect induction keeping the disturbances alive and transporting them to the next generation. We conclude in stating that treatment recommendations focusing on a standard algorithm of handling the emotions system fail because there is no general indication for such enterprises.     

Emotion deficits in schizophrenia: timing matters

The past two decades of research on emotional response in schizophrenia has demonstrated that people with schizophrenia do not have a marked deficit in reported emotional experience in the presence of emotionally evocative stimuli. However, the extent to which people with schizophrenia maintain their emotional state to guide future behavior remains a largely unexplored area of investigation. In the present study, we tested hypotheses about whether people with schizophrenia maintained their emotional state in the absence of emotionally evocative stimuli. In addition to reported emotional experience, we measured startle response magnitude both during the viewing and after the offset of emotional pictures to assess whether people with schizophrenia (n = 31) and without schizophrenia (n = 28) differ in their patterns of immediate response to emotional pictures and in their patterns of maintenance of these responses. Our findings indicated that people with and without schizophrenia did not differ in their self-report or startle response magnitude during presentation of emotional pictures. However, healthy controls maintained these responses after the stimuli were removed from view, but people with schizophrenia did not.     

Emotion regulation and aggression

This review considers the impact of deliberate emotion regulation on aggression, by integrating findings from recent emotion regulation research with a contemporary model of aggressive behavior, the General Aggression Model. First, it considers how individuals who under-regulate anger and other emotions may be more likely to behave aggressively in an attempt to repair, terminate, or avoid uncomfortable emotional states. Second, it explores how over-regulation of emotion may lead to aggressive behavior by increasing negative affect, reducing inhibitions against aggression, compromising decision making processes, diminishing social networks, increasing physiological arousal and hindering the resolution of difficult situations. Finally, it reviews three skills thought to underlie deliberate emotion regulation: emotional awareness, emotional acceptance and proficiency in a variety of emotion regulation strategies. Treatment encompassing all of these skills may improve an individual's ability to regulate difficult emotion states more adaptively and thereby lessen aggressive behavior.     

儿童情绪理解发展的研究述评

近20年来,情绪理解越来越成为大家关注一个的研究领域。作者认为情绪理解可以分为对情绪状态的理解和对情绪过程的理解两部分。情绪状态的理解包括表情识别、情绪情景识别和混合情绪理解等,情绪过程的理解涉及情绪原因的理解、愿望与信念对情绪作用的理解、情绪表现规则知识和情绪调节的理解等。作者系统介绍了情绪理解的研究方法及相关研究成果,同时从研究方法和研究内容上提出目前研究的局限性,在方法上有必要对研究材料的文化适用性进行标准化,对问题和情景进行严格设计,降低对儿童语言能力的要求,还可以补充自然语言分析等方法;在内容上有必要深入探讨情绪理解过程及其作用的内部机制,开展情绪理解作用的实验研究,加强对情绪理解的个体内部影响因素的考察     

Continuity in Emotion Knowledge from Preschool to Middle-Childhood and Relation to Emotion Socialization

This longitudinal study examined the preschool correlates of middle school children's knowledge of emotional display rules. Participants included 50 children (29 girls) who were seen at preschoolage and again 4 years later. A total of 91% of the children were Caucasian, 4.5% were Mexican American, and 4.5% were Asian American. During the preschool period, measures included children's knowledge of facial expressions, knowledge of emotion-eliciting situations, and emotional role-taking ability. In addition, the rate at which their mothers explained the causes of emotions was assessed. Four years later, the children's knowledge of emotional display rules was assessed. The display rule measures included expression regulation knowledge (i.e., whether the children altered the facial expression relative to the internal feeling without providing a motive), self-protective display rules, and prosocial display rules. Results revealed that preschoolers' situation knowledge was a negative predictor of expression regulation knowledge and that emotional role-taking was inversely related to knowledge of self-protective display rules. The results also demonstrated that the rate at which mothers' explained emotions to their children as preschoolers was positively associated with expression regulation knowledge and knowledge of prosocial display rules.     

Emotion in psychotherapy

The therapeutic process involves many different types of affective phenomena. No single therapeutic perspective has been able to encompass within its own theoretical framework all the ways in which emotion plays a role in therapeutic change. A comprehensive, constructive theory of emotion helps transcend the differences in the therapeutic schools by viewing emotion as a complex synthesis of expressive motor, schematic, and conceptual information that provides organisms with information about their responses to situations that helps them orient adaptively in the environment. In addition to improved theory, increased precision in the assessment of affective functioning in therapy, as well as greater specification of different emotional change processes and means of facilitating these, will allow the role of emotion in change to be studied more effectively. A number of different change processes involving emotion are discussed, as well as principles of emotionally focused intervention that help access emotion and promote emotional restructuring.     

精神分裂症患者的情绪调节

日常生活中, 个体通常有不同的理想与目标, 当个体被特定的目标驱动, 试图去影响自身将要体验到的情绪类别、将要体验到的情绪感受发生的时间, 以及如何体验、表达此种情绪时, 情绪调节就发生了。精神分裂症是一种复杂的精神疾病, 该类疾病患者普遍存在情绪方面的缺陷, 通过操控各种内外因素, 可以帮助精神分裂症患者进行有效的情绪调节, 有利于帮助他们构建健全的情绪体验, 对促进其身心健康发展具有现实临床意义。     

Emotion Socialization in the Context of Family Risks: Links to Child Emotion Regulation

The current study expands upon the extant literature by examining the influence of contextual risk factors (e.g., parental psychological distress, household income, educational attainment) on parental responses to children’s emotional experiences. Participants included 97 ethnically and demographically diverse mother–child dyads with children ranging in age from 7 to 12. Mothers reported indicators of supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization practices, and measures of child emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation. Higher scores on the familial risk index were positively related to increased emotion dysregulation and negatively related to decreased emotion regulation through mediated effects of mothers’ unsupportive reactions to children’s negative emotional expressions. These findings suggest the importance of considering contextual influences on the emotion socialization process and offer potential avenues to foster adaptive emotional development in the context of high risk.     

Child and Adolescent Emotion Regulation: The Role of Parental Emotion Regulation and Expression

This paper reviews current literature relating to parent and child emotional functioning, specifically their emotion regulatory skills and emotional expression. Included are considerations regarding theoretical, methodological, and sampling strengths and weaknesses of existing literature. On the basis of the review, several directions for future research are proposed. First, it is argued that consistency in the measurement of emotion regulation is necessary, including assessment of more refined theoretical conceptualizations of regulatory types, skills, or strategies. Second, it is argued that emotion regulation developmental research examining the post-early childhood period is necessary in order to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of youths’ emotion regulation. Finally, it is argued that greater examination of paternal influences on child emotional functioning, in addition to maternal influences, is required. Consideration of these issues in future emotion regulation research will ideally contribute to a greater understanding of the mechanisms involved in child and adolescent development of optimal regulatory capacities.     

Emotion Reporting Using Electronic Diaries Reduces Anxiety Symptoms in Girls With Emotion Dysregulation

Theory and empirical research suggest that electronic diaries, which require children to report on their emotional experiences, might encourage emotional processing and facilitate a reduction in symptoms of anxiety, particularly for children exhibiting emotion-related deficits. Electronic diaries were given to 52 children (aged 7–12) to track their emotions and associated intensity for 7?days; anxiety was assessed prior to and after the use of the electronic diary by both parent- and child-report. It was hypothesized that the use of an electronic diary to track emotional experiences would lead to a reduction in anxiety symptoms for those children high in poor awareness, high in expressive reluctance, and low in emotion coping. The use of electronic diaries was effective at reducing child self-reported anxiety symptoms in girls who reported low emotion coping and reducing parent-reported anxiety for girls who reported a high reluctance to express emotions. Current findings suggest that having children identify their emotions using electronic diaries may be particularly beneficial for girls who are reluctant to express emotions and who report poor coping abilities.     

Emotion in Later Life

Recent research investigating emotion in old age suggests that autonomic responsiveness diminishes with age. The experiential aspects of emotion, however, show less marked age differences. Despite the health-related and social losses of old age, research findings on changes in the frequency and valence of affect in old age are inconsistent, and those studies that have reported changes have found only small ones. Studies of emotion regulation have found evidence of increasing self-regulatory skill with age. Theoretical accounts of emotional development in late life emphasize the integration of cognitive and affective processes, but differ in whether accommodative mechanisms are considered to be as effective as proactive mechanisms in reaching emotional goals.     

Emotion Regulation Mediates Effects of Alexithymia and Emotion Differentiation on Impulsive Aggressive Behavior

Alexithymia and low emotion differentiation restrict access to emotional information and increase propensity toward dysregulated and deviant behaviors, such as impulsive aggression. However, mechanisms underlying such effects are largely unknown. This study examined the mediating role of emotion regulation in the relationship between restricted access to emotional information and impulsive aggression. Alexithymic features and emotion differentiation explained 43% of the variance in impulsive aggression; these relationships were fully mediated by emotion-regulation difficulty. Contrary to previously held assumptions, alexithymic features and emotion differentiation were uncorrelated with one another, each limiting the translation of unique emotion information necessary for adaptive emotion and behavior regulation.     

Suicidal Behavior and Problems with Emotion Regulation

We examined in two independent samples whether: (1) difficulties with emotion regulation predict suicide ideation and (2) depressed adults with a history of attempting suicide report and exhibit more emotion dysregulation compared to healthy and depressed controls. Difficulties with emotional clarity and relationship status were significant predictors of suicide ideation (Study 1). In Study 2, when compared to controls, depressed attempters reported significantly more difficulties with emotional clarity and emotional impulsivity. Attempters had significantly more difficulty than controls returning to heart rate baseline following a stressful task. Problems with emotions are therefore differentially connected to suicidal behaviors.     

The Structure of Emotion

ABSTRACT— One common point of debate in the study of emotion is whether the basic, irreducible elements of emotional life are discrete emotion categories, such as anger , fear , sadness , and so on, or dimensions such as approach and avoidance . Resolving this debate will identify the basic building blocks of emotional life that are the most appropriate targets of scientific inquiry. In this paper, we briefly review meta-analytic work on the neuroimaging of emotion and examine its potential for identifying "natural kinds" of emotion in the brain. We outline criteria for identifying such natural kinds, summarize the evidence to date on category and dimensional approaches, and suggest ways in which neuroimaging studies could more directly address fundamental questions about the nature of emotion.