Semantic and affective manifestations of ambi (valence)

ABSTRACT

People sometimes report both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when presented with affective stimuli. However, what is reported as “mixed emotions” might reflect semantic knowledge about the stimulus (Russell, J. A. (2017). Mixed emotions viewed from the psychological constructionist perspective. Emotion Review, 9(2), 111–117). The following research examines to what degree self-reported mixed emotions represent actual feelings compared to knowledge about the stimulus. In a series of three experiments, participants reported either their feelings or their knowledge in response to affective stimuli. In Experiment 1, we sampled the entire IAPS pictorial space and examined the proportion of mixed emotion ratings using feelings-focused and knowledge-focused self-reports. We found a higher degree of mixed emotions under knowledge-focused than feelings-focused self-reports. In Experiment 2, we used a priori selected pictures to elicit mixed emotions. The proportion of mixed emotions was again higher under knowledge-focused instructions. In Experiment 3, we used movie clips that were previously used to elicit mixed emotions. In contrast to Experiments 1 and 2, there was no difference between feelings-focused and knowledge-focused self-reports. The results suggest a strong semantic component and a weak experiential component of self-reports in the case of pictorial stimuli. However, ambivalent movie clips elicited a stronger experiential component, thus supporting the existence of mixed emotions at the level of feelings.     

Exploring emotions as social phenomena among Canadian varsity athletes

ObjectivesAthletes are constantly engaging with teammates, coaches, and opponents, and rather than treating emotions as manifested in the individual as is often the case, psychological analyses need to treat emotions as social and relational. The purpose of this research was to explore athletes' accounts of emotions as social phenomena in sport using qualitative inquiry methods.MethodFourteen Canadian varsity athletes (7 males, 7 females, age range: 18–26 years) from a variety of sports participated in two semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using inductive coding, categorization, micro-analysis, and abduction (Mayan, 2009; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).ResultsAthletes reported individual and shared stressors that led to individual, group-based, and collective emotions, and they also reported emotional conflict when they simultaneously experienced individual and group-based or collective emotions. Emotional expressions were perceived to impact team functioning and performance, communicated team values, served affiliative functions among teammates, and prompted communal coping to deal with stressors as a team. Factors which appeared to influence athletes' emotions included athlete identity, teammate relationships, leaders and coaches, and social norms for emotion expression.ConclusionsOur study extends previous research by examining emotions as social phenomena among athletes from a variety of sports, and by elaborating on the role of athletes' social identity with regard to their emotional experiences in sport.     

Toward an Integrative Perspective on Distinct Positive Emotions for Political Action: Analyzing,Comparing, Evaluating,and Synthesizing Three Theoretical Perspectives

Which emotions explain why people engage in political action (e.g., voting, protesting)? To answer this question, theory and research in psychology and political science predominantly focused on distinct negative emotions such as anger. The current article conceptually explores the motivational potential of distinct positive emotions by developing an integrative perspective that specifies which positive emotions can be differentiated (i.e., their form), which function these emotions have, and which implications these have for explaining political action. To this end, I analyze, compare, evaluate, and synthesize three approaches to positive emotions (affective intelligence theory, appraisal theories of emotion, and broaden-and-build theory). This perspective generates new hypotheses for the field to test, including the role played by distinct positive emotions such as joy, inspiration, interest, hope, and pride in motivating political action. I discuss how this perspective may help restore a balance in research on emotions and political action by focusing on the motivational potential of distinct positive emotions.     

On motivational influences,moving beyond valence,and integrating dimensional and discrete views of emotion

ABSTRACT

The field of cognition and emotion has grown considerably over the past 30 years, with an increased emphasis on the relationships between emotional and motivational components and how they contribute to basic perceptual, cognitive, and neural processes. For instance, research has revealed that emotion often influences these processes via emotion’s relationship with motivational dimensions, as when positive emotions low versus high in approach motivational intensity have different influences on attentional and other cognitive processes. Research has also revealed that motivational direction (approach vs. withdrawal) and affective valence (positive vs. negative) are not as closely related as once was theorised; that is, positive affect is not inevitably associated with approach motivation and negative affect is not inevitably associated with withdrawal motivation. These and other lines of research with anger have suggested that the field needs to move beyond a focus on affective valence and it needs to consider an integration of dimensional and discrete models of emotion. The article also includes some suggestions for improving methods of measuring and inducing emotions and some recommendations for future researchers.     

Emotion dysregulation and posttraumatic stress disorder: a test of the incremental role of difficulties regulating positive emotions

Background and Objectives: Literature provides support for the role of emotion dysregulation in the development and course of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among women victims of intimate partner violence (IPV). However, a dearth of studies have examined the contribution of emotion dysregulation stemming from positive emotions to PTSD. Extending research, the current study examined (1) the bivariate association of difficulties regulating positive emotions to PTSD symptom severity, and (2) the incremental role of difficulties regulating positive emotions in PTSD symptom severity beyond difficulties regulating negative emotions.

Design: Participants were 210 women victims of IPV involved in the criminal justice system because of their partners’ arrest (M age?=?36.14, 48.6% African American).

Methods: Participants completed empirically-supported self-report measures assessing difficulties regulating positive and negative emotions and PTSD symptom severity.

Results: Difficulties regulating positive and negative emotions (overall and across each of the specific dimensions) were significantly positively associated with PTSD symptom severity. Moreover, difficulties regulating positive emotions demonstrated an incremental relation to PTSD symptom severity beyond the variance accounted for by difficulties regulating negative emotions.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest the potential utility of targeting difficulties regulating positive emotions in interventions for PTSD among women victims of IPV.     

A qualitative analysis of the role of emotions in different patterns of long-term weight loss

Objective: To explore participant perspectives of the impact emotions have on weight loss.

Design: A qualitative design gathered data through semi-structured interviews with participants in a weight management programme. The interview addresses the following research questions: (1) how do individuals working to lose weight perceive the impact emotions have on their long-term success, and (2) what strategies do more or less successful participants use to regulate their emotions? Researchers conducted and transcribed the interviews then completed content analysis to create and organise themes.

Results: Two broad themes emerged through the interviews with 21 participants: emotional impact and emotional regulation. Further subthemes captured emotions blocking action toward goals, strategies for regulating emotions (e.g. exercise, food) and the need for new strategies to regulate emotions. Themes were also split in to three groups based on weight outcomes: regainer, moderate success (3–6% loss) and large success (>7% loss). More successful participants, compared to regainers, shared being aware of the impact of their emotions and made efforts to develop healthy regulation strategies.

Conclusions: Emotional awareness and regulation play an important role in participant’s weight management experience. Taking time to build emotional awareness and strategies to manage emotions is important to participants in weight management.     

The emotions least relevant to politics? Queering autonomous activism

Studies of emotion and activism have often attempted to uncover ‘the emotions most relevant to politics’ (Goodwin et al., 2001). This suggests that only certain feelings are productive for activism, while other emotions have less relevance for activist theory and practice. In this paper I ask if the notion of politically ‘relevant’ emotions helps perpetuate a distinction between what is considered political and what is not. This paper builds upon a case study in which I interviewed self-identified queer-activists about their experiences of autonomous activism. These interviews reveal how the everyday emotions surrounding the ‘personal’ politics of sexuality/intimacy are often seen as either less important, a distraction from, or entirely irrelevant to ‘real’ political issues. Ultimately, I want to challenge attempts to neatly separate our intimate lives from the public sphere of activism. I argue that it can never just be a matter of politics and emotion, but also the politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore we should not just assume that emotions matter for resistance - without first realizing the importance of resisting these hierarchies of emotion.     

The place of appraisal in emotion

Abstract

The concept of “appraisal” has been used in the literature in a dual way: to refer to the content of emotional experience, as well as to the cognitive antecedents of emotions. I argue that appraisal in the former sense is what is contained in information in self-reports and that this information is of limited use for making inferences on emotion antecedents. This is so because emotional experience may contain appraisals that are part of the emotional response rather than belonging to its causes. They often result from elaboration of the experience after it has begun to be generated. Although in most or all emotions some cognitive appraisal processes are essential antecedents, these processes may be much simpler than self-reports (and the semantics of emotion words) may suggest. The appraisal processes that account for emotion elicitation can be assumed to be of a quite elementary kind.     

Shared emotions

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of “straightforwardly shared” emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants’ shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about “straightforward sharing” is argued to be of secondary importance.     

Children's utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision‐making

This study investigated the relevance of emotion expectancies for children's moral decision‐making. The sample included 131 participants from three different grade levels (M = 8.39 years, SD = 2.45, range 4.58–12.42). Participants were presented a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and asked to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonists' shoes. Overall, it was found that the anticipation of moral emotions predicted an increased likelihood of moral choices in antisocial and prosocial contexts. In younger children, anticipated moral emotions predicted moral choice for prosocial actions, but not for antisocial actions. Older children showed evidence for the utilization of anticipated emotions in both prosocial and antisocial behaviours. Moreover, for older children, the decision to act prosocially was less likely in the presence of non‐moral emotions. Findings suggest that the impact of emotion expectancies on children's moral decision‐making increases with age. Contrary to happy victimizer research, the study does not support the notion that young children use moral emotion expectancies for moral decision‐making in the context of antisocial actions.     

Intensity of positive and negative emotions: Explaining the association between personality and depressive symptoms

The aim was to examine to what extent emotional intensity accounted for associations between the Big Five personality dimensions and depressive symptoms. Study 1 tested the model cross-sectionally, using survey data of 266 Dutch social science students. Study 2 experimentally examined how personality dimensions were related to emotional reactivity after exposure to various emotional stimuli. Dutch psychology students (N = 130) reported on their personality and viewed an amusing or sad film clip, after which the change in intensity of experienced positive and negative emotions was assessed. Individuals scoring higher on neuroticism generally experienced more intense negative emotions, through which they experienced a higher level of depressive symptoms. Individuals who were more agreeable experienced a lower level of depressive symptoms indirectly through higher general intensity of positive emotions. More agreeable individuals showed stronger increase in negative emotions and stronger decrease in positive emotions, though after exposure to the sad stimulus only. Although replication is needed, our results offer empirical support for a more taylor-made approach in decreasing nonclinical depressive symptoms taking into account both personality characteristics and emotion regulation.     

Emotion processing and regulation in women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery

Emotional eating, the tendency to eat when experiencing negative affect, is prevalent in morbid obesity and may indicate that ways to deal with emotions are disturbed. Our aim was to compare emotion processing and regulation between 102 women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery and 102 women from the general population (control group) and to examine in the group with morbid obesity the association of emotion processing and regulation with emotional eating. The group with morbid obesity reported higher scores on difficulty identifying feelings (alexithymia, p?=?0.002) and suppression of emotions (p?=?0.003) than the control group. In the women with morbid obesity, more negative affect and a higher difficulty identifying feelings were correlated with more emotional eating (r?=?0.36 and r?=?0.35, p?<?0.001). Our study suggests that negative emotions and unhealthy emotion processing may play a role in emotional eating, and it indicates the possible relevance of emotion processing and emotional regulation as initiating or perpetuating mechanisms in morbid obesity.     

What is an academic emotion? Insights from Filipino bilingual students’ emotion words associated with learning

We explored Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions by studying the words they use to describe their emotional experiences associated with learning. Two main theoretical frames were used as reference in the analysis: Clore, Ortony, & Foss’ (1978) taxonomy of emotion words, and Pekrun’s (2006) dimensions of academic emotions. We asked Filipino learners to describe the positive and negative emotions that they associate with their learning experiences using an open ended questionnaire. The 676 students used 1337 words which were classified into root word categories; 38 categories which were mentioned by at least 1% of the participants were included in the analysis. The interpretive analysis suggested that Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions includes appraisals of cognitive and even physical conditions, beyond the typical affective conditions assumed in theories of emotions and academic emotions. Moreover, Filipino learners’ concepts of academic emotions include a wider range of emotion concepts, and may require additional characteristic dimensions, compared to what is being studied in current academic emotions research.     

Revisiting the past and back to the future: Horizons of cognition and emotion research

ABSTRACT

To commemorate that Cognition & Emotion was established three decades ago, we asked some distinguished scholars to reflect on past research on the interface of cognition and emotion and prospects for the future. The resulting papers form the Special Issue on Horizons in Cognition and Emotion Research. The contributions to Horizons cover both the field in general and a diversity of specific topics, including affective neuroscience, appraisal theory, automatic evaluation, embodied emotion, emotional disorders, emotion-linked attentional bias, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, lifespan development, motivation, and social emotions. We hope that Horizons will spark constructive debates, while offering guidance for the future growth and development of research on the interface between cognition and emotion. Finally, we provide an update on how Cognition & Emotion has fared over the past year, and announce some changes in editorial policies and the editorial board.     

The past thirty years of emotion research: appraisal and beyond

ABSTRACT

For this Special Issue, I highlight the past and present importance of appraisal theory as well as the challenges to its status as a total theory of emotions from the other functions of emotions: associative learning, self-regulation and social communication. This theoretical view applies both to emotion research in general and the specific fields of my interest in the emotions of moral judgment and intergroup processes. Methodologically, developments in analyses of large and more naturally occurring data sets will give an opportunity to square psychology’s structural models of discrete emotions with the more complicated reality that exists. Both for the field and for individual researchers picking up the study of emotions, my advice is to pay special attention to measures, their assumptions and their context.     

Cognition and Emotion Lecture at the 2010 SPSP Emotion Preconference

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research.     

The role of emotion expectancies in adolescents' moral decision making

This study investigated the impact of emotion expectancies on adolescents’ moral decision making in hypothetical situations. The sample consisted of 160 participants from three different grade levels (mean age = 15.79 years, SD = 2.96). Participants were confronted with a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and needed to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonist’s shoes. Findings demonstrate that emotion expectancies differentially influenced adolescents’ hypothetical decision making in antisocial versus prosocial behavioral contexts. Whereas negatively charged self-evaluative emotions over failing to act morally (e.g., guilt) were the strongest predictor for moral choice in antisocial behavioral contexts, positively charged self-evaluative emotions over acting morally (e.g., pride) most strongly predicted moral choice in prosocial contexts. Older adolescents paid greater attention to outcome-oriented emotions that make the decision to act morally less attractive (e.g., regret). Overall, the study suggests that emotion expectancies influence moral decision making in unique and meaningful ways.     

Recalcitrant Fears of Death

According to what I will refer to as judgmentalist approaches to the fear of death (JFD), the fear of death conforms to the structure implied by judgmentalist theories of emotion. JFD holds that fears of death are constituted in part by evaluative judgments or beliefs about one’s own death. Although many philosophers endorse JFD (explicitly or implicitly), there is good reason to believe that it may be problematic. For, there is a troubling (and, for the purposes of this discussion, rather interesting) objection to judgmentalist theories of emotion; if judgmentalism is false, then so too is JFD. In brief, the worry with judgmentalist theories is this: it is sometimes the case that one has an emotion, but holds a belief (or beliefs) that is in tension with the emotion. For example, I sometimes fear flying despite the fact that I believe flying is not dangerous. Emotions of this sort are often referred to as recalcitrant emotions, and they are widely thought to pose a serious challenge to judgmentalist theories. In this paper, I consider an objection to JFD based on the existence of recalcitrant bouts of the fear of death. I include in this discussion an Epicurean-inspired solution to the problem of emotional recalcitrance. Although I argue this solution may be ultimately unsuccessful, I believe it is still worth considering. For, in most discussions of the problem of emotional recalcitrance, philosophers abandon judgmentalism in favour of some other theory of emotion. The Epicurean-inspired solution I discuss in this paper, however, may allow one to retain one’s commitment to judgmentalism.     

Moral emotions and the development of the moral self in childhood

Researchers have been emphasizing the importance of moral emotions for young children's moral self. However, the relationship between children's moral self and moral emotions has never been investigated empirically. The present study examined the relationship between children's self-representations about (im)moral behaviour and moral emotions attributions in a sample of 132 elementary-school children (M _age = 8.39 years, SD = 2.50). Participants were presented a newly developed moral self measure, along with a measure of moral emotion attributions. Two dimensions of children's moral self-concept were identified: preference for prosocial behaviour and avoidance of antisocial behaviour. Results revealed a slight decrease in preference for prosocial behaviour with age, as well as an increased correlation between preference for prosocial behaviour and moral emotion attributions. Overall, findings suggest that moral emotions do not play a pivotal role for young children's moral self-concept. Children's moral self-concept becomes increasingly coordinated with moral emotions as they approach adolescence.     

Are Envy,Anger, and Resentment Moral Emotions?

Abstract

The moral status of emotions has recently become the focus of various philosophical investigations. Certain emotions that have traditionally been considered as negative, such as envy, jealousy, pleasure-in-others'-misfortune, and pride, have been defended. Some traditionally “negative” emotions have even been declared to be moral emotions.

In this brief paper, I suggest two basic criteria according to which an emotion might be considered moral, and I then examine whether envy, anger, and resentment are moral emotions.