Negative life events, cognitive emotion regulation and emotional problems

A new questionnaire, named the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, has been constructed, measuring nine cognitive coping strategies people tend to use after having experienced negative life events. A test–retest design was used to study the psychometric properties and relationships with measures of depression and anxiety among 547 high school youngsters. Principal component analyses supported the allocation of items to subscales, while alphas of most subscales exceeded 0.80. Cognitive coping strategies were found to play an important role in the relationship between the experience of negative life events and the reporting of symptoms of depression and anxiety. The results suggest that cognitive coping strategies may be a valuable context of prevention and intervention     

Cognitive and physiological markers of emotional awareness in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

The ability to understand emotion in others is one of the most important factors involved in regulating social interactions in primates. Such emotional awareness functions to coordinate activity among group members, enable the formation of long-lasting individual relationships, and facilitate the pursuit of shared interests. Despite these important evolutionary implications, comparative studies of emotional processing in humans and great apes are practically nonexistent, constituting a major gap in our understanding of the extent to which emotional awareness has played an important role in shaping human behavior and societies. This paper presents the results of two experiments that examine chimpanzees' responses to emotional stimuli. First, changes in peripheral skin temperature were measured while subjects viewed three categories of emotionally negative video scenes; conspecifics being injected with needles (INJ), darts and needles alone (DART), and conspecific directing agonism towards the veterinarians (CHASE). Second, chimpanzees were required to use facial expressions to categorize emotional video scenes, i.e., favorite food and objects and veterinarian procedures, according to their positive and negative valence. With no prior training, subjects spontaneously matched the emotional videos to conspecific facial expressions according to their shared emotional meaning, indicating that chimpanzee facial expressions are processed emotionally, as are human expressions. Decreases in peripheral skin temperature, indicative of negative sympathetic arousal, were significantly lower when subjects viewed the INJ and DART videos, compared to the CHASE videos, indicating greater negative arousal when viewing conspecifics being injected with needles, and needles themselves, than when viewing conspecifics engaged in general agonism. Accepted after revision: 8 April 2001 ❚ Electronic Publication     

Emotional reactivity following surgery to the prefrontal cortex

We aimed to elicit emotion in patients with surgically circumscribed lesions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in order to elucidate the precise functional roles in emotion processing of the discrete subregions comprising the ventromedial PFC, including the medial PFC and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Three components of emotional reactivity were measured: subjective experience, behaviour, and physiological response. These included measures of self‐reported emotion, observer‐rated facial expression of emotion and measurements of heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) during film viewing, and a measure of subjective emotional change since surgery. Patients with lesions to the ventromedial PFC demonstrated significant differences compared with controls in HRV during the film clips, suggesting a shift to greater dominance of sympathetic input. In contrast, patients with lesions restricted to the OFC showed significant differences in HRV suggesting reduced sympathetic input. They also showed less facial expression of emotion during positive film clips, and reported more subjective emotional change since surgery compared with controls. This human lesion study is important for refining theoretical models of emotion processing by the ventromedial PFC, which until now have primarily been based on anatomical connectivity, animal lesion, and human functional neuroimaging research. Such theories have implications for the treatment of a wide variety of emotional disorders.     

The face of the state on the U.S.-Mexico border

In recent years, feminist geopolitics and the turns toward emotional and affective geography have resulted in new perspectives on theories of power, embodiment and subjectivity. Other recent trends have considered non-human objects as important for state theory, insofar as state practice often relies upon the force of objects in everyday life. This article works to bring together object-oriented and emotional geographies for a new perspective on the state. It does so by drawing on another theoretical tradition that has been less familiar for political geography: psychoanalytic theory. Findings from ethnographic research with residents living near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona help illuminate the presence and spectral circulation of what we call the “face of the state” as a psycho-emotional entity in everyday life for these residents. Surveillance objects enter the psyche through the face of the state, insofar as they are imagined and felt as a visual and embodied experience. The force of the object, then, extends beyond its own materiality and into the psycho-social dimensions of life through which state power operates, thereby empowering the border to gaze at the subject population in powerful new ways.     

Managing emotion online

I apply emotion work to a case study of reader responses on the blog, Young House Love, owned by Sherry and John Petersik. The author performed a qualitative analysis of 1070 comments, examining readers' collective emotion work. After learning of the bloggers' hiatus, YHL readers responded using interpersonal and personal emotion management techniques. Comments exhibit deep acting and surface acting strategies directed primarily at the bloggers and their perceived emotional state. Positive sentiment emerged among comments as readers shared personal stories of connection, influence, expressions of support, and accounts. Furthermore, readers' comments reveal feeling rules guiding the YHL bloggers and readers. Thus, discursive efforts to influence the bloggers' emotions are conceptually linked to readers' attempts to rescue and repair the bloggers' public persona on YHL. This analysis confirms the relevance of Goffman's (1959) and Hochschild's (1979) work online and explores blogs as a tool for managing emotion. I also discuss the importance of the comments section in the co-creation of a blog.     

Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes—the human speech sounds that constitute words—have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature—namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts.     

Activation of emotion information in text among younger and older adults

The ability to represent emotions is an important capacity for the understanding of discourse. In the current literature, it is unclear whether older adults represent emotion information in the course of language processing, in particular as it relates to developing an adequate mental model of characters in narratives. We addressed this issue in two studies, one assessing emotion activation at the word level and the other at the mental model level. In the first experiment, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which words were drawn from both logic- and emotion-based categories. For both category types, priming was evident for young and old. In the second experiment, subjects read passages with emotion information that was consistent or inconsistent with the implied emotional tone. Both age groups showed an increase in reading time in response to inconsistent emotion information, indicating that the protagonist's emotional state was represented while reading. Results of these studies generally suggest age preservation in the activation of emotion information in language processing.     

Action and emotion in everyday life

This study of naturally occurring behaviour employed a "beeper technique" to investigate the actions carried out by 152 subjects in eight different groups, viz. adult students, employed students who were also parents, unemployed, art students, doctoral students, alcoholics, retired people and a control group. Actions were sampled for seven subsequent days, five times per day between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. at randomly selected occasions. Each action was rated on a number of variables, shortly after it was sampled (median delay approximately 10 min). Some of the findings were: Time allocation corresponded well with national estimates. Being under situational control was highly aversive. Instrumental and consummatory orientations correlated positively. The background variables were, on the whole, only rather weakly related to action ratings, but it was found that women and retired persons tended to report a higher level of well-being.     

The effect of cognitive reappraisal on the emotional memory trade-off

Emotional information is often remembered better than neutral information, but this enhancement can come at the cost of memory for non-emotional stimuli presented alongside emotionally salient items. Two encoding-related factors have been proposed to influence the magnitude of this trade-off: The intensity of the affective response to the scenes (which increases the trade-off) and the cognitive control exerted to process the scenes (which decreases the trade-off). The present study examined the relative importance of these two factors by assessing the effect of cognitive reappraisal on the magnitude of the trade-off effect. Cognitive reappraisal refers to the implementation of cognitive strategies to assist a person in changing the intensity of their response to an experience. Thus, reappraisal provides a way to assess both of the factors that are important for the elicitation of the trade-off. The results revealed that when participants were asked to view the scenes, without cognitive reappraisal, a robust memory trade-off occurred. But, when participants were asked to either heighten or decrease their emotional reactions via reappraisal, there was a reduction in the magnitude of the trade-off. These results suggest that the cognitive process of reappraising the scenes is sufficient to reduce the trade-off effect, even when such processing leads to an intensified affective response.