Stop crying! The impact of situational demands on interpersonal emotion regulation

ABSTRACT

Crying is a common response to emotional distress that elicits support from the environment. People may regulate another’s crying in several ways, such as by providing socio-affective support (e.g. comforting) or cognitive support (e.g. reappraisal), or by trying to emotionally disengage the other by suppression or distraction. We examined whether people adapt their interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to the situational context, by manipulating the regulatory demand of the situation in which someone is crying. Participants watched a video of a crying man and provided support by recording a video message. We hypothesised that when immediate down-regulation was required (i.e. high regulatory demand), participants would provide lower levels of socio-affective and cognitive support, and instead distract the crying person or encourage them to suppress their emotions, compared to when there is no such urgency (i.e. low regulatory demand). As predicted, both self-reported and behavioural responses indicated that high (as compared to low) regulatory demand led to a reduction in socio-affective support provision, and a strong increase in suppression and distraction. Cognitive support provision, however, was unaffected by regulatory demand. When the context required more immediate down-regulation, participants thus employed more regulation strategies aimed at disengaging from the emotional experience. This study provides a first step in showing that people take the context into account when attempting to regulate others’ emotions.     

Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception

ABSTRACT

How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in valence (neutral, positive [amusement] or negative [anger]). They were instructed to identify the location of the vocalizations (Experiment 1) and to evaluate their emotional qualities (Experiment 2). Emotion-space interactions were observed, but only in Experiment 1: emotional vocalizations were better localised than neutral ones when they were presented from the back and the right side. In Experiment 2, emotion recognition accuracy was increased for positive vs. negative and neutral vocalizations, and perceived arousal was increased for emotional vs. neutral vocalizations, but this was independent of spatial location. These findings indicate that emotional salience affects how we perceive the spatial location of voices. They additionally suggest that the interaction between spatial (“where”) and emotional (“what”) properties of the voice differs as a function of task.     

Processing emotional category congruency between emotional facial expressions and emotional words

Facial expressions are critical for effective social communication, and as such may be processed by the visual system even when it might be advantageous to ignore them. Previous research has shown that categorising emotional words was impaired when faces of a conflicting valence were simultaneously presented. In the present study, we examined whether emotional word categorisation would also be impaired when faces of the same (negative) valence but different emotional category (either angry, sad or fearful) were simultaneously presented. Behavioural results provided evidence for involuntary processing of basic emotional facial expression category, with slower word categorisation when the face and word categories were incongruent (e.g., angry word and sad face) than congruent (e.g., angry word and angry face). Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the presentation of the word–face pairs also revealed that emotional category congruency effects were evident from approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset.     

Hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of negative and positive words: A divided field study

Research on the lateralisation of brain functions for emotion has yielded different results as a function of whether it is the experience, expression, or perceptual processing of emotion that is examined. Further, for the perception of emotion there appear to be differences between the processing of verbal and nonverbal stimuli. The present research examined the hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of verbal stimuli varying in emotional valence. Participants performed a lexical decision task for words varying in affective valence (but equated in terms of arousal) that were presented briefly to the right or left visual field. Participants were significantly faster at recognising positive words presented to the right visual field/left hemisphere. This pattern did not occur for negative words (and was reversed for high arousal negative words). These results suggest that the processing of verbal stimuli varying in emotional valence tends to parallel hemispheric asymmetry in the experience of emotion.     

Differentiated associations between childhood maltreatment experiences and social understanding: A meta-analysis and systematic review

The extreme parenting experiences encountered by children who are physically abused or neglected place them at increased risk for impaired socio-emotional development. There is growing evidence that maltreated children may apprehend interpersonal encounters in different ways from children without such traumatic histories. This systematic review examines the links between childhood physical abuse and neglect and various constituent skills of social understanding (including emotion recognition and understanding, perspective taking, false belief understanding, and attributional biases) in 51 empirical studies. The review incorporates a meta-analysis of 19 studies on emotion recognition and understanding in this population. This showed an overall negative effect of maltreatment, but moderation analyses revealed that significantly stronger effects were found for measures of emotion understanding rather than recognition, and for younger rather than older age groups. The broader review also reveals a complex and differentiated profile of social understanding among maltreated children. Directions for future research that addresses individual differences in children’s experiences, both within and outside the maltreatment context, are discussed.     

Emotion regulation in action: emotional reactivity in experiential avoidance

The present study examined the relationship between emotional reactivity (self-report and physiological reactivity) to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral emotion-eliciting stimuli and experiential avoidance (EA). Sixty-two participants were separated into high and low experiential avoiders. Results indicated that high EA participants reported greater emotional experience to both unpleasant and pleasant stimuli compared to low EA participants. In contrast to their heightened reports of emotion, high EA participants displayed attenuated heart rate reactivity to the unpleasant stimuli relative to the low EA participants. These findings are interpreted as reflecting an emotion regulation attempt by high EA participants when confronted with unpleasant emotionally-evocative stimuli.     

Understanding the emotional past: relations between parent and child contributions in emotionally negative and nonnegative events

The past event conversations of 33 mothers with their 3-year-old children (18 girls and 15 boys) were selected from a larger sample based on their discussion of negative events. Negative events included both those that were negative in topic and those that contained negative incidents but were otherwise positively themed. Within-subjects comparisons were made between the negative events and a neutral or positive event. There were few differences in how mothers and their children talked about negative and nonnegative events. Children did include more interpretations (internal state and causal references) in their negative event conversations. For both event types, mothers who talked more about the past events had children who reported more. When maternal talkativeness was controlled, involving children in the negative event conversations through deflecting the conversational turn predicted children's total contributions and number of interpretations. Repeating information and requests for information while constraining the topic was negatively related to the number of details children reported for nonnegative past events. Conversations about minor negative experiences demonstrate that mothers can influence children's involvement in discussions and understanding of the past.     

Gratitude and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in Vietnam war veterans

Little information exists on the contribution of psychological strengths to well-being in persons with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Data from other populations suggest that gratitude, defined as the positive experience of thankfulness for being the recipient of personal benefits, may have salutary effects on everyday functioning. We investigated whether dispositional gratitude predicted daily hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in combat veterans with and without PTSD. We also examined associations between daily gratitude and daily well-being across time. Veterans with PTSD, compared to those without PTSD, exhibited significantly lower dispositional gratitude; no differences were found on daily gratitude. Dispositional gratitude predicted greater daily positive affect, percentage of pleasant days over the assessment period, daily intrinsically motivating activity, and daily self-esteem over and above effects attributable to PTSD severity and dispositional negative and positive affect in the PTSD group but not the non-PTSD group. Daily gratitude was uniquely associated with each dimension of daily well-being in both groups. Although preliminary, these results provide support for the further investigation of gratitude in trauma survivors.     

Sex differences in response to a panicogenic challenge procedure: an experimental evaluation of panic vulnerability in a non-clinical sample

Epidemiological studies show that women are twice as likely as men to develop panic disorder (PD) during their lifetimes. Data from retrospective studies also suggest that women are more distressed by panic and other negative emotional states than men, and that this tendency may precede the development of PD. The present prospective study sought to expand this work by evaluating sex differences in the predisposition to panic in individuals without PD or other forms of psychopathology. Participants (N=96; 52 women) were exposed to 12 panicogenic inhalations of 20% CO2-enriched air while physiological (e.g., heart rate, electrodermal response, Frontalis EMG) and self-report (e.g., subject distress, fear, frequency and severity of DSM-IV panic symptoms) response domains were monitored. As expected, magnitude of autonomic responding failed to reliably discriminate between women and men. Yet, women reported more fear and panic immediately following the challenge procedure relative to men, and this sex difference persisted when assessed again 30 min post-challenge. Implications of these results are discussed broadly in the context of biopsychosocial accounts of sex differences in the clinical presentation of PD.     

The capacity for music: what is it, and what's special about it?

We explore the capacity for music in terms of five questions: (1) What cognitive structures are invoked by music? (2) What are the principles that create these structures? (3) How do listeners acquire these principles? (4) What pre-existing resources make such acquisition possible? (5) Which aspects of these resources are specific to music, and which are more general? We examine these issues by looking at the major components of musical organization: rhythm (an interaction of grouping and meter), tonal organization (the structure of melody and harmony), and affect (the interaction of music with emotion). Each domain reveals a combination of cognitively general phenomena, such as gestalt grouping principles, harmonic roughness, and stream segregation, with phenomena that appear special to music and language, such as metrical organization. These are subtly interwoven with a residue of components that are devoted specifically to music, such as the structure of tonal systems and the contours of melodic tension and relaxation that depend on tonality. In the domain of affect, these components are especially tangled, involving the interaction of such varied factors as general-purpose aesthetic framing, communication of affect by tone of voice, and the musically specific way that tonal pitch contours evoke patterns of posture and gesture.