Retelling everyday emotional events: Condensation,distancing, and closure

Narratives of emotional experiences are widely assumed to reflect how well the speaker has coped with them. Some cross-sectional studies have suggested that well-being and absence of psychopathology correlate with more elaborate and coherent narratives of negative events. Other studies, on the other hand, suggest that retelling and coping render narratives shorter, more cognitive, and explicitly evaluative. To test this latter hypothesis, 30 young women narrated five events eliciting anger, sadness, anxiety, pride and happiness from the past week, and retold the same events three months later. After three months, narratives contained fewer attempts to solve the complication, and evaluations became more global and impersonal. Negative narratives were framed better and re-evaluated positively. Unexpectedly, narrative clauses did not decrease, nor did evaluations shift from past to present. Ways to better differentiate effects of memory and retelling from mere effects of coping are suggested.     

Where's the impairment: An examination of factors that impact sustained attention following a stressor

This contribution examines the emotional engagement of men and women when reading narrative texts, aiming to see under which textual conditions men and women turn out to be different from or similar to each other in what they think and feel during reception. As part of an experimental mixed-methods study, male and female readers are asked to read either experience-type texts (focusing on inner experiences of characters) or action-type texts (focusing on actions as part of a suspenseful plot) and report their engagement on questionnaire scales and in written protocols. Results show that men and women differ in their engagement when reading action texts and in their emotional affinity to plots. They are highly similar when reading the experience texts, however, and in their affinity to characters. This study underlines that the emotional responses of males and females during reading are highly dependent on (con)textual cues.     

Wheel chairs and arm chairs: A novel experimental design for the emotional Stroop effect

The emotional Stroop effect demonstrates that people are slower to name the ink colour of emotionally charged words than that of neutral words. Attributing this slowdown to emotionality or threat requires that the emotion and neutral words presented are equal on all extraneous variables. However, it is impossible in principle to match the two types of words on all conceivable variables. To address the problem, we presented the same set of words, polarised to be negative in one condition and neutral in another by using appropriate prime words that produced the desired valence through idiomatic two-word expressions. Across two studies, participants took longer to name the colour of the same words when they were rendered negative than when they were rendered neutral. This difference reflects a true emotional Stroop effect given the control provided for all potentially confounding variables tied to the target stimuli. The new procedure also enables researchers to calculate item-specific emotional Stroop effects for the first time.     

Contextual interference processing during fast categorisations of facial expressions

We examined interference effects of emotionally associated background colours during fast valence categorisations of negative, neutral and positive expressions. According to implicitly learned colour–emotion associations, facial expressions were presented with colours that either matched the valence of these expressions or not. Experiment 1 included infrequent non-matching trials and Experiment 2 a balanced ratio of matching and non-matching trials. Besides general modulatory effects of contextual features on the processing of facial expressions, we found differential effects depending on the valance of target facial expressions. Whereas performance accuracy was mainly affected for neutral expressions, performance speed was specifically modulated by emotional expressions indicating some susceptibility of emotional expressions to contextual features. Experiment 3 used two further colour–emotion combinations, but revealed only marginal interference effects most likely due to missing colour–emotion associations. The results are discussed with respect to inherent processing demands of emotional and neutral expressions and their susceptibility to contextual interference.     

Emotion understanding,pictorial representations of friendship and reciprocity in school-aged children

This study examined the relationship between emotional understanding, friendship representation and reciprocity in school-aged children. Two hundred and fifty-one Caucasian 6-year-old children (111 males and 140 females) took part in the study. The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and the Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR) were used. Children having a reciprocal friendship and children having a unilateral friendship with a child named as their “best friend” were compared on the emotional understanding task and on their pictorial representations of friendship. Multilevel analyses indicated that friendship status effects were not influenced by classroom-level differences. Results showed that children with reciprocal friendships drew themselves as more similar to and more cohesive with their best friends, and they showed better understanding of emotions, than children having a unilateral friendship. Finally, the implications of these findings for theoretical and empirical research development on friendship are discussed.     

The influence of indirect and direct emotional processing on memory for facial expressions

We used the Remember–Know procedure (Tulving, 1985 Tulving, E. 1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology, 26: 1–12. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to test the behavioural expression of memory following indirect and direct forms of emotional processing at encoding. Participants (N=32) viewed a series of facial expressions (happy, fearful, angry, and neutral) while performing tasks involving either indirect (gender discrimination) or direct (emotion discrimination) emotion processing. After a delay, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test. Our results revealed that indirect encoding of emotion produced enhanced memory for fearful faces whereas direct encoding of emotion produced enhanced memory for angry faces. In contrast, happy faces were better remembered than neutral faces after both indirect and direct encoding tasks. These findings suggest that fearful and angry faces benefit from a recollective advantage when they are encoded in a way that is consistent with the predictive nature of their threat. We propose that the broad memory advantage for happy faces may reflect a form of cognitive flexibility that is specific to positive emotions.     

Self-structure and emotional experience

Two studies examine individual differences in affective reactivity by linking emotional experience to cognitive self-structure. Consistent with the view that individuals with an evaluative compartmentalised self-structure are emotionally reactive, we find that evaluative compartmentalisation is associated with the experience of, and desire for, high-arousal positive (HAP) affect, whereas evaluative integration is associated with the experience of low-arousal positive (LAP) and low-arousal negative affect and the desire for LAP affect. Although compartmentalised individuals are less granular in their tendency to report experiencing both HAP and LAP, they are strongly differentiated in their perceptions of high-arousal states as positive and low-arousal states as negative. Thus, compartmentalised individuals' reactivity may be explained by their preference for HAP states and the ‘breadth’ of their emotionality (e.g., the tendency to experience sadness and nervousness at the same time).     

Cerebellum and processing of negative facial emotions: Cerebellar transcranial DC stimulation specifically enhances the emotional recognition of facial anger and sadness

Some evidence suggests that the cerebellum participates in the complex network processing emotional facial expression. To evaluate the role of the cerebellum in recognising facial expressions we delivered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex. A facial emotion recognition task was administered to 21 healthy subjects before and after cerebellar tDCS; we also tested subjects with a visual attention task and a visual analogue scale (VAS) for mood. Anodal and cathodal cerebellar tDCS both significantly enhanced sensory processing in response to negative facial expressions (anodal tDCS, p=.0021; cathodal tDCS, p=.018), but left positive emotion and neutral facial expressions unchanged (p>.05). tDCS over the right prefrontal cortex left facial expressions of both negative and positive emotion unchanged. These findings suggest that the cerebellum is specifically involved in processing facial expressions of negative emotion.     

Getting stuck in depression: The roles of rumination and emotional inertia

Like many other mental disorders, depression is characterised by psychological inflexibility. Two instances of such inflexibility are rumination: repetitive cognitions focusing on the causes and consequences of depressive symptoms; and emotional inertia: the tendency for affective states to be resistant to change. In two studies, we tested the predictions that: (1) rumination and emotional inertia are related; and (2) both independently contribute to depressive symptoms. We examined emotional inertia of subjective affective experiences in daily life among a sample of non-clinical undergraduates (Study 1), and of affective behaviours during a family interaction task in a sample of clinically depressed and non-depressed adolescents (Study 2), and related it to self-reported rumination and depression severity. In both studies, rumination (particularly the brooding facet) and emotional inertia (particularly of sad/dysphoric affect) were positively associated, and both independently predicted depression severity. These findings demonstrate the importance of studying both cognitive and affective inflexibility in depression.