Abstract
Uncertainty and emotion are an inevitable part of everyday life and play a vital role in mental health. Yet, our understanding of how uncertainty and emotion interact is limited. Here, an online survey was conducted (n = 231) to examine whether uncertainty evokes and modulates a range of negative and positive emotions. The data show that uncertainty is predominantly associated with negative emotional states such as fear/anxiety. However, uncertainty was also found to modulate a variety of other negative (i.e., sadness/upset, anger/frustration, and confusion) and positive (i.e., surprise/interest and excited/enthusiastic) emotional states, depending on the valence of an anticipated outcome (i.e., negative and positive) and the sub parameter of uncertainty (i.e., risk and ambiguity). Uncertainty increased the intensity of negative emotional states and decreased the intensity of positive emotional states. These findings support prior research suggesting that uncertainty is aversive and associated with negative emotional states such as fear and anxiety. However, the findings also revealed that uncertainty is involved in eliciting and modulating a wide array of emotional phenomena beyond fear and anxiety. This study highlights an opportunity for further study of how uncertainty and emotion interactions are conceptualised generally and in relation to mental health.
Highlights
Emotions form a vital aspect of the human condition and have significant implications for health and well-being (Davidson, 1998; LeDoux, 1998)
We developed an online survey to examine whether uncertainty: (1) generally elicits and modulates negative and positive emotional states, (2) elicits negative and positive emotional states differently depending on the anticipated valence of an outcome, and (3) elicits negative and positive emotional states differently depending on the sub parameter of uncertainty
With respect to uncertainty serving as a modulator of emotional states, we hypothesised that experiencing uncertainty in daily life would significantly increase the intensity of existing negative emotional states and reduce the intensity of existing positive emotional states
Summary
Emotions form a vital aspect of the human condition and have significant implications for health and well-being (Davidson, 1998; LeDoux, 1998). Prior research has defined and measured emotional phenomena categorically, Uncertainty and Emotion encompassing specific and discrete emotional states (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear), or dimensionally, traditionally across two continuums: valence (negative-positive) and arousal (Mauss and Robinson, 2009). Empirical evidence from cross-cultural research has extended dimensional models of emotion, recommending that four major dimensions are required to support adequate discrimination of 24 emotion terms: valence, arousal, power/control, and unpredictability (Fontaine et al, 2007, 2013). Whilst progress has been made to define and understand the dimensions that support emotional phenomena (Cowen and Keltner, 2017), there is a limited literature on the role of uncertainty (an umbrella term for unpredictability, risk, ambiguity, novelty, etc, for discussion see Carleton, 2016) as a dimension that elicits and modulates emotional states (Roseman, 1984; Smith and Ellsworth, 1985; Fontaine et al, 2007)
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