Affect Labeling Research Articles

Diminished negative emotion regulation through affect labeling and reappraisal: insights from functional near infrared spectroscopy on lateral prefrontal cortex activation

BackgroundReappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy, includes reinterpretation and affect labeling involving verbalizing emotions. In general, reappraisal is supported by lateral prefrontal cortical regions, which are also known to underlie cognitive regulation. Other research has shown that affect labeling combined with reappraisal of negative emotions increases lateral prefrontal cortex activity more than reappraisal alone does, suggesting that affect labeling facilitates emotional regulation. However, the influence of affect labeling on the efficacy of reappraisal in reducing subjective negative emotions has not been determined.MethodsIn the experiment, 35 participants (mean age = 28.2 years (SD = 9.63); 12 women and 23 men) viewed vignettes that aroused negative emotion. Then, they rated subjective negative emotions as baseline values. Following the baseline rating, the task branched into four conditions, combining affect labeling and emotion regulation factors. In the affect-labeling factor, participants selected emotional labels consistent with their own emotions or not. Regarding the emotion regulation factor, participants engaged in reappraisal to regulate their negative emotions. Throughout the experiment, the intensity of negative emotions was measured three times, mirroring the baseline measurement. Oxyhemoglobin (OxyHb) signal values in prefrontal cortex regions during tasks were measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy.ResultsDifferences between the subjective negative emotion ratings at baseline and after reappraisal indicated that reappraisal significantly reduced negative emotion with and without affect labeling (t (1173.05) = 29.97, p < 0.001), and the combination of affect labeling and reappraisal was less effective in regulating negative emotions at the subjective level than reappraisal without affect labeling (t (1172.03) = 3.15, p < 0.01). Additionally, there was an increase in OxyHb signal in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal and right ventral prefrontal cortices while participants performed reappraisal with affect labeling.ConclusionOur findings suggest that affect labeling, when performed prior to cognitive reappraisal, may influence the process of negative emotion regulation in complex ways. The interaction between affect labeling and reappraisal appears to modulate prefrontal cortex activity, potentially reflecting changes in cognitive processing during emotion regulation attempts. These results highlight the need for further investigation into the intricate relationship between different emotion regulation strategies.

Bringing patients out of the gloom: Examining the effects of patient power and affect labeling on emotional experience reflected in emotional judgement

ObjectiveNegative emotions are common among patients in medical settings. It is important to investigate impacts of patient power and affect labeling on emotional experience in patients. MethodsBehavioral judgments and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants with high or low patient power made emotional judgments (positive, negative) about neutral faces, as well as investigating how affect labeling (affect labeling, viewing) influenced emotional judgments about neutral faces in participants with low patient power. ResultsIndividuals with low patient power made more and faster negative emotion judgements. A larger late positive component (LPC) amplitude was found in negative emotion judgments for individuals with low patient power, a component related to allocation of attentional resources to motivationally salient stimuli. Affect labeling elicited less and slower negative emotion judgments in individuals with low patient power. ConclusionsThese results suggest that low patient power triggers negative emotion, which can be reduced by affect labeling. Practice implicationsThe current findings provide valuable insights into reducing negative emotions in patients, fostering promising targets for training for medical professionals and education for patients aiming to ensure more humanistic and higher-quality care delivery.

Effects of behavioral interventions on stress reactivity in adults with substance use disorders.

Heightened reactivity to stress is associated with poor treatment outcome in people with substance use disorders (SUDs). Behavioral strategies can reduce stress reactivity; however, these strategies are understudied in people with SUDs. The objective of this study was to test the effect of two behavioral strategies (cognitive reappraisal and affect labeling) on stress reactivity in people with SUDs. Treatment-seeking adults with SUDs (N = 119) were randomized to receive brief training in cognitive reappraisal, affect labeling, or a psychoeducational control, followed by a standardized stress induction. Markers of stress reactivity were collected before and following stress induction and included self-reported negative affect and substance craving, as well as salivary cortisol, and skin conductance response. Analyses of covariance did not indicate a significant effect of treatment condition on negative affect, cortisol, or skin conductance response. Participants in the affect labeling condition had greater increase in craving than those in the cognitive reappraisal condition; neither condition differed from control. Results indicated that, although participants were able to implement behavioral skills following a brief training, training condition did not modify stress reactivity, on average, relative to control. Future directions include consideration of individual differences in response to training and determination of whether higher "dosing" of skills via multiple sessions or extended practice is needed to influence stress reactivity in people with SUDs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion labelling strengthens readers’ emotional responses to online messages

ABSTRACT Emotionally overheated social media discussions cause many harms both to the individuals participating in the discussion and to the wider society. To support emotion regulation in social media discussions, the strategy of affect labelling is explored. Two experiments were run to study the effects of emotion labels presented with social media messages on participants’ emotional responses to the messages. Altogether 84 participants read emotional social media messages presented without and with emotion labels (Experiment 1, N = 39), and without labels and with emotion / control labels (Experiment 2, N = 45) and rated their subjective emotional valence. Results show that the ratings of valence were significantly higher for the positive messages presented with label than for the messages presented as such without emotion label or presented with a control label. In addition, the results of the second experiment show that the negative social media messages were experienced as more negative when the messages were presented with an emotion label than without emotion label or with control label. The results suggest that affect labelling of social media messages is an ineffective strategy to down-regulate emotions but could be used to support and strengthen positive emotions.

Effects of scaffolding emotion language use on emotion differentiation and psychological health: an experience-sampling study

ABSTRACT Emotion differentiation (ED) – complexity in the mental representation and description of one’s emotional experiences – is important for mental health. However, less is known whether ED can be enhanced in adults. We investigated if scaffolding emotion language use during affect labelling – initial provision of emotion word prompts (close-ended) followed by free response (open-ended) – impacts ED and psychological health. Utilising a crossover design, 92 college students completed questionnaires assessing psychological health at three time-points and ecological momentary assessment of emotions, affect valence and emotional self-efficacy for 14 days. Participants were randomised to the “scaffolding” group, where they reported emotions using the close-ended (7 days) followed by open-ended (7 days) approach, or the reverse sequence (control group). We extracted two ED indices: traditional intraclass correlation coefficient from close-ended reports and novel specificity index from open-ended reports. Primary analyses examined group differences across weeks while exploratory analyses examined moment-to-moment differences using multilevel modelling. Relative to controls, the scaffolding group demonstrated greater ED during open-ended emotion reporting of negative emotions and associated shifts in negative affect and emotional self-efficacy. There were no significant group differences in psychological symptoms. Results provide preliminary evidence that scaffolding may enhance ED and have implications for psychological intervention.

Affect labeling: a promising new neuroscience-based approach to treating combat-related PTSD in veterans.

A significant portion of individuals exposed to combat-related trauma will develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a severe, debilitating disorder with adverse impacts on both mental and physical functioning. Current treatments are effective for many individuals, however, there is a need for new treatment approaches to improve outcomes in PTSD and address the many existing barriers to seeking or completing treatment. In this open trial pilot study, we tested a novel, brief, computer-based intervention for PTSD utilizing "affect labeling" that was inspired by recent advances in neuroscience with U.S. veterans. As expected, pre-intervention clinical and fMRI neuroimaging data indicated that U.S. veterans with combat-related PTSD (N = 20) had significantly higher PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, and amygdala reactivity to trauma cues than trauma-exposed healthy control veterans (N = 20). Veterans with PTSD who completed the affect labeling intervention (N = 13) evidenced reduced PTSD symptoms and these reductions were correlated with reductions in amygdala reactivity. Results from this initial proof-of-concept study are intriguing and suggest that affect labeling training offers significant potential as a novel, cost-effective, computer-based intervention for PTSD. Implications and next steps for further developing affect labeling interventions for PTSD are discussed. https://clinicaltrials.gov/, identifier NCT05924399.

How do “words poorly expressed emotion” affect mental health? The mediating role of affect labelling effect

ABSTRACT Previous studies have found that people with high negative emotional granularity(NEG) tend to have better health levels. It is generally believed that this is due to the selection and application of explicit emotion regulation strategies that affect mental health. However, no research has yet examined a more fundamental process, the role of affect labelling, an implicit emotion regulation strategy. This study focuses on the aforementioned issues and uses the experience sampling method to categorise participants into groups with high and low NEG. Using an affect labelling paradigm with ERP(event-related potential) technology, the study measures the effects of affect labelling in participants. Furthermore, it assesses the mental health levels of the participants through questionnaires to explore whether the affect labelling effect serves as a mediator between NEG and mental health. The results show that: (1) The high-NEG group exhibited significantly lower LPP wave amplitudes under affect labelling compared to under non-affect labelling, whereas the low-NEG group did not show significant differences. The results indicate that only the high-NEG group can produce the affect labelling effect. (2) The affect labelling effect mediates the relationship between NEG and mental health, meaning that NEG predicts mental health through the affect labelling effect.

Family and parenting factors are associated with emotion regulation neural function in early adolescent girls with elevated internalizing symptoms.

A prominent tripartite model proposes that parent role modeling of emotion regulation, emotion socialization behaviors, and the emotional climate of the family are important for young people's emotional development. However, limited research has examined the neural mechanisms at play. Here, we examined the associations between family and parenting factors, the neural correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation, and internalizing symptoms in early adolescent girls. Sixty-four female adolescents aged 10-12 years with elevated internalizing symptoms completed emotional reactivity, implicit (affect labeling) and explicit (cognitive reappraisal) emotion regulation tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Positive family emotional climate was associated with greater activation in the anterior cingulate and middle temporal cortices during emotional reactivity. Maternal emotion regulation difficulties were associated with increased frontal pole and supramarginal gyrus activation during affect labeling, whereas supportive maternal emotion socialization and positive family emotional climate were associated with activation in prefrontal regions, including inferior frontal and superior frontal gyri, respectively, during cognitive reappraisal. No mediating effects of brain function were observed in the associations between family/parenting factors and adolescent symptoms. These findings highlight the role of family and parenting behaviors in adolescent emotion regulation neurobiology, and contribute to prominent models of adolescent emotional development.

The role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances.

Emotion regulation is essential for psychological well-being. One strategy that is commonly researched is reappraisal. Individual differences regarding the tendency to use reappraisal, as well as its implications for affective experience, were extensively studied. In recent years, interest has emerged in the choice to use reappraisal, based on stimuli properties. Recently, we suggested that reappraisal is related to emotion recognition processes. Emotion recognition (and affective labeling, as an explicit form of emotion recognition) is regarded as a form of emotion regulation, however, the relations between emotion recognition and reappraisal have not been previously investigated. The aim of the current study was to explore the relationship between reappraisal affordances (the opportunities of re-interpretation that are inherent in a stimulus) and emotion recognition. For this purpose, we used the Categorized Affective Picture Database, a database that provides data regarding the emotional category of each picture, agreement levels for each category, and intensity ratings. Agreement levels were used to assess the certainty regarding the emotion evoked by the pictures. Findings suggest that reappraisal affordance is predicted by both agreement levels and intensity, in negative pictures alone. In negative pictures, intensity was negatively correlated with the difficulty to reappraise. These findings strengthen the hypothesis regarding the relationship between emotion recognition and reappraisal, and provide evidence for the role of emotion recognition in reappraisal affordances.

Impact of Emotional Awareness on Responses to Vaccine-Related Narrative Misinformation

ABSTRACT Emotionally evocative narratives are a common strategy to spread vaccine-related misinformation on social media. This study tested the use of two emotional awareness strategies – affect labeling and reflections of feelings – to mitigate the impact of misinformation. The online experiment (N = 143) found that emotional awareness (vs. control) led to greater felt emotions and concerns about HPV vaccine safety among female participants. Felt emotions further mediated the effect of emotional awareness (vs. control) on intentions to share misinformation and concerns about HPV vaccine safety. These findings suggest that emotional awareness may be ineffective at addressing narrative misinformation on social media.

Impaired implicit emotion regulation in patients with panic disorder: An event-related potential study on affect labeling.

Panic disorder (PD) involves emotion dysregulation, but its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Previous research suggests that implicit emotion regulation may play a central role in PD-related emotion dysregulation and symptom maintenance. However, there is a lack of studies exploring the neural mechanisms of implicit emotion regulation in PD using neurophysiological indicators. To study the neural mechanisms of implicit emotion regulation in PD with event-related potentials (ERP). A total of 25 PD patients and 20 healthy controls (HC) underwent clinical eva-luations. The study utilized a case-control design with random sampling, selecting participants for the case group from March to December 2018. Participants performed an affect labeling task, using affect labeling as the experimental condition and gender labeling as the control condition. ERP and behavioral data were recorded to compare the late positive potential (LPP) within and between the groups. Both PD and HC groups showed longer reaction times and decreased accuracy under the affect labeling. In the HC group, late LPP amplitudes exhibited a dynamic pattern of initial increase followed by decrease. Importantly, a significant group × condition interaction effect was observed. Simple effect analysis revealed a reduction in the differences of late LPP amplitudes between the affect labeling and gender labeling conditions in the PD group compared to the HC group. Furthermore, among PD patients under the affect labeling, the late LPP was negatively correlated with disease severity, symptom frequency, and intensity. PD patients demonstrate abnormalities in implicit emotion regulation, hampering their ability to mobilize cognitive resources for downregulating negative emotions. The late LPP amplitude in response to affect labeling may serve as a potentially valuable clinical indicator of PD severity.

Affect labeling as a buffer: reducing anxiety in the face of violent news

ABSTRACT Affect labelling, the process of putting feelings into words, has been shown to have a calming effect on the brain. This study examines the impact of affect labelling on self-reported levels of anxiety after exposure to distressing news. We conducted an online experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either a control group or a treatment group. Both groups were exposed to news about a violent crime and then asked to report their level of anxiety. The treatment group also went through a questionnaire to label their feelings before reporting their anxiety level. We found that self-reported anxiety levels were significantly lower in the treatment group, suggesting that affect labelling can be an effective tool for reducing anxiety generated by negative news.

Instantaneous estimation of momentary affective responses using neurophysiological signals and a spatiotemporal emotional intensity regression network

Previous studies in affective computing often use a fixed emotional label to train an emotion classifier with electroencephalography (EEG) from individuals experiencing an affective stimulus. However, EEGs encode emotional dynamics that include varying intensities within a given emotional category. To investigate these variations in emotional intensity, we propose a framework that obtains momentary affective labels for fine-grained segments of EEGs with human feedback. We then model these labeled segments using a novel spatiotemporal emotional intensity regression network (STEIR-Net). It integrates temporal EEG patterns from nine predefined cortical regions to provide a continuous estimation of emotional intensity. We demonstrate that the STEIR-Net outperforms classical regression models by reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) by an average of 4∼9 % and 2∼4 % for the SEED and SEED-IV databases, respectively. We find that the frontal and temporal cortical regions contribute significantly to the affective intensity's variation. Higher absolute values of the Spearman correlation coefficient between the model estimation and momentary affective labels under happiness (0.2114) and fear (0.2072) compared to neutral (0.1694) and sad (0.1895) emotions were observed. Besides, increasing the input length of the EEG segments from 4 to 20 s further reduces the RMSE from 1.3548 to 1.3188.

COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF MANAGING STRESS AND UNWANTED EMOTION SUCCESSFULLY IN OLD AGE

Abstract The ability to cope with stressors and manage unwanted emotion is central to health-related outcomes across adulthood. Prominent models of adult development suggest there may be age-related shifts in motivational strivings and accumulated knowledge that help support emotional well-being in old age. At the same time, older adults have cognitive and physical vulnerabilities that may offset some of these strengths. This session will showcase new work leveraging experimental and experiencing sampling methods to examine how people of varying ages and resource levels manage their emotions. These studies provide new insights into how older adults respond to stressors and adverse stimuli in controlled settings and daily life contexts. The first talk centers on how individuals are negatively impacted by cognitive stressors regardless of age, but older adults show more resilience than younger adults after stressor exposure. The second talk focuses on how a cognitive process known as affective labeling (or naming one’s emotions) can create emotion regulation difficulties, especially in old age. The third talk examines emotion regulation success and the benefits of instructional support for cognitively normal older adults compared to those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The fourth talk extends this work by tracking emotion regulation motives in daily life, showing that cognitively diverse older adults report fewer attempts to manage their emotions, but similar reasons for doing so, compared to relatively younger adults. Together these presentations delineate age-related similarity and differences in emotion regulation, highlighting avenues through which coping capacity may be maintained and improve in late life.

Video-based continuous affect recognition of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder using deep learning

Affect recognition is currently an active research area for machine learning researchers. Researchers are paying more and more attention to the assessment and the classification of emotions in people with mental disorders in order to propose monitoring healthcare systems and then to better assist patients. In this paper, a supervised learning method to classify Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to evaluate affect levels among autistic children is proposed. The use of methodologies for clinical patient monitoring and management is the focus of our research. YouTube video frames acquired in unconstrained environments and conditions of autistic children demonstrating typical autistic behaviors, as well as images of neurotypical people are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. This paper also proposes an extended version of a dataset, including the additional affect labels corresponding to the affect levels of autistic children. Finally, experiments using different models were conducted to determine which architecture performed best. These experiments have shown very promising results for continuous affect recognition of children with ASD. Results show also that using a model that has only been trained on neurotypical subjects does not perform as great when the subjects are ASD children.

Facial affect recognition in context in adults with and without TBI.

Several studies have reported impaired emotion recognition in adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), but studies have two major design features that limit application of results to real-world contexts: (1) participants choose from among lists of basic emotions, rather than generating emotion labels, and (2) images are typically presented in isolation rather than in context. To address these limitations, we created an open-labeling task with faces shown alone or in real-life scenes, to more closely approximate how adults with TBI label facial emotions beyond the lab. Participants were 55 adults (29 female) with moderate to severe TBI and 55 uninjured comparison peers, individually matched for race, sex, and age. Participants viewed 60 photographs of faces, either alone or in the pictured person's real-life context, and were asked what that person was feeling. We calculated the percent of responses that were standard forced-choice-task options, and also used sentiment intensity analysis to compare verbal responses between the two groups. We tracked eye movements for a subset of participants, to explore whether gaze duration or number of fixations helped explain any group differences in labels. Over 50% of responses in both groups were words other than basic emotions on standard affect tasks, highlighting the importance of eliciting open-ended responses. Valence of labels by participants with TBI was attenuated relative to valence of Comparison group labels, i.e., TBI group responses were less positive to positive images and the same was true for negative images, although the TBI group responses had higher lexical diversity. There were no significant differences in gaze duration or number of fixations between groups. Results revealed qualitative differences in affect labels between adults with and without TBI that would not have emerged on standard forced-choice tasks. Verbal differences did not appear to be attributable to differences in gaze patterns, leaving open the question of mechanisms of atypical affect processing in adults with TBI.

Modelling Stochastic Context of Audio-Visual Expressive Behaviour With Affective Processes

Recognising apparent emotion from audio-visual signals in naturalistic conditions remains an open problem. Existing methods that build on recurrent models, or in the modelling of contextual dependencies at the feature level using self-attention fail to model the long-term dependencies that subtly occur at different levels of abstraction. Affective Processes have emerged as a novel paradigm to the modelling of temporal dynamics through a probabilistic global latent variable that captures context and induces dependencies in the outputs, showing superior performance with little complexity. Despite its impressive results on visual data, Affective Processes remain unexplored in the domain of audio data, known to crucially influence the perception of emotions. In this paper, we first revisit and extend Affective Processes to the speech domain, identifying the key components and learning procedures for their efficient training. We then extend Affective Processes to audio-visual affect recognition, using modality-specific context encoders. Finally, we propose a novel application of Affective Processes in the domain of Cooperative Machine Learning for propagating affect labels in videos using sparse human supervision. We conduct extensive ablation studies, identifying the main components behind the success of Affective Processes, as well as comparisons against existing works in a variety of datasets.

Perceived Impact of Affect Labeling and Social Sharing in Healthcare: Insights from a Pilot Study and Opportunities for Future Investigation

Perceived Impact of Affect Labeling and Social Sharing in Healthcare: Insights from a Pilot Study and Opportunities for Future Investigation

Current and lasting effects of affect labeling on late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes elicited by negative events.

Labeling the emotional aspect of self-unrelated stimuli (i.e., affect labeling) is a crucial strategy for implicit emotion regulation. However, it is uncertain whether affect labeling influences event-related potential (ERP) responses (e.g., the late positive potential, LPP) to negative stimuli in comparison with control conditions in which attention is shifted to the emotional content of the stimuli (e.g., affect matching). Additionally, it is unknown whether affect labeling has a lasting effect on the processing of negative stimuli. Participants were required to label the emotion (negative or neutral) of target pictures with two words, to match the emotion with alternative pictures or to merely view the target pictures. Target pictures were presented again immediately after the regulation task. After all the target pictures had been labeled, matched and viewed, the pictures were re-exposed for the third time. The results showed that negative pictures elicited larger late LPP responses during the affect labeling task than during other tasks. However, the LPP responses were smaller for negative pictures in the affect labeling condition than in the other conditions when target pictures were re-exposed immediately after the task. When target pictures were re-presented again long after the regulation tasks, the LPP responses were smaller for negative stimuli with a history of affect labeling than viewing, whereas this effect did not differ between the affect labeling and matching conditions. The current findings suggest that affect labeling has current effects and, to some extent, has lasting effects on negative stimulus processing.

Using Emotion Regulation to Support Informed Literacy

When it comes to fake news, no medium circulates and reaches more youth than social media. Social media can provide an opportunity for students to create and post with an authentic audience; however, social media can also perpetuate the danger of fake news. Youth across the globe emotionally engage with content several hours a day and can become vulnerable to the clickbait style of news. Therefore, although research has studied how critical literacy instruction supports informed reading, literacy instruction must also address students’ emotional regulation needs. This research-to-practice article describes the dangers of fake news on youth interactions and provides practical emotional regulation tips for teachers. Emotional regulation strategies in this paper specifically concentrate on implementing affect labeling and mindful breathing in classrooms in order to support informed literacy.