Emotional Amplification Research Articles

The Costs of Suppressing Negative Emotions and Amplifying Positive Emotions During Parental Caregiving.

How do parents feel when they regulate their emotional expressions in ways that are incongruent with their genuine feelings? In an experimental study, parents reported experiencing lower authenticity, emotional well-being, relationship quality, and responsiveness to their children's needs when they recalled caregiving experiences in which they suppressed negative emotions and amplified positive emotions, relative to a control condition. In a 10-day daily experience study, parents tended to use both regulation strategies simultaneously. In addition, assessing their unique effects indicated that positive emotion amplification, but not negative emotion suppression, had an indirect effect on parental outcomes via authenticity, with negative emotion suppression no longer being costly. This indirect effect was dampened when accounting for care difficulty. In both studies, effects were independent of a child's mood. The current results suggest that parents' attempts to suppress negative and amplify positive emotions during child care can detract from their well-being and high-quality parent-child bonds.

Rhetorical Expectations and Self-Fashioning in Cicero's Speech for P. Sulla, §§18–19

Pro Sulla §§18–19 demonstrates a tactic of self-depiction unique in Cicero's speeches; the orator represents an internal dialogue in which his natural kindness towards the Catilinarian Autronius is overcome by arguments that his audience can recognize as the prosecutor's stock tactics of emotional amplification prescribed in De Inventione. By ostentatiously persuading himself to sternness with the stock appeals designed to persuade a normative audience, the orator can justify his actions against the Catilinarians while asserting that his essential nature is kind and compassionate. This tactic is both essential for Cicero's persuasive strategy and useful for his broader self-depiction for the reading audience of the speech.

Agent-Based Modeling of Emotion Contagion in Groups

To avoid the development of negative emotion in their teams, team leaders may benefit from being aware of the emotional dynamics of the team members. To this end, the use of intelligent computer systems that analyze emotional processes within teams is a promising direction. As a first step toward the development of such systems, this paper uses an agent-based approach to formalize and simulate emotion contagion processes within groups, which may involve absorption or amplification of emotions of others. The obtained computational model is analyzed both by explorative simulation and by mathematical analysis. In addition, to illustrate the applicability of the model, it is shown how the model can be integrated within a computational ‘ambient agent model’ that monitors and predicts group emotion levels over time and proposes group support actions based on that. Based on this description, a discussion is provided of the main contribution of the model, as well as the next steps needed to incorporate it into real-world applications.

Narratives of emotion and anxiety in medical tourism: on State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney

This paper explores the emotional geographies of State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney—two nonfiction narratives about medical tourism wherein American patients and their caregiver companions travel abroad for life-saving surgeries. The paper has two main goals: first, to illustrate the importance of emotional geographies in medical tourists' lived experiences of travel and tourism, as well as the giving and receiving of transnational health care and second, to generate empirical, theoretical, and methodological discussions between geographical, travel, tourism, and health studies on the relevance of emotional geographies. Medical tourists' experiences of travel and health care have been usually examined as spatially distinct rather than as entwined phenomena. We address the above goals by discussing how the narratives of traveling thousands of miles to a radically different socio-cultural milieu in order to receive essential medical care produce two interrelated emotional geographies: first, they demonstrate the existence of ‘emotional amplification’ (increase in the intensity of emotions) and ‘emotional extensivity’ (increase in the range of emotions) and second, they show how anxiety is underpinned by proximity to Otherness, uncertain boundaries, and isolated decision making. We conclude by briefly addressing how our examination of these narratives can be usefully expanded.

Aproximación a la semántica del contrafactual

The current study explores some fundamental aspects of counterfactuals, such us their functions in causal reasoning, scientific argument, and modulation and amplification of emotions. This study also describes the various types of counterfactuals, and the individual differences in their production and comprehension. Subsequently, the main theories and researches related to the dual meaning of counterfactuals were carried out, for example, mental models, propositional reasoning theories, or suppositional theory. Finally, special attention was given to the few investigations that have been made in the feld of psycholinguistics, concerned with the comprehension of counterfactuals.

Transformational leadership and customer service: A moderated mediation model of negative affectivity and emotion regulation

Integrating theories from leadership, emotion management, affectivity, and customer service, this study examines how transformational leadership leads to favourable customer intentions via the mediation of service employees' emotion regulation, job satisfaction, and their service performance and via the moderation of employee negative affectivity. Results obtained from data of 204 matched sets of managers, service employees, and customers show that the effect of transformational leadership on amplification of pleasant emotions was conditioned on service employees' negative affectivity. Employee service performance partially mediated the effect of job satisfaction on customer outcomes. Finally, overall results reveal that transformational leadership and amplification of pleasant emotions were more strongly related to the customer outcomes, as mediated through the intervening variables in the model, when negative affectivity was high than when negative affectivity was low. Results have implications for how service workers with negative affectivity can manage their emotions to achieve effective service outcomes through interactions with a leader, how the effect of transformational leadership can be bounded, and how transformational leadership and emotion regulation are relevant to customer service.

Cognitive Biases in Hypomanic Personality: Preliminary Findings Indicating the Relevance of Self-Versus-Other Encoding and High-Versus-Low Levels of Activation

While research indicates cognitive biases in individuals vulnerable to bipolar symptoms, the specificity of these biases to the self and others, and to low or high activation states, is underexplored. These biases were investigated using individuals with high (n = 24) and low levels (n = 24) of hypomanic personality (HPS) during word rating and free recall of a list of trait words after a positive versus neutral mood induction. The mood induction was not successful. Also, in contrast to the predicted self-serving bias, there was a self-denigratory bias in self-ratings relative to ratings of another person. In post hoc analyses, the study succeeded in producing a rating task of trait words that differentiated between high and low hypomania-prone individuals, as the high HPS group made higher ratings of high activation trait words (e.g. dynamic) to describe positive and neutral attributes regardless of whether it referred to themselves or another person. The high HPS group also showed a negative recall bias, but it was not specific to the self, questioning assumptions made about negative biases in existing research. Furthermore, a strong relationship emerged between greater use of imagery at encoding and greater recall of self-referent, positive, high activation words, suggesting a role for the intensity of images associated with the amplification of emotions in people with bipolar disorder (Holmes et al., 2008). It seems important to consider various multiple factors in memory bias research in people vulnerable to bipolar disorder, including self versus other encoding, high versus low activated states and the role of mental imagery. Further research is needed to spell out their interactive contribution.

The influence of power and solidarity on emotional display rules at work

This study examined the influence of two interpersonal relationship dimensions, relative power and solidarity (closeness), on the emotional display rules that employees report they would adopt in work situations in which they felt happiness or anger. Results demonstrated that display rules involved more control over emotional expressions (i.e., more deamplification and masking of emotion and less expressing and amplification of emotion) when the interaction partner had higher relative power compared to when the interaction partner had equal or lower relative power. This pattern of results was present for both happiness and anger, though the effects were larger for anger. Display rules also involved more control when the interaction partner was low in solidarity compared to when the interaction partner was high in solidarity, with this effect being similar in magnitude for anger and happiness.

Political Sociology and Social Movements

Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.

Emotion experience, expression, and regulation in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with intact experience but abnormal expression of emotion. Because emotion regulation is important in determining levels of experienced and expressed emotion, individuals with AD and control participants were asked to watch film clips under conditions of spontaneous expression, suppression, or amplification of emotion. Both groups had difficulties with behavioral amplification that were related to performance on a measure of theory of mind. However, intentional use of suppression was intact even for those with AD, consistent with models of aging that regard some emotion control processes as being relatively more automatic in older adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

The Assessment of Emotion Regulation in Cognitive Context: The Emotion Amplification and Reduction Scales

The purpose of this study was to provide initial psychometric evidence for the reliability and validity of The Emotion Amplification and Reduction Scales (TEARS), a questionnaire designed to assess perceived ability to change the trajectory of an emotional response. Items were formulated to assess perceived ability to amplify an emotionally response by either prolonging or intensifying an existing emotion. Additional items were selected to measure processes related to emotion reduction, selecting an emotional response or altering an existing emotion by softening, stopping, or shortening it. Both subscales, Emotion Amplification and Emotion Reduction, were found to have good internal consistency. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to document the two-factor structure of the measure and to assess evidence for construct validity. The latent Emotion Reduction variable was found to correlate inversely with negative affect and symptoms of depression. The latent Emotion Amplification variable was found to correlate with higher positive affect and also fatigue. As expected, TEARS is correlated with tonic measures of emotionality.

Identity Work and Collective Action in a Repressive Context: Jewish Resistance on the “Aryan Side” of the Warsaw Ghetto

Research on social movements has found that activists often deploy their identity strategically, putting forth certain images of themselves in order to best achieve their goals. However, such work has focused mostly on settings in which activists are relatively free to pursue different identity-based strategies. In contrast, less is known about the strategic use of identity in more repressive contexts, where the expression of certain identities may be curtailed. This paper addresses this issue by examining the “identity work” of Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Poland. While their resistance was fueled by a strong sense of collective identity, the heavy costs associated with public displays of Jewishness meant that identity also had to be kept hidden in order for the resistance to occur. Unlike the freely chosen, “harmonic” identity work that has been described by most research, these activists' work was forced and more dissonant, characterized by the simultaneous amplification and suppression of identity and emotion. The analysis points to the need for additional studies of activism in high-risk, repressive settings.

Understanding Emotion Regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder: Contributions of Neuroimaging

Understanding Emotion Regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder: Contributions of Neuroimaging

Emotional Feedback and Amplification in Social Interaction

This article develops an interactive, theoretical model of emotional feedback and amplification. Whereas the sociology of emotions typically examines how affect arises, this article focuses on the aftermath of an evoked emotion as it evolves in ongoing interaction. I argue that interactions serve as a stimulus to evoke emotional responses, but as interactions continue, these interactions provide an additional stimulus that feeds back into the initial emotion, amplifying it. I articulate two modes of emotional feedback and amplification: spontaneous and managed. Spontaneous amplification is a by-product of unplanned but continuous interactions. In contrast, managed amplification results from purposeful interactions and can be initiated through either surface acting or deep acting. The process of feedback and amplification is more likely under structural and cultural conditions that facilitate ongoing interactions. An empirical elaboration of the model is drawn from an ethnographic study of “TD's Restaurant.” Examining how feedback and amplification occur in different settings is an ongoing task for sociologists interested in emotions, work and occupations, mental health, and social movements.

A longitudinal analysis of the association between emotion regulation, job satisfaction, and intentions to quit

AbstractThe present longitudinal study explored the association between emotion regulation, defined as the conscious manipulation of one's public displays of emotion, and job satisfaction and intentions to quit. We predicted, based on an emotional dissonance model, that the suppression of unpleasant emotions decreases job satisfaction and increases intentions to quit. We propose a social interaction model that predicts that the amplification of pleasant emotions increases job satisfaction and decreases intentions to quit by improving the quality of interpersonal encounters at work. Data from 111 workers were gathered at two time points separated by four weeks. Advantages of the design included the use of longitudinal data and the statistical control for several personality, job, and demographic factors. Longitudinal regression analyses and tests of mediation revealed that, as predicted, (a) the suppression of unpleasant emotions decreases job satisfaction, which in turn increases intentions to quit, and (b) the amplification of pleasant emotions increases job satisfaction. Applied implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are offered. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Coping Style Influences Compliance with Multidisciplinary Pain Management

The treatment of chronic pain disorders has become multifaceted in recognition of the complexities of chronic pain. However, few models have emerged to predict patients' response to treatment. This study examined a path model of pain treatment outcome, incorporating the variables of coping style and treatment compliance. Results indicated that the suppression of negative emotion was associated with greater treatment compliance, whereas amplification of negative emotion was found to be associated with poorer treatment compliance. An aggressive coping style was found to be associated with poor treatment compliance. In turn, poor compliance predicted poor pre-/post-treatment functional capacity. Moreover, a path model incorporating compliance as a mediator between coping styles and functional impairment revealed an excellent model fit when compared to a path model with no mediators.

When Does Action Elicit More Regret Than Inaction and Is Counterfactual Mutation the Mediator of This Effect?

Norm theory's prediction that actions are more mutable than inactions and, as a consequence, will elicit more regret following a negative outcome was tested in two experiments. Action and inaction mutation frequencies were assessed in a design where both types of behaviors were presented together and when information about only one type was described. In Experiment 1, Kahneman and Tversky's (1982a) original scenario, where the action or inaction was instrumentally related to the negative outcome, was employed. More intense regret was obtained for the acting target than the nonacting one, but only when the information about both targets was presented simultaneously and not when either was presented alone. More importantly, action was not more frequently mutated than inaction and what was mutated was uncorrelated with the regret ratings. Instead, the active target's regret was correlated with the perceived wisdom of the nonacting target's behavioral choice when both targets were presented together and could be compared. In Experiment 2, where the action and inaction were not instrumentally related to the negative outcome, no emotional amplification was observed and inaction was targeted for mutation more often than was action. Discussion focuses on an alternative mechanism, besides mutability, that can account for differential emotion elicitation and on specifying the conditions under which the emotion effect will or will not occur.