Daily Emotions Research Articles

Unpleasant emotions and task-unrelated thoughts and their associations with amygdala activity during emotional distraction: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Previous emotion regulation studies revealed that emotional distraction decreases unpleasant emotions. This study examined whether distraction tasks decrease unpleasant task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and unpleasant emotions when recalling stressful daily interpersonal events. Amygdala activity was examined to assess implicit emotional changes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The behavioral data of 20 university students (mean age: 20.35 ± 1.42 years; range: 18–24 years) and fMRI data of 18 students were examined. As an emotion induction procedure, participants initially freely recalled memories of daily stressful interpersonal events and then responded to a series of questions about their recalled memories presented on a monitor. In the distraction experiment, the questions were re-represented as an emotional stimulation; a distraction task (nonconstant or constant finger tapping) or rest condition was then performed, and ratings were given for attentional state, thought types conceived during the tasks, and emotional state. Decreases in unpleasant emotions and TUTs were defined as distraction effects. We found that unpleasant TUTs decreased in the nonconstant relative to rest condition (p < .05). Furthermore, increased right amygdala activation positively correlated with unpleasant emotions, and bilateral amygdala activation correlated with unpleasant TUTs only in the rest condition, indicating the existence of amygdala activation associated with unpleasant emotions and thoughts. However, such associations were not under nonconstant or constant conditions, indicating distraction effects. Notably, this study showed that emotional distraction can decrease the degree of unpleasant emotions and the occurrence of unpleasant thoughts regarding common daily emotions.

The influence of two and three-dimensional spatial characteristics of industrial parks on the emotional well-being of employees: A case study of Shenzhen

Enhancing the emotions of the workers within industrial parks is crucial for achieving the sustainable development goal (SDG). However, evidence on the impact of industrial park environmental layouts on emotions is limited due to the low attention on the workers in the industrial park. Based on a framework of two-dimensional (2D) industrial park morphology indicators and three-dimensional (3D) spatial objective perception, this study aims to compare and analyze the effect of environmental characteristics in Shenzhen's industrial parks on workers' emotions by using emotional geography and social media data. The potential mechanism that environmental characteristic variables influence the positive emotion index (PEI) is also explored. Using the natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the Weibo check-in data, the study captures the daily emotions of workers in industrial parks. By adopting the linear and spatial regression models, this research reveals the complex relationship between the environmental layout of the total 425 industrial parks in Shenzhen city and the corresponding emotions of the workers. The conclusions are as follows: (1) There is a significant correlation between the environmental layout of the industrial parks and the emotions of the workers, with the correlation among 3D variables being higher than that among 2D variables considering spatial effects. (2) There is a certain degree of coordination and contradiction between the morphological indicators of the industrial parks and the spatial objective perception variables, necessitating the planners to consider both macro-scale and micro-perception environmental characteristics to enhance the workers' emotions. (3) In addition to higher accessibility and more public transportation options, the safer, wider, relatively more open streets, more perceivable green spaces, and richer street life can promote the positive emotions among the workers. On the contrary, the enclosed environments, the dense and overwhelming buildings, and the excessive road density may lead to negative emotions. This study contributes to establish the environmental layouts for the industrial parks that foster positive worker emotions and offer insights for the sustainable development of the industrial parks.

Impact of state and trait emotion regulation on daily emotional exhaustion among Korean school counsellors.

School counsellors in South Korea face significant emotional exhaustion due to their challenging occupational environment. Previous studies have shown that cognitive reappraisal (CR) reduces emotional exhaustion, whereas expressive suppression (ES) increases it. However, these findings predominantly rely on trait questionnaires within cross-sectional approaches, overlooking the dynamic nature of emotion regulation (ER) strategy selection. Individuals may choose strategies that deviate from their general tendencies based on situational demands. There is limited empirical knowledge regarding the interaction between trait and state regulation strategies and their influence on exhaustion. Utilizing the strategy-situation fit hypothesis, this study examines the context-specific effects of ER strategies, considering both situational contexts and individual response tendencies. A multilevel analysis was performed to examine the influence of state and trait ER strategies on daily emotional exhaustion. A daily diary study was conducted for 5days with 111 Korean school counsellors. Daily CR was associated with lower daily exhaustion and daily ES predicted higher daily exhaustion. Contrastingly, none of the trait ER strategies had an impact on daily exhaustion, but the trait level of both strategies significantly moderated the relationship between daily CR and exhaustion. The positive impact of daily CR was more pronounced in school counsellors who often utilized suppression strategies, and this impact was also evident in trait reappraisal. Re-evaluating daily emotions instead of suppressing them may assist in coping with emotional exhaustion caused by work. The effectiveness of these strategies may vary based on an individual's inclination to regulate emotions as state and trait. ER may aid in implementing preventive interventions for school counsellors experiencing emotional exhaustion.

Rejection in romantic relationships: Does rejection sensitivity modulate emotional responses to perceptions of negative interactions?

BackgroundRejection is a highly stressful experience and individuals tend to avoid it whenever possible. In intimate relationships, experiences of rejection can shape the interaction dynamics between partners. Highly rejection sensitive people fear that their romantic partner will reject them and they overreact to any ambiguous cues that might indicate rejection. Furthermore, because they focus on the threat of rejection, they may have difficulty disengaging from rejection-related emotions, persevere in a rejection-focused state and have a reduced capacity to regulate their emotions. The prolonged experience of strong negative emotions, together with maladaptive attempts to respond to rejection, may undermine key relationship maintenance processes that contribute to relationship functioning and lead to negative reciprocity in interactions. The goal of the present study was to shed light on how individuals experience rejection-related emotions and determine whether, following perceptions of negative interactions, rejection sensitivity was associated with stronger negative responses and less efficient downregulation of negative emotions. In addition, we examined whether dyadic patterns of rejection sensitivity were associated with negative emotion dynamics following perceptions of negative interactions.MethodsThe participants (N = 298) were couples experiencing the transition to parenthood. A multilevel modelling approach was used to assess the associations between rejection sensitivity, perceptions of negative interactions and emotional states. The analyses included repeated daily reports for both rejection and emotions.ResultsThe results suggest that rejection sensitive individuals do not report higher negative emotions when they perceive negative interactions. Moreover, rejection sensitive men and women did not remain longer in a negative emotional state after they perceived negative interactions with their partner. Finally, when both men and women partners reported higher levels of rejection sensitivity, neither reported having higher negative emotions after experiencing negative interaction perceptions.ConclusionsOur findings provide further insights into emotional dynamics and rejection sensitivity in romantic relationships. Our results do not provide evidence for a link between rejection sensitivity and higher negative emotions or slower recovery after reports of negative interactions. If individuals suppress their emotions, they may not benefit from regulation with their partner and instead may protect themselves over their relationships. However, in this context, rejection sensitivity might also not constitute a strong predictor of daily emotion fluctuations, but other variables– such as relationship satisfaction – might. Future research may investigate emotional responses in a sample with higher levels of rejection sensitivity and use more diverse measures of perceptions of negative interactions.

Friend Emotional Support and Dynamics of Adolescent Socioemotional Problems.

Emotional support from friends is a crucial source of social support for adolescents, significantly influencing their psychological development. However, previous research has primarily focused on how this support correlates with general levels of socioemotional problems among adolescents, neglecting the significance of daily fluctuations in these problems. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between friend emotional support and both the average and dynamic indicators of daily emotional and peer problems in adolescents. These dynamic indicators include within-domain dynamics-such as inertia, which reflects the temporal dependence of experiences, and volatility, which indicates within-person variance-and cross-domain dynamics, such as transactional effects, which measure the strength of concurrent or lagged associations between daily emotional and peer problems. Participants were 315 seventh-grade Chinese adolescents (Mage = 13.05 years, SD = 0.77 years; 48.3% girls). Adolescents reported on their friends' emotional support at baseline and then completed measures of daily emotion and peer problems over a 10-day period. Using dynamic structural equation models, the results revealed that higher levels of friend emotional support were associated with fewer daily socioemotional problems. This was evident both in terms of average levels and dynamic aspects, characterized by lower mean levels of daily emotional and peer problems, reduced inertia and volatility of these problems, and a weaker spillover effect from daily emotional issues to peer problems. These findings highlight the significant role of friend-emotional support in mitigating adolescents' daily socioemotional challenges.

Associations between emotional reactivity to stress and adolescent substance use: Differences by sex and valence.

Although stress is often related to substance use, it remains unclear whether substance use is related to individual differences in how adolescents respond to stress. Therefore the present study examined associations between substance use and daily emotional reactivity to stress within a year across adolescence. Adolescents (N=330; Mage=16.40, SD=0.74 at study entry; n=186 female; n=138 Latine; n=101 European American; n=72 Asian American; n=19 identifying as another ethnicity including African American and Middle Eastern) completed a longitudinal study, including three assessments between the 10th grade and 3-years post-high school. At each assessment, participants reported frequency of alcohol and cannabis use and the number of substances they had ever used. They also completed 15 daily checklists, in which they reported the number of daily arguments and their daily emotion. Multilevel models suggested that more frequent alcohol and cannabis use were related to attenuated positive emotional reactivity to daily stress (i.e., smaller declines in positive emotion on days when they experienced more arguments) for both male and female adolescents. Associations for negative emotional reactivity to stress varied by sex; more frequent alcohol use and use of more substances in one's lifetime were related to greater anxious emotional reactivity to stress among female adolescents, whereas more frequent alcohol and cannabis use and higher lifetime substance use were related to attenuated depressive emotional reactivity to stress among male adolescents. Taken together, substance use was related to emotional reactivity to daily stress within the same year during adolescence, although associations differed by valence and adolescent sex.

How Are You Feeling Today? Dynamic and Static Indices of Daily Affect Predict Psychological Adjustment One Year Later in a Multi-cohort, Longitudinal Investigation

BackgroundDominant psychotherapies target how individuals experience and understand their daily emotion. Therefore, research examining how daily emotions influence long-term mental health outcomes may help inform treatment development.MethodsThis investigation applied a multi-cohort (n = 378; n = 460), longitudinal design to test how reports of daily emotion predict psychological symptoms, loneliness, and wellbeing one-year later. Dynamic indices (polarity, inertia) reflecting “how” emotional experiences are conceptualized moment-to-moment and static indices (person-mean, standard deviation) of emotion were extracted from 10 daily reports. Each index was modelled individually, in concert with others, and in relation to a key dispositional factor in symptom development: trait anxiety.ResultsDynamic indices predicted outcomes one-year later, but only the effect of positive emotional inertia remained significant after accounting for mean intensity of affect. Daily reports of emotion also predicted small but significant variance in outcomes beyond trait anxiety.ConclusionsResults highlight the role of daily subjective experiences of emotion in long-term mental health outcomes and reinforce their importance as targets for treatment.

Childhood abuse and neglect and profiles of adult emotion dynamics.

Childhood maltreatment (CM) is experienced by ∼40% of all children at major personal and societal costs. The divergent associations between emotional, physical, and sexual abuse or neglect in childhood and differences in adult emotional functioning and regulation were examined in terms of daily emotion intensity, variability, instability, inertia, and diversity, reported over 30 days by 290 Dutch aged 19-73. Participants described their abuse/neglect experiences retrospectively using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Dissecting CM effects on adult emotion dynamics may inform theories on the ontogenesis and functioning of emotions, on effects of abuse and neglect, to better understand (dys)functional emotional development, and to prevent their adverse sequelae. Structural equation models (SEM) showed that most types of CM were associated with specific patterns of emotion dynamics, and only emotional abuse had no unique effects on the emotional dynamic indices. Emotional neglect was associated with most measures of emotion dynamics (i.e., less intense, variable, unstable, and diverse emotions). Sexual abuse associated with increases and physical neglect decreases in negative affect variability and instability. Physical abuse was associated with inertia but with a small effect size. Social contact frequency did not mediate much of the relationship between CM types and emotion dynamics.

Electrophysiological representations of multivariate human emotion experience

ABSTRACT Despite the fact that human daily emotions are co-occurring by nature, most neuroscience studies have primarily adopted a univariate approach to identify the neural representation of emotion (emotion experience within a single emotion category) without adequate consideration of the co-occurrence of different emotions (emotion experience across different emotion categories simultaneously). To investigate the neural representations of multivariate emotion experience, this study employed the inter-situation representational similarity analysis (RSA) method. Researchers used an EEG dataset of 78 participants who watched 28 video clips and rated their experience on eight emotion categories. The EEG-based electrophysiological representation was extracted as the power spectral density (PSD) feature per channel in the five frequency bands. The inter-situation RSA method revealed significant correlations between the multivariate emotion experience ratings and PSD features in the Alpha and Beta bands, primarily over the frontal and parietal-occipital brain regions. The study found the identified EEG representations to be reliable with sufficient situations and participants. Moreover, through a series of ablation analyses, the inter-situation RSA further demonstrated the stability and specificity of the EEG representations for multivariate emotion experience. These findings highlight the importance of adopting a multivariate perspective for a comprehensive understanding of the neural representation of human emotion experience.

Daily Emotional Experiences in Persons with Parkinson Disease: Relations to Subjective Cognitive Complaints and Quality of Life

Aim This study aims to explore positive and negative emotional experiences during the performance of daily occupations in Persons with Parkinson Disease (PwPD). Methods This cross-sectional study included 32 PwPD and 14 healthy older adults. Participants completed three questionnaires that measured emotional experiences during daily occupations, subjective cognitive complaints, and quality of life. Results PwPD experienced higher rates of negative affect during all occupations. Lower rates of positive affect were found only during personal care tasks. Additionally, experiences of daily negative affect were positively associated with subjective cognitive complaints and negatively associated with quality of life. Conclusion Different rates of positive and negative affect are experienced by PwPD during daily occupations. The experience of daily emotions has implications for understanding emotional processing in neurological populations. Occupational therapy practitioners should consider the role of emotions when providing occupation-based interventions for PwPD.

A qualitative study exploring experiences of female family caregivers of people with dementia in acceptance and commitment therapy

ABSTRACTObjectiveFew studies have explored the experiences of family caregivers of persons living with dementia (PLWD) in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). This study aimed for in-depth exploration on experiences of family caregivers of PLWD in ACT.MethodIndividual interviews were conducted with eight family caregivers of PLWD who were women and participated in an eight-week video conferencing ACT program. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.ResultsTwo overarching themes emerged, including improved strategies in responding to emotions and thoughts in challenging caregiving situations and taking better care of myself. Participants perceived that ACT skills training improved their coping strategies and, subsequently, their daily emotions and relationship with their relatives with dementia. Participants also perceived ACT strategies and exercises as helpful and applicable resources for daily use in challenging caregiving situations. In addition, ACT helped participants feel comfortable taking the time to take care of themselves without feeling guilty and acknowledge that they must take care of themselves first to take better care of their relatives with dementia. These changes helped caregivers increase their participation in valued activities.ConclusionsThis study contributes to the literature by exploring experiences of family caregivers of PLWD in ACT, including its perceived benefits on themselves.Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT04847986 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04847986)

감정일기를 통해 살펴본 예비 유아 교사들의 교육 실습 경험 탐색

The current study explored early childhood pre-service teachers’ emotions and experiences during student teaching through their daily emotion logs. Fifty students who enrolled in student teaching courses at one 4-year university in a G-province participated in this study. Throughout 19 days in their student teaching, 815 emotion logs were collected. Word Cloud was utilized to visualize the tendency of pre-service teachers’ emotions during student teaching. As a result, emotions of worries, happiness, satisfaction, and sense of accomplishment were prominent in the first week, emotions such as tranquility and respect were appeared in the second week, emotions of confusion, fear, and anxiety were reported frequently in the third week, and emotions of happiness, worries, satisfaction, and tranquility were reported often in the last week. Also, to examine the meaning of student teaching for pre-service teachers, emotion logs were analyzed. Emerging themes include vague worries and fear, tiredness and fatigue, sense of belonging, lack of capability after the first teaching, and sense of expectancy. The findings of this study will contribute to teacher preparation programs to better understand and better support pre-service teachers’ student teaching experiences.

When daily emotions spill into life satisfaction: Age differences in emotion globalizing.

Although the objective conditions of people's lives are fairly stable from day to day, daily life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster. For some people, life satisfaction hitches a ride on the emotional rollercoaster (i.e., momentary emotions spill over into broader evaluations of life). The extent to which positive and negative emotions spill over into life satisfaction is referred to as positive and negative emotion globalizing. Initial evidence suggests that emotion globalizing varies between individuals and is linked to a maladaptive psychological profile. Integrating a lifespan perspective, this is the first study to identify and describe age differences in emotion globalizing using data from two adult community samples (Study 1: N = 133 women, age range = 23-78; Study 2: N = 137, age range = 18-95). Further, we tested key boundary conditions of emotion globalizing by examining two types of emotions (i.e., current or after most stressful event of the day) and two types of satisfaction (i.e., overall life satisfaction [life satisfaction] or current day satisfaction [day satisfaction]). Specifically, we investigated how younger and older adults differed in the associations of current emotions with life satisfaction (i.e., emotion globalizing; Study 1), stressor-related emotions with life satisfaction (i.e., stressor-related emotion globalizing; Study 1), and stressor-related emotions with day satisfaction (Study 2). Results revealed that older (compared to younger) adults exhibited less negative (but not positive) emotion globalizing and stressor-related emotion globalizing. We found no age differences in the association between stressor-related emotions and day satisfaction. These findings extend insights into emotion globalizing and inform theories of emotional aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Feeling Emotions for Future People

It is more difficult to feel emotions for future generations than for those who currently exist, and this seems to be one of the reasons why we struggle to care for the future. According to a number of authors, who have recently focused on the psychological flaws that prevent us from dealing with transgenerational issues, the main problem is “future discounting”. Challenging this common view, we argue that the main reason we struggle to care about future generations lies in two features of our daily emotions: the «identified victim effect» and the decrease in empathy for people who are different from us. These traits give rise to two puzzles we call the problem of the indeterminateness of future persons and the problem of dissimilarity. After having analyzed these problems of our moral psychology, we show how they allow us to account for some differences in affectivity towards a number of entities that do not currently exist, such as future generations, past generations and fictional characters. Bearing in mind the real limits of our emotions when dealing with future people, we sketch an alternative proposal on how to develop emotions to provide citizens of liberal democracies with a motivation to act in favor of future generations.

Putting the emotion regulation process into person-specific context: An experience sampling and mobile sensing study

Emotion regulation is theorized to be situation-dependent. Thus far, researchers have looked for situational predictors of emotion regulation across individuals without considering that associations could vary from person to person. In a 14-day experience sampling and mobile sensing study (N = 164), we used Group Iterative Multiple Model Estimation (GIMME) to test how the emotion regulation process (goals, motives, strategies, and success) is linked to aspects of situations. A variety of idiographic associations between situations and emotion regulation emerged. Both self-reported subjective situations and passively sensed objective situations predicted emotion regulation, though more effects emerged for self-reported subjective situations (e.g., perceived negativity, sociality, or duty). Implications are discussed for personalized prediction of and intervention on daily emotion regulation.

The effect of age on emotion regulation patterns in daily life: Findings from an experience sampling study.

The present experience sampling study investigated the effect of age on emotion regulation patterns (i.e., emotion regulation strategy effectiveness, variability, and differentiation) in daily life. The study further explored the implications of potential age differences in emotion regulation patterns for well-being. A sample of 406 adults (age range: 18-81, 62.8% female) were prompted five times a day for seven days to rate momentary emotions, emotion regulation strategy use, and emotion regulation strategy effectiveness. Based on these ratings, indicators of emotion regulation variability and differentiation were calculated. Well-being outcomes included daily positive and negative emotions, and symptoms of depression and anxiety assessed at baseline. The findings revealed reduced emotion regulation variability with age and a negative association between emotion regulation variability and well-being. There were no associations between age and emotion regulation effectiveness or differentiation. Emotion regulation effectiveness was associated with more positive and less negative daily emotions, and these associations were stronger for younger adults compared to older adults. Drawing on prominent lifespan theories, the findings may indicate that as people age, they select and apply a few strategies that they know will be effective given the context and their resources which leads to reduced emotion regulation variability but ultimately more well-being. Concerning emotion regulation effectiveness, the findings suggest that effectiveness is less important for emotional well-being in daily life in older adulthood possibly because well-being is determined by other factors (e.g., less frequent and more predictable stressors) with age.

Ecological monitoring of emotional intensity, variability, and instability in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Results of a multicentre study.

Evaluating emotional experiences in the life of people with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder (SSD) is fundamental for developing interventions aimed at promoting well-being in specific times and contexts. However, little is known about emotional variability in this population. In DiAPAson project, we evaluated between- and within-person differences in emotional intensity, variability, and instability between people with SSD and healthy controls, and the association with psychiatric severity and levels of functioning. 102 individuals diagnosed with SSD (57 residential patients, 46 outpatients) and 112 healthy controls were thoroughly evaluated. Daily emotions were prospectively assessed with Experience Sampling Method eight times a day for a week. Statistical analyses included ANOVA, correlations, and generalized linear models. Participants with SSD, and especially residential patients, had a higher intensity of negative emotions when compared to controls. Moreover, all people with SSD reported a greater between-person-variability of both positive and negative emotions and greater intra-variability of negative emotions than healthy controls. In addition, the emotion variability in people with SSD does not follow a linear or quadratic trend but is more "chaotic" if compared to controls. Adequate assessments of positive and negative emotional experiences and their time course in people with SSD can assist mental health professionals with well-being assessment, implementing targeted interventions through the identification of patterns, triggers, and potential predictors of emotional states.

Associations between emotion reactivity to daily interpersonal stress and acute social-evaluative stress during late adolescence.

Emotion reactivity refers to the intensity of changes in positive and negative emotion following a stimulus, typically studied with respect to daily stressors (e.g., arguments, demands) or laboratory stressors, including the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Yet, it is unclear whether emotion reactivity to daily and to laboratory stressors are related. The present study examined whether greater emotion reactivity to daily stressors (i.e., arguments, demands) is associated with greater reactivity to the TSST. Late adolescents (N=82; Mage=18.35, SD=0.51, range 17-19; 56.1% female; 65.9% Latine, 34.2% European American) reported whether they experienced arguments and demands with friends, family, and individuals at school and their negative and positive emotion nightly for 15days. They also completed the TSST, a validated paradigm for eliciting social-evaluative threat, and reported their emotion at baseline and immediately post-TSST. Multilevel models examined whether daily and laboratory emotion reactivity were related by testing whether the daily associations between arguments and demands with emotion differed by emotion reactivity to the TSST. Individuals with greater positive emotion reactivity (i.e., greater reductions in positive emotion) and greater negative emotion reactivity to the TSST showed greater positive emotion reactivity to daily demands. Emotion reactivity to the TSST was not significantly related to emotion reactivity to arguments. Findings provide preliminary evidence that emotion reactivity to the TSST relates to some aspects of daily emotion reactivity, with relations differing depending on type of daily stressor and valence of emotion. Results contextualise the implications of emotion reactivity to the TSST for daily stress processes.

A Network Approach to Assessing the Relationship between Discrimination and Daily Emotion Dynamics

Discrimination-health research has been critiqued for neglecting the endogeneity of reports of discrimination to negative affect and the multidimensionality of mental health. To address these challenges, we model discrimination’s relationship to multiple psychological variables without directional constraints. Using time-dense data to identify associational network structures allows for joint testing of the social stress hypothesis, prominent in discrimination-health literature, and the negativity bias hypothesis, an endogeneity critique rooted in social psychology. Our results show discrimination predicts negative emotions from day-to-day but not vice versa, indicating that racial discrimination is a risk factor and not symptom of negative emotion. Furthermore, we identify sadness, guilt, hostility, and fear as a locus of interrelated emotions sensitive to racism-related stressors that emerges over time. Thus, we find support for what race scholars have argued for 120+ years in a model without a priori directional restrictions and then build on this work by empirically identifying cascading mental health consequences of discrimination.

The Impact of Daily Emotion Regulation Strategies on Creativity and Performance

The Impact of Daily Emotion Regulation Strategies on Creativity and Performance