Experience Of Discrete Emotions Research Articles

Unraveling Moral Evaluations: A Qualitative Exploration of Young Individuals’ Causal Beliefs and Moral Emotions

This article presents an empirical examination of attribution and appraisal theories, focusing on young individuals’ beliefs about causality and feelings toward two social issues impacting the welfare of others: food insecurity and opioid addiction. Using a deductive qualitative approach, this investigation deepens and expands our theoretical understanding of how causal beliefs shape moral evaluations and corresponding emotions. Through focus group discussions ( N = 9), participants revealed distinct patterns of causal cognitions and specific negative, other-oriented moral emotions. Causes of individuals’ hardships were characterized along four themes (personal choices, inherited circumstances, systemic issues, unexpected events), linking beliefs with corresponding discrete emotional experiences resembling contempt, pity, resentment, and compassion. Findings provide a description of attributions that supports a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between causality and emotion, thus contributing to the current theoretical perspective. Practical implications and opportunities for further investigation are discussed in view of the broader goal of developing strategies to amplify civic engagement.

The Role of Emotion Differentiation in the Association Between Momentary Affect and Tobacco/Nicotine Craving in Young Adults.

Tobacco/nicotine use is commonly initiated during adolescence or young adulthood, which increases the likelihood of continued use into adulthood and related adverse health outcomes. Despite interest in cessation, achieving and maintaining abstinence is difficult among this population. Cravings are often a barrier to abstinence, which have been associated with intensity of affect at the moment level. Emotion differentiation involves the ability to distinguish between discrete emotion states, and previous work suggests it may moderate the effect of momentary affect on craving, which has never been explored among young adults who are smoking or vaping nicotine. In a sample of young adults (N = 37, observations = 2020, ages 18-25, 51% female, and 78% white) interested in quitting smoking or vaping, we used real-time, naturalistic data capture via mobile phones to examine the interaction of momentary affect and trait emotion differentiation on nicotine craving. Participants were prompted with four surveys per day for 35 days and asked to make a 48-h quit attempt on day 7. Multilevel models showed moments of higher-than-average momentary negative affect (NA; b = 0.39, p < .001), and positive affect (PA; b = 0.26, p = .001) were associated with greater levels of craving. NA emotion differentiation significantly moderated the associations between PA and craving (b = -0.63, p = .031) and NA and craving (b = -0.67, p = .003). Findings from this exploratory analysis suggest that for young adults engaging in a nicotine quit attempt, greater ability to differentiate NA weakens the momentary association between intense affect and craving. Results of this study show that the ability to differentiate between discrete emotional experiences may protect young adults against nicotine craving during moments of intense affective experience. These preliminary findings suggest that emotion differentiation, a modifiable construct, could be an important treatment target for individuals engaged in treatment for nicotine dependence.

Parents’ and friends’ responses to discrete negative emotions: Associations with adolescent emotional experiences

AbstractEmotion socialization (ES) impacts a range of youth socioemotional outcomes. However, research often examines parent socialization of negative emotions more broadly. Research examining multiple socializers demonstrates that variety in ES messages may promote flexibility in youth socio‐emotional adjustment. The current study examined how parents’ and friends’ supportive socialization of discrete negative emotions (anger, sadness, worry) related to adolescents’ emotional experiences. Eighty‐seven adolescents (50 girls; 13–15 years old, M age = 14.23 years) reported on parent and friend supportive ES in 8th grade. Sixty‐four of these adolescents reported their own emotional experiences in 9th and/or 10th grade. Parents’ supportive ES was higher than friends’ for sadness and worry. Divergence between parent and friend ES of sadness related to lower increases in anger over time. There were effects of convergence in ES of anger, as matches between parent and friend ES were related to less experience of all three negative emotions. There were unique effects of parent and friend ES of worry. Parent ES of worry related to adolescents’ balance of anger and sadness, whereas friend ES of worry related to decreased sadness over time. These findings suggest that ES and its relations with adolescent emotional experience varied by discrete emotions, as each carries a different meaning and function. Future research should examine processes connecting discrete emotional experiences within interactions and across time.

Anger and Sadness Expressions Situated in Both Positive and Negative Contexts: An Investigation in South Korea and the United States.

A formidable challenge to the research of non-verbal behavior can be in the assumptions that we sometimes make, and the subsequent questions that arise from those assumptions. In this article, we proceed with an investigation that would have been precluded by the assumption of a 1:1 correspondence between facial expressions and discrete emotional experiences. We investigated two expressions that in the normative sense are considered negative expressions. One expression, “anger” could be described as clenched fists, furrowed brows, tense jaws and lips, the showing of teeth, and flared nostrils, and the other “sadness” could be described as downward turned mouths, tears, drooping eyes, and wrinkled foreheads. Here, we investigated the prevalence, understanding, and use of these expressions in both positive and negative contexts in South Korea and the United States. We found evidence in both cultures, that anger and sadness displays are used to express positive emotions, a notion relevant to Dimorphous Theory. Moreover, we found that anger and sadness expressions communicated appetitive feelings of wanting to “go!” and consummatory feelings of wanting to “pause,” respectively. There were moderations of our effects consistent with past work in Affect Valuation Theory and Display Rule Theory. We discuss our findings, their theoretical relevance, and how the assumptions that are made can narrow the questions that we ask in the field on non-verbal behavior.

Dimensional analysis of emotion trajectories before and after disordered eating behaviors in a sample of women with bulimia nervosa

There is an established relationship between increases in negative affect and engagement in binge eating and purging behaviors. Some evidence suggests that these behaviors may also be maintained via subsequent increases in positive affect. However, negative and positive affect are broad terms encompassing many emotions, and there is a theoretical speculation that every emotion consists of at least of three separate dimensions: valence, arousal, and approach/withdrawal. We conducted secondary analyses on a previously collected dataset using ecological momentary assessment in 133 women with bulimia nervosa. Participants rated their experience of discrete emotions and bulimic behaviors six times per day. Negative and positive emotions were organized within the 3-dimensional space characterized by valence, arousal, and approach/withdrawal. With multilevel modeling, we examined the trajectories of dimensionally defined emotion constructs prior and subsequent to bulimic behaviors as well as on days with and without bulimic behaviors. Negative valence, high arousal, and avoidance typified emotions that reached the highest levels before bulimic behaviors and were at the highest mean levels on days with bulimic behaviors. Arousal did not appear to moderate the trajectories of positive emotions. Application of a dimensional understanding of emotions may help elucidate the complex relationship between mood and disordered eating.

Teachers’ emotions and emotion management: integrating emotion regulation theory with emotional labor research

While the similarities between emotion regulation (Gross in J Personal Soc Psychol 74:224–237, 1998a) and emotional labor (Hochschild in The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983) have been theoretically discussed, empirical research on their relation is lacking. We examined the relations between the two constructs as well as their relations with teachers’ discrete emotions in a sample of 189 secondary school teachers. The results showed that reappraisal correlated positively with deep acting, whereas suppression correlated positively with surface acting. The findings further suggest that reappraisal and deep acting are linked to experiencing positive emotions, whereas suppression and surface acting are linked to experiencing negative emotions. However, there also were some differences in how emotion regulation and emotional labor were related to teachers’ discrete emotional experiences. Specifically, reappraisal and deep acting strategies were positively related to enjoyment; in addition, deep acting was negatively related to negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, and frustration. By contrast, suppression and surface acting strategies were positively associated with negative emotions (i.e., suppression with anxiety; surface acting with anxiety, anger, and frustration), and surface acting was negatively associated with the positive emotion enjoyment. Implications for integrating research on teachers’ emotion regulation and emotional labor are discussed.

Emotion differentiation and intensity during acute tobacco abstinence: A comparison of heavy and light smokers

The ability to recognize and label discrete emotions, termed emotion differentiation, is particularly pertinent to overall emotion regulation abilities. Patterns of deficient emotion differentiation have been associated with mood and anxiety disorders but have yet to be examined in relation to nicotine dependence. This study employed ecological momentary assessment to examine smokers' subjective experience of discrete emotions during 24-h of forced tobacco abstinence. Thirty daily smokers rated their emotions up to 23 times over the 24-hour period, and smoking abstinence was biologically verified. From these data, we computed individual difference measures of emotion differentiation, overall emotion intensity, and emotional variability. As hypothesized, heavy smokers reported poorer negative emotion differentiation than light smokers (d=0.55), along with more intense negative emotion (d=0.97) and greater negative emotion variability (d=0.97). No differences were observed in positive emotion differentiation. Across the sample, poorer negative emotion differentiation was associated with greater endorsement of psychological motives to smoke, including negative and positive reinforcement motives, while positive emotion differentiation was not.

A multimodal examination of emotional responding to a trauma-relevant film among traumatic motor vehicle accident survivors.

The Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen) has shown promise as a behavioral measure of emotional experience. The current study examined the degree of (de)synchrony between self-reported and facial expressions of fear, disgust, and sadness in response to a traumatic event-relevant film among individuals who had experienced a traumatic motor vehicle accident. Given high rates of comorbidity between posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and depressive symptoms, the potential impacts of both PTSS and depressive symptoms on emotional responding were examined. Results demonstrated synchrony between self-reported and facial expressions of disgust and sadness; however, no association between measures of fear was observed. Furthermore, depressive symptoms were associated with greater fear responding and PTSS were associated only with self-reported fear. Together, results support the importance of examining discrete negative emotions, rather than broad valence categories, when examining fear-based responding in traumatic event-exposed populations. Additional research examining the psychometric properties of the Facial Action Coding System as a measure of discrete emotional experiences among traumatic event-exposed individuals is needed to advance multimodal assessment approaches that yield incremental information for understanding emotional responding in this population.

INDIVIDUAL ALPHA FREQUENCY EEG AS NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ENDOPHENOTYPE OF AFFECTIVE PREDISPOSITIONS

Individual alpha frequency (IAF) of electroencephalogram (EEG) is regarded as a neurophysiological endophenotypic indicator of cognitive activity featuring individual propensity to efficient cognitive performance and creativity. Considering that cognitive coping style is intrinsic part of emotional regulation, defining medical aspects of individual health as well as risks of psychosomatic diseases, we intended to assess IAF contribution into mechanisms of individual emotional reactivity. As participants was healthy man subjects (n = 62). Three models of laboratory induced emotions were used: emotional perception (1); anxious apprehension (awaiting of inescapable aversive punishment) (2); experience of discrete emotions of anger and joy (3). It was revealed that high IAF individuals exhibit predisposition to prevalence of parasympathetic activity in the global circuit of autonomous regulation, proactive-like coping with inescapable threat, prevailing contribution of the positive emotional stance and better accessibility of recent positive memories. By contrast, low IAF subjects manifested predisposition to prevalence of sympathetic activity in the global circuit of autonomous regulation, maladaptive avoidance-like coping with inescapable threat, insufficiency positive emotional arousal mechanisms. It is suggested that IAF creates a "hardware" construct featuring individual emotional space and adaptability of coping styles to emotional challenges.

Age, Physical Functioning, and Affect in Midlife and Older Adulthood

The aim of this study was to examine age differences in high- and low-arousal positive and negative affect, and associations of physical functioning with affect over the latter half of the life course. Participants consisted of 39,958 midlife and older adults contributing to DYNOPTA; a large-scale collaborative project concerned with pooling data from Australian studies of aging. Items assessing the experience of discrete emotions were selected to represent different combinations of high- and low-arousal affect, and positive and negative valence affect. Older adults were more likely to endorse low-arousal positive affect, and less likely to endorse negative affect (both high and low arousal) relative to those in midlife. Better self-reported physical functioning was associated with younger age, higher positive, and lower negative affect, with physical functioning emerging as a suppressor of associations of age with affect in regression analyses. The results, based on a very large sample of older adults, are consistent with those of other studies demonstrating lower levels of negative emotion among older, relative to midlife adults. The findings also highlight the relevance of physical functioning to emotional well-being over the latter part of the life course.

Mindfulness and its relationship to emotional regulation.

Research on the effectiveness and mechanisms of mindfulness training applied in psychotherapy is still in its infancy (Erisman & Roemer, 2010). For instance, little is known about the extent and processes through which mindfulness practice improves emotion regulation. This experience sampling study assessed the relationship between mindfulness, emotion differentiation, emotion lability, and emotional difficulties. Young adult participants reported their current emotional experiences 6 times per day during 1 week on a PalmPilot device. Based on these reports of emotions, indices of emotional differentiation and emotion lability were composed for negative and positive emotions. Mindfulness was associated with greater emotion differentiation and less emotional difficulties (i.e., emotion lability and self-reported emotion dysregulation). Mediational models indicated that the relationship between mindfulness and emotion lability was mediated by emotion differentiation. Furthermore, emotion regulation mediated the relationship between mindfulness and both negative emotion lability and positive emotion differentiation. This experience sampling study indicates that self-reported levels of mindfulness are related to higher levels of differentiation of one's discrete emotional experiences in a manner reflective of effective emotion regulation.

An Experimental Investigation of Verbal Expression of Emotion in Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa

This study aims to use an experimental design to investigate verbal expression of emotion in anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Forty-two patients with AN, 26 patients with BN and 34 healthy controls (HCs) were videoed talking about discrete emotional experiences. Talks were analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Participants also completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). People with AN used fewer words when describing their emotional experiences and fewer positive affect words than HCs. People with BN were indistinguishable from HCs. Both ED groups had higher scores on the suppression subscale of the ERQ compared with HCs. Suppression was negatively correlated with negative verbal expression. This study highlights differences between AN and BN in emotion expression. It supports a model of AN, which highlights emotion inhibition as a maintaining factor of the illness. Methods of emotion regulation in EDs may contribute to increased negative mood and poorer social functioning.

Discrete Emotion and Motivation: Relative Activation in the Appetitive and Aversive Motivational Systems as a Function of Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Joy During Televised Information Campaigns

This study investigated whether predictable motivational activation in the appetitive and aversive systems underlies the production and experience of discrete emotions (anger, sadness, joy, and fear) experienced while viewing televised public service announcements. This study used both self-reports and physiological measures to index motivational activation and emotional experience. In the joy condition, physiological data provided moderate support for the prediction that strong appetitive motivational activation underlies the experience of joy but did not support the concurrent prediction of aversive motivational inhibition. However, the self-report data provided good evidence for both. In the fear condition, the self-report data supported the prediction of strong aversive and inhibited appetitive activation. The physiological data provide strong support for a highly activated aversive system but no support for an inhibited appetitive system. In the sadness condition, the self-report and physiological data supported the prediction that sadness is a moderately activated aversive condition. In the anger condition, the physiological data supported the prediction that anger is a coactive state with both aversive and appetitive activation. This study suggests that research on cognition, emotion, and motivation can benefit by blending findings and insights from both discrete and dimensional approaches to the study of emotion.

Emotional Segues and the Management of Emotion by Women and Men

Recent studies suggest that gender may be less influential on the experience of emotion than originally believed. Most of these studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on gender differences in discrete emotional experiences, paying less attention to the ways in which emotions may co-occur within a relatively short period. Using the General Survey's 1996 emotions module, I examine the correlational structure of nine latent emotion factors – tranquility, joy, hope, pride, self-reproach, anger, rage, fear and distress – by gender. Using the technique of shortest path analysis, I find women's most common emotional pathways are longer, more complex, and more likely to use more positive and less powerful emotions than those most common to men. Implications for emotion management, both personal and interpersonal, are discussed.

Emotional labor: A conceptualization and scale development

Despite increased research attention, the emotional labor construct remains without a clear conceptualization and operationalization. This study designed a conceptually grounded, psychometrically sound instrument to measure emotional labor with an emphasis on the experience of discrete emotions—the Discrete Emotions Emotional Labor Scale (DEELS). This conceptualization and operationalization of emotional labor departs from existing efforts because it focuses on the behavior of emotional expression, encompassing genuine, faked, and suppressed positive and negative emotional displays. Results provide initial evidence for the convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the DEELS.

The role of the face in human emotion: first system or one of many?

Evidence relating to the hypothesis on facial feedback which ties the experience of discrete emotions to feedback from innately patterned facial expressions is discussed. Strong evidence is deduced for a more general form of the hypothesis, but the requirements of necessity and sufficiency representing the strictest form are only satisfied within narrow limits of experimental manipulations which are not common to all investigations. Evidence is deemed to support a relationship between facial expression and emotion, but facial expression is regarded as one of many systems and cannot be assigned an exclusive role (either as first system or as necessary system).