Emotion-eliciting Situation Research Articles

Happier than thou? A self-enhancement bias in emotion attribution.

People tend to judge themselves as exhibiting above average levels of desirable traits-including competence, kindness, and life satisfaction-but does this self-enhancement extend to emotional responses? Here, we explore this question by having people attribute emotions to themselves and others following simple gambles. We demonstrate that people display an emotional self-enhancement bias that varies with the context of the emotion-eliciting situation. People judge themselves as experiencing more positive emotional reactions on average, and they also believed that others' emotions are more sensitive to gamble outcomes, such that people judge others to experience stronger negative affect in response to negative outcomes (Study 1). This self-enhancement bias further tracks social distance, such that people attribute less positive and more negative emotion to more dissimilar, as compared with more similar others (Study 2). People also predict less favorable emotional states for themselves and others experiencing events in the future, as compared with the present (Study 3), suggesting that this attribution bias extends across multiple dimensions of psychological distance. Broadly, these data suggest that people exhibit self-enhancement in emotion attribution, but do so in subtle ways that depend on situational and social factors. (PsycINFO Database Record

Emotion appraisal dimensions inferred from vocal expressions are consistent across cultures: a comparison between Australia and India.

This study explored the perception of emotion appraisal dimensions on the basis of speech prosody in a cross-cultural setting. Professional actors from Australia and India vocally portrayed different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, pride, relief, sadness, serenity and shame) by enacting emotion-eliciting situations. In a balanced design, participants from Australia and India then inferred aspects of the emotion-eliciting situation from the vocal expressions, described in terms of appraisal dimensions (novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conduciveness, urgency, power and norm compatibility). Bayesian analyses showed that the perceived appraisal profiles for the vocally expressed emotions were generally consistent with predictions based on appraisal theories. Few group differences emerged, which suggests that the perceived appraisal profiles are largely universal. However, some differences between Australian and Indian participants were also evident, mainly for ratings of norm compatibility. The appraisal ratings were further correlated with a variety of acoustic measures in exploratory analyses, and inspection of the acoustic profiles suggested similarity across groups. In summary, results showed that listeners may infer several aspects of emotion-eliciting situations from the non-verbal aspects of a speaker's voice. These appraisal inferences also seem to be relatively independent of the cultural background of the listener and the speaker.

The Relationship of Botín Foundation's Emotional Intelligence Test (TIEFBA) with Personal and Scholar Adjustment of Spanish Adolescents

This study analyzes the relationship of Botín Foundation's Emotional Intelligence Test for Adolescents (TIEFBA), a new ability-based measure to assess emotional intelligence (EI), with personal and scholar adjustment in Spanish adolescents. The instrument, based on the Mayer and Salovey model (1997), measures four branches of abilities while the participant is executing emotional tasks triggered by an emotion-eliciting situation. The TIEFBA was developed according to the Situational Judgment Test paradigm and it comprises eight scenes designed to evoke positive and negative emotions. A total of 1684 Spanish adolescents (48.2% males, mean age 14.37) completed the TIEFBA. Data on personality, empathy, intelligence and psychosocial adjustment were collected. The results provide evidence of instrument reliability and factorial, convergent, discriminant and some predictive validity. They further suggest that the TIEFBA is a promising new measure for assessing EI in Spanish adolescents, which will allow researchers and educators to understand better how EI affects youth as well as assess the impact of EI interventions.

La relación del Test de Inteligencia Emocional de la Fundación Botín (TIEFBA) con el ajuste personal y escolar de adolescentes españoles

This study analyzes the relationship of Botín Foundation's Emotional Intelligence Test for Adolescents (TIEFBA), a new ability-based measure to assess emotional intelligence (EI), with personal and scholar adjustment in Spanish adolescents. The instrument, based on the Mayer and Salovey model (1997), measures four branches of abilities while the participant is executing emotional tasks triggered by an emotion-eliciting situation. The TIEFBA was developed according to the Situational Judgment Test paradigm and it comprises eight scenes designed to evoke positive and negative emotions. A total of 1684 Spanish adolescents (48.2% males, mean age 14.37) completed the TIEFBA. Data on personality, empathy, intelligence and psychosocial adjustment were collected. The results provide evidence of instrument reliability and factorial, convergent, discriminant and some predictive validity. They further suggest that the TIEFBA is a promising new measure for assessing EI in Spanish adolescents, which will allow researchers and educators to understand better how EI affects youth as well as assess the impact of EI interventions.

That's not funny! - But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory.

Previous research has shown that humorous reappraisal can reduce elicited negative emotions, suggesting that humor may be a functional strategy to cope with emotionally negative situations. However, the effect of humorous reappraisal on later memory about the emotion-eliciting situation is currently unknown, although this is crucial for more adaptive responding in future situations. To address this issue, we examined the effects of humorous reappraisal on both emotional experience and memory, compared to non-humorous rational reappraisal and a non-reappraisal control condition. Replicating previous findings, humorous reappraisal reduced evoked negative valence and arousal levels very effectively, and the down-regulation of experienced negative emotions was even more pronounced after humorous compared to rational reappraisal. Regarding later memory for emotion-eliciting stimuli, both humorous and rational reappraisal reduced free recall, but recognition memory was unaffected, with memory strength being stronger after humorous than after rational reappraisal. These results indicate that humor seems to be indeed an optimal strategy to cope with negative situations because humor can help us to feel better when confronted with negative stimuli, but still allows us to retrieve stimulus information later when afforded to do so by the presence of appropriate contextual features.

Dispositional cognitive reappraisal modulates the neural correlates of fear acquisition and extinction

Adverse learning experiences play a significant role in the etiology of anxiety disorders. However, not all individuals experiencing negative events develop heightened anxiety. This is possibly due to individual differences in the regulation of negative emotions associated with these negative events. Cognitive reappraisal is defined as reinterpreting an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that changes its emotional impact. A more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal in daily life has been shown to be more adaptive. However, no study to date examined the association of dispositional cognitive reappraisal with emotional learning, in order to elucidate individual differences in negative emotional responses towards aversive events.The goal of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to investigate the association of dispositional cognitive reappraisal with subjective, electrodermal and neural correlates of fear acquisition and extinction. Data of 41 healthy individuals, who participated in a socially relevant differential conditioning paradigm (acquisition and extinction learning: day 1, extinction recall: day 2), were acquired.Dispositional cognitive reappraisal was negatively associated with right insula, and hippocampus activation during acquisition. Furthermore, the reduction of self-reported conditioned fear during extinction learning as well as reduced insula and enhanced rostral anterior cingulate cortex activation during extinction learning was related to cognitive reappraisal. In addition, reduced recovery of conditioned arousal, reduced anterior cingulate and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation and enhanced ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation during extinction recall was observed in individuals with higher cognitive reappraisal scores.The results indicate that dispositional cognitive reappraisal modulates subjective and neural correlates of fear conditioning, probably leading to reduced acquisition and stronger extinction learning and recall. These results point to the important role of dispositional cognitive reappraisal in the development and modification of conditioned emotional responses and might further improve our understanding of anxiety disorders.

Liberating Reason From the Passions

A classic problem in moral psychology concerns whether and when moral judgments are driven by intuition versus deliberate reasoning. In this investigation, we explored the role of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that involves construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that diminishes the intensity of the emotional experience. We hypothesized that although emotional reactions evoke initial moral intuitions, reappraisal weakens the influence of these intuitions, leading to more deliberative moral judgments. Three studies of moral judgments in emotionally evocative, disgust-eliciting moral dilemmas supported our hypothesis. A greater tendency to reappraise was related to fewer intuition-based judgments (Study 1). Content analysis of open-ended descriptions of moral-reasoning processes revealed that reappraisal was associated with longer time spent in deliberation and with fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 2). Finally, in comparison with participants who simply watched an emotion-inducing film, participants who had been instructed to reappraise their reactions while watching the film subsequently reported less intense emotional reactions to moral dilemmas, and these dampened reactions led, in turn, to fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 3).

Emotion Appraisal Dimensions can be Inferred From Vocal Expressions

Vocal expressions are thought to convey information about speakers' emotional states but may also reflect the antecedent cognitive appraisal processes that produced the emotions. We investigated the perception of emotion-eliciting situations on the basis of vocal expressions. Professional actors vocally portrayed different emotions by enacting emotion-eliciting situations. Judges then rated these expressions with respect to the emotion-eliciting situation described in terms of appraisal dimensions (i.e., novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conduciveness, urgency, power, self- and other responsibility, and norm compatibility), achieving good agreement. The perceived appraisal profiles for the different emotions were generally in accord with predictions based on appraisal theory. The appraisal ratings also correlated with a variety of acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, voice quality, and temporal characteristics. Results suggest that several aspects of emotion-eliciting situations can be inferred reliably and validly from vocal expressions which, thus, may carry information about the cognitive representation of events.

Predicting the duration of emotional experience: Two experience sampling studies.

The authors present 2 studies to explain the variability in the duration of emotional experience. Participants were asked to report the duration of their fear, anger, joy, gratitude, and sadness episodes on a daily basis. Information was further collected with regard to potential predictor variables at 3 levels: trait predictors, episode predictors, and moment predictors. Discrete-time survival analyses revealed that, for all 5 emotions under study, the higher the importance of the emotion-eliciting situation and the higher the intensity of the emotion at onset, the longer the emotional experience lasts. Moreover, a reappearance, either physically or merely mentally, of the eliciting stimulus during the emotional episode extended the duration of the emotional experience as well. These findings display interesting links with predictions within N. H. Frijda's theory of emotion, with the phenomenon of reinstatement (as studied within the domain of learning psychology), and with the literature on rumination.