Everyday Emotional Experiences Research Articles

AGE DIFFERENCES IN AFFECT DYNAMICS: APPLYING A FORMALIZED THEORETICAL APPROACH

Abstract Emotional aging research is dominated by the idea of age-related improvements that result from shifts in motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) proposes that as individuals age, they increasingly favor emotion-related goals and savor positive but avoid negative emotions. Previous age-comparative studies on everyday emotional experience typically were descriptive or studied the processes underlying emotional experience in isolation. We aimed at a more holistic approach to test hypotheses derived from SST regarding age-related differences in general emotional dispositions (i.e., anchoring), emotional reactivity, and emotion regulation by using a comprehensive computational approach. We applied our Model of Intraindividual Variability in Affect (MIVA) to data on everyday emotional experiences in an age-diverse sample (N = 378, age range 14 – 86 years). Parameter estimations were carried out within a Bayesian framework. Our results provide partial support for predictions derived from SST. Consistent with SST, affect elicited by pleasant events was down-regulated less by older adults and affect elicited by unpleasant events was down-regulated more by older compared to younger adults. Inconsistent with SST, anchoring showed a negative age-related trend, indicating a more positive general affect disposition in younger, not older adults. Reactions to pleasant events showed no age-related differences. Reactivity to unpleasant events was highest in midlife and lower for younger and older adults. We discuss the broader implications of our approach for understanding emotional development across the lifespan.

Have the concepts of 'anxiety' and 'depression' been normalized or pathologized? A corpus study of historical semantic change.

Research on concept creep indicates that the meanings of some psychological concepts have broadened in recent decades. Some mental health-related concepts such as 'trauma', for example, have acquired more expansive meanings and come to refer to a wider range of events and experiences. 'Anxiety' and 'depression' may have undergone similar semantic inflation, driven by rising public attention and awareness. Critics have argued that everyday emotional experiences are increasingly pathologized, so that 'depression' and 'anxiety' have broadened to include sub-clinical experiences of sadness and worry. The possibility that these concepts have expanded to include less severe phenomena (vertical concept creep) was tested by examining changes in the emotional intensity of words in their vicinity (collocates) using two large historical text corpora, one academic and one general. The academic corpus contained >133 million words from psychology article abstracts published 1970-2018, and the general corpus (>500 million words) consisted of diverse text sources from the USA for the same period. We hypothesized that collocates of 'anxiety' and 'depression' would decline in average emotional severity over the study period. Contrary to prediction, the average severity of collocates for both words increased in both corpora, possibly due to growing clinical framing of the two concepts. The study findings therefore do not support a historical decline in the severity of 'anxiety' and 'depression' but do provide evidence for a rise in their pathologization.

Emotions matter: EMPOWER-ing youth by integrating emotions of (chronic) disaster risk into strategies for disaster preparedness

In a context where disaster risk has become a chronic, continuous condition, this paper explores new pathways for creating long-term (emotional) resilience. I show that emotions matter as part of devising community-based and formal educational strategies for disaster risk reduction and preparedness. Focus is on exploring young people's everyday emotional experiences in situations of recurrent disaster risk, such as flooding and landslides. The article draws on lessons learned from participatory and community-based research with 30 young people in the urban periphery of Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as educational approaches on dealing with climate anxiety and ecological distress. Results indicate that participants tended to ‘normalise’ risk while using humour to engage with difficult emotions. Results however also show that with the tools at hand to acknowledge, validate and engage with the emotions of disaster risk, youth can develop and cultivate hope, improve individual coping behaviours, and recognise their agency without minimising or denying their experience. To guide interdisciplinary disaster risk scholars and practitioners in developing a process of reflective participation and collaborative peer- and intergenerational learning about disaster risk, I developed the EMPOWER framework. I suggest that by openly engaging with and sharing emotions across the researcher/practitioner and participant divide, we can develop critical reflexivity and collective hope as part of a praxis for improved wellbeing and disaster preparedness.

Age Differences in Everyday Emotional Experience: Testing Core Predictions of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory With the MIVAModel.

Emotional aging research is dominated by the idea of age-related improvements that result from shifts in motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) proposes that as individuals age, they increasingly favor emotion-related goals and savor positive but avoid negative emotions. Previous age-comparative studies on everyday emotional experience typically were descriptive or studied the processes underlying emotional experience in isolation. We aimed at a more holistic approach to test hypotheses derived from SST regarding age-related differences in general emotional dispositions (i.e., anchoring), emotional reactivity, and emotion regulation by using a computational approach. We applied our Model of Intraindividual Variability in Affect (MIVA) to data on everyday emotional experiences in an age-diverse sample (N=378, age range 14-86years). Parameter estimations were carried out within a Bayesian framework. Our results provide partial support for predictions derived from SST. Unexpectedly, anchoring showed a negative age trend, indicating a more positive affect disposition in younger, not older adults. Reactions to pleasant events showed no age trend. Reactivity to unpleasant events was highest in midlife and lower for younger and older adults. Consistent with SST, affect elicited by pleasant events was regulated less strongly by older adults and affect elicited by unpleasant events more strongly. As our results provide only partial support for SST, we revisit the phenomena that are at its foundations and provide suggestions on how to refine the theory.

Sweet escape: The role of empathy in social media engagement with human versus virtual influencers

Virtual influencers engage in emotional sharing to gain and keep followers. However, given that many people use social media for diversion purposes, this emotional sharing may hinder users’ ability to escape from everyday emotional experiences, particularly for highly empathetic individuals. Using a between subjects, randomised experimental design, we explore how empathy affects reactions to virtual vs. human influencers, showing that those highest on empathy are more likely to follow a virtual influencer, and rate her as more socially attractive, than a comparable human influencer; these results disappear when the influencers’ true nature is unknown to participants. We postulate that these results represent an “escapism effect”, where the virtual influencer is expected to provide greater diversionary benefits from everyday human emotional experiences and require fewer cognitive resources in the form of emotional sense making. We present practical implications and future research opportunities arising from this effect.

The Transformation of Emotion: First and Third Person Perspectives in Developmental Context

ABSTRACT Shun argues that the distinction made between emotions experienced from the first-person perspective and those from the third-person perspective does not capture our everyday emotional experience. My proposal is that even if we accept this claim, first- and third-person perspective taking is still crucial in the development of our emotional psychology. This is so in two respects. First, the features of intimacy and impartiality that mark adult emotional response are a product of a developmental process that involves perspective taking. Second, perspective taking is a crucial part of refining and developing virtuous emotional responses.

Individual differences in emotion processing styles are differentially associated with affective dynamics.

Previous research has identified four emotion-processing styles (cerebral, hot, cold, and overwhelmed) based on levels of emotional clarity, attention to emotion, and affect intensity. Although associated with psychopathology, studies have yet to examine whether these styles are associated with the dynamics of everyday emotional experiences. Cluster analysis (n = 233) replicated cerebral, hot, cold, and overwhelmed emotion processing styles based on participants' scores on the Affect Intensity Measure and Clarity and Attention subscales of the Trait Meta Mood Scale. Participants completed experience sampling surveys assessing high and low arousal negative (NA) and positive affect (PA) for 14 days, eight times per day. Mean-level affect, instability (root mean square of successive differences), and inertia (autocorrelation lag 1) were computed. Multilevel models revealed overwhelmed individuals tended to display the highest level of affective dysregulation in daily life. Specifically, they experienced higher mean-level NA, had lower mean-level low-arousal PA, and showed evidence of higher instability of both high- and low-arousal NA compared to the other styles. Emotion processing styles were not well differentiated by levels of inertia. We discuss implications for psychopathology and utility of emotion processing style in clinical contexts for idiographically tailoring emotion-focused interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Everyday Emotional Experiences in Current and Remitted Major Depressive Disorder: An Experience-Sampling Study

The emotional experiences of people with major depressive disorder (MDD) are characterized by emotional disturbances. We examined whether these patterns characterize people with MDD in remission. Participants included individuals who had experienced at least two major depressive episodes (remitted-MDD group; n = 80), had current MDD (current-MDD group; n = 48), or were control participants ( n = 87). Participants reported their momentary affect five times per day for 14 days, from which we computed the mean (i.e., intensity), standard deviation (i.e., variability), and autocorrelation (i.e., inertia). Negative affect (NA) intensity and variability, but not inertia, differed between groups; the current-MDD group had the highest levels, the control group had the lowest, and the remitted-MDD group fell in between. Differences in NA variability held after accounting for mean NA. The only significant group difference for positive affect (PA) was that PA intensity was lower in the current-MDD group compared with the other two groups. Emotional disturbances of participants with remitted MDD appear limited to NA.

Intrinsic functional network contributions to the relationship between trait empathy and subjective happiness

Subjective happiness (well-being) is a multi-dimensional construct indexing one's evaluations of everyday emotional experiences and life satisfaction, and has been associated with different aspects of trait empathy. Despite previous research identifying the neural substrates of subjective happiness and empathy, the mechanisms mediating the relationship between the two constructs remain largely unclear. Here, we performed a data-driven, multi-voxel pattern analysis of whole-brain intrinsic functional connectivity to reveal the neural mechanisms of subjective happiness and trait empathy in a sample of young females. Behaviorally, we found that subjective happiness was negatively associated with personal distress (i.e., self-referential experience of others’ feelings). Consistent with this inverse relationship, subjective happiness was associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex exhibiting decreased functional connectivity with regions important for the representation of unimodal sensorimotor information (e.g., primary sensory cortices) or multi-modal summaries of brain states (e.g., default mode network) and increased functional connectivity with regions important for the attentional modulation of these representations (e.g., frontoparietal, attention networks). Personal distress was associated with the medial prefrontal cortex exhibiting functional connectivity differences with similar networks––but in the opposite direction. Finally, intrinsic functional connectivity within and between these networks fully mediated the relationship between the two behavioral measures. These results identify an important contribution of the macroscale functional organization of the brain to human well-being, by demonstrating that lower levels of personal distress lead to higher subjective happiness through variation in intrinsic functional connectivity along a neural representation vs. modulation gradient.

Conserving and commercialising forests: tribal women and subjectivity in Bagafa forest of Tripura (Northeast India)

Two perspectives on women’s relationships to forests are usually invoked in much of the mainstream policies and research on gender and forest management in India. First, forest-dwelling women, particularly tribal women, are perceived as sharing some inherent and symbiotic relationships to forests and are, custodians of forests. These women are also seen as having significant stakes in state-led forest management projects to meet their subsistence and cultural needs in forests. Second, there is also a perception in India that forest-dwelling communities have strong desires to commercialise forests, and women work with men to garner economic benefits by unsustainably extracting forest resources. Both perspectives are often used to understand how and why tribal women use forest resources and may participate in state-led forest management projects. However, such perspectives give scarce attention to how forest management projects and other lived realities in forests have gendered consequences for women’s lives and livelihoods, the everyday emotional and physical experiences of which reinforce gender inequalities, shape gender subjectivities, and is useful to understand how and why different women may use forest resources and relate to conservation projects in certain complex ways. Through an ethnographic study of a small group of tribal women who illegally planted rubber trees in the Bagafa reserved forest of Tripura, this article examines how women’s subjectivities are produced, performed and contested at intersections of livelihood struggles in forests, aspirations for development, and forest management project-encounters, that come to shape both, their use of forest resources and approaches towards conservation projects.

Everyday Life Emotions during Anti-Fugitive Offenders Ordinance Protests in Hong Kong

This experience sampling study investigated the impact of political movement (i.e. Anti-Fugitive Offenders Ordinance Protests) on everyday emotional reactivity and dynamics. Participants who finished our experience sampling during Movement (18–70 years; n = 100) and matched sample (18–70 years; n = 100) reported positive and negative emotions seven times a week for five weeks. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that during the Movement, participants reported lower positive emotions and higher negative emotions, and lower positive emotional inertia and higher negative emotional inertia. This study is the first of its kind to investigate different aspects of everyday emotional experiences during political movements. Participants perceived significant changes in their everyday events although the Movement was not long and not severely violent. This study highlights the importance of investigating everyday emotions of people in other more serious conflict and post-conflict settings.

Patient experience of long-term recovery after open fracture of the lower limb: a qualitative study using interviews in a community setting

ObjectivesTreatment of open fractures is complex and patients may require muscle and skin grafts. The aim of this study was to gain a greater understanding of patient experience of recovery...

Parenting and neighbouring in the consolidating city: The emotional geographies of sound in apartments

Apartment residents share space vertically and horizontally, and apartment materiality shapes their experiences of sound and space. Across diverse contexts, rapid urban population growth has prompted a shift towards higher-density dwellings – often a pronounced departure from cultural norms of detached, suburban housing. Yet little is known about the everyday emotional experiences of apartment residents. This paper draws on insights gathered from families, with children, living in apartments in Sydney, Australia – a city undergoing profound densification. Developers typically market high-rise apartments as a transitional housing form for singles and couples. However, a sizeable number of families with children now live in apartments, and as our findings suggest, they struggle with expectations that children (and their sounds) do not belong. These families' experiences of high-density living reveal how the materiality of sound and built form interact with cultural norms to shape how apartment spaces are understood and inhabited. So too, how the emotions of everyday life co-construct apartment spaces and social relations (both within families and between neighbours). Physical proximity leads to tensions around acoustics and privacy, while apartment materiality creates an emotional dilemma between being a good parent and a good neighbour. Sound can lead to feelings of guilt, shame, and stress. We discuss such travails, as well as families’ spatial, temporal and material coping strategies. Cultural and technical norms, we contend, must shift to support families with children in the consolidating vertical city.

The Double Intentionality of Emotional Experience

AbstractI argue that while the feeling of bodily responses is not necessary to emotion, these feelings contribute significant meaningful content to everyday emotional experience. Emotional bodily feelings represent a ‘state of self’, analysed as a sense of one's body affording certain patterns of interaction with the environment. Recognising that there are two sources of intentional content in everyday emotional experience allows us to reconcile the diverging intuitions that people have about emotional states, and to understand better the long‐standing debate between bodily feeling‐based and appraisal‐based theories of emotion.

Parental autonomy granting and child perceived control: effects on the everyday emotional experience of anxious youth.

Childhood anxiety is associated with low levels of parental autonomy granting and child perceived control, elevated child emotional reactivity and deficits in child emotion regulation. In early childhood, low levels of parental autonomy granting are thought to decrease child perceived control, which in turn leads to increases in child negative emotion. Later in development, perceived control may become a more stable, trait-like characteristic that amplifies the relationship between parental autonomy granting and child negative emotion. The purpose of this study was to test mediation and moderation models linking parental autonomy granting and child perceived control with child emotional reactivity and emotion regulation in anxious youth. Clinically anxious youth (N=106) and their primary caregivers were assessed prior to beginning treatment. Children were administered a structured diagnostic interview and participated in a parent-child interaction task that was behaviorally coded for parental autonomy granting. Children completed an ecological momentary assessment protocol during which they reported on perceived control, emotional reactivity (anxiety and physiological arousal) and emotion regulation strategy use in response to daily negative life events. The relationship between parental autonomy granting and both child emotional reactivity and emotion regulation strategy use was moderated by child perceived control: the highest levels of self-reported physiological responding and the lowest levels of acceptance in response to negative events occurred in children low in perceived control with parents high in autonomy granting. Evidence for a mediational model was not found. In addition, child perceived control over negative life events was related to less anxious reactivity and greater use of both problem solving and cognitive restructuring as emotion regulation strategies. Both parental autonomy granting and child perceived control play important roles in the everyday emotional experience of clinically anxious children.

Daily life with depressive symptoms: Gender differences in adolescents' everyday emotional experiences

Depression is a prevalent and debilitating illness facing many adolescents, especially adolescent girls, whose risk for this disorder is approximately twice that of boys. Many studies have identified mechanisms that place girls at higher risk for depression during adolescence. Few, however, have examined differences in the everyday emotional experiences of boys and girls with varying levels of depressive symptoms. Using the Experience Sampling Method, this study investigated the roles of gender and depressive symptomatology in the emotional experiences of a community sample of youth (11–18 year-olds) from the Sloan 500 Family Study. Females with higher levels of depressive symptoms were more likely than females with fewer depressive symptoms and all males to experience strong negative emotions and to attribute the cause of these emotions to other people. These results suggest that emotional reactivity in interpersonal contexts is especially important to understand gender differences in the daily experience of depressive symptoms.

The good, the bad, and the neutral: The influence of emotional valence on young children's recall

Despite the important theoretical and applied implications, there is limited experimental research investigating the influence of emotional valence on young children's verbal recall of everyday emotional experiences. This issue was addressed in the current study. Specifically, we investigated young children's (5–6 years) recall of emotional experiences presented in six brief stories. To address methodological limitations of the small body of existing literature, we adopted a within participants design in which story content was matched and valence (positive, negative, neutral) was counterbalanced across stories. Fifty-four children were presented the six stories via narrated slideshow, and recall was assessed after delay. Results showed that emotional stories were better recalled than neutral stories and negatively valenced stories were better recalled than positively valenced stories. The recall advantage of negatively valenced information was found for all aspects of each story, suggesting that negative valence renders events particularly memorable.

Neuroticism developmental courses--implications for depression, anxiety and everyday emotional experience; a prospective study from adolescence to young adulthood.

BackgroundNeuroticism is frequently discussed as a risk factor for psychopathology. According to the maturity principle, neuroticism decreases over the course of life, but not uniformly across individuals. However, the implications of differences in personality maturation on mental health have not been well studied so far. Hence, we hypothesized that different forms of neuroticism development from adolescence to young adulthood are associated with differences in depression, anxiety and everyday emotional experience at the age of 25.MethodsA sample of 266 adolescents from the general population was examined three times over ten years (age at T0: 15, T1: 20 and T2: 25) using questionnaires, interviews and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). At all measurement points, neuroticism was assessed with the NEO inventory. At T2, diagnoses of major depression and anxiety disorders were captured with a structured clinical interview (M-CIDI). Phone-based EMA was used to assess emotional experience and affective instability over a two-week period at T2.ResultsThe best fitting model was a latent class growth analysis with two groups of neuroticism development. Most individuals (n = 205) showed moderate values whereas 61 participants were clustered into a group with elevated neuroticism levels. In both groups neuroticism significantly changed during the ten year period with a peak at the age of 20. Individuals with a higher absolute level were at 14-fold increased risk for depression and 7-fold risk for anxiety disorders at the age of 25. In EMA, increased negative affect and arousal as well as decreased positive emotions were found in this high group.ConclusionsOther than expected, personality did not mature in our sample. However, there was a significant change of neuroticism values from adolescence to young adulthood. Further, over 20% of our participants showed a neuroticism development which was associated with adverse outcomes such as negatively toned emotional experience and a heightened risk to suffer from depressive and anxiety disorders in young adulthood. These high-risk persons need to be identified early to provide interventions supporting continuous personality maturation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12888-014-0210-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Everyday emotional experience of adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: evidence for reactive and endogenous emotional lability.

Emotional lability (EL), characterized by negative emotional traits and emotional instability, is frequently reported in children and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, EL is primarily assessed using retrospective self-report, which is subject to reporting bias and does not consider the potential influence of positive and negative everyday experiences. Ambulatory assessment was carried out in 41 men with ADHD without co-morbidity, current medication or substance abuse, and 47 healthy control participants. Reports of negative and positive emotions (irritability, frustration, anger, happiness, excitement) and the occurrence of bad and good events were completed eight times daily during a working week. Group differences in emotional intensity and instability were investigated using multilevel models, and explored in relation to bad and good events and the Affective Lability Scale - Short Form (ALS-SF), an EL questionnaire. The ADHD group reported significantly more frequent bad events, heightened intensity and instability of irritability and frustration, and greater intensity of anger. The results for positive emotions were equivocal or negative. Bad events significantly contributed to the intensity and instability of negative emotions, and showed a stronger influence in the ADHD group. However, covariation for their effect did not eliminate group differences. Small-to-moderate correlations were seen between intensity and instability of negative emotions and the ALS-SF. Adults with ADHD report heightened intensity and instability of negative emotions in daily life. The results suggest two components of EL in ADHD: a reactive component responsive to bad events and an endogenous component, independent of negative everyday events.

Does adding an emotion component enhance the Triple P−Positive Parenting Program?

This pilot study aimed to compare the efficacy of a regular offering of the group-delivered Triple P-Positive Parenting Program for child behavior problems with an enhanced version tailored to promote child emotion competence. Families of children between ages 3 and 6 years displaying early-onset conduct problems were randomly assigned to Group Triple P (GTP; final n = 18) or Emotion Enhanced Triple P (EETP; final n = 18), in which parents were encouraged to incorporate emotion labels and causes and to coach emotion competence during discussions of everyday emotional experiences with their child. Compared with parents who received GTP, parents who received EETP increased their discussion of emotion labels and emotion causes in conversations with their child at postintervention, but this advantage was lost by the 4-month follow-up. Parents in the EETP condition also used more emotion coaching postintervention and at follow-up. There were no differences at postintervention or follow-up in children's emotion knowledge skills. Postintervention improvement in disruptive child behavior was greater for GTP, but the groups converged at follow-up. Parents were similarly satisfied with both interventions. Overall, EETP showed little advantage over regular GTP delivery.