Individual Emotions Research Articles

What’s love got to do with it? Understanding local cognitive and affective responses to wind power projects

Negative perceptions of renewable energy development can lead to protest, resulting in project delay or failure. Alternatively, good communication and sensitivity to community feelings are pathways to success. While literature referencing the social aspects of wind power siting have become widespread, analyses which include individuals’ affect or emotional dimensions are rarer. Appreciation for emotional as well as cognitive perceptions is crucial for adequate understanding of not just consumptive or productive aspects of energy, but entire systems. We use a US national cross-sectional data set of 1705 individuals who live within 8 km of a wind turbine collected in a research project led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in a random probability-based phone, mail, and online survey in 2016. We hypothesize that individuals who moved-in prior to commencement of project construction will differ markedly from those who move in afterwards in terms of the cognitive and affective aspects of their attitude formation, and in particular, that negative emotions will be distinct. Variables include emotions such as pride, anger, and annoyance, perceptions of fit with the landscape, descriptions of the turbines as industrial and whether they added to or detracted from the community. We find affect is the stronger driver of attitude, but not merely by negative emotions. When we include both cognitive and affective variables, individual emotions are generally more predictive of attitude for pre-construction neighbors and cognitive variables such as wind being an effective means of climate mitigation and perception of property value change are stronger post-construction.

Cognitive Network Science Reconstructs How Experts, News Outlets and Social Media Perceived the COVID-19 Pandemic

This work uses cognitive network science to reconstruct how experts, influential news outlets and social media perceived and reported the news “COVID-19 is a pandemic”. In an exploratory corpus of 1 public speech, 10 influential news media articles on the same news and 37,500 trending tweets, the same pandemic declaration elicited a wide spectrum of perceptions retrieved by automatic language processing. While the WHO adopted a narrative strategy of mitigating the pandemic by raising public concern, some news media promoted fear for economic repercussions, while others channelled trust in contagion containment through semantic associations with science. In Italy, the first country to adopt a nationwide lockdown, social discourse perceived the pandemic with anger and fear, emotions of grief elaboration, but also with trust, a useful mechanism for coping with threats. Whereas news mostly elicited individual emotions, social media promoted much richer perceptions, where negative and positive emotional states coexisted, and where trust mainly originated from politics-related jargon rather than from science. This indicates that social media linked the pandemics to institutions and their intervention policies. Since both trust and fear strongly influence people’s risk-averse behaviour and mental/physical wellbeing, identifying evidence for these emotions is key under a global health crisis. Cognitive network science opens the way to unveiling the emotional framings of massively read news in automatic ways, with relevance for better understanding how information was framed and perceived by large audiences.

Hooked on a Feeling: Influence of Brief Exposure to Familiar Music on Feelings of Emotion in Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease.

Research has indicated that individuals with Alzheimer's-type dementia (AD) can experience prolonged emotions, even when they cannot recall the eliciting event. Less is known about whether music can modify the emotional state of individuals with AD and whether emotions evoked by music linger in the absence of a declarative memory for the eliciting event. We examined the effects of participant-selected recorded music on self-reported feelings of emotion in individuals with AD, and whether these feelings persisted irrespective of declarative memory for the emotion-inducing stimuli. Twenty participants with AD and 19 healthy comparisons (HCs) listened to two 4.5-minute blocks of self-selected music that aimed to induce either sadness or happiness. Participants reported their feelings at baseline and three times post-induction and completed recall and recognition tests for the music selections after each induction. Participants with AD had impaired memory for music selections compared to HCs. Both groups reported elevated sadness and negative affect after listening to sad music and increased happiness and positive affect after listening to happy music, relative to baseline. Sad/negative and happy/positive emotions endured up to 20 minutes post-induction. Brief exposure to music can induce strong and lingering emotions in individuals with AD. These findings extend the intriguing phenomenon whereby lasting emotions can be prompted by stimuli that are not remembered declaratively. Our results underscore the utility of familiar music for inducing emotions in individuals with AD and may ultimately inform strategies for using music listening as a therapeutic tool with this population.

An examination of emotional eating behavior in individuals with a severe mental disorder

Emotional eating behavior is commonly accompanied by negative emotions in individuals with a severe mental disorder in community. This descriptive study has aimed to identify emotional eating behavior and the factors acting on emotional eating behavior and to investigate the relationship of uncontrolled eating and cognitive restriction scores with emotional eating behavior in individuals with a severe mental disorder followed up in community mental health centers (CMHC). The study included 130 patients with a severe mental disorder. The Emotional Eater Questionnaire (EEQ) and the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ-R21) were used for data collection. The chi-square significance test and correlation analyses were used for determining the correlation of emotional eating behavior scores across independent variables. The prevalence of emotional eating behavior was 49.22% among individuals with a severe mental disorder. The mean EEQ score of the individuals was 11.74 ± 7.42. Emotional eating behavior was observed in 56.7% of individuals at ages from 35 to 49 years, in 62.5% of women, in 58.6% of individuals with a history of dieting, and in 61.2% of individuals with night eating behavior. This study has shown that emotional eating behavior can occur in individuals with a severe mental disorder independent of the diagnosis, use of antipsychotic medications, body mass index (BMI), physical exercise, and eating behavior. It was observed that emotional eating behavior was correlated with being middle-aged, being female, and night eating behavior.

LGBTQ+ individuals seeking information and support from online communities to navigate unpleasant emotions

AbstractAs part of an ongoing project, this paper investigates the LGBTQ+ individual's emotions they expressed when seeking information and support in online communities by analyzing online user generated posts in LGBT Chats & Forums. Sixty‐one posts that contained emotional texts were coded using content analysis. Seven categories of emotions emerged from the analysis: fear, uncertainty, sadness, anger, shame, joy and others. The results show that emotions LGBTQ+ individuals expressed in their online requests are often unpleasant and evoked their needs of informational and emotional supports. The findings contribute to the existing knowledge of how LGBTQ+ individuals cope with unpleasant emotions and how online communities can better support sexual and gender minority people.

Development and Validation of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Germophobia Questionnaire in Iran

Objective: The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) has recently been identified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The outbreak of the disease has caused numerous individuals around the world to become extremely frightened and subsequently present the signs of phobia. Fear is the basic emotion of anxiety disorders and individuals cope with their emotions by different strategies. The present study aimed at developing and validating Emotion Regulation Strategies for Germophobia Questionnaire (ERS-GPQ). Methods: The study participants were 99 individuals (74 females) of the Iranian population with concerns about germs who were selected with the snowball sampling method. They completed the ERS-GPQ and GPQ in the Google Forms platform. Results: The present study results illustrated that the ERS-GPQ has acceptable internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (a=0.61), reliability coefficients with split-half (0.70), and one-week test-retest (0.92); the ERS-GPQ also presented a moderate positive correlation with the contamination obsessions checklist of GPQ (r=0.44) as the convergent coefficient. Besides, the confirmatory factor analysis indicated 2 factors of the ERS-GPQ. Finally, the ERS-GPQ has 2 components with good convergent and discriminate validities and composite reliability. Conclusion: Based on the current research findings, the ERS-GPQ has acceptable and good psychometric properties; researchers can use the ERS-GPQ as a reliable and valid instrument for assessing ER strategies concerning germophobia. Furthermore, it has some considerations for practitioners in epidemic and pandemic crises, like COVID-19.

Public obscenity and the formation of emotional legal landscapes in Dries Verhoeven’s Ceci n’est pas …

ABSTRACT This article addresses the relationships between emotions and the law, and how they define public order and constitute emotional legal landscapes. Using the example of the litigation process of the censorship of Dries Verhoeven’s art installation Ceci n’est pas … we explore the power of individual and collective emotions in acting as a stimulus to the evaluation of the acceptability and legality of artworks in urban public spaces. Verhoeven’s installation was interrupted in Helsinki, Finland, because of public obscenity after a passer-by who was offended by the artwork reported it to the police. This led to a three-year court process, the legal archaeological analysis of which reveals the complex moral geographies in the formation of legal landscapes: the arbitrariness of the interpretation of the law, the significance of time and place in legal evaluation, and the hidden morals included in the understanding of public order. The results show the potential of the concept of emotional legal landscapes in exploring the spatial effects of legal processes, and in revealing how legal reasoning is complex and emotionally laden instead of being carried out by rational legal actors.

Emotional Analysis of Bogus Statistics in Social Media

Fake info or bogus statistics is a new term and it is now considered as a greatest threat to democracy. Since the world is full of surprises and humans have developed their delicate nature to detect unexcepted information. Social media plays a vital role in information spreading, since the impact towards fake information has gained more attention due to the social media platforms. Trending the hot topic without analyzing the information will introduce great impact over millions of people. So, it is essential to analyze the message and its truthfulness. Emotional analysis is an important factor in bogus statistics as the information gets reshared among other based on individual emotions. Considering these facts in social media information analysis, an efficient emotional analysis for bogus statistics in social media is proposed in this research work using recurrent neural network. In an emotional perspective, fake messages are compared with actual message and false messages are identified experimentally using recurrent neural network.

Knowledge and emotion dual-driven method for crowd evacuation

Knowledge and emotion play important roles in the process of crowd evacuation. Knowledge determines the moving direction of an individual, and emotion determines the moving speed of an individual. However, the existing works lack consideration of knowledge and emotion at the same time, which results in unreasonable simulation of crowd evacuation. To solve this problem, we propose a knowledge and emotion dual-driven method for crowd evacuation simulation. First, the knowledge representation and knowledge transmission are modeled to quantify the knowledge of evacuees. In this step, the knowledge representation is modeled by differentiating the hazard source knowledge and the scenario knowledge and the factors affecting knowledge transmission are combined with the susceptible infected (SI) model to simulate the process of knowledge transmission. Second, the emotion model is constructed to quantify the individual emotion in the evacuation process. In this paper, the quantification of emotion takes into account two factors: (1) the influence of individual knowledge on emotion is quantified by using Siminov’s psychology model; (2) the influence of emotional contagion among individuals is also considered. Then, quantitative individual knowledge and emotion are combined with the reciprocal velocity obstacles (RVO) model to build the knowledge and emotion dual-driven crowd evacuation model. Finally, we implement a 3D crowd simulation system based on the knowledge and emotion dual-driven model to visualize the results of our theoretical analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed method can more realistically simulate crowd evacuation in an emergency situation.

Emotionality modulates the impact of chronic stress on memory and neurogenesis in birds

Chronic stress is a strong modulator of cognitive processes, such as learning and memory. There is, however, great within-individual variation in how an animal perceives and reacts to stressors. These differences in coping with stress modulate the development of stress-induced memory alterations. The present study investigated whether and how chronic stress and individual emotionality interrelate and influence memory performances and brain neurogenesis in birds. For that, we used two lines of Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) with divergent emotionality levels. Highly (E+) and less (E−) emotional quail were submitted to chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) for 3 weeks and trained in a spatial task and a discrimination task, a form of cue-based memory. E + and E− birds were also used to assess the impact of CUS and emotionality on neurogenesis within the hippocampus and the striatum. CUS negatively impacted spatial memory, and cell proliferation, and survival in the hippocampus. High emotionality was associated with a decreased hippocampal neurogenesis. CUS improved discrimination performances and favored the differentiation of newborn cells into mature neurons in the striatum, specifically in E+ birds. Our results provide evidence that CUS consequences on memory and neural plasticity depends both on the memory system and individual differences in behavior.

Modeling Network Public Opinion Propagation with the Consideration of Individual Emotions

The occurrence of popular social events causes fluctuations and changes of public emotions, while the rapid development of online social platforms and networks has made individual interactions more intense and further escalated public emotions into public opinion. However, there is a lack of consideration of individual emotions in the current research on online public opinion. Based on this, this paper firstly expounds the quantitative representation of attitude and emotion, analyzes the formation and propagation process of online public opinion by combining individual’s expression willingness, individual’s expression ability, attitude perception value, attitude change probability and other factors, and constructs a network public opinion propagation model that takes individual emotion into consideration. Finally, the main factors affecting the formation and propagation of network public opinion are discussed through simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that: (1) fear is conducive to the formation of online public opinion, but the speed is relatively slow; sadness is not conducive to the formation, but once enough people participate in the exchange of views, the formation of online public opinion will be faster; (2) the influence of online public opinion on individual emotions expands with the increase of the number of individual interactions; (3) different network structures impact differently on the propagation of public opinion. Among them, BA (BA network is a scale-free network model proposed by Barabasi and Albert in order to explain the generation mechanism of power law, BA model has two characteristics: growth and priority connection mechanism) and ER (ER network is a network with random connectivity proposed by Erdös-Renyi) random networks can promote the propagation of online public opinion, which is prone to “one-sided” online public opinion. WS small-world networks (proposed by Watts and Strogatz. It is a kind of network with short average path length and high clustering coefficient) and fully-connected networks have an inhibitory effect on the spread of online public opinion, easily maintaining the multi-dimensional nature of online public opinion.

Emotional Echoes: Young People, Divorce, and the Public Media, 1960–2000

Abstract The article introduces the methodological concept of emotional echoing to analyze the cultural formation of individual emotions and demonstrates its utility in an analysis of young people’s emotional experience of parental divorce in Denmark between 1960 and 2000. Drawing on recent theorizations within the history of emotions, we posit that emotional echoing is a key element in the historical processes through which emotions are configured. Individuals more or less consciously employ collective templates of emotionality to interpret and convey their own feelings, giving shape to experience and subjectivity in the process. We then present a study of a variety of Danish public media to examine how young people interpreted and described the experience of parental divorce. We argue that a new public emotionality emerged at this time and that this impacted young people’s experiences. Growing divorce rates, the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, the rising status of children and youth, and the blooming media market all helped spur this change. Echoing each other’s tropes, practices, and images, young people emphasized the difficult and painful aspects of the emotional experience of divorce. During the last decades of the century, they increasingly articulated anger toward their parents, but they also more often emphasized “bad conscience” and signaled the importance of regulating one’s own emotions to protect one’s parents. Through nonmechanical and creative echoing, young people processed their emotions by digesting and contributing anonymously to the public media.

The impacts of a COVID-19 epidemic focus and general belief in a just world on individual emotions

Whether the general belief in a just world (GBJW) can protect individual emotions during a major disaster is a matter of debate. This study conducted two experiments to explore this question during the COVID-19 epidemic. Experiment 1 (N = 92, Mage = 22.52, 48.91% was male) manipulated the focus regarding the COVID-19 epidemic to investigate the impact of this focus on participants' emotions. The results showed that compared with the nonepidemic focus group, the epidemic focus group had higher negative emotions and lower positive emotions. Experiment 2 (N = 200, Mage = 23.91, 49% was male) manipulated the epidemic focus and GBJW to investigate their effects on the participants' emotions. The results showed that high levels of GBJW reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions regardless of whether the participants were focused on the epidemic. This study expands the influence of the GBJW on individual emotions and finds that the GBJW can protect individuals' emotions when they face a major social disaster. These findings imply that controlling people's intake of information on the epidemic can avoid their suffering from the vicarious traumatization caused by epidemic-related information overload and that improving the public's GBJW protects their mental health during an epidemic.

Travel, Cultural Hybridity and Transnational Connections in Taiwanese Graphic Narratives

Abstract This study adopts a discursive analytical perspective to elaborate on transnational connections and cultural diversity as strategies for defining Taiwaneseness in graphic narratives published between 1997 and 2016. It considers the following aspects represented in the analysed texts: (1) processes of self-identification while travelling abroad; (2) depictions of Taiwan centred on familiar spaces open to outside cultural influences, which become locally appropriated through daily activities that link them to individual emotions and weave them into personal and collective memories; and (3) reaching beyond Taiwan to highlight transnational encounters and connections, thus placing the island within a global or regional framework of reference. The article assesses the degree to which this transnational viewpoint reproduces, challenges or complements existing notions regarding Taiwan’s relations with China, Japan and the US, while also exploring relations established with other nodes of reference: Europe, New Zealand and Hong Kong. It also comments on the extent to which academic critical stances on Taiwan’s multiculturalism and warnings against overlooking existing ties between Taiwan and the PRC in contemporary definitions of nationhood may hold true for the research material.

Influence of attributions on negative emotions of individuals experiencing parenting-related trauma

We investigated how the type of trauma and attributions contribute to and affect negative emotions in individuals who have experienced parenting-related trauma. We assessed 6 negative emotions and 4 attributions of 294 participants who had experienced 3 types of parenting-related trauma: infertility, death of a child, or a child with a disability; and 124 participants who had not experienced parentingrelated trauma (control group). Results show that the attributions had different effects on the negative emotions of participants in each of the 3 trauma groups and the control group. Our findings suggest that attribution is an important factor in inhibiting the influence of parenting-related trauma on negative emotions.

Wearing rose-coloured glasses. The happiness effect of party attachments in Europe

ABSTRACT As related research in political psychology shows, election results affect the emotions of individuals, although most studies report about a short-term effect that disappears in one or two weeks. This paper investigates whether election results influence the general mood, the happiness of individuals in the long run. The analysis uses the European Social Survey data from 30 European countries between 2002 and 2015. Regression models suggest that voting for and being attached to an incumbent party increases happiness, while ideological closeness to the government does not. Moreover, the interaction effects show that the closer people feel to their preferred party, the larger the happiness gap becomes between government and opposition supporters. This trend, however, does not hold in case of opposition supporters, whose happiness level is not alternated by the closeness of the attachment. These results prove that partisan motivations are in action in the non-political sphere of life too, and they complement former evidence about an intense short-term effect of winning the elections on voters’ happiness. By testing and confirming the effects of the most widely used explanatory variables of happiness on a large cross-national sample, the paper contributes to general happiness research as well.

群体认同对群际敏感效应及其行为表现的影响

The intergroup sensitivity effect(ISE) shows that people have more pronounced negative emotional responses and are less likely to respond with acceptance to criticism from outgroup members than to criticism from ingroup members. Although ISE has been confirmed in a variety of group contexts(e.g., country, religion, and gender), many issues still remain to be resolved. For instance, it is still unknown how social interaction may affect the strength of ISE and what its aftereffects may be. Therefore, the first aim of the current study was to assess the applicability of ISE in an inter-group interaction context and examine the effect of intra-individual group identification on ISE. The second aim of the current study was to explore the behavioral aftereffects of ISE and its emotional-behavioral mechanism. Experiment 1 a(N = 93) repeated the test of ISE in Chinese participants who identified with a specific college group. Experiment 1 b(N = 114) examined the influence of negative group evaluations from different sources(an ingroup critic versus an outgroup critic) on emotion in the context of inter-group interaction with the minimal group. In experiment 2(N = 137) we explored the influence of negative group evaluations from different sources(an ingroup critic versus an outgroup critic) on emotion by instructing participants to read their school’s negative evaluations on college BBS, and we also assessed their group identification. Experiment 3(N = 138) further tested group-donation behavior as an indicator of positive intragroup behavior to examine the influence of group identification and sources of negative group evaluations(an ingroup critic versus an outgroup critic) on behavioral consequences, while the negative emotions may act as important intermediates in the relationship between the interaction and positive intragroup behavior. The results showed the following: a) We replicated and extended the basic view of ISE and found negative evaluations from outgroup members can cause more intense negative emotional responses than similar evaluations from ingroup members, even within an inter-group interaction context. b) Group identification was found to play a moderate role in ISE: for high-group identification individuals, negative evaluation from outgroup members caused stronger negative emotional responses than from ingroup members, while for those low-group identification individuals, this effect was not significant. c) Group identification performed a mediated moderating role on the influence of different sources of negative group evaluations on negative emotion response and positive intragroup behavior: under high-group-identification condition, sources of negative group evaluations had an indirect positive effect on positive intragroup behavior via emotional responses, whereas under low-group-identification condition, emotional responses did not mediate the relationship between sources of evaluation and positive intragroup behavior. In conclusion, the current work is the first study to explore the intergroup sensitivity effect in China. We examined the influence of negative group evaluation on individual emotion and behavior and its mechanism from the perspective of group identification. This study provides a new theoretical basis and empirical support for the individual’s psychological and behavioral response in the inter-group interaction context, and has important implications for future inter-group relationship research. Future research should further explore the dynamic relationship for the change of inter-group attitude and behavior caused by negative group evaluation and the influence of interactions of situational factors and intra-individual factors on intergroup sensitivity effect.

On Spatiality of Emotions

Summary The paper argues that all emotions possess a spatial and objective, social character. We can gain access to them only insofar as we are affected by them in a felt-bodily way. Therefore, we need a conception of felt embodiment if we are to achieve a philosophical understanding of the spatial character of emotions. Different phenomena, ranging from the atmospheres of landscapes to shared and individual emotions, illustrate the theses concerning the spatiality of emotions and atmospheres, exemplified by the social contrast of emotions, among other things. The next step clarifies why we should distinguish between the emotion itself and the felt-bodily affection by the emotion. By means of distinctions between two types of felt-bodily or corporeal interaction, a unipolar and a bipolar form, we can gain a better understanding of the spatial character of emotions but also how resonances of emotions work. One result of our examination is that we can explain why positive collective emotions become more intense through shared bodily experience.

Rethinking Employment Relations in the New World of Work: A Psychological Contract Perspective

In the new world of work, employers are increasingly favoring flexible work arrangements in order to minimize labor costs, and technological advancements are also making it easier for corporate employers to pursue efficiency and productivity at the expense of humanness in the workplace. As such, more workers are faced with new challenges in their employment relations, especially regarding how to make sense of their relationships and mutual obligations with the organization and then act accordingly. Against this backdrop, our symposium seeks to shed new light on issues of employee-organization relationship in the new world of work, particularly taking a psychological contract perspective. Conceptual and empirical studies in this symposium aim to advance our understanding of psychological contracts in relation to workplace changes, technological disruptions, individual emotions, and identity in the new world of work. Specifically, these studies highlight the potential influence of new technology (e.g., integration of artificial intelligence into the workplace) on the development of psychological contract currencies, the implications of different types of psychological contracts for human experience at work (e.g., in terms of emotional regulation and authentic self-expression), and possible ways for organizations to enrich employment relations in today’s workplace (e.g., through expressed gratitude, organization-sponsored causes). Will AI Make Human Work More Meaningful or Make Humans Obsolete? AI and Psychological Contract Presenter: Sarah Bankins; Macquarie U. Presenter: Paul Formosa; Macquarie U. Costs of Becoming Less Human: Psychological Contract and Emotional Regulation Presenter: Ki-Won Haan; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Presenter: Chen Zhang; Tsinghua U. Presenter: Julia Lee Cunningham; U. of Michigan What Gratitude Brings to Organization: Receiving Gratitude and Psychological Contract Presenter: Boram Do; Yonsei U. Presenter: Claire Huang; Tsinghua U. School of Economics and Management Presenter: Julia Lee Cunningham; U. of Michigan Presenter: Paul Isaac Green; U. of Texas at Austin Just

Individuals with the post-traumatic stress disorder process emotions in subcortical regions irrespective of cognitive engagement: a meta-analysis of cognitive and emotional interface.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) manifests as emotional suffering and problem-solving impairments under extreme stress. This meta-analysis aimed to pool the findings from all the studies examining emotion and cognition in individuals with PTSD to develop a robust mechanistic understanding of the related brain dysfunction. We identified primary studies through a comprehensive literature search of the MEDLINE and PsychINFO databases. The GingerALE software (version 2.3.6) from the BrainMap Project was used to conduct activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses of the eligible studies for cognition, emotion and interface of both. Relative to the non-clinical (NC) group, the PTSD group showed greater activation during emotional tasks in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus. In contrast, the NC group showed significantly greater activation in the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) than did the PTSD group in the emotional tasks. When both emotional and cognitive processing were evaluated, the PTSD group showed significantly greater activation in the striatum than did the NC group. No differences in activation between the PTSD and NC groups were noted when only the cognitive systems were examined. Individuals with PTSD exhibited overactivity in the subcortical regions, i.e., amygdala and striatum, when processing emotions. Underactivity in the emotional and cognitive processing intermediary cortex, i.e., the ACC, was especially prominent in individuals with PTSD relative to the NC population following exposure to emotional stimuli. These findings may explain the trauma-related fear, irritability, and negative effects as well as the concentration difficulties during cognitive distress associated with emotional arousal, that are commonly observed in individuals with PTSD.