Regulating mirroring of emotions A social-specific mechanism?

There is evidence that humans mirror others’ emotional responses: brain responses to observed and experienced emotion overlap, and reaction time costs of observing others’ pain suggest that others’ emotional states interfere with our own. Such emotional mirroring requires regulation to prevent personal distress. However, currently it is unclear whether this “empathic interference effect” is uniquely social, arising only from the observation of human actors, or also from the observation of non-biological objects in “painful” states. Moreover, the degree to which this interference relates to individual differences in self-reported levels of empathy is yet to be revealed. We introduce a modified pain observation task, measuring empathic interference effects induced by observation of painful states applied to both biological and non-biological stimuli. An initial validation study ( N = 50) confirmed that painful states applied to biological stimuli were rated explicitly as more painful than non-painful states applied to biological stimuli, and also than both painful and non-painful states applied to non-biological stimuli. Subsequently, across two independent discovery ( N = 83) and replication ( N = 80) samples, the task elicited slowing of response times during the observation of painful states when compared to non-painful states, but the magnitude of this effect did not differ between biological and non-biological stimuli. Little evidence was found for reliable relationships between empathic interference and self-reported empathy. Caution should therefore be taken in using the current task to pursue an individual differences approach to empathic interference, but the task shows promise for investigating the specificity of the mechanism involved in regulating emotional mirroring.

A Deep Multimodal Model for Predicting Affective Responses Evoked by Movies Based on Shot Segmentation

Predicting the emotions evoked in a viewer watching movies is an important research element in affective video content analysis over a wide range of applications. Generally, the emotion of the audience is evoked by the combined effect of the audio-visual messages of the movies. Current research has mainly used rough middle- and high-level audio and visual features to predict experienced emotions, but combining semantic information to refine features to improve emotion prediction results is still not well studied. Therefore, on the premise of considering the time structure and semantic units of a movie, this paper proposes a shot-based audio-visual feature representation method and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model incorporating a temporal attention mechanism for experienced emotion prediction. First, the shot-based audio-visual feature representation defines a method for extracting and combining audio and visual features of each shot clip, and the advanced pretraining models in the related audio-visual tasks are used to extract the audio and visual features with different semantic levels. Then, four components are included in the prediction model: a nonlinear multimodal feature fusion layer, a temporal feature capture layer, a temporal attention layer, and a sentiment prediction layer. This paper focuses on experienced emotion prediction and evaluates the proposed method on the extended COGNIMUSE dataset. The method performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art while significantly reducing the number of calculations, with increases in the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) from 0.46 to 0.62 for arousal and from 0.18 to 0.34 for valence in experienced emotion.

What You Believe Can Affect How You Feel: Anger Among Caregivers of Elderly People With Dementia

Background and Purpose: Anger has been recognized as a commonly experienced emotion among caregivers of elderly people with dementia. While several cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based intervening methods have been developed, limited research has systematically examined the associations between dementia-related cognition and caregiving anger. Currently, we focused on three representative and well-studied cognitive constructs, person-centered attitude (PCA), dementia representation (DR), and empathy, exploring how they related to caregiving anger.Methods & Results: In total, 327 caregivers (239 female) participated in the study and finished online questionnaires. Multi-variable regression analyzes showed that PCA (βPCA = −0.22**) and empathy (βempathy = −0.18**) could negatively predict caregiving anger. However, all DR dimensions had no influence on caregiving anger except coherence (βcoherence = −0.24**) in the current study.Conclusion: Generally, lower caregiving anger was associated with: (1) being more empathic; (2) having a person-centered attitude; and (3) having a comprehensive understanding of dementia. The results of this study provide detailed suggestions for the development of anger management programs for caregivers of people with dementia.

Cooling Down or Charging Up?

This chapter argues that the selection of, and engagement with, aggressive entertainment contents can be an emotion regulation strategy, or a way of influencing the nature, expression and intensity of an experienced emotion. It explains this in the context of two, often experienced, negative emotions that have been linked to aggression in the general emotion literature: anger and boredom. By first defining these two emotions and describing their typical action tendencies, it aims to show how the engagement with aggressive media content can be a way of regulating these emotions, sometimes in functional but also in dysfunctional ways. It thereby extends the scope from passively watching aggressive entertainment contents to actively participating and enjoying aggressive acts in the online environment (e.g., online bashing, trolling and cyberbullying).

HR Managers’ Emotions in Strategic Decision-Making Events: Evidence from Croatia

The inclusion of emotions in the strategic decision-making research is long overdue. This paper deals with the emotions that human resource managers experience when they participate in a strategic problem-solving event or a strategic planning event. We examine the patterns in the intensity of experienced emotions with regard to event appraisal (from a personal perspective and the organization’s perspective), job satisfaction, and coexistence of emotions. The results reveal that enthusiasm is the most intensely experienced emotion for positively appraised strategic decision-making events, while frustration is the most intensely experienced emotion for negatively appraised problem-solving events, as is disappointment for strategic planning. The distinction between a personal and organizational perspective of the event appraisal reveals differences in experienced emotions, and the intensity of experienced anger is the best indicator of the difference in the event appraisals from the personal and organizational perspective. Both events reveal the variety of involved emotions and the coexistence of—not just various emotions, but also emotions of different dominant valence. The findings indicate that a strategic problem-solving event triggers greater emotional turmoil than a strategic planning event. The paper also discusses theoretical and practical implications.

The construction of awe in science communication

Awe is a frequently represented and commonly experienced emotion in science communication. According to a popular account of this emotion, awe is an innate and universal human affective experience that occurs when a person evaluates a target as vast, forcing a shift in their worldview. This shift is portrayed in science communication as resulting in an enhanced interest in the scientific material at hand. Based on the latest research in affective science, however, we challenge this narrow version of awe in science communication and instead advocate a broader account of this emotion in line with a constructionist perspective. We argue that there are a variety of awe types in science communication, each with different forms and functions in relation to the mandates within the multiplicity of contexts in this cultural space. We also contend that people’s awe experiences result from their previous interactions with this emotion and the unique affordances provided by the science communication situation.

Moral Cognition About Harm in Anxiety Disorders: The Importance of Experienced Emotion

Recent work has shown that emotional arousal influences decision-making in sacrificial moral dilemmas, with heightened levels of arousal associated with increased aversion to committing moral transgressions to maximize utilitarian outcomes. Patients with anxiety disorders experience pathologically heightened states of arousal and thus may be expected to exhibit reduced utilitarian responding on such dilemmas. Extant evidence has been mixed, however, regarding whether anxious patients differ in their moral decisions from controls, and no study has conducted a careful examination of emotions experienced during decision-making. We administered sacrificial moral dilemmas to a cohort of 95 patients from across the spectrum of anxiety disorders to test whether they differed from matched controls on a) utilitarian decision-making, and b) ratings of experienced emotion during the moral deliberative process. Results showed no group differences between patients and controls on endorsement of utilitarian sacrificial action or on reported experience of emotionality during the experiment. Additionally, exploratory analysis revealed that specific emotions were correlated with utilitarian judgments. These results are in line with the Dual Process Theory model’s prediction that decreased utilitarian responding will be concomitant with an increased emotional arousal. Our findings support past work indicating that moral cognition is intact in anxiety disorders despite the emotional dysregulation characteristic of anxious psychopathology. Future work would benefit from the use of process-dissociation techniques to further clarify whether emotional or cognitive processes may differ in anxiety disorders during moral cognition.

Is Self-Other distinction malleable? Egocentric and altercentric biases in empathy are modulated by priming attachment style and similarity mindsets

Empathic abilities are increasingly shown to be modulated by interpersonal and contextual factors. However, causal evidence regarding self-other distinction abilities in empathy, as measured by egocentric and altercentric biases, is virtually non-existent. This study aimed to demonstrate how malleable such biases are by investigating the impact of two priming manipulations. Prior to completion of an affective touch task, experiment 1 primed a secure, avoidant, or anxious attachment style, whereas experiment 2 primed a similarities or dissimilarities focus. We predicted that, unlike affect sharing, self-other distinction benefits from interpersonal distance primed by avoidant attachment and dissimilarities focus. Experiment 1 revealed a modulation of the altercentric bias: the extent the other person’s feelings biased self-perspective judgments was significantly lower in the avoidant attachment group than in the secure and anxious attachment groups. Experiment 2 demonstrated that egocentric bias – the extent to which first-hand experienced emotion biases judgments of another person’s emotion – was significantly lower in the group primed with a similarities focus. These findings suggest that self-other distinction abilities in empathy are modulated by interpersonal and contextual factors, but in ways that differ from affect sharing (in Experiment 1), and non-affective self-other distinction (in Experiment 2).

Internalizing Problems and Attentional Control

Individuals with internalizing problems differ in levels of attentional control (AC), and this heterogeneity could be associated with differences in autonomic arousal. The present study investigated whether AC moderated the effect of internalizing problems on self-reported experience and autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses after the induction of negative affect. Children aged 9–13 years were recruited into a patient group (29) and a healthy control group (25). AC was measured by the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire. Heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV) and pre-ejection period (PEP) were recorded during baseline, a sad film clip and recovery, and analyzed using a marginal linear model. Children reported their experienced emotion, valence, and arousal in response to the film. A significant interaction effect showed increased HRV and longer PEP from baseline to recovery for patients with higher AC. Patients with lower AC showed increased HRV followed by a return to baseline values after the film clip and no significant changes in PEP. Healthy controls showed no significant changes in HRV or PEP independent of level of AC. There were no differences between groups in self-reported experience. The results indicate that AC moderated the effect of internalizing problems on ANS regulation. Increased HRV and longer PEP from baseline to recovery were uniquely associated with higher AC and internalizing problems. This physiological response might indicate a cognitive avoidance strategy. AC could be an important factor explaining heterogeneity in ANS activity among individuals with internalizing problems. Clinical implications of the present findings are discussed.