Lab Meets World: the Case for Use-Inspired Basic Research in Affective Science

Managing emotions in the age of political polarization: A randomized controlled trial comparing mindfulness to cognitive reappraisal

Emotional appraisals of political stimuli (e.g., videos) have been shown to drive shared neural encoding, which correspond to shared, yet divisive, interpretations of such stimuli. However, mindfulness practice may entrain a form of emotion regulation that de-automatizes social biases, possibly through alteration of such neural mechanisms. The present study combined a naturalistic neuroimaging paradigm and a randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of short-term mindfulness training (MT) (n = 35) vs structurally equivalent Cognitive Reappraisal training (CT) (n = 37) on politically-situated emotions while evaluating the mechanistic role of prefrontal cortical neural synchrony. Participants underwent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recording while viewing inflammatory partisan news clips and continuously rating their momentary discrete emotions. MT participants were more likely to respond with extreme levels of anger (odds ratio = 0.12, p < .001) and disgust (odds ratio = 0.08, p < .001) relative to CT participants. Neural synchrony-based analyses suggested that participants with extreme emotion reactions exhibited greater prefrontal cortical neural synchrony, but that this pattern was less prominent in participants receiving MT relative to CT (CT > MT; channel 1 ISC = .040, p = .030).

The Future of Affective Science: Introduction to the Special Issue

Modern affective science-the empirical study of emotional responding and affective experience-has been active for a half-century. The Future of Affective Science special issue considers the history of this field and proposes new directions for the decades ahead. Contributors represent diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological expertise, and domains of study, and the special issue includes both literature reviews and new empirical studies as illustrations. This introductory article synthesizes the contributions, articulating the broader context of the current status of our field and highlighting common themes across articles as well as gaps notable even in this special issue. Sections of the article address theoretical and conceptual issues, research methodology, the questions we ask, and translation of basic affective science to applied domains. We conclude that much has been learned from the first 50 years of affective science, and it is now time for new theories, new research questions, and innovative methods for the decades ahead.