Depression severity moderates the relation between self-distancing and features of emotion unfolding

Measuring Continuous Affect in Daily Life With Intensity Profile Drawings

We examined continuous affect drawings as innovative measure of affective experiences over time. Intensive longitudinal data often rely on discrete assessments, containing "blind spots" between measurements. With continuous affect drawings participants visually depict their affect fluctuations between assessments. In an experience sampling study, participants (N = 115) rated their momentary positive and negative affect 6 times daily. From the second daily rating on, they additionally drew their positive and negative affect changes and reported affective events between assessments. They received one measurement burst between assessments daily. The strength of the approach is a substantial amount of informational gain (average 7%) over linearly interpolated points between assessments. The additional information was subsequently categorized into positive and negative affect peaks and valleys, each occurring once a day per person on average. The probability of detecting peaks and valleys increased with reported events. The drawings correlated positively with momentary affect scores from the burst. Yet, the drawing predicted the bursts less well suggesting that the momentary ratings may yield different information than the drawings. Although the timing of retrospective drawings is less precise than individual momentary assessments, this method provides a comprehensive understanding of affective experiences between assessments, offering a unique perspective on affect dynamics.

Emotion Regulation by Psychological Distance and Level of Abstraction: Two Meta-Analyses

Self-reflection is suggested to attenuate feelings, yet researchers disagree on whether adopting a distant or near perspective, or processing the experience abstractly or concretely, is more effective. Given the relationship between psychological distance and level of abstraction, we suggest the "construal-matching hypothesis": Psychological distance and abstraction differently influence emotion intensity, depending on whether the emotion's appraisal involves low-level or high-level construal. Two meta-analyses tested the effects of psychological distance (k = 230) and level-of-abstraction (k = 98) manipulations on emotional experience. A distant perspective attenuated emotional experience (g = 0.52) but with weaker effects for high-level (g = 0.29; for example, self-conscious emotions) than low-level emotions (g= 0.64; for example, basic emotions). Level of abstraction only attenuated the experience of low-level emotions (g = 0.2) and showed a reverse (nonsignificant) effect for high-level emotions (g = -0.13). These results highlight differences between distancing and level-of-abstraction manipulations and the importance of considering the type of emotion experienced in emotion regulation.

Punish or Protect? How Close Relationships Shape Responses to Moral Violations

People have fundamental tendencies to punish immoral actors and treat close others altruistically. What happens when these tendencies collide—do people punish or protect close others who behave immorally? Across 10 studies ( N = 2,847), we show that people consistently anticipate protecting close others who commit moral infractions, particularly highly severe acts of theft and sexual harassment. This tendency emerged regardless of gender, political orientation, moral foundations, and disgust sensitivity and was driven by concerns about self-interest, loyalty, and harm. We further find that people justify this tendency by planning to discipline close others on their own. We also identify a psychological mechanism that mitigates the tendency to protect close others who have committed severe (but not mild) moral infractions: self-distancing. These findings highlight the role that relational closeness plays in shaping people’s responses to moral violations, underscoring the need to consider relational closeness in future moral psychology work.

The impact of self-distancing on emotion explosiveness and accumulation: An fMRI study

Emotions unfold over time with episodes differing in explosiveness (i.e., profiles having a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e., profiles increasing over time vs. going back to baseline). In the present fMRI study, we wanted to replicate and extend previous findings on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Specifically, we aimed to: (a) replicate the finding that different neural mechanisms are associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, (b) replicate the finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreases emotion explosiveness and accumulation at the level of self-report, and (c) examine whether adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective similarly modulates activity in the brain regions associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Participants in an fMRI scanner were asked to adopt a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about negative social feedback, and to report on felt changes in negative affect during that period using an emotion intensity profile tracking approach. We replicated previous findings showing that emotion explosiveness and accumulation were related to activity in regions involved in self-referential processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and sustained visceral arousal (such as the posterior insula), respectively. The finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective lowers emotion explosiveness and accumulation was also replicated at a self-report level. However, perspective taking did not impact activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation.