Dynamic associations between emotion expressions and strategy use in Chinese American and Mexican American preschoolers

Yucatec Maya Children's Responding to Emotional Challenge

While the field of affective science has seen increased interest in and representation of the role of culture in emotion, prior research has disproportionately centered on Western, English-speaking, industrialized, and/or economically developed nations. We investigated the extent to which emotional experiences and responding may be shaped by cultural display rule understanding among Yucatec Maya children, an indigenous population residing in small-scale communities in remote areas of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Data were collected from forty-two 6- and 10-year-old Yucatec children who completed a resting baseline and a structured disappointing gift task. Children were asked about whether specific emotions are better to show or to hide from others and self-reported the intensity of their discrete positive and negative emotional experiences. We observed and coded expressive positive and negative affective behavior during and after the disappointing gift task, and continuously acquired physiological measures of autonomic nervous system function. These multi-method indices of emotional responding enable us to provide a nuanced description of children's observable and unobservable affective experiences. Results generally indicated that children's understanding of and adherence to cultural display rules (i.e., to suppress negative emotions but openly show positive ones) was evidenced across indices of emotion, as predicted. The current study is a step toward the future of affective science, which lies in the pursuit of more diverse and equitable representation in study samples, increased use of concurrent multimethod approaches to studying emotion, and increased exploration of how emotional processes develop.

The Fidget Factor and the obesity paradox. How small movements have big impact

The hypothesis is that the Fidget Factor is the innate neurological pulse that propels humans and other species to move to support their health. Fidgets, previously thought to be spontaneous, are neurologically regulated and highly ordered (non-random). Modern societies being chair-based overwhelm Fidget Factor pulses and consequently inflict chair-based living for transportation, labor, and leisure. Despite impulses firing through the nervous system, people sit because environmental design overwhelms the biology. Urbanization and chair-based societies were designed after the industrial revolution to promote productivity; however, the consequence has been opposite. Crushing the natural urge to move—the Fidget Factor—is a public health calamity. Excess sitting is associated with a myriad of detrimental health consequences and impairs productivity. Fidgeting may reduce all-cause mortality associated with excessive sitting. The Fidget Factor offers hope; data demonstrate that workplaces and schools can be designed to promote activity and free people's Fidget Factors. Evidence shows that people are happier, healthier, wealthier, and more successful if their Fidget Factors are freed.