How a general vulnerability for psychopathology during adolescence manifests in young adults' daily lives

BACKGROUND

There is widespread interest in the general factor of psychopathology or 'p factor', which has been proposed to reflect vulnerability to psychopathology. We examined to what extent this 'vulnerability' is associated with dysregulations in affect and behavior that occur in daily life. As such we hoped to provide an account of how this vulnerability may be maintained.

METHODS

We used data from the Tracking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS; N = 2,772) collected at ages 11, 14, 16, 19, and 22 years to fit a bifactor model with a general psychopathology factor, alongside internalizing, externalizing (EXT), attention-deficit/hyperactivity, and autism spectrum problem domains. Following the fifth TRAILS assessment, a subsample of participants (n = 133, age = 22.6, 43% women) with heightened risk for psychopathology completed a 6-month daily diary protocol with one assessment each day. Using a dynamic structural equation approach, we examined to what extent mean intensity, variability, inertia, and within-day co-occurrence of EXT, anxious-tense, and depressed-withdrawn affects and behaviors were associated with general factor scores.

RESULTS

Unexpectedly, higher general factor scores were not associated with higher mean intensity of any of the three types of daily negative affects and behaviors, but were associated with higher variability and less carryover (inertia) EXT affects and behaviors.

CONCLUSIONS

We showed that individual differences in general factor scores do not manifest as differences in average levels of daily affects and behaviors, but instead were related to a type of EXT reactivity to the environment. Future research is necessary to investigate whether reactive irritable moods may be involved in or signal vulnerability sustained psychopathology.

Effects of scaffolding emotion language use on emotion differentiation and psychological health: an experience-sampling study

Emotion differentiation (ED) - complexity in the mental representation and description of one's emotional experiences - is important for mental health. However, less is known whether ED can be enhanced in adults. We investigated if scaffolding emotion language use during affect labelling - initial provision of emotion word prompts (close-ended) followed by free response (open-ended) - impacts ED and psychological health. Utilising a crossover design, 92 college students completed questionnaires assessing psychological health at three time-points and ecological momentary assessment of emotions, affect valence and emotional self-efficacy for 14 days. Participants were randomised to the "scaffolding" group, where they reported emotions using the close-ended (7 days) followed by open-ended (7 days) approach, or the reverse sequence (control group). We extracted two ED indices: traditional intraclass correlation coefficient from close-ended reports and novel specificity index from open-ended reports. Primary analyses examined group differences across weeks while exploratory analyses examined moment-to-moment differences using multilevel modelling. Relative to controls, the scaffolding group demonstrated greater ED during open-ended emotion reporting of negative emotions and associated shifts in negative affect and emotional self-efficacy. There were no significant group differences in psychological symptoms. Results provide preliminary evidence that scaffolding may enhance ED and have implications for psychological intervention.

The association between negative emotion differentiation and emotion regulation flexibility in daily life

Emotion differentiation emphasises labelling emotional experiences in a precise and context-sensitive way. Negative emotion differentiation (NED) has been found to be associated with mental health, where emotion regulation (ER) may act as a pathway. The current study aims to explore the association between NED and flexible ER implementation in daily life. Specifically, we examined how NED was associated with two aspects of ER flexibility: contextual synchrony and temporal ER variability. 101 college students (54% female; Mage = 20.24 years) reported their momentary emotions via a 7-day experience sampling protocol, and the intraclass correlation coefficients were calculated to reflect NED. In 10-day daily diaries, they also reported information about the most negative event during the day (i.e. event type, event intensity and ER goal) and how they regulated their emotions. The results revealed that individuals with high NED showed higher levels of synchrony between change in ER use and change in event type and ER goal. In addition, NED was positively associated with both within- and between-strategy variability in ER use. The results demonstrated that the ability to differentiate between negative emotions was related to higher ER flexibility, which shed new light on understanding the role of emotion differentiation in well-being.

Enhancing the Utility of the Moral Injury Experience Wheel: Manualized Applications for Diverse Contexts

Moral injury has emerged as an important construct for understanding the distress experienced in the aftermath of a moral violation, initially among combat veterans and increasingly among other populations, such as healthcare workers and first responders. While numerous measures have been validated to assess for exposure to potentially morally injurious events and/or sequelae, additional tools are needed to facilitate nuanced discussion of the experience of moral injury in therapeutic encounters. The Moral Injury Experience Wheel (MIEW; Fleming, 2023) is an infographic instrument that is designed to elicit precise language and help differentiate feelings in an effort to process morally perplexing circumstances. This paper describes the contents and potential clinical applications of a newly developed manual to guide the use of the MIEW. The MIEW and manual are designed to be used independently or alongside existing moral injury interventions. A case study featuring the use of the MIEW and manual demonstrates how the tools can be used in a professional healthcare setting. Recommendations for moral injury care practitioners are provided.

Exploring Within-Person Variability in Qualitative Negative and Positive Emotional Granularity by Means of Latent Markov Factor Analysis

Emotional granularity (EG) is an individual's ability to describe their emotional experiences in a nuanced and specific way. In this paper, we propose that researchers adopt latent Markov factor analysis (LMFA) to investigate within-person variability in qualitative EG (i.e., variability in distinct granularity patterns between specific emotions across time). LMFA clusters measurement occasions into latent states according to state-specific measurement models. We argue that state-specific measurement models of repeatedly assessed emotion items can provide information about qualitative EG at a given point in time. Applying LMFA to the area of EG for negative and positive emotions separately by using data from an experience sampling study with 11,662 measurement occasions across 139 participants, we found three latent EG states for the negative emotions and three for the positive emotions. Momentary stress significantly predicted transitions between the EG states for both the negative and positive emotions. We further identified two and three latent classes of individuals who differed in state trajectories for negative and positive emotions, respectively. Neuroticism and dispositional mood regulation predicted latent class membership for negative (but not for positive) emotions. We conclude that LMFA may enrich EG research by enabling more fine-grained insights into variability in qualitative EG patterns.

Ability-Related Emotional Intelligence: An Introduction

Emotionally intelligent people are thought to be more skilled in recognizing, thinking about, using, and regulating emotions. This construct has garnered considerable interest, but initial enthusiasm has faded and it is time to take stock. There is consensus that ability-related measures of emotional intelligence (EI) can be favored to self-report tests, in part because the resulting scores cannot be equated with personality traits. However, there are questions surrounding measurement as well as predictive value. Experts in the field were encouraged to chart new directions, with the idea that these new directions could reinvigorate EI scholarship. Special Issue papers speak to theory, mechanism, measurement, and training. In addition, these papers seek to forge links with research traditions focused on interpersonal perception, emotional awareness, and emotion regulation. As a result of these efforts, new insights into what EI is and how it works can be anticipated in upcoming years.

The effect of age on emotion regulation patterns in daily life: Findings from an experience sampling study

The present experience sampling study investigated the effect of age on emotion regulation patterns (i.e., emotion regulation strategy effectiveness, variability, and differentiation) in daily life. The study further explored the implications of potential age differences in emotion regulation patterns for well-being. A sample of 406 adults (age range: 18-81, 62.8% female) were prompted five times a day for seven days to rate momentary emotions, emotion regulation strategy use, and emotion regulation strategy effectiveness. Based on these ratings, indicators of emotion regulation variability and differentiation were calculated. Well-being outcomes included daily positive and negative emotions, and symptoms of depression and anxiety assessed at baseline. The findings revealed reduced emotion regulation variability with age and a negative association between emotion regulation variability and well-being. There were no associations between age and emotion regulation effectiveness or differentiation. Emotion regulation effectiveness was associated with more positive and less negative daily emotions, and these associations were stronger for younger adults compared to older adults. Drawing on prominent lifespan theories, the findings may indicate that as people age, they select and apply a few strategies that they know will be effective given the context and their resources which leads to reduced emotion regulation variability but ultimately more well-being. Concerning emotion regulation effectiveness, the findings suggest that effectiveness is less important for emotional well-being in daily life in older adulthood possibly because well-being is determined by other factors (e.g., less frequent and more predictable stressors) with age.

Is disgust more resistant to extinction than fear? A meta-analytic review of laboratory paradigms

Disgust can be acquired via evaluative conditioning; a process by which a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus; CS) comes to be evaluated as disgusting due to its pairing with an inherently disgusting stimulus (unconditioned stimulus; US). Research has shown that conditioned disgust responses are resistant to extinction which may have implications for disorders (i.e., contamination-based obsessive-compulsive disorder, specific phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder) in which heightened disgust has been implicated. Importantly, extinction is the primary mechanism by which exposure therapies are thought to achieve symptom reduction for these disorders. Exposure therapies were originally modeled on fear extinction, whereas disgust extinction was largely overlooked until recently. Accordingly, differences in the degree to which learned disgust and fear can be attenuated via extinction learning remains unclear. The present investigation was a meta-analysis directly comparing the degree of extinction of conditioned disgust (n = 14) and conditioned fear (n = 14) in laboratory paradigms. Extinction was operationalized as the standardized mean difference (SMD) in evaluative ratings between the CS+ (the CS paired with the US) and CS- (the unpaired CS) after extinction training. Results of a subgroup analysis indicated that disgust (SMD = 0.52) was significantly more resistant to extinction than fear (SMD = 0.37). Additionally, a series of meta-regression analyses indicated that extinction was not influenced by important study characteristics (e.g., sex, age, number of conditioning and extinction trials). The findings suggest that extinction-based approaches may be less effective at attenuating learned disgust and research is needed to better optimize treatments for disgust-related disorders.

Acting impulsively when "upset": Examining associations among negative urgency, undifferentiated negative affect, and impulsivity using momentary and experimental methods

INTRODUCTION

Negative urgency is a personality pathway toward impulsive behavior that increases risk for transdiagnostic psychopathology. Limited research supports the core tenant of urgency theory, that is, that individuals with high trait negative urgency act more impulsive when experiencing increased negative emotion. We hypothesized that it may not be negative emotion intensity, but difficulty in differentiating among negative emotions, that prompts impulsive behavior among individuals with elevated negative urgency.

METHODS

We tested this hypothesis in 200 undergraduates using both ecological momentary assessment (measured momentary undifferentiated negative affect and impulsivity) and experimental methods (manipulated emotion differentiation and measured behavioral impulsivity).

RESULTS

Momentary undifferentiated negative affect predicted impulsivity in the specific domains of work/school and exercise, but interactions between momentary undifferentiated negative affect and negative urgency were not supported. Manipulated emotion differentiation did not impact behavioral impulsivity regardless of negative urgency scores.

CONCLUSION

Inconsistent with theory, the impulsive behavior of individuals with negative urgency may not be conditional on elevated or undifferentiated negative affect.

The roles of negative affect and emotion differentiation in the experience of 'feeling fat' among undergraduate students: An ecological momentary assessment study

'Feeling fat' is the somatic experience of being overweight not fully explained by objective body mass. According to the body displacement hypothesis, 'feeling fat' occurs when diffuse negative emotions are projected onto the body in lieu of adaptive emotion regulation. Emotion differentiation, the ability to experience and label discrete emotions, is an important skill for adaptively addressing emotion that may reduce 'feeling fat.' We hypothesized that individuals with better negative emotion differentiation would be less likely to report 'feeling fat' when experiencing high negative emotion. We collected ecological momentary assessment data from 198 undergraduate students (52.24% female). Multilevel modeling revealed that both within-person increases in negative emotions and the tendency to experience greater negative emotion were associated with greater 'feeling fat.' Of the specific types of negative emotion, guilt and sadness predicted 'feeling fat.' Contrary to hypotheses, individuals with better emotion differentiation were more likely to report 'feeling fat' after experiencing elevated negative affect. These findings contradict the primary clinical conceptualization of 'feeling fat,' suggesting that factors beyond displacement of negative emotions onto the body may be responsible for 'feeling fat'. Results in a sample with pronounced shape/weight concern may better support the traditional clinical understanding of 'feeling fat.'

Effects of a brief online emotion word learning task on negative emotion differentiation, emotional self-efficacy, and prospective distress: Preliminary findings

BACKGROUND

Disruptions in emotion processing are common across psychological disorders. Research suggests that emotion differentiation (ED; specificity in language used to characterize one's emotional experience) and emotional self-efficacy (ESE; perceived ability to understand and manage one's emotions) are important transdiagnostic factors associated with various psychological benefits. Whether ED and ESE can be improved in adults remains largely unclear.

METHODS

Using a longitudinal prospective design, we tested a brief online training targeting emotion word knowledge (vs. a control condition) to see if it improved negative ED (NED) and ESE in a college sample. Moreover, we tested if changes in NED or ESE mediated the effects of the training on levels of psychological distress one week and two-months post-intervention.

RESULTS

Findings provided partial support for our hypotheses. Individuals whose ESE increased post-intervention reported lower levels of distress two months later. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed those who demonstrated greater training engagement experienced increases in NED that in turn predicted lower distress one-week post-intervention. However, there were no direct effects of intervention group on NED or ESE and distress.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings highlight the potential of a remotely-administered emotion-language intervention to influence key dimensions of emotion processing and suggest avenues for further refinement. Both NED and ESE may be malleable for some, and that enhancements in ESE may produce long-term psychological benefits.

Emotion differentiation among individuals in a randomized clinical trial for alcohol use disorder: Within- and between-person associations with affect, craving, and alcohol use in daily life

Emotion differentiation refers to cognitively distinguishing among discrete, same-valenced emotions. Negative emotion differentiation (NED) is a transdiagnostic indicator of emotional functioning. The role of positive emotion differentiation (PED) in clinical disorders, including alcohol use disorder (AUD), is less understood. Further, despite consensus that emotions are highly variable, little is known about within-person fluctuations in NED/PED. The current study leveraged 84 consecutive daily smartphone surveys from participants (N = 181) in a clinical trial of cognitive behavioral therapy for AUD to investigate whether between-person differences in overall NED/PED, or within-person variability in daily NED/PED, were associated with affect intensity, craving, drinking, and heavy drinking in daily life. Subsequent analyses explored whether associations were moderated by baseline alexithymia. At the between-persons level, greater average PED, but not NED, was associated with lower heavy drinking odds. At the within-persons level, higher-than-usual PED was associated with lower negative affect and odds of any drinking. Individuals with baseline alexithymia had stronger negative within-person associations between daily NED and both any and heavy drinking. PED is a skill linked to less alcohol use between- and within-persons irrespective of baseline alexithymia, whereas greater daily NED appears especially important for reduced alcohol use among individuals with co-morbid AUD and alexithymia.

Measurement reactivity in ambulatory assessment: Increase in emotional clarity over time independent of sampling frequency

Ambulatory assessment (AA) studies are frequently used to study emotions, cognitions, and behavior in daily life. But does the measurement itself produce reactivity, that is, are the constructs that are measured influenced by participation? We investigated individual differences in intraindividual change in momentary emotional clarity and momentary pleasant-unpleasant mood over the course of an AA study. Specifically, we experimentally manipulated sampling frequency and hypothesized that the intraindividual change over time would be stronger when sampling frequency was high (vs. low). Moreover, we assumed that individual differences in dispositional mood regulation would moderate the direction of intraindividual change in momentary pleasant-unpleasant mood over time. Students (n = 313) were prompted either three or nine times a day for 1 week (data collection took place in 2019 and 2020). Multilevel growth curve models showed that momentary emotional clarity increased within participants over the course of the AA phase, but this increase did not differ between the two sampling frequency groups. Pleasant-unpleasant mood did not show a systematic trend over the course of the study, and mood regulation did not predict individual differences in mood change over time. Again, results were not moderated by the sampling frequency group. We discuss limitations of our study (e.g., WEIRD sample) and potential practical implications regarding sampling frequency in AA studies. Future studies should further systematically investigate the circumstances under which measurement reactivity is more likely to occur.

A longitudinal study on artificial intelligence adoption: understanding the drivers of ChatGPT usage behavior change in higher education

As the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to progress, the use of AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, in higher education settings has gained significant attention. This paper addresses a well-defined problem pertaining to the critical need for a comprehensive examination of students' ChatGPT adoption in higher education. To examine such adoption, it is imperative to focus on measuring actual user behavior. While measuring students' ChatGPT usage behavior at a specific point in time can be valuable, a more holistic approach is necessary to understand the temporal dynamics of AI adoption. To address this need, a longitudinal survey was conducted, examining how students' ChatGPT usage behavior changes over time among students, and unveiling the drivers of such behavior change. The empirical examination of 222 Dutch higher education students revealed a significant decline in students' ChatGPT usage behavior over an 8 month period. This period was defined by two distinct data collection phases: the initial phase (T1) and a follow-up phase conducted 8 months later (T2). Furthermore, the results demonstrate that changes in trust, emotional creepiness, and Perceived Behavioral Control significantly predicted the observed change in usage behavior. The findings of this research carry significant academic and managerial implications, as they advance our comprehension of the temporal aspects of AI adoption in higher education. The findings also provide actionable guidance for AI developers and educational institutions seeking to optimize student engagement with AI technologies.

Cognitive and affective reflection increases appreciation for less preferred subcategories of experiential goods

Attitudes, particularly negative attitudes toward experiential goods, are difficult to change. As a result, people tend to choose and consume experiential goods from their preferred subcategory (e.g., prefer impressionist art so primarily choose to view impressionist paintings) while disregarding options from less preferred subcategories (e.g., ignore cubist or surrealist paintings). This research investigates the consequences of reflection while consuming experiential goods from less preferred subcategories. Namely, an initial, negative reflexive response can be overridden by a reflective appraisal which increases appreciation for experiential goods from less preferred subcategories. Six studies show how a reflective appraisal differs from a reflexive response (i.e., a reflective appraisal has more cognitive and affective thoughts than evaluative thoughts, respectively), that reflective appraisals can supplant reflexive responses to experiential goods in less preferred subcategories, and that reflective appreciation training encourages reflective appraisal. A reflective appraisal improves the intent to consume, enhances appreciation of the consumption, and increases the consumption of novel experiential goods in less preferred subcategories.

Cross-cultural differences in self-reported and behavioural emotional self-awareness between Japan and the UK

OBJECTIVE

How we express and describe emotion is shaped by sociocultural norms. These sociocultural norms may also affect emotional self-awareness, i.e., how we identify and make sense of our own emotions. Previous studies have found lower emotional self-awareness in East Asian compared to Western samples using self-report measures. However, studies using behavioural methods did not provide clear evidence of reduced emotional self-awareness in East Asian groups. This may be due to different measurement tools capturing different facets of emotional self-awareness.

RESULTS

To investigate this issue further, we compared the emotional self-awareness of Japanese (n = 29) and United Kingdom (UK) (n = 43) adults using the self-report Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), alongside two behavioural measures - the Emotional Consistency Task (EC-Task) and the Photo Emotion Differentiation Task (PED-Task). Japanese adults showed higher TAS-20 scores than UK participants, indicating greater self-reported difficulties with emotional self-awareness. Japanese participants also had lower EC-Task scores than UK adults, indicating a lower ability to differentiate between levels of emotional intensity. PED-Task performance did not show clear group differences. These findings suggest that cross-cultural differences in emotional self-awareness vary with the task used, because different tasks assess distinct aspects of this ability. Future research should attempt to capture these different aspects of emotional self-awareness.

Development and Validation of an Ability Measure of Emotion Understanding: The Core Relational Themes of Emotion (CORE) Test

Emotion understanding (EU) ability is associated with healthy social functioning and psychological well-being. Across three studies, we develop and present validity evidence for the Core Relational Themes of Emotions (CORE) Test. The test measures people's ability to identify relational themes underlying 19 positive and negative emotions. Relational themes are consistencies in the meaning people assign to emotional experiences. In Study 1, we developed and refined the test items employing a literature review, expert panel, and confusion matrix with a demographically diverse sample. Correctness criteria were determined using theory and prior research, and a progressive (degrees of correctness) paradigm was utilized to score the test. In Study 2, the CORE demonstrated high internal consistency and a confirmatory factor analysis supported the unidimensional factor structure. The CORE showed evidence of convergence with established EU ability measures and divergent relationships with verbal intelligence and demographic characteristics, supporting its construct validity. Also, the CORE was associated with less relational conflict. In Study 3, the CORE was associated with more adaptive and less maladaptive coping and higher well-being on multiple indicators. A set of effects remained, accounting for variance from a widely used EU test, supporting the CORE's incremental validity. Theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Higher emotional granularity relates to greater inferior frontal cortex cortical thickness in healthy, older adults

Individuals with high emotional granularity make fine-grained distinctions between their emotional experiences. To have greater emotional granularity, one must acquire rich conceptual knowledge of emotions and use this knowledge in a controlled and nuanced way. In the brain, the neural correlates of emotional granularity are not well understood. While the anterior temporal lobes, angular gyri, and connected systems represent conceptual knowledge of emotions, inhibitory networks with hubs in the inferior frontal cortex (i.e., posterior inferior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal anterior insula) guide the selection of this knowledge during emotions. We investigated the structural neuroanatomical correlates of emotional granularity in 58 healthy, older adults (ages 62-84 years), who have had a lifetime to accrue and deploy their conceptual knowledge of emotions. Participants reported on their daily experience of 13 emotions for 8 weeks and underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. We computed intraclass correlation coefficients across daily emotional experience surveys (45 surveys on average per participant) to quantify each participant's overall emotional granularity. Surface-based morphometry analyses revealed higher overall emotional granularity related to greater cortical thickness in inferior frontal cortex (pFWE < 0.05) in bilateral clusters in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and extending into the left dorsal anterior insula. Overall emotional granularity was not associated with cortical thickness in the anterior temporal lobes or angular gyri. These findings suggest individual differences in emotional granularity relate to variability in the structural neuroanatomy of the inferior frontal cortex, an area that supports the controlled selection of conceptual knowledge during emotional experiences.

The Promise of Affective Language for Identifying and Intervening on Psychopathology

We are in dire need of innovative tools for reducing the global burden of psychopathology. Emerging evidence suggests that analyzing language (i.e., the words people use) can grant insight into an individual's emotional experiences, their ability to regulate their emotions, and even their current experiences of psychopathology. As such, linguistic analyses of people's everyday word use may be a diagnostic marker of emotional well-being, and manipulating the words people use could foster adaptive emotion regulation and mental health. Given the ubiquity of language in everyday life, such language-based tools for measuring and intervening in emotion and mental health can advance how we identify and treat mental illnesses at a large scale. In this paper, I outline the promise of this approach and identify key problems we must solve if we are to make it a reality. In particular, I summarize evidence connecting language, emotion, and mental health for three key constructs: sentiment (i.e., the valence of one's language), linguistic distancing (i.e., using language to separate oneself from distressing stimuli), and emotion differentiation (i.e., using words to specifically identify one's emotions). I also identify open questions in need of attention for each of these constructs and this area of research as a whole. Overall, I believe the future is bright for the application of psycholinguistic approaches to mental health detection and intervention.

How to explore within-person and between-person measurement model differences in intensive longitudinal data with the R package lmfa

Intensive longitudinal data (ILD) have become popular for studying within-person dynamics in psychological constructs (or between-person differences therein). Before investigating the dynamics, it is crucial to examine whether the measurement model (MM) is the same across subjects and time and, thus, whether the measured constructs have the same meaning. If the MM differs (e.g., because of changes in item interpretation or response styles), observations cannot be validly compared. Exploring differences in the MM for ILD can be done with latent Markov factor analysis (LMFA), which classifies observations based on the underlying MM (for many subjects and time points simultaneously) and thus shows which observations are comparable. However, the complexity of the method or the fact that no open-source software for LMFA existed until now may have hindered researchers from applying the method in practice. In this article, we provide a step-by-step tutorial for the new user-friendly software package lmfa, which allows researchers to easily perform the analysis LMFA in the freely available software R to investigate MM differences in their own ILD.

The Role of Emotion Differentiation in the Association Between Momentary Affect and Tobacco/Nicotine Craving in Young Adults

INTRODUCTION

Tobacco/nicotine use is commonly initiated during adolescence or young adulthood, which increases the likelihood of continued use into adulthood and related adverse health outcomes. Despite interest in cessation, achieving and maintaining abstinence is difficult among this population. Cravings are often a barrier to abstinence, which have been associated with intensity of affect at the moment level. Emotion differentiation involves the ability to distinguish between discrete emotion states, and previous work suggests it may moderate the effect of momentary affect on craving, which has never been explored among young adults who are smoking or vaping nicotine.

AIMS AND METHODS

In a sample of young adults (N = 37, observations = 2020, ages 18-25, 51% female, and 78% white) interested in quitting smoking or vaping, we used real-time, naturalistic data capture via mobile phones to examine the interaction of momentary affect and trait emotion differentiation on nicotine craving. Participants were prompted with four surveys per day for 35 days and asked to make a 48-h quit attempt on day 7.

RESULTS

Multilevel models showed moments of higher-than-average momentary negative affect (NA; b = 0.39, p < .001), and positive affect (PA; b = 0.26, p = .001) were associated with greater levels of craving. NA emotion differentiation significantly moderated the associations between PA and craving (b = -0.63, p = .031) and NA and craving (b = -0.67, p = .003).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings from this exploratory analysis suggest that for young adults engaging in a nicotine quit attempt, greater ability to differentiate NA weakens the momentary association between intense affect and craving.

IMPLICATIONS

Results of this study show that the ability to differentiate between discrete emotional experiences may protect young adults against nicotine craving during moments of intense affective experience. These preliminary findings suggest that emotion differentiation, a modifiable construct, could be an important treatment target for individuals engaged in treatment for nicotine dependence.

Female-to-Male Sexual Assault: The Role of the Perpetrator's Attractiveness and Attributed Emotional States on Victim Blame

This study investigated the effect of the victim's gender and the perpetrator's attractiveness on the observer's blame on the male and female victims of coercive sexual contact. Two hundred and ninety-six participants (184 females) were enrolled in an experiment in which the victim's gender and the offender's attractiveness were manipulated using vignettes depicting cross-gender sexual assault. Participants rated emotions that the victims experienced in being assaulted and attributed victim blame. The results indicate that the male victim was blamed more than the female victim, especially when the female perpetrator was described as attractive. The female victim was perceived as having experienced more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions than the male victim. The effect of the victim's gender on victim blaming was mediated by both positive and negative emotions.

Examining the Role of Emotion Differentiation on Emotion and Cardiovascular Physiological Activity During Acute Stress

Emotion differentiation (ED) - the tendency to experience one's emotions with specificity - is a well-established predictor of adaptive responses to daily life stress. Yet, there is little research testing the role of ED in self-reported and physiological responses to an acute stressor. In the current study, we investigate the effects of negative emotion differentiation (NED) and positive emotion differentiation (PED) on participants' self-reported emotions and cardiac-mediated sympathetic nervous system reactivity (i.e., pre-ejection period) in response to a stressful task. Healthy young adults enrolled in a two-session study. At an initial session, participants completed a modified experience sampling procedure (i.e., the Day Reconstruction Method). At session 2, 195 completed the Trier Social Stress Test while cardiac impedance was acquired throughout. Linear regressions demonstrated that higher NED, but not PED, was associated with experiencing less intense self-reported negative, high arousal emotions (e.g., irritated, panicky) during the stressor (β =  - .15, p < .05) although people with higher NED also exhibited greater sympathetic reactivity (β = .16, p < .05). In exploratory analyses, we tested whether the effect of NED on self-reported stress was mediated by the tendency to make internally focus (or self-focused) attributions about performance on the task but did not find a significant indirect effect (p = .085). These results both complement prior work and provide a more complex picture of the role of NED in adaptive responses to stressful life events, suggesting that people with higher NED may experience their emotions as more manageable regardless of their level of physiological arousal.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00189-y.

Daily-level relationships between negative affect, negative emotion differentiation, and cannabis behaviors among a high-risk sample of young adults

Prior research suggests that higher trait negative emotion differentiation (NED; one's ability to make subtle distinctions between different negative emotional states) is associated with consuming less alcohol when experiencing high negative affect (NA) in daily life. Yet, whether these findings extend to cannabis use behaviors is unclear. The present study used intensive daily data to test whether NED moderated the relationship between NA and cannabis behaviors. A community sample of 409 young adults who used alcohol and cannabis completed a baseline survey and five 2-week bursts of online surveys across two years. Multilevel models tested cross-level interactions between trait NED (person-level) and daily NA (daily-level) predicting cannabis use, hours high, negative consequences, craving, and coping motives. In contrast to expectations, on days with higher reported NA, people with higher NED (compared to those with lower NED) had a greater likelihood of experiencing any cannabis craving, experienced more intense craving, and reported higher cannabis coping motives. NED x NA interaction was not significant for likelihood of cannabis use, hours high, or negative consequences. Post-hoc descriptive analyses suggest notable person-specific heterogeneity in these findings. Individuals with higher ability to differentiate between negative emotions reported higher coping motives and craving when experiencing higher NA. However, these associations were variable for individuals within the sample. It may be that high NED individuals crave and purposefully use cannabis to reduce NA states. Findings are inconsistent with the alcohol literature and have important implications for intervention efforts aimed at reducing coping-motivated cannabis use among young adults.

Negative emotion differentiation and white matter microstructure

BACKGROUND

Deficits in the differentiation of negative emotions - the ability to specifically identify one's negative emotions - are associated with poorer mental health outcomes. However, the processes that lead to individual differences in negative emotion differentiation are not well understood, hampering our understanding of why this process is related to poor mental health outcomes. Given that disruptions in some affective processes are associated with white matter microstructure, identifying the circuitry associated with different affective processes can inform our understanding of how disturbances in these networks may lead to psychopathology. Thus, examination of how white matter microstructure relates to individual differences in negative emotion differentiation (NED) may provide insights into (i) its component processes and (ii) its relationship to brain structure.

METHOD

The relationship between white matter microstructure and NED was examined.

RESULTS

NED was related to white matter microstructure in right anterior thalamic radiation and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus and left peri-genual cingulum.

LIMITATIONS

Although participants self-reported psychiatric diagnoses and previous psychological treatment, psychopathology was not directly targeted, and thus, the extent to which microstructure related to NED could be examined in relation to maladaptive outcomes is limited.

CONCLUSIONS

Results indicate that NED is related to white matter microstructure and suggest that pathways subserving processes that facilitate memory, semantics, and affective experience are important for NED. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms by which individual differences in NED arise, suggesting intervention targets that may disrupt the relationship between poor differentiation and psychopathology.

Determining Profiles of Pain-Specific and General Emotion Regulation Skills and Their Relation to 12-Month Outcomes Among People With Chronic Pain

Difficulties with pain-specific emotion regulation (ER; eg, pain catastrophizing, pain acceptance) are associated with poor pain outcomes. Less is known about how general ER relates to pain outcomes, or the extent to which pain-specific and general ER interact. In a sample (N = 1,453) of adults with chronic pain, the current study used latent profile analysis to identify subgroups of people with distinct pain-specific and general ER profiles, and determined how subgroup membership at baseline related to pain severity, pain interference, depression and anxiety symptoms at 12-month follow-up. Four groups were identified: 1) general ER difficulties only (29.6%); 2) pain-specific and general ER difficulties (26.3%); 3) skillful pain-specific and general ER (24.6%); 4) pain-specific ER difficulties only (19.4%). Controlling for auto-correlation and demographic covariates, those with pain-specific and general ER difficulties had the worst outcomes in all domains. Membership to other groups did not differentiate between pain severity or interference outcomes; those skillful in pain-specific and general ER had the lowest depression and anxiety symptoms at 12 months. General ER difficulties are common among adults with chronic pain and raise relative risk when paired with pain-specific ER difficulties. Findings offer potential directions for individualizing pain psychology treatment. PERSPECTIVE: This article shows that people with chronic pain have different sets of strengths and difficulties when it comes to regulating emotions related and/or unrelated to the experience of pain itself. Understanding an individual's unique constellation of emotion regulation skills and difficulties might help personalize the psychological treatment of pain.

Exploring the perception of stress in childhood and early adolescence

Stressful life experiences may jeopardize the healthy development of children. To improve interventions, more knowledge is needed on the perception of stress by children. In adults, stress is regarded as a state of low valence and high arousal. It is unclear whether children perceive stress similarly. In the current study, 35 children of the general population completed three tasks aiming to provide insight into their knowledge of the concept stress. In the first task, participants were asked about their verbal knowledge of the concept stress. In the second task, they rated the valence and arousal of eight emotion-evoking vignettes. In the final task, participants completed an experience sampling survey for at least 1 day, consisting of a stress thermometer and pictorial scales of valence and arousal. Participants' perception of stress was found to be mainly valence focused. Age and sex were found to play a role in the degree of arousal focus. Older participants differentiated more in arousal levels than younger participants, as did girls in comparison with boys. Because the perception of stress depends on developmental and other individual factors, using stress as a single measurement dimension in a survey is not recommended.

The role of emotional awareness in evaluative judgment: evidence from alexithymia

Evaluative judgments imply positive or negative regard. But there are different ways in which something can be positive or negative. How do we tell them apart? According to Evaluative Sentimentalism, different evaluations (e.g., dangerousness vs. offensiveness) are grounded on different emotions (e.g., fear vs. anger). If this is the case, evaluation differentiation requires emotional awareness. Here, we test this hypothesis by looking at alexithymia, a deficit in emotional awareness consisting of problems identifying, describing, and thinking about emotions. The results of Study 1 suggest that high alexithymia is not only related to problems distinguishing emotions, but also to problems distinguishing evaluations. Study 2 replicated this latter effect after controlling for individual differences in attentional impulsiveness and reflective reasoning, and found that reasoning makes an independent contribution to evaluation differentiation. These results suggest that emotional sensibilities play an irreducible role in evaluative judgment while affording a role for reasoning.

Emotions in social anxiety disorder: A review

Extant cognitive behavioral models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) have primarily focused on cognitions and behaviors that maintain the disorder. Emotional aspects of SAD have been investigated but have not been sufficiently integrated into current models. To facilitate such integration, we reviewed the literature on emotional constructs (emotional intelligence, emotional knowledge, emotional clarity, emotion differentiation, and emotion regulation), and discrete emotions (anger, shame, embarrassment, loneliness, guilt, pride, and envy) in SAD and social anxiety. We present the studies conducted on these constructs, summarize the main findings, suggest areas for future research, discuss the findings in the context of existing models of SAD and attempt to integrate the findings into these existing models of the disorder. Clinical implications of our findings are also discussed.

The Moral Injury Experience Wheel: An Instrument for Identifying Moral Emotions and Conceptualizing the Mechanisms of Moral Injury

This paper introduces an infographic tool called The Moral Injury Experience Wheel, designed to help users accurately label moral emotions and conceptualize the mechanisms of moral injury (MI). Feeling wheels have been used by therapists and clinical chaplains to increase emotional literacy since the 1980s. The literature on the skill of emotion differentiation shows a causal relationship between identifying emotions with specificity and emotional and behavioral regulation. Emerging research in moral psychology indicates that differentiating moral emotions with precision is related to similar regulatory effects. Based on this evidence, it is proposed that increasing moral emotional awareness through use of an instrument that visually depicts moral emotions and their causal links to MI will enhance appraisal and flexible thinking skills recognized to reduce the persistent dissonance and maladaptive coping related to MI. Design of the wheel is empirically grounded in MI definitional and scale studies. Iterative evaluative feedback from Veterans with features of MI offers initial qualitative evidence of validity. Two case studies will show utility of the wheel in clinical settings and present preliminary evidence of efficacy.

Early antecedents of emotion differentiation and regulation: Experience tunes the appraisal thresholds of emotional development in infancy

In this review, we synthesize evidence to highlight cognitive appraisal as an important developmental antecedent of individual differences in emotion differentiation and adept emotion regulation. Emotion differentiation is the degree to which emotions are experienced in a nuanced or "granular" way-as specific and separable phenomena. More extensive differentiation is related to positive wellbeing and has emerged as a correlate of emotion regulation skill among adults. We argue that the cognitive appraisal processes that underlie these facets of emotional development are instantiated early in the first year of life and tuned by environmental input and experience. Powerful socializing input in the form of caregivers' contingent and selective responding to infants' emotional signals carves and calibrates the infant's appraisal thresholds for what in their world ought to be noticed, deemed as important or personally meaningful, and responded to (whether and how). These appraisal thresholds are thus unique to the individual child despite the ubiquity of the appraisal process in emotional responding. This appraisal infrastructure, while plastic and continually informed by experience across the lifespan, likely tunes subsequent emotion differentiation, with implications for children's emotion regulatory choices and skills. We end with recommendations for future research in this area, including the urgent need for developmental emotion science to investigate the diverse sociocultural contexts in which children's cognitive appraisals, differentiation of emotions, and regulatory responses are being built across childhood.

Emotion word use patterns and eating disorder symptoms: Considering the circumplex model of affect and basic emotions theory

OBJECTIVE

No prior research has examined whether the types of emotion words individuals use to describe their affective experiences cluster along affective dimensions inherent within leading affect theories, or how such emotion word use maps onto eating disorder (ED) symptoms.

METHOD

To address these gaps, latent profile analysis was used to empirically-identify groups of young adults (N = 352) by how often they use emotion words characterized by the circumplex model of affect's valence-arousal dimensions and basic emotions theory's basic versus complex emotion word categorizations. Auxiliary analyses examined differences in groups' ED symptoms (binge eating, purging, restricting, excessive exercising, muscle building, body dissatisfaction, and cognitive restraint).

RESULTS

The 5-profile valence-arousal model and 4-profile basic-complex model were the best-fitting theoretically-supported solutions. Valence-arousal profiles with greater negative affect valence generally exhibited worse ED pathology than others, whereas profiles with greater positive affect valence produced inconsistent risk- and protective-factor relations with distinct ED symptoms. Basic-complex profiles characterized by frequent use of both basic and complex emotion words generally had the greatest ED severity, and profiles with greater basic emotion word use exhibited elevated binge eating.

DISCUSSION

Individual-differences in young adults' emotion word use patterns, versus sample-level averages only, warrant further consideration in ED prevention and research.

PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE

The present findings suggest that young adults differ in the types of words they use to describe their emotional experiences, and that these unique emotion word use patterns are linked to distinct eating disorder symptoms. These sources of variation warrant further consideration in eating disorders prevention efforts and future research seeking to advance affect-based eating disorders theories.

Preliminary data on the development of emotion vocabulary in typically developing children (5-13 years) using an experimental psycholinguistic measure

Introduction

Vocabulary of emotion is integral to emotional development and emotional intelligence is associated with improved mental health outcomes. Many language disordered groups experience emotional difficulties; Developmental Language Disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. However, (as in the case of autism) research tends to focus on assessing recognition of emotional states, rather than exploring labeling skills. Where labeling is assessed, measures have focused on early-acquired vocabulary (happy, sad, angry) or self/parent reporting. To date, no objective assessment has been made of vocabulary of emotion across childhood.

Methods

This study uses an experimental psycholinguistic measure, The Emotion Vocabulary: Expressive and Receptive ability measure (EVER) which includes two tasks (receptive vocabulary and word generation/expressive vocabulary). This measure has capacity to demonstrate vocabulary growth across age groups. 171 participants (5.0-13.11 years) completed The EVER Measure, alongside two closely matched standardized measures of basic language: BPVS (receptive vocabulary task) and CELF (word-association task). Assessments were completed online and en vivo (COVID testing restrictions dependent).

Results

As predicted, children's accuracy increased on both receptive and expressive emotion vocabulary tasks, in line with age at time of testing. EVER scores were significantly predicted by age and correlated with matched basic language scores. Secondary analysis provided preliminary findings on age of acquisition for specific emotion vocabulary items.

Discussion

The findings consequently demonstrate proof of concept for the use of The EVER Measure in assessing emotional vocabulary across childhood. This study provides important preliminary data on generating and recognizing emotion labels across typical child development. Critically, it extends current knowledge on emotion vocabulary acquisition into middle childhood, where linguistic ability is relatively mature. As such, findings have implications for research with potential clinical application in the assessment of older children, with either language or emotional differences or both. Findings demonstrate the need for a standardized tool, and its potential application in research and clinical practice is explored. A large-scale study offering proof of concept and reliability of The EVER Measure is indicated.

Negative emodiversity is associated with emotional eating in adolescents: An examination of emotion dynamics in daily life

INTRODUCTION

Emotional eating is a mental health concern, common in adolescents, that develops as a result of their tendency to use high-energy food to regulate their fluctuating emotions. Due to their highly fluctuating emotional life, adolescents tend to have unique within-person profiles of emotional experiences that change across moments and days, often lost in global assessments of emotions. Hence, it is imperative to examine individual differences in dynamics of emotions, as experienced in daily life, in relation to emotional eating in adolescents.

METHODS

In an Ecological Momentary Assessment study, we examined individual differences in three within-person dynamic characteristics (baseline levels, intraindividual variability, and emodiversity) of emotions in 158 dominantly Hispanic adolescents in the United States, aged 14-17 years old, predicting trait-level emotional eating.

RESULTS

Results indicated that higher negative emodiversity, baselines, and variability in stress were predictive of emotional eating in adolescents. When all considered together, negative emodiversity (i.e., variety of the types of negative emotions experienced in one's daily life) remained the only significant predictor of emotional eating.

CONCLUSIONS

This study affirms the importance of diversity in emotional experiences in relation to emotional eating, particularly in daily contexts of adolescents' lives. Additionally, the study emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between diversity (i.e., variety in types) in positive versus negative emotional experiences with regard to emotional eating. By taking into account the ecological validity of adolescents' daily lives and individual differences in dynamical changes in emotions, we are taking a step forward by shedding light on how the dynamics of negative emotions-in terms of within-person baselines, variability, and diversity-might be related to general levels of emotional eating in adolescents.

Sad, Sadder, Saddest: Recognition of Sad and Happy Emotional Intensity, Adverse Childhood Experiences and Depressive Symptoms in Preschoolers

Adverse childhood experiences (ACES) have repeatedly been associated with depression. The ability to differentiate emotional intensity is a protective factor for psychopathology and in the context of life stressors, poor negative emotion differentiation (ED) is associated with depressive symptoms. However, little is known about whether the ability to recognize negative emotional intensity, a theorized developmental prerequisite of ED, influences the relationship between ACES and depressive symptoms in early childhood. The current study examined the interactive effects of ACES, the ability to recognize emotional intensity and depressive symptoms in 249 preschoolers enriched for depression. Findings demonstrated that when experiencing ACES, sad (not happy) emotion recognition was associated with elevated depressive symptoms. Specifically, when facing multiple ACEs, preschoolers with poor and moderate ability to recognize sad emotional intensity exhibited elevated depressive symptoms. Findings demonstrate that when experiencing elevated ACES, sad emotion recognition may be a protective factor for depression in early childhood.

Operationalizing undifferentiated affect: Validity and utility in clinical samples

Emotion differentiation is conceptualized as the process of categorizing one's general affective experiences into discrete emotions. The experience of undifferentiated affect or the inability to distinguish the particular emotion or combination of emotions that one is experiencing is often considered a hallmark of emotion dysregulation. Some past research has attempted to operationalize the general tendency to experience undifferentiated affect at the trait level using explicit questionnaire measures. More recently, indirect measures using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) to estimate the consistency between simultaneous measures of different in-the-moment emotional experiences have become the favored method of quantifying undifferentiated affect. While the ICC method constitutes an advancement in estimating undifferentiated affect, which is theorized to be a dynamic process that occurs at a very granular level, prior investigations have used aggregate ICC measures or momentary ICC derivations that ignore multiple sources of dynamic variability to make inferences about in-the-moment experiences. We introduce a new, flexible method of calculating ICC measures of undifferentiated affect at different levels of experience that takes full advantage of time-intensive data measurement and more closely maps onto the theorized process. This method provides more refined estimates of undifferentiated affect and its associations with various behavioral outcomes, as well as uncovers more nuanced associations regarding the temporal process of emotional differentiation. It also elucidates potential conceptual issues in mapping empirical estimates of emotion undifferentiation onto their underlying theoretical interpretations.

Using the theory of constructed emotion to inform the study of cognition-emotion interactions

In this article I suggest how theories of emotion construction may inform the study of cognition-emotion interactions. To do so, I adopt the two main concepts core affect and emotions as categories: Core affect, one's current affective state, which is defined by the two dimensions pleasure and arousal, is an inherent part of any conscious experience. Specific emotions are understood as categories including highly diverse exemplars. I argue that (1) affective states can and should not be differentiated from cognitive states, and that (2) specific emotions may follow the same principles as other biological or more general categories. I review some empirical evidence in support of these ideas and show avenues for future research.

Harvesting Context and Mining Emotions Related to Olfactory Cultural Heritage

This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence approach to mining context and emotions related to olfactory cultural heritage narratives, particularly to fairy tales. We provide an overview of the role of smell and emotions in literature, as well as highlight the importance of olfactory experience and emotions from psychology and linguistic perspectives. We introduce a methodology for extracting smells and emotions from text, as well as demonstrate the context-based visualizations related to smells and emotions implemented in a novel smell tracker tool. The evaluation is performed using a collection of fairy tales from Grimm and Andersen. We find out that fairy tales often connect smell with the emotional charge of situations. The experimental results show that we can detect smells and emotions in fairy tales with an F1 score of 91.62 and 79.2, respectively.

The roles of negative emotion intensity, negative emotion differentiation, and self-compassion in loss of control eating

OBJECTIVE

Negative affect intensity is robustly related to binge eating, but the relationship between negative emotion differentiation (i.e., the ability to differentiate negatively-valenced emotions) and binge eating is unclear. Further, little is known about factors that might reduce emotion intensity and/or enhance emotion differentiation, thereby reducing binge eating. Self-compassion is consistently linked to less binge eating, which may be due to decreased negative affect and/or an enhanced ability to differentiate emotions. The current study examined the roles of negative emotion intensity, negative emotion differentiation, and self-compassion in binge eating using ecological momentary assessment.

METHOD

Participants were 201 university students (52.2% female) who completed questionnaires assessing affect seven times a day, and engagement in loss of control (LOC) eating episodes at the end of each day, for 10 days. The average of sadness, fear, guilt, and hostility subscales represented negative emotion intensity; intraclass correlations across negative affect subscales defined negative emotion differentiation. Both daily (i.e., within-person) and trait (i.e., between-person) emotion variables were examined as predictors.

RESULTS

Between-person negative emotion intensity, but not negative emotion differentiation, significantly predicted LOC eating occurrence. Self-compassion had a significant effect on LOC eating frequency, and this relationship was partially mediated via negative emotion intensity, but not via negative emotion differentiation.

DISCUSSION

Lower levels of negative emotion intensity partially account for the relationship between greater self-compassion and less frequent LOC eating. These findings highlight the importance of cultivating self-compassion to down-regulate negative emotions and to reduce LOC eating.

PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

Our findings suggest that university students who approach their limitations compassionately experience fewer negative emotions in daily life and engage in less loss of control eating. Lower levels of negative affect partially explain this relationship between self-compassion and loss of control eating. These results highlight the importance of cultivating an understanding and a compassionate attitude toward oneself for reducing eating pathology.

The Association of Daily Stressors and Daily Emotions to Daily Optimism

Abstract. Daily life events often trigger and co-occur with various emotional reactions, which activate self-regulatory processes. One possible outcome of self-regulatory processes is optimism. Limited research has examined optimism in daily life and potential daily predictors, including stressors, negative emotions, and positive emotions. Emotion differentiation – the ability to identify and label discrete emotional states – has the potential to change the association between daily predictors and optimism. The current study contextualized optimism in the emotion-laden daily life and examined the association of daily stressors and daily negative and positive emotional states to daily optimism and the role of negative and positive emotion regulation on these relationships. The current study adopted a daily diary design and collected self-reported daily responses from a sample of 248 college students over a 7-day study period. The results included concurrent and lagged effects and showed that daily negative affect and positive affect predicted both concurrent daily optimism and the next day’s optimism. Greater negative emotion differentiation predicted higher daily optimism. A better ability to differentiate positive emotions predicted a stronger relation between positive affect and daily optimism. The findings underscored the importance of daily affect and emotion differentiation being important markers for optimism interventions and daily practices.

Defining Transformative Experiences: A Conceptual Analysis

The concept of transformative experience (TE) has been widely explored by several disciplines from philosophy to neurobiology, and in different domains, from the spiritual to the educational one. This attitude has engendered heterogeneous models to explain this phenomenon. However, a consistent and clear understanding of this construct remains elusive. The aim of this work is to provide an initial comprehensive interdisciplinary, cross-domain, up-to-date, and integrated overview on the concept of TEs. Firstly, all the models and theories on TEs were reviewed to extract and analyze TEs’ main components emerging from different disciplines. Then, this preliminary analysis was integrated with an in-depth examination of redundancies and particularities across domains and disciplines, to provide an integrated theoretical framework of TEs and a preliminary interdisciplinary operational definition of TEs. This examination, in turn, can help organize current research and theories, thus providing suggestions for operationalizing TEs as well as encouraging new interdisciplinary research endeavors.

A new science of emotion: implications for functional neurological disorder

Functional neurological disorder reflects impairments in brain networks leading to distressing motor, sensory and/or cognitive symptoms that demonstrate positive clinical signs on examination incongruent with other conditions. A central issue in historical and contemporary formulations of functional neurological disorder has been the mechanistic and aetiological role of emotions. However, the debate has mostly omitted fundamental questions about the nature of emotions in the first place. In this perspective article, we first outline a set of relevant working principles of the brain (e.g. allostasis, predictive processing, interoception and affect), followed by a focused review of the theory of constructed emotion to introduce a new understanding of what emotions are. Building on this theoretical framework, we formulate how altered emotion category construction can be an integral component of the pathophysiology of functional neurological disorder and related functional somatic symptoms. In doing so, we address several themes for the functional neurological disorder field including: (i) how energy regulation and the process of emotion category construction relate to symptom generation, including revisiting alexithymia, 'panic attack without panic', dissociation, insecure attachment and the influential role of life experiences; (ii) re-interpret select neurobiological research findings in functional neurological disorder cohorts through the lens of the theory of constructed emotion to illustrate its potential mechanistic relevance; and (iii) discuss therapeutic implications. While we continue to support that functional neurological disorder is mechanistically and aetiologically heterogenous, consideration of how the theory of constructed emotion relates to the generation and maintenance of functional neurological and functional somatic symptoms offers an integrated viewpoint that cuts across neurology, psychiatry, psychology and cognitive-affective neuroscience.

The Longitudinal Relationship Between Emotion Regulation and Pain-Related Outcomes: Results From a Large, Online Prospective Study

People with chronic pain engage in various strategies, such as pain catastrophizing and pain acceptance, to regulate the difficult emotional aspects of living with pain. Engagement in these strategies is known to influence pain severity and pain interference. However, less research has examined the extent to which general emotion regulation, the ability to identify emotions and engage in strategies to alter emotions, relates to pain-related outcomes. The current study, a large (N = 1453) online prospective study of adults with chronic pain, employed theory-driven assessment of emotion regulation to determine the extent to which general difficulties with emotion regulation at baseline relate to pain severity and pain interference at three-month follow-up, above and beyond pain catastrophizing and pain acceptance. We conducted a series of path models, controlling for demographic covariates and baseline pain severity and pain interference. Pain catastrophizing and pain acceptance at baseline significantly predicted pain interference at three-month follow-up. However, when indices of general emotion regulation were entered into the model, the associations between pain catastrophizing and pain interference (B = .009, P = .153) were no longer statistically significant. Alexithymia emerged as a significant predictor of pain severity (B = .012, P = .032) and pain interference (B = .026, P < .001). These findings highlight the value of considering the role of general emotion regulation (particularly identifying and describing emotions), in addition to pain-specific experiences, in understanding risk for poor pain-related outcomes. PERSPECTIVE: In addition to pain catastrophizing and pain acceptance, difficulties regulating emotions in general (particularly elevated alexithymia) relates to pain outcomes three months later. These findings shed light on risk for poor pain outcomes and point to general emotion regulation as a potentially important target of chronic pain intervention.

Emotion differentiation in early recovery from alcohol use disorder: Associations with in-the-moment affect and 3-month drinking outcomes

Background

Early recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) is commonly associated with high levels of negative affect, stress, and emotional vulnerability, which confer significant relapse risk. Emotion differentiation—the ability to distinguish between discrete emotions—has been shown to predict relapse after treatment for a drug use disorder, but this relationship has not been explored in individuals recovering from AUD.

Methods

The current study used thrice daily random and up to thrice daily self‐initiated ecological momentary assessment surveys (N = 42, observations = 915) to examine whether 1) moments of high affective arousal are characterized by momentary differences in emotion differentiation among individuals in the first year of a current AUD recovery attempt, and 2) individuals’ average emotion differentiation would predict subsequent alcohol use measured by the timeline follow‐back over a 3‐month follow‐up period.

Results

Multilevel models showed that moments (Level 1) of higher‐than‐average negative affect (p < 0.001) and/or stress (p = 0.033) were characterized by less negative emotion differentiation, while moments of higher‐than‐average positive affect were characterized by greater positive emotion differentiation (p < 0.001). At the between‐person level (Level 2), participants with higher stress overall had lower negative emotion differentiation (p = 0.009). Linear regression showed that average negative, but not positive, emotion differentiation was inversely associated with percent drinking days over the subsequent 3‐month follow‐up period (p = 0.042). Neither form of average emotion differentiation was associated with drinking quantity.

Conclusions

We found that for individuals in early AUD recovery, affective states are associated with acute shifts in the capacity for emotion differentiation. Further, we found that average negative emotion differentiation prospectively predicts subsequent alcohol use.

The structure of lay-concepts within the fear spectrum revealed using emotional verbal fluency

Given the fact that natural language analysis can distinguish constituents of mental constructs, the present research was designed to investigate the structure of concepts related to the broad spectrum of emotions comprising worry, fear, anxiety, and panic, which in this article is referred to as the ‘fear spectrum’. A new technique presented here is based on a word association task and enables a description of the structure of emotion concepts. The technique is a variant of a verbal fluency task, i.e. emotional verbal fluency technique. Two studies have been conducted: the first to examine the cognitive structure of concepts within the fear spectrum (n = 280, 150 women, 130 men) and the second to confirm the stability of word association in the fear tasks and differentiation of the fear concepts in relation to trait anxiety and dogmatism (n = 190, 100 women, 90 men). A hierarchical clustering analysis, based on the linguistic material, i.e. words produced by the participants for the task of anxiety, was performed to present in what way the emotional verbal fluency technique can be applied to explore the structure of emotional concepts. According to our results, there is a relatively constant tendency in producing semantic clusters (emotional word association) among lay people. Moreover, produced clusters allow to describe the structure and to differentiate lay-concepts within the fear spectrum, such as worry, fear, anxiety, panic [respectively in Polish: obawa, lęk, strach, panika].

Specificity in the Study of Mixed Emotions: A Theoretical Framework

Research on mixed emotions is yet to consider emotion-specificity, the idea that same-valenced emotions have distinctive characteristics and functions. We review two decades of research on mixed emotions, focusing on evidence for the occurrence of mixed emotions and the effects of mixed emotions on downstream outcomes. We then propose a novel theoretical framework of mixed-emotion-specificity with three foundational tenets: (a) Mixed emotions are distinguishable from single-valenced emotions and other mixed emotions based on their emotion-appraisal relationships; (b) Mixed emotions can further be characterized by four patterns that describe relationships between simultaneous appraisals or appraisals that are unique to mixed emotions; and (c) Carryover effects occur only on outcomes that are associated with the appraisal characteristics of mixed emotion. We outline how mixed-emotion-specific effects can be predicted based on the appraisal tendency framework. Temporal dynamics, the application of mixed-emotion-specificity to individual difference research, methodological issues, and future directions are also discussed.

Emotion regulation patterns: Capturing variability and flexibility in emotion regulation in an experience sampling study

Variability and flexibility in emotion regulation (ER) are considered important ingredients in adaptive ER. Few attempts at operationalizing variability and flexibility in ER have been made. In two 10‐day experience sampling studies (N = 51 and 39), healthy participants rated their momentary emotions and their ER efforts in response to those emotions. We evaluated the association between ER (i.e., between and within ER strategy variability and ER flexibility, operationalized as putatively adaptive, putatively maladaptive and total strategies) and measures of well‐being (psychological distress, satisfaction with life) in general (person‐level) and in everyday life (day‐level). Higher within‐variability indicated that a strategy was used more at some occasions and less at others. Higher between‐variability indicated variation in the extent to which different strategies were engaged at the same time point. Overall, results were mixed, but in some instances, indicators of ER variability and ER flexibility were related to each other and measures of well‐being differently. Total within ER variability was negatively associated with well‐being at the person and day level. Putatively adaptive between and within ER variability were associated with less well‐being at the person level. At the day level, putatively adaptive and maladaptive between ER variability and maladaptive within ER variability were negatively associated with well‐being. Putatively adaptive ER flexibility was negatively associated with satisfaction with life. This study adds to the literature on indicators of variability and flexibility in ER and their potential adaptiveness. The results indicate that variability in ER could be a maladaptive property, but more research is needed to understand this in terms of putatively adaptive and maladaptive strategies. Future studies on the adaptiveness of these indicators should obtain more contextual information.

Emotional Nuance: Examining Positive Emotional Granularity and Well-Being

The focus of this review is on positive emotional granularity. Emotional granularity is the level of specificity that characterizes verbal representations of an affective experience. Although there has been research on negative emotional granularity, relatively less attention has been given to the study of positive emotional granularity. Positive emotions are theorized to motivate an individual to “broaden and build” one’s scope of cognition, attention, and behavior. Distinct positive emotion concepts may provide individuals with more informational value than that provided by global mood. Indeed, individuals who are higher in positive emotional granularity report being better at coping with stressful experiences. In this review, we discuss growing research on positive emotional granularity and well-being. Issues of measurement, interventions, and considerations for future lines of research are discussed.