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Alcoholism and emotional reactivity: more heterogeneous film-induced emotional response in newly detoxified alcoholics compared to controls--a preliminary study.

Alcoholics are thought to be characterized by irregular emotional responses, having trouble reaching an optimal level of emotional arousal. They therefore may use alcohol to restore emotional homeostasis. This study investigated whether recently detoxified alcoholics show different emotional responses as compared to controls. Film excerpts were used to induce emotions in 14 newly detoxified alcoholics (9 men, 5 women) and matched controls in a standardized laboratory setting. Subjective emotional (questionnaires) and physiological measures were employed. Depression and cognitive deterioration were controlled. Based on subjective ratings, alcoholics displayed greater variability of emotion; they displayed also fewer or no physiological arousal changes. Subjective emotional responses were exceedingly high or low. These differences were not accounted for by depression or cognitive deterioration. We hypothesize that alcohol could be used to restore an optimal level of emotional arousal. This homeostatic function of alcohol is yet to be clearly assessed.

Adult↗

Parental coping with children's negative emotions: relations with children's emotional and social responding.

This study examined the relation between parents' reactions to children's negative emotions and social competence. Additionally, the role of parental emotional distress in children's emotional socialization was examined. The emotional reactions of 57 preschoolers (33 girls, 24 boys; M age = 59.2 months) were observed during their free-play interactions. Parents (mostly mothers) completed questionnaires about their reactions to children's negative emotions. An index of children's social competence was obtained from teachers. Results indicated that the relation between harsh parental coping strategies and children's emotional responding was moderated by parental distress. In addition, the relation of the interaction of parental coping and distress to children's social competence was mediated by children's level of emotional intensity. It was concluded that distressed parents who use harsh coping strategies in response to children's negative emotions have children who express emotion in relatively intense ways. In turn, these children find it relatively difficult to behave in a socially competent manner.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Toward the simulation of emotion in synthetic speech: a review of the literature on human vocal emotion.

There has been considerable research into perceptible correlates of emotional state, but a very limited amount of the literature examines the acoustic correlates and other relevant aspects of emotion effects in human speech; in addition, the vocal emotion literature is almost totally separate from the main body of speech analysis literature. A discussion of the literature describing human vocal emotion, and its principal findings, are presented. The voice parameters affected by emotion are found to be of three main types: voice quality, utterance timing, and utterance pitch contour. These parameters are described both in general and in detail for a range of specific emotions. Current speech synthesizer technology is such that many of the parameters of human speech affected by emotion could be manipulated systematically in synthetic speech to produce a simulation of vocal emotion; application of the literature to construction of a system capable of producing synthetic speech with emotion is discussed.

Communication Devices for People with Disabilities↗

The effects of mother's physical and emotional unavailability on emotion regulation.

In summary, emotion dysregulation can develop from brief or more prolonged separations from the mother as well as from the more disturbing effects of her emotional unavailability, such as occurs when she is depressed. Harmonious interaction with the mother or the primary caregiver (attunement) of the mother's physical unavailability were seen in studies of separations from the mother due to her hospitalization or to her conference trips. These separations affected the infants' play behaviors and sleep patterns. Comparisons between hospitalizations and conference trips, however, suggested that the infants' behaviors were more negatively affected by the hospitalizations than the conference trips. This probably related to these being hospitalizations for the birth of another baby--the infants no longer had the special, exclusive relationship with their mothers after the arrival of the new sibling. This finding highlights the critical importance of emotional availability. The mother had returned from the hospital, but, while she was no longer physically unavailable, she was now emotionally unavailable. Emotional unavailability was investigated in an acute form by comparing two laboratory situations, the still face paradigm and the momentary leave taking. The still face had more negative effects on the infants' interaction behaviors than the physical separation. The most extreme form of emotional unavailability, mother's depression, had the most negative effects. The disorganization or emotion dysregulation in this case is more prolonged. Changes in physiology (heart rate, vagal tone, and cortisol levels), in play behavior, affect, activity level, and sleep organization as well as other regulating functions such as eating and toileting, and even in the immune system persist for the duration of the mother's depression. My colleagues and I have suggested that these changes occur because the infant is being chronically deprived of an important external regulator of stimulation (the mother) and thus fails to develop emotion regulation or organized behavioral and physiological rhythms. Finally, individual differences were discussed, including those related to maturity (e.g., prematurity) and temperament/personality (e.g., uninhibited/inhibited or externalizing/internalizing) and those deriving from degree of mother-infant mismatch, such as dissimilar temperaments. Further investigations are needed to determine how long the effects of such early dysregulation endure, how they affect the infant's long-term development, how their effect differs across individuals and across development, and whether they can be modified by early intervention. Eventually, with increasing age, developing skills, and diversity of experience, infants develop individualized regulatory styles. That process, and how it is affected by the mother's physical and emotional unavailability, also requires further investigation.

Affect↗

Demythologizing the emotions: adaptation, cognition, and visceral representations of emotion in the nervous system.

This article highlights four issues about the neurobiology of emotions: adaptation vs. dysfunction, peripheral and central representations of emotion, the regulation of the internal milieu, and whether emotions are cognitive. It is argued that the emotions evolved to play diverse adaptive roles and are biologically vital sources of information processing. They were not designed as pieces of pathology, though they certainly can underlie some psychophathologies. Emotions are, in part, appraisal systems that are operative at numerous level of the nervous system from the brainstem to the cortex. Like other information processing systems they are not perfect cognitive systems. Emotional systems often utilize somatic and visceral information for appraisals of events to facilitate decisions of whether to approach or avoid objects. The neural systems of emotions traverse the entire neural axis and are linked to the regulation of the internal milieu. Thus, in addition to the experiential aspects of emotions, emotions embody appraisal systems that are pervasive to all levels of the brain to facilitate function, adaptation, and survival.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Psychological resilience and positive emotional granularity: examining the benefits of positive emotions on coping and health.

For centuries, folk theory has promoted the idea that positive emotions are good for your health. Accumulating empirical evidence is providing support for this anecdotal wisdom. We use the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998; 2001) as a framework to demonstrate that positive emotions contribute to psychological and physical well-being via more effective coping. We argue that the health benefits advanced by positive emotions may be instantiated in certain traits that are characterized by the experience of positive emotion. Towards this end, we examine individual differences in psychological resilience (the ability to bounce back from negative events by using positive emotions to cope) and positive emotional granularity (the tendency to represent experiences of positive emotion with precision and specificity). Individual differences in these traits are examined in two studies, one using psychophysiological evidence, the second using evidence from experience sampling, to demonstrate that positive emotions play a crucial role in enhancing coping resources in the face of negative events. Implications for research on coping and health are discussed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Controlling the integration of emotion and cognition: the role of frontal cortex in distinguishing helpful from hurtful emotional information.

Emotion has been both lauded and vilified for its role in decision making. How are people able to ensure that helpful emotions guide decision making and irrelevant emotions are kept out of decision making? The orbitofrontal cortex has been identified as a neural area involved in incorporating emotion into decision making. Is this area's function specific to the integration of emotion and cognition, or does it more broadly govern whether emotional information should be integrated into cognition? The present research examined the role of orbitofrontal cortex when it was appropriate to control (i.e., prevent) the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 1) and to incorporate the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 2). Together, the two studies suggest that activity in lateral orbitofrontal cortex is associated with evaluating the contextual relevance of emotional information for decision making.

Adult↗

Expression of emotions in dance: relation between arm movement characteristics and emotion.

This study was designed to investigate the relations between emotional expression and the movement characteristics. For this purpose, we used kinematic data related to three factors of the movement characteristics: Speed, Force, and Directness. In Exp. 1, we examined how the dancers expressed emotions when they used a certain body action and body part, and how they altered the movement characteristics. In Exp. 1, 10 female dancers were instructed to express three emotions, joy, sadness, and anger, by altering arm-movement characteristics. Analysis of variance indicated that the three exhibited emotional expressions had different movement characteristics. Discriminant analysis indicated that kinematic data for evaluation of movement characteristics are useful for discrimination of the three emotional expressions in dance. In Exp. 2, we investigated how naive observers perceived the type of emotion from the arm-movement characteristics. Analysis of variance showed that 22 observers accurately perceived each emotion distinguished from other emotions. Multiple regression analysis showed that specific movement characteristics influenced the perception of particular emotion.

Adult↗

Personality, emotional experience, and efforts to control emotions.

Three converging, multimethod studies examined personality and emotional processes. Study 1 (N = 321) examined links among sex, personality, and expectations for emotional events. In Study 2, participants (N = 468) described contents of emotionally evocative slides to a partner (either a friend or a stranger). Participants reported their emotional experience, efforts to control emotion, and the anticipated reactions of their partners. Structural modeling of self-report data and analyses of observational data indicated that Agreeableness and sex were significant predictors of emotional experience and of efforts to control emotion. Study 3 (N = 68) replicated and extended the two previous studies using psychophysiological methods to examine responses to positively and negatively charged emotional materials. Outcomes are discussed in terms of processes underlying the five-factor structural dimension of Agreeableness and links to emotional self-regulation.

Affect↗

The distinctiveness of emotion concepts: a comparison between emotion, abstract, and concrete words.

Are the concepts represented by emotion words different from abstract words in memory? We examined the distinct characteristics of emotion concepts in 3 separate experiments. The first demonstrated that emotion words are better recalled than both concrete and abstract words in a free recall task. In the second experiment, ratings of abstract, concrete, and emotion words were compared on concreteness, imageability, and context availability scales. Results revealed a difference between all 3 word types on each of the 3 scales. The third experiment investigated priming in a lexical decision task for homogeneous (abstract-abstract and emotion-emotion) and heterogeneous (abstract-emotion and emotion-abstract) associated word pairs. Priming occurred only for the homogeneous and heterogeneous abstract-emotion word pair conditions. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed in terms of the circumplex, hierarchical, and semantic activation models. The results are most consistent with the predictions of the semantic activation model.

Adult↗

Ambivalence over emotional expression and reading emotions in situations and faces.

Three studies explored the relation of ambivalence over emotional expression (AE) and emotional expressiveness (EE) to reading the emotions of others. In Study 1 (N = 340, 110 men), AE positively correlated and EE negatively correlated with self-reported confusion in reading others' emotions. In Studies 2 and 3, participants wrote descriptions of the emotions likely to be felt by a person in an emotional scenario or in a slide of a universal facial expression. Descriptions were content analyzed for emotion words. Results revealed significant AE x EE interactions. In both studies, inexpressive ambivalent individuals used emotion words of the opposite valence of that implied in the scenes or expressions. Implications for social relationships are discussed.

Adolescent↗

Vicarious emotional experience and emotional expression in group psychotherapy.

Emotional arousal is a key concept in most theories of change. To be able to understand the role of emotional expression better, two treatments, cognitive therapy (CT) and focused expressive psychotherapy (FEP; a manualized form of Gestalt therapy), with opposite process assumptions about the expression of emotions were compared. Additionally vicarious emotional experience in the sense of an underlying emotional contagion was examined. Clients suffering from major depression were rated for the expression of emotion in three randomly selected sessions of a 20-session treatment course. While the types of emotions generally experienced by CT clients and FEP clients did not differ significantly, differences in the subgroups of active and observing-group members were found. This indicated that the process assumptions made by the respective treatments were only valid for the actively participating clients and not for the observing group members. Emotional contagion as a process was not supported.

Adult↗

Posed prosodic emotional expression in unilateral stroke patients: recovery, lesion location, and emotional perception.

Recovery of emotional functioning following stroke has received limited attention in the neuropsychological literature. By emotional functioning, we refer to a range of processing modes, including perception, expression, experience, and behavior. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the course of prosodic emotional expression over time in individuals with stroke. Posed prosodic expression tasks from the New York Emotion Battery were administered to right brain-damaged (RBD), left brain-damaged (LBD), and demographically matched normal control (NC) participants at two separate testing times (median interval of 25 months). Posers (i.e., individuals producing the emotional expressions) were required to produce neutral-content sentences using four different emotional tones (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). Raters judged poser output for accuracy, intensity, and confidence. For accuracy ratings, RBDs and LBDs were impaired relative to NCs at baseline. In terms of recovery, there was a tendency for LBDs to improve over time, and there was a significant decline for RBDs. Inspection of the group mean data suggested that frontal lesions had a negative impact on prosodic emotional expression in RBDs and that lesion extent did not systematically influence performance at baseline or over time. Participants maintained their relative standing on the NYEB expression tasks over time. Finally, no significant relationships were found between participant performance on prosodic emotional perception and expression tasks at either testing time, suggesting that these two processing modes are relatively independent.

Aged↗

Does the emotional go/no-go task really measure behavioral inhibition? Convergence with measures on a non-emotional analog.

This study tested the convergence of behavioral inhibition measures across emotional and non-emotional versions of the same go/no-go task in 85 college students. The two tasks differed only in the stimuli used for trial cues (i.e., circles versus facial expressions). Moderate correlations (r=.51-.56) between commission errors across the emotional and non-emotional tasks support the construct validity of behavioral inhibition. Further, parametric manipulation of preceding context had comparable effects on performance on the two tasks. Responses were slower and more variable, commission errors were more numerous, and perceptual sensitivity was lower on the emotional than the non-emotional task. A bias for happy faces on the emotional task resulted in faster responses and more commission errors for happy than sad faces despite marginally greater sensitivity for the latter. These results suggest that the basic neuropsychological constructs of the original go/no-go task were preserved in the emotional adaptation.

Adolescent↗

Acute alteration of emotional behaviour in epileptic seizures is related to transient desynchrony in emotion-regulation networks.

OBJECTIVE: During focal epileptic seizures, patients may express intense agitation, screaming and facial expressions of rage, fear or anger. The precise anatomical origin of such intense ictal emotional behaviour is not fully understood and the mechanisms by which the epileptic discharges provoke these phenomena are unknown. In the present study, we analysed the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying ictal emotional behaviour in 3 patients with frontal lobe epilepsies undergoing intracerebral recordings for presurgical evaluation. METHODS: We analyzed the interactions between regions forming 'emotional networks', before and during behavioural alterations. Intracerebral recordings (SEEG method) of seizures from 3 patients presenting with frontal lobe seizures were analyzed. A nonlinear measure of SEEG signal interdependencies was used to evaluate the functional couplings occurring between brain structures. RESULTS: We found that these intense emotional alterations were associated with a decrease of synchrony between signals recorded from the neural networks known to be involved in emotional processing, and in particular a loss of synchrony between the orbito-frontal cortex and the amygdala. This disruption of functional connections could then result in the disruption of emotional regulation leading to the release of altered behaviour, as observed in epileptic patients during seizures. CONCLUSIONS: We propose that the occurrence of intense ictal emotional behaviour disturbance in frontal lobe seizures is related to a disruption of the normal mechanisms of emotional regulation SIGNIFICANCE: These results provide some insight into our understanding of the pathophysiological processes involved in human partial epilepsies as well as in the interpretation of clinical semiology.

Adult↗

High and low emotion events influence emotional stress perceptions and are associated with salivary cortisol response changes in a consecutive stress paradigm.

Numerous studies over the last few decades have successfully utilized "psychological" stressors to examine stress-induced cortisol release as a function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) cascade. In contrast, research examining the effect emotionally-laden stressors may have on cortisol release is scarce. Moreover, the results from the few studies that have examined subjective perceptions of emotional stress and their relationship to cortisol release are mixed. Thus, little is known about the impact an emotionally-charged stressor may have on cortisol responsivity and even less is understood about the relationship between cortisol release and perceived emotional stress. The primary goal of the present research was to investigate the effect of consecutive, emotionally stressful events on cortisol release. The secondary goal was to examine the influence perceptions about emotionally stressful events might have on cortisol responsivity. This is the first study to identify two distinct patterns of cortisol release that were significantly reversed (P=0.006) in response to high and low emotion events presented in a consecutive stress paradigm that were associated with perceptions of emotional stress.

Adolescent↗

Do parents respond in different ways when children feel different emotions? The emotional context of parenting.

When children experience emotions, do they view their primary caregiver as reacting in a different manner depending on the children's different emotions? Parental socialization of negative emotions and child psychopathology were examined among 161 inner city youth ages 11-14 years. These early adolescents were more likely to perceive their parents as responding in a different manner to different emotions than responding in the same way to different emotions. In addition, we asked if emotion-specific socialization strategies tell us more about child psychopathology than global socialization strategies do. Exploratory analyses suggest that a mixture of both emotion-specific and global socialization strategies may best predict child psychopathology. It remains important to clarify the emotional context of socialization strategies.

Adolescent↗