Depression-related difficulties disengaging from negative faces are associated with sustained attention to negative feedback during social evaluation and predict stress recovery

The present study aimed to clarify: 1) the presence of depression-related attention bias related to a social stressor, 2) its association with depression-related attention biases as measured under standard conditions, and 3) their association with impaired stress recovery in depression. A sample of 39 participants reporting a broad range of depression levels completed a standard eye-tracking paradigm in which they had to engage/disengage their gaze with/from emotional faces. Participants then underwent a stress induction (i.e., giving a speech), in which their eye movements to false emotional feedback were measured, and stress reactivity and recovery were assessed. Depression level was associated with longer times to engage/disengage attention with/from negative faces under standard conditions and with sustained attention to negative feedback during the speech. These depression-related biases were associated and mediated the association between depression level and self-reported stress recovery, predicting lower recovery from stress after giving the speech

The role of appraisal in emotion

status: publishe

More than a feeling: A unified view of stress measurement for population science.

Stress can influence health throughout the lifespan, yet there is little agreement about what types and aspects of stress matter most for human health and disease. This is in part because "stress" is not a monolithic concept but rather, an emergent process that involves interactions between individual and environmental factors, historical and current events, allostatic states, and psychological and physiological reactivity. Many of these processes alone have been labeled as "stress." Stress science would be further advanced if researchers adopted a common conceptual model that incorporates epidemiological, affective, and psychophysiological perspectives, with more precise language for describing stress measures. We articulate an integrative working model, highlighting how stressor exposures across the life course influence habitual responding and stress reactivity, and how health behaviors interact with stress. We offer a Stress Typology articulating timescales for stress measurement - acute, event-based, daily, and chronic - and more precise language for dimensions of stress measurement

Effects of mediated social touch on affective experiences and trust

This study investigated whether communication via mediated hand pressure during a remotely shared experience (watching an amusing video) can (1) enhance recovery from sadness, (2) enhance the affective quality of the experience, and (3) increase trust towards the communication partner. Thereto participants first watched a sad movie clip to elicit sadness, followed by a funny one to stimulate recovery from sadness. While watching the funny clip they signaled a hypothetical fellow participant every time they felt amused. In the experimental condition the participants responded by pressing a hand-held two-way mediated touch device (a Frebble), which also provided haptic feedback via simulated hand squeezes. In the control condition they responded by pressing a button and they received abstract visual feedback. Objective (heart rate, galvanic skin conductance, number and duration of joystick or Frebble presses) and subjective (questionnaires) data were collected to assess the emotional reactions of the participants. The subjective measurements confirmed that the sad movie successfully induced sadness while the funny movie indeed evoked more positive feelings. Although their ranking agreed with the subjective measurements, the physiological measurements confirmed this conclusion only for the funny movie. The results show that recovery from movie induced sadness, the affective experience of the amusing movie, and trust towards the communication partner did not differ between both experimental conditions. Hence, feedback via mediated hand touching did not enhance either of these factors compared to visual feedback. Further analysis of the data showed that participants scoring low on Extraversion (i.e., persons that are more introvert) or low on Touch Receptivity (i.e., persons who do not like to be touched by others) felt better understood by their communication partner when receiving mediated touch feedback instead of visual feedback, while the opposite was found for participants scoring high on these factors. The implications of these results for further research are discussed, and some suggestions for follow-up experiments are presented

Social touch in human–computer interaction

Touch is our primary non-verbal communication channel for conveying intimate emotions and as such essential for our physical and emotional wellbeing. In our digital age, human social interaction is often mediated. However, even though there is increasing evidence that mediated touch affords affective communication, current communication systems (such as videoconferencing) still do not support communication through the sense of touch. As a result, mediated communication does not provide the intense affective experience of co-located communication. The need for ICT mediated or generated touch as an intuitive way of social communication is even further emphasized by the growing interest in the use of touch-enabled agents and robots for healthcare, teaching, and telepresence applications. Here, we review the important role of social touch in our daily life and the available evidence that affective touch can be mediated reliably between humans and between humans and digital agents. We base our observations on evidence from psychology, computer science, sociology, and neuroscience with focus on the first two. Our review shows that mediated affective touch can modulate physiological responses, increase trust and affection, help to establish bonds between humans and avatars or robots, and initiate pro-social behavior. We argue that ICT mediated or generated social touch can (a) intensify the perceived social presence of remote communication partners and (b) enable computer systems to more effectively convey affective information. However, this research field on the crossroads of ICT and psychology is still embryonic and we identify several topics that can help to mature the field in the following areas: establishing an overarching theoretical framework, employing better research methodologies, developing basic social touch building blocks, and solving specific ICT challenges

Worry at Work: How State Anxiety Influences Negotiations, Advice, Reappraisal, and Performance

At work, sources of anxiety abound. Individuals worry about the quality of their work, their job security, and impressing their bosses. At the same time, many managers induce anxiety, incidentally or deliberately, in an effort to motivate their employees. Until now, the study of anxiety in organizations has been surprisingly sparse. Previous anxiety research has focused on anxiety as a personality trait. In contrast, I focus on state anxiety, an unpleasant emotional state triggered by novelty and the potential for adverse consequences, which has profound effects on cognition and behavior. Across three chapters, I examine the intrapersonal experience and interpersonal effects of state anxiety. Using a variety of methods, including survey, archival, and experimental data, I test the influence of anxiety on negotiations, advice taking, emotional reappraisal, and high-pressure performance. In Chapter 1, I find that anxious negotiators tend to make low first offers, exit prematurely, and ultimately obtain worse outcomes. In Chapter 2, I find that feeling anxious leads individuals to rely more heavily on advice, even when the advice is obviously bad. These effects are mediated by low self-efficacy; Feeling anxious lowers self-efficacy, which causes negotiators to exit negotiations and causes individuals to rely more heavily on others\u27 advice. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigate a counterintuitive strategy to contend with the harmful effects of anxiety: reappraising anxiety as excitement. I find that, compared to the intuition to calm down or reduce anxiety, reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement primes an opportunity mindset (as opposed to a threat mindset) and improves subsequent performance across public and private performance tasks

Attention Training Toward and Away from Threat in Social Phobia: Effects on Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological Measures of Anxiety

Social Phobics exhibit an attentional bias for threat in probe detection and probe discrimination paradigms. Attention training programs, whereby probes always replace nonthreat cues, reduce attentional bias for threat and self-reported anxiety. However, it remains unclear whether the therapeutic benefits of attention training result from people learning to disengage attention from threat cues or acquiring greater control over their attention by learning to deploy it flexibly. Moreover, researchers have seldom taken behavioral measures, and have never taken physiological measures of fear reduction. Investigating these questions, we found that training to disengage attention from threat is more effective than training to deploy it flexibly in social phobia. Indeed, the former condition reduced self-report, behavioral and physiological measures of anxiety.Psycholog

Subjective and objective measures

One of the greatest challenges in the study of emotions and emotional states is their measurement. The techniques used to measure emotions depend essentially on the authors’ definition of the concept of emotion. Currently, two types of measures are used: subjective and objective. While subjective measures focus on assessing the conscious recognition of one’s own emotions, objective measures allow researchers to quantify and assess the conscious and unconscious emotional processes. In this sense, when the objective is to evaluate the emotional experience from the subjective point of view of an individual in relation to a given event, then subjective measures such as self-report should be used. In addition to this, when the objective is to evaluate the emotional experience at the most unconscious level of processes such as the physiological response, objective measures should be used. There are no better or worse measures, only measures that allow access to the same phenomenon from different points of view. The chapter’s main objective is to make a survey of the main measures of evaluation of the emotions and emotional states more relevant in the current scientific panorama.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Subclinical Depression, Anxiety, and Alexithymia: Implications for Implicit and Explicit Emotion Regulation

Alexithymia is defined as an inability to identify or experience emotions, and has been connected to both major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Both MDD and GAD are associated with a tendency to select maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) techniques. The present studies explored the relationship between alexithymia and subclinical depression/anxiety by proposing that alexithymia is a mediator of the relationship between depressive/anxious symptoms and ER difficulty. Study 1 examined this relationship in the context of implicit, or automatic, ER, as assessed by an emotional conflict task. While the task failed to index implicit ER ability, this study fostered an understanding of the role of response windows in implicit ER paradigms. Study 2 explored this relationship in the context of explicit, or effortful, ER, as assessed by heart rate variability (HRV) and subjectively reported affect associated with an anxiety-inducing task prior to which participants were instructed to implement reappraisal. This study did not find alexithymia to be a mediator of the relationship between symptoms of depression/anxiety and ER, suggesting that alexithymia does not negatively impact individuals’ ability to engage in instructed reappraisal. However, based on the general failure of reappraisal on a physiological level, this study also suggested that the relative success of reappraisal is contextually determined. Finally, this study found depression and anxiety to be associated with heightened subjective distress, and pointed to a decoupling between physiological and subjective emotional experience in subclinical depression and anxiety