Arousal or Relevance? Applying a Discrete Emotion Perspective to Aging and Affect Regulation

While research in the psychology of human aging suggests that older adults are quite adept at managing negative affect, emotion regulation efficacy may depend on the discrete emotion elicited. For instance, prior research suggests older adults are more effective at dealing with emotional states that are more age-relevant/useful and lower in intensity (i.e., sadness) relative to less relevant/useful or more intense (i.e., anger). The goal of the present study was to probe this discrete emotions perspective further by addressing the relevance/intensity distinction within a broader set of negative affective states (i.e., fear and disgust, along with anger and sadness). Results revealed that participants reported relatively high levels of the intended emotion for each video, while also demonstrating significant affective recovery after the attentional refocusing task. Age differences in sadness and anger reactivity were observed with older adults reporting higher subjective reactivity relative to younger adults, with comparable recovery levels. Results from the physiological analyses did not reveal significant age differences in reactivity and recovery profiles. We discuss how the present results, at least in terms of participants’ subjective emotional experiences, suggest potential expansions to the discrete emotions approach for affective processing and regulation throughout the adult lifespan

EMOTION SUPPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT ON POSITIVE EMOTION EXPERIENCE.

Abstract This thesis aimed to examine the impact of emotion suppression of negative material on subsequent reactivity to positive material with a group of MDD participants and healthy controls. A mixed design laboratory based experiment was used, where in the first condition participants firstly “just viewed” a sad film clip, and in the second condition they suppressed their emotions to a different sad film clip. Before and after each of the film clips, positive self referent and non self referent material was presented. Based on findings from Dunn et al. (2009), Liverant et al. (2008), and Kashdan and Breen (2008) it was suggested that the suppression of negative emotional experience would down-regulate negative affect, but with the consequence of reducing reactivity to subsequently presented material, including positive. The underlying rationale was that alterations in emotion regulation, and specifically, emotion suppression, may be a contributory factor in the processing disturbances, which occur in MDD, particularly anhedonia. These ideas overlap with current clinical thinking, where interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MCBT) have begun to target both emotion regulation difficulties, and explore the role of acceptance of emotional experience, as opposed to emotion suppression. The results showed that there were no changes in reactivity to positive nonself referent material as a function of emotion regulation type. However, the results from the positive self referent material, showed that emotion suppression to negative material influenced subsequent reactivity to it. For the control group, the results replicated the findings from the Dunn et al. (2009) study. Namely, a consequence of emotion suppression was the dampening of positive reactivity to positive self referent material following suppression of emotions to a negative film clip. However, for the MDD group, the opposite pattern was obtained, participants had a greater reduction in positive reactivity following the view condition, compared to the suppress condition. This effect occurred despite higher suppression effort reported following the suppress condition. With regard to emotion reactivity more generally, across both conditions, there was significantly higher ratings of sadness to the positive memories in the MDD group compared to the control group, there were also significantly lower ratings of happiness to the positive images in the MDD group relative to the control group. With regard to the negative videos, there was no evidence of elevated sadness from the MDD in response to the negative videos; however the MDD group did report significantly lower happiness ratings following the sad videos. These findings offered support for both the positive attenuation view, and partially for the ECI hypothesis. A number of interpretations of the data have been offered, with regard to the differences between the control and MDD group on the effects of suppression. In particular, the idea of “ego depletion” as a result of the suppress condition, with subsequent implications for reactivity related to self control. Executive function processes were implicated as generic processing factors, which are implicated both in emotion regulation and in self control and self regulation. The clinical implications from these results focused on the role of flexibility and of habitual suppression in emotional experience. Finally, future research areas were suggested, including examining the role of executive function load in a precise way, and looking at the time course of emotional reactivity following specific types of regulation

A Framework of Distinct Musical Chills: Theoretical, Causal, and Conceptual Evidence

The phenomenon of musical chills has attracted extensive attention in previous music and emotion research, correlating the experience with musical structure, psychoacoustics parameters, individual differences in listeners, and the listening situation. However, there are three crucial limitations in the literature: 1) The emotional characteristics of musical chills have not been explored, and are poorly understood; 2) musical chills have never been causally manipulated, and no theories have been tested; and 3) it is unclear whether chills are a unified psychological construct, or a set of distinct experiences, distinguished at the levels of subjective feeling, psychophysiological response, individual differences, and underlying psychological induction mechanisms. Across five studies, ranging from qualitative surveys to experimental manipulations of musical chills, these limitations were addressed in the current thesis, with results suggesting firstly that musical chills are often mixed emotional experiences, described as moving, bittersweet and intense; secondly, that musical chills can be manipulated, and corresponding theories tested, with a novel experimental paradigm, by removing key sections in a piece or changing psychoacoustic parameters such as loudness and brightness; finally, that there are likely distinct types of chills experiences, which across multimedia are linked to both the affective dimension of valence and individual differences such as trait empathy, and with music through mechanisms of fear and vigilance on the one hand, and social bonding on the other. The studies and results are discussed in terms of two categories of musical chills experiences, culminating in a preliminary Distinct Musical Chills Framework, producing a series of testable hypotheses for future empirical work, and a comprehensive research agenda for the field moving forward