Emodiversity, health, and well-being in the MIDUS daily diary study

Emodiversity, or the variety and relative abundance of emotions experienced, provides a metric that can be used to understand emotional experience and its relation to well-being above and beyond average levels of positive and negative affect. Past research has found that more diverse emotional experiences, both positive and negative, are related to better mental and physical health outcomes. The present research aimed to test the relationship between positive and negative emodiversity across the span of 8 days with measures of health and well-being using 2 samples of the Midlife in the United States study (http://midus.wisc.edu/). Participants (N ⫽ 2,788) reported emotional states (14 negative, 13 positive) once each day for 8 days. Emodiversity scores were computed for each day using an adaptation of Shannon’s biodiversity index and averaged across the days. All models included average affect and demographic covariates. Greater positive emodiversity was associated with fewer symptoms of depres- sion and anxiety and fewer physical health symptoms but was not related to eudaimonic well-being nor cognitive functioning. In contrast to previous research, greater negative emodiversity was related to more symptoms of depression and anxiety and more physical health symptoms. Greater negative emodiversity was only associated with one positive outcome: better executive functioning. These findings illustrate inconsistencies across studies in whether negative emodiversity is associated with better or worse outcomes and raise further questions about how the construct of emodiversity can be better refined

Modifying the Trier Social Stress Test to Induce Positive Affect

Studies comparing the effects of positive and negative affect on psychological outcomes are limited by differences in the situations that evoke these states and in the resulting levels of arousal. In the present research, we adapted the speech portion of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to create conditions with similar situational features that induce either positive, negative, or neutral affective states (N = 301). Pre-post emotion ratings showed that negative affect increased in the negative condition but decreased in the positive and neutral conditions. Positive affect increased in the positive condition, remained unchanged in the neutral condition, and decreased in the negative condition. Participants' post-speech ratings of their positive and negative emotions differed significantly between the positive and negative conditions, which has not been accomplished in previous attempts to create a non-stressful positive TSST. Importantly, participants in the positive and negative conditions did not differ in self-reported levels of arousal and showed similar changes in mean arterial pressure across the speech period, although heart rate was relatively higher during the speech for participants in the negative compared to positive and neutral conditions. Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of a modified TSST for inducing positive affect with similar levels of emotional arousal to the traditional negative TSST.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00074-6

Emotional Context Effects on Memory Accuracy for Neutral Information

Despite decades of study, it remains unclear how emotional contexts influence memory for non-emotional information. In two studies, we previously found memory accuracy for neutral information encoded in an emotional differed by valence. Specifically, neutral images encoded in a negative context were remembered with similar accuracy as those encoded in a non-emotional context, and neutral images encoded in a positive context were remembered with less accuracy than a non-emotional context. This Registered Report contains a third study to replicate our original results and allow for direct comparison between the negative and positive encoding conditions. People in the positive condition to showed decreased memory accuracy, but this effect was very small in size and only significant when compared to the neutral condition. Given the lack of difference between negative and neutral conditions, effects of emotion on memory are not only a function of emotional arousal. At the same time, given the nonsignificant, small difference between positive and negative conditions, effects of emotion on memory are also not solely attributable to valence. This series of studies represents a step towards re-examining the tenet that emotion enhances memory unless the experience elicits sufficiently high arousal levels such that memory is impaired

Neurodynamics of affect from the fMRI emotional picture viewing task in the MIDUS Refresher neuroscience project

The Midlife in the United States study (MIDUS) is a longitudinal national study of adults in the United States that began in 1995. MIDUS consists of several projects, including Survey, Daily Diary, Cognitive, Biomarkers, and Neuroscience projects. The original MIDUS sample was assessed between 1995-1997 (MIDUS 1), again between 2004-2009 (MIDUS 2), and again starting in 2013 (data collection ongoing; MIDUS 3). To replenish the original sample, new participants were added to the protocol between 2011-2014 (MIDUS Refresher). This OSF page is intended to serve as the basis for several projects relating to the MIDUS Refresher neuroscience project functional MRI data. We outline here the details of how MIDUS Refresher fMRI data were collected, cleaned, and processed by our group. Parts of the MIDUS Refresher fMRI data have already been analyzed and some hypotheses have already been tested by others in our group and will be noted when relevant. A clear delineation of what hypotheses have been tested and which have yet to be tested will be included when necessary