Emotion regulation (ER) strategies are often implemented to reduce negative affect and boost positive affect. While research has focused on the relation between negative affect and less effective ER strategy use, more work is needed to investigate how ER strategies modulate positive affect and bolster individuals’ sense of agency. This EMA study examined the temporal effect of savoring on positive affect through increasing perceived controllability of daily stressors. Over a 14-day period, participants (n = 110) reported the most emotional event of the day, its level of perceived controllability, their use of 11 ER strategies (e.g., distraction, rumination), and their positive and negative affect. The use of savoring (i.e., reflect on or intensify positive experiences) emerged as both significantly relating to better affective outcomes, and, in a time-lagged mixed effects model, predicting both higher levels of self-perceived controllability and increased positive affect the day after.
This study integrates achievement goal theory and stress frameworks to advance our understanding of students’ performance and affective experiences in an academic context. A total of 308 first-year college students (Mage = 18.3 years, SDage = 0.62 years) reported their achievement goals (i.e., performance-approach, performance-avoidance, mastery-approach, and mastery-avoidance), stress appraisals (i.e., resources and demands) and post-exam emotions (i.e., happiness, pride, sadness and embarrassment) during exam days in a first-semester college course. Approach goals were associated with better exam scores; avoidance goals were not related to exam performance. Resource appraisals mediated the link between mastery-approach goals and exam scores, whereas the link between performance-approach goals and exam scores was independent of stress appraisals. Exploratory analyses revealed that students’ resource appraisals before an exam were a better predictor of post-exam emotions than demand appraisals and achievement goals. These findings underscore the added value of an integrative approach for both theory and practice, which has the potential to inform the development of more effective and individualized educational interventions.
The present article aims at revisiting the question of the link between valence and epistemic feelings, by showing that the property of being arranged as pairwise polar opposites, far from being restricted to algedonic states, also applies to affective states that are associated with the experience of a form of cognizance. In revisiting the notion of affective valence, I propose a renewed ontology of epistemic feelings, which I envision as consisting, in the final analysis, of a system of bidirectionally organized affective dimensions. After presenting the models of epistemic valence elaborated by Lipps, Avenarius, and Wundt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I address the question of polar opposition and valence in current epistemic feeling literature, showing that both issues, while not entirely overlooked, have largely been disregarded. Then, I comment on two articles by Arango-Muñoz (2014) and Loev (2022), which are the only recent publications that address in detail the question of the link between valence and epistemic feelings. I insist that there are actually good reasons to assume the existence of an epistemic valence besides algedonic valence. Finally, I lay out the foundation for a theoretical model in which I systematically address the question of how epistemicity, dimensionality, directionality are interrelated in affective states. I highlight that, in order to be considered as pairs of polar opposites, epistemic feelings should consist of a limited number of well-defined, elementary, and discrete qualitative entities that are organized bidimensionally and likely to vary in intensity.
The transition to parenthood is a period of heightened emotion; while deeply rewarding, it is also a stressful time, marked by an increased risk of mental health problems. Socializing is vital for parents’ mental health and may buffer these risks. However, little is known about how different forms of socializing relate to parents’ emotional well-being, or how individual differences in internalizing symptoms (depression and anxiety) may modify these associations. The present study examined real-time associations between social activities and mothers’ momentary affect, with a focus on comparing in-person socializing, virtual socializing (e.g., FaceTime, phone calls, instant messaging, text, or email), and social media use (e.g., browsing or posting on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok). Two hundred and fifty mothers (Mean age = 33.2 years, range = 19–45, 51.5
Expressive suppression is defined as the inhibition of emotion displays. Most studies among European Americans have found expressive suppression to be associated with poorer mental health. However, cross-cultural studies have shown that these associations are mixed for Asian Americans, with some studies finding negative associations, non-significant associations, and positive associations between expressive suppression and poorer mental health. As such, an investigation of within-group variability in the function of expressive suppression across emotion valence (i.e., negative vs. positive emotions) and suppression targets (i.e., with unfamiliar others vs. close others) among this group may help unpack these findings. The current study examined the relationships between daily expressive suppression and negative affect by emotion valence and relationship types, and whether these relationships were moderated by interdependent values among a sample of Asian American college students. Seventy-eight Asian Americans completed a 14-day daily diary study. There was no significant main effect of daily expressive suppression with close others on negative affect. Interdependent values moderated the relationship between daily expressive suppression of negative emotions, but not positive emotions, and same-day negative affect in close relationships, such that individuals who suppressed negative emotions with close others tended to experience greater negative affect among those who endorsed low interdependent values. Findings highlighted the importance of emotion valence and relationship types. Further, the findings demonstrated the potential protective role of interdependent values in buffering the maladaptive link between expressive suppression of both positive and negative emotions in close relationships and negative affect.
Numerous examples exist in our everyday lives of our being paradoxically drawn to all forms of negative emotion-evoking stimuli, even when they are not “enjoyed” per se. Traffic gets backed up for miles on highways because drivers are seemingly unable to control their tendency to observe the aftermath of an accident (i.e., rubbernecking). Likewise, a prominent slogan of the media is “if it bleeds, it leads,” which highlights how tragedy is used to bait us into the news. And it works! Then there are numerous examples of our not only being paradoxically drawn to, but under certain conditions, actually enjoying aversive states (e.g., benign masochism). Finally, under the right circumstances, aversive conditions in our lives can serve as the raw resource for intense pleasure (e.g., flow and humor states). We review each of these interrelated phenomena (i.e., our attraction to threat, enjoyment of it, and ability to transform it into intensely positive experiences) with a focus on what they mean for some of the basic assumptions of many theories of emotion, and specifically to the conceptualization of emotional valence. Critically, such examples, numerous as they are, draw into question the application of a simple, static label (i.e., negative) to them. We illustrate this by drawing on three common characterizations of valence, namely (1) approach- (positive) versus avoidance- (negative) motivation, (2) subjectively felt positivity and negativity, and (3) information and goal congruency (positive) versus incongruency (negative).
Emotion polyregulation refers to the use of multiple emotion regulation strategies within an emotional episode. However, empirical findings regarding its affective outcomes remain inconclusive. This inconsistency likely arises from reliance on strategy count as a proxy for polyregulation, while neglecting that the effectiveness of discrete emotion regulation strategies differs by individuals and cultures. To resolve this inconsistency, across two ecological momentary assessment studies in the United States (N = 158; 12,217 observations) and China (N = 144; 11,347 observations), we introduced the idiographic effective strategy ratio, the ratio of idiographically effective strategies to total strategies used at a given moment, to characterize the idiographic quality. Across both samples, polyregulation showed opposite associations with momentary distress depending on idiographic quality: when the idiographic effective strategy ratio was low, polyregulation was associated with higher distress, whereas when the ratio was high, polyregulation was related to lower distress. These results held after controlling for lagged distress and in a temporal hold-out test segregating effective strategy identification and outcome prediction. Cultural differences emerged in the composition of idiographically effective strategies especially for engagement strategies, but not in implementing them. Canonical putative adaptive strategies were only partially idiographically effective, more so in the United States than in China, whereas maladaptive labels were highly corroborated across cultures. These findings underscore that the affective outcomes of polyregulation depend on idiographic quality rather than the number of strategies used. More broadly, this work illustrates how idiographic modeling can capture general processes of emotion regulation while revealing cultural differences.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with variation across several linguistic features, including more negative tone, less positive tone, greater use of first-person pronouns, and reduced use of affiliation words. This research has largely relied on analyzing texts from clinical samples, autobiographical reports of negatively valenced content, or unprompted narratives. This represents a significant gap in the literature, as large-scale language datasets (e.g., social media) increasingly capture individuals with depressive symptoms outside of MDD who express both positive and negative self-relevant content. However, whether linguistic features vary with depressive symptoms outside the context of MDD and whether these associations differ based on the emotional valence of the recalled content (i.e., positive vs. negative) remains unclear. In the present study, undergraduate students (N = 457) were randomly assigned to write about a sad or happy personal experience in as much detail as possible. We assessed negative tone, positive tone, first-person pronoun usage, and affiliation words using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. Greater depressive symptoms were associated with more negative tone and more first-person pronoun usage (i.e., greater self-focus) in the negative condition, as hypothesized, but depressive symptoms were not associated with linguistic features in the positive condition. Depressive symptoms did not relate to positive tone or use of affiliation words. Findings suggest that social-emotional biases present in depression may pertain to the processing of negative but not positive personal events and hold implications for identifying depressive symptoms in non-clinical and clinical settings and large linguistic databases.
This study examines associations between brain levels of amyloid-β and tau with representational pattern similarity in amygdalar reactivity to negative and neutral images in older adults without dementia. 81 participants viewed affective images during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants rated the images on valence and arousal outside the scanner. Amyloid-β and tau were measured with 11C-Pittsburgh compound B and 18F-MK-6240 positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Representational pattern similarity analyses compared amygdalar responses to negative and neutral stimuli, while preserving the voxel-wise pattern of fMRI activation. Greater differentiation in the pattern of responding across the amygdala was indicated by lower similarity between negative and neutral stimuli. Greater tau levels in the entorhinal cortex and amygdalae were associated with less pattern similarity in left amygdalar reactivity to negative and neutral images in participants whose tau level was below standard positivity thresholds. Less pattern similarity in right amygdalar reactivity to negative and neutral images was also associated with the participants’ valence and arousal ratings of the stimuli. No associations were found with global amyloid levels and only the association between entorhinal tau and amygdalar similarity remained significant after Bonferroni correction. Greater amygdalar pattern separation in response to negative and neutral stimuli with higher levels of entorhinal tau suggest greater amygdalar sensitivity to negative compared to neutral information as tau accumulates in the brain, suggesting a potential underlying mechanism for the disrupted emotional processes often observed in preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease and other Related Dementias.
Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves changing one’s interpretation of a situation to change its emotional impact. Cognitive reappraisal studies typically assess changes in valence ratings following reappraisal as the primary dependent variable, but scholars have recently documented that valence ratings can take two forms: affective valence (i.e., the positivity/negativity of one’s hedonic internal feelings) and semantic valence (i.e., the positivity/negativity of one’s cognitive evaluation of the stimulus). Because typical rating instructions do not distinguish between these forms of valence, it remains unknown how strongly cognitive reappraisal shifts either one. We address this gap through two preregistered studies. In Study 1, N = 155 participants completed a classic cognitive reappraisal task in which they either responded naturally to or cognitively reappraised negative images. Critically, we manipulated whether participants rated either affective valence, semantic valence, or “default” valence (conventional instructions). Reappraisal significantly improved valence ratings in all conditions, but reappraisal most strongly influenced semantic valence and least strongly affective valence. Interestingly, default valence behaved most similarly to semantic valence, suggesting that existing reappraisal studies largely document changes in semantic evaluations, more than affective experiences. Study 2 (N = 105) replicated these effects within-subjects. These results extend research on affective and semantic valence by demonstrating that they vary in their responsiveness to regulation. Additionally, they suggest that existing research likely overestimates the impact of reappraisal on felt emotional experiences, prompting new perspectives on past findings and more focused methods for assessing the hedonic impact of emotion regulation.
In two studies, we examined the signature emotions of three aspects of a good life, using multiple data analytic techniques ranging from Lasso and Elastic net regressions to bootstrapping-based stability analyses of predictor selections to Bayesian Adaptive Sampling (BAS)-based posterior inclusion probability. In Study 1 (N = 158), a happy life (measured by life satisfaction) was best captured by happiness, satisfaction, and the relative lack of regret and suffering. A meaningful life was characterized by hope and passion. A psychologically rich life was captured by passion, delight, grief, and lack of dejection. In Study 2 (N = 435), a happy life was again best characterized by happiness, satisfaction, and lack of regret. A meaningful life was best captured by hope, passion, enjoyment, and the relative lack of unhappiness and hate. A psychologically rich life was signified by thrill, compassion, grief, and the relative lack of hate, unhappiness, and embarrassment. Across two studies, happiness, satisfaction, and the relative lack of regret were signature emotions of a happy life, whereas hope and passion were signature emotions of a meaningful life. Finally, delight/thrill and grief were signature emotions of a psychologically rich life. These distinct sets of signature emotions help advance our understanding of emotional experiences specific to happiness, meaning, and psychological richness.
How people try to influence others’ emotions may depend not only on what they want to change, but also on the cultural value orientations they bring to a social interaction and the motives those values make salient. Here, we ask whether cultural value orientations affect the strategies people use to regulate others’ emotions through different motive emphases. Across two studies, we examined whether individual differences in self-reported allocentric and idiocentric value orientations are associated with distinct motives for regulating others’ emotions and, in turn, distinct extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. In Study 1, a 7-day daily diary study (N = 211, 1,557 daily reports) of everyday interpersonal interactions, higher allocentrism was associated with greater use of extrinsic reappraisal, whereas higher idiocentrism was associated with greater use of extrinsic suppression. Allocentrism was also associated with stronger other-serving motives, whereas idiocentrism was associated with stronger self-serving motives. In Study 2, a preregistered follow-up study (N = 428), we tested the same proposed pattern and again found that allocentrism positively predicted extrinsic reappraisal and other-serving motives, whereas idiocentrism positively predicted extrinsic suppression and self-serving motives. Bootstrap mediation analyses supported the predicted indirect effects from allocentrism to reappraisal through other-serving motives and from idiocentrism to suppression through self-serving motives. Together, these findings provide evidence that individual-level cultural value orientations are linked to how and why people regulate others’ emotions. More broadly, the results suggest that motives help explain how value orientations become expressed in distinct forms of extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation.
Evaluation is typically organized on a positive-to-negative valence continuum. We advocate instead for greater functional granularity. We do so with our Dual Implicit Process Model (DIPM), which serves as a case in point by having provided both conceptual and empirical insights via distinguishing evaluation of physically-threatening negativity (i.e., stimuli that are evaluatively negative and diagnostic of immediate physical danger) from nonthreatening negativity (i.e., stimuli that are also evaluatively negative but not immediately physically harmful). Specifically, we (a) briefly review the historical role of valence and its complications, (b) detail distinctions between physical-threat-negative and nonthreat-negative processes, (c) outline the DIPM and its empirical support, (d) illustrate with concrete empirical examples the explanatory benefit of the DIPM’s functional evaluative distinction, and (e) argue for the theoretical advantages of using a multi-dimensional, process-based taxonomy of evaluation over a simple valence-based one. Understanding the distinct functional nature of experiences that have traditionally been collapsed together as negative valence provides a more detailed and accurate roadmap for addressing critical question about human evaluation.
Gratitude expressions of recipients toward benefactors prompt third-party witnesses to ascribe moral qualities to benefactors. To date, however, relatively little is known about how observing the gratitude expressions of others toward their benefactors affects moral perceptions of expressers. Given that gratitude is a moral emotion, its expression should signal an expresser’s moral qualities, and possibly by extension, a halo of positive traits outside the moral domain. Here, we measured how the expression of gratitude impacts inferences about expressers’ moral and general positive traits (i.e., halo effects) and how such perceptions shape observers’ desires to affiliate and cooperative behavior in a trust dilemma with expressers. Across two studies (N = 680), participants watched a video depicting a benefactor resolving a problem for an expresser who conveyed either gratitude or simple positivity in return, and then provided impressions of the expresser, and, in the second study, decided whether to cooperate with the expresser to earn money where exploitation by the expresser was possible. We found witnessing gratitude expressions produced stronger moral and nonmoral positive halo effects than witnessing simple positivity expressions and were principally mediated by perceptions of greater responsiveness from expressers. These halos, in turn, increased trust, perceived closeness, and desires to interact with expressers, with trust directly influencing decisions about whether to cooperate on a financial task entailing risk. The findings have implications for the group-level function of gratitude in signaling expresser traits and helping witnesses identify high-quality social partners.
What is neutral affect? And how can we elicit it? Based on a targeted review of the literature, the present study provides a large-scale, pre-registered investigation of affective responses to 39 neutral film clips. Participants (N = 996) watched random subsets of eight neutral and (for manipulation checks) one amusement- and one sadness-eliciting film clip and reported on their affective experiences (i.e., 16 discrete emotions, valence, arousal) at baseline and after each film clip. To probe neutral affect, we examined discrete affect intensity, variability, and peakedness (following discrete emotion models) and valence and arousal (following dimensional emotion models). Results showed that participants experienced relatively high levels of positive affect at baseline. We conducted eight analyses (six using affective response indices derived from discrete and dimensional models and two assessing peakedness) to identify the most neutral films (i.e., those eliciting the lowest levels of affective responses, or for peakedness analyses, the least differentiation among discrete emotions). Five neutral film clips elicited the lowest levels of affective responses across all eight analyses, with one clip eliciting the lowest levels of affect across four indices and an overall affect composite. Four to 32 other neutral film clips elicited significantly greater affective responses than the film that elicited the lowest level of each of the affective response indices. Follow-up analyses probed generalizability across age and gender. Findings from this first large-scale investigation of neutral film clips provide a robust foundation for future studies with neutral film clips and suggest directions for future research.
It is common to refer to emotions as “positive” or “negative” – that is, to categorize emotions in terms of valence. Here we question the degree to which the concept of valence aids our understanding of human nature. We consider conceptual issues as well as empirical findings at the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels of analysis that cast doubt on the predictive validity of valence, suggesting that the notion of valence hampers rather than helps scientific understanding and progress. We argue that, rather than in explaining the effects of primary emotional experiences and expressions – which are better understood in terms of specific appraisals, action tendencies, and social functions – valence may have utility at the level of meta-emotions, that is, how people feel about how they feel. We propose that meta-emotion valence is constructed through assessments of the momentary goal congruence and sociomoral evaluation of primary emotions, and that people subsequently represent emotional episodes in terms of how they felt at the time relative to how they wanted to feel. We suggest that the valence of these meta-emotions predicts emotion regulation strategies, enables economical representation of experiences in memory, and characterizes social communication about emotional experiences. These functions at the meta-emotion level may help explain the pervasiveness of valence in human thinking about emotions, despite the conceptual and empirical issues that beset the construct. By repurposing valence at the level of meta-emotions, we hope to pave a constructive path forward towards a better understanding of the role of valence in the human mind.
What is the role of consciousness in motivation? Can we be motivated by unconscious incentives, and pursue goals that we are not even aware of? In this article, we critically review extant empirical and theoretical works that support such claims and contrast them with an alternative, valence-centered account of motivation. In light of recent methodological advancements in the field of unconscious processing, we raise concerns about the accurate assessment of perceptual awareness in previous influential cognitive neuroscience experiments that sparked theorizing about potential alternative processing routes of unconscious external reward cues. Furthermore, we discuss a conflation of automatic behavior responses with intentional and motivated behaviour. We argue that the subjective experience of valence, a fundamental aspect of phenomenal consciousness, is the core organizing principle of human intentional behaviour. This account is supported by empirical findings that suggest that affective evaluation is an integral part of perceptual experience.
Valence refers to the positive or negative quality of an emotion, feeling or mood. Much has been written about the structure of valence, particularly regarding the relationship between positive and negative valence. However, far less is known about the structure of positive valence itself. Improving our understanding of positive valence in itself is an important step towards clarifying the structure of valence more broadly. In this study, we investigated whether positive valence is best conceptualized as unidimensional (i.e., a single spectrum ranging from minimally positive to maximally positive) or multidimensional (i.e., a complex construct that accommodates multiple distinct ways an emotion can be experienced as positive). To do this, we examined the structure of positive valence through exploratory factor analyses of participants’ (N = 380) evaluations of positive emotions along positive aspects that served as candidate valence dimensions, as assessed through questionnaires. Across analyses of positive valence structure in both aspect space and emotion space, together with several supplementary robustness analyses, our results supported a single-factor model, suggesting a unidimensional structure in participants’ judgements of positive valence. Further, cross-validated regression models showed that this single positive valence factor accounted for variations in participants’ preference-based rankings of positive emotions better than any other factor or individual aspect, establishing predictive validity and providing further support for the unidimensionality of positive valence in participants’ judgements of positive emotional experiences. These findings constrain models of valence by reducing the plausibility of accounts that posit multiple orthogonal positive dimensions.
A central aim of affective science has been to reduce the complexity of human emotional experience to a small set of continuous latent dimensions. Among the most influential is the Valence–Arousal–Dominance (VAD) framework. Traditionally, these dimensions are extracted as orthogonal factors using standard linear factor-analytic techniques. In this paper, we propose a different perspective: reframing the same components as forces within a dynamical system, with valence serving as the primary control variable. We show that arousal and dominance, while conceptually distinct, are nonlinearly related to valence through a single-peaked function. In this framework, arousal surges and control efforts rise with stress up to a point, but decline under sustained negative feedback, eventually leading to depression. This representation draws on established models of stress, in particular Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome and Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress. We argue that for such single-peaked relationships, standard factor-analytic methods yield informative but overparameterized models. Instead, unfolding models provide a more appropriate and innovative psychometric approach, enabling a unidimensional representation of emotion. We illustrate this with data from an emotion-induction experiment, showing that responses on arousal and dominance items can be recovered as an inverse-U function of an underlying valence dimension.
Valence is a common feature across emotion theories and is often described using a simple positive versus negative dimension. Whereas many circumstances elicit relatively consistent categorizations of positivity and negativity across people, there are other conditions when the valence of a stimulus is ambiguous and thus defies this simple, uniform categorization. In this short review, we will describe research investigating individual differences in interpretations of valence ambiguity to support the notion that valence is not an invariant feature of a stimulus, but rather arises from diverse appraisals that can be learned, challenged, and changed. These individual differences are referred to as valence or interpretation biases and defined as the tendency to evaluate ambiguous emotional stimuli as more positive or negative. Valence bias has been associated with affective traits, psychosocial functioning, and brain organization, demonstrating trait-like stability that, nonetheless, is malleable during targeted interventions including treatment for mental health disorders. Collectively, studies of valence ambiguity highlight the variable nature of valence interpretations across people, supporting the notion that valence itself is a multifaceted construct uniquely determined by the perceiver in a given context. Future research should further probe valence ambiguity in real world conditions and better characterize individual differences in the origins, limits, and implications of biased valence interpretations.
