Mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches propose that psychological suffering is maintained by cognitive fusion, in which individuals become entangled with the content of their private events. The present research examined psychological ownership as a contextual mechanism linking emotional valuation to self-referential responding and tested whether brief mindfulness practice alters this functional relation. Across two studies, we investigated whether emotionally salient experiences are more likely to be experienced as "mine," thereby increasing identification with mental events, and whether mindfulness disrupts this process without reducing emotional valuation. In Study 1 (N = 340), emotionally valued experiences were more strongly appraised as psychologically owned, suggesting that emotional salience functions as a contextual cue for ownership of private events. In Study 2 (N = 180), psychological ownership was experimentally manipulated using pronoun-based priming before and after a 20-minute mindfulness meditation. Results indicated that ownership increased identification with mental content, consistent with cognitive fusion processes. Importantly, mindfulness did not reduce emotional valuation but attenuated the functional relation between ownership and self-identification, suggesting reduced self-referential control by emotionally salient private events. These findings support a contextual account in which mindfulness promotes defusion by weakening ownership-based relational networks underpinning selfing.
Psychological distance has been extensively explored in social cognition and has recently been advanced in affective science. However, existing studies have primarily examined the effect of a single psychological distance on emotion, with less attention paid to the interaction effect of multiple psychological distances. Drawing on emotion appraisal theory, the present study focused on social distance to investigate how it moderates the effects of temporal and spatial distance on negative emotional feeling across four experiments. In these experiments, we manipulated social distance (self, friend, vs. stranger) alongside temporal or spatial distance, and measured participants' reported negative emotion to negative events. Results showed that social, temporal and spatial distance all directly influenced negative emotion, replicating previous findings. Importantly, temporal and spatial proximity elicited significantly greater negative emotion when negative events involved a close (vs. distant) social distance-that is, events affecting the self (Experiment 1) or a friend (Experiment 2) versus a stranger. These findings suggest that different dimensions of psychological distance jointly shape negative emotion, extending Construal Level Theory's multidimensional perspective to the affective domain and providing potential implications for emotion regulation by highlighting the importance of considering the social relevance of negative events to the individual.
Wars, terrorist incidents or natural disasters not only cause physical destruction and loss of life, but can also create traumatic experiences that threaten individuals' psychological well-being. Research conducted in recent years in particular has shown that the psychological effects following disasters are not limited to those directly exposed, but that indirect witnessing can also cause psychological distress. Considering the prevalence of social media use worldwide, social media addiction, with its impulsivity and habit-forming components interacting with FoMo, exposes individuals to disaster content, increasing both the frequency and emotional intensity of exposure. Within this framework, to investigate the concepts of social media addiction, FoMo, and indirect trauma caused by exposure to traumatic content through the media, we collected data using a semi-longitudinal design from the same participants at three-month intervals (N = 220). The sample group's ages ranged from 18 to 43 [172 (78.2%) women and 48 (21.8%) men]. The mean age was calculated as 21.69 (SD = 2.51). Findings obtained using a cross-lagged panel model within a semi-longitudinal mediation framework to conduct the mediation test at two time points at three-month intervals revealed significant longitudinal relationships between variables and that FoMo played a longitudinal mediating role in the relationship between social media addiction and vicarious trauma. The results revealed the negative effects of social media addiction and FoMo on the indirect trauma that exposure to disasters through the media can cause.
