Background: Affective responses to daily hassles may contribute to associations between daily stress and health. Social exchange processes are assumed to influence these responses. For example, people may disclose negative experiences to others. Past research suggests that this spontaneous behaviour – emotional sharing – helps individuals to downregulate negative affects after the event. Methods: We used multiple methods to test this hypothesis. In a dyadic experience-sampling study with 100 cohabitating, heterosexual couples, both partners repeatedly used mobile phones to document whether they had recently experienced a hassle and whether they had told their partner about it. Both partners also repeatedly rated their current affect. In an additional laboratory paradigm, we analysed the content of spontaneous dyadic conversations among 69 couples before and after watching emotional film clips. Both partners also rated their current affect before and after the session. Results: Data from both studies suggest that emotional sharing in couples is a frequent behaviour after negative events. There was no evidence supporting the notion that such social exchange processes contribute to reducing negative affect. In the laboratory, emotional content in dyadic conversations increased after watching emotional videos compared to baseline, but associations with changes in affective experiences were inconclusive. Multilevel analyses of the experience-sampling data showed that both partners‘ affect was worse after one partner had experienced a hassle. Both partners’ affect was additionally worsened after emotional sharing, compared to undisclosed hassles. Discussion: We discuss these results considering potential functions of emotional sharing for emotion regulation, relationship regulation, and health.

People smile in various emotional contexts, for example, when they are amused or angry or simply being polite. We investigated whether younger and older adults differ in how well they are able to identify the emotional experiences accompanying smile expressions, and whether the age of the smiling person plays a role in this respect. With this aim, we produced 80 video episodes of three types of smile expressions: positive-affect smiles had been spontaneously displayed by target persons as they were watching amusing film clips and cartoons. Negative-affect smiles had been displayed spontaneously by target persons during an interaction in which they were being unfairly accused. Affectively neutral smiles were posed upon request. Differences in the accompanying emotional experiences were validated by target persons' self-reports. These smile videos served as experimental stimuli in two studies with younger and older adult participants. In Study 1, older participants were less likely to attribute positive emotions to smiles, and more likely to assume that a smile was posed. Furthermore, younger participants were more accurate than older adults at identifying emotional experiences accompanying smiles. In Study 2, both younger and older participants attributed positive emotions more frequently to smiles shown by older as compared to younger target persons, but older participants did so less frequently than younger participants. Again, younger participants were more accurate than older participants in identifying emotional experiences accompanying smiles, but this effect was attenuated for older target persons. Older participants could better identify the emotional state accompanying smiles shown by older than by younger target persons. Taken together, these findings indicate that there is an age-related decline in the ability to decipher the emotional meaning of smiles presented without context, which, however, is attenuated when the smiling person is also an older adult.

Evidence on the coherence between emotion and facial expression in adults from laboratory experiments is reviewed. High coherence has been found in several studies between amusement and smiling; low to moderate coherence between other positive emotions and smiling. The available evidence for surprise and disgust suggests that these emotions are accompanied by their “traditional” facial expressions, and even components of these expressions, only in a minority of cases. Evidence concerning sadness, anger, and fear is very limited. For sadness, one study suggests that high emotion–expression coherence may exist in specific situations, whereas for anger and fear, the evidence points to low coherence. Insufficient emotion intensity and inhibition of facial expressions seem unable to account for the observed dissociations between emotion and facial expression.

The current study investigated spontaneous anger coping, cardiac autonomic regulation and phasic heart rate responses to anger provocation. Forty-five adolescents (27 female, mean age 14.7 years) attended the single experimental session, which included monitoring of continuous heart rate and blood pressure responses to anger provocation (receiving an unfair offer) using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game (UG). Vagal activation was operationalized as high frequency component of heart rate variability during rest periods, and spontaneous baroreflex-sensitivity (SBR) during the UG. Adolescents employing cognitive reappraisal showed higher vagal activity under resting conditions and attenuated heart rate deceleration after receiving the unfair offer compared with participants who tended to ruminate about their anger and experienced injustice. Results from SBR suggested vagal withdrawal in anger ruminators during contemplation of the unfair offer. These results provide further support for the specificity and sensitivity of vagal responses to higher cortical functions such as emotion regulation.

Three studies examined the effects of experimentally manipulated surprise expressions on the experience of surprise. Surprise was induced by a sudden, unannounced change of the stimulus presentation during a computerized task. Facial expression was manipulated by leading participants to adopt an expression akin to surprise, or by forcing them to look up steeply to a monitor. The expression manipulations had no intensifying effect on the experience of surprise, whereas manipulations of unexpectedness and mental load had strong effects. In addition, mental load was found to affect beliefs about facial expression, suggesting that the participants used their feelings of surprise to infer their probable facial displays. Path analyses supported this reverse self-inference hypothesis.

The hallmark of psychology as an empirical science is the reliance on empirical data to support its claims. As traditionally conceived in philosophy and psychology (see, e.g., Brentano, 1874; Wundt, 1896), empirical data comprise all kinds of information obtained through experience, both those acquired through the “outer senses” (the sense-organs; i.e., the eyes, ears, etc.) and those acquired through the “inner sense”, the self-observation of conscious mental states (also called introspection ). 1 Common sense suggests that for obtaining empirical information about emotions, both methods—introspective selfobservation and external observation—are useful. For example, to acquire empirical information about anger, one can either observe one’s own feelings and thoughts during an episode of anger or ask others to report their experiences; or one can watch what other people do, say, and express nonverbally in their face, voice, and body when they are angry. In agreement with common sense, both introspection and external observation have been extensively used in emotion research since the beginnings of psychology as an independent discipline in the late 19th century (e.g., Wundt, 1896). Over the years, both methods have evolved and now exist in several more or less standardized variants. Introspection-based observation methods are today usually referred to as self-report methods (see Pekrun & Bühner, 2014). Their best-known incarnation in current emotion psychology is the emotion rating scale, but several other self-report based methods useful for emotion research do exist (e.g., Junge & Reisenzein, 2013). In this chapter, however, interest is on methods of emotion assessment based on external observation. From the systematic perspective, methods of external observation in psychology comprise all methods that are based on the observation of intersubjectively accessible aspects of a psychological phenomenon (e.g., emotion), with or without the help of special observation instruments (e.g., video cameras, physiological sensors), and with or without making inferences to underlying mental states. Hence, from the systematic perspective,