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Research indicates that a subtle shift in language—silently referring to oneself using one’s own name and non–first-person-singular pronouns (i.e., distanced self-talk)—promotes emotion regulation. Yet it remains unclear whether the efficacy of distanced self-talk depends on the intensity of the negative experience reflected on and whether the benefits extend to emotionally vulnerable individuals. Two high-powered experiments addressed these issues. Distanced as opposed to immersed self-talk reduced emotional reactivity when people reflected on negative experiences that varied in their emotional intensity. These findings held when participants focused on future and past autobiographical events and when they scored high on individual difference measures of emotional vulnerability. The results also generalized across various types of negative events. These findings illuminate the functionality of language for allowing people to regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences across the spectrum of emotional intensity and highlight the need for future research to examine the clinical implications of this technique.

Because of the rise of social networking sites (SNSs), social comparisons take place at an unprecedented rate and scale. There is a growing concern that these online social comparisons negatively impact people's subjective well-being (SWB). In this paper, we review research on (a) the antecedents of social comparisons on SNSs, (b) the consequences of social comparisons on SNSs for SWB and, (c) social comparison as a mechanism explaining (mediator) or affecting (moderator) the relationship between SNSs and SWB. The occurrence of social comparisons on SNSs depends on who uses the SNS and on how the SNS is being used with passive use in particular resulting in increased levels of social comparison. Moreover, social comparison on SNSs may occasionally result in an increase in SWB but typically negative effects are found as people tend to engage in contrasting upward social comparisons. Finally, several studies show that social comparison is a key mechanism explaining the relationship between use of SNSs and SWB and that users with a tendency to engage in social comparison are especially likely to be negatively impacted by SNSs. The dynamic, cyclical processes that result from this pattern of findings are discussed.

Psychologists have long debated whether it is possible to assess how people subjectively feel without asking them. The recent proliferation of online social networks has recently added a fresh chapter to this discussion, with research now suggesting that it is possible to index people's subjective experience of emotion by simply counting the number of emotion words contained in their online social network posts. Whether the conclusions that emerge from this work are valid, however, rests on a critical assumption: that people's usage of emotion words in their posts accurately reflects how they feel. Although this assumption is widespread in psychological research, here we suggest that there are reasons to challenge it. We corroborate these assertions in 2 ways. First, using data from 4 experience-sampling studies of emotion in young adults, we show that people's reports of how they feel throughout the day neither predict, nor are predicted by, their use of emotion words on Facebook. Second, using simulations we show that although significant relationships emerge between the use of emotion words on Facebook and self-reported affect with increasingly large numbers of observations, the relationship between these variables was in the opposite of the theoretically expected direction 50% of the time (i.e., 3 of 6 models that we performed simulations on). In contrast to counting emotion words, we show that judges' ratings of the emotionality of participants' Facebook posts consistently predicts how people feel across all analyses. These findings shed light on how to draw inferences about emotion using online social network data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Thinking about a negative event from a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective is associated with lower emotion intensity. However, it is unclear how self-distancing impacts emotion unfolding and whether individual differences in depression severity moderate this impact. We addressed this issue by examining the effect of self-distancing on emotion explosiveness (i.e., steepness of the emotion response at onset) and accumulation (i.e., intensification of the response after onset) in participants differing in levels of depression. Participants adopted a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about manipulated negative social feedback. Both explosiveness and accumulation decreased when participants adopted a self-distanced perspective. Moreover, the effect of perspective taking on accumulation was especially outspoken for people with high levels of depression severity.

Mindfulness theorists suggest that people spend most of their time focusing on the past or future rather than the present. Despite the prevalence of this assumption, no research that we are aware of has evaluated whether it is true or what the implications of focusing on the present are for subjective well-being. We addressed this issue by using experience sampling to examine how frequently people focus on the present throughout the day over the course of a week and whether focusing on the present predicts improvements in the 2 components of subjective well-being over time-how people feel and how satisfied they are with their lives. Results indicated that participants were present-focused the majority of the time (66%). Moreover, focusing on the present predicted improvements in life satisfaction (but not happiness) over time by reducing negative rumination. These findings advance our understanding of how temporal orientation and well-being relate. (PsycINFO Database Record

It has been shown that both fear of missing out (FoMO) and problematic (i.e., excessive) smartphone use (PSU) are negatively associated with indicators of emotional well-being. Moreover, FoMO has been found to be a key predictor of PSU. This suggests that PSU may mediate the relation between FoMO and decreased emotional well-being but this pathway has never been tested. Moreover, in most studies on PSU, the multidimensional nature of this construct has been ignored. The aim of the present study was to address these gaps by directly testing the mediating role of (subdimensions of) PSU in the association between FoMO and emotional well-being. We conducted a cross-sectional study with Estonian participants (n = 426). Using a simple mediation analysis, we found that PSU partially mediated the relationship between FoMO and decreased emotional well-being. Using a parallel mediation analysis, we found that two specific dimensions of PSU were significant mediators of the relationship between FoMO and decreased emotional well-being: Cyberspace-oriented Relations and Physical Symptoms. This suggests that the negative relationship between FoMO and decreased emotional well-being is due to FoMO stimulating (a) online relationships at the cost of offline interactions and (b) Physical symptoms associated with excessive smartphone use. Overall, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the relationship between FoMO, PSU and emotional well-being.

Emotions are not confined to short momentary states but carry on over time, facilitating the perception and interpretation of the environment in mood-congruent ways. Yet, the (neural) mechanism linking affective stimulation at a certain time-point to such altered, mood-congruent processing of stimuli presented at a subsequent time-point remains unknown. Recent research suggests that such a link could be explained by transient effects of affective stimulation on the organization of intrinsic macro-scale neural networks. It remains, however, unclear whether these changes in network organization are influencing subsequent perception in a mood-congruent way. Addressing this gap the current study investigated whether changes in network organization, measured in terms of network efficiency, mediate the relation between mood-induction and mood-congruent processing as measured by reaction-times during an emotional Stroop task. The results demonstrated that negative mood-induction increased the efficiency of the Salience Network and decreased the efficiency of the Central Executive Network. This modulation of network efficiency fully mediated the effects of mood-induction on reaction-times to negative words. These findings indicate that transient shifts in the organization of macro-scale neural networks are an essential part of the emotional response and can help to explain how affect shapes our interaction with the environment. ispartof: Social Cognitive And Affective Neuroscience vol:14 issue:9 pages:987-995 ispartof: location:England status: published

The relationship between emotional labor strategies (i.e., deep acting and surface acting) and employee outcomes has been often studied. Yet, although the impact of surface acting on employee well-being is clear, findings regarding deep acting have been inconsistent. In the present study, we propose that this may be explained by the multidimensional nature of deep acting, which subsumes different specific emotion regulation strategies. With a 5-day diary study, we investigated the links between subtypes of deep acting (i.e., cognitive change and attentional deployment) and key employee outcomes (i.e., mental fatigue, self-authenticity, and rewarding interactions) in a sample of 244 employees. Multilevel analyses confirmed that different emotion regulation strategies underlying deep acting were differentially related to employee outcomes, which may explain the mixed results of previous research examining deep acting as a uniform construct. Theoretical and practical implications of considering specific emotion regulation strategies underlying deep acting are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Social network sites are ubiquitous and now constitute a common tool people use to interact with one another in daily life. Here we review the consequences of interacting with social network sites for subjective well-being—that is, how people feel moment-to-moment and how satisfied they are with their lives. We begin by clarifying the constructs that we focus on in this review: social network sites and subjective well-being. Next, we review the literature that explains how these constructs are related. This research reveals: (a) negative relationships between passively using social network sites and subjective well-being, and (b) positive relationships between actively using social network sites and subjective well-being, with the former relationship being more robust than the latter. Specifically, passively using social network sites provokes social comparisons and envy, which have negative downstream consequences for subjective well-being. In contrast, when active usage of social network sites predicts subjective well-being, it seems to do so by creating social capital and stimulating feelings of social connectedness. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of this work.

Emotions are fundamentally temporal processes that dynamically change over time. This temporal nature is inherently involved in making emotions adaptive by guiding interactions with our environment. Both the size of emotional changes across time (i.e. emotional instability) and the tendency of emotions to persist across time (i.e. autocorrelation of emotional experience, emotional inertia) are key features of a person’s emotion dynamics, and have been found central to maladaptive functioning and psychopathology as well as linked to social functioning. However whether different (neural) mechanisms are underlying these dynamics as well as how they are related to the processing of (socio-)emotional information is to date widely unknown. Using a combination of Experience Sampling methods and fMRI (involving a social feedback paradigm), we examine how emotional instability and inertia in everyday life are associated with different aspects of the neural response to socio-emotional events. The findings indicate that while emotional instability is connected to the response of the core salience network, emotional inertia is associated to responses in the parahippocampal gyrus and lateral orbitofrontal cortex. This is the first study showing that different aspects of the neural response to socio-emotional events are associated with different aspects of the temporal dynamics of emotion in real life. ispartof: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience vol:12 pages:1-10 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

Emotions unfold over time with episodes differing in explosiveness (i.e., profiles having a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e., profiles increasing over time vs. going back to baseline). In the present fMRI study, we wanted to replicate and extend previous findings on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Specifically, we aimed to: (a) replicate the finding that different neural mechanisms are associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, (b) replicate the finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreases emotion explosiveness and accumulation at the level of self-report, and (c) examine whether adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective similarly modulates activity in the brain regions associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Participants in an fMRI scanner were asked to adopt a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about negative social feedback, and to report on felt changes in negative affect during that period using an emotion intensity profile tracking approach. We replicated previous findings showing that emotion explosiveness and accumulation were related to activity in regions involved in self-referential processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and sustained visceral arousal (such as the posterior insula), respectively. The finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective lowers emotion explosiveness and accumulation was also replicated at a self-report level. However, perspective taking did not impact activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation. ispartof: PLoS One vol:13 issue:11 pages:1-19 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

It has been widely believed that individuals transform high-intensity shame into anger because shame is unbearably painful. This phenomenon was first coined "humiliated fury," and it has since received empirical support. The current research tests the novel hypothesis that shame-related anger is not universal, yet hinges on the cultural meanings of anger and shame. Two studies compared the occurrence of shame-related anger in North American cultural contexts (where shame is devalued and anger is valued) to its occurrence in Japanese contexts (where shame is valued and anger is devalued). In a daily-diary study, participants rated anger and shame feelings during shame situations that occurred over one week. In a vignette study, participants rated anger and shame in response to standardised shame vignettes that were generated in previous research by either U.S. or Japanese respondents. Across the two studies, and in line with previous research on humiliated fury, shame predicted anger for U.S.PARTICIPANTS: Yet, neither in the daily diary study nor for the Japanese-origin vignettes, did we find shame-related anger in Japanese participants. Only when presented with U.S.-origin vignettes, did Japanese respondents in the vignette study report shame-related anger. The findings suggest that shame-related anger is a culture-specific phenomenon.

Quite a few studies in the behavioral sciences result in hierarchical time profile data, with a number of time profiles being measured for each person under study. Associated research questions often focus on individual differences in profile repertoire, that is, differences between persons in the number and the nature of profile shapes that show up for each person. In this paper, we introduce a new method, called KSC-N, that parsimoniously captures such differences while neatly disentangling variability in shape and amplitude. KSC-N induces a few person clusters from the data and derives for each person cluster the types of profile shape that occur most for the persons in that cluster. An algorithm for fitting KSC-N is proposed and evaluated in a simulation study. Finally, the new method is applied to emotional intensity profile data.

Emotions are processes that unfold over time. As a consequence, a better understanding of emotions can be reached only when their time–related characteristics can be assessed and interpreted adequately. A central aspect in this regard is the duration of emotional experience. Previous studies have shown that an emotional experience can last anywhere from a couple of seconds up to several hours or longer. In this article, we examine to what extent specific appraisals of the eliciting event may account for variability in emotion duration and to what degree appraisal–duration relations are universal or culture specific. Participants in 37 countries were asked to recollect emotional episodes of fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame and guilt. Subsequently, they were asked to report the duration of these episodes and to answer a number of questions regarding their appraisal of the emotion–eliciting event. Multi–level analyses revealed that negative emotions last especially long when the eliciting event and its consequences are perceived to be incongruent with the individual's goals, values and self–ideal, creating a mismatch. These relations are largely universal, although evidence for some limited variability across countries is found as well. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology

The study of emotion dynamics involves the study of the trajectories, patterns, and regularities with which emotions (or rather, the experiential, physiological, and behavioral elements that constitute an emotion) fluctuate across time, their underlying processes, and downstream consequences. Here, we formulate some of the basic principles underlying emotional change over time, discuss methods to study emotion dynamics, their relevance for psychological well-being, and a number of challenges and opportunities for the future.

Time is given a central place in theoretical models of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998, 2015), but key questions regarding the role of time remain unanswered. We investigated 2 such unanswered questions. First, we explored when different emotion regulation strategies were used within the course of an emotional episode in daily life. Second, we investigated the association between the temporal deployment of strategies and negative emotional experience. We conducted a daily diary study in which participants (N = 74) drew an intensity profile depicting the temporal unfolding of their negative emotional experience across daily events (N = 480), and mapped their usage of emotion regulation strategies onto this intensity profile. Strategies varied in their temporal deployment, with suppression and rumination occurring more at the beginning of the episode, and reappraisal and distraction occurring more toward the end of the episode. Strategies also varied in their association with negative emotion: rumination was positively associated with negative emotion, and reappraisal and distraction were negatively associated with negative emotion. Finally, both rumination and reappraisal interacted with time to predict negative emotional experience. Rumination was more strongly positively associated with negative emotions at the end of the episode than the beginning, but reappraisal was more strongly negatively associated with negative emotion at the beginning of the episode than the end. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for timing in the study of emotion regulation, as well as the necessity of studying these temporal processes in daily life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Intensity profiles of emotional experience over time have been found to differ primarily in explosiveness (i.e. whether the profile has a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e. whether intensity increases over time vs. goes back to baseline). However, the determinants of these temporal features remain poorly understood. In two studies, we examined whether emotion regulation strategies are predictive of the degree of explosiveness and accumulation of negative emotional episodes. Participants were asked to draw profiles reflecting changes in the intensity of emotions elicited either by negative social feedback in the lab (Study 1) or by negative events in daily life (Study 2). In addition, trait (Study 1 & 2), and state (Study 2) usage of a set of emotion regulation strategies was assessed. Multilevel analyses revealed that trait rumination (especially the brooding component) was positively associated with emotion accumulation (Study 1 & 2). State rumination was also positively associated with emotion accumulation and, to a lesser extent, with emotion explosiveness (Study 2). These results provide support for emotion regulation theories, which hypothesise that rumination is a central mechanism underlying the maintenance of negative emotions.

BACKGROUND: Although the relationship between depression and "offline" social support is well established, numerous questions surround the relationship between "online" social support and depression. We explored this issue by examining the social support dynamics that characterize the way individuals with varying levels of depression (Study 1) and SCID-diagnosed clinically depressed and non-depressed individuals (Study 2) interact with Facebook, the world's largest online social network.METHOD: Using a novel methodology, we examined how disclosing positive or negative information on Facebook influences the amount of social support depressed individuals (a) actually receive (based on actual social support transactions recorded on Facebook walls) and (b) think they receive (based on subjective assessments) from their Facebook network.RESULTS: Contrary to prior research indicating that depression correlates with less actual social support from "offline" networks, across both studies depression was positively correlated with social support from Facebook networks when participants disclosed negative information (p=.02 in Study 1 and p=.06 in Study 2). Yet, depression was negatively correlated with how much social support participants thought they received from their Facebook networks (p=.005 in Study 1 and p=.001 in Study 2).LIMITATIONS: The sample size was relatively small in Study 2, reflecting difficulties of recruiting individuals with Major Depressive Disorder.CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that an asymmetry characterizes the relationship between depression and different types of Facebook social support and further identify perceptions of Facebook social support as a potential intervention target. (243 words; 250 max).

According to theories of emotion dynamics, emotions unfold across two phases in which different types of processes come to the fore: emotion onset and emotion offset. Differences in onset-bound processes are reflected by the degree of explosiveness or steepness of the response at onset, and differences in offset-bound processes by the degree of accumulation or intensification of the subsequent response. Whether onset- and offset-bound processes have distinctive neural correlates and, hence, whether the neural basis of emotions varies over time, still remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we address this question using a recently developed paradigm that allows to disentangle explosiveness and accumulation. Thirty-one participants were exposed to neutral and negative social feedback, and asked to reflect on its contents. Emotional intensity while reading and thinking about the feedback was measured with an intensity profile tracking approach. Using non-negative matrix factorization, the resulting profile data were decomposed in explosiveness and accumulation components, which were subsequently entered as continuous regressors of the BOLD response. It was found that the neural basis of emotion intensity shifts as emotions unfold over time with emotion explosiveness and accumulation having distinctive neural correlates. ispartof: SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE vol:12 issue:8 pages:1261-1271 ispartof: location:England status: published