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Background and Objectives: Perceived emotion invalidation is linked to the development or worsening of a variety of emotional and physical health conditions. However, prior studies are largely cross-sectional and whether there are day-to-day effects of generally feeling invalidated is unknown., Design: We examined the relations between perceived emotion invalidation and momentary affect, average daily affect, and the experience of daily stressors among a sample of young adults using ecological momentary assessment (EMA)., Methods: Participants ( n   =  86) completed measures of perceived emotion invalidation and emotional reactivity at baseline then completed one week of EMA including: (1) 7x/day reports of current affect and social context and (2) 1x/day index of experienced stressors and their intensity., Results: Higher perceived emotion invalidation predicted lower momentary positive affect. Perceived invalidation also interacted with social context such that higher emotion invalidation predicted greater negative affect when participants were with non-close others (i.e., co-workers, acquaintances). Only participants with high perceived emotional invalidation experienced increased stress alongside heightened daily negative affect., Conclusions: These results provide preliminary evidence that feeling emotionally invalidated may predict affective experiences, including how emotions are momentarily experienced and how life stressors are interpreted when they are later reflected on.

The current behavioral tasks assessing distress tolerance measure tolerance to frustration and tolerance to physical discomfort, but do not explicitly assess tolerance to negative emotion. We closely evaluated the conceptual distinctions between current behavioral tasks and self-report tasks assessing distress tolerance, and then developed a new behavioral distress tolerance task called the Emotional Image Tolerance (EIT) task. The EIT task retains elements of existing behavioral tasks (e.g., indices of persistence) while augmenting the reliability and content sufficiency of existing measures by including multiple trials, including a variety of negative affect stimuli, and separating overall task persistence from task persistence after onset of distress. In a series of three studies, we found that the EIT correlated with extant behavioral measures of distress tolerance, the computerized mirror-tracing task and a physical cold pressor task. Across all of the studies, we also evaluated whether the EIT correlated with self-report measures of distress tolerance and measures of psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety, and binge eating). Implications for the refinement of the distress tolerance construct are discussed.

Emotion invalidation is theoretically and empirically associated with mental and physical health problems. However, existing measures of invalidation focus on past (e.g., childhood) invalidation and/or do not specifically emphasize invalidation of emotion. In this article, the authors articulate a clarified operational definition of emotion invalidation and use that definition as the foundation for development of a new measure of current perceived emotion invalidation across a series of five studies. Study 1 was a qualitative investigation of people's experiences with emotional invalidation from which we generated items. An initial item pool was vetted by expert reviewers in Study 2 and examined via exploratory factor analysis in Study 3 within both college student and online samples. The scale was reduced to 10 items via confirmatory factor analysis in Study 4, resulting in a brief but psychometrically promising measure, the Perceived Invalidation of Emotion Scale (PIES). A short-term longitudinal investigation (Study 5) revealed that PIES scores had strong test-retest reliability, and that greater perceived emotion invalidation was associated with greater emotion dysregulation, borderline features and symptoms of emotional distress. In addition, the PIES predicted changes in relational health and psychological health over a 1-month period. The current set of studies thus presents a psychometrically promising and practical measure of perceived emotion invalidation that can provide a foundation for future research in this burgeoning area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has critically advanced the neuroanatomical understanding of affect processing in the human brain. Central to these advancements is the brain state, a temporally-succinct fMRI-derived pattern of neural activation, which serves as a processing unit. Establishing the brain state's central role in affect processing, however, requires that it predicts multiple independent measures of affect. We employed MVPA-based regression to predict the valence and arousal properties of visual stimuli sampled from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) along with the corollary skin conductance response (SCR) for demographically diverse healthy human participants (n = 19). We found that brain states significantly predicted the normative valence and arousal scores of the stimuli as well as the attendant individual SCRs. In contrast, SCRs significantly predicted arousal only. The prediction effect size of the brain state was more than three times greater than that of SCR. Moreover, neuroanatomical analysis of the regression parameters found remarkable agreement with regions long-established by fMRI univariate analyses in the emotion processing literature. Finally, geometric analysis of these parameters also found that the neuroanatomical encodings of valence and arousal are orthogonal as originally posited by the circumplex model of dimensional emotion.

The Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen) has shown promise as a behavioral measure of emotional experience. The current study examined the degree of (de)synchrony between self-reported and facial expressions of fear, disgust, and sadness in response to a traumatic event-relevant film among individuals who had experienced a traumatic motor vehicle accident. Given high rates of comorbidity between posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and depressive symptoms, the potential impacts of both PTSS and depressive symptoms on emotional responding were examined. Results demonstrated synchrony between self-reported and facial expressions of disgust and sadness; however, no association between measures of fear was observed. Furthermore, depressive symptoms were associated with greater fear responding and PTSS were associated only with self-reported fear. Together, results support the importance of examining discrete negative emotions, rather than broad valence categories, when examining fear-based responding in traumatic event-exposed populations. Additional research examining the psychometric properties of the Facial Action Coding System as a measure of discrete emotional experiences among traumatic event-exposed individuals is needed to advance multimodal assessment approaches that yield incremental information for understanding emotional responding in this population., (© The Author(s) 2014.)

Recent work has extended the idea of implicit self-theories to the realm of emotion to assess beliefs in the malleability of emotions. The current article expanded on prior measurement of emotion beliefs in a scale development project. Items were tested and revised over rounds of data collection with both students and nonstudent adult online participants. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor structure. The resulting scale, the Emotion and Regulation Beliefs Scale, assesses beliefs that emotions can hijack self-control, beliefs that emotion regulation is a worthwhile pursuit, and beliefs that emotions can constrain behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that the Emotion and Regulation Beliefs Scale has good internal consistency, is conceptually distinct from measures assessing individuals' beliefs in their management of emotions and facets of emotional intelligence, and predicts clinically relevant outcomes even after controlling for an existing short measure of beliefs in emotion controllability., (© The Author(s) 2014.)

Research on nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) has moved beyond examination of factors that associate with the mere presence or absence of the behavior, and into more nuanced examination of which discrete features of NSSI behavior relate to pathology. This study examined two features of NSSI, frequency of occurrence and recency, as cross-sectional predictors of psychopathology in a large community sample of adults with a history of NSSI ( N = 315). Results of 2 × 2 factorial ANOVAs testing the interactive effects of NSSI frequency (clinical, subclinical) and recency (current, past) revealed that current NSSI was consistently associated with poorer emotional and behavioral health (e.g., greater symptoms of depression, panic, and anxiety, worse emotion regulation, greater alcohol misuse). Results for NSSI frequency were more variable, though preliminary evidence suggested significant interactions of current NSSI and clinical frequency on emotion dysregulation, general anxiety, and panic. Possible clinical and empirical implications of the NSSI disorder frequency criteria proposed in DSM-5 are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral motivation is regulated through the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioral approach system (BAS), which underlie responses to emotional stimuli and are thought to influence emotion dysregulation. Research shows that mindfulness may increase the efficacy of emotion regulation among those with psychological symptoms, but the relationships between behavioral motivation and mindfulness have been only minimally explored. This study examines relationships between behavioral motivation systems and emotion dysregulation as mediated by mindfulness facets. Mediation was tested in a sample of 246 college students ( M age = 19.28, 61.8% female, 81.3% Caucasian) using a multiple mediator bootstrapping method. Results revealed an indirect relationship between BIS sensitivity and increased emotion dysregulation through underutilization of three distinct mindfulness skills: act with awareness, non-judging, and non-reactivity. Mindfulness facets did not mediate relationships between BAS sensitivity and emotion dysregulation, though BAS Reward Responsiveness directly predicted increased emotion dysregulation while BAS Drive was marginally associated with decreased emotion dysregulation. Findings delineate specific relationships between BIS/BAS, mindfulness skills, and emotion dysregulation while suggesting mindfulness training may be useful for BIS sensitive individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]