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Research shows that lay beliefs about the helpfulness and controllability of emotions may affect which strategies people use to regulate their emotions. A separate line of work shows that individuals who tend to use more disengagement-oriented regulation strategies (e.g., distraction) relative to engagement-oriented strategies (e.g., reappraisal) report higher trait loneliness. The present study investigates how lay beliefs about emotions shape strategy selection in social contexts and contribute to feelings of loneliness in everyday life.

In everyday life, people often want to tune the emotions they experience and express to better fit their internal needs and external demands. Importantly, the specific strategies people use to regulate their emotions can have far-reaching implications for psychological, social, and physical health and well-being. Features of the context, like emotional intensity, have been linked to the likelihood of engaging in emotion regulation as well as to selection of specific strategies in previous observational and experimental work. There is promising initial evidence indicating that features of the individual, like global beliefs about emotions, may play an important role in shaping general patterns of habitual emotion regulation. The goal of the present study is to extend prior work on emotion beliefs to everyday contexts in order to better understand how occurrent beliefs about controllability, helpfulness, and justification of specific emotions contribute to regulation of emotions of varying intensities. Specifically, we are interested in understanding how occurrent beliefs about emotions shape how much people regulate as well as how much they rely on two strategies: distraction and reappraisal.

Affective experiences are critical components of human behavior, guiding our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Prior research has largely focused on dimensional theories of emotions, such as valence and arousal, which rely on self-reported sentiments and behavioral tasks using unimodal stimuli like pictures and faces. However, obtaining continuous measures of affective experience in naturalistic environments presents significant challenges due to the complexity and dynamics of the real-world context. In this study, we explore the feasibility of predicting individuals’ dynamic affective experience during naturalistic viewing using semantic information extracted from annotated descriptions of the movie, as well as brain functional connectivity. By applying fine-grained sentiment analysis, we derive a continuous representation of the movie’s sentiment during the movie-viewing experience. We then correlate these sentiments with behavioral valence and arousal ratings from an independent group of 60 participants and previously collected fMRI data from 17 participants who watched a TV show episode in the scanner (Chen et al., 2017). Our results suggest that automated sentiment analysis can effectively predict subjective valence on an event-level basis, even though it may not be a reliable predictor of affective experience at the sentence level. Meanwhile, we developed a more flexible approach to clustering sentiment scores based on meaningful shifts in the narrative such as topic, time, location, which provides a more accurate and contextualized analysis of sentiment. These findings provide new insights into how individuals’ dynamic feelings of valence during movie-watching can be measured and predicted, contributing to the growing body of literature and methods in natural language processing, affective computing, emotion processing, and whole-brain functional connectivity.

Pain is a fundamental experience that promotes survival. In humans, pain stands at the intersection of multiple health crises: chronic pain, the opioid epidemic, and health disparities. The study of placebo analgesia highlights how social, cognitive, and affective processes can directly shape pain, and identifies potential paths for mitigating these crises. This review examines recent progress in the study of placebo analgesia through affective science. It focuses on how placebo effects are shaped by expectations, affect, and the social context surrounding treatment, and discusses neurobiological mechanisms of placebo, highlighting unanswered questions and implications for health. Collaborations between clinicians and social and affective scientists can address outstanding questions and leverage placebo to reduce pain and improve human health.

Modern adventure games combine storytelling with gameplay using conventions familiar to film and television audiences. These games are different from others in that the experience depends on narrative content, and so is challenging to evaluate for improving content. The subgenre pioneered by Telltale Games uses dramatic choices to shape player experience. I developed and applied an annotation schema to a dataset of 6 player traversals of the first episode of The Wolf Among Us by Telltale Games. The schema supports comparison of player responses consisting of a combination of psychophysiological measurements and self-report events. These events are segmented and classified based on concepts drawn from Robert McKee, including the beat and story values, as well as traditional narrative elements such as character and plot. The results provide evidence that content annotations can facilitate analysis of players responses in longer traversals in spite of different levels of expressivity.

Emotional mimicry is impaired when the expressed emotion is interpreted as inappropriate (Kastendieck et al., 2020, Mauersberger et al., 2022). We now propose a study to explore whether a brief loving-kindness meditation can reduce the perception of inappropriateness and restore mimicry. The methodology is very similar to that of our previous studies, which had already been approved by the Ethics Committee (proposal number 2021-30; see also 2021-10). In this study, we plan to do a brief online guided Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM induction) with the participants and to show digitally created targets who express reactions (joy vs. distress) to different scenes (funny vs. disgusting). Prior to the experimental trials, the same targets will be depicted with a neutral expression and participants should wish them that they will always be loved or never have to suffer (LKM condition) or just look at them neutrally without sending them positive wishes (no LKM condition). During the display of the targets, we measure emotional mimicry using a webcam-based facial emotion recognition software (OpenFace, Baltrusaitis et al., 2018). The targets will be created using Epic Games' free Metahuman Creator software. Hence, these digital targets do not exist, which means that there are no obligations or concerns with regards to ethical issues such as invasion of privacy.

Without independent measures of positivity and negativity, ambivalence (the simultaneous experience of positive and negative) can be mistaken as neutrality in most experimental designs. More concerningly, certain methods and viewpoints conflate ambivalence with uncertainty over how one feels. But ambivalence is not the same as uncertainty, and it has been shown that one can be quite certain about ambivalent attitudes (Hong & Lee, 2010; Schneider & Schwarz, 2017). It has also been found that ambivalence with and without certainty of those positions leads to different long-term stability of those feelings (Luttrell, Petty, & Briñol, 2020; Van Harreveld, Rutjens, Rotteveel, Nordgren, & Van Der Pligt, 2009). There are vast differences from person to person in how mixed feelings relate to positive, or negative, effects on well-being. No studies have directly tested for certainty of mixed feelings being related to individual personality differences. The current study will test how individual differences relate to the uncertainty people feel when faced with ambivalent situations.

Long-standing affective science theories conceive the perception of emotional stimuli either as discrete categories (for example, an angry voice) or continuous dimensional attributes (for example, an intense and negative vocal emotion). Which position provides a better account is still widely debated. Here we contrast the positions to account for acoustics-independent perceptual and cerebral representational geometry of perceived voice emotions. We combined multimodal imaging of the cerebral response to heard vocal stimuli (using functional magnetic resonance imaging and magneto-encephalography) with post-scanning behavioural assessment of voice emotion perception. By using representational similarity analysis, we find that categories prevail in perceptual and early (less than 200 ms) frontotemporal cerebral representational geometries and that dimensions impinge predominantly on a later limbic–temporal network (at 240 ms and after 500 ms). These results reconcile the two opposing views by reframing the perception of emotions as the interplay of cerebral networks with different representational dynamics that emphasize either categories or dimensions. Are vocal emotions perceived as categories (for example, anger) or as dimensions (for example, an intense negative emotion)? Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and magneto-encephalography, Giordano et al. find that categories prevail in early (less than 200 ms) neural representations, whereas dimensions emerge later (240 ms and more than 500 ms).

The ability to focus on relevant information is central to human cognition. It is therefore hardly unsurprising that the notion of relevance appears across a range of different disciplines. As well as its central role in relevance-theoretic pragmatics, for example, relevance is also a core concept in the affective sciences, where there is consensus that for a particular object or event to elicit an emotional state, that object or event needs to be relevant to the person in whom that state is elicited. Despite this, although some affective scientists have carefully considered what emotional relevance might mean, surprisingly little research has been dedicated to providing a definition. Since, by contrast, the relevance-theoretic notion of relevance is carefully defined, our primary aim is to compare relevance as it exists in affective science and in relevance theory, A further aim is to redress what we perceive to be an imbalance: Affective scientists have made great strides in understanding the processes of emotion elicitation/responses etc., but despite the fact that among humans the communication of information about emotional states is ubiquitous, pragmatists have tended to ignore it. We conclude, therefore, that affective science and relevance theory have much to learn from each other. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

In mammals, increased experiential diversity via exploration has neurobiological and affective benefits. In humans, geolocation measured experiential diversity is associated with positive affect (PA). However, it is unknown whether changes in experiential diversity in humans are causally linked to affect and if so, for whom. In 260 participants, we measured geolocation and positive and negative emotion via experience sampling between January-May 2020, a timeframe encompassing the stay-at-home-orders due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March. Using this quasi-experimental reduction in experiential diversity, we will test the following hypotheses: (1) prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, the experiential diversity—PA association will replicate, (2) COVID-19 lockdown will reduce experiential diversity and PA, (3) lockdown will moderate the association between experiential diversity and PA, and (4) the association between PA and experiential diversity during lockdown will be impacted by trait-levels of how exploratory an individual was prior to lockdown.

Broadly speaking, this project aims to examine: (1) the feasibility, utility, and validity of using ambulatory acoustic recording as an ecologically valid tool to observe interpersonal emotion regulation interactions in daily life; (2) the phenomenology of interpersonal emotion regulation in the daily lives of committed, cohabiting romantic couples; (3) links between provision and receipt of interpersonal emotion regulation, momentary emotion, psychological wellbeing, and relationship satisfaction; (4) correspondences between provider, receiver, and observer ratings of interpersonal emotion regulation interactions; and (5) individual and relational differences that predict more or less frequent and effective use of interpersonal emotion regulation. Couples in this study are assessed at baseline using questionnaires and computerized tasks, at study completion using questionnaires, and, in the interim, using a combination of ecological momentary assessment and ambulatory acoustic monitoring (for eight days across four consecutive weeks). A secondary aim of this project is to examine predictors of cohabiting couples' coping with and adjustment to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One noticeable aspect of emotions is their intensity (e.g., Frijda et al., 1992). The experienced intensity of emotions can have an impact on the well-being and adaptive functioning of individuals (e.g., Gruber, 2011). Well-being is often conceptualized with the experience of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions (e.g., Diener, 1984). However, this does not indicate that individuals should strive to experience positive emotions as intense as possible and suppress negative emotions. In fact, the experience of very intense positive emotions can be detrimental (Gruber, 2011) as it makes it more likely for a person to engage in high-risk behaviors (e.g., drug use, binge eating; Cyders & Smith, 2008). In addition, Keltner and Buswell (1997) demonstrated that experiencing low levels of embarrassment in response to a social faux pas can impair an individual’s social relationships if they are not stimulated by embarrassment to excuse themselves. Despite the strong consensus on where emotions and their intensity have an impact, there is less consensus on what emotions are. The predominant scientific theories of emotion can be classified into ‘basic emotions’ theories and cognitive appraisal theories. Basic emotions theories hypothesize that there exists a small set of discrete emotions (e.g., fear, happiness) that are psychologically and biologically ‘’basic’’, each recognized in a recurring structure of associated behavioral components (Ekman, 1992). Accordingly, these theories suggest that what we experience as emotions consist of innate and universal mental states (Kowalska & Wróbel, 2017). In contrast to basic emotion theories, cognitive appraisal theories refer to emotions as processes, rather than universal, mental states (Moors et al., 2013). Cognitive appraisal theories hold the core assumption that the interpretation (i.e., appraisal) of a situation explains the elicitation and differentiation in the discrete emotions we use to classify the experience (Siemer et al., 2007). Both appraisals as well as ‘basic’ discrete emotions are often used in emotion induction procedures that work through recall of affect-laden autobiographical memories (e.g., Ellsworth & Smith, 1988). In a typical study, individuals are instructed to recall and write about an episodic memory associated with an intended emotion. This presumably causes individuals to relive that situation which, in turn, increases the probability that they will feel the intended emotion. Previous studies have demonstrated that both appraisals as well as discrete emotions instructions are effective in manipulating emotions in autobiographical recall procedures (e.g., Siemer et al., 2007). However, it remains unclear what the effects of the framing of emotion recall instructions (i.e., appraisal vs. discrete emotion) are on the recaller’s perceived emotion intensity. The perceived recalled emotion intensity is not only assumed to be predicted by the framing of the recall instructions. It is suggested that the emotions associated with autobiographical memories can decrease in intensity as time from the original event increases (e.g., Ritchie & Batteson, 2013). However, it could be argued that the extent to which the intensity fades is not equivalent for emotions associated with positive and negative autobiographical memories. The fading affect bias theory assumes that the intensity of emotions associated with negative events fades faster than emotions associated with positive events. An opposing view is the ‘’bad is stronger than good’’ theory reflected by Baumeister et al. (2001). This theory argues that due to the nature of the self, humans are more prone to remember and focus on negative events (Baumeister et al., 2001). Moreover, when investigating the effects of emotion recall instructions and valence on the recaller’s perception of emotion intensity, a possible interfering factor could be emotion regulation. Recalling emotional experiences can elicit emotions that individuals may want to regulate. Regulating emotions can subsequently influence the intensity of the recalled emotions. Individual’s motivation to use emotion regulation strategies might depend on the valence tone of the recalled emotions (e.g., English et al., 2017). In summary, the current project will be carried out in two parts, both following specific research questions. Part 1 will be guided by the following: RQ1: What are the effects of emotion recall instructions and valence on the recaller’s perception of emotion intensity, and is this effect moderated by trait emotion regulation? Part 2 is concerned with other-perception of the affective texts produced in Part 1 and the agreement between authors and readers. Especially for text, the basic idea underlying this development is that emotions can be traced in texts – on individual words, text fragments, or other linguistic patterns – and that these patterns, produced by authors, can be identified and labelled correctly by an uninvolved reader. However, disparities between self- and other-perceptions have been addressed in a range of research fields: a) regarding audio-visual data, differences between self-annotation and other-annotation of emotions have been observed (e.g., Truong, Neerincx, & Van Leeuwen, 2008); b) regarding the "curse of knowledge" (e.g., Keysar, 1994), which refers to the phenomenon that people tend to be unable to disregard their own knowledge when assessing another person's perspective, which worsens their cognitive and affective empathy; c) regarding the "illusion of transparency" (e.g., Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998), which postulates that people overestimate the intensity of their own emotional expressions, causing a dissonance between intended/assumed communicated emotions and actually communicated emotions. However, an affective text written based on appraisal instructions might lead to a more accurate assessment of an emotional situation of an uninvolved leader since the particular situation responsible for the author's emotion becomes transparent and tangible. In contrast, if an author produces a text based on their own interpretation of an emotion term such as "anger", their description of the event might remain vague, limiting the ability of a reader to take the author's perspective and experience empathy for them. Thus, Part 2 will be guided by the following research questions: RQ2: What are the effects of text emotion recall instructions and text valence on a reader's perception of emotion intensity, and is this effect moderated by trait emotion regulation? RQ3: To what extent does the recaller’s perception of an affective text match a reader’s perception? References: Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is Stronger than Good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323 Cyders, M. A., & Smith, G. T. (2008). Emotion-based dispositions to rash action: Positive and negative urgency. Psychological Bulletin, 134(6), 807–828. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013341 Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542–575. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.542 Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068 Ellsworth, P. C., & Smith, C. A. (1988). From appraisal to emotion: Differences among unpleasant feelings. Motivation and Emotion, 12(3), 271–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00993115 English, T., Lee, I. A., John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2017). Emotion regulation strategy selection in daily life: The role of social context and goals. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 230–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9597-z Frijda, N.H., Ortony, A., Sonnemans, J., & Clore, G.L. (1992). The complexity of intensity: Issues concerning the structure of emotion intensity Gruber, J. (2011). Can Feeling Too Good Be Bad? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(4), 217–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411414632 Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(2), 332. Keltner, D., & Buswell, B. N. (1997). Embarrassment: Its distinct form and appeasement functions. Psychological Bulletin, 122(3), 250–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.122.3.250 Keysar, B. (1994). The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text. Cognitive psychology, 26(2), 165-208. Kowalska, M., & Wróbel, M. (2017). Basic Emotions. Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_495-1 Moors, A., Ellsworth, P. C., Scherer, K. R., & Frijda, N. H. (2013). Appraisal Theories of Emotion: State of the Art and Future Development. Emotion Review, 5(2), 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912468165 Ritchie, T. D., & Batteson, T. J. (2013). Perceived changes in ordinary autobiographical events’ affect and visual imagery colorfulness. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(2), 461–470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.02.001 Siemer, M., Mauss, I., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Same situation--Different emotions: How appraisals shape our emotions. Emotion, 7(3), 592–600. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.3.592 Truong, K. P., Neerincx, M. A., & Van Leeuwen, D. A. (2008). Assessing agreement of observer-and self-annotations in spontaneous multimodal emotion data.

A survey study designed to test postulates of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) regarding age differences in emotional experience and socioemotional goals during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

This project is aimed at investigating the extent to which social robots’ cognitive architectures can elicit emotionally rich expressions and information from people to identify their needs and emotional states over time. By conducting an online experiment this research will examine people’s expressions to social robots, as well as how people disclose their needs and emotions to social robots via video chat over time. By measuring peoples’ disclosures and emotional states through different channels of communication and behaviour, emotional patterns of peoples’ experiences regarding different topics (i.e., coping with COVID-19 and general everyday experiences) will be further evaluated. Finally, the study results will provide evidence for peoples’ expressions, perceptions, and reactions to a social robot in reoccurring interactions over time, and will reduce the current knowledge gap regarding novel effects in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. The research findings will be employed for developing speech-based health and well-being interventions using social robots. Furthermore, these will contribute to our broader understanding of how individuals share information and disclose their emotions to social robots, and how social robots can be used as tools to support people's emotional health. This study investigates the extent to which social robots can elicit and support socially meaningful conversation with people over time. A between-subjects repeated measures online experiment is planned with participants completing 10 online video chats with a social robot across five weeks. By measuring the quantity and quality of peoples’ disclosures, expressions, and perceptions, this study aims to provide a nuanced overview of the impact of affective interactions with social robots over time.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it will use ecological momentary assessment strategies to examine daily temporal fluctuations in four features of affective experiences: valence (positive v negative affect), granularity (number of unique emotions experienced), regulation, and stress. Second, the study will extend recently completed work from our laboratory (https://psyarxiv.com/9stvx) by testing for group differences in the four aforementioned types of affective experiences among three different types of regulators (defined in the previously linked paper).

Positive affect and emotion have become major topics in behavioral science, of growing importance in basic and applied research. A broad review of the literature reveals multiple, theoretically distinct constructs associated with the terms ‘positive affect’ and ‘positive emotion,’ sometimes conflated across this body of work. This article differentiates three primary constructs — subjectively pleasant affect; approach or appetitive motivation; and emotion states evoked by opportunities and rewards in the environment — and summarizes the major theoretical perspective with which each is intertwined. While these versions of positivity often coincide in lived emotional experience, we highlight examples of divergence, and discuss dynamic ways in which they influence each other. Distinct cognitive, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms by which each version of positivity may produce downstream effects are discussed, as is the importance of selecting and operationalizing the target construct with care in both basic affective science and translational research.

The current theoretical paper discusses the unintended systemic racism and racial biases that impact neuroscience, specifically in research utilizing electroencephalography (EEG). As a popular technique in affective science research, EEG requires adherence between the electrode and scalp to measure brain activity. To obtain high-quality data, various factors such as hair length, hair type, body movement, and/or extraneous noise from the environment are taken into consideration. As EEG researchers attempt to gather good-quality data, the recruitment and retention of Black American participants is challenging due to hairstyles commonly worn by Black American participants (e.g., cornrows, braids) and hair type. Taken together, the systemic lack of data from Black American participants renders research findings less generalizable and causes disparities in theoretical knowledge applicable to this population. To address this disparity, innovative solutions invented by bioengineers are discussed.

What is the relationship between language and emotion? The work that fills the pages of this special issue draws from interdisciplinary domains to weigh in on the relationship between language and emotion in semantics, cross-linguistic experience, development, emotion perception, emotion experience and regulation, and neural representation. These important new findings chart an exciting path forward for future basic and translational work in affective science.

Much of the recent work in psychology (and affective science) has shown that humans regulate their emotions nearly constantly, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. I argue that properly regulating one’s emotions displays emotional rationality, and failing to do so displays emotional irrationality. If an agent feels an emotion that is obviously problematic for the agent to feel and she is aware that it is problematic, then the agent ought to regulate her emotions in future similar situations. To capture this aspect of emotional rationality, I introduce the concept of imprudence, which is meant to capture a familiar way that we assess each other’s emotions, despite the fact that it has yet to be a factor in the literature on emotions in philosophy, psychology, or affective science. Publisher PDF

Though computational cognitive architectures have been used to study several processes associated with human behavior, the study of integration of affect and emotion in these processes has been relatively sparse. Theory from affective science and affective neuroscience can be used to systematically integrate affect into cognitive architectures, particularly in areas where cognitive system behavior is known to be associated with physiological structure and behavior. I introduce a unified theory and model of human behavior that integrates physiology and primal affect with cognitive processes in a cognitive architecture. This new architecture gives a more tractable, mechanistic way to simulate affect-cognition interactions to provide specific, quantitative predictions. It considers affect as a lower-level, functional process that interacts with cognitive processes (e.g., declarative memory) to result in emotional behavior. This formulation makes it more straightforward to connect these affective representations with other related moderating processes that may not specifically be considered as emotional (e.g., thirst or stress). An improved understanding of the architecture that constrains our behavior gives us a better opportunity to comprehend why we behave the way we do and how we can use this knowledge to recognize and construct a more ideal internal and external environment.

Within affective science, the central line of inquiry, animated by basic emotion theory and constructivist accounts, has been the search for one-to-one mappings between six emotions and their subjective experiences, prototypical expressions, and underlying brain states. We offer an alternative perspective: semantic space theory. This computational approach uses wide-ranging naturalistic stimuli and open-ended statistical techniques to capture systematic variation in emotion-related behaviors. Upwards of 25 distinct varieties of emotional experience have distinct profiles of associated antecedents and expressions. These emotions are high-dimensional, categorical, and often blended. This approach also reveals that specific emotions, more than valence, organize emotional experience, expression, and neural processing. Overall, moving beyond traditional models to study broader semantic spaces of emotion can enrich our understanding of human experience.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human-like capacities and traits to non-human entities. Anthropomorphism is ubiquitous in everyday life and in scientific domains, operating both implicitly and explicitly as a function of the human lens through which we view the world. A rich history of work in psychology, animal behavior, cognitive science, and philosophy has highlighted the negative and, to a lesser degree, the positive implications of anthropomorphism. In this article, we aim to provide a nuanced perspective of how anthropomorphism impacts the work of comparative affective science. Specifically, we discuss three domains of empirical inquiry in which lessons can be drawn about the benefits and pitfalls of anthropomorphism: responses to death, inequity aversion, and prosocial behavior. On balance, we advocate a mindful approach to anthropomorphizing in comparative affective science, and comparative science more generally.

Support vector machines (SVMs) are being used increasingly in affective science as a data-driven classification method and feature reduction technique. Whereas traditional statistical methods typically compare group averages on selected variables, SVMs use a predictive algorithm to learn multivariate patterns that optimally discriminate between groups. In this review, we provide a framework for understanding the methods of SVM-based analyses and summarize the findings of seminal studies that use SVMs for classification or data reduction in the behavioral and neural study of emotion and affective disorders. We conclude by discussing promising directions and potential applications of SVMs in future research in affective science.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy (PDT) and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) have much in common and much to offer one another. Yet, their differing theoretical foundations create challenges when attempting to integrate the two. PDT is founded on concepts such as the dynamic unconscious, defenses, a developmental perspective and recurrent patterns including transference that are not included in EFT theory. By contrast, EFT is founded on basic affective science rather than clinical observations, a focus on experiencing affect fully rather than simply overcoming defenses and an emphasis on gestalt methods such as 2-chair work rather than working mainly within the experiential field of the therapeutic dyad. If one were to aim for a more balanced integration key psychodynamic concepts would need to be reconceptualized in more empirically-tractable terms and concepts. The central thesis of this paper is that psychodynamic concepts could have broader and more generalized application and potential for integration with other modalities if they were updated in light of advances in affective science and neuroscience. Specific core concepts addressed in this way include unconscious processes, development, conflicts, defenses and the mechanisms of therapeutic change. These conceptual refinements highlight the importance of observable behavior, emotional experiencing and learning in defining the nature of clinical problems and their treatment.

Experiencing positive emotions is paramount to derive vitality from daily lived experiences. Positive emotions are associated with a range of beneficial outcomes, including longevity, reduced incidents of stroke, improved sleep quality, larger social networks, increased prosocial behavior, lower cortisol levels, and increased endogenous opioids and oxytocin. Despite these benefits, only limited research has focused on understanding positive emotion regulation within the context of depression. Rather, mechanisms related to the regulation of negative emotion have been the focus of research and evidence-based treatments. This interdisciplinary review article aims to advance knowledge regarding the role of positive emotion regulation in individuals with depression to inform the development of transdiagnostic evidenced-based approaches to treatment that bolster the experience of positive life events. We drew on research findings across the fields of clinical psychology, affective science, and social psychology to identify future directions for novel interdisciplinary translational research regarding mechanisms associated with positive emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

This discussion introduces ideas of emotion and affect for a volume of articles demonstrating the scope of approaches used in their study within the humanities and creative arts. The volume offers multiple perspectives on emotion and affect within 20th-century and 21st-century texts, arts and organisations and their histories. The discussion explains how emotion encompasses the emotions, emotional feeling, sensation and mood and how these can be analysed particularly in relation to literature, art and performance. It briefly summarises concepts of affect theory within recent approaches before introducing the articles.