Search

Although the delivery of a Victim Impact Statement (VIS) in court is assumed to contribute to the healing and recovery process of victims of violent crimes, its effectiveness to facilitate emotional recovery is widely debated. The current longitudinal study is the first to empirically examine the psychological effects of delivering a VIS in terms of the two most important emotional reactions after crime: anger and anxiety. It extends previous findings by showing that the debate concerning the effectiveness of delivering a VIS is not a ‘black and white’ matter. In this article, we argue that the question should not be whether delivering a VIS ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’ for the victim, but for whom, and under which conditions. We show that delivering a VIS does not give rise to direct ‘therapeutic’ effects. However, we found that feelings of anger and anxiety decrease for victims who experience more control over their recovery process and higher levels of procedural justice.

Previous research has shown the relation between social sharing and emotional processing to be notoriously complex. In the present study, we unraveled this complexity by, for the first time, taking 3 key aspects of this relation into account simultaneously: the nature of the emotion, the timing of possible sharing effects, and the multicomponential character of emotions. Using the day reconstruction method, we first identified an intense anger or sadness target episode for each participant. In a second phase, participants repeatedly reported their sharing behavior and intensity of different emotion components over 5 days. Growth curve analyses revealed that sharing anger leads to several immediate and delayed beneficial effects, whereas sharing sadness leads to limited positive effects that emerge later on. This implies that all 3 aspects under study, as well as their interplay, are of critical importance in the relation between sharing and emotional processing.

Emotion regulation has primarily been studied either experimentally or by using retrospective trait questionnaires. Very few studies have investigated emotion regulation in the context in which it is usually deployed, namely, the complexity of everyday life. We address this in the current paper by reporting findings of two experience-sampling studies (Ns = 46 and 95) investigating the use of six emotion-regulation strategies (reflection, reappraisal, rumination, distraction, expressive suppression, and social sharing) and their associations with changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in daily life. Regarding the relative use of emotion-regulation strategies, a highly similar ordering was found across both studies with distraction being used more than sharing and reappraisal. While the use of all six strategies was positively correlated both within- and between-persons, different strategies were associated with distinct affective consequences: Suppression and rumination were associated with increases in NA and decreases in PA, whereas reflection was associated with increases in PA across both studies. Additionally, reappraisal, distraction, and social sharing were related to increases in PA in Study 2. Discussion focuses on how the current findings fit with theoretical models of emotion regulation and with previous evidence from experimental and retrospective studies.

People often socially share their emotions to regulate them. Two-mode theory of social sharing states that cognitive sharing will contribute to emotional recovery, whereas socio-affective sharing will only temporarily alleviate emotional distress. Previous studies supporting this theory, measured emotional recovery in terms of residual emotional intensity. Until now, another important time-dynamic aspect of emotions, emotion duration, has been largely ignored. In two experience sampling studies we addressed this gap. In Study 1, participants reported on the duration of anger, fear, and sadness episodes; additionally time-varying information on the occurrence and mode of sharing was collected. This study revealed that sharing led to a shortening in emotion duration, in particular when it was socio-affective in nature. In Study 2 we investigated whether this result could be interpreted in terms of our measure of duration primarily reflecting emotional relief rather than recovery. In this study, the same method as in Study 1 was used; additionally, residual emotional intensity was measured three days after emotion onset. Study 2 largely replicated the findings from Study 1. Furthermore, duration appeared to be empirically distinct from residual intensity. Finally, no relation between sharing and residual intensity was found, even when considering the sharing mode.

The relation between affect and retrospective duration estimation has hardly been examined. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by studying the influence of arousal on the remembered duration of positive events. Based on the contextual change model (Block & Zakay, 2008), we expected that high-arousal positive events would be remembered as longer compared to low-arousal positive events. To test this hypothesis, we set up a naturalistic study in which participants were asked at the end of a pleasant amusement park ride at the local fair to rate how pleasant and aroused they felt during the ride as well as to estimate the ride's duration. Feeling more aroused during a ride was associated with longer estimates of the ride's duration. Results are discussed within the framework of retrospective time estimation models.

Research has shown that cognitive control processes play a central role in emotion regulation. While most research has examined whether individual differences in such processes are related to the use of these strategies, a crucial next step involves examining whether such differences influence their impact on people's feelings, especially in normal daily life. The present study examined whether impairments in cognitive control (measured using an affective interference resolution task) moderate the impact of using rumination and reappraisal on affective experiences in everyday life (assessed using experience sampling methods). Multilevel analyses revealed that difficulties removing previously relevant negative information from working memory were associated with a larger increase in negative affect following rumination, and smaller increase and decrease in positive and negative affect, respectively, following reappraisal. These findings show that impaired interference resolution for negative information aggravates the deleterious effects of rumination and curbs the benefits of reappraisal in daily life. ispartof: Cognition & Emotion vol:27 issue:3 pages:492-501 ispartof: location:England status: published

Individual differences in the affective component of global personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism can be described in terms of three different aspects: frequency, intensity and duration. Extraversion and neuroticism have been found to be related to the frequency and intensity of positive and negative emotions, respectively. However, it is unclear whether both personality traits are related to the duration of emotions and which aspect of trait affect most strongly characterizes the emotional life of extraverts and neurotics. For a period of 1 week, participants were asked to report at the end of each day the frequency, intensity and duration of the positive and negative emotions they experienced earlier that day. Correlational analyses revealed that extraversion is positively related to the frequency, intensity and duration of positive emotions whereas neuroticism is positively related to the frequency and duration of negative emotions. Regression analyses and a comparison of effect sizes further showed that the duration of positive emotions is the strongest predictor of extraversion whereas the frequency of negative emotions is the strongest predictor of neuroticism.