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The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older adults. Results showed that (a) greater sadness coherence was associated with lower dispositional negative affect (i.e., greater positive to negative affect ratio; lower neuroticism) and (b) older adults had greater sadness coherence than younger adults. Findings remained stable when controlling for covariates. Results were specific to coherence characterized by an inverse association between heart rate and facial expressions of sadness (i.e., did not emerge for absolute changes in heart rate or skin conductance), specific to sad facial expressions (i.e., did not emerge for happy facial expressions), specific to stimulus (i.e., did not emerge for sadness coherence in response to a happy film clip), generalized across overall levels of emotional responding (i.e., sad facial expressions; heart rate reactivity), and remained stable when controlling for expressive suppression. These findings demonstrate that individuals who exhibit greater sadness coherence experience more favorable dispositional affect, consistent with evolutionary-functionalist models of emotion, and that sadness coherence is higher in late life, consistent with developmental accounts of heightened reactivity to loss in late life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Members of stereotyped groups are vigilant to situational cues signaling threats to their social identity. In one psychophysiological experiment, we examined whether mere exposure to a watching male face would increase attentional vigilance among female STEM students due to the activation of math-gender stereotypes. Male and female students performed an alleged math intelligence task while being primed with male faces or control images. Automatic responses to errors were captured with error-related negativity (ERN), a neural index of error vigilance. Women showed larger ERN upon making errors when primed with male faces compared to control images, whereas no such priming effect occurred among men. Moreover, this face priming effect was pronounced only among women highly invested in pursuing STEM careers. These findings suggest that minimalistic social cues may activate negative stereotypes early in informational processing, thereby selectively shunting attention on errors in stereotype-relevant tasks among individuals invested in the performance domain.