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It has been widely assumed that emotional avoidance during bereavement leads to either prolonged grief, delayed grief, or delayed somatic symptoms. To test this view, as well as a contrasting adaptive hypothesis, emotional avoidance was measured 6 months after a conjugal loss as negative verbal-autonomic response dissociation (low self-rated negative emotion coupled with heightened cardiovascular activity) and compared with grief measured at 6 and 14 months. The negative dissociation score evidenced reliability and validity but did not evidence the assumed link to severe grief. Rather, consistent with the adaptive hypothesis, negative dissociation at 6 months was associated with minimal grief symptoms across 14 months. Negative dissociation scores were also linked to initially high levels of somatic symptoms, which dropped to a low level by 14 months. Possible explanations for the initial cost and long-term adaptive quality of emotional avoidance during bereavement, as well as implications and limitations of the findings, are discussed.

According to appeasement hypotheses, embarrassment should have a distinct nonverbal display that is more readily perceived when displayed by individuals from lower status groups. The evidence from 5 studies supported these two claims. The nonverbal behavior of embarrassment was distinct from a related emotion (amusement), resembled the temporal pattern of facial expressions of emotion, was uniquely related to self-reports of embarrassment, and was accurately identified by observers who judged the spontaneous displays of various emotions. Across the judgment studies, observers were more accurate and attributed more emotion to the embarrassment displays of female and African American targets than those of male and Caucasian targets. Discussion focused on the universality and appeasement function of the embarrassment display.

We compared partisan group members' construals and beliefs regarding contentious issues, contrasting actual differences in construal with their assumptions about those differences. Study 1 dealt with the abortion debate and Study 2 with the racially charged Howard Beach incident. Although many significant examples of construal differences were found, overestimation of such differences was far more common than underestimation. Misperception about the extremity and consistency of conservatives was particularly pronounced. Partisans in both studies felt that their own views were less driven by political ideology than those of the other side or their own side. In Study 2, nonpartisans similarly overestimated liberal-conservative differences (again, especially for conservative). This finding suggests the phenomenon is best characterized as a bias not in partisan perceptions but in the way partisans, and partisanship, are perceived.

In keeping with cognitive appraisal models of emotion, it was hypothesized that sadness and anger would exert different influences on causal judgments. Two experiments provided initial support for this hypothesis. Sad Ss perceived situationally caused events as more likely (Experiment 1) and situational forces more responsible for an ambiguous event (Experiment 2) than angry Ss, who, in contrast, perceived events caused by humans as more likely and other people as more responsible. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 showed that the experience of these emotions, rather than their cognitive constituents, mediates these effects. The nonemotional exposure to situational or human agency information did not influence causal judgments (Experiment 3), whereas the induction of sadness and anger without explicit agency information did (Experiments 4 and 5). Discussion is focused on the influence of emotion on social judgment.

This investigation examined the influence of emotional attributions on the relevance of current feelings to judgments of personal satisfaction. In the first three studies, subjects were led to make different attributions for their naturally occurring feelings and then asked to judge their personal satisfaction. Satisfaction was higher after situational and specific attributions than after general and self-referential attributions, but only in domains that were unrelated to the causes to which subjects attributed their feelings. Study 4 tested whether affective states such as emotions with clearly defined causes are less relevant to judgments of life satisfaction than more diffuse states such as moods. Satisfaction was elevated after a laboratory mood induction only when subjects were led to focus on their moods in ways characteristic of emotional states (by articulating specific causes and labels for their feelings). These studies illuminate the role of emotional attribution in judgments of personal satisfaction.

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. In the past decade, scientists have systematically moved beyond the six traditionally studied emotions to document a broader array of emotion-related experiences and expressive behaviors. Semantic space approaches to emotion organize the study of emotion-related behavior by establishing the number of distinct patterned responses that occur systematically within an emotion-related modality, how these behaviors are most precisely conceptualized, and whether these behaviors are discrete or exist along a continuum. Computational methods reveal emotional behavior to be high dimensional, involving upwards of 25 distinct kinds of emotion. Specific categories of emotion, more so than valence and arousal, drive the representation of emotion in experience, expression, and neural processing. Much of emotional response is found to be systematically blended rather than discrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the degree to which human facial expressions co-vary with specific social contexts across cultures is central to the theory that emotions enable adaptive responses to important challenges and opportunities1–6. Concrete evidence linking social context to specific facial expressions is sparse and is largely based on survey-based approaches, which are often constrained by language and small sample sizes7–13. Here, by applying machine-learning methods to real-world, dynamic behaviour, we ascertain whether naturalistic social contexts (for example, weddings or sporting competitions) are associated with specific facial expressions14 across different cultures. In two experiments using deep neural networks, we examined the extent to which 16 types of facial expression occurred systematically in thousands of contexts in 6 million videos from 144 countries. We found that each kind of facial expression had distinct associations with a set of contexts that were 70% preserved across 12 world regions. Consistent with these associations, regions varied in how frequently different facial expressions were produced as a function of which contexts were most salient. Our results reveal fine-grained patterns in human facial expressions that are preserved across the modern world. An analysis of 16 types of facial expression in thousands of contexts in millions of videos revealed fine-grained patterns in human facial expression that are preserved across the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of psychological theories suggest that increased economic inequality may lead to greater social class stereotyping. However, all existing evidence for this claim is correlational. Across three experiments (one exploratory and two confirmatory, N = 2,286), we observed that exposure to socially signaled inequality—operationalized in terms of variation in perceived incomes among groups of target individuals—amplified the endorsement of one key social class stereotype: the perception that higher income individuals are more competent. When judged amid greater inequality, the same high-income targets were perceived as more competent and the same low-income targets were perceived as less competent, compared with when judged amid greater equality. By contrast, we found no consistent effect of exposure to inequality on stereotypes regarding warmth and relatively weak class-based stereotyping on the warmth dimension in general. We discuss implications of these findings for theories regarding the effects of economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Guided by a functional account of awe, we aimed to test the hypothesis that people who often feel awe are also more curious (Studies 1 and 2), and that this relationship in turn relates to academic outcomes (Study 3).Method: In Study 1 (n = 1,005), we used a self-report approach to test the relationship between dispositional awe and curiosity. In Study 2 (n = 100), we used a peer-report approach to test if participants' dispositional awe related to how curious they were rated by their friends. In Study 3, in a sample of 447 high school adolescents we tested if dispositional awe related to academic outcomes via curiosity.Results: We found that dispositional awe was positively related to people's self-rated curiosity (Study 1) and how curious they were rated by their friends (Study 2). In Study 3, we found that dispositional awe was related to academic outcomes via curiosity.Conclusions: We conclude that among the seven positive emotion dispositions tested, awe was related to unique variance in curiosity, and this link in turn predicted academic outcomes. This work further characterizes awe as an epistemic emotion and suggests that activities that inspire awe may improve academic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the nature of the feelings evoked by music? We investigated how people represent the subjective experiences associated with Western and Chinese music and the form in which these representational processes are preserved across different cultural groups. US (n = 1,591) and Chinese (n = 1,258) participants listened to 2,168 music samples and reported on the specific feelings (e.g., "angry," "dreamy") or broad affective features (e.g., valence, arousal) that they made individuals feel. Using large-scale statistical tools, we uncovered 13 distinct types of subjective experience associated with music in both cultures. Specific feelings such as "triumphant" were better preserved across the 2 cultures than levels of valence and arousal, contrastingwith theoretical claims that valence and arousal are building blocks of subjective experience. This held true even for music selected on the basis of its valence and arousal levels and for traditional Chinese music. Furthermore, the feelings associated with music were found to occupy continuous gradients, contradicting discrete emotion theories. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map (https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~acowen/music.html) reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of subjective experience associated with music in multiple cultures. These findings can inform inquiries ranging from the etiology of affective disorders to the neurological basis of emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this review, we discuss psychedelics’ acute subjective and persisting therapeutic effects, outline the science of positive emotions, and highlight the value in considering distinct positive emotions in psychedelic science. Psychedelics produce a wide variety of acute subjective effects (i.e. the ‘trip’), including positive emotions and affective states such as awe and joy. However, despite a rich literature on distinct emotions and their different correlates and sequelae, distinct emotions in psychedelic science remain understudied. Insofar as psychedelics’ acute subjective effects may play a role in their downstream therapeutic effects (e.g. decreased depression, anxiety, and substance misuse), considering the role of distinct positive emotions in psychedelic experiences has the potential to yield more precise statements about psychedelic-related subjective processes and outcomes. We propose here that understanding the role of positive emotions within the context of psychedelic experiences could help elucidate the connection between psychedelics’ acute subjective effects and therapeutic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]