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The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior,...
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The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in terms of potential losses (e.g., “If you do not practice these steps, you can endanger yourself and others”) or potential gains (e.g., “If you practice these steps, you can protect yourself and others”)? Collecting data in 48 languages from 15,929 participants in 84 countries, we experimentally tested the effects of message framing on COVID-19-related judgments, intentions, and feelings. Loss- (vs. gain-) framed messages increased self-reported anxiety among participants cross-nationally with little-to-no impact on policy attitudes, behavioral intentions, or information seeking relevant to pandemic risks. These results were consistent across 84 countries, three variations of the message framing wording, and 560 data processing and analytic choices. Thus, results provide an empirical answer to a global communication question and highlight the emotional toll of loss-framed messages. Critically, this work demonstrates the importance of considering unintended affective consequences when evaluating nudge-style interventions.
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High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if s...
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High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71% mothers; Mage = 39.20) and showed that the prevalence of parental burnout varies dramatically across countries. Analyses of cultural values revealed that individualistic cultures, in particular, displayed a noticeably higher prevalence and mean level of parental burnout. Indeed, individualism plays a larger role in parental burnout than either economic inequalities across countries, or any other individual and family characteristic examined so far, including the number and age of children and the number of hours spent with them. These results suggest that cultural values in Western countries may put parents under heightened levels of stress.
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Social stress is associated with depression and anxiety, physiological disruptions, and altered brain morphology in central stress circuitry across development. Environmental enrichment strategies may improve responses to social s...
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Social stress is associated with depression and anxiety, physiological disruptions, and altered brain morphology in central stress circuitry across development. Environmental enrichment strategies may improve responses to social stress. Socially monogamous prairie voles exhibit analogous social and emotion-related behaviors to humans, with potential translational insight into interactions of social stress, age, and environmental enrichment. This study explored the effects of social isolation and environmental enrichment on behaviors related to depression and anxiety, physiological indicators of stress, and dendritic structural changes in amygdala and hippocampal subregions in young adult and aging prairie voles. Forty-nine male prairie voles were assigned to one of six groups divided by age (young adult vs. aging), social structure (paired vs. isolated), and housing environment (enriched vs. non-enriched). Following 4 weeks of these conditions, behaviors related to depression and anxiety were investigated in the forced swim test and elevated plus maze, body and adrenal weights were evaluated, and dendritic morphology analyses were conducted in hippocampus and amygdala subregions. Environmental enrichment decreased immobility duration in the forced swim test, increased open arm exploration in the elevated plus maze, and reduced adrenal/body weight ratio in aging and young adult prairie voles. Age and social isolation influenced dendritic morphology in the basolateral amygdala. Age, but not social isolation, influenced dendritic morphology in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. Environmental enrichment did not influence dendritic morphology in either brain region. These data may inform interventions to reduce the effects of social stressors and age-related central changes associated with affective behavioral consequences in humans.
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Inequities in pain assessment are well-documented; however, the psychological mechanisms underlying such biases are poorly understood. We investigated potential perceptual biases in the judgments of faces displaying pain-related m...
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Inequities in pain assessment are well-documented; however, the psychological mechanisms underlying such biases are poorly understood. We investigated potential perceptual biases in the judgments of faces displaying pain-related movements. Across five online studies, 956 adult participants viewed images of computer-generated faces ("targets") that varied in features related to race (Black and White) and gender (women and men). Target identity was manipulated across participants, and each target had equivalent facial movements that displayed varying intensities of movement in facial action-units related to pain (Studies 1-4) or pain and emotion (Study 5). On each trial, participants provided categorical judgments as to whether a target was in pain (Studies 1-4) or which expression the target displayed (Study 5) and then rated the perceived intensity of the expression. Meta-analyses of Studies 1-4 revealed that movement intensity was positively associated with both categorizing a trial as painful and perceived pain intensity. Target race and gender did not consistently affect pain-related judgments, contrary to well-documented clinical inequities. In Study 5, in which pain was equally likely relative to other emotions, pain was the least frequently selected emotion (5%). Our results suggest that perceivers can utilize facial movements to evaluate pain in other individuals, but perceiving pain may depend on contextual factors. Furthermore, assessments of computer-generated, pain-related facial movements online do not replicate sociocultural biases observed in the clinic. These findings provide a foundation for future studies comparing CGI and real images of pain and emphasize the need for further work on the relationship between pain and emotion.
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Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that is postulated to reduce risk for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD), particularly the risk due to negative affect. At present, however, the brain systems and v...
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Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that is postulated to reduce risk for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD), particularly the risk due to negative affect. At present, however, the brain systems and vascular pathways that may link reappraisal to CVD risk remain unclear. This study thus tested whether brain activity evoked by using reappraisal to reduce negative affect would predict the multiyear progression of a vascular marker of preclinical atherosclerosis and CVD risk: carotid artery intima-media thickness (CA-IMT). Participants were 176 otherwise healthy adults (50.6% women; aged 30-51 years) who completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging task involving the reappraisal of unpleasant scenes from the International Affective Picture System. Ultrasonography was used to compute CA-IMT at baseline and a median of 2.78 (interquartile range, 2.67 to 2.98) years later among 146 participants. As expected, reappraisal engaged brain systems implicated in emotion regulation. Reappraisal also reduced self-reported negative affect. On average, CA-IMT progressed over the follow-up period. However, multivariate and cross-validated machine-learning models demonstrated that brain activity during reappraisal failed to predict CA-IMT progression. Contrary to hypotheses, brain activity during cognitive reappraisal to reduce negative affect does not appear to forecast the progression of a vascular marker of CVD risk.
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A fundamental challenge in emotion research is measuring feeling states with high granularity and temporal precision without disrupting the emotion generation process. Here we introduce and validate a new approach in which respons...
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A fundamental challenge in emotion research is measuring feeling states with high granularity and temporal precision without disrupting the emotion generation process. Here we introduce and validate a new approach in which responses are sparsely sampled and the missing data are recovered using a computational technique known as collaborative filtering (CF). This approach leverages structured covariation across individual experiences and is available in Neighbors, an open-source Python toolbox. We validate our approach across three different experimental contexts by recovering dense individual ratings using only a small subset of the original data. In dataset 1, participants (n=316) separately rated 112 emotional images on 6 different discrete emotions. In dataset 2, participants (n=203) watched 8 short emotionally engaging autobiographical stories while simultaneously providing moment-by-moment ratings of the intensity of their affective experience. In dataset 3, participants (n=60) with distinct social preferences made 76 decisions about how much money to return in a hidden multiplier trust game. Across all experimental contexts, CF was able to accurately recover missing data and importantly outperformed mean and multivariate imputation, particularly in contexts with greater individual variability. This approach will enable new avenues for affective science research by allowing researchers to acquire high dimensional ratings from emotional experiences with minimal disruption to the emotion-generation process.
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Effectively communicating pain is crucial for human beings. Facial expressions are one of the most specific forms of behavior associated with pain, but the way culture shapes expectations about the intensity with which pain is typ...
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Effectively communicating pain is crucial for human beings. Facial expressions are one of the most specific forms of behavior associated with pain, but the way culture shapes expectations about the intensity with which pain is typically facially conveyed, and the visual strategies deployed to decode pain intensity in facial expressions, is poorly understood. The present study used a data-driven approach to compare two cultures, namely East Asians and Westerners, with respect to their mental representations of pain facial expressions (experiment 1, N=60; experiment 2, N=1A) and their visual information utilization during the discrimination of facial expressions of pain of different intensities (experiment 3; N=60). Results reveal that compared to Westerners, East Asians expect more intense pain expressions (experiments 1 and 2), need more signal, and do not rely as much as Westerners on core facial features of pain expressions to discriminate between pain intensities (experiment 3). Together, those findings suggest that cultural norms regarding socially accepted pain behaviors shape the expectations about pain facial expressions and decoding visual strategies. Furthermore, they highlight the complexity of emotional facial expressions and the importance of studying pain communication in multicultural settings.
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While the field of affective science has seen increased interest in and representation of the role of culture in emotion, prior research has disproportionately centered on Western, English-speaking, industrialized, and/or economic...
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While the field of affective science has seen increased interest in and representation of the role of culture in emotion, prior research has disproportionately centered on Western, English-speaking, industrialized, and/or economically developed nations. We investigated the extent to which emotional experiences and responding may be shaped by cultural display rule understanding among Yucatec Maya children, an indigenous population residing in small-scale communities in remote areas of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Data were collected from forty-two 6- and 10-year-old Yucatec children who completed a resting baseline and a structured disappointing gift task. Children were asked about whether specific emotions are better to show or to hide from others and self-reported the intensity of their discrete positive and negative emotional experiences. We observed and coded expressive positive and negative affective behavior during and after the disappointing gift task, and continuously acquired physiological measures of autonomic nervous system function. These multi-method indices of emotional responding enable us to provide a nuanced description of children's observable and unobservable affective experiences. Results generally indicated that children's understanding of and adherence to cultural display rules (i.e., to suppress negative emotions but openly show positive ones) was evidenced across indices of emotion, as predicted. The current study is a step toward the future of affective science, which lies in the pursuit of more diverse and equitable representation in study samples, increased use of concurrent multimethod approaches to studying emotion, and increased exploration of how emotional processes develop.
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Habitual expressive suppression (i.e., a tendency to inhibit the outward display of one's emotions; hereafter suppression) is often conceptualized as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. Yet, is this equally true for suppres...
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Habitual expressive suppression (i.e., a tendency to inhibit the outward display of one's emotions; hereafter suppression) is often conceptualized as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. Yet, is this equally true for suppression of positive and of negative emotions? Across three studies and seven samples (total N> 1300 people) collected in two culturally distinct regions (i.e., Taiwan and the US), we examined the separability and distinct well-being effects of suppressing positive vs. negative emotions. Results consistently showed that (a) people suppressed their positive (vs. negative) emotions less, (b) the construct of suppression of positive (vs. negative) emotions was conceptually farther away from that of suppression of emotions in general, (c) suppression of positive and of negative emotions were only moderately correlated, and (d) only suppression of positive, but not negative, emotions, predicted lower well-being. An internal meta-analysis (k=52 effect sizes) showed that these associations were robust to the inclusion of age, gender, and region as covariates. Future research may further probe the respective links between suppression of positive and of negative emotions and well-being across more cultural regions and across the life-span.
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Affective states are expressed in an individual's physical appearance, ranging from facial expressions and body postures, to indicators of physiological arousal (e.g., a blush). Confirming the claimed communicative function of the...
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Affective states are expressed in an individual's physical appearance, ranging from facial expressions and body postures, to indicators of physiological arousal (e.g., a blush). Confirming the claimed communicative function of these markers, humans are capable of distinguishing between a variety of discrete emotion displays. In an attempt to explain the underlying mechanism, characteristic bodily changes within the observer, including physiological arousal and mimicry, have been suggested to facilitate the interpretation of an expression. The current study aims to create a holistic picture of emotion perception by (1) using three different sources of emotional information (prototypical facial expressions, bodily expressions, and subtle facial cues) and (2) measuring changes in multiple physiological signals (facial electromyography, skin conductance level, skin temperature, and pupil size). While participants clearly discriminated between perceived emotional expressions, there was no overall 1-1 correspondence with their physiological responses. Some specific but robust effects were observed. Angry facial expressions were consistently responded to with a peak in skin conductance level. Furthermore, sad body expressions were associated with a drop in skin temperature. In addition to being the best recognized expression, viewing happy faces elicited congruent facial muscle responses, which supports the potential role of embodied simulation in emotion recognition. Lastly, tears were not only rated as highly emotional intense but also evoked a peak in skin conductance level in the observer. The absence of distinct physiological responses to other expressions could be explained by the lacking functionality of affect sharing in a non-interactive experimental context. Consequentially, emotional alignment in body and mind might especially take place in real social situations, which should be considered in future research.
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